While I am open to new prep days, I'm expressing preference for also getting things done. Whether that's T150-175 research, or force domes since we'll be in a fixed location, or finishing up Chakra capacitor rune in a day before prepping Oasis runes for the potential veterans bonus, or what. I know it's frustrating not having relevant prep runes reported yet.
But y'all. If there's a large backlog of prep days we don't have the results from. Doing too many more prep days for novel runes isn't going to help things, unfortunately. Increasing veterancy and getting actual results feels like it'll be helpful in character, and out of character for meta reasons. Let's not create more work for QMs until we at least use the work they've put in. (No, I'm not also talking about technique hacking, why are you asking?)
I'd be more receptive to this if we already had a good route to success with what we currently have. I know it takes a lot of spoons, but the entire conceit of this arc is that we throw stuff at the wall until enough things stick that we can defeat the Akatsuki. We're not at that point unless you count Superchillers, so we still need to be throwing stuff at the wall.
I'm still somewhat receptive. We have enough for-sure runes to occupy us for the immediate future and in that time we don't need to be straining the QM spoon drawer. I'm okay with putting off "throw stuff at the wall" prep days until the current backlog is resolved. But we're going to reach the point where we need more good ideas sooner rather than later.
This isn't quite a game of "find the right answers", it's a game of doing the best research in the best order to minimize the amount of time it takes to reach our wincon. Prep days do not come out of our research-time budget, they come out of our more flexible non-research SC budget. Prep days are not at all incompatible with getting things done, it just puts strain on the QMs when we throw a lot of stuff at the wall. But again, that's what we're here for. We need to research the best runes in the best order, and if one of our ideas is a winner we need to know ASAP so we can research it before/instead of other runes with less marginal value. I said that we have for-sure runes already lined up to research, but once we burn through those that principle arrives in full force.
The one thing detracting from that is the notion that if we do enough research eventually our prep days will give us clearer results. I don't doubt that this will happen eventually, but I'm unsure whether it happens fast enough to matter for the purposes of this arc. On balance I'm not convinced to hold off on prep daying our best ideas in the hopes that sometime in the future after we researched other runes with less marginal value we might have a better picture of how achievable they are. I'd rather prep day them sooner (albeit not immediately), and then if we do unlock higher-fidelity prep days we can go back and re-check our best ideas.
And, of course, the ones we intend to prep day
this update are based on this special location that we likely won't be returning to after we leave. I'd very much like to have our research there on the right track before we go, which might involve seeing the prep day results and doing more things at the cave before we leave (like venturing further in to try and find what's doing this to the water, if needbe). These runes absolutely 100% get prepped ASAP, while we're still here interacting with the thing they're trying to recreate.
