How Powerful would a fullborn actually be.

[MangoBoi101 he/him]

I was wondering about this because I know that they are powerful but I'm not sure I fully understand how powerful yet, so I'm asking how strong would a fullborn be if he had access to all the 16 normal metals plus atium. TLR managed to take over the whole world using this power so what else do you think it could do? what if you became a fullborn savant (burning all 16 metals as much as possible) how powerful would that be?

[Quantus he/him]

It consistently floats to the top of the "Who Could Win in a Fight" debates.  The combination of Speedster-style physical AND mental speed plus precognition plus actual temporal manipulation plus compounded gold healing plus the offensive capabilities of allomancy, etc etc etc. are very hard to beat.  Generally speaking the only strategy that works is to set some sort of trap (AonDor, Fabrials, Soulcasting Aluminum, etc) that would shut down their abilities before they can bring them all into play.  But few if any strategies have a strong chance once the Fullborn is ready and aware of you and flairing through their stores.   

[alder24]

One of the most powerful beings. You have almost unlimited feruchemical attributes, can heal from almost everything, including damage to the soul, and with Savantism in all 32 powers, you are just crazy powerful. That was TLR, but he was the strongest Mistborn ever because he granted himself that power with the use of the Well and became a savant in every metal. Fullborn has more useful powers because of feruchemy and compounding, while Mistborn powers become just secondary powers. With unlimited Atium, there is almost no power that can stop them. His only weakness is separation from his metalminds, but if you play it smart, you can put your metalminds inside your body and to play it even smarter, put several of them in every corner of your body, to make sure that you can always tap them and heal, even if decapitated. When you have access to compounding, burning allomanticly regular pewter or steel feels just weak, when you can get insane feruchemical strength or speed. With almost unlimited speed you can end a fight before it even begins. You can pause a fight by using a bendalloy bubble and zinc compounding to think about every option you have. 

And if you have access to feruchemical attributes of fortune, connection, identity and investiture - you just become even more insane. Feruchemical fortune and allomantic Atium and electrum would make you avoid all dangers you can ever encounter, making you literally untouchable.

[Trusk'our he/him]

1 hour ago, MangoBoi101 said:

I was wondering about this because I know that they are powerful but I'm not sure I fully understand how powerful yet, so I'm asking how strong would a fullborn be if he had access to all the 16 normal metals plus atium. TLR managed to take over the whole world using this power so what else do you think it could do? what if you became a fullborn savant (burning all 16 metals as much as possible) how powerful would that be?

I suppose that a Fullborn we'd see doesn't likely have the same level of Allomantic power as TLR, so they would be much more limited in both raw Allomantic might as well as having their Compounding being less efficient.

They still would be extremely powerful though, as not only do they have access to at least one power that would be useful in basically every situation, they could also theoretically create Unsealed Metalminds and doll out powers of near equal power to anyone they so desire.

One well-prepared Fullborn is perhaps the single most dangerous semi-mortal combatants in the Cosmere.

A well-prepared Fullborn with an army of loyal, Invested minions though...well, even the Fused and Radiants would be hard pressed.

[Frustration he/him]

TLR made himself far more powerful than any natural born Fulborn could be.

In reality, Fullborn are dangerous, but not as much as I think people tend to make them out to be.

They would be able to make themselves 2-3 times better in every feruchemical attribute, as well as store that up for later, but things like running at the speed of sound would be incredibly rare, even for them.

[Mistchemist16]

2 hours ago, MangoBoi101 said:

what if you became a fullborn savant (burning all 16 metals as much as possible) how powerful would that be?

Rashek already was this. A savant or near savant in ever power he had except perhaps Atium. Granted, he also had Allomancy better than lerasium, but nicrosil Compounding theoretically puts a modern Fullborn on the same level
 

theFinisher4Ever

Was the Lord Ruler using Feruchemy + Allomancy to Soothe all of the people around him? Or was he, as I like to think, flaring for so long that he became a Soother Savant?

Brandon Sanderson

He lived long enough and used his metals enough (particularly Soothing) to become nearly a savant in every area, if not a full savant.

/r/fantasy AMA 2013 (April 15, 2013)

 

 

Questioner

There are Allomantic savants, are there Feruchemical savants?

Brandon Sanderson

Much harder to do. My feeling on Feruchemical savants was because it was your own power in the first place, you can't steep in it so much in the way. But, if you can get someone else's power or if you are fueling your Feruchemy another way, you would become one. So, the Lord Ruler is a good example.

Questioner

Was Miles a...

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah. Miles would be the same sort of thing.

Questioner

Is that why he didn't die as quickly in the execution?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes.

So yeah. Normally no but if you can Compound you become... basically that is how I am explaining part of the Compounding abilities. 

Starsight Release Party (Nov. 26, 2019)

 

I also did a bit of math on the Bands of Mourning, such as when Marasi creates a vacuum with speed. That would take 7200 km/hr speed or 7 times the speed of sound. If we use an average human running speed of 10.6 km/hr for perspective, creating said vacuum requires 600-700 times average human speed

If we conclude that all Compounding can handle attributes around this much, you can get an idea for how far you can take it. We’ve already seen what the Bands can do, but you could also do things like Compound the strength from allomantic Pewter until you’re 100 or even 1000 times stronger than normal, instead of double. Or give people third degree burns with a touch. And ambushing a Fullborn is tricky since they never sleep and always have enhanced sense + bronze and steelsight forever. Also, Fullborn might still eat since bendalloy is relatively rare, but they can probably sniff out poisoned meals even better than Straff did. 
 

