Legendary Cornerstones

[koboldlord]

Most of the drizzle cornerstones have purple borders, and usually these 'epic' cornerstones give some useful passive bonus. During certain years, though, you get to choose from a pack of golden-bordered 'legendary' cornerstones, which are often very powerful and often change the way you play the run. You will never reroll from purple to gold or gold to purple, so it may be a good idea to save your rerolls for legendary years, to ensure you get one you like. Legendary cornerstones are mostly unavailable from other sources, with only the occasional appearance in themed glade events or the like.

I've tried a bunch of the legendary cornerstones, and I figured it would be fun to compare notes on some of them. The game is EA, so pretty much everything is subject to change, but a bunch of them make a run all by themselves, and a few are actively harmful. But maybe I'm missing some value? Perhaps some boring- or harmful-looking legendary is actually transformative, at least in the right situation? A bunch of them do get a lot stronger or weaker depending on prestige, or on particular biomes or map modifiers.

What do you all think of my take on these?

Alarm Bells value: C impact: C
15% bonus to production when there's enough cysts. It's really hard to make enough cysts, and you kind of need to kill them and start over when it storms, because the number of cysts you need to get the bonus is also enough to kill six people. You basically get the bonus one clearance every three years, plus whenever you roll one of the harder available danger glade events. It's a big bonus, but you don't get it very often, and you're never going to pollute hard enough to trigger it just by using the water-and-pipe system.

Ancient Pact value: B impact: B
This one is pretty strong. Losing villagers is painful, but being able to see glade events before you open them means you never an unlucky one that you are unprepared for. No more breaking into an unassuming danger glade in year 6 and now you have 40 cysts to deal with. You can usually double up on glades each year safely by selecting two that give different, non-stacking penalties. You can also beeline whatever map resources you happen to need most. The question I have is, however, why is the Queen's envoy giving this to you?

Back to Nature value: B impact: B
You get a pretty massive bonus to farms, but you have a food emergency to resolve immediately. Food emergencies are pretty bad, and they get harder to resolve in upper prestige levels. If you get past that, it's all gravy, but even after you've stabilized the farm bonus is actually kind of annoying unless you also have some sort of carrying capacity bonus for your farmers, too. They harvest three squares and their storage is full, and then they need six trips to get it all to the storage, and then clearance season is over before they get another load in. You definitely need to build some extra farms and do some seasonal worker micro to actually benefit from the extra food production, but if you do all that it does pretty well fix up your food economy.

Baptism of Fire value: C impact C
The clearance 3 cyst generation is good for a -30 hostility every three years. That's not really very much. You also can't burn wood or coal to deal with hostility during the storm if there's even a single straggler cyst lurking in the settlement. That's pretty bad. The really bad blightrot glade events could give you a lot more hostility reduction, but you also have to burn those 38 cysts during the storm without being able to mitigate hostility. If you can make it through the storm without needing to burn, you probably have enough global resolve to end the game pretty quick anyway.

Calming the Forest value: B impact: C
-50 to hostility per two dangerous glade events compares pretty favorably with the -60 hostility penalty for opening those glades in the first place. Assuming you don't get two copies, this perk lets you be a lot more aggressive in doing something you were probably doing anyway. I never feel bad about grabbing this one in drizzle 2, but it also doesn't make me play any differently.

Calming Water value: C impact: B
Okay, here's the main problem with all the water system perks, legendary and otherwise. Pipes are rare and expensive and limited in supply, and even if you get a recipe for them you can get tools from most of the same sources and with the same crafting materials. Tools are just better. There are fourteen victory points required to win a run, and the option that gets you four or five of those victory points is probably a lot better than paying an incredible cost to get -10 hostility per 150 units of water in some production building.

Cheap Construction value: A impact: C
In mid-prestige you get a penalty to construction, and this mostly eliminates that penalty. Suddenly you just erase all the hard choices you need to make with regards to spending precious mechanisms, pipes, or wildfire essence, because you now have enough for everything again, and you can spam buildings like you're not playing prestige any more. This is pretty good, but it's also pretty boring. That prestige penalty is one of the more interesting ones to play around, so a perk that takes it away is less fun.

