Storing attributes

[MangoBoi101 he/him]

How light/heavy can you get with this, I know you can decrease your weight till you weigh nothing, but what is the opposite of that? how much weight could you (possibly or theoretically) use at once? If you can store all your weight at once easily does that mean there is a cap at how much you can store with other metals? for instance could you store tin till you are blind and thus fill up your metalmind faster then turn around and use it all at once? what would things like this do to you?

I could be getting this all wrong and bein a bit stupid I dont know a lot about this stuff. 

Edited January 13, 2023 by MangoBoi101

[Quantus he/him]

It varies by attribute.  There's no set rate limit on Tapping Metalminds the way there is for Burning in Allomacy, so in theory you can flush your entire store all at once or pretty close. Wax does this to get dramatic.  But for others there can be practical limits.  Pewter makes bulky muscle and per WOB eventually your limbs just cant move.  Gold wont make you any more than Perfectly healthy so once you are healed up it has nothing more to really do. Im not sure what "FiVe TiMeS-Awake" would be (coffee induced "fake awake" is different and can be stored as a separate flavor, per WOB).   "Determination" is a sliderbar between a Manic state and and Depressed one, and Im not comfortable commenting on what levels might exist for those as Im entirely unqualified.  

[Mistchemist16]

We know that you can theoretically fill exactly as much attribute as you have and maintain it for as long as you have the coherent ability to do Feruchemy. Problem is most attributes will wreck your body and possibly kill you. Quick list

 

Steel (Speed): Unclear exactly, but I guess your heart stops moving and you die

Iron (Weight): Again not sure what this would do. I assume you’d break something in your body and die, but I don’t know what or how

Tin (Senses): You could go willingly blind or deaf and not die. Honestly, this may be one of the few metals where it’s feasible to fully tap

Pewter (Muscle): Your muscles are basically gone and you die

Bronze (Wakefulness): It seems like the filling a metal mind in your sleep is a result of continuously waking up and falling back asleep, at least subconsciously. Maybe you’d go into a coma or die if you fully filled. Idk

Copper (Memories): You get amnesia but don’t die

Zinc (Mental Speed): Your brain turns off and you die or become a vegetable

Brass (Heat): You freeze to death. Maybe you can stop that by staying in a fire or something but it’d be tricky

Gold (Health):  You get sick and die

Electrum: You become suicidally depressed and maybe don’t ever want to regain determination

Cadmium (Breath): You suffocate and die

Bendalloy (Nutrients): You starve or dehydrate. 

Aluminum (Identity): You might have trouble healing, but this one is specifically used for unkeywd metalminds and it’s not like there are that many known uses for higher Identity anyway

Duralumin (Connection): Depends on how exactly Connection works. It could be useful and make people not notice you, but it could also make you a sociopath (you don’t care about others)

Chromium (Forturne) : I guess you’d be more likely to make stupid mistakes or other bad things. Not instantly lethal

Nicrosol (Investiture): Don’t know enough about this one to say anything

 

This also doesn’t account for any other damage that may come from filling at 50% or something. Tin is really the only one you can mega drain and even that has big trade offs. Makes sense that people stay at around 80%
 

As for how high you can go, the most easily measurable feat that comes to my mind is Marasi making a speed vacuum. You’d need around 7 times the speed of sound for about 7200 km/hr or 4483 mph. That’s around 700 times faster than your average human, give or take. If we assume most attribute provide similar protection, then you can multiply the same number by the base human ability to get a rough idea. That being said, you would probably need to compound the strength of Allomantic pewter instead of actually growing all those muscles. We also don’t know the exact cap when your Feruchemy stops protecting you well enough, but even a few hundred times better is good enough for basically anything. 

 

Edited January 13, 2023 by Mistchemist16

[Frustration]

So I think there is a very large misconception here, there are strict limits to how much you can store at once, you cannot, no matter how large of a metalmind you have, weigh nothing.

Spoiler

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)