User:Numaris/PaintByNumbers

This is a work in progress.

Welcome to Paint By Numbers, a guide to finding your personal paint reactions. It aims to be a simple and step-by-step, providing you with just enough information to do what you need to do.

In boxes like this, I'll go more into the technical side of paint and the theory behind the method I present. None
of this information will be required to follow the guide, so if you're not interested, you can safely skip the rest
of these.

How Does Paint Work?

To make paint, you add a number of ingredients to a Pigment Laboratory, and the colors mix to give you your paint. Sounds simple, right? Well here's the catch: many of the ingredients react with each other, and the strength of these reactions depends on the person mixing the paint. That's why if you've tried a recipe you found on someone's user page, it probably didn't work. And that's why if you want to get your optimum recipes, you'll need to do some work yourself.

This information is available in several places already, so I'll just summarize... the base color of your paint
is a weighted average of the RGB values of the ingredients you added. The final color is that base RGB value summed
with all the various reactions.

Which ingredients react is the same for all avatars, as is what colors are affected. Some reactions only change
the Green value of the paint, some only the Blue, some only the Red, and some change all three. No reaction changes
only two values. For those that change all three (termed "white reactions"), all three are changed by the same
constant value. Reaction values range from -64 to +64.

The order in which ingredients are added *does* matter. Although they will affect the same color(s) either way,
the actual reaction value for Ingredient A followed by Ingredient B will be different from Ingredient B followed
by Ingredient A.

Preparation

Here's what you'll need to get started:

In-game:

• A handful (5 should be plenty) of all the paint ingredients:
  • Cabbage Juice
  • Carrots
  • Clay
  • Dead Tongue Mushrooms
  • Toad Skin Mushrooms
  • Earth Light Mushrooms
  • Red Sand
  • Lead
  • Silver Powder
  • Iron
  • Copper
  • Sulfur
  • Potash
  • Lime
  • Saltpeter
• A healthy stack (150+, to be safe) of whichever ingredient you consider cheapest. I like Red Sand, others prefer Clay or Cabbage Juice. This will be referred to as your "bulk ingredient" and will be used to flush away paints when you're done.
• A Pigment Laboratory. If you don't have one of your own, check your local public works.

Out of Game:

• A tool that shows you the X,Y location of your mouse cursor on the screen. I like Nattyware Pixie; it's a Windows program but works via Wine on Linux. I'm not familiar with Macs, but you should be able to find a similar tool.
• The PaintByNumbers spreadsheet, which is in OpenOffice Calc format. OpenOffice is available in all platforms you can play ATITD on.
• Sigil's PracticalPaint, or a similar paint analyzer tool. PracticalPaint only runs on Windows... unfortunately, I've not been successful getting it to run under Wine.