[OPEN] The Complete Coins Compendium
Jun 16, 2016 21:40:07 GMT
alphanumeric, telestialGrotto, and 1 more like this
Post by eunomiczenith on Jun 16, 2016 21:40:07 GMT
Hello Sburban community! This is eunomicZenith, native Guide of Time currently in my sixth session. Coins is a fascinating aspect, I have had the occasion to see during the time I have enjoyed the company of my (ex?)boyfriend timorousGanymedes, a native Coins player. Unfortunately, Sburb is a nasty thing geared towards manipulating and isolating players, so after our native session together I never got to see him again. Having noticed that there is really no satisfactory guide on the subject of this awesome aspect, last session I decided to get down on the business of writing my own, taking advantage of my second Coins coplayer so far.
SECTION 1: Coins' Themes
Coins is probably the most positive and enjoyable aspect I've encountered. Once you understand its core themes, you'll do well, I'm told. Well enough not to die horribly, hopefully. Here they are:
- Riches: Straight up money, gold, jewels etcetera. A bunch of abilities of Coins' deal with that. You'll notice that items imbued with The Fair tend to be glittery or look like solid gold, too, which is awesome when you're imbuing yourself and you look like you've got diamond dust on your skin or something. If that earns you any appreciative compliments, enjoy and accept them, it's good for your self esteem and your ARC.
- Self worth: This aspect wants you to lift your self esteem up and be aware of your talents and skills and recognize your worth as a person. If you've rolled it, chances are you were kind of self depreciating in some way. Coins will teach you to love yourself, that you're wonderful and precious more than any amount of diamonds.
NOTE: By the time you get the hang of not feeling worthless, you might get a bit self-absorbed. There's nothing wrong with thinking you're awesome. Just don't boast about it, dude, because your ARC doesn't care if your sessionmates know, and you'll be seen as a coinceited jackass if you do.
- Abundance and generosity: You'll quickly notice that Coins tends to make its players very endowed in terms of richness. You've got plenty of boonies, grist, and some huge pluck spending power thanks to [Golden Ratio], so you've always got plenty to spare. In fact, this aspect also teaches you to be generous: there's always enough to share with others.
- Alchemy (the Sburban kind): Since this aspect deals so much with material wealth, it should be no surprise that grist and alchemization fall under its domain. After all, grist is something you pay with, to create something with a value.
- Alchemy (the old-timey kind): You know those alchemist guys who tried to make the Philosopher's Stone and turn stuff like lead into solid gold? The ones that were basically chemists before chemistry was really a thing? Well, it turns out you owe to them the fact of Coins having an array of abilities that let you create a bunch of cool chemical stuff.
The inverse to Coins is Dust. I happen to have rolled Knight of Dust in my fifth session. Where Coins is abundance, self esteem, creating new things and generosity, Dust stands for scarcity, restriction, humbleness, working with the scraps you have and valuing your metaphorical breadcrumbs. More on Dust in the guide I wrote, linked here. [Currently unavailable.]
SECTION 2: The Unlimited Awesomeness of Coins
Without further ado, let's move onto Coins' abilities. As I said, the theme of Coins is generosity and abundance. These abilities might seem very costly early-on, but eventually you'll have far more than the assets to afford to use them very generously. In facts, the more you use them and the more generous you are about helping others with them, the better!
Now, a (not-so-)brief list of highlights you should know about.
[Midas Touch]: This kinda pluck-intensive ability is going to be your best friend. Cast it on your hands, and the next thing you touch will turn to solid gold, at least partially. If it doesn't turn the enemy into a 24 karat gold statue due to insufficient flummoxie/pluck/contact time, it'll at least disable part of their bodies. Issue is, completely golden'ed enemies are still counted as "alive", creating a similar issue to Rhyme's frozen enemies where they mess with the spawn timer. They don't give any exp nor grist until properly offed, either. Either break the statue, convert it into gold grist using [Glean], or melt the gold using [Aqua Regia].
PROTIP: Turning a sessionmate to gold prevents them from dying.
