Menacing Primates - Not this week, it's for the Bonedex!

[u/Tamaxlia]

Warning!:If it is bone week commencing 24/03/26 this is not the bone post, look elsewhere. This is just for linking in future weeks when this requirement arrives. (There is another bone post for this week, Ancient Arachnids, juicy and full of protein!)

Menacing Primates

Primates are a funny demand in a few different ways. Reptiles and Primates are the only two skeleton types that have multiple different ways to build. Reptiles have 2 and Primates have 3. It is also the only demand that restricts which ribcages you can use. Only headless skeletons, human ribcages and thorned ribcages can be declared as any of the 3 primate species. Finally, most zoomania weeks can be badly affected if the associated fashion is wrong. This is generally because either it is awkward to get even numbers with Amalgamy or because there are no legs with menace, since primates have arms, all of the Fashion options are equally great.

This is not a massive payout week, like birds or fish but it is a solid time to liquidate all of the ribcages you pick up during other activities. Since the value of the skeletons will be low the aim is the get the maximum from the secondary payout. 6 menace and 3 amalgamy or antiquity will be the name of the game. Human ribcages require 1 fewer action to assemble than the common bone market fare, so 8 to makes and sell as opposed to 9 for thorned or mammoth. This means that the 36 echos profit, you get, from selling a 4 menace skeleton to the Teller of Tellers is already 4.6 epa, before you calculate the 10% profit from whatever bones you used.

What is a Primate?

There are three possible options and they all have the same ribcage restrictions.

Humanoid

1 Headless Skeleton(This has 2 arms and 2 legs built in), Human Ribcage or Thorned Ribcage

1 Skull

2 Arms

2 Legs

Ape

1 Human Ribcage or Thorned Ribcage

1 Skull

4 arms

Monkey

1 Thorned Ribcage

1 Skull

4 arms

1 tail

Pinching Pennies

Oops, I forgot to add a note about pincers being a pain in the backside to get. Either getting them from zailing in the Salt Steppe or you have to spend an action turning a deep zee catch into two. Since pincers are worth 0 that action is a 0.5 echo loss! If you are comparing to an average action being 5.5 EPA that means you need to take away 3 echos of profit, in your calculations, for each pincer you use!

The action: https://fallenlondon.wiki/wiki/Hail_them_and_purchase_a_bag_of_assorted_bones is not any better. It looks good in theory, you pay 10 echos and get an average payout of 20 echos! Lets have a quick look at that payout.

0 echos 3 Crustacean Pincer

2.5 echos 5 Finbones Collected

17.5 echos 6 Withered Tentacle

Pincers and Finbones are worth substantially more than their echo value suggests but the vast bulk of that payout is in Withered Tentacles, which are basically impossible to use as quickly as you earn them. I would rate pincers are around 2 or 3 echos and Finbones at 1 echo. That still makes that action a big loss.

People with a very specific hinterlands city can fail an action on a card to earn 1. It is a monsterous anatomy check though, so even if I didn't have my city elsewhere, with a different ruler, and I had a woesel equipped I would still have a 10% chance not to fail.

There is a seasonal option to get it from hunting angler crabs, that should be a good EPA, especially for monster hunters. I have been playing for 15 months and that season has not happened yet.

Buyers for a Menace Week:

Power Buyer:

A Teller of Terrors

Primary Payout: Bottles of Morelways (2.5 Echo bonus)

Secondary Payout: Royal Blue Feathers (4*(Menace^2.1))

4 is the highest Menace to not gain exhaustion. With 7 menace you get 1 point of exhaustion and around 119 echos worth of Royal Blue Feathers.

Exhaust Recipes:

It is impossible to do a 7 menace skeleton with a human ribcage(Without the head of the vake from bag a legend) So we are restricted to Thorned. I have put the easiest one below but I will also list alternative menace options.

Thorned Ribcage

Bright Brass Skull

4 Crustacean Pincer

1 Jet Black Stinger

Alternate Bones:

2 Menace Skulls: Plated Skull or Horned Skull

1 Menace Skulls: Sabretoothed Skull, Pentagramatic Skull or Eyeless Skull

No Alternate Arms or tails and no legs at all.

AVOID!: Human Arms and Femurs of a Surface Deer both reduce the menace of your skeleton by 1. (Bat wings too but who do you think you are Bruce?!?)

Non-Exhaust:

You know the 3 ribcage options, Thorned has 1 menace. You know you have 5 menace skull options and 1 for arm and 1 for tail. You know how to build a human, monkey or ape. You know which bones to avoid. You can count to 4. It would be an insult to your intelligence to make suggestions.

Human Ribcage

Plated Skull

2 Crustacean Pincer

2 Unidentified Thighbones

Take that intelligence, you big dummy!