Cooking Steam value: D impact: C
Oh, boy, +10% to food production speed for not using drizzle water. Maybe it'll be better when the water system is rebalanced in some future patch, but I'd rather just use the drizzle water and get +40% to my biscuit production to that one building only. If you're letting drizzle water sit around not doing anything, that means you've committed mechanisms or pipes to the task of having it sitting around not doing anything, and you can get things that are a lot better without spending a legendary pick on it.

Copper Extractor value: B impact: B
You always chop a lot of wood, so you get a lot of copper. You need two blueprints to make this do anything, but once you get them it's easily good for four or five points of reputation.

Counterfeit Amber value: C impact: B
10 amber per 75 units of water used is nice enough, but it has the same problem as any other water perk. 10 amber is at least a pretty good bonus, since you need it at high prestige to open more glades and there aren't a lot of ways to get it if you run out.

Crowded Houses value: D impact: C
Since space is hardly ever an issue, you get what is effectively a -33% cost reduction to construction costs for houses only. It's like the Cheap Construction cornerstone, except it doesn't work on the building materials that are actually precious. On the plus side, it doesn't actively hurt you.

Deserted Caravans value: F impact: A
This one actively hurts you. +50% to production is a pretty hefty bonus, but if losing trading doesn't hurt you, you were winning anyway. At best, this is a winmore perk, and in all the rest of the cases you are worse off for having it. It would be a good candidate for a map modifier... oh, wait, it already is one. It works better in the role of a bonus challenge, because it is not a reward.

Economic Migration value: D impact: C
Once you do a whole lot of trade routes, you get rewarded by having newcomers arrive in the middle of the storm rather than right after it. This is not a good thing. Fortunately, you can just not accept them until the storm is over, but that just means this legendary cornerstone is doing literally nothing instead of actively harming you. It could be reworked into a pretty interesting map modifier, but it would also need to pause your game to force you to receive newcomers, because why would you ever click the accept button during a storm if you didn't have to?

Exploration Expedition value: F impact: A
Here's another one that's fascinating, but also extremely bad. -5 to global resolve is enormous. That's as much as working a dangerous glade event, but all the time. Your villagers are all glade junkies and demand that you keep opening glades to give them a sweet hit of those glade drugs, but every time you give them what they want you're stacking another hostility penalty on your run. There are quite a few safe-ish small glades to work with, usually, but you definitely need to give them a hit before every storm, and any glade event that hits global resolve will probably force you to open a second glade to deal with it before work is finished on the first one. Eventually you're going to run out of safe glades for your junkies. I think this one would be a pretty great map modifier with minimal changes, but for a legendary cornerstone I'll pick almost anything else, including that shiny 'decline' button.

Extraction Tools value: D impact: C
You get some free citadel resources. Not very many of them. You probably took this one when you first started unlocking upgrades in the citadel, and you were probably disappointed to find out you needed to take the cornerstone in multiple games to actually have enough for an unlock. Eventually food overtook artifacts and machinery as the choking resource for your progress, and you probably have hundreds of artifacts sitting around that you can't do anything with any more. I guess you can sell them to a trader, if you want, but they aren't really worth all that much there, either.

Family Gratitude value: D impact: C
You get 40 wineskins per reputation point gained, but only if you're getting it strictly from having high resolve. If you're sitting on enough global resolve to trigger this, you're probably already doing great and you probably already have your container situation sorted out. This is a modest bonus that comes in when you don't need it. The species that is easiest to farm reputation from resolve doesn't even have a use for containers!

Firekeeper's Prayer value: A, impact: B
+30% to glade working speed is really good, even with the downside of sacrifices in the hearth being more expensive. Quite a few of the really bad glade events proc their negative effect every X seconds, and working them faster means you get less of the bad thing as well as having to put up with the bad thing for less time. The very nasty blightrot events will usually get at least one proc shaved off their total, which makes them a lot more manageable, and even the more mild glade events let you go back to business as usual a lot more quickly. Oddly, there's also a purple Prayer Book cornerstone that has a similar effect as this one, but without the negative side effect. Arguably, the epic cornerstone is the better of the two, but they stack so you can always just take both.