NOTE: It has a small cooldown of 10 or so minutes, I should mention. Probably just there to keep you from spamming it like crazy.
[Pactolus]: Just in case you want to revert the transformation into gold that [Midas Touch] causes, this is the ability for you.
WARNING: While [Midas Touch] is learned in the early game, [Pactolus] is Post-Denizen. You've been warned.
BIGGER WARNING: It can't fix what the Bersek Trigger [El Dorado] turns to gold. It just can't. My Muse of Coins learned that the tragic way.
[Golden Ratio]: Ever wanted to know why Coins players have a near damn bottomless pool of pluck to spend by the time they're in the middle game? This is why. It costs a good chunk of pluck to activate, but it permanently multiplies your pluck regeneration factor by the golden ratio, which is 1.618, approximately. That alone is a relatively small boost, but you can activate it multiple times, leading to your pluck regen ratio spiralling out into being out of this world. The catch is, the price to pay for activation also increases in the same way as the boost with each activation, so you'll eventually hit a point where you currently cannot afford the next upgrade.
[Glean]: Recycles an item into its worth in grist without the need of any equipment, at a very low pluck price.
[Ex Novo]: Makes a simple item that costs a small amount of grist appear out of thin air. Technically, every other creation ability Coins gets (ie the chemistry stuff) is a variation of this.
[Amalgam]: Fuses items into cool stuff. Kinda works like alchemy, except you have more control on the result, but can't get stuff that is too far removed from what you started with. For instance, [Amalgam]'s not going to make you a jetpack from your old school backpack and a rocket figurine, no matter how hard you try.
NOTE: If you use it onto living beings, I will personally melt your bones. Trust me, it's horrible.
[Time is Money]: Passively drains your pluck and converts it to boons at a fixed rate. Very much worth its price in the early stages, when a boonbuck is still considered a fortune, but eventually becomes worthless. At that point, turn it off.
[Payday]: Passively drains pluck, boosts the grist drops of underlings. You can also decide how much pluck it drains, so it scales well.
[Gil Toss]: Expend X boons, then throw a single golden projectile that deals damage based on X. The more, the better. Doesn't expend any pluck and can get crazy strong if you've got a fat wallet to draw from.
[Vitriol]: Dumps a decent amount of undiluted sulphuric acid on an enemy. Simple enough.
[Aqua Regia]: Like [Vitriol], except it is a bigger quantity, can also be sprayed for better multitargeting potential, and notably melts gold and other noble metals, which is something [Vitriol] cannot do. For the chemistry nerds out there, it's a mix of nitric and hydrochloric acid.
[Azoth]: Like [Aqua Regia], except even bigger, pluck-costly and capable of eating right through any material that is not bedrock. We have no idea what it is chemically. We're not even sure Sburb didn't just decide to screw science and make an acid with minus infinity pH.
[Therein Lye's The Secret]: This punny-named ability creates caustic lye, aka potassium hydroxide, a strong base capable of causing serious burns.
[Fulminating Gold]: Creates a small quantity of a gold compoud also called fulminating gold. Why fulminating? Because it explodes vigorously with a good knock. Works hilarious wonders with [For the Fairest].
[All That Glitters]: Coats something in pretty, sparkly glitter. Imps are attracted to the stuff, for some reason. Dirt cheap to cast. Makes everything awesome, if you ask me.
[For the Fairest]: Makes an item be perceived as extremely precious and desirable, and visually solid gold or diamond-glittering. You can throw it in the middle of a bunch of imps and watch them kill each other for it. Or coat it in [Fulminating Gold] and enjoy the fireworks. You can also cast it on yourself if you want to attract enemies like a magnet - just make sure there are no sessionmates nearby, you don't want to attract the wrong kind of attention. *cough*
[Ever Brimful]: At the price of a hefty chunk of pluck and feeling utterly exhausted once it runs out, this late-game ability will temporarily make your pluck infinite, and your cooldowns nonexistent, for a time that can go from few seconds to a couple minutes, it depends.
