uw sites

[earcaraxe]

which magic sites are uw? (they arent marked in the database i think) Or: what are the needed magic path levels for finding most of them?

[Edi]

Yes they are. UW sites are those whose locmasks only allow them to appear in sea or deep sea.

[earcaraxe]

oh, so that is what the mask means. how can it be decoded?

[Edi]

There is a Sitemasks tab in the DB, where all the locmasks are listed. Look for the ones that have sea and deep sea in them. I think 288 was both sea and deep sea, 32 was sea only and 256 was deep sea only. IIRC I screwed up the MagicSite tab in the static Excel spreadsheet, in that the decoded site masks don't display correctly there. I should probably fix that and then reupload the DB, but I need to look into that later.

[Squirrelloid]

Basically, the sitemask is the sum of some set of powers of 2. You can decompose one by finding the largest power of 2 that it can be reduced by, and subtracting that off, repeat until you're left with a power of 2. All the powers of 2 you subtracted are the informative bits, and their meanings are in the DB.

[earcaraxe]

thx, i found out the summing procedure.
Could you tell an "optimal" mage's paths who can find the majority of uw sites? for instance, is it worth to start searching later, in exchange for a 2N mage instead of a N1?

[Squirrelloid]

2s is pretty good for manual searching. There is a single non-unique relatively common 3 level site for each path, but otherwise all other 3s and all 4s are rare, unique, or both.

Ideally you'd search with 3s since then you only miss 1-2 sites per path, and those are all rare and unique. But 2s are perfectly acceptable. 1s you'd want to go over again.

That said, so long as you can stomach researching sites you've already searched, if you can get 4-5 1+s, you can get some decent gem income searching with that.

[thejeff]

If you're underwater it's worth searching as soon as possible for nature sites, even if it's only N1. You find the Kelp Fortresses that way.

[Squirrelloid]

Oh right, UW... I'd have to look again, the 'math' for UW is a little different. For example, D1 will hit all but one site, and D2 would catch that.

[Lingchih]

You'll mostly find N, W, and S sites underwater. N is probably the most important.