Fullborn are among the strongest contenders for most powerful non Shard entity in the Cosmere. Their only real weakness is that they can’t always have their powers on at full blast since they need prep time and metal intake, especially with rarer metals. But a Fullborn fighting on their own terms is basically unbeatable. 

Edited February 28, 2023 by Mistchemist16

[cometaryorbit]

One caveat: we don't really know what a few of the Feruchemical abilities actually do. Does Identity do anything other than let other Feruchemists use your metalminds? What does Feruchemical Fortune do exactly? What does Feruchemical Investiture do outside of SoScad Medallions? (That one is really important to the question of overall power level, as it determines how much they can boost their Allomantic strength).

Strengths

They're incredibly powerful - one of the, if not the, most powerful non-Shardic beings in the Cosmere*.

Mistborn are already very powerful - ridiculously so against people using metal weapons or armor, but Kelsier beat six hazekillers and Vin (admittedly unusually skilled and strong) dealt with ten without needing atium. Adding atium and/or duralumin makes them way stronger (though duralumin is dangerous since it leaves them without metals until they drink another vial). Duralumin + Soothing/Rioting means control of koloss (and possibly kandra, though Harmony might not let that work in Era 2). Iron/Steel are obviously powerful, but Pewter Allomancy is often underrated, IMO - the strength boost isn't huge (about x2 for normal burn or x3 for flaring), but it does so much more than just muscle strength - speed, grace/dexterity, physical toughness and resistance.

And Compounding covers up Mistborn's most important weaknesses - the limited "peak" on flaring, and their lack of (combat) healing. Flaring Pewter only makes you so strong, and while Duralumin Allomancy can raise that limit, it's dangerous and not very controllable - F-Pewter is much better for that. A-Pewter only helps with healing on a "medical recovery" time scale, and while it also toughens the body to help against e.g. breaking bones, a cut throat is still lethal. But not with F-Gold.

The most impressive Compounding powers are probably Atium (though only really available in Era 1, except for Marsh), Gold, and Steel, though Pewter and Zinc are also super impressive. Bronze Compounding (never need to sleep) is also pretty cool. F-Gold + F-Steel is probably near invincibility, and combining that with A-Atium is just unfair. Add in F-Pewter for one-hit-kill strikes...

Even without access to atium (say in Era 2) Zinc Compounding to process the shadows of A-Electrum might be nearly as good.

Weaknesses

But, there are limits...

1) Availability of metal. Generally, not all the metals are available. In Era 1, they have atium (and potentially malatium - TLR knew of it - not that it's terribly useful) but chromium/nicrosil and cadmium/bendalloy aren't available. (TLR presumably knew they existed, but the Final Empire didn't have the technology to make them.)

So you either get the near-invincibility of A-Atium and the near-endless youth of Atium Compounding, or Leeching and time bubbles, but not both.

2) F-Gold healing needs metalminds on the body to work. Therefore, it presumably can't save even a Compounder from anything that melts away/vaporizes the metalminds, or blows the body apart sufficiently that the metalminds are no longer attached to the largest piece of body. In Era 1, or even AoL times, with relatively limited power weapons, it's effectively true invulnerability (Miles survives dynamite he's holding trivially). But as technology advances, that should change.

3) The amount of power a Fullborn has is limited to how much metal they can fit in their stomach (to burn) or how much power fits in their metalminds (Feruchemically). They don't actually have infinite attributes - they can't become a black hole with infinite weight, or travel at the speed of light with infinite speed, etc. And Feruchemy has diminishing returns at high rates of tapping, so it's likely that the limits are a lot more sane than they appear at first glance. Wax can use months of weight to become "heavier than a building", but I doubt even a Fullborn with several pounds of completely full by Compounding ironminds could become as heavy as a mountain.

4) Leeching still works. And with a primer cube, Leeching can be an area effect...

5) Aluminum is still a problem. A Fullborn still can't Riot/Soothe through an aluminum hat or Push/Pull on aluminum. Even A-Atium won't save a Fullborn from aluminum bullets (aluminum doesn't have an atium shadow). F-Gold healing won't get an aluminum bullet out of them (it will presumably keep them from outright dying, but staying alive with bullets in vital organs is probably going to burn health at a horrific rate).

*at least, in a "who would likely win in a fight" sense. There are others who have more versatility, or more sheer quantity of Investiture. (Cosmere general)

Spoiler

Fully-functional Elantrians are more versatile (at least on their home ground) and probably hold more Investiture. High Heightening Awakeners/Returned definitely hold more Investiture. The most powerful spren (like the Sibling and Stormfather) operate on a far greater scale, but they and Dawnshards are hardly fair to compare to 'mortals'.

 

On 2/28/2023 at 9:22 AM, Frustration said:

TLR made himself far more powerful than any natural born Fulborn could be.

In reality, Fullborn are dangerous, but not as much as I think people tend to make them out to be.

They would be able to make themselves 2-3 times better in every feruchemical attribute, as well as store that up for later, but things like running at the speed of sound would be incredibly rare, even for them.

Definitely (although I think 2-3 times is pretty low end, but yeah, Marasi with the Bands is super extreme even for Compounding. We see TLR use Steel Speed and he doesn't go anywhere near that fast.)

