User:Duiker/Guides/Thistle

Overview

Thistle is made up of seven vitamins: Ascorbin, Biotin, Carotene, Folin, Niacin, Pyroxidine, Thiamine. For a given thistle, each of these vitamins will be present in a quantity from 0 to 99, but we only care if it's in three buckets:

-	Low	≤ 20
~	Average	> 20, < 80
+	High	≥ 80

Basics

So, how do you make a thistle with these properties? The theory is simple! The practice is hard. As an important note, not every vitamin combo is possible every week. Sometimes you'll be designing one and then realize that it's just objectively impossible. It's not because you're bad at it; it just can't be done sometimes.

Initial Values

Every recipe gets 50 Nitrogen and 50 Potassium for free. If you're making thousands of thistle, this is all you will ever have to work with, because otherwise you'll have to sink hundreds of dung or saltpeter into your production.

Water is functionally free. Place your Thistle Garden near water, or near a Rain Barrel, and make sure you're carrying a good number of Jugs and you're set.

Oxygen is completely free.

Sunlight is tricky. Recipes are generally "daytime" or "nighttime" recipes, because trying to time a recipe for the period when the sun is rising or setting is very hard and not worth it. When it's nighttime, then the Sunlight value is 0, always. When it is daytime, then the Sunlight value is 99 when the cover is open, and 33 when it is closed. During dawn/dusk, the value transitions smoothly from 0 to 99 or 99 to 0.

Conversions

A conversion has three parts: the condition under which it happens, the vitamin or resource being convert from, and the vitamin being converted to.

Two examples: "H20 > 79, 10 Nit → 3.33 Asc". Let's say it's tick 10, and we have 30 Nit and 80 H20.

Tick	Nit	H2o	Asc	Conversions that will happen	Actions Taken
10	30	80	10	Nit→Asc	None
11	10	70	13.33	None	None
12	0	60	13.33	None	None

If there are two conditions that are true, then they will BOTH happen and IN ORDER. So let's use these two conversions: "Sun > 79, 10 Asc → 10 Car" and "Oxy < 49, 10 Car → 20 Thi".

Tick	Oxy	Sun	Asc	Car	Thi	Conversions that will happen	Actions Taken
10	50	99	80	0	0	Asc→Car	None
11	40	99	70	10	0	Asc→Car,Car→Thi	None
12	30	33	60	10	20	Car→Thi	Click "Sun" to close cover
13	60	33	60	0	40	None	Click "Oxy" twice
14	50	99	60	0	40	Asc→Car	Click "Sun" to open cover
15	40	99	50	10	40	Asc→Car	None

Voids

Every week, we have a different list of voids. A void is a conversion that doesn't work. This lets recipes work that otherwise wouldn't, and breaks recipes that would otherwise work.

If your recipe is depending on the Asc→Bio conversion to get B+, and it's void, then you'll have to rework your recipe to get Biotin from Pyroxidine instead and that might be really hard.

If your recipe needs the Nia→Thi conversion, which needs H20 < 49, but it's being blocked by the Nia→Fol conversion, which needs H20 < 59, then you can't use that recipe unless Nia→Fol is void because you cannot fulfill Nia→Thi without fulfilling Nia->Fol.

Void Testing

I don't know how to do this, but it's basically testing every conversion and seeing which ones fail to apply.

Void List

The historical voids from Tale 6 have applied perfectly into this tale.

Designing a Recipe

Use a simulator! A full run of thistle takes a long 6 minutes, and that's time you're spending NOT producing the type of thistle you need while you're experimenting.

Study which conversions are being applied. If a vitamin you want is being converted away, try to remove the conditions in which it applies. For example, if you need your Fol and it's all going into Asc because Sun > 79, then close the cover.

Look for Cycles

• Example: Pyr→Nia, Nia→Fol, Fol→Pyr. This cycle takes 10 Pyr and turns it into 30 Pyr. This is a great way to build up Pyr.

It's fairly easy to get a lot of Bio and Pyr. It's pretty hard to get a lot of Nia and Thi.

• When you have N+ or T+, you should consider using Silkworm Unguent to change it.

If you can't figure out a recipe for the current week, try looking at the next few weeks. Sometimes the voids are better.

• The current week can be determined based on Cegaiel's calendar. You can then look it up on Guilds/Twisted_Thistle.

Using Duiker's Sim

I built a simulator! It lives in a webpage and is completely open source: https://saraid.github.io/atitd/thistle.html

How do you use it?

• Choose the week in the top right. This will set the voids for you. (The conversions will become crossed out.)
  • If you don't know the week, change the date selector and the simulator will calculate it for you.
• Enter your goal, e.g. A+C-F~N-, in the bottom right.
  • This will light up the vitamins so that it's clear what's good and what's not.
• Toggle Daytime/Nighttime using the button right above the goal.
• Start playing with the actions. See what happens when you change things.
  • Notice that, when you hover over a tick, some of the conversions will light up green. These are the conversions being applied this tick.

I built it in Google Chrome. It looks like it doesn't quite work right in Internet Explorer. I haven't checked Firefox yet. Sorry.