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[DON'T KILL]

Fibrous Mechanites DON'T KILL. In fact, it can be useful at times. The only thing mechanites or muscle parasites do is cause pain. I recently posted that on the RimWorld Wiki. I would stop using medicine because there really isn't any threat.

I can confirm that there is no physical threat; I have never seen a parasitic disease like that kill in Rimworld. However, there are secondary disadvantages, such as pain in the Mechanites' case. If you have infected colonists breaking down a lot, it may be worth considering switching to herbal medicine (as it's cheaper than produced medicine) to try to eradicate it.

As for the infection not going away, the nonlethal diseases like gut worms, fiberous mechanites, and muscle parasites do tend to have a long lifespan; they will be recovered from eventually (including without treatment, though it takes roughly 15 times longer, 2 k seconds compared to 30 k seconds¹) but compared to things like the flu or plague which have a very low treatment time, it can seem like forever.

¹: Treatment, http://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Fibrous_Mechanites

Also, when throwing a coin, there's a solid chance to get head 10 times in a row. Forgot the numbers, but people tend to underestimate that.

P(heads)=0.5 [Given a fair coin.]
P(heads * 10) = 0.5¹⁰~=0.00097~=0.1%.

Those are pretty low odds. Of course, if you throw a set of 10 coins in a hundred different trials, that increases the odds somewhat. More interesting to me would be this: save scum, try again, exact same conditions. If a similar result is had, then it's pretty suggestive evidence that it's not bad RNG but something in the code. If it's replicated in three trials, I'd be pretty confident in the results, especially if it's reproducible.

Shotguns should be the perfect weapons against horde assault from stuff like Manhunters or tribals but have kind of spread makes it pretty useless against individual targets.

Doesn't make much sense to me that it fires as a 'cluster'.

Never has.

I'm inclined to agree; at extreme ranges, the spread is significant in real life, but over any reasonable Rimworld ranges (particularly those at which the shotgun is often employed) it's pretty close to a point-mass. Assuming one Rimworld tile equals 1 meter, the pump shotgun has an effective range of 16 m.¹ At that range, you'd be looking at around a 5 inch-spread.² Depending on the exact gun and barrel length, that spread may vary, but even with a relatively wide spread (e.g., one inch spread per yard of distance³) you'd be looking at a tight spread within a bit over a foot.

Contrasting this with what I've seen of the Rimworld shotguns, which seem to spread a few meters at the maximum range of 16 meters, this is a pretty significant difference. What I imagine as a more effective simulation (and more interesting gameplay mechanic) would be, if possible, having damage drop off with distance. For instance, in meatspace, a spread of 15 inches (the most generous estimate I'm using at a 16 m range; I'd welcome sources that show greater spread) could easily result in fewer pellets impacting the target. In game terms, that'd mean less damage.

But, by contrast, at close ranges, shotguns are fairly notorious for superior stopping power. While only slightly better when compared to rifles (within 5% one-shot incapacitation) when compared with handguns it's a solid 20-30%.⁴ When looking at fatality, a shotgun and rifle are more than doubly as lethal for torso shots, and significantly more for handgun.⁵

This seems to suggest that, in game terms, shotguns could provide an interesting compromise; a rifle would do comperable damage to a short-range shotgun, but have much greater range. In contrast, a shotgun would be slightly more likely to hit at greater ranges, but necessarily do less damage. This means there could be the interesting game dynamic of "Do I want high-probability, low damage shots at range, or low-probability, high-damage shots?" Personally, I like the idea of each gun being useful, just in different roles. (E.g., sidearms have quick target aquisition but reduced damage, making them useful for close quarters, rifles and shotguns being useful in an open field but having their own tradeoffs, etc.)

As for the OP's complaint, I do agree that the difference in outcome given the armaments and shooter skill is both unrealistic and, game-wise, no fun. From a realism standpoint, a sniper rifle is more unwieldy (though not by much) in close quarters than a shotgun at 1 m ranges. From a game standpoint, it's really frustrating when your level 15 pawn gets his butt kicked by a level 5 one.

