Butchering result of animal fats

[xerandus]

The drop rate of animal fats is just too low to be able to level Candle Making after a while. I know there are recipes for filthy and lumpy animal fats, but I would think that it is intended for players to be leveling by grinding the higher level recipes. Afterall, after a while the lower level recipes give less xp or no xp.

I just spent a little over an hour running around in the Fae Realm killing fae bear and fae panthers, out of whom can give Typical Animal Fat on butchering. My butchering skill is maxed (82), as are "Bear and Bugbear Anatomy" (50) and Feline Anatomy (50). I have Yogzi's Butcher Knife, which gives and effective +3 to butchering level (so effective 85). I already know that fat is not considered an body organ, so Amatusa's Organ Knife doesn't matter, though I am carrying it as well. Most of the time I get 1 meat from the animal, so my count of meat is close to the number of animals butchered. It might be off by 5%.

This is what I collected:

Robust Beast Meat: 95
Robust Cat Meat: 88
Rib Bone: 19
Stomach: 17
Femur: 15
Heart: 10
Spleen: 10
Astonishing Animal Skull: 6
Brain: 6
Typical Animal Fat:4

Some of the stomachs were drops rather than the result of butchering. I would say 4-5 were drops rather than butchered.

Maybe make the animal fats a "rare meat", per the bonuses from the anatomy skills, so that there is a bonus to get them with the appropriate anatomy skill without the boost that body organs get from Amatusa's Organ Knife? I don't think that "rare meat" designation is being used for anything at present. If it isn't even coded for at present, then perhaps either having the animal fats be organs, or just tweak the % chance of getting them?

[Mikhaila]

Possibly just bad luck, but over two days I did over 100 oxen, and over 100 Bharghests (warden quest mob) in Gazluk. This resulted in 0 fat. Max skill, max anatomies, all the special tools etc. Both mobs used to drop fat, and while rare, doing that many usually would have resulted in at least a half dozen from each.

[Citan]

Edit: fixed some math

Hmm. I've just looked over the code and data, and it looks okay. There's been no changes in source control, so it's still the same chance it's always been. There could of course be bugs, but I don't see any in the butchering code flow. It's pretty simple, so let me go through how it works. I'll use Barghests here, although Snow Oxen are the same (except slightly easier butchering check, 73 instead of 80). Fae bears and fae panthers are also similar.

Animal fat *is* an organ, so an organ knife does help. Your chances for an organ are 3% for every 9 points of the relevant anatomy skill, plus any item bonus. So if you have a level 45+ anatomy skill and Amutasa's +7% organ knife, you would have a 22% chance for an organ. Barghests have five different organs (stomach, brain, heart, spleen, tier-4 animal fat) so if you get an organ from one, you have a 1-in-5, or 20%, chance of getting a fat. That amounts to... (0.22*0.2=0.044) a 4.4% chance to get fat from a Barghest.

I've also double-checked the fae bear and panther, and this is true for them also, except that they drop tier-3 fat. (The bear is a level 80 butcher and the panther level 73.) The butchering difficulty level doesn't always match the product result right now. It will make more sense eventually, when we have lots more high-level monsters to spread the loot out on, but right now it's a bit messy. Also, note that fae panthers are fae anatomy, not cat anatomy. But fae bears are bear anatomy, not fae anatomy.

It's important to note that if you fail the first butchering skill check ("botch the butchering"), it won't even roll to see if you get an organ, so having Butchering as high as possible is important.

Anyway, 4% seems about right for a rare crafting resource that's supposed to have some trade value. Randomness is streaky, but I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be 4% given a large enough sample size.

In any case, the way it's coded right now doesn't give me an easy place to tweak the numbers, it just falls out of the organ harvesting system. When the anatomy level caps go up, the organ-harvesting rate would shoot up... but I think this would make organ harvesting too easy, and I'll need to rethink about how all these systems scale. (That's why I haven't raised the anatomy level caps yet.)

Edit 2: it may be possible to raise some anatomy skills to level 54 with synergy bonuses, and this would give you +3% more chance for organs. The server simply divides your skill by 9, rounds down, and multiplies the result by 3, so your skill level is all that matters. I mention this because anatomy skills don't have labels that go above 50, so there's no "Butchery yields rare meat or organs: +3%" at level 54... but those labels are just to make the system more understandable to players. The server doesn't care.

[xerandus]

Citan,

Thanks for the answer. I was basing my statement about fat not being an organ on what I see in the json file, where things like brains have the keyword of bodyorgan but the animals fats just have "CorpseTrophy" and "CandleRelated". And randomness can be streaky. I just read about the "Venice 53" incident yesterday.

[Celerity]

The organ tag on the json is for recipes like the mushroom farming organ substrate one and gifts I believe.

You're correct about the randomness, which is why you get the results you reported in the first post. The law of large numbers means you would need a sample size of at least a few thousand to get an accurate representation of the average drop rate for this, since 4% is a relatively low chance.

The 4% number lines up roughly with my own experiences and I think it's a fair number for this though, because you only need a few stacks of it. It definitely makes candle making a non-noob friendly skill, but since the early fats have recipes to craft and the benefits of the candles are relatively minor anyway I don't think it's too big a deal.

[xerandus]

After I logged out of that farming session, somewhat in frustration, I logged back in a couple hours later and did a lot better. I have a feeling that an RNG seed is generated when you log in and used until you log out again. Or I could be overthinking it.

[Niph]

After I logged out of that farming session, somewhat in frustration, I logged back in a couple hours later and did a lot better. I have a feeling that an RNG seed is generated when you log in and used until you log out again. Or I could be overthinking it.

What you roll is decided server-side, so you logging in probably doesn't make any difference. :)