As I watch my ghostly TOTK sage companions whale ineffectively on a single gibdo, I find myself wishing for the hundredth time that their basic attacks did elemental damage. Riju's swords should deal shock, Yunobo's boulder breaker should set opponents on fire, Tulin should be able to blow enemies off of cliffs, and Sidon's trident attack should get people wet.
At least then I wouldn't have to wait an hour for the four of them to take out a single gibdo or watch in embarrassment as everyone but Riju flails uselessly when confronted with a walking tree. A tree, for Hylia's sake. These sages are supposed to be the best of the best and only one of them can even mildly damage a shrub with an attitude.
But, one issue that has remained unaddressed throughout the entirety of the LOZ canon and apocrypha is the lack of a royal mint.
This implies that rupees are a commodity (a physical material that has value) rather than a fiat currency (a currency not backed by a commodity but by faith in a specific government that ensure it's value).
Most modern governments use Fiat currencies because:
"Fiat money isn't a scarce or fixed resource like gold so central banks have much greater control over its supply. This gives them the power to manage economic variables such as credit supply, liquidity, interest rates, and money velocity." [1]
We can see evidence of Hyrulean government's failure to manage their economy during the runaway inflation of Wind's era
This graph depicts the price to buy an arrow in each specific era of the Legend of Zelda games. The price of arrows between Wind Waker and Phantom Hourglass jumped by two rupees and arrow, indicating inflation.
The Origin of Rupees
So if Hyrule's Royal Family isn't minting rupees, where do they come from?
The Hyrule Compendium entry for blupees mentions that "these peculiar little things have a penchant for collecting rupees" but the identity of the compendium's author is unverified and so is their research.
The unregulated nature of Hyrule's commodities-based currency becomes a problem in Tears of the Kingdom, when Koltin asks Link to slaughter all 167 bubbelfrogs.
The life cycle of blupees, bubbelfrogs, and the King of the Mountain requires further study but it is evident that when a blubbelfrog is killed, a blupee is generated. So Link's quest to collect bubbelgems introduces 167 more blupees into Hyrule's ecosystem. These 167 extra blupees eat, drink, and more importantly to us, shit.
So how much did this quest impact Hyrule's economy? To answer that question, some math is required.
The first number we need is the average amount of rupees that blupees shit. To determine this, I shot 30 blupees and fitted the resulting data to a standard distribution.
Blupees Moneybags Georg who shat 51 rupees was an outlier who should not be counted and thus was removed from the dataset.
Multiplying that average amount of rupees that blupees shit by the blupee population [2], gives us the amount of rupees being shat in hyrule.
As you can see, a lot more rupees are being generated during the events of Tears of the Kingdom than in Breath of the Wild. How big of a problem is this? Well, to answer that, we need to know the size of Hyrule's economy.
The Size of Hyrule's Economy
I deciding to determine the size of economy by collecting the prices of every item sold in Hyrule by every merchant (except Ramella, I forgot Ramella).
With the collected price data, we are able to estimate the amount of currency changing hands among the people of Hyrule every year.
So after all this, we can see that the amount of rupees being shat per year should cause significant inflation. And yet, you may recall from our first graph, the price of arrows hasn't significantly changed and neither has the cost of most goods and services across Hyrule with some limited exceptions.
So why aren't prices skyrocketing?
Because the Great Fairies act as the Federal Reserve. They regulate the economy by removing varying amounts of money from circulation via their enchanting services.
In Breath of the Wild, the Great Fairies collectively charge Link 11,600 rupees to wake all 4 great fairies.
In Tears of the Kingdom, they charge Link per individual item of clothing enchanted. This, in total, costs 78,280 rupees.
Accounting for a target 2% rate of inflation, the Great Fairies remove 3.28% of all rupees shat during Breath of the Wild. In Tears of the Kingdom, their rupee removal rate is 5.17% of all rupees being shat.
The Great Fairies are definitely removing less rupees than are being shat but most blupees inhabit far-flung locations that most Hyruleans are not venturing to in these chaotic times. I have confidence that the Great Fairies can adjust their rate of currency removal should the need arise.
But who is attempting to cause this inflation and why?
One thing has always bugged me about Tears of the Kingdom, it wasn't the emptiness of the depths, or the fact that it was easy to miss out on the paraglider, or even the fact that that one cutscene kept being repeated after every temple. It was that Koltin asks you, Link, to go on a rampage of ecological destruction, to hunt the species of Bubbelfrogs to Extinction.