Firelink Ritual value: D, impact: C
This only works for humans and lizards, and you need one of a few specific service buildings plus a large and expensive production chain set up to keep you supplied with incense. If you actually have this all set up, you're probably about to win anyway because their resolve is probably going gangbusters.

Forge Trip Hammer value: C impact: C
You can make mechanisms in the smithy, if you happened to random into that specific blueprint and absolutely nothing else will do. Mechanisms do represent one of the key problems you need to handle on a high prestige run, but every person who has ever played this game has clicked on an order or cornerstone that requires a specific blueprint and then gone the rest of the run without ever seeing that blueprint. Probably okay if you already clicked on the smithy or found a ruin, but that's a gamble you should really never take if you're looking at your legendary cornerstone choices trying to decide what to click.

Free Samples value: A impact: B
Here's a way to get mechanisms that you can actually trigger reliably. It's really good. Even after the prestige penalty kicks in, you're still going to get things from the trade, so you might as well solve another problem at the same time. Trade routes give you credit on progress toward this perk based on the actual amber value you get, rather than the book value, so selling to trade routes is usually better than selling to a trader before the prestige penalty and is always massively better after the prestige penalty. Selling amber to traders for goods does give credit, but buying perks or blueprints does not.

Frequent Caravans value: B impact: B
Wow, this is impressively annoying. +3 global resolve is a pretty big bonus, but better grab a calculator to figure out when to start it to guarantee you get it when you actually want it. Some trade routes take a minute to complete, others take five minutes or more, and you get the same 60 seconds of bonus regardless. Expect the bonus to suddenly cut out at very unfortunate times, as you random into trade routes that you can't complete or that take too long. Still pretty powerful, but I'd really prefer to never click on it just because of the annoyance.

[koboldlord]

Generous Rations value: B impact: C
+5 to global resolve is a pretty massive bonus, enough to smooth out a lot of the game. You already have the prestige penalty to food, and the drawback to this cornerstone stacks with it, so you're effectively losing another 33% of your food budget. +5 does go quite a long way to evening out a few people complaining of starvation, oddly enough, but once you've addressed the food supply problem you've gotten a lot of wiggle room for every other aspect of the current run.

Hidden from the Queen value: A impact: B
This is almost useless until high prestige, until it suddenly turns off one of the major game clocks. It is very hard to lose to impatience without the extra penalty from losing piles of villagers, so once you have this you probably have a won run. Why is the Queen's envoy giving you this?

Hunter-Gatherers value: A impact: A
Double production from camps is typically going to solve your food problems for the run. That's a lot of bonus food. If you were already heavily invested in farming you probably would pass on this one, but you need to solve food problems now, not in a couple years when you've finally found fertile soil in a glade and have a blueprint for some farm from a trader.

Improvised Tools value: B impact: A
Opening glades in a storm is pretty crazy, but this is enough tools to be a victory condition all on its own. I find I need to make a lot of adjustments to hostility management and micro to actually get the bonus, but if I can pull it off it is a free cache worth of reputation every storm.

Lost Supplies value: A impact: C
40 meat and 40 grain is a lot of food. Assuming you have a flour recipe from somewhere, it's enough food to solve your food problems as long as you do a dangerous glade every year, which you were probably doing anyway.

Lumber Tax value: C impact: C
1 amber per 50 wood is probably in the neighborhood of 6 to 8 amber per year. This isn't bad, but it also isn't very exciting for a legendary cornerstone. It does solve the P19 softlock scenario, and you will surely find other good uses for a trickle of free amber, but you're not going to be making bank here.

Mist Piercers value: B impact: B
Like the Ancient Pact, you never need to make a risky choice ever again. All the glades you open are safe to handle and never cause casualties, and they always have resources that you currently want. Because you knew what was in there before you opened it. The drawback is trivial at low- to mid-prestige, but it does cause a bit of a squeeze at the highest prestige levels, so you absolutely need to squeeze every bit of advantage out of the extra information at that point. You might need to pass on some very nice harmony glade events just because they don't give reputation to pay back the half point of impatience you got for going in.

Mushroom Seedlings value: D impact: C
All farms now produce mushrooms, and should probably be directed to produce mushrooms, because mushrooms are one of the better possible crops. But did you really want to spend a legendary cornerstone on getting 6 mushrooms per square instead of 6 berries? They're better, but only by a little bit.

