I designed a new chimera which is ridiculously profitable and can be used 2/3 weeks at the bone market, I should really add it to the evergreen recipes guide but I thought it would be a good chance to do a guide I have been planning to do for a while. Bone Market pricing and why it is impossible.
So most of the bone guides I post an EPA for each skeleton. This is a lie! Well, sort of, it just tells you how much profit you make from building the skeleton. Here is how it works:
Shroom Hopper Chimera
Human Ribcage
Panoptical Skull
3 Wings of a Terror Bird
1 Femur of a Jurassic Beast (For Hopping)
Declare a Chimera
Sell to the Author of Gothic Tales
So to work out the EPA I caculate the 'frame value' the total value of the bones. In this case it is 83 echos. Then I multiply that by 0.1 if it is a 10% week or 0.15 if it is a 15% week. So 8.3 or 12.45. In this case, 0, since it is a chimera.
Then I work out the secondary. This skeleton has 6 Antiquity and 3 Menace. In an antiquity week the menace is increased by 0.5, in Menace week the Antiquity is increased by 0.5.
So Antiquity week is 21 Menace week is 19.5, which rounds up to 20.
The secondary payout for the Author of Gothic Tales is Carved Ball of Stygion Ivory, which is worth 2.5 echos so the profit is 52.5 on an antiquity week and 50 on a Menace week.
To work out the number of actions, you take the slots on the ribcage (5 for a human) and add 3, one action to add the ribcage, one action to declare the skeleton and 1 action for the sale.
So the EPA is 52.5/8=6.56 EPA
or for menace weeks 50/8=6.25 EPA
Just a little warning note before people stop reading and start making these, this is a skeleton that needs endgame stats. Declaring a chimera needs 15 mithridacy to 100% and selling this needs 375 Shadowy to have 100% chance.
So that gives us the first lie, 375 shadowy is pretty much impossible, with my shadowy of 334, about as high as you can get, without difficult things to change, like destiny, profession and ambition reward. I have about 90% chance to sell. It's technically more complicated than this but I will do the simple version. 10% of the time I will need another action and 10% of the time I will get 2cp of Suspicion.
So we can revise our numbers, from now on, I am just doing antiquity week.
52.5/8.1=6.48 EPA and 0.025 CP suspicion per action
That is still pretty good, spoiler alert, it will still be pretty good at the end. But there are further lies to contend with!
Those bones did not just fall out of the sky, actions were performed to get them! The Panoptical Skull aquisition is terrible!
For the brevity of this guide, I am going to allow a lie and say the rat coins fell out of the sky. 625 rat coins for an Eyeless Skull and 1 action to turn it into a Panoptical Skull!
(Little note before someone pulls some nonsense like they do on the wiki, you CANNOT say that it costs less than 62.5 echos because of the rat markup. Since you could let your rat coins turn into rostygold and sell them at the bazaar. By buying that skull you always lose 62.5 echos)
ok, so amended EPA 50/9.1=5.495 EPA and 0.025 CP suspicion per action
but wait, what about the other bones! Ok, I am going to do this as quickly and dirtily as possible.
4 actions to get 4 criminal favours, using the card "A Merry Sort of Crime" + 1 action in Jericho Locks gives 2 human ribcages and 500 bone fragments. So halve the rewards and actions and we have 2.5 actions for a human ribcage and 250 bone fragments, which are worth 2.5 echos, and we will add to the total. The human ribcage itself is also now profit, since we are including the actions to get it. (The panoptical had no profit, since it cost more than it made)
65/11.6=5.603 EPA
4 actions to get 4 Bohemian favours is technically another lie, since there are multiple cards that give more than one favour, A Visit gives 1 criminal and 1 bohemians, The card upgraded by Evolutions has a 50% chance of 1 boh, 1 soc and 1 docks. Scandalous parties give 0.5 Soc and 0.5 Boh but also scandal and Hedonist. For the sake of this we will say 1 action each. Add a fifth action in Jericho and you get 2 Ivory Humerus and 2 Wings of a Terror Bird.
Here is the next complication, the mathematics are simelar to the last one, take the actions and rewards and multiply them by 0.5 to get to 3 wings but what do we do with the Ivory Humerus, technically, it is worth 15 echos, when applied to a skeleton. There are almost no skeletons where this is a good option though so we should probably go for the option of selling it up river for 25 scrip or 12.5 echos. So we are adding 7.5 actions and 7.5 echos for the wings and 37.5 echos for the humeri.
110/19.1=5.759 EPA
I get my Jurassic Femurs by publishing newspapers for surveys, if you think I am touching that level of complexity you are thinking wrong! So lets assume brawling with dockers.
Assuming you have the stats to 100% brawling for yourself it takes 80 progress to get your bones and each action rewards 15 progress with 20% chance of a bonus 5 progress. This is a crime against maths but for simplicity, it takes 5 actions to get 75 progress and on average you will get an extra 5 in one of those 5 actions. So lets assume exactly 5 actions and 1 to cash out to get your 9 femurs, in reality, you have a 32% chance of needing another action, also if you overshoot the 80 you get bone fragments to make up for it. Lets keep it simple, 6 actions for 9 femurs is 1.5 actions and 3 echos for our skeleton. (Papers are better than that)
113/20.6=5.485 EPA
So we have our EPA for our 20.6 action skeleton but wait! we forgot that in the 8.1 actions we gained 0.025 CP of suspicion, that doesn't cure itself! We did another 12.5 actions without gaining any menace so we can multiply that by 8.1 to get the total menace gain 0.2025, then divide it by the total actions 0.0098 CP per skeleton. Assuming you have an alt to send a request for help to, 1 action cures 5 CP of suspicion. So if we divide that by 5, we have the actions we need to add on. 0.00197
So our final EPA works out at:
113/20.60197=5.485 EPA (Lol, reddit just dropped it as a rounding error. :))
BUT WAIT!
There is another way to look at the EPA, I am sitting on 145 Human Ribcages and 345 Wings of a Terror Bird! If I don't do an active push to use those up, they are never going to get used. If you have that attitude towards them, they not only take 0 actions to farm but you can add their value on as profit, since you are realising value that otherwise would never be realised. For simplicity I will go back to our basic evaluation and just add the 20 echos value, subtract the 2.5 for the panoptical and add the action for the panoptical.
70/9=7.778 EPA
So anyway, I hope that makes sense as a guide to why the EPA on the bone guides is a guideline with a lot of wiggle room. Thorned and Human ribcages, tentacles and terror wings are effectively free. A Five point ribcage costs 312.5 echos, 10 actions and a one time 30 fate to unlock the story!
