Stuiver Grinding (Guide)

Early Firmament Content

This guide is incomplete. You can help by expanding it.

What needs work: Waiting for Firmament Part 5 to release. However, it serves as a decent guide already.

This page requires constant monitoring and updating to keep up with the state of the game. It hasn't been updated in 63 days, so the information within may be outdated.

StPA: Stuivers per Action

The EPA on this page does not represent the total value of the carousel, but the total value of the items that can't be converted into Stuivers. For example, Ecdysis earns you 3.8 Echoes (EPA) and 32 Stuivers (StPA) per action, or 5.4 EPA if the Stuivers are converted into Echoes.

Stuiver exclusive items

Why grind Stuivers? Well, by offering 1,000,000 Stuivers to the Duchy of Burgundy you can become A Knight of the Order of the Golden Carapace, a unique numbered Accomplishment. At this time, there are 305 Knights of the Golden Carapace bestriding the Neath like colossi.

In addition to becoming a Knight, here's a list of items that are currently only purchasable with Stuivers. Strict BiS are in bold, shared BiS are in italic.

Price	Item	Description	Notes
The Cenobitic Outfitter
1500	Gentleman's Self-Similar Carryall	Luggage Shadowy +6 Insubstantial +1	Current BiS for Shadowy and the only available Shadowy Luggage.
2000	Celestial Cinnabar Compass	Home Comfort Watchful +6 Inerrant +1	Current BiS for Inerrant and the only available Inerrant Home Comfort.
Old Whaler's Unlicensed Imports
1500	Leviathan-Leather Valise	Luggage Zeefaring +1 Inerrant +1	Current BiS for Zeefaring and the only available Zeefaring Luggage.
2000	A Conspiracy of Smugglers	Crew Shadowy +4	Currently the only Shadowy Crew.
Slaughterhall Wholesalers
4000	Carmine Escoffion	Hat Persuasive +7 Respectable +3 Dreaded -1 Inerrant +1	Currently the only Inerrant hat.
17500	Burgundian Doublet	Clothing Persuasive +7 Respectable +2 Chthonosophy +1	Along with Burgundian Gown, the only Cthonosophy clothes.
17500	Burgundian Gown	Clothing Persuasive +7 Respectable +2 Chthonosophy +1	Along with Burgundian Doublet, the only Cthonosophy clothes.
Hortus Conclusus
2500	Moth-Eaten Tapestry	Home Comfort Respectable +1 Mithridacy +1
Fuel for Glory's Fire
74500, among other costs; see To Make a Moth (Guide)	A Metamorphosed Moth-Self	Affiliation Respectable +1 Dreaded +1 Bizarre +1 Neathproofed +1	Current BiS for Neathproofed and the only Neathproofed Affiliation.
The Ossuary
2500	Vertebral Bludgeon	Weapon Dangerous +7 Persuasive +7 Neathproofed +1	Currently the only non-seasonal Neathproofed weapon; peer item also requires 3 x Amber Ha'penny
4200	Supracranial Skull	Hat Dangerous +6 Monstrous Anatomy +1	Peer MA items are either ambition-locked or cost 50000 x Curator's Gratitude (equivalent to 10000)
7500	Six-by-Two Carryall	Luggage Dangerous +6 Neathproofed +1 Increases Suspicion build up.?	Currently the only Dangerous luggage, and the only Suspicion-increasing one.

Opportunity Cards

Stuivers are a bit more convoluted than Echoes or Scrip in that each of the three opportunity decks presents some opportunities for obtaining Stuivers and so are worth going through occasionally for the dedicated player. As a rule of thumb Risen Burgundy is your best location for Stuivers, particularly if you happen to be A Knight of the Order of the Golden Carapace already, but by no means should you neglect the other two decks.

The Fifth City

The best use of actions in the London deck is grinding Favours for those factions which provide Bones tradable in #The Sous: Favours: Bohemian, Favours: Hell, and Favours: Criminals. See that section for further details. You may also wish to acquire Favours: Rubbery Men if you would like to build #Ivory Trilobite.

