Hypotetical Scenario where the entire world is lit up with mushlights/glowcaps, and the viability of it

[Maxil20]

Have you ever thought to yourself “how much effort would it take to cover the entire map with mushlights and/or glowcaps?” If you have, you have (hopefully) come to the right place!

In order to get the data without much issue, I will be throwing in a few disclaimers:
 

- Mushlights (and glowcaps) have a 4 tile radius of light. In order to simplify calculations, I am going to be assuming they will perfectly light up a radius of 16 tiles. Parusoid corrected me both with a better radius (2.5 tiles) and with the calculation of pi*r*r, which gives us a calculation of 19.635.
- I will also be assuming you are able to perfectly space every light to the point where you will not need excess mushlights to cover up gaps that world gen might have (such as uneven corners or non removable things like ponds). As a result, you will likely need a lot more mushlights then the numbers I will be covering.

In order to get our calculations, we need to first know the average amount of tiles on a map, which will include the hermit + lunar island.

- @Hornete made a nice command to achieve this, which you can try out yourself with the following (use the command in local, not on remote, unlike most commands):
 

Spoiler

local count = 0 
    local map = TheWorld.Map 
    local w, h = map:GetSize() 
    for i = 1, w do 
        for j = 1, h do 
            local tile = map:GetTile(i, j) 
            if not (tile >= GROUND.OCEAN_START) and (tile ~= GROUND.IMPASSABLE) and tile ~= GROUND.INVALID then 
                count = count + 1 
            end 
        end 
    end 
print(count)

- I ran the command on 10 different maps, and achieved the following data:

Spoiler

46335

47040

47494

50633

55771

43138

47064

57361

52510

46584

The average of the numbers turns out to be 49493. More worlds could be done for a better average, but this is sufficient for now.

After this, we can calculate the amount of lights. Using simple math of 49493/19.635, we end up with our total amount of lights we would need, at 2520.65 (which since you can’t have part of a mushlight, will be rounded to 2521).

 

Now of course, this is only seeing the lights themselves, so let's break down the costs of building them:
- If you are only building mushlights, you will require 4 logs (for the bucket of poop), which in total is 10084 logs needed. If you are only building glowcaps, you will require an additional 4 logs for the board, leading to 20168 logs.
- Every light also requires 2 bone shards and 3 manure for the buckets. You will need 5042 bone shards and 7563 manure to build the buckets for the lights.
- Shroom skin is by far the hardest part for the lights. You will need 2521 shroom skins to build the lights, which is equivalent to 504.2 (505) Misery toadstool kills, or 840.33 (841) normal toad kills. If you were to kill misery or normal toad exactly every 20 days at the exact time it respawns, it would take 10100 days to amass the shroom skin with misery toad, or 16820 days if you were doing normal toad.

- Now because that would take an insane amount of time to farm up the lights, you also have the alternative of deconstructing napsacks for shroom skin. For bulk farming the best method will be to use 6 green gems, 5 living logs, 13 nightmare fuel, and 2 thulecite to make 1 construction amulet to be used for 5 deconstruction staffs. Each staff use will net the player .75 shroom skin, since the player will need to recraft the napsacks every 4 deconstructs (the poisoned canary can be caught again by hand if you are quick enough, so this isn’t an issue). Assuming the first craft of the shroom skin is free (which is essentially the effort of getting 1 canary since the misery toad you need for the napsack will drop 5 shroom skin), you would need to deconstruct 3352.93 (3353) times to get the required amount of shroom skins needed. This in turn translates to 806 green gems, 671 living logs, 1747 nightmare fuel, and 270 thulecite (the first 134 times will use up 804 green gems, 670 living logs, 1742 nightmare fuel, and 268 thulecite, while the final time will use 2 green gems, 1 living log, 5 nightmare fuel, and 2 thulecite, leaving you with a construction amulet at 80% and a deconstruction staff at 40%).

- In addition, you will also need to light up the lights with whatever method you choose. You will need at least 10084 items that can go into the lights. Mushlights are limited to lightbulbs, glow berries, and festive lights, while glowcaps can also use spores, which aside from winter's feast is the only way to have colored light.
 

There are also some other little things that you need to watch out for, even after construction:
- Mushlights/glowcaps can be set on fire. Unless you have dedicated areas to go to for fire hounds/summer, you will need to watch out for the occasional fire that could burn a mushlight.
- Because mushlights/glowcaps can be set on fire, they are also a potential threat for lightning strikes. As a result, you will need to have the entire world have lightning rods to protect from lightning as well, otherwise you risk some getting struck and burning up
- Due to the meteor field(s), it is naturally impossible to fully light up the area as the meteors can destroy them, reducing the amount you would need to build.
- I am aware you can speed up the shroom skin grinding by fleeing from toad before it dies, since doing so recovers its health and it drops shroom skin mid fight. However, it will still take an extremely long time to get all of the shroom skin needed to build the lights.