HUGE WARNING: Do not *EVER* try to upgrade [Golden Ratio] while using [Ever Brimful]. Due to a minor bug it WILL create an endless loop that spirals out of all controls and ends with a Berserk Trigger and you EXPLODING like something a Rage player crammed too much Purple Prose into.
[We Are Golden]: Gives you a heavy self esteem boost, lasting approximately six hours. Can make you pretty arrogant, but also boosts your ARC temporarily and your power as a result. It has a very long cooldown, though, approximately two weeks. Best saved for emergencies. Also works wonders for some mental disorders.
[Aimless Morning Gold]: Makes a person generous. Useful for solving arguments, from time to time.
WARNING: It should go without saying that using [We Are Golden] or [Aimless Morning Gold] on a Dust player is a CRITICALLY BAD idea. It might even end up causing a Berserk Trigger, a bit like how Rage will NOT tolerate being mellowed down by Rhyme's [Ice Cream in the Veins]. Trust me, I've seen both things firsthand. And she learned this at the price of her life. Please don't let it go wasted.
SECTION 3: Berserk Triggers
Well, Coins is the aspect of abundance and stuff, so in addition to having the highest number of abilities in the game (yes, higher than Life!) it also has more Berserk Triggers than average, at 3 while I've never heard of other aspects having more than 1 or 2. They're as follows:
[Riches to Ruins]: The absolutely crazy version of [Gil Toss]. It'll drain everything of worth you have - boondollars, grist, pluck, sylladex items, health - to fuel an insanely powerful projectile that delivers a hydrogen bomb-like explosion on impact. If you see them starting to shine like they're turning into the Sun, run like hell.
[Gringott's Gold Grave]: This one is probably the least dangerous of the Coins BTs. It just produces a mountain's worth of gold items (generally a mix of weapons of abstrati of the caster, things they have in inventory and more cliché valuables like jewelry). It starts off with small stuff like rings, but it very quickly escalates into submerging everything in the vicinity in gold within few seconds, avalanche style. Either drop kick them to the head at the early stages, or get the hell out of there.
[El Dorado]: This one, on the other hand, is probably the most horrifying. It starts with a huge Coins ideograil symbol covering a very wide area, so that's your cue to get out of there this instant if you don't want to be PERMANENTLY get turned into gold like every single thing in its AOE. Skip the hug, skip the kick, contact with the player will deal the same effect. The most disturbing bit, however, is how Sburb still treats living beings turned into gold as alive.
SECTION 4: Other known Coins glitches and things you shouldn't do
One of Coins' fraymotifs is just named "$$$$$$$$$$$" and it just sounds like a text-to-speech program set to Danish trying to pronounce five minutes' worth of "dollardollardollardollardollar". It doesn't give any boosts either. It's just annoying.
Scrying on a Coins player while they are charged with [Midas Touch] counts as contact and WILL turn you into solid gold. If you need to check on your Coins player, it's best to just send a message.
WARNING: This also applies to [El Dorado]. If you somehow know that something BIG is happening around your Coins player, it's worth being cautious and waiting until it's over before scrying.
SECTION 5: Denizens
Lakshmi: TG's denizen. She's this beautiful four-armed silk-draped incredibly long-haired giantess covered in jewelry and stuff. She's relatively nice as far as Denizens go, I've heard. Still one mean jimmies rustler, though. Coquettish, petty and sharp-tongued, the whole package. She took him relatively little time to get to not wanting to kill her, though, and a lot to recover from the grief because "we were practically bffs okay?", I quote.
Pluto: Male, and much more of a jackass than Lakshmi, from what I've heard. Also gigantic, and sits on a huge throne made of melted valuables and gold-plated consort skulls. As a note, I've been told he's a pretty honest dude. His word is his bond and all that stuff. So yeah, he might rustle your jimmies until they turn into plasma, but he won't betray your trust.
Hecate: Female. Kind of humanoid, but has a bunch of arms - like, a hundred of them - and they're all stick thin, spider style. She's also generally clad in a black-and-gold veil that doesn't let her face show. She embodies the more alchemic part of Coins. As a note, if you ever hear her chanting in some mystic language and summoning long shadow hands, you should stay away from her during those little rites she does. They carry a pretty substantial risk of Others corruption. And she will NOT take it well if interrupted.
