The Maze-Garden (Guide)

Mid Zailing Content

The Maze-Garden Summary

Locked Limited-Length Activity

Setup

1 A

Progress

15+ A

End

2 A

Progress Details

Build up Awakening..., gaining, IPSEITY or COMMUNION along the way.

Items Inputs/Outputs

Start-up

• Free
• Pair of Scarlet Stockings of Dubious Origin
• Pair of Magician's Gloves
• Prisoner's Mask
• Shabby Opera Cloak

Boosting

• Ostentatious Paisley Suit

Outputs

• Silk Scrap
• Surface-Silk Scrap
• Whisper-Satin Scrap
• Correspondence Plaque
• Thirsty Bombazine Scrap
• Glass Gazette

Raw EPA

4.36

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

What needs work: Missing info on fate locked Ostentatious Paisley Suit

The The Maze-Garden is a carousel in the Polythreme Docks. Each time you pass through the Maze-Garden, you bring with you a piece of clothing and "usher your garment towards independence". At the end of your journey, your item of clothing will wander off to a life in Polythreme, and you will be rewarded by a clay man bearing various gifts. The more alive your sartorial pupil is by the time you leave the garden, the better the rewards offered to you!

Getting there

The Maze-Garden is located in Polythreme and require services of a ship. There are two ways to reach Polythreme:

1. The first is to buy a ticket on the tramp steamer at Wolfstack Docks using 150 Map Scraps (typically earned from the Rat Market). Then build your Approaching Journey's End quality to 10, using the various cards and storylets aboard the Tramp Steamer. Once it is at 10, the There at last! storylet will open up. Selecting Polythreme there will place you in the Polythreme Docks, from where you can unlock and access The Maze-Garden.
2. The second method requires a ship of your own (check the PoSI Item Crafting guide to see how to get one) and an assembled Screaming Map. See the Zailing (Guide) for an introduction to how you zail and plan a trip to Polythreme in the Sea of Voices.

When it's time to leave the island the following options are present:

• Board the Tramp Steamer for 80 Surface-Silk Scraps (8.00 Echoes). These can be gained in the carousel.
• Journey home on your own ship

The challenges in The Maze-Garden are variable and thus fit for many levels. Due to the slight difficulty in reaching Polythreme, this guide will assume you have around PoSI- levels or higher.

Useful items and their challenge level

During your stay you may need some specific items of clothing. As there is no access to the Bazaar in Polythreme, you will have to bring these garments with you. One item of clothing is needed each time you enter the Maze-Garden, and you will lose whatever item of clothing you select. The easiest and most difficult items of clothing to choose are always available at the Maze's front gates, which is to say selecting them does not require an item from your inventory. However, if you want a specific challenge level (that is Polythremean Disposition:) in-between those two extremes, you must bring the item corresponding to that level. The challenge level is given to all main attribute checks ( Shadowy etc.) and also affects the reward. Higher challenge levels have harder checks, but greater rewards.

Some pieces of clothing are chiral. This means that the left version or the right version will be easier than the other, which means your Polythremean Disposition: may increase or decrease by up to 30, depending on your choice.

It seems as though the rewards for a trip through the Maze-Garden do not increase beyond 100 Polythremean Disposition: or 120 Polythremean Disposition: (shown in-game as "Spirited"). This suggests that repeatedly choosing a Prisoner's Mask is the easiest way to get the maximum reward, if you can do so reliably.

Progress Qualities

There are several important qualities within the Maze-Garden.

• Polythremean Disposition: adjusts the difficulty of the carousel, sometimes together with Temperamental Chirality.
• Perambulating... measures how close you are to the end of the carousel. When you hit 11, you reach the end of the Maze-Garden.
• Awakening... measures how alive your article of clothing has become. This is proportional to the rewards you will receive.
• IPSEITY and COMMUNION are qualities used for several checks inside the Maze-Garden. Some rewards require one of them at level 7.

Progress Through The Maze

Once you reach Perambulating... 5, The Silent Gate autofires which costs an action and raises Perambulating... to 6. Then when you reach Perambulating... 9, The Heart of the Labyrinth autofires which costs an action and raises Perambulating... to 10. Then when you reach Perambulating... 11, The Watchful Gate autofires which costs an action and takes you to An Offering (The Maze-Garden) where you can choose your rewards and exit the maze. This costs one more action and resets your Maze-Garden qualities. However, any unplayed cards will remain when you start your next trip through the maze.

