šŸ§Ŗ Early Information on "IMPROVED" Alchemy Lab [Part of The Beta Beat v30]

Every time you use alchemy lab to transmute stuff it gives you certain number of Alkashards along with end result. Think of them like reward points you accumulate while spending via credit cards. Gather enough of those and you can pick one of six rewards viz mats, emblems or lodge battle items. Thereā€™s more info on top and some threads in #player-guides you can search for

Users should be aware that this version of the Alchemy Lab is arguably WORSE than the current incarnation. It is my opinion that it is a step in the wrong direction for primarily two reasons:

  1. Transmuting Epic Ascension Materials costing two items for an output of one item.

  2. Farming of Alkashards and Rewards: Iā€™ll write about this below.

Current Model

You can run three low levels of the AL in order to farm Alkashards. Each will produce 2 Alkashards per hour, making your total yield 6 Alkashards per hour. In terms of combining Alkashards for a rewards, letā€™s look at the two I feel are most desirable: four star ascension materials and emblems.

  • Four star AM: youā€™ll need 10,000 Alkashards, but it is guaranteed that there will be a four star AM as a reward. So you need to run AL for 1,666.6 hours per four star mat.

  • Emblems: youā€™ll need 10,000 Alkashards for 50 emblems. Creating 6 Alkashards per hour would mean youā€™re making 0.03 emblems per hour.

Revised Version

Since you are restricted to one operation at a time, your Alkashard production per hour will be lower, likely between 2-3 per hour, so Iā€™ll show a range of results (N.B. you can get higher production with higher levels, which I will address, and with gem boosts, which I will not address).

  • Four star AM: youā€™ll need 1,000 Alkashards, but there is only a 5% chance youā€™ll roll the four star slot. So, on average, youā€™ll need between 6,666.6 (producing 3 Alkashards per hour) and 10,000 hours (producing 2 Alkashards per hour). Even if I plug in 6.25 Alkashards per hour produced (the highest Alkashards per hour possible, with level 10) youā€™ll need 3,200 hours - about twice what you need wit the current version.

  • Emblems: youā€™ll need 1,000 Alkashards for 10 emblems. If youā€™re producing 2 Alkashards per hour thatā€™s 500 hours, making it 0.02 emblems per hour. At 3 Alkashards per hour thatā€™s 333.3 hours, which means 0.03 emblems per hour (what the current model does). Only if youā€™re using the higher levels can you beat the current model. At 6.25 Alkashards per hour you need 160 hours, yielding 0.0625 emblems per hour.

Conclusion

I really feel this is a horrible revision and would honestly rather just keep the crappy building we already have. The four star ascension materials are gated right now but the revised building makes this gating MUCH WORSE. The emblem production could be better (but in many cases will not be), but regardless of how you feel about it the production is paltry. For context, if we assume I get 1 emblem per day from watching Mystic Visions (which I think is conservative), Iā€™m producing 0.0416 emblems per hour there, better than most levels of the revised AL. NOT an improvement imo.

18 Likes

As someone who has never bothered with AL in itā€™s current form, are there any levels that would be worth running to ā€œfarmā€ Alkashards before this change is implemented?

your Alkashard production per hour will be lower, likely between 2-3 per hour

That is why I think this version is better, with the 10A and 10B recipes, you get 1050 alkashards per week (7d) which is a whopping 6.25 alkashards per hour!

Not only that but whoever says recipe 10A and 10B are expensive are currently not farming alkashards, I am currently using recipe 2 and 4 (since my building is only level 5) non stop to farm alkashards, this is costing me 63k food 4 times a day plus 42k food 12 times a day, for a big total of 756k per day. Meaning I spend 5292k food per week. 2650k for 10A and 3110k for 10B are quite a deal in my book.

Since my plan is to farm 10A, I will spend half the food for 3 times the amount of alkashards.

Right now I am more in the camp of SGG please do not nurf this.

3 Likes

To be honest Alchemy lab is te most frustrating building in this game for me:

  • I build it only because of current version of 9th level, which is scam and I received 0 epic materials from that (6000 alkashards only from that level)
  • new version is even worse and i donā€™t see any use from that, please fix level 9 instead so the % will be higher

By the way, we are forced to build infinite amount of building upgrades so itā€™s not enough materials to build any artifacts at the first place, so who need alchemy lab anyway? For alkashards? Come on.