Midas: Because of course the dude himself is a Denizen. He's on Pluto's same jackass league, and yes, he turns whatever he touches into gold, so be careful. If needed, imbue your clothes with [Pactolus] or something just as a precautionary measure.
SECTION 1: Coins' Themes
Coins is probably the most positive and enjoyable aspect I've encountered. Once you understand its core themes, you'll do well, I'm told. Well enough not to die horribly, hopefully. Here they are:
- Riches: Straight up money, gold, jewels etcetera. A bunch of abilities of Coins' deal with that. You'll notice that items imbued with The Fair tend to be glittery or look like solid gold, too, which is awesome when you're imbuing yourself and you look like you've got diamond dust on your skin or something. If that earns you any appreciative compliments, enjoy and accept them, it's good for your self esteem and your ARC.
- Self worth: This aspect wants you to lift your self esteem up and be aware of your talents and skills and recognize your worth as a person. If you've rolled it, chances are you were kind of self depreciating in some way. Coins will teach you to love yourself, that you're wonderful and precious more than any amount of diamonds.
NOTE: By the time you get the hang of not feeling worthless, you might get a bit self-absorbed. There's nothing wrong with thinking you're awesome. Just don't boast about it, dude, because your ARC doesn't care if your sessionmates know, and you'll be seen as a coinceited jackass if you do.
- Abundance and generosity: You'll quickly notice that Coins tends to make its players very endowed in terms of richness. You've got plenty of boonies, grist, and some huge pluck spending power thanks to [Golden Ratio], so you've always got plenty to spare. In fact, this aspect also teaches you to be generous: there's always enough to share with others.
- Alchemy (the Sburban kind): Since this aspect deals so much with material wealth, it should be no surprise that grist and alchemization fall under its domain. After all, grist is something you pay with, to create something with a value.
- Alchemy (the old-timey kind): You know those alchemist guys who tried to make the Philosopher's Stone and turn stuff like lead into solid gold? The ones that were basically chemists before chemistry was really a thing? Well, it turns out you owe to them the fact of Coins having an array of abilities that let you create a bunch of cool chemical stuff.
The inverse to Coins is Dust. I happen to have rolled Knight of Dust in my fifth session. Where Coins is abundance, self esteem, creating new things and generosity, Dust stands for scarcity, restriction, humbleness, working with the scraps you have and valuing your metaphorical breadcrumbs. More on Dust in the guide I wrote, linked here. [Currently unavailable.]
SECTION 2: The Unlimited Awesomeness of Coins
Without further ado, let's move onto Coins' abilities. As I said, the theme of Coins is generosity and abundance. These abilities might seem very costly early-on, but eventually you'll have far more than the assets to afford to use them very generously. In facts, the more you use them and the more generous you are about helping others with them, the better!
Now, a (not-so-)brief list of highlights you should know about.
[Midas Touch]: This kinda pluck-intensive ability is going to be your best friend. Cast it on your hands, and the next thing you touch will turn to solid gold, at least partially. If it doesn't turn the enemy into a 24 karat gold statue due to insufficient flummoxie/pluck/contact time, it'll at least disable part of their bodies. Issue is, completely golden'ed enemies are still counted as "alive", creating a similar issue to Rhyme's frozen enemies where they mess with the spawn timer. They don't give any exp nor grist until properly offed, either. Either break the statue, convert it into gold grist using [Glean], or melt the gold using [Aqua Regia].
PROTIP: Turning a sessionmate to gold prevents them from dying.
NOTE: It has a small cooldown of 10 or so minutes, I should mention. Probably just there to keep you from spamming it like crazy.
[Pactolus]: Just in case you want to revert the transformation into gold that [Midas Touch] causes, this is the ability for you.
WARNING: While [Midas Touch] is learned in the early game, [Pactolus] is Post-Denizen. You've been warned.
