Economy of charged unsealed / unkeyed metal minds in Era 3

[+Oltux72]

You can store an attribute in a metal mind and retrieve it at a later date. You can also use compounding to fill a metal mind. It looks like compounding still needs a human component. Note that you can liberate the Investiture in a metal mind by melting it and casting it again. So feruchemy can be used to get rid of attributes.

Some things are unclear. Can a machine fill a metal mind? Like when the South Scadrians use their ships, do they have immense amounts of Invested iron free to use?

Some metal minds are incredibly precious. So I will try to rank them:
 

1. Atium - immortality, basically
2. Gold - health
3. Zinc - thought has value
4. Steel - time is money
5. Bronze - time is also money
6. Pewter - practical, psychological and cosmetic reasons for that
7. Tin - useful
8. Cadmium - recreational, medical and mining
9. Electrum - maybe.

And here we are leaving the area of those who are clearly desirable for tapping

• Brass is going to have a regionally and seasonally fluctuating price. In hot summers it will go negative, in cold winters it will be positive

And we have some that will have a negative price

1. Iron - Wax may have a use for more mass. But most people will rather safely jump off high places or use it to increase mobility decreasing their weight.
2. Bendalloy - people like to eat. Given the levels of obesity that come with wealth, we can safely conclude that there is a higher need of getting rid of excess calories rather than more food. That is kind of unique. In Era 3 you will be paid to be provided for in terms of basic food.

[Karger]

We don't actually know how you fill unkeyed metalminds.  Suit did not manage to get it to work so it is probably more involved then just having the right attribute and storing.

[NameIess]

I think the most valuable one would be nicrosil. Without it, you couldn't have ant of the others. Also, Brass would be good for all seasons, as you can fill it to cool off.

[Frustration]

My philosophy is that storing can be just as useful as tapping.

[Mage]

2 hours ago, Frustration said:

My philosophy is that storing can be just as useful as tapping.

This is true for the most part, but personally I don't think gold or tin, or the speed ones would be very fun to store in, except maybe in the case of a disguise or something

[Frustration]

45 minutes ago, Mage said:

tin,

Um, there are plenty of time when I've wanted to not be able to see, hear, taste, feel, or smell something

47 minutes ago, Mage said:

 gold

disguise, also a way for kids to skip school

48 minutes ago, Mage said:

speed

You mean steel, and on this one I'll admit is close to breaking it, except that in crowded areas or when playing with younger people that it would be easier than forcefully taking smaller steps.

[Mage]

42 minutes ago, Frustration said:

You mean steel, and on this one I'll admit is close to breaking it, except that in crowded areas or when playing with younger people that it would be easier than forcefully taking smaller steps.

by speed I meant both steel and zinc, I just generalized into one word. Sorry for the confusion.

[Frustration]

Just now, Mage said:

by speed I meant both steel and zinc, I just generalized into one word. Sorry for the confusion.

Oh, Zinc can be used as substitute bronze, or for when your pretending to be stupid, or when your bored but don't want to sleep.

[+Oltux72]

6 hours ago, Frustration said:

My philosophy is that storing can be just as useful as tapping.

Not for everything to the same extent. That was kind of my point.

And storing is unlimited. Tapping is limited by storing or compounding. But storing is not free. Once the metal mind is full, it is full. You can erase the Investiture by burning it and resmelting. That is possible, but not free. Hence it can be more economic to pay people for tapping it.

[Chiberty]

17 hours ago, Oltux72 said:

Not for everything to the same extent. That was kind of my point.

And storing is unlimited. Tapping is limited by storing or compounding. But storing is not free. Once the metal mind is full, it is full. You can erase the Investiture by burning it and resmelting. That is possible, but not free. Hence it can be more economic to pay people for tapping it.

Storing is limited.