On 2/28/2023 at 8:46 AM, Trusk'our said:

I suppose that a Fullborn we'd see doesn't likely have the same level of Allomantic power as TLR, so they would be much more limited in both raw Allomantic might as well as having their Compounding being less efficient.

They still would be extremely powerful though, as not only do they have access to at least one power that would be useful in basically every situation, they could also theoretically create Unsealed Metalminds and doll out powers of near equal power to anyone they so desire.

One well-prepared Fullborn is perhaps the single most dangerous semi-mortal combatants in the Cosmere.

A well-prepared Fullborn with an army of loyal, Invested minions though...well, even the Fused and Radiants would be hard pressed.

We don't know enough about Unsealed Metalmind creation to assume that being Fullborn is enough to do it - there may be "mechanical" or "technological" components, or it might have needed Kelsier's Sliver expanded mind to design the process (kind of like designing Hemalurgic constructs).

Edited March 2, 2023 by cometaryorbit

[StanLemon]

On 2/28/2023 at 8:22 AM, Frustration said:

TLR made himself far more powerful than any natural born Fulborn could be.

In reality, Fullborn are dangerous, but not as much as I think people tend to make them out to be.

They would be able to make themselves 2-3 times better in every feruchemical attribute, as well as store that up for later, but things like running at the speed of sound would be incredibly rare, even for them.

 

1 hour ago, cometaryorbit said:

Definitely (although I think 2-3 times is pretty low end, but yeah, Marasi with the Bands is super extreme even for Compounding. We see TLR use Steel Speed and he doesn't go anywhere near that fast.)

These claims are disproven by the mere existence of the Bands. They prove a combination of Feruchemy and Allomancy can make anyone as strong as TLR. And then you have Brandon's own statement saying that Compounding can be used to increase the strength of Allomancy. Wax was powerful enough while holding the Bandsto Push the trace metals in stone hard enough to smash stone walls and casually Pushed a boulder off of himself. The only Steelpushing seen in the entire series of comparable power was when Vin was being fueled by the Mists in HoA

Also, 2-3 times better in every Feruchemical attribute? That's a ludicrous statement. Miles who could only Compound Gold was worlds more effective as a Bloodmaker than Wayne ever was. And that's not even counting the ways you can synergize various Feruchemical traits which is improved by having little to no worry about rationing Metalmind stores. As for why TLR didn't go as fast as Marasi did? Why would he? That would be like draining enough health to survive an explosion to heal a papercut. Kind of pointless

Edited March 2, 2023 by StanLemon

[Trusk'our he/him]

8 hours ago, StanLemon said:

These claims are disproven by the mere existence of the Bands. They prove a combination of Feruchemy and Allomancy can make anyone as strong as TLR.

I don't know about that. It could be that Hemalurgy was used to augment the creator of the Bands, so the powers stored would be stronger.

I'm hesitant to believe that nicrosil Compounding leads to an increase in Allomantic potential, but we just don't know for sure yet. This quote makes it sound to me like when you tap a Nicrosilmind you just get back what you put in, rather than being able to compress the power as you can with most Feruchemy. Although, maybe it means specifically that Malwish medallions work kind of like this, which might make them something different than your vanilla Identity-blanked Metalmind, which is something I haden't considered before, but would make sense.

Quote

General Signed Books 2018 (Oct. 15, 2018)
 

Pagerunner

When you tap the nicrosil portion of a medallion, will it run out over time? Or is it like a coppermind, where something discrete is taken, used, and returned?

Brandon Sanderson

Good question! Like a coppermind.

If you can increase your Investiture levels via nicrosil, then it is a very big power booster, but also not infinite, since compressed Feruchemical attributes bring diminishing returns and you can only carry a Metalmind so large before it becomes impractical.

And even then, I suppose that you could actively burn Nicrosilminds to bring in a constant influx of raw Allomantic potential, which itself is effected and enhanced by its own burning. If it is possible to do so, I think that there would likely still be a practical upper limit, but it would probably be very high.

[Frustration he/him]

10 hours ago, StanLemon said:

These claims are disproven by the mere existence of the Bands. They prove a combination of Feruchemy and Allomancy can make anyone as strong as TLR.

For a short time, not forever.

[alder24]

3 hours ago, Trusk'our said:

I don't know about that. It could be that Hemalurgy was used to augment the creator of the Bands, so the powers stored would be stronger.

It was told in BoM that powers stored in nicrosilmind are running out, and compounding is necessary to replenish them. But does this mean powers are getting weaker or that just time of use is shorter - we don't know.

3 hours ago, Trusk'our said:

Although, maybe it means specifically that Malwish medallions work

Medallions works a bit different:

Spoiler

Calderis

Does the nicrosil portion of the medallions function identitically to how a Soulbearer Ferring would use Nicrosil? 

Brandon Sanderson

Not exactly. The medallion is a little more restrictive, for one thing.

Skyward Pre-Release AMA (Oct. 31, 2018)

 

[Trusk'our he/him]

20 hours ago, alder24 said:

Medallions works a bit different:

  Hide contents

Calderis

Does the nicrosil portion of the medallions function identitically to how a Soulbearer Ferring would use Nicrosil? 

Brandon Sanderson

Not exactly. The medallion is a little more restrictive, for one thing.