The other non-action based way to gain Stuivers is through the Discordant Law: specifically, you want to obtain Another Mouth and then attempt to trade kiss-handshakes with Rubbery Men when you're out of actions, thus obtaining 22 in Nodule of Warm Amber for zero actions and theoretically infinite StPA. Efficiency doesn't matter when we're dividing by zero! Note that the different Discordant Ripples cards look identical, so any individual card only has a 1/6 chance of rewarding any Stuivers at all. See The Hurlers (Guide) for more details.

Upper River

Note that you ideally want a few levels of Seeing Banditry in the Upper River to make Stuivers, as the majority will come from grinding #Bessemer Steel Ingot as described in that section.

If you happen to already be rich enough to be In the Company of a Hellworm, the worm gacha is a profitable enough echo grind that it is competitive with other options. Even with an unsaddled worm, using your Hellworm profits to make #Tiktaalik and selling on a non-Fish week will still net over 100 StPA, with the profit margins only increasing by selling on the proper weeks, having a Hellworm saddle, having an efficient Piracy (Guide) setup to make trips to Port Cecil (Guide) more profitable, etc.

Risen Burgundy

The easiest direct source is to play actions that raise Burgundian Beneficence, which can be traded in for a Glim-Encrusted Carapace after 10 actions, for 125 StPA. Fomenting unrest can be added as more action-efficient source at 145 StPA, but has fewer cards in the deck to advance it, as well as single Very Infrequent card to start the carousel.

To make card-drawing more efficient at the cost of some action-efficiency, raising Beneficence can be alternated with raising Against Time and Kings, which can be turned in for Rat Marketable items, and thence to Preserved Surface Blooms to trade for BSI (see #Bessemer Steel Ingot).

The Donjon of Lilies is also a notable card: it allows for a fairly efficient trade of Mourning Candle for Memory of a Much Stranger Self and Sighting of a Parabolan Landmark for Against Time and Kings, respectively. Notably, you can acquire Mourning Candle efficiently by purchasing a bulk order of Phosphorescent Scarab at the Rat-Market and upconverting them. You can also trade Mourning Candle for Echo items and a point of Burgundian Beneficence on the card Warrens of Worship, which is otherwise useless for grinding Stuivers.

There are further card-based grinds which pay out in a mix of Stuivers and Echoes which you may consider worthwhile; see Risen Burgundy (Guide) for more details.

Stuiver Grinds

Stuivers can be gained directly by selling items at the various Roof markets. Popular and reproducible items include Tempestuous Tales ( 10), Roof-Charts ( 50), Memories of a Much Stranger Self ( 250), Caustic Apocrypha, and Glim-Encrusted Carapaces.

The Stacks

Depending on the book sought, The Stacks provides:

• 9 x Caustic Apocryphon and 35 x Tantalising Possibility (Walk in, Index of Banned Works, 1899 Edition)
• 1 x Glim-Encrusted Carapace and 495 x Tantalising Possibility (Return with one of the carcasses, Annal of Lost Stars)
• 40 x Roof-Chart (Return with the lighthouse-keeper's ledgers and charts, Annal of Lost Stars)
• 1 x Glimpse of Anathema (Chained Octavo, only available at most once every ten runs)

along with any Tantalising Possibility you may have picked up on the way – in groups of 40 or 50. The other books do not pay out in enough Stuiver-sellable goods to be worth listing here.

The Stacks is an RNG-heavy activity, with some difficult stat/skill checks, so number of actions per cycle can vary considerably. Assuming 20 actions per run, Index gives 116 StPA, Annal's carcass option gives 112 StPA, and Annal's ledgers option gives 100 StPA.

The Midnight Trade

The Midnight Trade (Guide) provides 1 x Memory of Moonlight and 1 x Ascended Ambergris per carousel, resulting in 50 StPA.

Option	Reward
End your shift	1 x Memory of Moonlight 1 x Ascended Ambergris 2 x Crate of Incorruptible Biscuits 2 x Basket of Rubbery Pies 2 x Zee-Ztory 2 x Memory of Light	Total: 12 + 300
		EPA: 2	StPA: 50

Ecdysis

Ecdysis provides 1 x Memory of a Much Stranger Self and 7 x Tempestuous Tale per carousel, resulting in a maximum 32 StPA.

