How quickly do metalminds burn?

[Cocoa he/him]

Do we know how quickly metalminds burn when compounding? Does the whole metalmind go at once like an enhancement metal, releasing 10x whatever you had stored with it and forcing you to either use or store it away again in the space of a moment? Or is it more like tapping, where you control the rate at which you draw out power, and the burn rate fluctuates based on that? Or is it something else?

[Quantus he/him]

I believe it varies from metal to metal as it does with normal allomancy, burning at similar rates and allowing all the same control (flaring, etc.). 

[StanLemon]

Considering that Brandon has said that burning Duralumin doesn't only makes Compounding faster. I'd agree with Quantus. 

I'd also add that it depends on what the Investiture is doing as Brandon has said the more a metal is doing the faster it burns. Iron and Steel are the best example of this, if all the Allomancer is doing is seeing the blue lines it doesn't burn too fast, but when Pushing or Pulling it burns faster, most Allomncers don't notice because they only Push/Pull in short bursts

[HavingTheHasHoidAPurpose?]

Well though, Brandon has also stated that a chromium burner would take longer to burn away a compounder's Feruchemical reserves.

This probably means that metalminds, and any stuff with higher investiture is harder to burn away

[Halyo_Alex he/him]

4 minutes ago, HavingTheHasHoidAPurpose? said:

Well though, Brandon has also stated that a chromium burner would take longer to burn away a compounder's Feruchemical reserves.

This probably means that metalminds, and any stuff with higher investiture is harder to burn away

A little of column A, a little of column B...

[Raphaborn]

One thing is certain. It's not the same as Allomancy, or that would be too fast for Atium (and we know that's not true).
 

[HSuperLee]

10 hours ago, Raphaborn said:

One thing is certain. It's not the same as Allomancy, or that would be too fast for Atium (and we know that's not true).
 

I'm not sure I follow. Certainly an atium compounder would want it to burn extremely quickly so that they can quickly get a large amount of youth out of the metalmind and then store it in another atiummind for slow tapping. Its not like compounders are compounding every moment of every day, they just do it until they have a massive store of the desired trait in their metalminds and then slowly tap that over time.

[Raphaborn]

6 hours ago, HSuperLee said:

I'm not sure I follow. Certainly an atium compounder would want it to burn extremely quickly so that they can quickly get a large amount of youth out of the metalmind and then store it in another atiummind for slow tapping. Its not like compounders are compounding every moment of every day, they just do it until they have a massive store of the desired trait in their metalminds and then slowly tap that over time.

An Atium bead lasts for 30 seconds. If it ended so quickly on Feruchemy, Marsh would never have survived 300 years with a bag.
In the case of using Feruchemy, burning slower generates more atribute per gram and is better.

[Cocoa he/him]

7 hours ago, Raphaborn said:

An Atium bead lasts for 30 seconds. If it ended so quickly on Feruchemy, Marsh would never have survived 300 years with a bag.
In the case of using Feruchemy, burning slower generates more atribute per gram and is better.

I don't think you're correct about a slower burn rate producing more attribute per gram; we're just told that compounding lets you get out what you put in tenfold. The burn rate, in my mind, has more to do with how fast you get that increased attribute out, not how much of it you get in total.

I also don't think Marsh managing to survive so long says anything about the burn rate of atiumminds. Even if it's a 'slow burn,' it's like HSuperLee said, it'd be far more efficient if you're thinking in rationing terms to burn metalminds, store what you get out, then tap that at the necessary rate before repeating the process when your stores get low. To illustrate:

Let's assume, just for for simplicity's sake, that the bag holds 100 beads of atium.

Fill 1 atium bead to 100% capacity, or as close as you can get. This gives us our basic unit of age.

Burn that bead and store the resulting 10 units of age in 10 new atium beads as you burn it. Set 1 unit aside, and then tap the remaining 9 as necessary until they're depleted.

Once you've depleted them, burn the bead you set aside and fill up the 9 depleted beads plus 1 from your bag.

Repeat until you run completely out of beads. Once you dip below 10 empty beads, you'll no longer be able to store all the units you get by burning, so those units will only be of any use to you for as long as you're burning.

In total, this would give you 1000 units of age for your initial 1 unit investment, 55 of which at the end you'd be unable to store and thus would be the only ones actually limited by the atiummind burn rate. The other 945 units would have been stored in metalminds and so could be tapped at your leisure.