No Quality Control value: A impact: A
+2 to wood productive is such an incredibly massive bonus. You are rolling in wood every storm, easily 600+ wood to burn with no consequences for wasting it. At the end of the storm you lose all that wood, but your woodcutters are getting 6 wood per tree so you'll have new wood pretty quickly. You also get 50 bugs at the end of the storm, which is a very relevant amount of food that you can turn into jerky because you have functionally unlimited wood anyway. Solving both your food supply and your fuel supply at the same time is about as good as cornerstones can get. You do need to do some micro every drizzle to keep the fire going, but the game can't find wood that isn't in the main storage so you can have some sitting in your blight post, your jerky building, your plank building, etc. during the storm and just send it all back to have enough for your hearth until your woodcutters bring in more. Drizzle is a very non-risky time to have hearth accidents anyway.

Old Fedora Hat value: B impact: C
You get more inventory items from glade events, including caches. This does count for amber if you turn a glade event in for reputation, but it does not double the reputation gain, perks, or villagers. If you happen to get two hats, you just guarantee that it doubles every time. On average, you're going to get quite a bit of extra material from doing the things you were doing anyway, and if you happen to be achievement hunting at low prestige you can get absolutely silly numbers of tablets or crafting material for tools to keep the run going. It is also very funny seeing your villagers open a fairly distant large cache and then spend two full years taking the contents back to storage.

Over-Diligent Woodworkers value: C impact: C
3 barrels per 10 planks is a pretty good bonus, but the only think you're likely to be using barrels for is pickled food. It's a small, reliable bonus that you are probably going to use, but it also doesn't measure up to what you can expect from legendary cornerstones. Usually complex food isn't all that hard to get.

Overexploitation value: B impact: C
+10 to all deposits per tile of deposit. That's a bunch of extra food, but you don't actually collect it any faster. You just don't have to open a glade as often to keep from running out. This can help smooth out the early game, which could be exactly what it takes, but once you've found a permanent solution to your food problem the extra charges don't do anything important any more. The drawback is a bit of extra hostility, scaling to +30 at high prestige, which basically means you open one fewer dangerous glade or two fewer small glades to compensate. You probably got compensation from whichever glades you did open, if you got even one collectable resource.

Prosperous Settlement value: B impact: A
Another really good trading cornerstone, this one gives +1 global resolve permanently for every 40 amber worth of transactions. Again, trade routes are massively better than selling to the trader, and you can probably stack this bonus multiple times per year if you have a good trading setup. It won't really kick in until midgame, though, so you might need some more immediate solutions to make it through the first couple storms.

Protected Trade value: A impact: A
This would be the king of trading perks, except Trade Hub also exists. -15 to hostility for every 25 amber worth of transactions. That's low enough that you can start triggering it immediately even with 0 standing, and if you keep at it hard enough you can stack it enough to make hostility go negative, with some other bonuses in play anyway. Even without any silly tricks, you can easily buy off your choice of hostility from years, villagers, or glade opening.

Queen's Gift value: D impact: C
50 hearth resistance per point of impatience. This isn't nothing, but it also isn't enough to let you survive a blightrot glade event without doing all the same things you had to do anyway, so it is in fact very close to nothing. You could count on it maybe holding off the cysts for long enough for the storm to end, and probably be disappointed, or you could do the thing that will certainly work and just build another blight post.

Rebellious Spirit value: A impact: B
At high prestige, you're probably floating a bunch of impatience at any given time anyway. This is several points of global resolve that you don't have to do anything special to maintain, probably as much as you can get from a whole complex food production chain. That's really very good. But why is the Queen's envoy giving this to you?

Rich Glades value: C impact C
5 extra food per tile just isn't that much extra food. Every little bit helps, but this is the tier of cornerstone that gives you bonuses like doubling all food from a particular source.

Rooty Ground value: A impact: B
+1 to wood production is a very notable bonus, which should sort out your fuel issues for the rest of the game. The drawback is much less impactful than Hunter-Gatherers, though, because you can just build an extra farm on each plot and throw on an extra worker to compensate. You might also luck into a perk that just counters out the penalty without any special effort on your part, because they are pretty common as a payout for glade events like living matter clones.

