Dynamic spawn
- This article is about commodity spawns. For spawning of ships at sea, see ship spawn.
Dynamic spawn refers to the change in commodity spawn rates based on the ocean-wide need for that commodity.
Developers have never publicly stated how exactly the dynamic spawn system works, but it appears that the price paid for a commodity changes the sales tax rate for that commodity, which in turn changes the spawn rate. The game is designed to have the price of a commodity fluctuate over time, but it also tries to keep the price of a commodity within a certain, undisclosed, range. If a commodity becomes scarce (relative to the demand), people will raise the prices for that commodity, which in turn will raise the sales tax, which in turn will eventually increase the spawn rate. Once the spawn rate has increased too much (relative to the demand), prices will start to drop, which will eventually drop the spawn rate.
The sales tax rate appears to change based on actually dockside transactions (both player and merchant brigand transactions), actual filling of bid tickets (not just placing bid tickets), and the use-cost when a product is actually ordered. The game appears to use some sort of trimmed mean of recent commodity transactions, that is, they throw out ones that are either too high or too low. The sales tax rate appears to have a very slow impact on the dynamic spawn rate, simply changing the sales tax rate by a large amount may have no impact on the commodity spawn rate for a while.
The size of an island is only loosely determines how much of a commodity spawns on it. There are examples on the Cerulean ocean where an outpost island spawns more of an herb than a large island, but generally, the larger the island, the more it will spawn.
External/other links
- Initial thread where Cleaver and company describe its arrival
- Spawn Rates and Island Size
- Bid ticket questions
- Detailed discussion of spawn rates on Cerulean (The general ideas apply to other oceans.)
Arr! This article be a stub. Ye can help YPPedia by expanding it.
