Anyone out there I could contract for high Q vanilla beans? Otherwise I'll just dump all my money into farming beans
Define 'high Q'. I'm at like... I don't remember, but my tech level is like 12, and I'm using Q22 water or so right now. I've been stockpiling to make vanilla extract (which I'm dumping lots of research into at the moment), but that factory has lots of other stuff on its plate. I could drop by IRC at night and give you a heads-up before I drop 10k vanilla on the market. If you plan to be a regular buyer, I'll expand my fields some more. Heck, I might do that anyway~. It's been selling great on B2B, so when I get home I think I'll expand my plantation from 50m^2 to 100m^2, or whatever value will use up my water for the night. God, I really need to start producing my own high quality water. I hate having to watch the water market like a hawk.
My ice cream factories are finally being productive, and all that wheat is going to good use in flour. I'm about to hit completely home-made Neapolitan ice cream (though it'll be like Q5 for now), and once I get blueberries up to speed, I'll be making cheesecake, pies and muffins.
...Does any other Excel whiz feel like doing me a big favor? I'm not sure where to source the data, or I might take a stab at it myself. I want a value-added table. For each good, I want it to report 1) total cost of its ingredients, 2) intrinsic cost, 3) time, and 4) average market rate. Bonus points if it bases its values on batches of 10,000 or so. It should allow overriding values, which is trivial really.
Basically, I want to be able to say "I get water at $0.16/unit. Oranges require 3 units of water, X units of electricity, and cost $0.YY, and their average value on the market is $Z. $Z - cost = $V value added per unit, or $T value added per second per square meter. If I turn them into canned oranges, and buy cans at $C, I'll add value of $D/second, based on (value of canned oranges - production cost - the production cost of oranges)." Find the supply chain with the greatest average value added per second, which will probably occur mostly at the end of the chain, and you basically win the game.
If anyone wants a copy of my store scraper, I can post a copy. It's still pretty manual; for each good in your store you have to ctrl-A ctrl-C, alt-tab to scraper, ctrl-V ctrl-C, alt tab to excel, type good name, ctrl-V. If you're fastish, it'll take you about twenty seconds per good. But hey it works.
Oh yeah! And if you ever wondered what effect quality has on your goods' value, look no further than the export screen. It tells you the base value of your goods, plus a quality modifier. I'm willing to bet that it uses the same formula when you're selling things in a store, so a Q0 good priced at $10 will sell at the same rate as a Q15 good priced at $13 (just an example, not actual numbers). What I don't know is the formula for sales rate. Like...if the market average for action figures is 20Q for $10, and you sell 20Q for $5, how much faster will you sell them? 1.5x? 2x? 4x?