 

Now to contrast from that, let's look at how effective the lights would be vs. A world that has 0 mushlights/glowcaps, and gets through every night (including full moons) using only the lantern/miner hat perfectly (equipping it the moment it hits night while taking it off the moment it hits day):

- The first year’s night cycle will leave you in the dark for a grand total of 128.5 minutes, which is slightly over 2 hours out over the 9.33 hours of the full 70 day year. This is around 23% of the total time of the year.
- 1 light bulb replenishes 90 seconds of any light source. On average, you will need 85.67 light bulbs a year to get through every night.
-Since light bulbs can be easily stockpiled and bundled throughout the years after killing bee queen and klaus, the overall maintenance of light bulbs is usually a non issue after the first few years, as the only real cost aside from the bulbs is the rope.

 

In conclusion, while you could get through every year without worrying about light needs, it would be an extreme cost to both set up and perform/actively prevent the lights from being destroyed, while also not really rewarding the effort all that much. While it is tedious, getting the bulbs and simply getting by with a lantern/miner hat are far more viable then grinding the items for in game years just to keep the world lit up. It does solidify mushlights/glowcaps as decor for me, and overall shows how relatively underpowered they are compared to conventional means, at least on the surface.

 

If anyone is wondering why I did this, I did it for a few reasons:
A) I was bored.

B) I wanted to truly find out the real cost of 100% lighting up the map, since while it is an extreme task, it technically isn’t impossible.

 

I do want to note that I intentionally left out the caves for this. The mushlights are a much more viable choice down there, since their light needs are already there in massive amounts, and the fact that most areas in the caves are dark 24/7 with the exception of the light bulbs. In addition, they normally cannot be destroyed by most means, except by players or by antlion's sinkholes.

Future plans:
A) Gather more varied data points, like how many trees it would take to farm the treeguards for living logs if going the napsack route, the amount of crumpled packages it would take to farm the festive lights, and so on.
B) Perhaps see the exact number of lights to light up the entire caves in the future?
Edit(s)

Edit 1: Corrected the initial data, since my initial calculation was incorrect compared to the current one (16 vs 19.635). Also added future plans, since I do plan on investing more time into the project in the future

[Notecja]

[Articestone]

You missed out shroom skin as a possible drop from klaus, dfly kill and fuelweaver for more green gems, numerous treeguards for ur deconstrut staff or u can deconstrut deconstrut staff instead. For infinite light, asumming is winter feast server, clamping at oasis for bundles for christmas light and killing winter feast deerclops. Further more it takes alot of time to craft all of this even with winona, food issues, time taken to travel from ruins to surface and traveling place by place carefully building  glowcaps or mushcaps which means killing walrus to move faster, daily sanity loss 

I recommend not to recalculate the entire thing unless u really have nothing better to do

[Cheggf]

8 hours ago, Maxil20 said:

- Shroom skin is by far the hardest part for the lights. You will need 3094 shroom skins to build the lights, which is equivalent to 618.8 (619) Misery toadstool kills, or 1031.33 (1032) normal toad kills. If you were to kill misery or normal toad exactly every 20 days at the exact time it respawns, it would take 12380 days to amass the shroom skin with misery toad, or 20640 days if you were doing normal toad.

1,651 - 2,752 real life hours. That's 69 - 115 real days of nonstop playtime. Even if you were playing for 8 hours a day that's still 206 - 344 days before you even had enough. Jeese.

Thanks for all this useless math, it's my favourite kind of math. Very interesting read.

[Parusoid]

13 hours ago, Maxil20 said:

Mushlights (and glowcaps) have a 4 tile radius of light

Are you sure about that?

the radius is roughly 2.5 pitchfork tiles

13 hours ago, Maxil20 said:

I am going to be assuming they will perfectly light up a radius of 16 tiles

you mean an area?

why base calculation on intentionally incorrect data? just calculate the area of a circle pi*r*r and use that to determine amount of tiles covered by the light. that will give you a little more accurate results

[Maxil20]

10 hours ago, Articestone said:

You missed out shroom skin as a possible drop from klaus, dfly kill and fuelweaver for more green gems, numerous treeguards for ur deconstrut staff or u can deconstrut deconstrut staff instead. For infinite light, asumming is winter feast server, clamping at oasis for bundles for christmas light and killing winter feast deerclops. 

Very valid points! Although ruins regen is pretty random (you have cases of getting 2-3 green gems vs 10-11), The other methods are more consistent.
As for deconstructing decon staffs, you would only do it for the non green gem mats, since they wouldn't return the gems.
I do want to see how long it would take to farm all the winters feast lights. I'm not sure of the exact chance from the oasis though.

 

5 hours ago, Parusoid said:

 just calculate the area of a circle pi*r*r and use that to determine amount of tiles covered by the light. that will give you a little more accurate results

I KNEW I WOULD MESS UP ON REMEMBERING TO DO BASIC CALCULATIONS. Thanks for catching this at least.

I will be rewriting the math soon-ish, but I did want to get a proper scale of the light radius for myself as well. I did decide to do a wall graph for slightly better results, and this is what I got:

I would say the radius is about what you said, at 2.5 tiles (Technically 2.75 works since you won't be attacked by Charlie, but you would start rapidly losing sanity and overall really pushes it).
Anyway, redoing the calculation with 2.5 tiles got me 19.635. I'll be basing the new mushlight calculations on this. Once again, thanks for the reminder!