Royal Guard Training value: C impact: C
Well, this is at least a better version of a fundamentally terrible perk concept. Services are really hard and expensive to get running, and you are probably about to win the run once you have them set up. This one at least gives you a big bonus for fulfilling it that works with the resolve dash to the end that you're almost certainly doing once you have services going. A C value might be a bit generous considering how hard it is to get services going, but I wanted to at least make a distinction between +5 resolve for doing a hard thing and the barely discernable bonus provided by some other, similar perks.

Safe Haven value; B impact: B
If you expand as aggressively as possible, you get a -40 hostility reduction for every 14 villagers. Combined with what the hearths do on their own without the perk, this basically eliminates hostility from population. If you can get the wildfire essences from somewhere, this is pretty easy to leverage and does a pretty good amount of hostility management.

[/b]Small Distillery[/b] value: B impact: C
Assuming you're on a map with resin, which is actually the minority of biomes, a steady stream of crystalized dew and a single blueprint constitutes another win condition. But if you're on one of the several biomes that don't have resin, it does literally nothing except block a legendary cornerstone slot.

Smuggler's Visit value: A impact: B
You can pick whatever blueprint you want. Odds are, no matter when you are in the game, there's a problem that you face that you can solve with exactly the right blueprint. Complex food early, services later, maybe trigger a chain of orders that you were stuck on. Getting to pick anything in the game is guaranteed to be value. Why is the Queen's envoy introducing you to this guy, though?

Stormwalker Tax value: C impact: C
Hey, it's another steady stream of free amber. 15 is starting to get to be a useful amount, and if you have the P19 penalty you don't have to worry about getting softlocked. It's not going to change your game but you can always use amber.

Survivor Bonding value: B impact: C
I'm not sure how I feel about this one. Both parts of the bonus are good, but this legendary perk is inexplicably available from pretty easy glade events and caches. It's probably still pickable, but it feels bad spending a legendary drizzle cornerstone on it.

Trade Hub value: S impact: A
This is a cut above all other trade cornerstones and is honestly probably too good. You can pretty easily win a run just off of this. Once you've build up standing with the Smoldering Citadel, a single ancient tablet sent off at the right time can represent a half point of reputation all by itself, and no matter your game situation you always have extra stuff to dump when the right trade route comes up. 1/14 of a win is a really big reward for a really modest on your part, and 60 amber of transactions isn't hard to accumulate at any point in the game.

Urban Planning value: D impact: C
This is pretty hilarious to imagine, but its benefits come in too late to do much. If you've got trade routes running anyway, you're eventually going to be packing 6 or 8 or 12 people in each of your skyrise condos. That won't actually kick in until housing stops being something that is expensive to accomplish, though, so making it functionally free doesn't help very much.

Without Restrictions value: C impact: C
You get another +10% to production that stacks nicely with your other bonuses, but it's just a bonus on the pile. You lose access to consumption control, which could mess with your efforts to farm reputation from resolve from harpies but more likely will do nothing at all.

Woodcutter's Prayer value: A impact: B
+1 to wood production solves your fuel problems, but you also get an immediate fuel emergency to handle. It usually isn't too hard to handle, since wood currently in your woodcutter's camps or in your plank building will be spared, but if you picked oil as an embark bonus you are probably sad to see 4 embark points get completely wasted. It's probably still worth making that trade, just because the bonus is so big.

Woodpecker Technique value: B impact: B
Well, it is a decent amount of food. It's a lot less than it was before the nerf, and also a lot harder to trigger, but you can usually keep a couple woodcutters going through the storm. Early in the game you might be able to keep all of them out, and two insects per tree will help a lot to smooth out your early food economy. Eventually you can't keep them out in the storm any more, and the perk basically shuts off, but hopefully it got you to a more permanent solution by then.

Work Safety Guide value: D impact: C
It's another bonus for a service that isn't relevant because you have a service and are about to win the run. If you've successfully set up the production chain for education, your harpies are already happy enough that you can go afk and win in a few minutes. You didn't need a production bonus for it.

