Final Fantasy Randomizer Feature: Random Treasure

Awesome Games Done Quick is about to start tomorrow, but just after that there’s a plans to hold a single day Final Fantasy Randomizer tournament featuring randomized treasures with “Impoverished” wealth, clamped bosses, and no Black Belts! That’s pretty hard core!

Well, it’s actually less hard core than one would think, because random treasure currently works a bit differently than one might expect.

What you might think

With “Random Wealth” settings going from “High” to “Normal”, “Low”, “Impoverished”, and finally “Melmond”, one might expect “High” wealth seeds to have tons of powerful weapons and armor, and lots and lots of money in chests.

Likewise, an “Impoverished” seed would have mostly common weapons, and, when one does find gold, it’s a few dozen pieces.

That’s not entirely correct though.

In fact, while it’s rather unlikely, an “Impoverished” seed can have multiple Masamune swords, and every chest that holds gold could be holding thousands of pieces of it.

To understand why, let me pull back the curtain and explain how random treasure actually works.

Bits go in, sausagetreasure comes out

Random treasure works by dividing all the treasure in Final Fantasy into tiers: Unique, Legendary, Rare, Common, Consumable, and Gold. Unique includes only one weapon, the Masamune itself. Legendary, Rare, and Common are further divided into weapons, and armor, with things like the Vorpal and Xcalber in Legendary, and Ice and Flame swords in rare, and Silver Swords in common.

All of the items in each tier can be found here in the source code, if you’d like to look.

For each “wealth” there are a number of buckets created to match all the tiers that looks like this:

Type	Unique	Legendary Weapons	Legendary Armor	Rare Weapons	Rare Armor	Common Weapons	Common Armor	Consumables	Gold
High	1	6	18	20	20	8	15	20	90
Normal	1	4	12	17	16	13	23	36	112
Low	1	3	10	14	13	17	28	36	112
Impoverished	1	3	9	12	12	19	30	36	112
Melmond	0	2	8	12	12	25	35	36	100

This means that, for “High” wealth, we’ll create 1 bucket that’s for all unique weapons, 6 for legendary, etc…

The big thing to take note of is that, under “Melmond”, there aren’t any “Unique” buckets, which means you cannot find the Masamune in the game, unless it was added as an incentive item.

When the randomizer goes to fill one of the 200+ treasure chests, it picks a random bucket, and then a random item in that bucket.

Yes, random, that means that the game could, even on “Impoverished” wealth, contain multiple Masamunes, Ribbons for everyone, and a few Opal Bracelets for your mages.

Likewise, a “High” wealth seed might just be full of Ice Swords and chests containing 10G.

Now, both of those are a bit less likely, given the number of buckets, but the key take away is that the “Random wealth” setting doesn’t force more high quality items when set to high, just like it doesn’t force only low quality items when set to “Low” or even “Melmond”.

A bit of salt

This is the way the code works as of today, but it isn’t ideal, and it is likely that it will change in the (potentially near) future.

In the end, I wrote this for the participants of the tournament (and other players), so that they’ll have a better understanding for what the flags mean, and will be able to make informed decisions for how to best play.