Whenever I craft oil, you use only half the meat you should. Is this intended and the wiki is wrong, or is it bugged?
For example, say you put 2x meat soups in the pot and cook them, you should, as per the wiki, get 4x oil.
However, what actually happens is that you gain double the amount soup put in as oil and use up half of your soup.
So, say you have 7x soups and chuck them all together in the pot and cook them. You'll use 4 soups, get 14x oil and keep 3x soups. Do it again, with the 3x soups left and you'll get 6x oil and 1x soup left, then you can do it one more time with the last soup and get 2x oil for a total of 22x oil instead of the 14x you should have. According to the wiki, at least.
So, I've done some excel magic and found the efficiency, aka the amount of oil crafted per soup used using this wonky arrangement and found that it quickly escalates from 2 ops (oil per soup) if you were to only put in 1 soup in, to 3.75 ops at 8 soup in the pot, then slowly peaks at around 4 ops simmered down. Which is to say, you put 8 soup in the pot, make the oil, take the oil out, leave the soup and repeat until there is none left.
The most efficient amount of soup to turn into oil at a time are exponents of 2 (2, 4, 8, 16, etc) with it going down every additional soup you add and with upticks on every sub exponent. That is to say, 16 is most efficient until 32, but the second highest between those two is 24 (16+8) and the third highest is 20 (16+4).
There are exceptions to this rule due to rounding.
You can make this a nearly linear line from peak to peak by not putting the whole amount of soup at once.
Eg. you have 15x soups. using this chart, you should have an approximate efficiency of 3.47 ops, or 52x oils.
By instead putting only cooking 8x soups, then adding 4 and cooking those, cooking 4x, adding 2 and cooking those, cooking 2x, adding 1 cooking those and finally cooking the last soup, you'd get 58x oils or, an efficiency of 3.87 basically the same as the golden standard of using exponents of 2.
Here's another simpler example, imagine you have 3x soups. By the chart, and empirically, you'd end up with 8x oils, an efficiency of 2.67 ops. By cooking only 2x soups, adding the last one and cooking it, and finally cooking the leftover, you'd get 10 soups, which doesn't sound like much at first sight, but you go to 3.33 ops. Which is a full 25% increase in efficiency!
Finally, why? Well, often time, enemies drop a lot of meat that you may not be able to make use of at the moment. Or it's awful meat you wouldn't want to use anyways such as humanoid or mutant meat because it makes you get sick and potions get expensive in the wild. Even if they aren't, getting potion sickness sucks and overall it'd be best not to use it. So, you can instead turn all that juicy, calorie-dense, food-stuff into firepower. Into Molotov cocktails! Those are sold for ~150tp each, a mystery smoked meat ~80tp, a human smoked meat ~160tp and a normal smoked meat ~240tp.
To calculate the amount of tp generated for piece of meat, since it depends on the amount of meat you have on you, we'll go for a few benchmarks efficiency markers, 1.5 opm(oil per meat) since you need 2 meat per soup, 1.87 opm and 2 opm.
We can start with the easiest to calculate related wealth generators: turning meat into smoked meat. since you always need 2 meat to turn into smoked meat, we can calculate this very simply by dividing the tp earned by meat needed to craft the smoked meat. in which case we'd get 40 tpm (tp per meat) for mystery smoked meat, 80 tpm for human smoked meat and 120 tpm for normal smoked meat.
Now for oil calculations:
We first need to divide the amount of tp earned by selling Molotov cocktails by the amount of oil needed to craft them, that's easy enough, the value is then 150 tp/6 oil so the value here is now 25 tpo. To turn this into tpm to compare them, we simply need to multiply our tpo by our benchmark opms.
As such, we'll have 37.5 tpm if you only have 4 meats on you, 46.75 tpm if you have 16 meats and 50 tpm if you have 64 meats.
In conclusion, let's overview all the different ways to turn meat into money in order of highest to lowest trading points per meat harvested and try to get better at the game:
Smoked meat: 120 tpm
Human smoked meat: 80 tpm
Oil if you have >64x: 50 tpm
Oil if you have >16x: 46.75 tpm
Mystery smoked meat: 40 tpm
Oil if you have >4x: 37.5 tpm
Knowing this, let's make a simple flowchart to make use of this information:
1. If the meat you've harvested is from human or animal sources and you can, use it to make smoked meat. Try to separate human and non-human meat.
2. If the meat you've harvested is dubious, have >=16x meat and can do so, turn it all into molotov cocktails. (This happens often when raiding orkind, fishkind and abomination nests and corrupted forests)
3. If you have <16x dubious meat and can do so, turn it into mystery smoked meat.
4. if you can't do any of those things, maybe because you're missing a log and you won't have time to buy or harvest one, or you don't have 10 or more survival, it's still better to turn it all into cocktails than letting it rot.
This might make you reconsider investing 10 points in survival, since with this you can still retain a reasonable amount of value from dropped meat. You only need 5 survival to make a Molotov so this saves you 5 trait points to put in more combat, constitution or wisdom and, I know I've done it, usually, if I'm taking 10 survival, I end up thinking that the last 5 points are probably worth putting into to be able to make potions. So my case, it'd save 10 trait points.