Worker's Rations value: C impact: C
You get another +10% to production n exchange for workers eating 170% of their normal food rather than just 150% as normal. This probably doesn't make any difference at all, but if you are on the edge of having enough food to feed everybody the production bonus isn't going to compensate as well as the +5 to global resolve from Generous Rations.

[Lantantan]

Read the whole thing and I think you're spot on! You expertly butchered those D tier cornerstones and dissected what makes so many of them crappy. And indeed some of these trash cornerstones would make interesting map modifiers since they don't ever get picked.

[Lantantan]

I do think you undervalue 10% double production chance perks. That's extra 10% on every step of the production process, for a 3 step process like tool production we're talking about a 33% output boost per same amount of raw resources. Even if you're cooking two step food recipes there's a 21% increase of food per resource node. That's as good as "Overexploitation" And on top of that, effective production speed is at also 10% faster. Great deal for an effective increase of only 13% more food eaten on P20 with "Worker's Rations", this perk actually helps deal with food shortages.

[DG]

Baptism of fire is still top tier. I think I got -175 hostility from it last game.
Calming the forest really change the way I play. My strategy is normally to open as few glades as possible but this cornerstones allows much more aggressive play, as does -10 for each glade event.
Family Gratitude is good in any strategy where you open as few glades as possible.
Woodpecker technique ended with about 1000 insects in storage in my last game, despite being my primary food source. I'm assuming it was buggy but maybe it can just go crazy? (if you've got extra woodcutter speed and -175 hostility from baptism of fire)

[koboldlord]

10% production chance is a pretty good bonus, but you probably have a 10% bonus from hub level, a 10% bonus from species job preference, and maybe even two of them from hooking up water on there, so it's just one more 10% to the pile. I think I gave all those generic ones a C, which is fine but not exciting. I wouldn't turn a bonus like that down, just maybe not as a legendary pick. It would feel pretty bad to reroll past one and get a pick between two service legendaries.

-175 from Baptism of Fire sounds like it had some glade events involved. That's 51 cysts burned, which is pretty cursed RNG. It isn't retroactive, so you've got to pick it in the expectation that you're going to get multiple of the most expensive and hard-to-manage glade events available, and you're going to handle them without needing to sacrifice. Pretty good if you already have hostility on lockdown, I think, but if I'm not on the Crimson Orchard I'm usually not feeling like I do yet.

[Lorska]

Imo you're severely undervaluing some of these perks, though the obvious good or bad ones you got right.

Feeding your glade junkies more glades is actually optional. You aren't expected to have this buff active at all times (though you obviously could if you want to open small glades). I tend to only trigger this with larger glades and it gives pretty much guaranteed resolve = reputation when I need it or helps to buffer harsh storms (even if you just use it for the storms that's around 7 glades in a game you have to open which barely adds up to 1 hostility).
This perk is absolutely amazing on a tool run (so like every coral forest run). It also should be noted that this perk generally speeds up runs by a lot, because you'll open glades faster and gain resolve quicker.

The increased production with drizzle water seems mediocre until you remember that geysers are a thing to keep your water maxed out at all times. This can cut down massively on the absurd greenhouse production time, so even if you don't want to use pipes you can make use of this. It's also possible that you don't actually use drizzle water at all and it's just doing nothing in large quantities because you have more important things to use your pipes on. I've gotten some silly production bonuses from this perk which not only solves any food issues but also can be used for trading. It might not be a year one meat specialization on coral forest levels of food production but this is a lot more controllable.

Yes both of these perks aren't 100% insta-picks every game but are very strong if you know how to use them.

It's weird you completely ignore pipes in your review for baptism of fire. That's your main generator of cysts. The whole resolve argument is also weird considering you can use water to increase resolve and that you lower the resolve penalty by decreasing hostility.
The actual argument against this perk is that it somewhat requires burnt to a crisp due to being a huge fuel drain (though having a kiln as your water drain fixes this mostly) and that it encourages longer runs.

[koboldlord]

The glade junkies are at -5 global resolve at all times, and they swing to +10 if you give them another hit. Depending on what complex foods you've randomly gotten, and what anti-hostility perks you've managed to accumulate, this could put your harpies and lizards into the single digits even outside the storm. A simple destroyed caravan or termite nest being worked for seven minutes isn't going to be survivable without the bonus.