As for the assertion that shotguns shouldn't miss at close range, that I would very much disagree with; any weapon short of a fragmentation grenade, if not or poorly aimed, will miss. Because at close range any firearm is effectively a point target (3 yard shotgun shots make one continuous hole⁶) the miss chance for any longarm should be comparable.

As a side note, it seems to make sense to me that handguns should not have reduced accuracy at close ranges, which would make them useful in-game. My first thought was that they would suffer reduced accuracy at close range due to the psychological panic factor, but a study of the NYPD seems to suggest otherwise.⁷ In fact, this seems to suggest that handguns or other handheld weapons would have a very useful niche in close contact scenarios. In meatspace, that's just a Thing. But in the game... that adds another interesting dynamic, namely that your ambush team of tunnel fighters may want hand weapons while your skirmishers and snipers may be well-served with rifles and shotguns.

In any case, all this is merely idle thought; my personal feeling is that making the guns of Rimworld more about role than simple hirearchy of "power" would be very fun. However, not everyone will agree, and that's okay. Similarly, I've made a lot of arguments based on meatspace; these are interesting, but there are many of the opinion that it's more important for the game to be fun than realistic. That, too, has merit, and if someone both believes (with good reason) that fun trumps realism, and that this more role-based rather than power-based firearms notion would not be fun, then I will happily acknowlege a difference of opinion and that their stance is perfectly rational and valid.

All that said, I'm curious; what do people think about this? Does this seem like a reasonable solution to the OP's problem? Does it seem fun? Or does it seem unnecesarry, inaccurate, or otherwise unacceptable?

References:
¹: http://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Pump_Shotgun
²: http://www.realpolice.net/forums/firearms-4/27706-shotgun-spread-patterns-pics.html
³: https://www.zombiehunters.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=109&t=84803
⁴: https://www.buckeyefirearms.org/alternate-look-handgun-stopping-power
⁵: ibid
⁶: See #2
⁷: Page 7, http://www.theppsc.org/Staff_Views/Aveni/OIS.pdf

Yup! Sculptures are one of the many pieces of furniture which, once installed, have the little "uninstall" button; there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to install it then, once you're ready, uninstall and sell it.

I haven't run the numbers, but sculptures built from bought materials — mainly wood and stone — certainly can be quite profitable!  I haven't bothered much with other ingredients, such as steel or precious materials, so I can't verify for those, but this is DEFINITELY true for more mundane materials (assuming even basic skill on your artists' part).  My colony does this quite often, in fact.

My preliminary results definitely support this conclusion! Aside from being plentiful on most maps, wood and stone present a very cheap input for a proportionally expensive output. However, things like gold, silver, jade and uranium, being small items, seem to be the exception; the increase in volume of input required (e.g., 2400 gold instead of only 120 stone) seems to make exotics a losing proposition for most things. Still, art is a reliable, if labor-intensive option.

As such, one of the metrics I'm looking at in this Profitability Study is work-per-silver. For instance, supposing one could make Gizmos which sell for 10 silver apiece and take 10 work to make, but could also (with the same inputs) make Doodads which also sell for 10 silver but take 12 work apiece, Gizmos are clearly superior. I'm hoping that, because of the hard and normalized figures I'll be using, I'll be able to compare entirely unlike things such as dusters and sculptures, swords and drugs, in order to find the most efficient possibilities. (Well, that and permit players to pick their own favorite; if I want to make an agricultural colony I might be more interested in textiles than firearms; once I get some publishable results, the hope is people can just look and see their best option given their preferences.)

Interesting, I thought you might enjoy the analytics mod https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=27521 I made for those who likes analytics, planning and prediction. Currently it's limited, however, I am planning to expand the feature sets for more analysis. My ultimate goal is to have a full-blown analytic capabilities. I think, as others have suggested, you can look into in-game data to do your analysis, so if you are interesting, I am open for collaboration on this.