Option	Reward
Emerge as a freshly-made self	1 x Memory of a Much Stranger Self 1 x Direful Reflection 1 x Emetic Revelation 1 x Antique Mystery 7 x Tempestuous Tale -1 CP Wounds +1 CP Nightmares	Total: 37.5 + 320
		EPA: 3.8	StPA: 32

Lab Research

Three new experiments have been added to the Laboratory which can produce Stuiver-sellable items.

The table below assumes an average of 25 x Laboratory Research per action, as well as two actions for setting the experiment up/concluding it. The total value factors in the resources spent at the beginning of the experiment, so e.g. Make a study of a few samples from a Starved citadel nets 0 Stuivers, since the 5 Starved Expression used to begin the research can be sold for the same Stuiver value as the 5 Tempestuous Tale the experiment produces.

Items and Research Needed	Reward
Make a study of a few samples from a Starved citadel
5 x Starved Expression 550 x Laboratory Research	5 x Tempestuous Tale 2 x Emetic Revelation 15 x Extraordinary Implication	Total: 62.5 + 0
		EPA: 3.6	StPA: 0
Make a cartographical study of the ceiling
5 x Tempestuous Tale 550 x Laboratory Research	14 x Roof-Chart 11 x Extraordinary Implication	Total: 27.5 + 650
		EPA: 1.1	StPA: 27.1
Study the geochemical properties of Roof drippings
1 x Sample of Roof-Drip 100 x Laboratory Research	5 x Tempestuous Tale 4 x Extraordinary Implication	Total: 10 + 48
		EPA: 1.7	StPA: 8

Bessemer Steel Ingot

After reaching The Sous, BSI can be sold in The Mausoleum Stalls for 1 x Tempestuous Tale each, which can in turn be sold for 10 each. With efficient late-game sources of Preserved Surface Blooms and drawing cards in Upper River, Smuggle in industrial materials can provide 11.8 BSI/action, resulting in 118 StPA. See Bessemer Steel Ingot (Guide) for more details and other BSI-grinding options.

Bone Market

The only two Bone Market buyers who will pay in items saleable for Stuiver are A Zailor with Particular Interests and An Enthusiast of the Ancient World. The former pays out in Nodule of Warm Amber, which offers a poor rate of exchange to Stuivers, and so is not generally worth selling to for the purposes of Stuiver conversion. Thus we will mostly be focused on trading to An Enthusiast of the Ancient World.

Some facts about the Enthusiast:

• Sales to him require one point of Skeleton: Antiquity
• He pays at a rate of 1 Unprovenanced Artefact per point of Antiquity, with a bonus if our Bone Market Fluctuations: are on Antiquity. Therefore, these weeks are the most profitable to sell to him.
• Given that he is a linear buyer he cannot be locked out by Bone Market Exhaustion, but this also means you can't exploit his secondary payout for it, either.

An important thing to note is that because his secondary payout is linear, we want to prioritise large Skeleton Value in the bones we add, and we also want to finish our skeletons as quickly as possible, since every action we add a low-value bone reduces the efficiency of this buyer. If we must add a low-value bone, we should prioritise Antiquity to minimise this loss.

Lyon's Lollipop

The easiest method of selling to the Enthusiast is to Buy a Sabre-toothed Skull off him, pop it onto a Headless Skeleton, declare it a Human, and sell it right back to him. This is a simple and efficient way to convert Hinterland Scrip into Stuiver at any time, and gains even further efficiency when Zoological Mania: is Primates.

Bipes Biporus

• Segmented Ribcage
• Bright Brass Skull
• 2 x Femur of a Jurassic Beast
• Tomb-Lion's Tail
• Declare it a completed Reptile

Sell during a Reptile week. This skeleton is the most efficient conversion from Echoes to Stuivers, and can be made moreso using Ivory Femur instead of the Femur of a Jurassic Beast, although you may prefer to save your Ivory Femur for the more profitable Spider and Insect weeks.