To be honest Iā€™m pretty stoked about this implementation. Mandatory gem costs on useful levels were the main thing that kept me from building the lab so far, along with the rng nature of the shard rewards with no chance to reroll the reward options. Spent 4 months trading rings looking for blades? HEREā€™S A SET OF RINGS FOR YOUR TROUBLE! have fun grinding for another 4 months!

This new version doing away with mandatory gem costs is immediately, unbelievably more useful. I might use some of the lower levels for kicks when Iā€™m using food to ascend heroes or level troops, but Iā€™m planning to run 10A nonstop. Iā€™m leader of a small alliance - getting 2 guaranteed 3 star (minimum) unfarmable mats a week in exchange for easily farmable resources sounds pretty great to me. Not to mention the repeated chances to get 10 emblems that i can use if the mats donā€™t appeal.

Yeah a higher 4 star mat chance (either in the shard rewards or else reappearing in the 3 star transmute chance) would be nice, and i agree that 10b is a little ridiculous since 4 star mats are SO rare (2 for 1? let players pick the result at least), but for me this building is already way more than i hoped for given itā€™s initial appearance. Slight tweaks (down) on some of the food costs and high level production times and a few QOL things (concurrent production or at least research, queues) and this would 100% be a building in constant use for me

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I couldnā€™t agree more

I always have levels 9 and 10 running simultaneously.

What is going to happen when the new bastardized version pops up? Are they going to cancel one or the other? Am I going to lose the gems and mats I have invested currently transmuting?

The food costs are ridiculous. They are trying to pull the wool over our eyes. They know that most of us donā€™t carry over 3000 food on a regular basis. So whatā€™s it going to take for us to get that extra foodā€¦? Youā€™ve got it; more gems to get our food levels up to the level we need than it would have cost to just pay the gems in the original version of this thing.

Iā€™ve been finding the alchemy lab useful in its current state. I agree it needs to be made better. But this proposal only makes it worse. Especially on the levels 9 and 10 which are the only levels I use. Thereā€™s no rational argument to be made that this is ā€œimprovedā€ as the title of the thread claims. 2 4* ascension mats for 1? Thatā€™s a hardcore backslide. No explanation could make that a fair deal. Donā€™t even try, youā€™ll just sound like a complete smeghead.

2 Likes

If the Alchemy Lab winds up looking like this, Iā€™ll probably just run 10A continuously to farm shards. That gets me either 10 emblems or a 4* ascension item each week without using any gems. Thatā€™s not bad, but to have 20 recipes and only have 1-2 of those be useful is really disappointing.

8 Likes

I am not following your logic hereā€¦ How is the proposed new Alkashard reward program better than the current reward program, when the proposed rewards are considerably nerfed when compared to the current rewards?

For example, if you are farming 10A for Alkashards to exchange for emblems, true you are spending less in food (half the food) for 3 times the shards, but the exchange in the proposed rewards program (10 emblems) is 1/5 the emblems in the current reward program (50 emblems). That is, you need to repeat the shard exchange in the proposed reward program a total of 5 times in order to gain the current reward of 50 emblems. How is the proposed shard reward system better?

For me, I need 4* ascension mats. Iā€™m farming shards for 4* ascension mats. Changing the reward for Slot 1 from a guaranteed 4* ascension mat to a ā€œchanceā€ for a 4* ascension mat is a slap in the face.

6 Likes

My understanding is that Slot 1 no longer guarantees a 4* ascension matā€¦ You have a ā€œchanceā€ at getting a 4* ascension mat. From the description of the rewards, looks to be between a 5% and 25% chance of getting the 4* ascension mat; otherwise, you get a 3* ascension mat.

Iā€™m very disappointed with the proposed changes to the rewards

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Yes, that is my understanding as well. Whenever thereā€™s no 4* ascension item available, picking the 10 emblems will be an easy choice.

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Strongly disagree. The Alkashards have no intrinsic value; you have to look at it from the standpoint of actual rewards received.

I felt I addressed the possibility of making 6.25 Alkashards per hour in my post - itā€™s still a worse building. Besides the fact that Iā€™m making 7.57 Alkashards per hour right now. I donā€™t know - maybe you value food more highly than I do. For me, hamā€™s value is de minimis, whereas I heavily weight the value of 4 star ascension materials.

Maybe the ham issue is the difference in our perspective: Iā€™m feeding the current Alchemy Lab over 1.2 million food per day and not batting an eye at that.