BIGGER WARNING: It can't fix what the Bersek Trigger [El Dorado] turns to gold. It just can't. My Muse of Coins learned that the tragic way.
[Golden Ratio]: Ever wanted to know why Coins players have a near damn bottomless pool of pluck to spend by the time they're in the middle game? This is why. It costs a good chunk of pluck to activate, but it permanently multiplies your pluck regeneration factor by the golden ratio, which is 1.618, approximately. That alone is a relatively small boost, but you can activate it multiple times, leading to your pluck regen ratio spiralling out into being out of this world. The catch is, the price to pay for activation also increases in the same way as the boost with each activation, so you'll eventually hit a point where you currently cannot afford the next upgrade.
[Glean]: Recycles an item into its worth in grist without the need of any equipment, at a very low pluck price.
[Ex Novo]: Makes a simple item that costs a small amount of grist appear out of thin air. Technically, every other creation ability Coins gets (ie the chemistry stuff) is a variation of this.
[Amalgam]: Fuses items into cool stuff. Kinda works like alchemy, except you have more control on the result, but can't get stuff that is too far removed from what you started with. For instance, [Amalgam]'s not going to make you a jetpack from your old school backpack and a rocket figurine, no matter how hard you try.
NOTE: If you use it onto living beings, I will personally melt your bones. Trust me, it's horrible.
[Time is Money]: Passively drains your pluck and converts it to boons at a fixed rate. Very much worth its price in the early stages, when a boonbuck is still considered a fortune, but eventually becomes worthless. At that point, turn it off.
[Payday]: Passively drains pluck, boosts the grist drops of underlings. You can also decide how much pluck it drains, so it scales well.
[Gil Toss]: Expend X boons, then throw a single golden projectile that deals damage based on X. The more, the better. Doesn't expend any pluck and can get crazy strong if you've got a fat wallet to draw from.
[Vitriol]: Dumps a decent amount of undiluted sulphuric acid on an enemy. Simple enough.
[Aqua Regia]: Like [Vitriol], except it is a bigger quantity, can also be sprayed for better multitargeting potential, and notably melts gold and other noble metals, which is something [Vitriol] cannot do. For the chemistry nerds out there, it's a mix of nitric and hydrochloric acid.
[Azoth]: Like [Aqua Regia], except even bigger, pluck-costly and capable of eating right through any material that is not bedrock. We have no idea what it is chemically. We're not even sure Sburb didn't just decide to screw science and make an acid with minus infinity pH.
[Therein Lye's The Secret]: This punny-named ability creates caustic lye, aka potassium hydroxide, a strong base capable of causing serious burns.
[Fulminating Gold]: Creates a small quantity of a gold compoud also called fulminating gold. Why fulminating? Because it explodes vigorously with a good knock. Works hilarious wonders with [For the Fairest].
[All That Glitters]: Coats something in pretty, sparkly glitter. Imps are attracted to the stuff, for some reason. Dirt cheap to cast. Makes everything awesome, if you ask me.
[For the Fairest]: Makes an item be perceived as extremely precious and desirable, and visually solid gold or diamond-glittering. You can throw it in the middle of a bunch of imps and watch them kill each other for it. Or coat it in [Fulminating Gold] and enjoy the fireworks. You can also cast it on yourself if you want to attract enemies like a magnet - just make sure there are no sessionmates nearby, you don't want to attract the wrong kind of attention. *cough*
[Ever Brimful]: At the price of a hefty chunk of pluck and feeling utterly exhausted once it runs out, this late-game ability will temporarily make your pluck infinite, and your cooldowns nonexistent, for a time that can go from few seconds to a couple minutes, it depends.
HUGE WARNING: Do not *EVER* try to upgrade [Golden Ratio] while using [Ever Brimful]. Due to a minor bug it WILL create an endless loop that spirals out of all controls and ends with a Berserk Trigger and you EXPLODING like something a Rage player crammed too much Purple Prose into.
[We Are Golden]: Gives you a heavy self esteem boost, lasting approximately six hours. Can make you pretty arrogant, but also boosts your ARC temporarily and your power as a result. It has a very long cooldown, though, approximately two weeks. Best saved for emergencies. Also works wonders for some mental disorders.