While you can make a variation of this skeleton using Leviathan Frame instead, I would strongly recommend waiting for a Fish week instead, as the extra zoological mania bonus during Fish weeks gives much more value for such an expensive ribcage.

Beelzebufo

• Thorned Ribcage
• Bright Brass Skull
• 4 x Femur of a Jurassic Beast
• Decide your skeleton needs no tail
• Declare it a completed Amphibian

Sell during an Amphibian week. This skeleton is a bit less efficient than the Reptile one because it takes longer to put together, but Thorned Ribcages are much easier to acquire than Segmented Ribcages since the former can be exchanged through Favours: Hell with A Glabrous Nymph in Jericho Locks, whereas the latter requires a zee-trip to Port Cecil.

Brass Birds

• Skeleton with Seven Necks
• A mix of Bright Brass Skull and Sabre-toothed Skull
• Albatross Wing (preferred) or Wing of a Young Terror Bird, depending on if you still need Antiquity
• Declare it a completed Bird

Bird week is the most efficient time to convert between Skeleton Value and other currencies, given that we can attach as many Bright Brass Skull as we want to our skeletons. Depending on your playstyle and equipment you may want more or fewer Brass skulls, as each one raises the Shadowy challenge needed to sell the skeleton. My personal preference is five Brass and two Sabre-tooth, but you may prefer four or even three depending on how high your tolerance. Relatedly, this is an excellent time to use up your stockpile of Hastily Scrawled Warning Note.

If you can get at least four Unprovenanced Artefact from your sale, you can efficiently "recycle" them by visiting the Moonlit Woods (Guide) and choosing to Lay a trail and gather Observation: Grouse, which can be traded back for a Skeleton with Seven Necks and some Wing of a Young Terror Bird. Given that the terror-wings give two of the required four Skeleton: Antiquity when added to the ribcage, it's fairly easy to keep this loop going until you run out of wealth to convert to Stuivers.

For even more value, put together a Ribcage with a Bouquet of Eight Spines at Helicon House and use it instead of the Seven-Necker. In this case remember that ribcage doesn't already have legs and needs a tail, so you'll need to throw on Femur of a Jurassic Beast and Tomb-Lion's Tail.

Tiktaalik

• Segmented Ribcage
• Bright Brass Skull
• Amber-Crusted Fin (preferred) or Fin Bones, Collected
• Tomb-Lion's Tail
• Declare it a completed Fish

A fishy variant on Bipes biporus. Note that Fish weeks give a larger 15% bonus, so this one is more efficient than its reptile cousin.

A variant Tiktaalik using Leviathan Frame is also very efficient here, as its larger value means it is worth even more on Fish weeks.

Ivory Trilobite

• Flourishing Ribcage
• Bright Brass Skull
• Carved Ball of Stygian Ivory
• 3-5 Ivory Femur
• Remainder of the limbs get Femur of a Jurassic Beast
• Decide your skeleton needs no tail
• Declare it a completed Insect

As a rule of thumb, this skeleton is only really worth it if you have at least three Ivory Femur, but it is an excellent rate of exchange for them. The Flourishing Ribcage is easily available from An Invertebrate Factor at Jericho Locks.

Ungoliant

• Glim-Encrusted Carapace
• Carved Ball of Stygian Ivory
• 4-7 Ivory Femur
• Remainder of the limbs get Femur of a Jurassic Beast
• Declare it a completed Spider

Spider Week is the only time we cannot get any bonus from Bright Brass Skull. Like its insect cousin, it's only really worth making if we can fill at least half of its limbs with Ivory Femur, which is even more important in this case since we have no head.

Exhaustion

"I thought you said the buyer can't be exploited for exhaustion?", I hear you say. While it's true that his secondary payout cannot be, his primary payout absolutely can be cashed out as Stuivers using A Custom-Engraved Skull, if you have a stockpile of them from the Feast of the Exceptional Rose. This presents a small challenge, however, as neither our skull nor the Headless Skeleton provide any Antiquity, so we cannot simply use the lollipop method.