Maybe it works better than I think? If you have more detail on how you manage the -5 without opening glades, I'm interested in hearing.

I do completely ignore the pipes for blightrot generation, because I have yet to get a run where I get significant cyst generation out of that system. You need to buy a whole lot of very expensive goods from the trader, or use a whole lot of hard-to-get crafting materials, and even if you do it pretty aggressively working down from your most-used buildings you still only get enough cysts for a -10 or a -20 per year. With the effort expended to getting that set up, you can just buy a stack of tools that gets you victory points.

[Urza]

I kinda think we should be able to choose a deck of like minimum 25 legendary cornerstones. There are some that I just never want to see in my pool.

Im one of those players who thinks a game can have too much RNG. I dont care about any balance arguments people want to bring, I just dont think its fun.

[Quagma Blast]

Originally posted by koboldlord:

Maybe it works better than I think? If you have more detail on how you manage the -5 without opening glades, I'm interested in hearing.

You just open the glades. Assuming your 'normal' rate is 1 dangerous glade/year, it takes another 3 small glades per 2 years to get 100% uptime on the buff. That adds up to a bit less than one full level of hostility after 4 years, which means that during the storm you'll be taking -6 resolve that you wouldn't otherwise, for a net of +4. Unless something goes really wrong, I find I typically win by year 8 or 9, so even if you get it really early it never quite stacks up to 2 full levels of hostility, and the bonus Resolve means extra Rep generation which accelerates your win anyway.

Sometimes there is a really harsh mid-level forest mystery, and the game becomes about managing your hostility to keep from hitting it. In that case, the cornerstone can be a bad idea. Otherwise, it's pretty good.

I do completely ignore the pipes for blightrot generation, because I have yet to get a run where I get significant cyst generation out of that system. You need to buy a whole lot of very expensive goods from the trader, or use a whole lot of hard-to-get crafting materials, and even if you do it pretty aggressively working down from your most-used buildings you still only get enough cysts for a -10 or a -20 per year. With the effort expended to getting that set up, you can just buy a stack of tools that gets you victory points.

You start with 14 pipes for free. That's enough for a geyser and two piped buildings. That'll let you run the engines on them at pretty much full blast, which is quite effective at making cysts. I think it's something like 1 water per minute per engine level per worker? Maybe 0.5. That's enough for a cyst every couple of minutes, basically investment-free, and it blunts the yearly hostility by about 1/3.

[LotusBlade]

Okay let's try to discuss some of it.

Originally posted by koboldlord:

Alarm Bells value: C impact: C
15% bonus to production when there's enough cysts. It's really hard to make enough cysts

You produce crysts by using rain water. Just place few water collectors or water pumps and start using water like crazy = cryst spawn like crazy. Since buildings with water already have 25% bonus for double production, adding another +15% is huge. Let's say, you produce 10 pickled food, boom, now you make extra 10 for free which will feed double ammount of people or you can free 1 worker.

Originally posted by koboldlord:

Baptism of Fire value: C impact C
The clearance 3 cyst generation is good for a -30 hostility

Same story, provoke their spawn and get incredible value.

Originally posted by koboldlord:

Calming Water value: C impact: B
Okay, here's the main problem with all the water system perks, legendary and otherwise. Pipes are rare

Wrong. You can make pipes by using basic makeshift post or whatever it is called with few bars. Price of pipes from trader is only 1 gold, which is much cheaper compared to tools; and syringes outperform tools x2 anyway, while costing only slightly more. Buying 19 tools to finish one single big box and get +1 rep takes around 42 ember, ouch. With 42 pipes you can build 2 pumps and feed 5 buildings.

I am not gonna read any further, cus clearly, you haven't touched water system to begin with. If you did that to water, you mostlikely did same to everything else, barely understanding how it works and stated very wrong 'c' and 'd' marks.

Game plays super different depensing on difficulty, biom, starting conditions and player preferences. Water system is the most interesting to me and i absolutely pick it's cornerstone wherever i can (the only exception is, obviously, glade information).