That actually sounds really interesting! My apologies for the lack of initial response, I seem to have missed your post. But, once I've got my results published from vanilla-only, I'd really like to collaborate with you to see how the empirical results compare to the theoretical ones. If nothing else, it'd be a good exercise in finding where I went wrong with my calculations. :p

As for your mod itself, that looks really useful in-game. I usually stick religiously to vanilla-only, but I might bend my rules for this one. This will be especially useful in finding practical values such as colonist work-per-tile for crops, or animal resource consumption per unit of output. (E.g., how much hay is used in producing a unit of wool for an Alpaca?) I'm definitely going to have to give your mod a look once I've finished gathering my vanilla data.

What would be great to see is the relative profitability of manufacturing smokeleaf joints, survival rifles, and alpaca wool parkas, assuming some baseline labor cost (pawns consume meals, so some multiple of the food cost might work).

What I would especially like to know is if it is *ever* profitable to make something with resources purchased from traders, or if profitability always requires using map resources (farming, mining, raiders)

That's actually exactly what I'm working on now! Anything produced from local materials will have a higher profit margin than what my next study will state by virtue of having some or all input costs go to zero, excepting labor. Since my study will be assuming entirely depleted local resources (including crops; dunno how that'd work, but it's useful from an analytic standpoint) and as such will give profit margins for a worst-case scenario. We'll see what they actually are; it may be that, like firearms, there doesn't exist a good option. :p We'll find out, I think.

[EDIT 2016-11-18: The first of the studies is complete! It can be found in this thread here.

The link is broken there is a rogue quotation mark and http in the link. Tbe proper link can be found here.
Pls fix (even though it's the same post it might cause ppl some stress)

Ah, good catch! Thank you! Link on the front page should be fixed. I appreciate the help!

[EDIT 2016-11-24-0225: Hm, I've done an analysis for textile items, and most of what I find is that I need to gather some more raw data regarding commodity values, specifically for the various wools, hyperweave, and synthtread. Guess that's the nest step; once I get that data, the page should come together nicely, but at the moment there's so much material cost data missing only 10% or so of the analyses come through with a non-error result. Something for me to do tomorrow, I guess. ]

[Rimworld Economics Studyby Andrew Whitaker]

Rimworld Economics Study
by Andrew Whitaker
Prepared 2016-11-18

Abstract:
Trade remains necessary in Rimworld, and exporting goods is a critical component of this. Goods such as Neutroamine, which is the primary component in medicine and other drugs, cannot be locally manufactured, and the quantity scavenged will be low in the best cases. A topic of some debate, which goods are the most profitable to export remains a significant question, particularly as local resources are exhausted and raw materials must be imported. This study attempts to quantify the value for a large variety of Rimworld goods as the first step in obtaining objective data on costs and revenues for the production of various goods, as well as the impact of factors such as item health, quality, and material on product value. Subsequent studies will investigate the profit margins provided by various product and material combinations, but that will not be in the scope of this study.

Purpose:
The purpose of this study is to provide solid, raw data for use in subsequent studies on the profitability of other goods. This includes the cost to buy and revenue to sell for as many listed items as possible, and has a special focus on the cost to buy of raw materials.

Materials:
One copy of the Rimworld simulation, access to the raw data gathered¹, and sufficient time to gather data.