[Aimless Morning Gold]: Makes a person generous. Useful for solving arguments, from time to time.
WARNING: It should go without saying that using [We Are Golden] or [Aimless Morning Gold] on a Dust player is a CRITICALLY BAD idea. It might even end up causing a Berserk Trigger, a bit like how Rage will NOT tolerate being mellowed down by Rhyme's [Ice Cream in the Veins]. Trust me, I've seen both things firsthand. And she learned this at the price of her life. Please don't let it go wasted.
SECTION 3: Berserk Triggers
Well, Coins is the aspect of abundance and stuff, so in addition to having the highest number of abilities in the game (yes, higher than Life!) it also has more Berserk Triggers than average, at 3 while I've never heard of other aspects having more than 1 or 2. They're as follows:
[Riches to Ruins]: The absolutely crazy version of [Gil Toss]. It'll drain everything of worth you have - boondollars, grist, pluck, sylladex items, health - to fuel an insanely powerful projectile that delivers a hydrogen bomb-like explosion on impact. If you see them starting to shine like they're turning into the Sun, run like hell.
[Gringott's Gold Grave]: This one is probably the least dangerous of the Coins BTs. It just produces a mountain's worth of gold items (generally a mix of weapons of abstrati of the caster, things they have in inventory and more cliché valuables like jewelry). It starts off with small stuff like rings, but it very quickly escalates into submerging everything in the vicinity in gold within few seconds, avalanche style. Either drop kick them to the head at the early stages, or get the hell out of there.
[El Dorado]: This one, on the other hand, is probably the most horrifying. It starts with a huge Coins ideograil symbol covering a very wide area, so that's your cue to get out of there this instant if you don't want to be PERMANENTLY get turned into gold like every single thing in its AOE. Skip the hug, skip the kick, contact with the player will deal the same effect. The most disturbing bit, however, is how Sburb still treats living beings turned into gold as alive.
SECTION 4: Other known Coins glitches and things you shouldn't do
One of Coins' fraymotifs is just named "$$$$$$$$$$$" and it just sounds like a text-to-speech program set to Danish trying to pronounce five minutes' worth of "dollardollardollardollardollar". It doesn't give any boosts either. It's just annoying.
Scrying on a Coins player while they are charged with [Midas Touch] counts as contact and WILL turn you into solid gold. If you need to check on your Coins player, it's best to just send a message.
WARNING: This also applies to [El Dorado]. If you somehow know that something BIG is happening around your Coins player, it's worth being cautious and waiting until it's over before scrying.
SECTION 5: Denizens
Lakshmi: TG's denizen. She's this beautiful four-armed silk-draped incredibly long-haired giantess covered in jewelry and stuff. She's relatively nice as far as Denizens go, I've heard. Still one mean jimmies rustler, though. Coquettish, petty and sharp-tongued, the whole package. She took him relatively little time to get to not wanting to kill her, though, and a lot to recover from the grief because "we were practically bffs okay?", I quote.
Pluto: Male, and much more of a jackass than Lakshmi, from what I've heard. Also gigantic, and sits on a huge throne made of melted valuables and gold-plated consort skulls. As a note, I've been told he's a pretty honest dude. His word is his bond and all that stuff. So yeah, he might rustle your jimmies until they turn into plasma, but he won't betray your trust.
Hecate: Female. Kind of humanoid, but has a bunch of arms - like, a hundred of them - and they're all stick thin, spider style. She's also generally clad in a black-and-gold veil that doesn't let her face show. She embodies the more alchemic part of Coins. As a note, if you ever hear her chanting in some mystic language and summoning long shadow hands, you should stay away from her during those little rites she does. They carry a pretty substantial risk of Others corruption. And she will NOT take it well if interrupted.
Midas: Because of course the dude himself is a Denizen. He's on Pluto's same jackass league, and yes, he turns whatever he touches into gold, so be careful. If needed, imbue your clothes with [Pactolus] or something just as a precautionary measure.