Instead, on any week where the Zoological Mania: is not Spiders or Apes, it's worth simply substituting A Custom-Engraved Skull in place of the Bright Brass Skull in whichever of the above recipes gets a bonus, as Exhaustion doesn't prevent us from selling to the Enthusiast anyway.

On a Spider week, since we can't sell skulls at a premium, Bipes biporus is our best option, since both it and Tiktaalik are tied for the fastest skeleton to assemble, but Bipes yields more Antiquity.

On an Apes week, our best option is to use the Human Ribcage, a few Fossilised Forelimbs or filler arms, and declare it an Ape. Alternatively with a dearth of Fossilised Forelimbs, you can use two Femur of a Jurassic Beast as well as two arms and declare it a Human. This is not efficient if you buy the forelimbs from Anning and Daughters, but can be an efficient way to use up Palaeontological Discovery or any Forelimbs you might have previously acquired through Professional Activities (Guide). You may also prefer to treat it like a Spider week and sell an Exhausting Bipes biporus instead.

The Sous

For players who dislike the Bone Market, or if the whims of the World Qualities simply don't align, there is an alternative in The Bones Above the Sous. Over the course of a set 12 actions, this pays out a base of 2 x Memory of a Much Stranger Self with a bonus based on the bones you give.

This can be a profitable way to dispose of bones you already have a stockpile of, and acquiring bones efficiently to give to the Sous can also be worth it. As an example, calling in Favours: Bohemian, Favours: Hell, and Favours: Criminals in Jericho and trading in the Ivory Humerus, Human Ribcage, and Thorned Ribcage respectively amortising the travel costs gives a value of 71 StPA plus an echo profit depending on how efficiently the Favours were acquired. The Criminals deserve a special note since their Favours are plentiful in the London deck and the Labyrinth always hungers for Human Ribcage.

Another option that is worth mentioning is visiting the Octagonal Tomb. The Night-Whisper can be profitably offloaded at the Rat Market on the proper weeks, Tale of Terror!! sold for Echoes, Final Breath traded for Scrip, and the Human Ribcages offloaded here at the catacombs for Stuivers, making this one option actually a fairly good grind for four of the game's currencies all at once. See Canal Cruising in Jericho Locks (Guide) for details.

The Catacombs or the Market?

Since there are no superlinear buyers whom we can exploit for Stuivers, the question of whether the Sous or the Bone Market is a more efficient use of bones is not as clear-cut as it might otherwise be. There's a few rules of thumb, however:

• The Sous gives a flat bonus of 500 over 12 actions for a base StPA of 41.67, whereas the Bone Market bonuses are variable based on the bones you put in. We can roughly estimate a sweet spot at values between 1000 and 2000 Skeleton Value, where giving bones to the Sous is both A. reasonably profitable and B. as good or better than the Bone Market. See below for a list.
• Bones which do not possess Antiquity but are reasonably valuable (e.g. Plated Skull) can be worth disposing of in the Sous if you don't have a good plan to redeem them in the Bone Market.
• Remember that with Bright Brass Skull, we are converting existing Echo wealth into Stuivers, and echoes can be acquired at an extremely efficient rate through methods like Railway Board meetings, Professional Payments, Trade Secrets, etc. This raises the overall StPA of the relevant skeletons substantially.
  • Similarly, Ivory Femur, our other primary Bone Market value driver, is extremely efficient when sold during Insect and Spider weeks because of their bigger bonus, and so is never worth giving to the Sous.

Assuming that we have acquired them efficiently, here's a list of the bones which are worth giving to the Sous, rather than being used as skeletons:

• Labyrinth's Hunger, Ribs: Human Ribcage & Thorned Ribcage
• Labyrinth's Hunger, Skulls: Skull in Coral, Horned Skull, & Pentagrammic Skull
• Labyrinth's Hunger, Arms: Ivory Humerus
• Labyrinth's Hunger, Legs: None.
• Labyrinth's Hunger, Appendages: Amber-Crusted Fin & Albatross Wing

Zenith

See The High Sancta (Guide). (146StPA; once per week carousel)