Talk:Conditional Drops

Hellion's just edited in "Some monsters will drop only 1 out of a set of possible items at a time, such as the swarm of fire ants dropping their familiar equipment[...]". But that contradicts the note on the ant page "More than one of the tools can drop at the same time". So which is wrong? --Club (#66669) (Talk) 00:32, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

• Since Hellion is a dev, I would lean towards the note on the monster page being wrong. Either an early bug, or people not distingushing between various pickpocket mechanics (or failing to count). At some point I can head over to the desert and re-spade the ants, but not for a few days. --Flargen 00:38, 4 August 2009 (UTC)
  • Since I posted info that contradicts other info on the wiki, I went and double-checked. The familiar equipment is indeed a mutually-exclusive drop group. --Hellion 06:22, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

I'm not so sure about some of the info on this page. For instance, the conditional in the sea isn't there just to prevent yoinking. It's there because they needed the conditional effects of pressure and it's countermeasures. (Heard on the radio...)

It also seems confusing to call pick-pocket only items conditional drops. --Starwed 00:39, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

• The pick-pocket thing is a bit conjectural. Maybe. I don't feel like I'm the one who came up with that statement. The conditional would be a vapid one: it's always false, hence why you can only get it through pickpocketing (since it can't drop after combat). Combined with a "this can be pickpocketed regardless" flag. But I can't remember if there's an official word on this, or any way to actually discern the difference in-game. And if the sea conditional is a direct consequence of the pressure, then you should be able to steal items from putty'd versions of sea monsters, which is known to be false (and the He-Boulder disintegration doesn't give you anything from a putty'd fish). Well, I suppose the conditional could still be there and just always evaluates to true when putty'd. The conditional is equivalent to a trivial one from my spading data, however. Testing at various item drop bonuses did not yield inconsistent drop rates. If there's a non-trivial rejection rate, then it would introduce discrepancies between averages seen at distinct item drop bonuses. At some point I could head back there and see if I can refine things further and see if a rejection rate pops up, but for now I'd say it's functionally identical to a trivial conditional. --Flargen 00:52, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

A post by Jick concerning how nopickpocket conditionals tend to work. This sort of conditional flag is the same as the trivial conditional (functionally speaking). As for the sea pressure penalties constituting a conditional, the best I can figure is that the game rolls up values for figuring if you get a drop or not randomly; then it checks if that item would drop at your drop modifier (before the pressure penalty); then it checks if it ALSO would have dropped at the pressure penalty modifier, and rejects the drop if not. This would help explain why they also said on the radio--when discussing the possibility of dolphins you could fight to get items that didn't drop because of the pressure penalty--that they already had the code necessary to detect when it is the pressure penalty that specifically causes the item not to drop. This would still be functionally equivalent to the trivial condition, with the pressure penalty viewed as a standard item drop modifier, however. So the implementation may be thematically distinct due to technicalities in the code, but it's observable effects are exactly equivalent to the trivial conditional. --Flargen 02:44, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

I just hit the Jilted Mistress with my He-Boulder's yellow ray, and got only the antique hand mirror. As one would expect, class-specific drops seems to be conditional, editing the page to make this clear.--Jeffbee 04:47, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

Yellow rayed a hobo, a slime and a elemental hobo. Got nothing for the hobos and the food and drink from the slime. Must mean that basically all dungeon drops are conditional.--Fhthd 10:24, 7 March 2010 (UTC)

Sub-One-Percent Drops and Formatting

People on the G-D forum have been asking the same questions about drops like Spice Melange for far too long, and apparently some of them point to the wiki in their confusion about why they couldn't figure out for themselves why the He-Boulder won't drop the items. I suggest we make the drop percentages with conditional items links to the Conditional Items page, like this:

You acquire an item: spice melange (~.1% chance)*

Thoughts? --Azeltir 19:18, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

• That would probably be a good solution. Conditional drops present something of a formatting issue for the wiki. The conditions don't really have a common locus. For the sea there's a condition imposed by the zone; for things like melange there's just a generic rejection rate that's probably specifically coded on the monster; others come from the player's inventory and such, and those conditions might be coded specifically on the item. And then there's that it was the he-boulder itself that really necessitated the inclusion of conditional drop mechanics on the wiki. Before that they were knowledge common in the speed run community and to spaders, but otherwise little known except to those that had paid attention to the occasional drop mechanics explained by Jick and Co. So it's certainly a fresh issue. Some sort of link would seem appropriate. I'd just like to avoid duplicating information all over the place. This way is at least unobtrusive, but I don't think it works for everything since then people will start wondering what the conditions actually are, and that linking format won't really help them answer that question except in a few cases where it's fairly obvious. --Flargen 19:51, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

• I like this idea, but something needs to identify it as conditional at a glance. The condition itself could be added as mouse-over text---it does imply some duplication in that, but it could be eliminated by making the conditional requirement text a field of the data page. As a slight modification then, how about something like one of these, with mouse-over text added to indicate actual condition?

[[File:melange.gif

You acquire an item: spice melange

(~.1% conditional chance*)

or

[[File:melange.gif

You acquire an item: spice melange

(~.1% conditional? chance*)

or

[[File:melange.gif

You acquire an item: spice melange

(~.1%cond chance*)

--Fig bucket 21:06, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

I agree we should have a way to show that a drop is conditional. Those examples are a bit awkward to read (to me), but using a tooltip via the title attribute sounds like a good way to include the conditions. Maybe something like the following:

[[File:melange.gif

You acquire an item: spice melange

(Conditional, 0.1% chance*)

--Lordebon 22:11, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

Sabre teeth

Sabre teeth are currently assumed to be conditional drops, they're definitely NOT guaranteed by YR. There's been enough spade work done to confirm this. --Confusion 04:07, 31 May 2010 (UTC)

• Sabre teeth drop from two monsters. Is that true for both of them or just the goat? --Club (#66669) (Talk) 22:26, 31 May 2010 (UTC)

Stealth update?

I read recently (sorry, no citation) that the drop logic was changed in a stealth (i.e. unannounced) trivial update. The change allows some conditional drops to drop via yellow ray, e.g. shirt drops. --Stannius 19:17, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

• Yes, this is correct, and there are some rather bizarre situations that have been detected from this. Such as:
  • The Knob Goblin elite shirt can be pickpocketed, but cannot be disgorged.
  • In contrast to the previous, the harem girl t-shirt can be neither pp'd nor disgorged. This despite that the zones these monsters are in were reworked in the same revamp.
  • The evil eye can be pickpocketed, but cannot be obtained via the V for Vivala mask or divine crackers. This suggests there could actually be two evil eye drops: one pickpocket only, and one conditional (won't drop if the pickpocket one has been stolen). It is known that things such as the mask and cracker cannot obtain pp-only items, and also cannot obtain conditionals, so this would explain what is observed. But it need not be the only possible way of explaining things.
• --Flargen 02:12, 20 August 2011 (CEST)