Gold healing does not make sense

[therunner he/him]

So, Gold healing does not make sense to me.

Basically, one thing we know about Feruchemy is that tapping a lot of attribute at once leads to losses, which means regular Ferrings could easily waste all their resources in very inefficient manner.

However, Wayne can heal gunshot wounds in minutes, despite only having few weeks worth of health in his metalminds. However, gunshots typically take few weeks to heal with modern medical care, and more on their own.
So if there is loss in Feruchemy, how come Wayne can seemingly tap nearly all his health at once without worry and heal all that damage ~360 000x as fast as naturally? Based on the loss he should run out after like a milisecond, and not heal nearly anything.

The only explanation I can think off is that the usual loss in tapping large amounts does not happen for F-Gold, because the origin of the loss is that Feruchemy 'fights' against spiritweb to maintain the changes. However, since F-Gold heals by restoring physical body according to spiritual ideal, this 'fight' does not happen there. This would allow Wayne to heal gunshot wound in minutes with only few weeks of stored health, because the loss would not be there so he could tap nearly all of it at once.

Thoughts?

Edited March 5, 2023 by therunner

[Werewolff Studios he/him]

I think you've nailed it with this section here. This is how I've always seen it working.

52 minutes ago, therunner said:

The only explanation I can think off is that the usual loss in tapping large amounts does not happen for F-Gold, because the origin of the loss is that Feruchemy 'fights' against spiritweb to maintain the changes. However, since F-Gold heals by restoring physical body according to spiritual ideal, this 'fight' does not happen there. This would allow Wayne to heal gunshot wound in minutes with only few weeks of stored health, because the loss would not be there so he could tap nearly all of it at once.

All other attributes warp the spiritweb, but gold healing strengthens it. Though there probably is still some decay, it's likely not as high as other metalminds. 

Great observation! 

[alder24]

Wayne stores the health of his entire body, and taps it to heal just a very small portion of his body, thus health is healing just that part, and it is much more focused, and he can heal more and faster if wounds are small. I believe loss should still be there, and I think even it was told in Era 2 when Wayne didn't have enough health, he had to heal much slower because he couldn't heal it all at once, which tells that loss is still there. No idea where it was said, or how, I just remember something like that mentioned. 

From AoL, 2 weeks for healing 3 gunshot wounds:

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"That was the second bullet wound of the night,” Wayne said. “I can maybe heal one more.” Wayne stood as Waxillium pulled him to his feet. “Took me a good two weeks in bed to store up that much. Hope that girl of yours is worth it.”

The feruchemical loss is because of the compression of investiture to facilitate faster burning rate, not "fight against spiritweb". 

Spoiler

Sporkify

This is more towards the whole physics stuff, but is Feruchemy really balanced? If it gives diminishing returns, wouldn't this end up as a net loss of power?

Brandon Sanderson

It doesn't diminish. Or, well, it does—but only if you compound it. You get 1 for 1 back, but compounding the power requires an expenditure of the power itself. For instance, if you are weak for one hour, you can gain the lost strength for one hour. But that's not really that much strength. After all, you probably weren't as weak as zero people during that time. So if you want to be as strong as two men, you couldn't do it for a full hour. You'd have to spend some energy to compound, then spend the compounded energy itself.

In more mathematical terms, let's say you spend one hour at 50% strength. You could then spend one hour at 150% strength, or perhaps 25 min at 200% strength, or maybe 10min at 250% strength. Each increment is harder, and therefore 'strains' you more and burns your energy more quickly. And since most Feruchemists don't store at 50% strength, but instead at something like 80% strength (it feels like much more when they do it, but you can't really push the body to that much forced weakness without risking death) you can burn through a few day's strength in a very short time if you aren't careful.

Footnote: This question was asked when fueling Feruchemy with Allomancy had only been seen in Rashek. As such, the term compounding is used purely to reference tapping at a higher rate than can be stored.
Hero of Ages Q&A - Time Waster's Guide (Oct. 15, 2008)

 

[Treamayne]

1 hour ago, therunner said:

So, Gold healing does not make sense to me.

<snip>

Thoughts?

Keep in mind that the loss in power when "compounding" (tapping at a rate greater than the rate of storage) has been confirmed as being because power is expended to increase the rate of access. WoB (Note: this WoB is from before when "Compounding" was set as the canon term for using Allomancy to fuel Feruchemy)

Spoiler

Brandon Sanderson       (Oct. 15, 2008)

It doesn't diminish. Or, well, it does—but only if you compound it. You get 1 for 1 back, but compounding the power requires an expenditure of the power itself. For instance, if you are weak for one hour, you can gain the lost strength for one hour. But that's not really that much strength. After all, you probably weren't as weak as zero people during that time. So if you want to be as strong as two men, you couldn't do it for a full hour. You'd have to spend some energy to compound, then spend the compounded energy itself.

