New Vines (whether to merge and comparison with lightbulb and grocery)

The recent change in Dec '24 has greatly nerfed the vines. Changes include staggered longer refresh times, fewer item drops, simplified item structure with fewer auto orders.

There are now only 2 auto orders for vines, 1 max grape juice and 1 dreamcatcher. Max grape juice auto order value has now been increased to roughly 150 coins per level, but this increase does not exactly make up for the other changes they've implemented. Dreamcatcher auto order does not appear to have changed, they are still chest rewards. Details of rewards can be found in the auto order spreadsheet.

To decide whether to merge the new vines, I've calculated the efficiency of each merge based on an average of 50 sets of item drop data from each producer level.

The blue table shows the producer's refresh times, type and number of items dropped.

The green table shows the comparison between having producers unmerged and merged. The first column 'Unmerged' refers to the number of producers you have. Due to differing refresh times, auto order yield comparison between producer levels is made at 20 hours (1200 minutes). For example, if you have all 7 vines and continually collect the items for 20 hours, you can get 2.83 max Grape Juice and 0.506 Dreamcatcher. Inversely, you can see how many sets of 20 hours are required to reach the max items.

For efficiency, we are simply taking having all producers unmerged to be at 100% efficiency for comparison. There seems to be only small fluctuations for both item series for the first few merges. In consideration of efficiency, refresh times and board space, I'll recommend to merge to 3 vines (1 level 6 vines and 2 level 5 vines). The yield will be comparable to fully unmerged, but with 3 producers all refreshing in 40 minutes. To emphasize, this data is comparing continual item drop collection, hence it is only applicable to active players who check in frequently.

For less active players, for example checking in every 2 hours or so to collect item drops, please refer to the red table for similar efficiency info.

I have now merged my vines from 7 to 3, and will be sticking with it for the time being. If and when I fully merge them, I'll collect data for level 7 vines and update the table here.

With the vines now changed, by my calculations, nerfed by around 80% in yield, I was interested to know if it would be better to take out my other fully merged auto producers. Also using the average of 50 sets of item drop data, I've done a comparison between fully merged lightbulb, fully merged new grocery and new vines merged to 3.

The 2nd picture shows the 3 producers' basic info and their average yield comparison, in terms of coin. For globe and dreamcatcher, I used an average amount (roughly the 40% mark of the reward range). Based on the average coin yield per hour assuming active item collecting, even if excluding globe (which takes a much longer time to make), lightbulb is better valued than both grocery and vines. New grocery without the shopping carts is also much better than I expected!

Note that auto orders prices are level proportionate, so you may not be getting the same amount listed, but the ratio between the yield per hour of the 3 producers should still you give an idea of how they compare.