I'd like to propose a somewhat coordinated spading effort to start discovering the specific data behind twilight.
For one thing, if anyone is spading anything specific they can post it here. People can then suggest how to do that properly and faster. But also, I'd like to propose specific projects for spading, and see if people are willing to participate.
Item Drop Effects
The first spading project I'd like to propose is spading item drop bonuses of the effects we are not certain of. You can find the full list of effects here. The effects of Amazing Technicolor Dreampants Pants, Clockwork kangaroo,
Crow, Echolocation, Gumshoe, Monkey and Nicely Aged are unknown.
How does one spade item drop bonuses you might ask? Well the idea I came up is to find an anchor - an item for which item drop percentages are high and well known. I believe I have found such an item: pearls of wisdom in the bay drop 80% of the time. Why this helps is detailed below. It involves a bit of math, so if you are not into this, and trust the math, feel free to skip to the list of things YOU can do to help at the end.
So how can such an anchor be use to determine the exact item drop of an effect? Assume pearls do drop 80% of the times. If you are using 25% item drop bonus, they will drop 0.8*1.25=100% of the times. However, if you have 24% item drop bonus they will only drop 0.8*1.24=99.2% of the times.
To demonstrate how this can be used I spaded the drop percentage of Metal Detector (MeD). With 8% item drop from other sources I have witnessed the pearl not dropping. So MeD must be below 17%. With 9% however, we have spent 600 turns between us and it dropped every single time. If the MeD bonus was 15%, the chance of this would be (0.99^600)=~0.2% which is low enough for our purposes.
Moving on to other effects, I hope the method I propose is clear. Say you think Gumshoe is 10%. Try first using it with additional 10% and witness it not dropping. Then raise it slowly, 1% at a time. In each case adventure until you witness it not dropping, or repeat 300ish turns with drops.
How DO we know that pearls drop 80%? Ryme already confirmed that drop rates are integers. I have spent 2609 turns with no effects or equipment in the bay and 2094 pearls dropped. By the powers of mathematics we know that with 90% certainty the real value is between 78.98 and 81.54. I believed this to be 80%. But much stronger proof was provided by Satan (see post below). With 24% item drop bonus purely from equipment worn Satan witnessed a pearl not dropping. So the exact drop rate is below 1/1.24=80.6%. Furthermore, he had 501 turns with 25% drop where pearl always dropped. The chance of this happening with 79% drop is (0.79*1.25)^501=0.18%. With very high certainty we are now sure that the drop rate is 80%.
To summarize how YOU can help (I will update the list as more data is available):
- Adventure in the bay with 5% item drop bonus from worn equipment and a Crow. Witness a case where a pearl does not drop and report it, or report count of turns it dropped.
- Do the same with Clockwork kangaroo and -7%.... that's a bit tough to get.
- Adventure in the bay with low item drop bonus from worn equipment and Gumshoe, or any of the other unknown effects, but only one effect at a time. Witness a case where a pearl does not drop and report it. Report exact drop rate bonus given by equipment. We will move on when people start reporting non-drops.
Level Up Gains
Simply post what you gained at each level here
Let the data flow in, and let me know what you think! Are there other things you rather see spaded? Do you have better methods in mind?