Procedure:
  1) Data gathering
   Data was gathered by using the in-game values in the Rimworld simulation, accessed through the information panel on items and the trade interface, and recorded on the sheet "Item Data" in the referenced spreadsheet. The data included the type of trader, social skill of the trader's point-of-contact with the colony, the cost to buy the item from the trader, the revenue that would be gained by selling the item to the trader, the health of the item in percent, what the item is, its quality if applicable, its composite material if applicable, and the relations with the trading faction, if applicable. A transaction number and category label were included for ease of data entry and organization purposes.
   Data on the slave trade was gathered but not used for this study.
   The data were then validated according to category as follows:
      I) Trader type was retrieved from the list of possible types found in "Hardcoded Data". List was generated as each new trader was encountered.
      II) PoC Social was forced to be between 0 and 20 to prevent values not seen in the simulation from being entered.
      III) Item health was forced to be between 0% and 100% to prohibit nonsensical values; below 1% the item is destroyed, and no way exists currently known to the investigator to produce an item with a health beyond 100%.
      IV) Category was grouped into the following for ease of organization:
         Commodity: Items used principally as raw materials for other items. Items were populated by experience, adding individual items as new ones were discovered.
         Textile Items: Items made of leather or textile materials. Generated from the Wiki.²
         Art Items: At this time, this category includes only the three sizes of sculpture, populated from experience.
         Melee Weapon: Any weapon that is a range of melee. Drawn from the wiki.³
         Simple Ranged Weapon: Bows and pila. Drawn from the wiki.⁴
         Firearms: Ranged weapons including grenades, rocket launchers, and traditional firearms. Also includes artillery shells. Drawn from the wiki.⁵
         Agricultural Products: Includes all raw crops excluding drug and textile crops, animal products excluding wool leather and meat, and refinements of those products such as meals, kibble, and pemmican. Chocolate and packaged survival meals included for thematic consistency.
         Drugs: All manufactured drugs and their components, including Neutroamine and drug-related crops. Populated with the help of the community.
         Animals: Every whole animal in the simulation, drawn from the wiki.⁶
         Meat: Drawn from the same list as above, though repeats were culled. E.g., Artic Fox and Red Fox both yield only generic "Fox Meat", and as such both were combined into one for this category. Humans added to account for cannibalistic colonies.
         Armor: All overtly dedicated protective wear, including power armor, ballistic vests, etc. Drawn from the wiki.⁷
         Exotic Items: Any item not included in the previous categories. Populated as new items were encountered.
      V) The individual items were drawn from the subcategory's contents, as defined in the sheet "Hardcoded Data".
      VI) Material was drawn, depending on category, from the Minerals, Textiles, or Other columns in the "Hardcoded Data" sheet. These values were populated based on what materials were permitted for a manufacturing job.
      VII) Quality was populated by using the existing qualities, and drawn when applicable from those recorded values in the "Hardcoded Data" sheet.
      VIII) Faction relations were forced to be between -100 and +100 to prevent accidental entries of absurdly high or low values.
   The item, material, and quality fields were populated by using a custom script found on the spreadsheet. The script was based of a project found at Stack Overflow⁸ and was extensively expanded and modified for use in this sheet.
   All data was entered as-generated and in order. Minor edits were made to preserve data consistency for further analysis, and were limited to category changes and formatting changes; no core data (Item type, health, PoC social, faction relations, cost or revenue) was altered at any point.

  2) Data Refinement
   Data was analyzed using pivot tables to determine the effect of item health, item quality, and item material on its final price in order to normalize data for pure item cost and revenue.
   Quality:
      Item quality was compiled in a pivot table located on the sheet "Item Quality Analysis", with the qualities as rows and items (organized by categories) as columns. Steel melee weapons were selected as they had the most consistent data and represented every quality category. Each quality was then arranged, and divided by the normal quality to yield a "Percent normal" or value as a percent of normal price.
   Health:
      Item health was compiled in a pivot table located on the sheet "Item Health Analysis", with health as rows and categories as columns, with cell entries being the average cost or revenue values for that health value and category. For each entry, if a fully intact (health=100%) item existed, its price was divided by the price of a full-health item of the same kind. Otherwise, it was ignored and discarded.
      All of these percent values were then averaged to form an aggregate value labeled "Average % of Perfect Health", or the percent at which an item with the corresponding level of damage is valued at relative to an entirely undamaged item.
      The resulting table of health and price percentage values was then plotted, and a trend line was fitted. This was done with both linear and exponential trend lines. On the suggestion of the community,⁹ the data set was also divided into points below 30% and above 30%, and this process repeated for each data set.
      The data set with the highest r² was selected as the model, and the LOGEST or LINEST functions, as appropriate, were employed to determine the coefficients for the best model for subsequent use.
   Materials:
      Data was compiled into a pivot table in the sheet "Material Analysis", with individual item as the row and material as the column, and the median cost or revenue as cell value. Any entries without a median were discarded.
      For each item, an average price was determined. Then, for each item/material combination, its price was divided by the average price to determine the percent of average price that item/material combination was. Each percent value was then averaged among materials to determine the material's average price, as a percent of average.
   Using the above models, each data point in the raw data was normalized by health, quality, and material in that order in order to determine that raw item's "true" price.

