TakerSpace: Overview

2024-12-24 // IOTM Overview

November's Peace Turkey was all about keeping up tradition. The December IOTM, the TakerSpace, is a similarly traditional achievement. The important tradition TPTB are celebrating this month is the traditional reminder TPTB get near the end of the year that the last workshed in standard is about to rotate out. They then will, as is tradition, add the new workshed in the last two months to overlap with the existing workshed instead of saving it for January, forcing them to make a new workshed 24 months later as opposed to 35 months later. Let's uncork our celebratory bottle of 3638 B.C. Chateau Filth Hermitage and examine this year's traditional workshed, the TakerSpace.

General Summary

The TakerSpace is a workshed that allows you to combine a bunch of pirate-themed goodies. Every day, your workshed is supplied with 3 each of "stolen spices", "robbed rums", "absconded-with anchors", and "misappropriated mainmasts". You also get 1 "snatched silk" and 1 "gaffled gold". None of these are actual in-game items -- they're (essentially) just currency that you can spend in your TakerSpace. (You can save these; the TakerSpace will just continue accumulating these goodies and allow you to spend them whenever you feel like it. Nice for aftercore!)

With so much currency and so many different combinations, you can make a LOT of items in your TakerSpace. To wit, here are the possible craftables from your TakerSpace, along with the item's cost in materials. I have (very roughly) ordered them according to speedrun value. We'll discuss them in the next section!

One last note -- this Crimbo, there was a weird, random interaction between TakerSpace and Crimbo's Veteran's Day Island, where using a key on the NC got you one of the spice/rum/anchor/masts. It is entirely possible that there are more of these that speedrunners will only discover next year, when the model train set isn't on for all of your combats in a run. If that happens, I'll try to add that here!

A quick aside to discuss the concept of Worksheds

The TakerSpace, as a workshed, is a tiny bit out of the ordinary. From a speedrunning perspective, all IOTM worksheds either do something as you keep adventuring with the given workshed or require resources you gain as you adventure throughout your run. To use the prior 6 IOTM worksheds as examples:

• The model train set does something every single combat you start, in a repeating pattern of eights.
• The cold medicine cabinet gives you an item (essentially) every 20 turns, dependent on the mix of combat environments in your previous 20 combats.
• The diabolic pizza cube's pizzas require input items that you gain as you adventure, allowing you to make better pizzas as you route new items into your pizza setup.
• The Asdon Martin gives you a banish every 30 turns, and requires food drops from your combats both for buffs and to power up the banish (and a 1/day freekill yellow ray that doesn't give Everything Looks Yellow).
• The Mayo Clinic doesn't really -change- throughout the day, it just requires large quantities of meat as an input to benefit from its abilities, meaning you generally can't do everything you want from it on turn 1.
• The DNA Splicing Lab requires that you use its associated 3/day combat items, the DNA Extraction Syringe, on 3 separate monsters for single-use potions and one all-day intrinsic that are dependent on the phyla you spliced. (So, this one only really takes 3 turns of use if you can summon up the right phyla.)

TakerSpace doesn't really fit into the "workshed" mold. This is funny, since (in a manner of speaking) the exact thing I do in my own workshed is woodworking and metallurgy and other such activities, combining items to make things. Perhaps this will be a new era of workshed usage that more closely matches real-life worksheds, where you get items and put them together and that's that. (It probably won't, TPTB make IOTMs that sound funny and good, they assuredly did not think of TakerSpace the way I'm thinking about it.)

Regardless. What DO you use your TakerSpace currency for? Luckily, there's a whole section about that coming right up!

Speedrun Applicability

Welcome to the whole section about that! There are essentially 5 ascension-relevant items in the TakerSpace that are useful to the speedsters among us:

The first (and most obviously useful) item is the pirate dinghy. It's quite rare for TPTB to mint items that provide ways to avoid the Shore's dreaded 9-turn tax. The Candy Cane Sword Cane cut 3 turns off it, but in unrestricted most of us were still using the Yellow Puck to unlock the shore. Now, I think people will (likely) ignore those puck turns and simply use the TakerSpace on turn 1 to grab the dinghy. This item saves 9 turns in the base case and costs 1 ANCHOR, 1 MAST, and 1 SILK.

The second item of interest is the jolly roger flag. This item reminds me a bit of 2018's balanced antler. The antler gave you a single reroll against beasts, which served as a full beast banish in a 1-beast zone and a harsh drop in beast frequency in zones with 2+ beasts but other possible items. I don't know if anyone ever pulled it for a speedrun, but it would've made a great pull for the Palindome back in the day. The jolly roger flag banishes monsters with above-average meat for the zone. This banish activates 66% of the time, independently activating for each rich monster. To use a few zones as examples, the Jolly Roger Flag will make you less likely to encounter:

• ... the sabre-toothed goat in the Goatlet (avg: 50)
• ... all non-topiary golems (5 monsters!) in the Twin Peak (avg: 40)
• ... the skeletal sommelier in the Haunted Wine cellar (avg: 50)
• ... the man with the red buttons, red herring, and red snapper in the Red Zeppelin (avg: 93)
• ... the pygmy orderlies in the Hidden Bowling Alley (avg is 129)
• ... the pygmy assault squad in the Hidden Park (avg: 140)

There are a few more, but these probably rank as the spiciest and most interesting ones. The best way to think about the flag is that it exists as (essentially) a means to make it more likely you will encounter poor monsters than rich monsters. If you have a zone that has 1 poor and 2 rich monsters, instead of a 33% chance for each monster, you are looking at something like 60% for the poor monster and 20% for each of the two rich monsters. This is a relatively neat tool, although it is best used in concert with either olfaction or our other sniff-likes (the McHugeLarge slash, the sniff-kick in Zootomist, etc).

