Sunday, April 3, 2016

Calculation Table for Minerals

This post plays hell with the appearance of my blog, but legibility is everything.

This is a piece of my prices table, from the page I use to calculate the price of things based on their weight, workmanship and specific density.  It is sort of a 'base page' that's used to script out items before they're gathered on another page that is cleaned up and simplified for player use.




I had to post this in three parts


Basically, this is a small piece of the content I'm making available for a $10 contribution to my Patreon.  The table is in construction at the moment, but I've gotten this section on minerals done (more than half of it is polished gems) so I thought I might post it as an idea.  Obviously, it's a very big picture and looks much clearer and easier to read in excel.

There are places on the table where the cell has been left blank, such as in the first table where there are no calculations for grey-pink marble, freestone, black marble or red sandstone.  That is because these lines are used as placeholders for materials that I know exist somewhere in my world, but are not yet in the area that has been added to the actual trade system: such as knowing that Adeese in my trade system tutorial probably has products that don't exist in Pon but as yet Adeese isn't linked up.

Likewise, the image above is partly unedited.  The first table says "Building Stone, Granite" and then lists all types of building stones.  That's because I was going to make it several tables and then I didn't, forgetting to fix the heading until just now, seeing the saved image.  Also, many of the items and descriptions are cut off by the width of the column.  These things can be seen on excel; I'm just keeping the column width deliberately narrow on the page so I don't have to scan left and right constantly when I'm doing calculations.

About the rose highlighting in the jewelry tables: this is just some conditional formatting that tells me when a certain gem size meets a pre-determined value, so that it can be selected and put on the vendor table as that variety and size of gem.

Anyway, I'm updating this weekly for the moment until it is back to working order, which should be some weeks.  This is an terrifically complicated evaluation process but it is the means I use to calculate literally everything that exists, from small items like a flint for starting fires to big, multi-component constructions like a gatehouse.

3 comments:

  1. When you have a moment, can you explain the relationship between coal and ice? I'm baffled. The books I've scared up on google have been of no use.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Also want to say that, leaving aside the depth of the research into references and their placements, it's the piece-by-piece construction of larger items from smaller ones which makes your end result so valuable. Treating everything like building blocks.

    The player looks over the table, frowns, says "but what I want to make a..." and bam, you've hooked them. "Draw up a design and/or a list of materials, player. Show me what you've got: I'll meet you halfway." If they're the type to be playing D&D for the long term then this will snag them like no other, I am convinced of it.

    ReplyDelete
  3. The ice isn't made from coal, it is made from the heat that the coal produces, using vacuum chambers and other artifices. It's merely added to the table as a kind of fun thing; I can't find again the ratio that originally inspired the addition . . . so just see it as a sort of rare game addition.

    ReplyDelete

If you wish to leave a comment on this blog, contact alexiss1@telus.net with a direct message. Comments, agreed upon by reader and author, are published every Saturday.

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.