Skyward Pre-Release AMA (Oct. 31, 2018)

 

It could just mean that the medallions are made for a specific purpose, and therefore not able to perform as much, such as granting a natural Feruchemist the ability to utilize the nicrosil portion to store their own power for someone else's use and that they can only tap the nicrosil portion to use the power already stored inside.

That being said, we just don't know for certain yet all of nicrosil Feruchemy's mechanics, so I'll do my best to keep an open mind until Brandon Sanderson clears it up in his writing (hopefully soon).

[cometaryorbit]

The Bands vs Medallion difference is weird. I am not sure how natural nicrosil would work.

[therunner he/him]

Sideposting from Fullborn vs 5th Ideal Windrunner thread, because I think the math is relevant.

Most of the power of Fullborn comes from Compounding, and the levels of stores Feruchemists simply don't have access to, so I will focus on that.
Two parts, one is the preparation of metalminds, the second actually tapping.

Part 1: Metalminds preparation
Assume, that you can fill a BB sized metalmind (0.3 grams) to fullness in about a month, so you have ~one month worth of attribute (for simplicity assuming you can store all of the attribute, i.e. 100%). Then you need to do that 16 times, and yes some can be done at the same time.

Then you need to burn these to Compound, where burn speed will play role. Most vials contain flakes of metals which will be fractions of a gram I would assume, and BB pellets are about ~0.3 gram. So you would burn that for minutes or hours, depending on the metal. We will take the upper bound, so 1 hour to burn BB pellet. If you disagree, simply rescale the numbers that result by the ratio of hour to your estimate for burning the BB pellet.

You need to repeat that many times, and each time you need 10x bigger piece of metal to store in, and so they would take up 10x as much time to burn the metalmind.

After doing this four times, you would need to burn each of your metalminds for ~10000 hours to compound again, and at that point they weight around 16*300 grams in total, and you need 48 kilograms of metal to store in.

So, you quickly run into physical limitations. If filling BB sized metalmind can be done within ~month of time, then at most Fullborn can have something around ~100000 months of attribute available at any given time, more then that would require too much metalminds (this already requires Fullborn to wear on him 48 kilograms of just metalminds). And time to do this is on the order of ~16*1 month for initial storing + 16*(10000+1000+100+10+1) hours, so about 260 months of pure time, i.e. more than 20 years of doing nothing but compounding. No practicing with powers, socializing, sleeping, eating, nothing. Bendalloy would help to 'cut down' externally perceived time, but that would require a lot of bendalloy.
Even if burning the original BB sized pellet took only 10 minutes on average across all metals, then it would still require doing nothing but compounding for ~3.3 years non-stop.

Part 2: Tapping inefficiency in feruchemy

Per this WoB (https://wob.coppermind.net/events/243/#e6126) the feruchemy is increasingly inefficient the harder you tap . If we look at example of F-steel (slightly borrowing from early post in Scadrial vs Roshar post RoW),  and try to figure out what penalties would be for n-fold tapping speed. I also assume that 100% speed for movement (running, walking etc.) is 9m/s, as that is roughly what above average person can sustain for a 100 meter dash.

We assume that the increasing tapping is not getting progressively difficult, just equally difficult. At 2x tapping we get 5/6 inefficiency, at 3x we get 1/2 inefficiency, ratio of these is 3/5, so then in the most optimistic scenario the penalty when tapping n-fold is 5/6(3/5)^(n-1). If I had 100 hours of 100% speed stored the time I would get out when tapping n-fold would be 100/n *5/6 * (3/5)^(n-1), so

1. Tapping at 10x speeds, to get total of 10+1 the human speed (i.e. 9*11 = 99 m/s), the time would 0.05 hours = 3 minutes (with original store being 100% (9m/s) speed for 100 hours)
2. Tapping at 20x speeds, to get total of 20+1 the human speed (i.e. 9*21 = 189 m/s), the time would be 0.00015 hours = 0.5 second
3. Tapping at 30x speeds, to get total of 30+1 the human speed (i.e. 9*31 = 279 m/s), the time would be 6*10^(-7) hours = 0.0022 second = 22 ms
4. Tapping at 40x speeds, to get total of 35+1 the human speed (i.e. 9*41 = 369 m/s, our first sonic speed!), the time would be 0.00001 second = 0.1 ms
    

Now, in light of the fact that Fullborn can have optimistically at most ~100 000 months of any given attribute at his person at a time (however with each metalmind weighting around 3 kilograms) then Fullborn has at most 30*24*100000 = 72 000 000 hours of 100% speed stored, which would enable them to move at mildly sonic speed for about ~72 seconds. Higher Machs would he exponentially more difficult to achieve, and with those stores would be basically impossible to sustain for more than a milisecond.

So either storing in the BB sized metalmind to fill it completely up takes more than a month, in fact considerably longer (~years). Or even Fullborn with full stores can move at Mach 1 for a minute at most, before running completely dry. And getting to that level of stores would take Fullborn years or possibly decades.

So based on this Fullborn would be a lot weaker than typically assumed.

Edited March 3, 2023 by therunner

[IlstrawberrySeed]

On 3/1/2023 at 8:00 PM, cometaryorbit said:

One caveat: we don't really know what a few of the Feruchemical abilities actually do. Does Identity do anything other than let other Feruchemists use your metalminds? What does Feruchemical Fortune do exactly? What does Feruchemical Investiture do outside of SoScad Medallions? (That one is really important to the question of overall power level, as it determines how much they can boost their Allomantic strength).

