Quantitative hypothesis for how the result is calculated:
“Magical charge”: number of ingredients that are in the specific list in the parent comment. I’m copying the “magically charged” terminology from Lorxus.
“Eligible” for a potion: Having the specific pair of ingredients for the potion listed in the grandparent comment, or at the top of Lorxus’ comment.
Get Inert Glop or Magical Explosion with probability depending on the magical charge.
0-1 → 100% chance of Inert Glop
2 → 50% chance of Inert Glop
3 → neither, skip to next step
4 → 50% chance of Magical Explosion
5+ → 100% chance of Magical Explosion
If didn’t get either of those, get Mutagenic Ooze at 1⁄2 chance if eligible for two potions or 2⁄3 chance if eligible for 3 potions. (presumably would be n/(n+1) chance for higher n).
If didn’t get that either, randomly get one of the potions the ingredients are eligible for, if any.
If not eligible for any potions, get Acidic Slurry.
todo (will fill in below when I get results): figure out what’s up with ingredient selection.
edit after aphyer already posted the solution:
I didn’t write up what I had found before aphyer posted the result, but I did notice the following:
hard 3-8 range in total ingredients
pairs of ingredients within selections being biased towards pairs that make potions
ingredient selections with 3 magical ingredients being much more common than ones with 2 or 4, and in turn more common than ones with 0-1 or 5+
and, this is robust when restricting to particular ingredients regardless of whether they are magical or not, though obviously with some bias as to how common 2 and 4 are
the order of commonness of ingredients holding actual magicalness constant is relatively similar restricted to 2 and 4 magic ingredient selections, though obviously whether is actually magical is a big influence here
I checked the distributions of total times a selection was chosen for different possible selections of ingredients, specifically for: each combination of total number of nonmagical ingredients and 0, 1 or 2 magical ingredients
I didn’t get around to 3 and more magical ingredients, because I noticed that while for 0 and 1 magical ingredients the distributions looked Poisson-like (i.e. as would be expected if it were random, though in fact it wasn’t entirely random), it definitely wasn’t Poisson for the 2 ingredient case, and got sidetracked by trying to decompose into a Poisson distribution + extra distribution (and eventually by other “real life” stuff)
I did notice that this looked possibly like a randomish “explore” distribution which presumably worked the same as for the 0 and 1 ingredient case along with a non-random, or subset-restricted “exploit” distribution, though I didn’t really verify this
Post-solution extra details:
Quantitative hypothesis for how the result is calculated:
“Magical charge”: number of ingredients that are in the specific list in the parent comment. I’m copying the “magically charged” terminology from Lorxus.
“Eligible” for a potion: Having the specific pair of ingredients for the potion listed in the grandparent comment, or at the top of Lorxus’ comment.
Get Inert Glop or Magical Explosion with probability depending on the magical charge.
0-1 → 100% chance of Inert Glop
2 → 50% chance of Inert Glop
3 → neither, skip to next step
4 → 50% chance of Magical Explosion
5+ → 100% chance of Magical Explosion
If didn’t get either of those, get Mutagenic Ooze at 1⁄2 chance if eligible for two potions or 2⁄3 chance if eligible for 3 potions. (presumably would be n/(n+1) chance for higher n).
If didn’t get that either, randomly get one of the potions the ingredients are eligible for, if any.
If not eligible for any potions, get Acidic Slurry.
todo (will fill in below when I get results): figure out what’s up with ingredient selection.
edit after aphyer already posted the solution:
I didn’t write up what I had found before aphyer posted the result, but I did notice the following:
hard 3-8 range in total ingredients
pairs of ingredients within selections being biased towards pairs that make potions
ingredient selections with 3 magical ingredients being much more common than ones with 2 or 4, and in turn more common than ones with 0-1 or 5+
and, this is robust when restricting to particular ingredients regardless of whether they are magical or not, though obviously with some bias as to how common 2 and 4 are
the order of commonness of ingredients holding actual magicalness constant is relatively similar restricted to 2 and 4 magic ingredient selections, though obviously whether is actually magical is a big influence here
I checked the distributions of total times a selection was chosen for different possible selections of ingredients, specifically for: each combination of total number of nonmagical ingredients and 0, 1 or 2 magical ingredients
I didn’t get around to 3 and more magical ingredients, because I noticed that while for 0 and 1 magical ingredients the distributions looked Poisson-like (i.e. as would be expected if it were random, though in fact it wasn’t entirely random), it definitely wasn’t Poisson for the 2 ingredient case, and got sidetracked by trying to decompose into a Poisson distribution + extra distribution (and eventually by other “real life” stuff)
I did notice that this looked possibly like a randomish “explore” distribution which presumably worked the same as for the 0 and 1 ingredient case along with a non-random, or subset-restricted “exploit” distribution, though I didn’t really verify this