  3) Data Compilation
   A pivot table was then created with items (organized by category) as rows, and cell values as the cost to buy and revenue to cell. This represents the final, most concise report of this study.

Data and Calculations:
All data and calculations are publicly available on the sheet found here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RFN9SX80YUc3ucComhU_vTiA4SPygl3OFn3u6Mm9h2Y/edit?usp=sharing

Results:
The results, which are dynamically generated based on the latest data, can be found in the sheet "Final Item Data" in the above listed spreadsheet. A copy, as of the time of publication, is available in the attached spreadsheet.

Conclusions:
The most expensive per-unit items appear to be firearms, melee weapons, and textile items, miniguns, long swords, and dusters in particular respectively. However, this lists only their raw price. It does not account for the materials involved in the manufacture of such goods. This does, however, lend credence of the motto of some that "Murder is the most profitable export", as the more expensive items are also the ones which one might expect to be possessed by a raiding party. However, the topic of profit is not discussed further in this study.
Due to the dynamic nature of the processing methods used, the addition of more data could substantially alter the results shown, though with a sample size of 1,320 a significant amount of confidence is held in these results. Of particular note, however, is that the Quality Analysis is based solely on steel melee weapons. Due to the lack of consistent data across all categories at the time of publication, analyzing the percent of normal across categories would likely have compounded error to an unacceptable degree. However, as more data becomes available, a new approach similar to the one used in the Material Analysis may be warranted.
Further research is called for on the topic of item production cost and profit, as well as a desire for significantly more data in order to raise confidence in these results to a near-certainty.

References:
¹: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RFN9SX80YUc3ucComhU_vTiA4SPygl3OFn3u6Mm9h2Y/edit?usp=sharing, retrieved 2016-11-18
²: http://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Clothing, retrieved 2016-11-18
³: http://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Weapons, retrieved 2016-11-18
⁴: Ibid
⁵: Ibid
⁶: http://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Animals, retrieved 2016-11-18
⁷: http://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Armor, retrieved 2016-11-18
⁸: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21744547/how-do-you-do-dynamic-dependent-drop-downs-in-google-sheets, retrieved 2016-9-3
⁹: Zhentar, https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=25133.msg266093#msg266093, retrieved 2016-11-18

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Thank you, Skullywag and Jimyoda! Both of those were resources I hadn't checked, and are quite definitive. I'd also like to further thank you for being so willing and awesomely nice about providing sources when asked; I'm aware it's often more a chore than anything else, so I'm very grateful you've enlightened me and dispelled a misconception I had! A special thanks to Jimyoda for updating the wiki, too; you're entirely correct that I misread the article in question, and thanks to you I don't imagine any one else will make the same mistake I did. :p

Y'all are helping to keep this community great.

The Cleanliness Tab on the RimWorld Wiki Here says "This stat affects medical outcomes, research speed, and the chance that cooked meals will cause food poisoning."

This is odd; on that same wiki, on the food poisoning article, it makes no mention whatsoever of cleanliness.

The cleanliness of the "kitchen", the room in which the food is cooked, does affect the food poisoning chance.

It sounds like you know something I don't; the wiki is inconsistent on this topic, which will hopefully be remedied soon. In the meantime, may I ask how you know the above? Were they experiments you performed, decompiled code, or somesuch? I'd like to be able to reference it properly the next time this comes up, as I've seen the converse asserted strongly in other threads; your assistance in spreading the truth would be much appreciated. ^ ^ 

As far as challenge goes, I can definitely see your point about how the mechanics necessitating micromanaging can be frustrating. For me personally, I kind of like all the little details to keep in mind, as it feels much like real life; the Devil is in the Details as they say, and to me it simulates the challenges of logistics and management, and how it's the little things that get you, not the big ones. However, I'm also an odd one, and even with my odd duck preferences, I can still see your point that for many, this style is merely frustrating, particularly when a simple button that says "restrict all animals to zones regardless of master" would do the same thing as all the micromanagement.