Koltin is clearly passionate about his quest to become a Satori, but he also has a secondary motive, to help out his brother: Kilton.
Kilton started his own currency that competes directly with the rupee and admits as much.
Kolton recruits Link under false pretenses in order to destroy the Bubbelfrog population, increase the amount of blupees, and cause skyrocketing inflation. This would devalue the rupee and incentivize the adoption of mon as a currency.
In the end, Koltins crimes caught up with him and Link helped the Great Fairies stabilize the economy, but Kilton is still out there and who knows what he has planned next.
This is an amazing analysis; I love the idea of the Great Fairies as a federal reserve (they do set monetary policy of a sort after all). However, I feel like there are a couple of elements missing: outside trade, and Link himself.
Hyrule has no manufacturing capabilities. Large-scale forges and sawmills don't exist. That means that mass-processed goods (paper, printing equipment, construction supplies, etc) must be imported from overseas. While a foreign trading partner would be unlikely to accept rupees in exchange, Hyrule has other goods (raw ore, elixirs, medicinal plants) that it can exchange in kind.
There are a few individuals around the kingdom that produce such things, but none so prolific as Link. I will use my own in-game Link as a basis, and this fellow makes a habit of slaughtering every rare talus, white frox, lynel, and molduga in the game on every blood moon cycle, as well as mining every rare ore deposit.
With the monster parts cooked into elixirs, that nets Link an average of 37,000 rupees per blood moon. If we accept that the lunar cycle is a month, this means that Link contributes 440,000 rupees worth of goods to the Hylian economy every year, exceeding the total of every other trader and city and bringing the GDP much closer to the money supply.
Most of these goods wind up in the hands of Hyrule's traders, who can then exchange them with foreign trading partners for imported goods which they can then sell for rupees at a markup, bringing the economy into balance.
EXCUSE ME THERE IS A PLANT THAT CAN MIMIC FAKE PLANTS?????
IT'S CALLED A BOQUILA TRIOFOLIOLATA AND IT'S FUCKING WITH MY BRAIN
IT APPARENTLY CAN MIMIC OTHER PLANTS AND AT FIRST I WAS LIKE "oh cool man it must take it's genetic code and copy it or feel the roots or something like that!! :3"
AND THEN I READ AN ARTICLE ON IT AND THESE FUCKING PARAGRAPHS HIT ME LIKE A BUS
In retrospect, consider the number 1 thing every grade-schooler knows about plants is they take in light, the idea they might be able to see should not wreck my shit as hard as it does
Living in a climate controlled biodome on Erid with a bunch of friendly rock creatures sounds lovely, actually. I probably wouldn't come back when the year was up.
About 5 months ago, I realized that playing Minecraft at my current base had gotten repetitive. I was on a transformed mycelium island, so there were no threats that I couldn't dispatch within seconds. I wasn't feeling inspired to do new builds, and I fell into a creative rut.
I decided it was time for a change. I took all my gear out of my ender chest and buried it on the island, than took off in a boat with only the clothes on my back to find new horizons.
My wanderings took me about 10000 blocks away from my base, where I found a badlands biome with a beautiful warm water lake and the most breathtaking lush cave system I've ever seen underneath. There's even a lost city further down for when I'm feeling more daring.
I'm going to set up a long term base here, with the goal of building a villager town with hanging gardens in the cave. I love the villager trading mechanics, but I never liked the idea of keeping them cooped up in a trading hall. I'm going for a balance that has them readily available for trading during the workday but allows them to roam freely in the mornings and evenings, as well as get a good night's sleep.
I've got the whole cave area I plan to develop lit up, and I pulled my server world into a single-player creative backup so I can experiment with various build styles. The video shows a spectator mode fly-through of the whole area. I'm really enjoying playing the game again, can't wait to try out some ideas!
finally learned how to use the compressed air stapler at work today and this whole time i’ve been certain that learning how to use it will make me less afraid of it but unfortunately the exact opposite has occurred because that thing is about 200 times more terrifying when you know exactly how little force it actually takes on the trigger to send a sharp piece of metal rocketing out of it at mach speed. why the fuck do we have one with the safety taped down
I design industrial joining machines for a living, and as a safety feature they require two-handed actuation. Users started taping down the second trigger so they could use the machine one-handed, and sure enough it was only a matter of time before someone had an accident.
I then re-wrote the software to require both triggers to be released before another cycle could start, effectively disabling the tape-down hack. I have since been inundated with complaints from people who are desperate to crush their hands in a 1200 pound clamp to save a quarter second of effort.
