Cptldsilver
Planter
I've been really into min maxing for awhile and I've also watched a lot of the prominent min maxers. One thing that everyone is getting wrong is the real value of iridium farmed in the skull cavern.
The common assumption is 270 gold/ore. This is based on the sell price of an iridium bar (1500/5) with the blacksmith perk as well as subtracting coal bought from clints in year 1 (150/5).
Here's my problem with this calculation, smelting iridium bars takes time. Not the time for the furnace to finish but the time it takes to click the furnace to start smelting and the time it takes to pick the finished bar up.
Let's go through an example. Let's say you can load and unload 3000 furnaces a day if all you do is that one activity. Let's further say you have enough furnaces to do this in one continuous activity without stopping. You are also able to gather 1500 iridium in an average skull cavern dive. That means every skull cavern day equates to about 300 bars.
Therefore, if you go to the skull cavern for 10 days straight you will have 15,000 iridium ore and enough iridium ore to smelt 3000 bars, which you can do in an exactly one day.
Here's the part that people miss. The true value of iridium needs to factor in the time it takes the farmer to smelt it all. To factor this in you have to divide (the number of days it takes you to mine enough iridium to fill an entire day with smelting, N*) by (N+1). You then multiply this fraction by 270. In our example this would look like
10/11=.91
.91×270=245.45
So the real value of iridium in this case about 245 gold/ore.
The interesting thing about this formula is that it will change based on how fast you can mine ore and smelt bars. If you can mine twice as fast but smelt at the same speed then ore is worth only 225.
One other factor is that you can sometimes smelt for "free" by having a line of furnaces on what would otherwise be normal pathing for your farmer. Most commonly this is the path from the desert warp location and the entrance to skull cavern.
The common assumption is 270 gold/ore. This is based on the sell price of an iridium bar (1500/5) with the blacksmith perk as well as subtracting coal bought from clints in year 1 (150/5).
Here's my problem with this calculation, smelting iridium bars takes time. Not the time for the furnace to finish but the time it takes to click the furnace to start smelting and the time it takes to pick the finished bar up.
Let's go through an example. Let's say you can load and unload 3000 furnaces a day if all you do is that one activity. Let's further say you have enough furnaces to do this in one continuous activity without stopping. You are also able to gather 1500 iridium in an average skull cavern dive. That means every skull cavern day equates to about 300 bars.
Therefore, if you go to the skull cavern for 10 days straight you will have 15,000 iridium ore and enough iridium ore to smelt 3000 bars, which you can do in an exactly one day.
Here's the part that people miss. The true value of iridium needs to factor in the time it takes the farmer to smelt it all. To factor this in you have to divide (the number of days it takes you to mine enough iridium to fill an entire day with smelting, N*) by (N+1). You then multiply this fraction by 270. In our example this would look like
10/11=.91
.91×270=245.45
So the real value of iridium in this case about 245 gold/ore.
The interesting thing about this formula is that it will change based on how fast you can mine ore and smelt bars. If you can mine twice as fast but smelt at the same speed then ore is worth only 225.
One other factor is that you can sometimes smelt for "free" by having a line of furnaces on what would otherwise be normal pathing for your farmer. Most commonly this is the path from the desert warp location and the entrance to skull cavern.