So, alchemy requires (most) materials to be in multiples of 5. Or 25 x number of items in the work order. Problem is, all our sources of herbs come in a wide range of numbers unless we can buy them from the society store. I've ended up having to script a lot of marking, breaking, stacking of herbs to get the right size and even then it has been kind of a hassle to deal with in bulk.

For example, I am working on chest potions for work orders. I buy stacks of 4 ithor root from the store, crush them. To get a round number, I need to crush 25 sets of herbs. But then I need to combine all 25 stacks. After all of that, I only make 4 uses.

Or, when I made a bunch of nemoih salve, I kept getting stacks of 6 instead of 5. Mark, break, figure out which hand has the 5 and which hand has the 1 unit. And then you have to do something with all those singles--put each one in a container or drop them on the ground and then gather them up one at a time and combine them, keep track, stow them in a different container.

None of these steps are particularly hard, but in large numbers it's a lot of tedious work. This isn't an urgent problem and I don't know the best way to make it less cumbersome. Something like an herb stacker that dispenses in units of 5, but the problem is there are a lot of herbs we'll want to keep track of so an item for each type of herb doesn't seem viable either.

So, something to think about. If we didn't have to script the management of herb/product stacks, that would be good.

How do you multiply 4 to get 75?

> Or, when I made a bunch of nemoih salve, I kept getting stacks of 6 instead of 5. Mark, break, figure out which hand has the 5 and which hand has the 1 unit. And then you have to do something with all those singles--put each one in a container or drop them on the ground and then gather them up one at a time and combine them, keep track, stow them in a different container.

I do it in a different order: make new stack, get old leftovers, combine, mark at 5, break, stow second. That keeps all the excess pieces in one stack, and eventually they accumulate up to 5 and can be bundled.

>>> I get stacks of 72 crushed ithor this way. That means I get two potions and 22 left over ithor. Right now I have something in the ballpark of 50 stacks of ithor. That means 50 left over ithor to recombine at 66. And then stacks of 16 to deal with, and then stacks of 14 to deal with and then stacks of 6 to deal with and so on.

You could use a script to do this for you. The script I use counts the size of a stack and, if it less than 25, gets a second stack and tries to combine them. If the second stack is too big it just uses that one instead. If your front end won't support extracting numbers it might be slightly more challenging to work with, but doable.

Hmm, would it help if the stacks could go higher for finished herbs and remedies? Say 250?

I can look into making stuff auto-combine when you STOW it into the same container, but it will likely be a decent sized project.

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"I have no data yet. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories instead of theories to suit facts."
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes

And actually, now that I think of it, making the herbs stack too high could cause issues with containers and weight restrictions. You might get all the herbs put together and then have no where to store them because they're too heavy.