ShneekeyTheLost
Farmer
And my opinion is that displaying the data in that way is extremely misleading because it states gold per day in a way that implies it is, in fact, more valuable. The context of the tradeoff is lost in the chart.
The average player isn't going to have a harvest of 700+ Ancient Fruit in the first place, so you're already creating a hypothetical corner case.
The solution in this theoretical case is to build more kegs. Actually, the solution is to calculate how many kegs you'd need to keep up with production of produce and come up with a solution when you plant them, preferably before they finish growing and start producing. If you've got 700+ Ancient Fruit growing year-round on Amber Island, you make 700+ Kegs to process them in. Let's face it, if you can put that many crops down, money is not your problem, you can afford to invest in your infrastructure.
There has never been an instance anywhere in the thousands of hours of playing SDV, all the way back to 1.0 when kegs required Clay, wherein I was unable to solve the problem of 'I have too much produce' with 'build more processing infrastructure' outside of the earliest parts of the game wherein you haven't unlocked the recipes yet.
As far as 'time is money', if the growth time for the crop exceeds the processing time, then you are making more work for yourself, not less. For stuff that grows daily like your fruit trees, that's not going to come up, so yes it is more time efficient to simply make 90 jars and run them once every three days. However, for ancient fruit, it takes three days to jar, but seven days to grow. Unfortunately, those numbers don't come out even, and you've now made more than twice the amount of work you need to do per week. Sure, you've reduced the number of production units you need, but now you need to cycle them through twice as fast, and you've got odd leftovers that don't fit evenly in a real-world application. The reason Kegs are so much more time efficient with stuff like Ancient Fruit is that the timing lines up, so you have merely a single workday per week, in which you collect your ancient fruit, collect the old wine and start the new batch. The rest of the week is yours to date whomever you like, befriend Linus, go researching with Demitrius, or make a pixelated Mario head out of floors (just don't post it or Nintendo will DMCA you).
To be clear here, I do want to reiterate that I truly do appreciate the time and effort it took to produce this chart. As someone who has worked in the financial industry, and has extensive knowledge with Excel, I understand that this was truly a work of a magnitude we rarely see from our community. However, also as someone who has worked in the financial industry, I've seen spreadsheets like this tank companies because while the information presented was entirely accurate and factual, it was also presenting the wrong numbers to focus on.
Also to be clear, this is not intended as a personal attack on anyone, nor is it intended to denigrate or call out anyone. However, one cannot improve if one does not receive constructive feedback. My concern with the spreadsheet is not and has never been a concern over maliciousness, but misinterpretation from end-user. Most people are not familiar enough with spreadsheets to understand what it is saying, and simply sees g/day and goes 'that must mean it is more profitable', which is not always the case. It is that ease of misunderstanding that causes me to raise what I feel is a legitimate concern. I feel that he should present his data in a better way. Perhaps it should be presented as 'how fast can produce be processed' with total profits being presented per crop rather than per processing unit.
Actually... that gives me an idea. Hmm... Let's see. Raw profit (sale price of unprocessed good), number of kegs needed per unit (growth time / processing time), number of jars needed per unit (growth time / processing time), profit-jar (per produce), profit-keg (per produce), delta profit (profit-keg - profit jar). Then have an Artisan boolean, IF True, then multiply profit-keg and profit-jar by 1.4, so you can toggle easily. Then the first couple of lines is where the end-user inputs the number of crops and the growth time of whatever crop they are looking at, as a quick and dirty implementation. A more substantial implementation would have a table already populated with profit and growth time figures, with a query function that multiplies by number of crops to return data at volume (i.e. to produce 30 pomegranate trees, you need either 90 jars or 210 kegs, with a profit per produce of 330 for jar and 420 for keg, leaving a delta profit of 90).
This would give people a look at the two important factors the spreadsheet attempts to highlight: the difference between the number of jars vs the number of kegs needed to process a given quantity of a given produce, and the the difference in profit margins you will get from it. However, explicitly, I wouldn't try to formulate a conclusion for anyone because where it becomes reasonable to keg vs jar is a matter of personal preference and infrastructure construction tolerance, other than perhaps a sanity check to highlight that it is both faster and more profitable to jar most vegetables, and faster but the same profit margin for blueberries. Something like IF(delta infrastructure <= 0 AND delta profit <=0, TEXT("Jars are both cheaper and faster")).
Instead of trying to tell people how to think, I'm giving them the information relevant to the question they are seeking answers to so they may make a more completely informed decision on the cost benefits analysis of kegging vs jarring. Some may decide that jarring is going to be easier even if there is theoretically more profit to be made by kegging, because the infrastructure requirements don't really justify the profit margins, then that's perfectly fine. That's a conclusion that you WILL be able to come to, because you'll see the infrastructure requirements and the expected profit margins and be able to make that call for yourself instead of being told what to do.
Actually... now that I think about it, I could have another page for infrastructure costs. How much of x materials will you need to support y number of z crop by jarring and by kegging so you can have a checklist of stuff to have before building. For example "You will need 90 or 210 Jars to keep up with the demand of 30 fruit trees. 90 Jars will cost you 4,500 Wood, 3,600 Stone, 720 Coal. 210 Kegs will require 210 Oak Resin, 210 Copper Bars, 210 Iron Bars, 6,300 Wood". You will need three fifths more wood to produce kegs, but instead of stone and coal, you need copper and iron bars plus oak resin which is passively accumulated.
I hope I have clarified my concerns here. I get what he is trying to do. I also think most people will misunderstand what he is attempting to convey from the manner in which he is conveying it.
