Updated Alchemy lab calculator?

[DaveCozy]

Yes. There’s a guide by Zephyr with an infographic by Cap here with building, research, ingredient cost, and alkashards produced:

@zephyr1

There’s also this thread listing recommended levels for Alkashard farming (personally I would add 1A in there at the top bullet):

@TheEyes

• The cheapest in terms of food is 1B: 500 food per shard, 2 shards per hour. Efficient farmers will have that running 24/7; it’s the TC11 of the Alchemy Lab. EDIT 6/22/20 : It has been brought to our attention that AL 1B has been boosted in price to 1800 food, which brings 1B’s efficiency down to 900 food per shard. Still nearly twice as good as any other level, but less useful than before. Also, as mentioned in @Druid’s post this recipe burns through 1-star crafting materials at a far higher rate than most people acquire them, so it’ll probably be necessary to alternate between this and another recipe.
• In terms of efficiency there’s a sort of sweet spot at 4B, 5B and 6B: roughly 1k food per shard, 2.5-2.7 shards per hour.
• It’s important to note that 5B also costs the Iron needed to craft the uncommon battle items in the first place: 7 bear banners costs 40530 iron (since I’m assuming you’re going to throw bear banners into this rather than something more expensive). It does, however, output a 3* battle item which is either more expensive or costs food to produce, so frankly that’s pretty much a wash; no one is substantively short on iron in the late game anyway, and being able to effectively purchase Revive scrolls and Super Antidotes using iron is a pretty good deal. Crafting material burn rate is going to be a problem with this recipe as well; in particular this recipe burns through 10 Metal Ores per day, which is more than most people earn through regular play. Farming S1-P15 and S2-P3/11 is recommended.
• Levels 7 and 8 have a big drop in efficiency for not much shard gain. 8B is also less interesting than 5B, because to feed it you need to sacrifice 5 Bomb attacks for 169K iron, which is a fairly significant sum even if iron is easier to come by than food in the late game.
• Level 9A bumps up to 3.1 shards per hour, but at more than double the food cost of 2.7k food per shard. Only take this if you literally have nothing better to do with your food (yeah, right!)
• 10A costs roughly 14 gems per day, which you can get at F2P if you’re lucky but is probably unsustainable without regularly putting cash in. On the other hand it’s a massively more efficient 6.25 shards per hour and costs only 119 food per shard, so in that sense you get what you pay for.
• 10B is a definitely unsustainable 28.5 gem per day burn rate, but also produces 6.25 shards per hour and costs only 214 food per shard.

EDIT: oh if you mean an updated calculator like the one Mags created in Google Sheets, I don’t believe that’s been done for the new lab.