Seeking

I don't know how the devs changed how seeking works in comparison to the old game, but from what little I have spent turns and paid attention to this it does seem similar, so I can elaborate on how it works. I figure this will be useful for newcomers too who are unfamiliar with this. Devs please feel free to correct however much you're willing to divulge in the specific mechanics and information, or any of my errors.

The way seeking works in terms of discovering items such as herbs or ore on a square is based on the fertility of that square. A square starts at 100% fertility, and each time you spend an "explore" turn it drops by 10%. Whether you find something or not, the fertility still goes down, thus the chance to find something in the square lowers. So, once you've explored a square 10 times in a short time frame, you won't find any herbs or anything, just the normal chance to encounter monsters. The fertility recharges at a rate of 10% per hour, and the higher seeking means higher chances to find something in the square, however I don't believe it affects the amount found in a discovery.

Close Giant Dad

Fertility is very complicated to explain in fact.

Fertility of a spot is 100%.

Everytime you explore, you MAY get a successful explore (based on your seeking skill).
If you get a successful explore, the fertility drops by 10% and you MAY get an item (based on the explore table of the area you are at).
If you don't get a successful explore, the fertility stays the same (this is why you have to change tile more frequently if you have high seeking).
Every hour, the fertility of all tiles on the map is raised by 10%.

Now, an explore table can have only 10% item finds, and another one (like copper mine) more than 80%. Which is why a successful explore doesn't necessarily mean you found something.

All that is quite complex so a simple rule of thumb for players is:
-If you care only about monsters and not herbs/ores, you can explore 250 turns on a same tile
-If you care about herbs/ores, it is recommended to switch tile every 15 turns. If your seeking skill is high (let's say over 200), then 12 turns. If it's really high (say over 400), then 10 turns.
-Once a tile is 'depleted', wait 10 hours before exploring on it again

THank you good to know

Whoa it's Dreadlock, this all was actually taken DIRECTLY from your guide you made, if you log onto the light forums for Stax and look up my guide I made under "Intelligence" I credited you on page 2 of my thead "A Beginner/Intermediate's guide to TPS and Stax". Thank you for all the work you put in, seriously.

Aww, somebody deleted my fertility post on the TPS EU boards. That would have made this so much simpler to copy paste. I don't know where the old Light boards are.

I found my Excel sheet that laid it out, though, and I have some year 2007 version of code (don't ask for copies, because I'm not giving it), so I can re-type it all. This explanation is assuming, of course, that no changes have been made to exploring. I could be wrong since there's a real chance my data is outdated.

First, you press Explore on the main or move pages. Complicated, right?

The game then:

1. If gold exploring is still around, it would make a check for if you find gold. This is NOT attached to your seeking skill at all, just whatever replaced intuition. Again, IF gold exploring is still in code. Don't clamor about it, the most powerful people in intuition could only get 800 gold at best. Most players would find under either under 10 gold or 50 gold.
2. Rolls a 1d100 die (random generation from 1 to 100, including both 1 and 100).
3. Multiplies your Seeking skill by Fertility in percent. Meaning 90 fertility is seeking * .9, 80 fertility is seeking * .8, and so forth. This translates into the less fertile the land is, the harder it is to find something. Unless your really skilled in seeking.
4. Compares the number from step 2 to that of step 3. If the dice roll is less than your seeking math, you win an explore and the fertility is reduced by 10! Yay! If you failed to pass the check, that tile's fertility is unmoved. Aww! Try again.
5. Checks the explore table assigned to that tile and rolls a 1d100 die. The game admins build explore tables with various items in it. They CAN and PROBABLY DO leave holes in those tables. If you know that explore table #1 is assigned to tile A and tile B, then your chances of finding anything in it are the exact same because it would be really sucky to build a unique explore table for each tile in the game. There may only be like 50 tables assigned across the map (I made that number up because I don't know current layouts). This means, unless the admins decide to place a unique explore table in just one part of a forest (roleplay of "the deepest depths of the forest"), odds are that the entire forest in a given location is all the same items. Here's an example:

Table Bobs-your-uncle
1 - 20 common comfrey, item count 1-3
21-40 mistletoe, item count 2-5
41-99 absolutely nothing
100-100 4 leaf clover, item count 1-1

That 1d100 die rolled in step 5 is what picks the item you get. The game then rolls a random number between the item counts. Comfrey will find you 1 to 3 items, Mistletoe will find you 2-5 of that, and the 4 leaf clover will find just 1 no matter what. Note that you have a 20% chance of finding two different common items, over half of that table is empty, and there's a pretty item at a 1% find rate. Disclaimer: I have no idea if that item is in-game, it's an example.

6. The game figures out if you picked a fight with a creature native to that tile. This is also separate from seeking skill.

So, if you want to figure out how many turns to spend based upon your seeking skill?

Download this antique Excel spreadsheet and open it. To come up with these numbers, I ran 10,000 simulations at each skill and fertility combination, so I'd say it's quite accurate in regards to turn cost.

Fertility chart.xls (38.5 KB)

Across the top, you will see "To go from 100 Fertility To...". Seeking skill of your character is down the left side. Each successful exploration reduces fertility by 10 points, so the most powerful seeker would only need 10 turns to go from 100 fertility to 0.

You'll note in the top left that it says it will take basically 5 turns to go from 100 fertility to 90 fertility with only 20 seeking. The worst case scenario in 10000 simulations was 67 turns to get 1 successful exploration. At the far end of the chart, 20 seeking skill takes an average of 146.4 turns to go from 100 fertility to 0, with a worst case scenario of "yeah, that's going to take several characters at that level" for 932 turns to zero out that tile.


There's obviously diminishing returns. A seeking skill above 500 hits 11 turns average to hit 0 fertility (nice!), and hitting 1000 seeking is the point where you have a guaranteed 10 turns to 0 fertility. The amount of time between 500 and 1000 skill is.... big.

Is there a way to notify this currently? If you want us to be able to keep track of fertility, a fail and a success-but-no-item looks the same. A message like "You thought you noticed something, but alas..." when you succeeded an explore but got no items, so you know you impacted the fertility?

Are these tile fertility systems global, or personal? If they are global, is it possible to implement a way to gauge a tile's fertility besides map dots?

For anyone late to the party, agonia.boards.net/post/606/thread says that you get a message when you decrease fertility but find nothing.

Oh, and the gold coin find? Not a thing in Agonia. It's uncharted land, so no people to drop coins before us.