Talk:Starfruit

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Highest

I am concerned about this sentence. "Starfruit produces Artisan Goods that have some of the highest sell values in the game." Why the weasel words "some of"? Is it justifiable to avoid stating a clear fact just because it could be misinterpreted? I suggest an edit. Options below:

• "Starfruit produces the Artisan Good that has the highest sell value in the game."
• "Starfruit wine has the highest sell value of any Artisan Good in the game."
• "While other Artisan Goods have a higher rate of return, Starfruit wine has the highest sell value of any Artisan Good in the game."
• "While other Artisan Goods have a higher rate of return, Starfruit wine has the highest sell values of any Artisan Good in the game."

-Tom Haws (talk) 04:50, 19 April 2020 (UTC)

While I agree that the language is a bit ambiguous, it might be due to ancient fruit being able to compete for high sell values. If you have the chance, take a look at Keg Productivity and Preserves Jar Productivity, which might explain why it is worded that way. It could also be that there are other artisan goods that sell for the same or higher, but I personally have not dabbled enough in artisan goods to know. Sylphoid (talk) 11:09, 19 April 2020 (UTC)

It's ambiguous, and I'm going to remove it. margotbean (talk) 16:45, 19 April 2020 (UTC)

Thanks, Margot. I would observe that many players (and contributors) over the years have focussed too much on sell values as a measure of profitability, and that has led only to opinions and ambiguities in the articles. Moreover, there are usually no simple single statements that apply directly to profitability, but only to elements of the process of making profit. So the articles get bulky, and also misdirect attention to this or that detail without attention to the whole picture. I think many are looking for bullet point wisdom where there is none to be had. The game is too good at balancing and combining the factors to allow for that.

• Profit = sell price minus COST.
• Real cost is not just gold, but time spent on process: growing crops, first off.
• Growing crops outside is a completely different matter than growing them in the greenhouse. To have no limits on growing season allows growth across game time seasons, adding days to repeated plantings that cross external seasonal boundaries. With a repeating crop like ancient fruit, that's a game changer, especially because of the long maturation time.
• Time between harvests is a major factor. It's shorter with repeating crops (once mature), an added factor for the greenhouse.
• The previous two points account for the primary differences in profitability (per day) between ancient fruit and starfruit. But the key is that the greenhouse reverses the equation for those two high-profit crops. The balancing factor is that greenhouse crop space is limited, so you can only take that so far.
• When it comes to artisan goods, your first question is "what kind of equipment?" and the second is "how many do you need/want?". The third then becomes "where do you put them?" Do you want to make a building? And all that comes back to COST. Time, accumulation of resources (including money) to create infrastructure. After that, time to keep the equipment supplied, loaded, and harvested.

So, the real questions come down to: what do I want to do with my playing time (how much this, how much that), how much time does it take to set up and get going (and do I need other things in the mean time), and how efficient is it possible to be in keeping the production pipelines going? Once you've plugged in the answers to all that, you might have the possibility of calculating a close approximation of your profitability over time, but even the time required would be a projection. (Besides, game time runs differently inside and outside.)

My argument boils down to this: keep the articles simple and direct, facts to the minimum basics. Provide short, simple tips to point people to a few options. And then let everyone go play and have some fun with what they want. The game is designed to flex so that these balances can't be pinned down to absolutes. IMO, even the "profit-per-day" stuff we have is over the top, because it has real no practical application. You can't look at profit until the point you've decided to sell, because everything is theoretical potentials until then, and those do not lead you to any next steps. Only the whole picture counts. Butterbur (talk) 01:44, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

I agree, Butterbur. I addressed this to some extent at User:Tom Haws and at Chucklefish forums (TL;DR: Ancient Fruit is fun, a lot of hassle, no help in Year 1, king of the outdoors, and a toss-up for the Greenhouse). I believe that with enough experience and good thinking, these things are not controversial or ambiguous. The question is whether there is a place for this on the Wiki and whether there is a clear way to communicate/summarize the facts without misguiding. It's a philosophical question about what's truly most helpful. Tom Haws (talk) 02:08, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

Thanks, Tom. I certainly agree that experience and good thinking these things become clear. IMO, though, there's not much to talk about in that regard on the Wiki. Communicate/summarize? What one would choose to say depends on your game-playing choices, and there's no right answer there. There's opinion, and sharing, but that's forum fodder. And there's fun. The accumulation of that experience, the thinking through and comparing of one's choices, and the selecting what appeals most to you. It's what playing the game is about. But it's individual, not factual. Butterbur (talk) 07:07, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

Not number crunching. Number crunching combined with experience and good thinking is invaluable. It matters to know the real facts. And this is the place to state them, where there's open editing of all hot air. To be clear and explicit, I don't hate wikis. I love them. I love the peer review. I love the necessity of finding the durable way to say things. I love that impracticality of moderating everything with an iron hand forever. Tom Haws (talk) 07:17, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

Here's an example: If you take any "best" spreadsheet referenced at Reddit or a forum, vet it, wikify it, discuss it, prune it, and clarify/disclaim it, you just added immense reference value and gravitas. There are way too many examples of statements, tables, tools, and discussions that either are just plain wrong, never got to the point they needed to get to, or are obscure. Only the wiki is (or potentially can be) living and authoritative. Tom Haws (talk) 07:17, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

Isn't the latest edit more confusing than before? What is "Artisan goods value"? Before the edit, the sentence was already pretty clear, but now it uses a made-up, ambiguous term and i'm not a fan of that. How about "...and can be processed into the most valuable Artisan goods in the game"? Sure the sentence becomes longer, but it also becomes more clear. Baconfry39 (talk) 07:46, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

I've removed the sentence about artisan goods in favor of crop sell price. Artisan goods' sell prices are a multiple of the crops' sell prices, so pointing out the former should suffice. margotbean (talk) 18:59, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

Good solution. Tom Haws (talk) 23:23, 7 May 2020 (UTC)

Agreed about the article removals. But another point, picking up on Tom's. I use number crunching, sometimes. But numbers are only facts, raw data. They are not information. Information requires interpretation of facts, the use of the numbers. What use?

I get value from the numbers because I have my own goals in mind. Someone else may get (often do get) different information from them. This is normal. Both can be correct within their frames of reference, but related to incompatible frames. The application of math is sometimes relative much as the physics of space is relative.

This is part of my point above about profits. Crop sell prices are data about profit from crops. You want info on fertilizer and rates of production of higher qualities when you look at that. If you're making wine, for example, that doesn't matter. Wine has its own price. Its relation to regular quality is one thing, to gold quality, another thing. But if you make wine you are declaring you don't care about that. What you care about is whether you choose the Artisan profession or not. So what do we write about on the wiki? In general, people care about both, but they have different frames of reference.

This is the problem with statistics, and why Mark Twain's comment about "lies, damn lies, and statistics" is still so relevant. The underlying math is fine, and has been greatly developed in our time. But the art of statistics lies in its interpretation, turning the numbers into information. The naive think everything is there already in the numbers, that they can't lie. Others think you can get an expert to interpret and then you'll be fine. But usefulness requires a frame of reference.

Even the best scientists often misunderstand. In the 1930's, Neils Bohr famously disagreed with the whole German community of physicists (the best in the world at that time) about data related to the divisibility (or not) of the atom. The argument was over interpretation of the data. And guess who was right? But statistics, and games, don't boil down to universal constants, and differences about interpretations are a given with human beings. So it's no wonder there's no simple solution to our discussions here. But I think it makes a good game (like this one) more fun. Because in the end, you have to figure it out for yourself. Butterbur (talk) 16:09, 8 May 2020 (UTC)