This inquiry is specifically directed to any bulk consumers, distributors, and producers of rotten flesh. My market operations have recently uncovered an unusual trend with the pricing of certain mob drops, most of them particularly specific to the price of rotten flesh. I am hoping to use this information to conclude if these trends point to a previously unknown (to me) fabrication technique, or if they are simply symptomatic of a high supply-low demand system. Background: Rotten flesh is a drop produced from the deaths of zombies, pig zombies, and is also occasionally found within certain types of dungeon chest. Because it is a mob drop, it is renewable, and highly grindable. Combined with the fact that it has almost no common uses, it is reasonable to expect that the value would be fairly low, even considering the time cost of transportation and logistic management. Through a bunch of rather unnecessary and complicated math, the adjusted market value falls to about... 1.4 r/unit. This is completely ridiculous. It is almost impossible to find a deal for more than 1r/u, even in shops whose prices have been forcibly marked up. So, my question to y'all prospective marketeers, what is going on with this. Analysis: Azoundria's price management database, found Here, lists rotten flesh as being worth about .182r/u on the open market. Accommodating for the fact that some people sometimes have well over 8 DC's of the stuff for sale at one time at various prices, a more accurate value of direct market liquidity comes out to about .23r/u. This adjustment is important, as some people sell far more of an item for a price than other people, thus changing the amount of that material available for a certain price, which is not reflected in Azoundria's database. Now, lets put this number in Minecraft friendly terms. This means that I can get rotten flesh (About 25 DC's, if all of the polled shops fully restocked since I bought them out) for 14.72 r/stack, which is 21% of what a predicted price would be. 25 DC's of flesh is equal to 89600 units of flesh, which is an absolutely rediculous amount of rotten flesh. With a standard one-spawner grinder and a Looting III (unbreakable, we assume) sword, it would take almost three days for someone to grind this much rotten flesh. Even making the flying assumption that said person(s) had a double or even a (nearly impossible) triple spawner, it is unlikely that enough players would spend the time needed to grind and haul back this much flesh, and this is only one day's worth of purchases. Another option lies in gold farming using nether portals, which is a suprisingly practical way of grinding both gold and rotten flesh... if you feel like investing several thousand obsidian into it. On normal difficulty, the spawning chance per unit portal block of a pigman is one/four hours. Assuming a practical max portal size of 20x20 blocks, each portal grid spawns .027 pigman/p (pps). With a nice sized grinder of 54 grids (the size of the grinder I use for test sequences) and an average server TPS of 19.5, a yield of 1.4 pps is produced. With looting, this is 4.2 flesh per second. Oddly, this comes out to about 20DC/day, which is fairly close to the market test amount, but it would require nonstop rendering to produce this, making it little better than a regular zombie grinder. The size of grinder that would produce this much flesh at a practical rate runs into another issue, if you have this many pigmen, you don't sell rotten flesh, you sell god apples. (At a rate of about 55/hour, if you want to multiply the grid size six times). Using a skyblock-style grinder in a 100% controlled area also doesn't produce enough, grinding using only Minecraft's latent spawn rates is so slow that I did not even bother doing the math for it. It doesn't come close. This is in addition to the fact that making a controlled area that big is a pain in the butt. Wow this is a lot of reading. Inquiry: Obviously, my math is pointing out a problem here. So, in this incredibly verbose post, I am asking any and all individuals who work in the trade of rotten flesh to throw me a (metaphorical) bone here. Where on earth do you source your rotten flesh. Is it fabricated, purchased and re-sold, croud-sourced? What is going on here, and how has the value been driven so far below what it should be. -Digitalis
I see a fair few point in this post. Flesh is low but it could still be even lower if the big producers bothered bringing the drops back to town. You have good assumptions. But unfortunately you haven't come close to the really big gold farms out there. Being overworld or nether ones. As an example. My biggest gold farm is close to 685 Max portals. About 10 times the basic calculation you have in your example. But taking in fact that flesh has no value to me for some odd reason I have a storage for 77DCs of flesh in a trading area at my gold farm to convert it to emeralds. A task that I can't be bothered doing anymore. All the overflows just dispenses into the lava. Maybe I would consider selling flesh if I get bored or outpost update comes out. but to be honest at a retail price of 20-32r per stacks it is not attractive enough for me to bring back flesh when I can bring back Iron blocks, Sea Lanterns, Prismarine Blocks that have a greater value of which I know cant even be bothered bringing back. I have accumulated so many of those item I just store them for the day we finally get teleport features to our private outposts. To make an better understanding of the value of flesh. Here is a comparison. An emerald has a value of 30-36r per unit some shops are higher but we will take the low end of the price market as an example. You can get 1 emerald for every 36-40 unit of flesh. To make it easier we will that the higher end of this part. Calculations: 1 Emerald = 30 rupees 40 Flesh = 1 Emerald 64 flesh = 20 rupees 1 DC of Flesh = 54 stacks = 3456 units of Flesh = 1080 rupees DC of Flesh/40 Flesh = 86.4 Emeralds 86 Emerald x 30 rupees = 2580 rupees In short 1 DC of flesh equals 2580 rupees for only an investment of 1080 rupees. Now that I think about it I should start trading again. But sadly I'm too lazy for that. Long story short trade flesh for emerald for big rupees.