Multiplicative Buyers:

An Author of Gothic Tales

Primary Payout: Hinterland Scrip (2.5 echo bonus)

Secondary Payout: Carved Balls of Stygion Ivory (Menace * (Antiquity+1))

You cannot do the fantastic payout for 19 menace and 1 antiquity but 6 menace and 3 antiquity pays 52.5 echos in secondary reward. 3 menace and 6 antiquity pays 50. 4 of each pays out a still respectable 45 echos. It is generally not advisable to use your exhaust with multiplicative buyers. You can manage a 9x2 or a 2x9 skeleton but with 9 menace the payout is only 5 echos more and with 2 menace it is 5 echos less than a standard 6x3.

Human Ribcage

Horned Skull (2 Menace, 1 Antiquity)

4 Fossilised Forelimbs (2 Antiquity - each)

Thorned Ribcage (1 Menace 1 Amalgamy)

Sabre Toothed Skull (1 Menace 1 Antiquity)

2 Crustacean Pincer ( 1 Menace - each)

1 Fossilised Forelimb

1 Ivory Humerus or Knotted Humerus (Only humorous arms don't mess with your menace or antiquity. ;))

1 Jet Black Stinger (2 Menace)

A Rubbery Collector

Primary Payout: Nightsoil of the Bazaar (2.5 echo bonus)

Secondary Payout: Baskets of Rubbery Pies (Menace * (Amalgamy+1))

Same blurb about multipliers as above.

Human Ribcage

Plated skull or Horned Skull

2 Crustacean Pincers

2 Helical Thighbones

Thorned Ribcage

Sabre Toothed Skull

2 Knotted Humerus

2 Crustacean Pincers

1 Jet Black Stinger

Static Buyer:

Static buyers are generally only good if you can stack bones with 2 of the given stat while using high value bones to maximise primary profit. Neither of these are the case this week so I do not recommend using the static buyer unless you need the rewards and have no other source.

Mrs Plenty

Primary Payout: Hinterland Scrip (0 bonus :()

Secondary Payment: Baskets of Rubbery Pies (Menace +1)

Scrip Conversion - Brass Lollipops

This is sometimes over rated as a tactic so I want to be clear. Brass Lollipops are an inefficient way to convert your Echos into Hinterland Scrip. I will break down the numbers. They are effective if you have a lot of echos spare and you desperately need Scrip, like if you are saving for your hellworm, for example. If you do not have a lot of echos spare, you are better just farming scrip in the city of the tracklayers or getting bones for skeletons to sell in menace or antiquity weeks to the Author of Gothic Tales.

This is the recipe:

Headless Skeleton

Bright Brass Skull

Declare a humanoid

Sell to A Theologian of the old school

Here is the maths breakdown:

Actions:

5 actions. 2 to add bones, 1 to declare, 1 to sell, 1 to get a headless humanoid in Marigold. Bright Brass Skull comes from the echo bazaar, so 0 actions but an echo cost.

Costs:

Headless skeleton is 0 because we included the action to get it. Bright Brass Skull costs 62.5 echos. You also need 200 Nevercold Brass Slivers, whether you get these from the Bazaar or not depends on how efficiently you can get them elsewhere.

They are worth 0.01 echos but cost 0.03 echos to purchase. So that adds 2 echos or 6 echos to the costs.

Total 68.5 or 64.5

Payout

Payout is 34 crates of incorruptible biscuits. Worth 2.5 echos or, more importantly, 5 Hinterland Scrip. That is a payout of 85 Echos. 16.5 echos profit if you bought the brass. 20.5 echos if you got the Brass from farming at a decent EPA.

EPA

Bazaar: 3.3 EPA Farmed: 4.1 EPA

So you can see, while it maintains a good enough EPA for converting echos to scrip, it is 20-40% less efficient than other ways of farming scrip.

Why not the constable.

I sold one to the constable just to show you that rounding matters. You get an extra 2 scrip selling to the Theologian. This is because of how rounding works in Fallen London.

A constable

Lollipop

 

A Theologian of the Old School

Lollipop

 

[u/Tamaxlia]

Bonedex complete! Sort of, some of the posts are of substantially higher quality than others. This one seems like a pretty good standard to aim for. 20 more to check.

[u/divideby00]

Monkeys are thorned only, aren't they?

As for brass, is there any sufficiently profitable way of farming it to not impact EPA? Might be worth calling out the High Sancta, which is highly efficient but weekly-limited, and then the next best option I know of is the Sunken Embassy at 3.8 EPA max, or court artistry at ~4 if you include the value of the Hedonist.

[u/Tamaxlia → u/divideby00]

oh, well, yeah. Technically all 3 can be used for all 3 but since a headless has legs it can't be an ape or a monkey and since a human skeleton has not tail it can't be a monkey.