In particular, I can empathize with how it feels like jumping through hoops to turn your simple command into actualized game effects. I could compare it to having a bill that says "make simple meal" versus having to make a series of bills such as "prepare meat" "dice vegetables" "combine ingredients" "roast" and "remove from heat" all to do the same thing. Both do the same thing, but one requires much more player work to get it done. And, just because my odd self would kind of enjoy that level of control (I could make sure my colonists use only the cheapest, most filling ingredients and save the others for export!) it seems fairly clear to me that it would be extremely frustrating for the majority of players.

On the topic of devilstrand patches, I've encountered something similar. That patch isn't, by chance, closest (as the crow flies, not by pathing) to the map edge the traders came from, was it? For me, the issue was that my farm plots seemed to be geometrically closest to some traders, despite being path-wise the farthest. Although, looking at your setup, it looks like it'd be very difficult to move it anyway. :/

Speaking only for myself, I keep them around for three reasons: 1) Trade, as even a puppy can fetch a decent price from traders, 2) Wool, which makes for a reasonably valuable clothing material and excellent insulation on cold maps, and 3) Combat, as a small swarm of warg puppies can distract raiders handily from my colonists.

Interestingly, I haven't yet determined if trade is worth it; they do eat a lot, and I wonder if they consume more value in food in carrying an infant to term than the infant gives in traded value. I will have to investigate.

<.< Adeeeerp. My bad. I was just looking at the graph and text, and completely skipped over the embedded pics. I withdraw my only complaint; you, sir, are awesome! *offers high-five*

Bravo, sir. Bravo. *salutes* I really appreciate you gathering and defining precise data (e.g., temperature and tick pairs, temperature curves, all for various configurations.) The only thing I might like would be pictures of the setup, though upon careful examination of (read: actually clicking on the link to) your data, the verbal descriptions were clear enough for replication.

*applauds* Well done, sir. You rock.

I'm going to refer you to the OP again; this isn't "what's the best way to make money", but rather "how much money can be made with various activities." The first is dependent largely on play style. The second is something quantitative, which can be used by players to find their own fun play style.

I'd also note that murder requires enemies, (or at least colonists you don't like very much, :p ) whose presence occurs at the whim of the storyteller. As far as I'm aware, there does not exist in the vanilla game a way to force raids outside of the dev tools. As such, there's likely to be at least some time between raids in which your colonists could be doing... something. Generally, a colony which murders just as effectively AND produces its own goods during the downtime will turn a higher profit than one which does not produce. As for what goods to produce, that's what this study is about.

1) What do you mean by "the values in game"? Do you mean the value found on the information tab? If so, you may have found something remarkable. If you would be willing, find an item, determine its true value through the information tab, then see if that's what traders offer for it. I've found a significant difference in the past; if you find something different, I'd be delighted to hear about it and see how to replicate it.

2) It sounds like you're assuming I'm after the values coded in; I am not. I'm seeking to compare the coded values with what actually happens. Again, as a programmer I've found that errors accumulate and the final result can be pretty far from the intended one, thanks to tiny little errors. As far as a discrepancy and bug forum goes, that's something I'd only find after doing this study. So, again, you can see why the study might be important to find such discrepancies to report.

3) What I'm hearing you say is that you make so much money from murdering enemies that anything which can be added to it by in-colony processing is negligible. I would be interested to see what numbers you have supporting this; I've typically seen relatively low-value items brought in by raiders, which have a significant hauling time associated with getting them to trading piles. Given the price increase in, say, a high-quality steel weapon, I feel that the silver gained from hauling ten 50% health shoddy cloth parkas from a failed raid is on the same order of magnitude as that one high-quality steel mace. At the very least, they seem close enough to warrant further quantification and consideration.

Also, as a point of order, as long as there are two or more agents buying, selling, and consuming goods in any given region, there is an economy. However, I think I get your meaning; it's true that Rimworld has an entirely undeveloped economic system (e.g., completely static supply and demand outside of the colony map) which makes things quite a bit simpler. :p

Simpler is good for my efforts; it means I get more information for less work. Speaking of, I notice you keep asserting that Murder is the best export. I confess I'm not entirely sure what you mean by that; do you mean selling goods from raids? Killing traders? What are the exact circumstances you're operating under? Do you have any numbers I could look at? I'd be very pleased to include your murder numbers in my final analysis.