I think that most people spend at least 5 minutes and as much as 45 minutes to get to their gold farms. This would put most people away from their farm for 15 minutes out of the hour for a profit of at max 1300 per run? Some gold farms take a little time to setup or like mine, require manual killing (which would mean I'm not getting the kills while loading). It might still be worth it for some, but it would have to be a shop with some massive arrays of buy chests that could be loaded quickly and reliably without waiting. I've had a very hard time finding a good place to sell emeralds lately with room. It seems the price is under 30r now unless I'm missing something. I think Skare's math holds up though on the total, as the redstone/lapis/glowstone mixers you'd use to keep trades open are worth slightly more.
I'm sorry, in all the post I missed this question The demand for flesh is very low. It's raw transportation costs don't increase it's demand and as such it's true market value.
How long does it take to convert 1 DC of rotten flesh into 86 emeralds? I think bulk-sale for emeralds is at 24-27r per emerald now. This is also bringing the price of diamonds down. It is interesting how things would change if teleport to a farm and back would be possible. I guess transport of 1 DC including loading and unloading / sorting would take 15-30 seconds, so for 10 DCs it's less than 5 min. If one uses trains of 20 carts (10 DCS) now, only the loading and unloading lasts around 7 min. So even for short travel time like 5 min, TP-ing 1 and 1/6 DC at a time is 3x faster. Transport costs per DC: now around 300 r (5 min trip), with TP around 80r (regardless of distance)
The question I have is, what would you do with 10 DCs of flesh in town if you got them there? You've got all 8/8 DCs full at your shop already.
Because I have like 16 DCs more in the storage and I check and fill them up frequently. People mostly buy several DCs at once. ... Sold 26 DCs of RF since start of March - so, sell them on auction or see if there is a shop which would bulk-sell it for you.
Wow, I did not expect such a fast reply. First off, that is a singularly ridiculous gold farm ScareCboi. I don't know how well your client would handle that, but I am fairly sure mine would curl up in a ball and die in a corner if I made it handle that many mobs. Second off, if what you all say is true about the fact that rotten flesh is produced in such large quantities, the pricing begins to make a lot more sense. Even without a massive transportation infrastructure, the fabrication speed you would achieve would knock the price down to almost nothing simply because nobody can convert that into other materials fast enough to make large scale profit possible under most circumstances. And yes, M4ster, I know you sold that much, because I was probably the one that bought all of it. As for the villager trade buffering, base emerald value can be upped a lot, but not as much as it used to be. Emeralds that would sell for 35r or more go for about 25r now, glowstone has dropped from 20-25r to 15-20r (about 60r/emerald), and redstone is still a pretty bad trade. That being said, the increasing price of lapis might actually become fairly decent soon, as I have seen places buying it for around 13-15r, which is significantly higher than it used to be. Have any of you considered bringing villagers out to your farm and just converting the rotten flesh into other materials right there? That gets around the transportation issue, and you are just going to do that anyway, or sell it to someone (like me) who does. If you hand kill the mobs with looting, you will get a pretty big drop in gold production, but a farm the size of ScareCboi's would basically mean a nonstop trade cycle, in addition to more xp than you can shake a pick at.
