Blemishine's Base Skills
Blemishine has 2 base skills for the Workshop: Careful Planning and Passionate Tinker. Both skills provide bonuses when crafting Elite Materials, which you'll be doing quite often.
- Careful Planning is unlocked immediately, before any promotions. This skill removes all LMD costs when crafting.
- Passionate Tinker is unlocked at Elite 2. This skill increases the rate of byproducts by 40%, to a total of 14%. This skill also halves the morale reduction from recipes that cost 8 morale.
Careful Planning is a unique base skill; instead of simply boosting the byproduct rate, it removes the LMD cost. How does it stack up against "traditional" Workshop base skills, which simply boost the byproduct rate? What about an Elite 2 Blemishine, who has Passionate Tinker unlocked?
Let's take a look.
Blemishine's Competitors
First, let's look at other base skills for the Workshop. Specifically, for producing Elite Materials. These skills all boost the byproduct rate by a certain amount.
| Byproduct rate boost | Examples | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 80% | Ceylon, Catapult (E1), Sussurro (E1), Blue Poison (E2) | These skills are fairly common. Most players should have access to one of these. |
| 90% | Chiave (E2, devices only), Aosta (E2, polyesters only) | These skills only apply to particular types of materials, and require E2 promotions. |
| 100% | Nian, Arene | Arene's byproduct boost depends on how many low-morale operators are in your dorms. His boost can reach at most 100%. |
Blemishine's Passionate Tinker only boosts the byproduct rate by 40%. Will the LMD refund from Careful Planning make up for this difference?
Calculations and Math
Note: this section contains math. If you don't like math, feel free to skip to the next section.
When no operator in the Workshop is used, a set amount of LMD is consumed, and there is no chance for any byproducts. I'll use this as a baseline. The sanity value gained from each craft is:
(value of LMD saved) + (avg value of byproduct) * (byproduct drop-rate)
Of course, these values vary by tier. Crafting high-tier materials costs more LMD, and drops better byproducts.
Byproducts
Different items actually have different drop-rates when byproducts are given. For example, when crafting tier 2 items to tier 3, you will get more Orirock Cubes than Devices. Fortunately, an analysis from the CN server determined how these drops were weighted, so calculating the exact drop-rates of each item is pretty easy.
We can then multiply the drop-rate of each byproduct by its sanity value. Moe's farming spreadsheet has calculated these values. This is a complex process, so click the link if you want to delve into the details.
And here are the results:
This table shows the average sanity value of a byproduct of each given tier. For example, if you got a byproduct from crafting 5 Orirocks (tier 2) into an Orirock Cluster (tier 3), that byproduct would be worth 5.9 sanity on average.
Evaluating the Base Skills
Now, we can plug the sanity values, drop rates, and LMD saved (for Blemishine specifically) into the formula above. This determines how much sanity each base skill saves when crafting. Since sanity values differ by material tier, these calculations need to be repeated for each tier.
Blemishine appears twice. Once at Elite 0, with only Careful Planning, and again at Elite 2, when she gains Passionate Tinker.
Final Results
Here are the results. For each tier of crafting, each base skill is ranked from best to worst.
This means...
- When crafting from tier 1 to 2, or tier 2 to 3, the value of byproducts is so low that Blemishine's LMD refund, even unpromoted, outperforms +100% base skills.
- When crafting from tier 3 to 4, +90% base skills outperform Blemishine, but +80% skills still fall behind E2 Blemishine. E0 Blemishine is useless.
- When crafting from tier 4 to 5, it's not worth using Blemishine at all.
If you want to check my calculations, here's a link to my spreadsheet.