Strengths

They're incredibly powerful - one of the, if not the, most powerful non-Shardic beings in the Cosmere*.

Mistborn are already very powerful - ridiculously so against people using metal weapons or armor, but Kelsier beat six hazekillers and Vin (admittedly unusually skilled and strong) dealt with ten without needing atium. Adding atium and/or duralumin makes them way stronger (though duralumin is dangerous since it leaves them without metals until they drink another vial). Duralumin + Soothing/Rioting means control of koloss (and possibly kandra, though Harmony might not let that work in Era 2). Iron/Steel are obviously powerful, but Pewter Allomancy is often underrated, IMO - the strength boost isn't huge (about x2 for normal burn or x3 for flaring), but it does so much more than just muscle strength - speed, grace/dexterity, physical toughness and resistance.

And Compounding covers up Mistborn's most important weaknesses - the limited "peak" on flaring, and their lack of (combat) healing. Flaring Pewter only makes you so strong, and while Duralumin Allomancy can raise that limit, it's dangerous and not very controllable - F-Pewter is much better for that. A-Pewter only helps with healing on a "medical recovery" time scale, and while it also toughens the body to help against e.g. breaking bones, a cut throat is still lethal. But not with F-Gold.

The most impressive Compounding powers are probably Atium (though only really available in Era 1, except for Marsh), Gold, and Steel, though Pewter and Zinc are also super impressive. Bronze Compounding (never need to sleep) is also pretty cool. F-Gold + F-Steel is probably near invincibility, and combining that with A-Atium is just unfair. Add in F-Pewter for one-hit-kill strikes...

Even without access to atium (say in Era 2) Zinc Compounding to process the shadows of A-Electrum might be nearly as good.

Weaknesses

But, there are limits...

1) Availability of metal. Generally, not all the metals are available. In Era 1, they have atium (and potentially malatium - TLR knew of it - not that it's terribly useful) but chromium/nicrosil and cadmium/bendalloy aren't available. (TLR presumably knew they existed, but the Final Empire didn't have the technology to make them.)

So you either get the near-invincibility of A-Atium and the near-endless youth of Atium Compounding, or Leeching and time bubbles, but not both.

2) F-Gold healing needs metalminds on the body to work. Therefore, it presumably can't save even a Compounder from anything that melts away/vaporizes the metalminds, or blows the body apart sufficiently that the metalminds are no longer attached to the largest piece of body. In Era 1, or even AoL times, with relatively limited power weapons, it's effectively true invulnerability (Miles survives dynamite he's holding trivially). But as technology advances, that should change.

3) The amount of power a Fullborn has is limited to how much metal they can fit in their stomach (to burn) or how much power fits in their metalminds (Feruchemically). They don't actually have infinite attributes - they can't become a black hole with infinite weight, or travel at the speed of light with infinite speed, etc. And Feruchemy has diminishing returns at high rates of tapping, so it's likely that the limits are a lot more sane than they appear at first glance. Wax can use months of weight to become "heavier than a building", but I doubt even a Fullborn with several pounds of completely full by Compounding ironminds could become as heavy as a mountain.

4) Leeching still works. And with a primer cube, Leeching can be an area effect...

5) Aluminum is still a problem. A Fullborn still can't Riot/Soothe through an aluminum hat or Push/Pull on aluminum. Even A-Atium won't save a Fullborn from aluminum bullets (aluminum doesn't have an atium shadow). F-Gold healing won't get an aluminum bullet out of them (it will presumably keep them from outright dying, but staying alive with bullets in vital organs is probably going to burn health at a horrific rate).

Also going to say what I said in the other thread - the bands had about 24cc of each metal. After diminishing returns, that is a huge amount of investiture per cc. Memories must be incredibly investiture intensive for keepers to where that much copper other than for orientation.

2 and 3 (for tapping) can be mitigated with realmatic shenanagains, by sending metalminds to the spiritual realm.

4 and 5 are issues, but Electrum should help with that.

On 3/2/2023 at 5:54 AM, Trusk'our said:

I don't know about that. It could be that Hemalurgy was used to augment the creator of the Bands, so the powers stored would be stronger.

I'm hesitant to believe that nicrosil Compounding leads to an increase in Allomantic potential, but we just don't know for sure yet. This quote makes it sound to me like when you tap a Nicrosilmind you just get back what you put in, rather than being able to compress the power as you can with most Feruchemy. Although, maybe it means specifically that Malwish medallions work kind of like this, which might make them something different than your vanilla Identity-blanked Metalmind, which is something I haden't considered before, but would make sense.

And even then, I suppose that you could actively burn Nicrosilminds to bring in a constant influx of raw Allomantic potential, which itself is effected and enhanced by its own burning. If it is possible to do so, I think that there would likely still be a practical upper limit, but it would probably be very high.

That shouldn't matter - we don't know the decay rates, so we can only calculate at 100% effeciency, and metal can only store so much no matter the strength of the fuerochemist.

I want to see that.

[therunner he/him]

28 minutes ago, IlstrawberrySeed said:

Also going to say what I said in the other thread - the bands had about 24cc of each metal. After diminishing returns, that is a huge amount of investiture per cc. Memories must be incredibly investiture intensive for keepers to where that much copper other than for orientation.

