Bug - Not A Bug "Use Milk" button opts to buy Milk of Magnesium instead of crafting

S

shoptroll

Member
This is a bit of an odd bug since I didn't think anything had changed under the hood.

Ascended casual a couple days ago. For the last two days Mafia is opting to buy Milk of Magnesium instead of crafting it (this was on build 9000 and 9055). I have 20 Glasses of Goat's Milk and over 1000 reagents. I've had Advanced Saucecrafting HC permed for several years now, and my kitchen is stocked with a Chef-In-The-Box. I can't figure out why it's preferring to buy from the mall instead of crafting.

Currently a level 5 Accordion Thief. Casual run.
 
StDoodle

StDoodle

Minion
Compare the price that those goats milk and reagents sell for in the mall to the price of a MoM, and I suspect you'll see the answer. I can't recall exactly how it always works, but I believe that unless you specify "create" the default behavior is to buy any of the potions that saucerors get a 3-to-1 crafting bonus on unless you're a sauceror.

I could easily be wrong though; I honestly don't pay nearly as much attention to what's going on in aftercore as I do in-run.
 
jasonharper

jasonharper

Developer
Run type detection has just been significantly changed, and I don't think we've done ANY testing for casual runs, so my guess is that mafia thinks you're in a SC or HC run and therefore can't access the ingredients. Are the glasses of milk and reagents in your actual inventory, or still in Hagnk's? Does create milk of magnesium in the CLI work properly?

Also, post the output from get buyScript - having such a script is currently the only way that mafia would choose to buy an item it believes to be craftable entirely from ingredients on hand.
 
StDoodle

StDoodle

Minion
Huh, really? I could swear something along the lines of what I described had been added at some point. If not, seems like a good idea for a feature request! (Currently, the reagent alone sells for more than the milk of magnesium; you basically never want to make potions as a non-sauceror.)
 
S

shoptroll

Member
jasonharper said:
Are the glasses of milk and reagents in your actual inventory, or still in Hagnk's? Does create milk of magnesium in the CLI work properly?
Click to expand...

Glasses and reagents are in my actual inventory.

> create milk of magnesium

You cannot cook fancy foods without a range.

...

*headdesk*

Right. I forgot you still need the fancy equipment to go with you the innaboxen. My bad!
 
jasonharper

jasonharper

Developer
The code will consider buying a missing ingredient vs. buying the finished product; the 3X potion yield of saucerors is taken into account, but does not force the decision one way or the other. (And that's exactly how it should be, since there ARE occasional price fluctuations of sufficient magnitude to change the decision - for example, this last Crimbo one of the stat equalizer potions was in such high demand by powerlevelers that it was vastly cheaper for even a non-sauceror to buy the ingredients and make it themselves.)

But that's not at all related to the problem here, since shoptroll actually has all the ingredients. Choosing to buy something that you could have made yourself (and then presumably selling the ingredients that you didn't use) is a fundamentally different kind of decision, one that mafia will currently never make on its own:
* Mafia has a reasonably good idea of what it would cost to buy an item in the mall, especially if you participate in the price-sharing program. However, that doesn't directly translate into a good idea of what an item would sell for in a reasonable time.
* Even with a good estimate of what an item could be sold for, there's no guarantee that any given player is going to go to the effort of selling them for maximum profit. They might choose the easier path of autoselling excess items, they might dump them in the mall really cheap so they sell quickly, or they might be packrats that never dispose of anything; for all such players, assigning the full mall value to items in their inventory would simply screw them over. Someday I hope to have an interface for players to indicate their selling habits - at which point mafia could reasonably make buy vs. sell decisions in addition to the current buy vs. buy - but it's not going to be soon.
 
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