The proposed Recipe 10B needs some serious revision. In itā€™s current form, we put in two 4* ascension mats as ingredients and transmute to a different (relative to those mats used as ingredients) 4* ascension mat. So, if we have a specific 4* ascension mat desired as output, we have 0.2 probability we actually get the desired 4* ascension (i.e., a total of five 4* ascension mats possible as output from the transmute, and we actually get the one we want).

Each transmute can be modeled as a Bernoulli random variable, with probability of success 0.2. Assuming transmutes are mutually independent of each other, the number of transmutes needed until we get the desired 4* ascension mat can be modeled as a Geometric random variable with probability 0.2. Thus, the expected number of transmutes until we get the desired 4* ascension mat is 5 (=1/0.2).

In summary, Recipe 10B:
Gain ā€“ Desired 4* ascension mat;
Expected Loss ā€“ a total of five 4* ascension mats, over 15 million food, and 5 weeks of transmute with Recipe 10B

Come on SGG, you can do much better!!!

5 Likes

This morning I received two damascus bladesā€¦ Gonna transmute one of them before AL10 gets actually nerfed. Seriously, less gems on extra shards are niceā€¦ But no matter what they are going to change about AL, they canā€™t call it an improvement when the transmution costs for 4* ascension mats is going to be 2:1

3 Likes

Does anyone know the rate of appearance of a 4* AM as a reward from combining Alkashards?
I get that if it is 10% or even higher and I combine 10x1k Alkashards I wonā€™t only get 1 4* AM but also 90 emblems, which is a huge improvement in outcome of the rewards, but if itā€™s below 10% I think I ll choose to combine 10k Alkashards now so I will get a guaranteed 4* AM which is the only reward I care for at the moment.

3 Likes

Iā€™m new to Alchemy Lab (donā€™t have one yet :stuck_out_tongue: ) Is there any particular property level I need to reach to gain access to the alkashard reward system?

No you donā€™t need to reach a specific level. Every transmutation has alkashards as rewards.

2 Likes

I think we need two separate threads for level 10 and levels 1-9 :joy: As everyone is discussing stage 10, the broken lower stage recipes are almost ignored hereā€¦

Fully agree with the common opinion about stage 10 :persevere: but I would like to point out that some of the lower level recipes also make very little sense to me, in particular 4A, 5A, 6A, 7A, 8A, 9A, 9B.

  • 4A: Why would you pay 32k food to turn a 2* crafting mat into another when recipe 1B does this for 1k food (hard to imagine running out of common herbs)?

  • 5A: Why pay 67k food and four 2* battle items to get that medium mana potion if you can have a random 2* for 3.6k food and 10 small heal potions (2B)? Yes, with 2B sometimes only bear/turtle banners pop out, but in one out of five cases medium mana potions. And axes or large heal potions arenā€™t bad either.

  • 6A: The fact that 2* ascension mats will hardly ever run out, who would pay 93.3k food for one of them? It isnā€™t even a good level to farm alkashards (like most A recipes)

  • 7A: 170k food to turn hardwood lumber into grimoire dust or midnight roots feels like a joke. In particular when 4B does the same thing for 15k food and uses much less precious 2* crafting mats (and is 4 times as fast)

  • 8A: Just WTF :joy: 372k food and four 3* battle items to get one 3* battle item? 5B uses 7 bear or turtle banners, costs 30k and is much faster. Also, it gives almost as many alkashards per day. 8B, despite being also quite expensive, at least turns 3* battle items into 4* battle items and has the same alkashard/day rate as 8A.

  • 9A: No comment

  • 9B: Four 4* battle items on top of over 600k food to get another 4* battle item? Seriously?

While most of the A recipes have more or less sensible prices now (some better than others), the recipes listed above seem pretty broken to me. Yes, it enables us to limit the output by using mats/ingredients we donā€™t need. Still, the extremely high food cost and in case of battle items crafting cost makes those recipes barely usable (in particular compared to the B recipes)

10 Likes

Hi all do alchemy lab is good ? And in which way ?

1 Like

Thatā€™s not at all how math works. In real world if you stack two 50% off coupons do you get the item for free? No you get it for 25% the original price. This just covers fractions part of math and there are many good books on probability theory to read. Please read those and then we can talk about real math.

If you want to skip all of that, @IvyTheTerrible did great analysis in this thread that you can refer to and see how new building has worse outcomes.

2 Likes