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Thoughtful Spurts

If there's really no upper limit to Feruchemy for practical reasons* , why didn't Sazed just fill steel at ridiculous levels for a few minutes in [Well of Ascension], and then go back to running instead of leaving his steelminds there? Say, being some 100,000 times slower than he would normally be for about a minute. Meaning that a Feruchemist should be able to fill a given metalmind in very short periods of time if you fill at a high enough rate.

*(yes, you have the limit of how much you can store in a given metalmind and for how many metalminds you can carry on your person, but those are probably too high to really be taken into account in more "normal" circumstances)

Brandon Sanderson

The low end is bounded. You can pull out tons--but in filling, you can only go so far. I didn't ever explicitly talk about this in the series, but the implications are there. Not all have the same bounds, but in your example, the body just can't slow beyond a certain point. Think of it this way--you can only fill a weight metalmind with as much weight as you have to give. So you can become very, very light--but you only add to a time for doubling your weight. You can't make yourself 100,000 times slower and gain 100,000 times multiplication. You can give up all of your normal speed, and so when you tap that speed out you are at 200% for an equal period. (And that's a theoretical maximum; realistically, you can only go to down around 75% slower or the like.)

17th Shard Forum Q&A (Sept. 26, 2012)

 

[GoWibble]

also:

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Brandon Sanderson

Chapter Twenty-Two - Part One

Feruchemy. Some like the word, others aren't as happy with it. It used to be called Hemalurgy, but I decided that would be a better word for the third magic system in the series. (You'll see it eventually.)

Feruchemy (not called that, however) was a magic system I lifted from Final Empire Prime, a book I wrote some years before I wrote this book. I had a person who could store up attributes, such as strength, then use them when he needed them. The thing is, the magic wasn't really that well formed, and this character never got any viewpoints, so I didn't get to use the magic as often as I wanted.

When I was developing this world, I knew I wanted the Keepers to have the fantastic memories. I realized that Feruchemy would make the perfect magic system for Sazed and his people. When I decided that I could use metals as a focus for this magic system (something that made it much more interesting, because it put a definable limit on what could be stored and how much of it could be stored) I knew I had something really good.

I like to use multiple magic systems in books, but I like it when they all have common elements. Feruchemy and Allomancy are like different aspects of the same concept. They both do some similar–yet different–things. There will be a lot more about this in the text.

Mistborn: The Final Empire Annotations (Feb. 5, 2007)

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Argent

We know that you can't Lash people in Shardplate, but can you Lash the person inside the Plate? If they had their helm off, for example. At that point Plate should be just dead weight, right? 

Brandon Sanderson

There's a bit of an interference envelope. Wearing plate, the person has this big ball of investiture around them, and so pushing any through it--even by touching a person without a helm--is going to be tough. Easier than with the helm on though, I suppose.

Investiture acts (roughly) like a saturated solution in these cases. Sticking more power into something like a Feruchemical storage or a hyper-invested object like Plate is increasingly hard. The other part is that Investiture tends to interfere with other Investiture, unless there's a familiar resonance. (This is part of what philosophers call Identity.) Slapping your hand through a sand master's stream of sand will cause interference, and make them start to drop. It's not that the sand is supporting them, it's that the investiture holding them up gets scrambled for a moment because of your own investiture.

Investiture pushed toward someone inside a hyper-invested (supersaturated) system like a person in Shardplate is going to get hard push-back.

This is similar to the reason that it's harder to Push on invested coins. Depends on how invested they are, in that case. It's generally not as hard as doing something like Lashing a person in plate. (This is more about the interference than the saturation of investiture.) But the two principles are what I use to guide the physics in these areas.

quietandproud

Can we take that as a hint that the Investiture in the Plates and the Investiture that the Surge of [Adhesion] uses come from different Shards? Or do they interfere because they "belong" to different spren?

Brandon Sanderson

You know, I should have realized this one would bring out the follow up questions. Let's leave it at what I posted for now. This is a deep, deep rabbit hole, and I do need to try to get some more writing done tonight. So...RAFO. (Sorry.)

Stormlight Three Update #4 (Nov. 2, 2016)