Sunday 26 January 2014

Upcoming, the Improved Silo


BlueByte have unveiled an upcoming building, the improved silo.
For now, it's marked as costing 1,995 gems, and advertised as having '3 times as fast as the output of the regular silo', but currently it's not quite as good as suggested.

It's of course prone to change since it's only on the test server currently, but it's down as having a production of 4 minutes, which is 3 times quicker, but doesn't take into account the walk time of the building. So with 3 times the walk, it winds up being 2 point something silos, depending a bit on just how short a walk you manage to give it.

Hopefully with testing and comments from users they will change it to being still a 12 minute production time like the regular silo, but fill 3 at 3 times the rate (so 15 wheat at level 5 instead of 5). For now, we'll assume it won't change.

Here is a chart showing how much wheat a farm pulls out over 24 hours at different walk distances. It only takes into account whole cycles, so a farm at 60 seconds walk time brings in 550 per day, but the farm is partway through producing another lot.

Here's a chart showing how much wheat an improved silo replaces over 24 hours. Similar to the farms, they may be producing another refill at the time.

Given these, over the course of 24 hours, a silo with the shortest walk time (20 seconds) fills 1660 wheat. 3x farms at 60 seconds walk (3 times the walk), take ~1650 wheat, so equals out. 60 seconds is an overly long time though, so you'll never actually want to run your farms that far away.

Your farms needing to be closer will mean you'll never be able to run a 1 improved silo to 3 farm ratio, but I would like to think that if it does stay like this we'll be able to come up with some nice 3 silo to 8 farm layout, which I'll be looking into if it stays as it is.

Saturday 25 January 2014

Silos in Sector 2 and 5

Here's a silo set-up that goes across the border of sector 2 and 5 on your island.

Click here for larger

The squares servicing the field on the left I've given black writing, and the orange writing goes to the field on the right.

On the left there's 6 farms and 6 silos, with an average walk distance of 46.7 seconds for either side. You also get a 3x2 spot along the top where I'd place a watermill. You could do a friary, but I'd make a friary closer, less important for the watermill since water is rather plentiful.
On the right there's 7 farms and 7 silos, with an average walk on either side of 44 seconds.

Both sides nicely under 48 seconds average, so will feed your buildings nicely.


Here's an image of the same layout showing the walk times (note that the number in the watermill's space covers as if that space was a farm/silo, not a watermill.

Friday 17 January 2014

Silos in Sector 7

This one comes from Fexno (Sandycove), and covers top of sector 7. The information was posted in a comment, but will eventually get lost there, so seemed worthwhile adding to the list for general consideration.

Click here for bigger

The yellow and brown dots towards the left without a red dot will all tend to the left field, and the yellow and brown dots on the right will use the field on the right. The black squares have travel times over 60 seconds, so don't get utilised in the layout.

On the left the yellow squares have a total travel time of 268 seconds (44.67 average, and the brown has a total of 264 (44.33 average)
On the right the yellow squares have a total travel time of 260 seconds (43.33 average), and the brown has a total of 256 (42.67).
It's all very close on either side, but to never ever refill, all squares with brown text would be filled with silos, and the yellow squares farms. The average time is nicely under 48 seconds, so all buildings that need wheat will be happy.

Tuesday 7 January 2014

Artefact search Explorer

I've rechecked the Artefact search skill at the top of the Explorer tree, and it seems to have greatly improved over what it initially was on test server. Enough so, such that you might consider setting up some explorers to give it a go.

However, a Artefact build itself wouldn't be all that interesting. While 'Artefact Search' lives under treasure searches in the explorers menu, it is not itself a treasure search for any of the skills that reference them. This means that there's only 1 other skill in the entire tree that benefits an explorer going out, and that's the codex level skill 'Pathfinder', that lowers search times for all searches by 5/10/15%.
An Artefact searcher needs to have a secondary goal. The most obvious thing that comes to mind is that sometimes there are events such as Christmas, where regardless of your build, you probably want all explorers to be out performing general treasure hunts for the extra goodies that come along with it. To that end, I'd propose a secondary goal of beefing up your extra long searches a bit.
As a lesser tertiary goal, you may of course also want to use as few of the expensive books as possible.

So, the build.

Working through from the bottom to the top.
5 Manuscripts anywhere in the bottom layer. 'Mountain boots' presents some relevance to the secondary goal, but you will be filling out the layer entirely anyway.