I know some people do that, but I guess it is quite a boring and lonely job, far out at the farm surrounded by piles of rotten flesh and few villagers that only say "hah".
since the villager update most people probably dont want to waste time growing baby villagers up in the wild where egging costs money idk just a thought
These are great posts. Very thoughtful. I agree that rotten flesh is under valued. Meaning a player can turn a profit by purchasing and converting. But because farm goods out perform rotten flesh as an emerald generator it leaves the flesh as a niche product. I do have villagers at my gold farm to produce glowstone. Glowstone is time consuming to farm so it's convenient to manufacture it while waiting for pigmen to collect. Regarding transport times...I agree with the analysis above. Just doesn't seem worth the time unless the player has no better means of income. Another option is to hire laborers to convert the flesh to emeralds. Maybe players will be willing to do this once teleportation and frontier protection come online. Auction sales are still viable, of course. That's just a special market.
I think one point missed in the OP is one other option to gathering rottenflesh- more of an automated skyblock farm as the OP stated. Link here for one that (dont quote me on this, I learned of this farm's drop rate months ago and not sure if Aikar as ruined anything since) produces about 25k drops/hr on EMC (In the right area with no other spawn spaces but in farm). Flesh is also easy with an option like this- Of course dont quote me on the current rates, I have heard even 1.9 will ruin some rates, but there are always new designs out there. Many players have massive farms like this that allow other drops as well as RF. But, I think many people have stated already that Flesh just isnt worth transporting to town- It would be easier to set up an infinite villager breeder and get your desired trades. Even other mob drops have gone up in price (so it seems from observations). People have thousands of DC out at their farms, the issue with drops of anykind including RF is the transportation time. I do not think people care about the cost of transport, rather the time it takes. Even loading up Minecarts takes a long time. Even with unloading machines, you have to somewhat keep an eye on the cart which takes more time out. So to sum it all up- People dont like transporting things. The money you get isnt worth the travel in many cases. Dont know if any of this makes sense to anyone, I tend not to make sense .
We have 5 at ours, all take the minimum of 36 flesh and are marked for what they give the max value on. I haven't gone through and made a perfect one yet that gets max value on all 3, but I have a few that give max on 2. Yes, it is non-stop trading if you have the stomach for it. The XP is a nice bonus, but mine is a manual killing farm so the xp from the farm itself outperforms it by far. Honestly if a very trustworthy individual wanted to get super rich, I'm sure they could find some gold farmers that would let them come and trade their zombie flesh away for days in exchange for a tiny cut of profits or just keep farm loaded. It really does sadden me seeing it all go to waste, just not enough for me to sit there and trade it This also makes witch farms obsolete (in 1.8) in my opinion. Redstone and glowstone come much faster from gold farms, sticks are cheap and you can trade the unlimited amount of sugar cane out there for glass to make empty bottles if you want to avoid mining or buying.
Lets follow this experiment and see where it leads: 10 DCs on auction Even with the future outpost tps, if your TP location is not right at the gold farm (most gold farm don't make for a welcoming center of town), you'll have some running around to do. Then if you plan to transport 10 DCs at a time, you'll need chests that you can reach without waiting for hoppers to drain. Those are not hard to resolve, just added annoyances. If future outposts add vault usage at the gold farm itself, then transportation time would really be minor for those diamond supporters.
I think their are 3 primary factors in why the price of rotten flesh is so low. 1. The supply is high due too it being a secondary byproduct of a lot of common activities/farms. Gold farms: rotten flesh is produced in massive quantities as secondary byproduct of gold farming. Gold nuggets and rotten flesh drop at almost the same rate (rotten flesh is slightly higher but this is evened out by the occasional drop of a gold bar) which means for every 2 stack of gold bars I make I in turn produce a single chest worth of rotten flesh (Hell I've made almost an sc of rotten flesh in the time it took to type this post) and I don't use rotten flesh for anything so I in turn sell it. Even the most basic and quickly built mob farm can produce reasonable quantities of rotten flesh in a short amount of time. Zombies are one of the most common mobs to encounter while adventuring. 2. Public Gold Farms have become more common over the past year with most smps having at least one among their player run utilities (see the above for how this effects rotten flesh supply). 3. Rotten flesh has only 3 uses none of them ideal: Food: It has an 80% chance to cause food poisoning so nobody eats it unless they absolutely have to. Breeding: It can be used to breed wolves but even if you are breeding for a shop you won't be using that much rotten flesh per day Trading: It can be used to unlock 2nd tier Priest trades (but only a small quantity is required for this purpose) and it's one of the slower methods to farm emeralds; I used to trade rotten flesh until I realized that not only does it have lower returns per item (flesh vs. paper/pumpkins/melons) but the amount of time eats up in comparison made it a better idea to just /dispose of it. Short version: High supply + low demand = ridiculously low price