You'll probably note I ask for a lot of details. The reason for this is simple: anecdotal evidence works fine for some people and not at all for others. In this thread, I'm attempting to steer clear of anecdotal evidence, and instead gather some statistical evidence one way or another to try to get some hard facts, independent of personal judgement and verifiable, which others can use to come to their own conclusions. (This is why I try to separate my conclusions from my calculations and data.) The reason for this is exemplified in this thread; I've gotten quite a few people telling me what the "best" way to make money is. How am I to chose between them? That's what numbers are for, to help me pick the strategy which is best for me.

Also, you might also notice this is an edit; my original message felt... I dunno, snarky, confrontational, and generally full of me being a jerkbag. So, although I'm hoping I culled most of that out by now, I apologize; me being snarky won't give you any reason whatsoever to treat me any differently, and it certainly won't make you feel good about trying to help me out with my project! You're a stranger on the internet; you could just as easily save yourself the trouble of posting and go about your business. You didn't, and I chose to believe that this is because you care, in however small a way, about this study, and don't want to see it wasted because of my ignorance. And so, Britnoth, I thank you; even when my knee-jerk reaction is to be salty, your input remains valuable, and I hope that this post has affirmed that, not belittled it.

A totally valid question. The answer contains several parts.

1) The value obtained from the information panel in-game is rarely the same as the cost to buy said item or the revenue gained from selling it. The difference can be substantial, especially when looking at profit margins that use imported materials.

2) The values from the game's code are not used for two reasons, as outlined in the OP: the first is practice, and the second is verification. As a programmer myself, I'm well aware that the way something should work isn't always the way it does work. This study is attempting to verify the game code's functionality. Incidentally, it has found a discrepancy in the item health calculation, though it's possible that's due to sampling error. Further data is necessary.

3) All of this supporting data can be used to expand the utility of existing data; once the formulae are verified for both quality and item health, all item entries can be normalized to obtain a more accurate average. Once that's done, the final profit analysis can be performed to determine the profit margins of individual items. Furthermore, thanks to the completeness of the data, things like pawn labor and skill can be taken into account as well.

Anyway, I hope that answered your question. And if not, then uh... <.< Maybe you could tell me what I missed?

[Preliminary Analysis of the Effect of Quality on Price]

Preliminary Analysis of the Effect of Quality on Price
By Andrew Whitaker
Abstract: As with the previous studies, there is a lack of data regarding the effect of quality on the price of goods in Rimworld. The game code provides an answer for what the effect should be; this study seeks to find an empirical value, to see what the effect is in practice, rather than just in theory.
Methodology: Data was gathered from the community and generated by normal play. All data was collected in the sheet here and was compiled into a pivot table, looking at both item category and material. Categories missing one or more quality levels were excluded, leaving only steel melee weapons. The entries were then sorted, then divided by the normal price to determine percent changes.
Data:

Quality	Average Cost to Buy	Percent of normal price
Legendary	$1 126.00	577.71%
Masterwork	$656.67	336.91%
Excellent	$435.00	223.18%
Superior	$312.11	160.13%
Good	$226.92	116.42%
Normal	$194.91	100.00%
Poor	$173.31	88.92%
Shoddy	$118.27	60.68%
Awful	$74.95	38.45%

Results: As expected, a significant positive correlation between quality and price was found. Furthermore, the empirical values found match very closely with those suggested by the code.
Conclusions: The code-given multipliers found on the Wiki are confirmed to be approximately those found empirically. Those values are recommended for ease-of-use. The departures from the expected values can be accounted for by sampling error, with items such as long swords, knives, and maces all being unequally distributed between the quality levels.
Notes: Data can be found in the above mentioned spreadsheet, on the sheet "Quality Analysis". Calculations, such as they are, may be found in columns A15-C27.