The Cards

Note that every card option will increase Perambulating... by +4, unless it's otherwise mentioned in the table below:

Rewards

The exact conversion rate of Awakening... to items is based on Polythremean Disposition:. This table gives the values with a prisoner's mask and cravat (disposition 120-200). With disposition 60 you gain approximately 2/3 of this number. For other dispositions, see the individual action pages.

Reward table

Action	Requirement/Cost	Reward	Max value per Awakening...
Take some silk scraps	1  / 1 CP	50 x Silk Scrap	0.5
Take some surface-silk	3  / 6 CP	60 x Surface-Silk Scrap	1.0
Take some whisper-satin	5  / 15 CP	30 x Whisper-Satin Scrap	1.0
Take some Correspondence plaques	7  / 28 CP	56 x Correspondence Plaque	1.0
Take some Thirsty Bombazine	11  / 66 CP 7 COM	26 x Thirsty Bombazine Scrap	0.98
Take some Glass Gazettes	11  / 66 CP 7 IPS	26 x Glass Gazette	0.98

Optimally cashing out

Awakening... can be cashed out at a maximum rate of 1 per CP. To achieve maximum EPA:

• You want to avoid choosing the 50 x Silk Scrap trade, as this loses 0.5 each trade.
• You also want to avoid the 26 x Thirsty Bombazine Scrap and 26 x Glass Gazette trades, as these lose 1 each trade.

So, for maximum EPA you want to cash out only in Correspondence Plaques, Whisper-Satin Scraps, and Surface-Silk Scraps. How best to do this depends on the total CP of Awakening... you have at the end of the maze. To find how many CP you have, on the action where you reach Perambulating... 12, before you click Onwards check your level of Awakening... and the number of CP you have towards the next level. Your total CP is:

$\mathrm {CP} _{\text{tot}}={\frac {\mathrm {Level} \cdot (\mathrm {Level} +1)}{2}}+\mathrm {CP} _{\text{to next}}.$

For example, if you have 12 Awakening... and 11 CP towards level 13, then your total CP is ${\frac {12\cdot 13}{2}}+11=89$.

The table below shows trade options for which achieve max value 66-99 CP of Awakening.... These have been chosen to maximize the number of Correspondence Plaques obtained, but at many levels there are other possibilities if one desires more Rag Trade items. There is also a dynamic programming solver for this is available here. (Note that below 66 CP, it may not be possible to cash out at max value, since 65 is the Frobenius number of 28, 15, and 6.)

Zero-loss Trade Pattern (High to Low)

Awakening...	Correspondence Plaque	Whisper-Satin Scrap	Surface-Silk Scrap
66	0	4	1
67	1	1	4
68	2	0	2
69	0	3	4
70	1	2	2
71	2	1	0
72	0	4	2
73	1	3	0
74	2	0	3
75	0	5	0
76	1	2	3
77	2	1	1
78	0	4	3
79	1	3	1
80	2	0	4
81	0	5	1
82	1	2	4
83	2	1	2
84	3	0	0
85	1	3	2
86	2	2	0
87	0	5	2
88	1	4	0
89	2	1	3
90	3	0	1
91	1	3	3
92	2	2	1
93	0	5	3
94	1	4	1
95	2	1	4
96	3	0	2
97	1	3	4
98	2	2	2
99	3	1	0

For example, if your Awakening... was 89 CP, you would do 2 Correspondence Plaque trades, then 1 Whisper-Satin Scrap trade, then 3 Surface-Silk Scrap trades for a total value of 89 .

Strategy & EPA

Treating each CP of Awakening... as worth 1 , each action spent gaining 6 Awakening... is a 6 EPA action. However, it also takes an action to start the maze, 3 actions to pass through gates, and an action to end the maze. In a typical cycle where you gain 4 CP Perambulating... per card, you have 13 actions spent playing cards, and the whole maze takes a total of 18 actions. If you get 6 CP Awakening... per action, you end up around 4.36 EPA, although this may be lower if you choose an item that gives a lower Polythremean Disposition:.