Or Bands of Mourning did not actually contain attributes, but raw Investiture (e.g. Mists). I have a whole theory on that

Quote

2 and 3 (for tapping) can be mitigated with realmatic shenanagains, by sending metalminds to the spiritual realm.

4 and 5 are issues, but Electrum should help with that.

You cannot send metalminds to spiritual realm or cognitive realm, how woudl that even work? Fullborn has no access to realmatic travel, and metalminds must be on person.

Electrum won't show you getting affected by emotional allomancy, so leeching would also not show.

[Mistchemist16]

32 minutes ago, therunner said:

Electrum won't show you getting affected by emotional allomancy, so leeching would also not show.

Yes and no. It wouldn’t be automatically obvious if you were leeched in future shadows. However, any electrum Allomancer worth their salt should have trained themself with signals so the shadows can communicate less obvious events. So the Fullborn simply develops a hand sign that means they’re being leeched and then that can be seen while burning electrum. Plus, Fullborn have F-Steel and F-Zinc: the latter of which should always be giving 2-3 times mental speed minimum at all times. And all of that doesn’t also account for the future seeing shenanigans from Compounding chromium or perhaps even future sight via F-Tin (assuming it’s possible)

[therunner he/him]

7 hours ago, Mistchemist16 said:

Yes and no. It wouldn’t be automatically obvious if you were leeched in future shadows. However, any electrum Allomancer worth their salt should have trained themself with signals so the shadows can communicate less obvious events. So the Fullborn simply develops a hand sign that means they’re being leeched and then that can be seen while burning electrum. Plus, Fullborn have F-Steel and F-Zinc: the latter of which should always be giving 2-3 times mental speed minimum at all times. And all of that doesn’t also account for the future seeing shenanigans from Compounding chromium or perhaps even future sight via F-Tin (assuming it’s possible)

Hand signals for such effects is a smart thing. To use it properly would require F-Zinc i think, because A-Electrum does not help process the information way Atium does, but Fullborn has access to that so that should not be an issue.

The only complication I see is that A-Electrum shows only Fullborn, nothing else, so even though Fullborn will now they will get leeched 2-3 seconds earlier, the don't know how that happens. And if it is area effect, it can be difficult for them to avoid it anyway.

How exactly would F-tin grant future sight?

[alder24]

15 hours ago, therunner said:

So, you quickly run into physical limitations. If filling BB sized metalmind can be done within ~month of time, then at most Fullborn can have something around ~100000 months of attribute available at any given time, more then that would require too much metalminds (this already requires Fullborn to wear on him 48 kilograms of just metalminds). And time to do this is on the order of ~16*1 month for initial storing + 16*(10000+1000+100+10+1) hours, so about 260 months of pure time, i.e. more than 20 years of doing nothing but compounding. No practicing with powers, socializing, sleeping, eating, nothing. Bendalloy would help to 'cut down' externally perceived time, but that would require a lot of bendalloy.
Even if burning the original BB sized pellet took only 10 minutes on average across all metals, then it would still require doing nothing but compounding for ~3.3 years non-stop.

That's very nice math. I like it. But few notes - you can flare the compounding metal, making it burn much faster. And you can use duralumin, to release all power at once, which I believe could be stored into new metalminds if done fast enough with proper training. It can be dangerous but controllable:

Spoiler

Questioner

What happens if you burn duralumin while Compounding?

Brandon Sanderson

Duralumin while Compounding. So, what duralumin does is it burns out of all of your metal in one burst. So it doesn't necessarily gain you power, it makes it all happen at the same time. The same thing would happen.

Questioner

Could you turn into a baby?

Brandon Sanderson

Oh, you could totally turn into a baby. That is within the power of using that, doing <health wrong>, yeah you could totally... You'd be really dangerous.

Questioner

But it wouldn't really do much?

Brandon Sanderson

Oh it would have explosive... it does things really fast. That's what it does. Yes you could achieve very powerful sudden effects through that. It'd be scary. Controlling it can be dangerous, regardless of which metal you use.

Arcanum Unbounded Seattle signing (Dec. 1, 2016)

Next, instead of using a BB sized metalmind, you can start with a single flake, and later compound it to bigger and bigger size, cutting the initial storing time significantly. With this and duralumin trick, you are now not restricted by the time you need to accumulate big amounts of attributes. But you are still limited by a metal you can carry with you. 

I do believe that the metalminds can store more than you assumed, afterall Marasi in BoM was moving with supersonic speeds for long enough to notice people raising their hands to cover ears from a sonic boom. Yes, she was burning it at an extreme rate, but still that should be more than 0.1s. However it’s hard to put a good number on it, as all we have are assumptions at that point.

15 hours ago, therunner said:

• Tapping at 10x speeds, to get total of 10+1 the human speed (i.e. 9*11 = 99 m/s), the time would 0.05 hours = 3 minutes (with original store being 100% (9m/s) speed for 100 hours)

To put that into perspective, in 3 minutes you would travel 18km. That's wild. Almost as fast as some jet airplanes (150-250 m/s).

[MangoBoi101 he/him]

Is anyone else starting to wonder how tlr died?

I had no idea how strong these guys were. 

Ok do we know what would happen if you duralium burned atium? I feel like that would be a lot of power.

