User:Duiker/Guides/Thistle

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

Concepts

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
11	10	70	13.33
12	0	60	13.33

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
11	40	99	70	10	0	Asc->Car,Car->Thi
12	30	33	60	10	20	Car->Thi	Click "Sun" to close cover
13	60	33	60	0	40		Click "Oxy" twice
14	50	99	60	0	40	Asc->Car	Click "Sun" to open cover
15	40	99	50	10	40	Asc->Car

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.