Two cards are worth remarking on: TRAVERSE and DISCERN. TRAVERSE you should usually not play, since its best option gives only 4 CP Awakening..., and keeping it in your hand stops you from drawing it again. DISCERN is more exciting, since the option Select a head from the pile gives a full 7 CP Awakening... but only 2 CP Perambulating.... If you play this card twice in a cycle, you will increase the number of actions spent playing cards by 1, giving you an opportunity to play another 6 or 7 EPA card, bringing up the overall EPA of the cycle. Contrary to what the in-game instructions say, this is almost always the most efficient use of your time in the Labyrinth, and you should (usually) play this option whenever it is offered. (If you are going for IPSEITY, it might sometimes be better to Leave the pile of heads to its own devices, hoping to fail the check in order to get +4 CP IPSEITY and have a better shot at the checks on DUEL, HARVEST, and TRANSFIGURE.) Additionally, if you have low Shadowy or Dangerous, playing Select a head makes failing Fight on behalf of your (garment), Walk softly, or Carry your (garment) across less punishing, since the extra action playing a good card can recoup your losses (but it is never worthwhile to intentionally fail these cards just to get the extra action).

If you could manage to only draw and play DISCERN, each cycle would net 175.50 in 30 actions, for an EPA of 5.85. More realistically, in a cycle where you play DISCERN twice and otherwise average 6.5 CP Awakening... per action, you would end up around 4.84 EPA.

Of course, you will spend some actions zailing to the Maze-Garden and back as well. Assuming no profit from zailing, it takes roughly 18 actions to zail back and forth to Polythreme. This means you may multiply your EPA from the garden with (x/x+1), where x is the amount of cycles done in the garden, in order to find your actual EPA for the whole venture. With one cycle, this gives only 50% of the above EPA, but e.g. with 9 cycles it raises to 90% of the above EPA.

IPSEITY and COMMUNION

It is best to focus on raising either IPSEITY or COMMUNION (based on which rewards you want), as it's hard to get both qualities to 7. You will need 6 in either of these two qualities to get 100% on their respective checks. If you're more interested in rewards unrelated to these two qualities, it's worth noting that both qualities have 3 challenges each, but the COMMUNION check in DISCERN is beneficial to fail, and the COMMUNION check in SCAVENGE can be avoided by choosing the Shadowy check instead. The IPSEITY checks are typically on cards that have no better options, which makes favouring IPSEITY the generally advisable strategy (unless you specifically want the Thirsty Bombazine Scraps that unlock with 7 or more COMMUNION). Note that this strategy applies only to the actions to make progress in the maze — if you're not interested in a specific reward, you should still pick non- IPSEITY reward options at the end for best EPA, since Glass Gazettes are more difficult to cash out and slightly less profitable.

It is suggested to avoid playing TRAVERSE, because it gives low rewards. In addition, you might want to avoid TRANSFIGURE with Awakening... less than 5. If keeping high IPSEITY/low COMMUNION you might want to avoid PARTAKE with Awakening... 6+.

If going for IPSEITY:

ADORN, DUEL, HARVEST, and SCAVENGE all have branches with +7 cp of Awakening.... Failing the COMMUNION check on DISCERN (90% if you have none) gives +6 cp. Playing TRANSFIGURE with at least Awakening... 5 gets you +6, while PARTAKE with at most 5 gives you +7. If you can pass all checks at ~90% this always gives you six cards you can play with an average of upwards of +6 cp Awakening....

If going for COMMUNION:

ADORN, HARVEST, PARTAKE, SCAVENGE, and DUEL with Awakening... at most 6 all get you +7 cp Awakening.... The first branch of DISCERN gives +6 cp, but if played multiple times will extend your visit, which isn't ideal if your primary goal is Thirsty Bombazine Scraps. Later in your visit you may get stuck playing one of DUEL, TRANSFIGURE, or TRAVERSE for lower gains. Of these TRAVERSE probably gives the best average gain unless you picked up some IPSEITY as well to pass the checks on the other two at least somewhat reliably.

Walking the Maze-Garden Multiple Times

Because the cards you have are preserved for your next time through the Maze-Garden, you can influence the cards you start subsequent Maze-Garden trip with. It might be worth not playing ADORN, HARVEST and PARTAKE cards you get in the late-stage, so you can use them in the early stages of your next Maze-Garden adventure in order to increase your garment's attributes quickly. If going for a mix of Thirsty Bombazine Scraps and other things, make sure to always use TRANSFIGURE when raising IPSEITY, so that it doesn't clog your hand if you start COMMUNION next.