[Urza]

Originally posted by LotusBlade:

Originally posted by koboldlord:

Calming Water value: C impact: B
Okay, here's the main problem with all the water system perks, legendary and otherwise. Pipes are rare

Wrong.

Pipes aside, I do feel like Calming Waters is underpowered compared to either other rainpunk perks or other hostility perks.

[el Darkness]

Originally posted by LotusBlade:

Okay let's try to discuss some of it.

Originally posted by koboldlord:

Alarm Bells value: C impact: C
15% bonus to production when there's enough cysts. It's really hard to make enough cysts

You produce crysts by using rain water. Just place few water collectors or water pumps and start using water like crazy = cryst spawn like crazy. Since buildings with water already have 25% bonus for double production, adding another +15% is huge. Let's say, you produce 10 pickled food, boom, now you make extra 10 for free which will feed double ammount of people or you can free 1 worker.

Honestly I do not see how to use this Cornerstone efficiently. You need to have 200% corruption, so in order for it to kick in, you either
- need to generate cysts like crazy and then still you will get benefit for probably less than a Clearance duration
- need to not burn most of your cysts during the storm which would result in your people dying to corruption

Other Rainwater/Cyst related perks work fine I think, they are good, but this one clearly I do not see working at all.

[Urza]

Originally posted by el Darkness:

Honestly I do not see how to use this Cornerstone efficiently. You need to have 200% corruption, so in order for it to kick in, you either
- need to generate cysts like crazy and then still you will get benefit for probably less than a Clearance duration
- need to not burn most of your cysts during the storm which would result in your people dying to corruption

Other Rainwater/Cyst related perks work fine I think, they are good, but this one clearly I do not see working at all.

I've personally not really bothered trying to get this cornerstone to work, but I imagine it could be managable if you combined it with the epic perk Firekeeper's Armor that increases the corruption removed per burned cyst by 50. You dont need to let your people die, you just need to burn enough cysts to keep corruption from reaching threshold.
By themselves these two perks might be useless, but if RNG smiled on you massively maybe you could get 15% bonus production for the price of two perks.
Its definitely a good idea to bank on that happening as soon as you see either of these perks.


Personally what I would do is make alarm bells scale with flat expected corruption, not as a percentage of your cap.
Base hearth corruption threshold is 1000, so if alarm bells gave you like 5% production bonus per 1500 expected corruption it could have some value early, some value that could scale with more/upgraded hearths, and some value if you happened to get the perfect perks to synergize with it.

[koboldlord]

You need 7 cysts active to get Alarm Bells to work. It's possible to get there if you've lucked into good geyser RNG and have a way to generate copper bars or crystallized dew, but it's going to take a good bit of time to get back to that number after you burn them all off every storm. I don't think you can plausibly stack corruption resistance to make it viable to not burn the cysts to keep above 200%, but even if it's possible with an exacting selection of perks it would be a meme run not a replicable strategy.

Alarm Bells isn't bad, strictly speaking, but the bonus is intermittent rather than steady. A 10% bonus that applies all the time is better than a 15% that applies mostly in clearance, and even an always-on 10% is hard to feel good about as a legendary cornerstone pick considering how many sources of 10% bonuses there are.

I'm trying another P20 run now to take another look at the pipe plan, and I'm feeling even more skeptical now. Pipes are two amber each, not one. Hooking up a building is 8 amber, and a geyser with an automaton is 10 pipes and a wildfire essence. Putting an actual worker in means giving up a +50% production speed bonus you get by putting that worker in a second copy of the building. Geysers are also pretty random and you're not guaranteed to get any at all, much less the kind you want, and traders often don't bring pipes or only bring a stack of 5.

There's a lot of opportunity cost involved in the early game. I'm certainly going to use whatever pipes I have, but my starter pipes cost 28 amber to replace and there's a lot of other things I could be spending that on, often with a shorter payoff time than -10 hostility per 3 cysts burned. I'll probably grab the perk again next time I see it, just to try it out again, but I'm feeling skeptical.

[Urza]

Originally posted by koboldlord:

There's a lot of opportunity cost involved in the early game.

This is especially relevant considering that the last of your 3 legendary perks is at the start of year 6.
Legendary perks all have to be considered as fairly early-game investments, and a lot of them arent that well suited for that.