Better Learning

There was a discussion in the comments of an earlier post regarding the learning skills in Glitch and if/when they're worth picking up. It was hard to figure out if I should be getting them or not since it wasn't entirely clear what they do. I've done some exploring in threads on the internet and it seems the developers aren't really sure either, but I do know what the intention is and what is currently happening.

By default your first 20 skills can be learned for their standard base cost. From the 21st skill forward each new skill you learn costs an extra 3% per skill over the cap. So if you haven't taken any of the better learning skills your 21st skill costs 103% of the normal time. Your 22nd costs 106.1%. Your 43rd skill would cost more than double.

So going over the cap a little bit doesn't actually seem like a big deal. My question yesterday was if I should learn up to the cap or not and the answer seems to be it wouldn't have hurt that much if I had. An extra 3% time on the 12 hour skill I was going to learn would be 21 extra minutes. The optimizer in me dislikes it but it wouldn't have really been a big deal.

In the long run the compounding aspect will really start to hurt. Paying more than double for skill number 43 seems like an awful lot, but even then it doesn't seem truly terrible. I was worried from talking to Sky that it was going to quickly become a 6x multiplier and that's really not the case.

Now, what does Better Learning I do? (Hereafter referred to as BLI, and assuming the very first things you ever learn are the BL skills if you're ever learning them.) It raises the cap of skills you can learn before the penalty starts kicking in from 20 to 21. It also knocks 2% off of the cost of all future skills. (The support rep claims that BLI isn't supposed to count as one of the 21 skills either, but right now it does. Unclear if that is a bug or a misunderstanding. For now I'm going to assume it is working as intended and BLI should count as a skill.) Since BLI counts as a skill and the cap only gets increased by one it doesn't matter when you learn it. All it does is knock 2% off of the cost of future skills. It takes 10 minutes to learn it will have paid for itself in 500 minutes, or less than 9 hours. After that it's pure profit and I think everyone should learn this pretty much as soon as they can.

How about BLII? Well, it takes the cap all the way to 24 and changes the 2% discount into a 5% discount. Given that you already have BLI this means that learning your first 20 skills actually takes 3.06% less time. Skill 21 takes 5.88% less time. Skills 22 and beyond take 8.63% less time. BLII takes 176.4 minutes to learn, so with the best saving ratio it will pay for itself in 2044 minutes, or 34 hours. This still seems like a very worthwhile investment.

BLIII bumps your cap to 28 and converts the 5% discount to an 8% discount. Compared to BLII it saves you 3.16% on your first 22 skills, 5.98% on skill 23, 8.72% on skill 24, and 11.38% on all future skills. BLIII requires an emblem of Lem (and therefore a fair amount of time spent in game) and 11.4 hours to learn. Again using the best ratio it will pay for itself in 100 hours. So you can be half a day worse for 4 days and then better forever after that. Depending on how you feel about getting rep with Lem this may or may not be feasible but it seems very strong.

BLIV bumps your cap to 32 and changes your 8% discount into a 12% discount. Compared to BLIII it saves you 4.35% on your first 25 skills, 7.13% on skill 26, 9.84% on skill 27, and 12.46% on all future skills. It takes 33.12 hours to learn and will pay for itself in 266 hours. That's a fairly long amount of time to get into the profit but it isn't terribly unreasonable.

BLV bumps your cap to 37 and changes your 12% discount into a 20% discount. Compared to BLIV it saves you 9.09% on your first 28 skills, 11.74% on skill 29, 14.31% on skill 30, 16.81% on skill 31, and 19.23% on all future skills. That's a really substantial discount! On the downside it does take 4.4 days to learn so it only pays itself off after almost 23 days. It will take way more than 23 days to learn everything in the game so if your plan is to do it all then it certainly makes sense to dive down this far since it's a really substantial saving across the board.


Personally I just learned my 24th skill and that skill was BLIII. This means I can now learn 4 more skills without the penalty approaching, and while BLIV is always good it gets better when the cap raise actually helps you out. I'm clearly not just playing for the long term since I want to explore around and do things on top of being efficient so I'm not sure I should plunge into BLIV and BLV right away. I am currently learning BLIV while I work out the math since I'm pretty sure I'll want it in 3 skills even if I don't end up wanting it right now. But I think it would be worthwhile to map out the next few skills I want and then see how long it would take to get them all with or without each of BLIV and BLV.

My main source of both money and experience right now is fondling animals and there are three more skills to more me even more efficient at doing so. Those are at the front of my list of things to pick up for sure. I also want to level up tinkering more so I can maybe start actually making things. There are 5 such skills left in that tree, though the last one has 4 low level prerequisites elsewhere. I've almost finished off Bureaucratic Arts II. I kinda want 3 more tiers of teleportation. I also feel like getting the last meditation skill would make sense. And if I get that then I can grab piety... Who knows what that will do!

Getting all the animal skills will cost me about 70 hours right now. With BLIV it will take 100. With BLV it will take 200. Clearly if I just want to go all animals all the time then I should stop where I am. On the other hand it is useful to look at when these things will finish. 70 hours from now is the middle of the day Saturday and I am likely going to be playing Magic all day, and then probably D&D on Sunday. By the time D&D is done (when I'll get to play again) BLIV and all the animal skills will be done. That seems ok. 200 hours is a more than a full week and seems less ok.

But that's an awfully short term view... What if I want all the tinkering related skills, too? Well, as is I'd get there in 228 hours. With BLIV? 244 hours. With BLV? 328 hours. BLV still isn't looking very good. BLIV still can't pull ahead but the gap is closing.

How about everything on my list? To go beyond this stuff would pretty much mean branching out into other types of things entirely. As is it would be 493 hours (TPV actually costs 4 days base!), with BLIV would be 476 hours, and with BLV would be 515 hours. BLIV pulls into the lead and BLV remains worse than neither!

I think BLV is getting excluded for now. I'm not convinced I'll be playing the game long enough for it to pay off. I'm not sure delaying everything I currently care about so I can get stuff I don't care about faster makes sense. BLIV is the same thing, only a lot less extreme. I can see it paying off right away. And I think the way the timing works out as far as when the weekend hits is actually enough to put it over the top.

I worry that excluding BLV now means I'm never going to get it, and that they'll end up adding in lots of new skills and I'll get left behind by not having it. But it just takes sooooo long to pay off.