[Trusk'our he/him]

21 minutes ago, MangoBoi101 said:

Is anyone else starting to wonder how tlr died?

Depression, mostly. He could have stomped Vin pretty much at his leisure, but after 1,000 years of life, he was basically only continuing to live to spite Ruin. And then, once Vin drew in the Mists, it was too late for him to stop her from pulling out his Metalminds.

23 minutes ago, MangoBoi101 said:

Ok do we know what would happen if you duralium burned atium? I feel like that would be a lot of power.

Have you read HoA yet? If so...

Spoiler

Elend does this, and briefly gains access to the spiritual realm in full- basically, he saw a vision of the future rather than seeing Atium shadows as would normally happen.

 

25 minutes ago, MangoBoi101 said:

I had no idea how strong these guys were. 

We're pretty sure that they are extremely powerful, but until we get a better understanding in canonically written works, we're mostly speculating with their true potential. But even so, yeah, Fullborn with the abilites we've already seen would be very powerful.

[Trusk'our he/him]

16 hours ago, therunner said:

Sideposting from Fullborn vs 5th Ideal Windrunner thread, because I think the math is relevant.

Most of the power of Fullborn comes from Compounding, and the levels of stores Feruchemists simply don't have access to, so I will focus on that.
Two parts, one is the preparation of metalminds, the second actually tapping.

Part 1: Metalminds preparation
Assume, that you can fill a BB sized metalmind (0.3 grams) to fullness in about a month, so you have ~one month worth of attribute (for simplicity assuming you can store all of the attribute, i.e. 100%). Then you need to do that 16 times, and yes some can be done at the same time.

Then you need to burn these to Compound, where burn speed will play role. Most vials contain flakes of metals which will be fractions of a gram I would assume, and BB pellets are about ~0.3 gram. So you would burn that for minutes or hours, depending on the metal. We will take the upper bound, so 1 hour to burn BB pellet. If you disagree, simply rescale the numbers that result by the ratio of hour to your estimate for burning the BB pellet.

You need to repeat that many times, and each time you need 10x bigger piece of metal to store in, and so they would take up 10x as much time to burn the metalmind.

After doing this four times, you would need to burn each of your metalminds for ~10000 hours to compound again, and at that point they weight around 16*300 grams in total, and you need 48 kilograms of metal to store in.

So, you quickly run into physical limitations. If filling BB sized metalmind can be done within ~month of time, then at most Fullborn can have something around ~100000 months of attribute available at any given time, more then that would require too much metalminds (this already requires Fullborn to wear on him 48 kilograms of just metalminds). And time to do this is on the order of ~16*1 month for initial storing + 16*(10000+1000+100+10+1) hours, so about 260 months of pure time, i.e. more than 20 years of doing nothing but compounding. No practicing with powers, socializing, sleeping, eating, nothing. Bendalloy would help to 'cut down' externally perceived time, but that would require a lot of bendalloy.
Even if burning the original BB sized pellet took only 10 minutes on average across all metals, then it would still require doing nothing but compounding for ~3.3 years non-stop.

Part 2: Tapping inefficiency in feruchemy

Per this WoB (https://wob.coppermind.net/events/243/#e6126) the feruchemy is increasingly inefficient the harder you tap . If we look at example of F-steel (slightly borrowing from early post in Scadrial vs Roshar post RoW),  and try to figure out what penalties would be for n-fold tapping speed. I also assume that 100% speed for movement (running, walking etc.) is 9m/s, as that is roughly what above average person can sustain for a 100 meter dash.

We assume that the increasing tapping is not getting progressively difficult, just equally difficult. At 2x tapping we get 5/6 inefficiency, at 3x we get 1/2 inefficiency, ratio of these is 3/5, so then in the most optimistic scenario the penalty when tapping n-fold is 5/6(3/5)^(n-1). If I had 100 hours of 100% speed stored the time I would get out when tapping n-fold would be 100/n *5/6 * (3/5)^(n-1), so

1. Tapping at 10x speeds, to get total of 10+1 the human speed (i.e. 9*11 = 99 m/s), the time would 0.05 hours = 3 minutes (with original store being 100% (9m/s) speed for 100 hours)
2. Tapping at 20x speeds, to get total of 20+1 the human speed (i.e. 9*21 = 189 m/s), the time would be 0.00015 hours = 0.5 second
3. Tapping at 30x speeds, to get total of 30+1 the human speed (i.e. 9*31 = 279 m/s), the time would be 6*10^(-7) hours = 0.0022 second = 22 ms
4. Tapping at 40x speeds, to get total of 35+1 the human speed (i.e. 9*41 = 369 m/s, our first sonic speed!), the time would be 0.00001 second = 0.1 ms
    

Now, in light of the fact that Fullborn can have optimistically at most ~100 000 months of any given attribute at his person at a time (however with each metalmind weighting around 3 kilograms) then Fullborn has at most 30*24*100000 = 72 000 000 hours of 100% speed stored, which would enable them to move at mildly sonic speed for about ~72 seconds. Higher Machs would he exponentially more difficult to achieve, and with those stores would be basically impossible to sustain for more than a milisecond.

So either storing in the BB sized metalmind to fill it completely up takes more than a month, in fact considerably longer (~years). Or even Fullborn with full stores can move at Mach 1 for a minute at most, before running completely dry. And getting to that level of stores would take Fullborn years or possibly decades.

