Figurines in Minish Cap

[torkell]

Minish Cap has a sort of gambling mini-game for collecting figurines - each try at a figurine costs a certain number of mysterious shells, and the more shells you spend the greater the odds of getting a new figurine are. Each extra shell you gamble increases your chances of success by 1% (i.e. if one figurine gives you a 50% chance, two will give you a 51% chance and three will give you 52%). The first figurine is a guaranteed success, as at that point all possible figurines are new and so only costs 1 shell. The second then costs 1 shell for a 100% chance, or 2 shells for a 99% chance, and so on up to final (130th at this point in the game) figurine which is one shell for a 1% chance or a hundred shells for a guaranteed success.

Anyway, while trying to get all of them I wondered just how long it'd take...


It's obvious that it'll take ages to get them all if you only spend 1 shell a time (about 730 attempts, assuming I've not gone horribly wrong somewhere), though it's surprising to see that that's actually the cheapest way of collecting them all. Playing to always win is the fastest with only 130 attempts needed, but chews through over six thousand shells. The game does throw vast quantities of shells at you, so that's possibly not as daft a method as it seems.

Excel gets very close with the equation for the Attempts needed line (it's actually y=-130ln(x)+130), but I'm unsure about the other one. It feels like it should also be logarithmic or exponential, but the only trend line that comes near it is a linear, or possibly squared function.

Ideas?

Comments

[torkell]

1) That is probably the most efficient way to get shells time-wise. You'll also be able to convert a fair number of the shells back into rupees, as each failed attempt at a figurine gives you 5 rupees as a consolation prize.

2) That would be too useful of it. I dare say there's enough to get them all with a 50% or 33% target rate.

3) Yep, I did exactly the same thing. /me slaps self

4) I aimed for a min 33% success rate to begin with, which makes the first set of figurines a lot cheaper. I'm not quite patient enough to try collection all the figurines with a min 1% success rate, even though that will get them all with no refills.

5) Yep, I've not taken them into account. Including them changes the odds and costs a little. Another potential exercise is to work out how much it costs if you always collect all available figurines before unlocking more (there's a few points during the game where more become available).

6) That way is rather tempting, and I may try that. First to get more shells... green picolyte doesn't drop anywhere near as many as some guides would have you believe. As it stands I've got 13 to collect, which for a 33% success could take as little as 375 shells. Or I could go for 100% and spend 1246 shells...

7) Yup, which is why I never did this on any of my previous playthroughs.

I did manage to get all 4 this time (hacing read up on and avoided the glitch). What I actually did for kinstones and heart pieces was to first print off a list of all of them, then as I found each one while playing tick it off. When it came down to mopping up the last few at the end I then had a list of all the ones I'd already found, which made that much easier.

For the town houses, the first went to Farore and the second to Nayru. No particular reason for picking those two.