Read-Only Link: Pippi Kit Coin Drop Calculator
Editable Version (Expect chaos)
TL;DR - Easily create probabilistically accurate, pseudo-random AoC coin drops for your Pippi kits. This calculator is built to handle all AoC coins and up to 5 drops per coin, which all combine to yield the desired gold per kit, on average. The calculator is fairly modular and contains individual coin-specific correction calculators (only tin is corrected for by default). Take the guess-work out of probability, and add some variety to your kits’ coin values today!
Good news, Exiles!
Today, I am proud to share with you a little something I have been working on—the Pippi Kit Coin Drop Calculator! Like most of you Bonded Ones, I have a love for this game, its mods, and the community. Some of my favorite moments in gaming have come from this game, and I wanted to give something back in return for all of the great memories I have shared with others in this beautiful world. This post will be rather long, since I wanted to explain a bit about what this tool is, why I was inspired to make it, and how it works.
Simply put, the Pippi Kit Coin Drop Calculator (PK-CDC) calculates theoretically exact drop values for user-defined drop percentages and a target gold/kit value.
The calculator is a useful little gadget that I created after having spent a considerable amount of time trying to figure out the ideal rates that I wanted certain NPC’s to have when dropping various amounts of AoC coins, implemented by the masterfully crafted mod, The Age of Calamitous. The drop implementation is due, of course, to the immensely powerful Pippi - User & Server Management mod’s ‘kit’ system. I’m taking the time to highlight these two mods in particular to say that I’m so happy for what these teams have been able to accomplish. These mods and so many others are massive gems in the global modding community, and I am so grateful for their respective developers’ hard work and dedication. From the bottom of my heart, thank you so much for your love, creativity, and craft. You truly are sorcerers in my eyes and so undoubtedly many others’.
I was inspired to create my own NPC drops in Pippi after having played in the wonderful server, Time of Origins RP. The world-builders had decided to add ‘random’ AoC coin drops to all slain NPC’s. At the time, I was hosting my own very small server, but we didn’t have anything like that. I thought it was a really cool idea, and I was impressed that they had even added some variance to the coins dropped, as well as their values, in order to create added interest in the loot. Thinking back, I should have reached out to them to figure out how they had built their drops in the Pippi interface, as in how they decided the percentages and associated values. Regardless, I decided that for my small private server, I wanted players to be able to have access to some powerful features, but those would cost vast amounts of AoC coin (as much as 20 AoC gold to join a new major faction, for example!) As a result, I wanted a way to accurately control how quickly they could gather coins just by killing enemies I had kits for. I wanted a system of drops that had variance and diversity, and I wanted to be able to ‘set’ a target gold value per kit and have things average out to that expected target value based on probability alone.
When I started creating these ‘pseudo-random’ drops, I was doing things by hand. That wasn’t fun, and after a while, I figured out some slick ways of accurately correcting for the certain difficulties in trying to get an exact solution to the problem of creating precise, probabilistic drops. The primary difficulty is that, while basic probability theory directly applies here, a lot of the actual values have to be rounded because only whole numbers are allowed in the Pippi kit UI. This is truly the root of my interest in the problem; how rounding affects the outcome. I’m a scientist in real life, and precise approaches to the problem of rounding are of great interest to me, and there are some fascinating theorems in math about them! Essentially, unless a perfect guess hits the jackpot of an exact solution, then there will be an error inherent in the drops itself. This error can be BIG, depending on the drop, and I wanted a clean way of generating perfectly accurate drop values from a small set of initial parameters, namely how much gold to drop per kit (strictly on average), the distribution of that gold value between all AoC coins in the kit, and the associated percentages for each drop/item included in the kit.
I decided on making a system of 5 drops for each of the 4 AoC coins (gold, silver, copper, and tin). That means that I wanted 20 individual drops to combine probabilistically to average out to the target gold value per kit. That’s a pretty interesting problem, since each coin needs to be weighted differently based on its value. Figuring this all out by hand for the first few (dozen) times was pretty rad and a huge amount of fun (sadly, I’m not joking), but boy, oh boy, is it sooo much better to have something do it for me! Not only that, but it gets exact solutions really easily. It’s bananas! Bananas…mmm…
Now, I know what you’re likely thinking…“20 drops to set up? Concomitant, that sure is a lot!” Well, normally I would say, “Sure, that’d really be hard to figure out!” Instead, today I tell you, “HI! I did THING!” The hardest part to the whole problem here is figuring out the drop values, since that’s what actually gets dropped based on the percentages (going the other way would be bonkers). So, truly, that part’s now done for you, and all you need to do is enter the values into the kit for the enemies/events you want to customize the kits for!
I had never really tried anything like this before (let alone making a beefy spreadsheet), so it was a really fun experiment and challenge! Ultimately, this calculator I am sharing with you today is the end result of all this madness and curiosity (or maybe a beginning, who knows?) I hope that you, too, are inspired to add some interactive and fun kits generated by this gizmo. The principles used here apply to really any economic system, and it can be customized to add more coins. If you are interested in that and need help, please let me know!
To wrap up, let me pause and thank you for for making it this far. I really do appreciate you taking the time to read this and check out my work! I’m quite proud and fond of this little gadget, and I hope you’ll find it useful as you forge your own adventures in the Exiled Lands, Siptah, and beyond the Void!
If you wish to provide feedback, please reply here, or message me on Discord: Concomitant#1973. I am eager to know what you think and how you use it!
Stay brave. Stay bold.
- Concomitant