The reason for this is that the banished monsters do not enter the queue, and due to the fact that monsters are independently banished, you have a decent likelihood that one or two will roll the 33% chance of showing up. This means that if the monster you actually want to see has queue rejection and the conditionally banished rich monsters don't, you become highly likely to see those rich monsters floating around. In general, the item will work more dependably in zones where it's only banishing a few monsters, and will work best when combined with sniffs of the monster you actually want to see. When used properly, this item probably avoids 2-3 unwanted encounters in a run. It can be a bit of a feelsbad item; you'll really notice the times it doesn't work and you won't notice the times it avoids you a bad combat. But it's still worth a handful of turns in value. The flag costs 1 RUM, 1 ANCHOR, and 1 SILK.

The third item of interest? The silky pirate drawers. Please see the Peace Turkey article for more on how to evaluate minus combat buffs. If you have this the whole run, it's around a 2-turn value. Realistically, though, you can't wear it in every NC in your NC hunt... because it happens to cost 2 SILK, which you won't have until day 2. RIP.

The fourth item of interest is the anchor bomb. It's a very simple freerun-banish combat item, so it's always worth 1 turn in delay (and a small bit extra if you really need the banish for something, like perhaps the Yossarian junkyard quest). This will likely see a bit more play as a softcore pull than an actual in-run use -- unfortunately, the cost of the bomb rules out any other anchor uses, because it costs 1 RUM, 3 ANCHOR, 1 MAST, 1 GOLD.

The fifth (and in my view final) item of serious interest is the deft pirate hook. It's a bit better for fun aftercore purposes (like the current Crimbo, where it effectively doubles your combat take on Spirits in the Holiday Islands), but it has a little bit of a fun twist by unlocking some pickpockets for classes that can't pickpocket (while allowing a chance of a double-up pickpocket for classes that can). Because the pirate hook is just a normal pickpocket rather than a special one, it's mainly useful for things like giving you a slight extra shot at more stone wool or bubblin crudes. It can also be useful in the Shadow Rifts, as it seems to bypass the zone's drop rate restrictions, giving you a slight extra boost for more shadow goodies. It also can just ambiently increase your gains in a few fights! Does have some anti-synergy with Goose (IE, can remove things from the drop pool you were intending to goose dupe) but is overall a pleasant and reasonably fun use of an offhand. Worth about a turn, probably, only happening on the rare occasion where it really bails you out. It costs 1 ANCHOR, 1 MAST, and 1 GOLD.

So, those are cool! The thing is... you can't really get all of them. Next year, when my beloved 2-day hardcore metas will return, there will be a lot of fun facestabbing potential around saving zones for D2 Jolly Roger Flag usage. But until then, you only have 1 day of resources, and that means you can really only snag 1 of the top 4 items. Helpfully, you CAN snag both the dinghy and the hook, which is a nice combo. If you get both, that leaves you with 3 SPICE, 2 RUM, 1 ANCHOR, 1 MAST. You can get whatever the hell you want at that point -- nothing else dramatically moves the needle.

2024 In-Standard Synergies

• Not really a synergy, more of an anti-synergy; a nice chunk of the full-run value of 2023's Candy Cane Sword Cane was that it allowed you to get 2 Shore Inc. Trip Scrips for the price of 1. Due to the fact that this IOTM's best feature is the island access, technically speaking, the extra CCSC scrip isn't really valuable anymore; even if you still do a shore trip, it will be done to get a compass, which only costs 1 scrip. (Both are still great items!)
• Because it enters the combat selection code, a monster you have used Recall Habitat on (via 2023's BOFA) is considered for the purposes of zone meat calculation. This can give you a little bit more juice for finding your habitats in zones that you want to find them in, assuming your habitat is lower than the average... and it normally will be!

Overall Rating

We rate the TakerSpace as a tier 2 IOTM. It's a bit of an odd duck. In the current 1-day meta, it really is only saving you 6-7 turns with the dinghy + the hook due to CCSC's awesome shore interaction. But this is the kind of IOTM that's essentially MADE for a 2-day meta, getting you a good 6-7 turns on D1, then 2-3 turns on D2 from clutch Jolly Roger encounter adjustment atop cute habitat tricks and bleeding edge play. And it'll save 3 more turns in a few standard cycles, when the CCSC drops out. There's something for everyone here! (Also, the theming is cute, my overly long paean to worksheds aside.)