1.4's crystalarium buff (spoilers)

[I Kinda Fail]

Something I just realized that might not be immediately obvious... Crystalariums got a bit of a utility/profit buff in 1.4, despite not receiving any updates. When spelunking in the Skull Caverns, many players rely on staircases, which are REALLY expensive to make after year 1 - about 10k per staircase, if you buy your stone.

Well, the desert trader now sells 1 staircase for 1 jade on Sundays. So if you load up your crystalariums with jade, you'll get jade every other day. So if I have 10 crystalariums, that's about 40 jade, worth 40 staircases, saving me a whopping 400k in money if I were to buy the stone from Robin.

And yes, staircases now stack in your inventory.

To a much lesser extent, you can also harvest quartz from a crystalarium (realistically) 2 times per day. The trader sells bombs for 5 quartz every day. So 10 crystalariums will get me 20 quartz per day, or 140 quartz per week, or 28 "free" bombs per week. Bombs cost 600g from the Dwarf, which isn't THAT expensive, although personally I always have enough ore from blast mining and killing serpents to upkeep my bombs. Still, if you buy your bombs, this'll save you about 15-20k per week. Not as lucrative as buying staircases, but still pretty dang good.

[thelefthorse]

That is a serious quality of life improvement for the Skull Caverns--thanks for the info. I swear, of all the new content and upgrades, etc., I think my favorite is that my cat now always sleeps on the bed with me. That used to happen seemingly by accident previously, and usually it would prevent me from being able to get into the bed, but now she sleeps on top of the covers every night. I can almost hear the purring :)

[reecevids]

Good info Thanks. I have spent so much on stone for staircases.

[josseriot]

I kind of figured that ConcernedApe intended this. Crystalariums are end game and kind of OP, and the desert trader is suppose to be end game as well, so it makes sense to utilize the crystalarium in this way, since mining for the precious stones isn't realistic for trading regularly with the desert trader. The only "currency" you might have to mine for is the omni geodes since the 1.4 update in my latest playthru, Sandy only sold me 3 at 1000g each, which isn't enough to buy an Artifput a limit on how many omni geodes Sandy and Krobus will sell you. I think when I check act Trove. When I checked Krobus, he could only sell me 2 omni geodes at 300g each. So those aren't good ways to get a lot of omni geodes fast anymore.

But for other precious stones, like aquamarine, jade, quartz, etc. it seems ConcernedApe wanted to make it a little trickier for us to exploit the Crystalarium. So instead of making it easy for us by having the desert trader require gold, since gold is so easy to make with the Crystalarium, we now have to use the Crystalarium to produce specific stones for the desert trader, and not just whatever gets us to the most gold for the time it takes to produce. So if we want something like a bunch of staircases or bombs, we have to tie up our Crystalariums producing those specific stones just for that, which means we either accept making less gold from the Crystalarium or invest more resources and time into making even more Crystalariums. So yeah, the Crystalarium is still OP but now a little more costly to work with if you intend to use the desert trader.

[I Kinda Fail]

Originally posted by josseriot:

I kind of figured that ConcernedApe intended this. Crystalariums are end game and kind of OP, and the desert trader is suppose to be end game as well, so it makes sense to utilize the crystalarium in this way,

Maybe! But I just figured I'd throw it out there because this game is full of stuff that isn't obvious to everyone.

Still, it's a pretty big jump from a crystalarium producing a diamond every... 5? 7? days, for 750g or whatever, to producing 1 jade every other day, which can be trades for an item that's essentially worth 10k. This is a massive buff to crystalariums, intended or not.

[Whirl]

You don't need to buy a crytalarium to farm quartz. CDs and Glasses have 100% chance of being Recycled into Refined Quartz. Crab Pots do the job just great, as does Trash Diving

[Keeper Of Monsters]

Originally posted by Hotwire:

You don't need to buy a crytalarium to farm quartz. CDs and Glasses have 100% chance of being Recycled into Refined Quartz. Crab Pots do the job just great, as does Trash Diving

Yes, that's if you need refined quartz.
But what if you want regular Quartz for whatever reason?

[I Kinda Fail]

Originally posted by Keeper Of Monsters:

Originally posted by Hotwire:

You don't need to buy a crytalarium to farm quartz. CDs and Glasses have 100% chance of being Recycled into Refined Quartz. Crab Pots do the job just great, as does Trash Diving

Yes, that's if you need refined quartz.
But what if you want regular Quartz for whatever reason?

The reason being you need quartz to buy bombs. :P