So based on this Fullborn would be a lot weaker than typically assumed.

We don't yet know how full a Metalmind's stores can be for its size, and apparently, it's not even linear: being able to put a month of attributes inside a BB sized piece of metal doesn't necessarily mean that you could put ten times the Investiture inside a Metalmind ten times the size.

Quote

JordanCon 2016 - Arcanum (coppermind.net)

Questioner

I was wondering if the size of a piece of metal determines the amount of Feruchemical charge that can be stored in it.

Brandon Sanderson

Yes.

Questioner

So how does that scale, like, in terms of the volume or mass of the metal or...

Brandon Sanderson

It-- So I've talked about this before, I'm trying to remember exactly what I've told people-- It does not scale as logically as you think it does. How about that? It's more like certain thresholds. You can have a-- You can store a Hemalurgic or Feruchemical charge even in very small pieces of metal, but larger pieces of metal will let you get more.

Questioner

So it's kind of like there are different classes of sizes?

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah, kind of like that.

Plus, we don't actually know what the inefficiency of tapping Metalminds at accelerated rates is.

I'd love to know for certain though, so I'm hoping that Sanderson gets around to getting some in-world characters to measure it out soon.

I'm not trying to disabuse you from the notion that Fullborn aren't invincible though: you have a pretty good point that their upper limits would not allow them to have unlimited Feruchemical stores, but I don't think that we have enough information at this point to really make accurate calculations about their abilities- though it's still fun to try 

[cometaryorbit]

On 3/3/2023 at 5:15 PM, IlstrawberrySeed said:

Also going to say what I said in the other thread - the bands had about 24cc of each metal. After diminishing returns, that is a huge amount of investiture per cc. Memories must be incredibly investiture intensive for keepers to where that much copper other than for orientation.

Keepers stored a ton of knowledge- all the knowledge of the whole organization, not just their specialty. I believe they spent years in training, and much of that was storing a library in copper.

And I think 24cc is actually quite a lot compared to most metalminds - often bracelets, rings or earrings. The wedding ring I'm wearing now has got to be much less than 1 cc, and it's a reasonably broad band - many rings are very thin. Bracelets would of course be a lot more, but 1 cc isn't that small an amount of metal - it's equivalent to a large coin (a US quarter is a bit less than 1 cc).

Edited March 5, 2023 by cometaryorbit

[therunner he/him]

18 hours ago, Trusk'our said:

We don't yet know how full a Metalmind's stores can be for its size, and apparently, it's not even linear: being able to put a month of attributes inside a BB sized piece of metal doesn't necessarily mean that you could put ten times the Investiture inside a Metalmind ten times the size.
 

Thanks for that WoB that is interesting
Technically this could either help or hinder Fullborn, depending on how spaced out the 'classes' are.
 

Quote

Plus, we don't actually know what the inefficiency of tapping Metalminds at accelerated rates is.

I'd love to know for certain though, so I'm hoping that Sanderson gets around to getting some in-world characters to measure it out soon.

I'm not trying to disabuse you from the notion that Fullborn aren't invincible though: you have a pretty good point that their upper limits would not allow them to have unlimited Feruchemical stores, but I don't think that we have enough information at this point to really make accurate calculations about their abilities- though it's still fun to try 

We have that one old WoB which is more to just give an idea that it happens. Basically the case I have above is sort of 'best case' scenario based on the information we have. If for example the penalty grows, then even Fullborn would have trouble accessing such speeds for example.
However, it is wildly speculative at this point.

However, considering what we see from BoM I think the estimate is about the right ballpark, i.e. Fullborn can get at best minutes of supersonic speeds, and Compounding stores to that level will take a lot of time (i.e. years)

I do maintain that Duralumin is not suitable for speeding Compounding up, a lot of tricks that removed serious limitations on magic systems are restricted by Brandon to not be possible (or at minimum being heavily non-trivial and requiring special set up).

[IlstrawberrySeed]

On 3/3/2023 at 3:46 PM, therunner said:

Or Bands of Mourning did not actually contain attributes, but raw Investiture (e.g. Mists). I have a whole theory on that

You cannot send metalminds to spiritual realm or cognitive realm, how woudl that even work? Fullborn has no access to realmatic travel, and metalminds must be on person.

Electrum won't show you getting affected by emotional allomancy, so leeching would also not show.

I'll read the theory, but why can't one tap/fill a metalmind your touching in the cognitive or spiritual? And it would use a perpendicularity.

On 3/5/2023 at 0:28 AM, therunner said:

Thanks for that WoB that is interesting
Technically this could either help or hinder Fullborn, depending on how spaced out the 'classes' are.
 

We have that one old WoB which is more to just give an idea that it happens. Basically the case I have above is sort of 'best case' scenario based on the information we have. If for example the penalty grows, then even Fullborn would have trouble accessing such speeds for example.
However, it is wildly speculative at this point.

However, considering what we see from BoM I think the estimate is about the right ballpark, i.e. Fullborn can get at best minutes of supersonic speeds, and Compounding stores to that level will take a lot of time (i.e. years)

I do maintain that Duralumin is not suitable for speeding Compounding up, a lot of tricks that removed serious limitations on magic systems are restricted by Brandon to not be possible (or at minimum being heavily non-trivial and requiring special set up).

A fullborn is best with lots of small metalminds because of durilium unless the investiture/gram increases drastically.