3 Tomes in 'Deforestation': Find 24% more exotic logs on very long searches. Good for the secondary goal, nothing bad about getting extra exo logs.
2 Manuscripts anywhere in the bottom layer.

3 Tomes in 'Sturdy Shovel': Find 9% more treasure on all treasure searches. Again, good for your extra long searches when you need them.
2 Manuscripts anywhere in the bottom layer.
Note, on this layer you might be tempted by Mistwalker, which increases your chances of getting Exo logs as loot from very long searches. But, if you're increasing the chances of getting exo logs, you're decreasing the chances of getting Granite to compensate, and you don't really want that.

2 Codex's in 'Pathfinder': Decreases the search time for all searches by 10%. Taking 10% off the search makes the rarity search take 10hours, 48minutes for a savage scout. I find this gives a small comfort window to be able to send the scout out twice a day. The third codex in the skill would offer an additional 36 minutes off the total if that would make timing better, but it's not going to allow a third run a day of course, so you can weigh up the third codex yourself.
3 Manuscripts in the remaining areas (or 2 if you've elected to push pathfinder to 3 books).

1 Codex in Travelling Erudite, to allow searching for buffs with 'Artefact Search'.

In the end it's 12 manuscripts, 6 tomes, 3 codex's (or 11 scripts, 6 tomes, 4 codex's depending on pathfinder). Assuming it's placed on a special explorer, he can go searching for buffs twice a day, and during events when you'll switch to running extra long treasure searches you will
> Take 19 hours, 39 minutes
> Find 24% extra exotic logs if that rolls up
> Find 9% extra treasure of all types.

I ran a sample of 30 searches, and here's what I received in the order I'd value the findings (and what the buffs do).
Bag of Rainbow Snow (4) - Quadruples a workyards output for 4 days, self only buff
Mr Myers (4) - Quadruples the production rate of your barracks for an hour.
Mother Tree  Ritual (3) - Triples a workyards output for 20 hours
Piero's bowl of Pasta (2) - Triples a workyards output for 8 hours
Roasted Duck (3) - Triples a workyards output for 4 hours
Helpful Scarecrow (2) - Triples a Farms output for 16 hours
Cheese sandwich (4) - +1 settler every 90 seconds for 15 minutes.
Aunt Irma's Gift Basket (3) - Doubles a workyards output for 6 hours
Solid Sandwich (3) - Doubles a workyards output for 2 hours
Fish Platter (1) - Doubles a workyards output for 30 minutes
Sandman's Powder (1) - Makes it dark on your island, no other effect.

Some of the more useful buffs appear to be coming up regularly enough to make the build seem useful and interesting.


Saturday 4 January 2014

End of the Calendar

The calendar ends today, and I hope everyone managed to log on each day to get your gold tower reward.
I picked up mine today and placed it in sector 5 up between some of the stone deposits. It's a reasonable shaped piece of land for it, and not much else could fit there, and there's even space in there between the storehouse and the tower to fit my stone mason.
For day 24, I went with the Watermill. Watermill's and Silo's are both nice and useful, but at the end of the day the Watermill is the more costly item, so probably best off going with it for your freebie.

This late in the event, I hope you've all managed to get everything you wanted with your presents, and if you have spares I'm liking the idea of stocking up on 'Return to the Bandit Nest' adventures for 95 presents.

So far, I have 18 in the star, and have completed 1 other one to check it out.
Troop losses aren't too bad, and to date it's the only adventure that will give science books in loot. I'm quite a fan of science'ing up my specialists (probably not all that surprising to you), so this seems like a great way to increase your book supply.
From the initial time I did it, I didn't get any books, here's my loot:
But 900 granite and 2 chocolate bunnies aren't bad.

Here's some other example loot piles others have received.
Source: SettlersOnline Reddit
Loot spots 4 and 5 can have either a bunny, a bookbinding glue, or 2 of one of the types of books in them. You could have the same book in both slots, and potentially getting 4 codex's from the adventure seems pretty amazing (however unlikely).

Info over from test server is that the adventures for presents will be becoming follow up adventures for their similar named counterparts, which will end up keeping them somewhat rare, as Secluded Adventures and Bandit Nest aren't really run all that often.

Stocking up now seems like a good way to go if you can manage a present surplus.