Quote from: zizard on September 19, 2018, 03:32:00 AMI did not know about this table, thanks! It turns out though that the numbers in that table are calculated by generating 10,000 qualities and seeing what comes out so they're not exact. It does a new simulation each time the table is opened so if you open and close it a few times and record the numbers (probability of Good at level 0 and 1 are good examples) you'll get slightly different values each time.
In development mode, there is a table called "Quality generation data" in the second gear menu at the top. This shows the chance of each quality level for each crafter (ur values are a little off).
The table I posted above calculates the values exactly. It's nice confirmation though that both tables are pretty close.
Quote from: zizard on September 19, 2018, 03:32:00 AM
Since work value contributes separately from material value, we can exclude it from the comparison. If some furniture breaks even including work value, then it lost value on the materials. There might be a work multiplier per material, but it doesn't matter as long as your crafter is always busy. i.e. to sell crafter labour, grow cotton; to apply a high level crafting quality multiplier to material, craft low work / quality ratio items. ofc there's some benefits to producing something with the perfect balance, but the point is that we should think of selling pawn's work as separate to applying their quality multiplier.
I'm not quite sure I understand what you're saying but I think I disagree slightly. If we consider material cost as fixed (since we can always just sell the materials) then crafting adds additional (possibly negative) value to the materials. The added value from crafting comes from a combination of work and quality but we don't care which because it's the value that gets sold, not the work or the quality.
I think what you're getting at is that, assuming unlimited material, to maximize wealth gain from crafting we'd want to do crafts which have a high added crafting value per unit work. Which is true when the colony has a labor shortage. If there's a labor surplus then we'd want to do crafts which have a high added crafting value per ingredient.