Have you read Elantris? It might help understand what is happening. If you have read it (or don't care about spoilers - Elantris Ch 53):

Spoiler

Quote

Roial’s eyes focused, perceiving for the first time the Aon that Spirit was drawing above him. He breathed out in awe. “Have you returned the beautiful city as well?”

Spirit didn’t respond, instead concentrating on his Aon. He drew differently from the way he had before, his fingers moving more dexterously and quickly. He finished the Aon with a small line near the bottom. It began to glow warmly, bathing Roial in its light. As Sarene watched, the edges of Roial’s wound seemed to pull together slightly. A scratch on Roial’s face disappeared, and several of the liver spots on his scalp faded.

Then the light fell away, the wound still belching blood with each futile pump of the duke’s dying heart.

Spirit cursed. “It’s too weak,” he said, desperately beginning another Aon. “And I haven’t studied the healing modifiers! I don’t know how to target just one part of the body.”

Roial reached up with a quivering arm and grabbed Spirit’s hand. The partially completed Aon faded away as the duke’s movement caused Spirit to make a mistake. Spirit did not start again, bowing his head as if weeping.

F-Gold is the opposite of this. Normal healing works slowly across the entire body. I.e. a gunshot wound won't stop your broken wrist from healing.

However, saved health in F-Gold us used only in healing the damage (unlike AonDor - where you need modifiers to get the same effect - which is part of the difference between self-healing and healing others). So just because a gunshot wound would need 3-4 months to heal without F-Gold does not mean that you need that much stored health to heal that injury. Part of the time is because natural healing can;t focus all effort on one injury.

You see a similar phenomenon in Stormlight Archive where Kaladin is healing multiple injuries and runs out of Stormlight before becoming fully healed. Investiture based self-healing heals the most dangerous damage fist and works though the injuries from most-severe to least sever - rather than like natural healing which is the same rate for all injuries at the same time (barring infection and other outside considerations).

 

[HSuperLee he/him]

I'm about to be extremely pedantic, I apologize upfront for that.

Part of how I understand this is that f-gold doesn't storing healing, it stores health. Its about the overall quality of the body, not solely the body's ability to recover from injury. So when Wayne draws 10 days worth of healing from his goldminds over 10 seconds, he's not healing at 86,400 times the speed, he's increasing the current quality of his health by 86,400 times for those 10 seconds. Yes, that has the side-effect of making him heal faster, but that's not strictly speaking what the metal does. In short, it doesn't make him heal faster, it makes him more healthy, and those are two slightly different things. If you want to think about it this way, f-gold doesn't just store healing speed but also healing quality and efficiency, and thus tapping it has a much more dramatic effect than if it was just healing speed.

I will add the caveat that I think this is something Sanderson has changed since he came up with the idea. In Hero of Ages chapter 73 we have this quote:

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There was nothing he could do. He'd used up most of the healing in his metalmind, and the rest would do him not good. Stored healing worked by way of speed. He could either heal himself a small amount very quickly, or wait and heal himself slowly, yet completely.

This doesn't seem consistent with how we've seen healing work in Era 2, which seems to indicate to me that Sanderson has reconsidered the mechanics and their effects.

All that said, the loss from tapping large amounts still likely does apply to gold. So rather than 10 days worth of gold being used in 10 seconds being a 86,400-fold modifier, its probably closer to a 80,000-fold modifier, if not lower, but that doesn't make too much of a difference considering how much of a boost even a little extra health would provide a person. I also think we tend to underestimate the power of feruchemy. A person that is twice as strong as a normal person is going to be approaching the upper limits of human strength, and that's just at a two-fold multiplier, which a feruchemist can theoretically maintain for hours with proper preparation. At a 4-fold modifier, just tapping what you stored at twice the rate you stored it, a feruchemist will beat any noninvested person in a competition of that attribute. A brute tapping four-times strength will be stronger than the strongest man, a steelrunner will be faster than the fastest, a sparker smarter than the smartest, etc. We don't really have a metric for measuring overall health in real life, but a person tapping even four-times health would be clearly and dramatically superhuman.

[therunner he/him]

8 hours ago, Treamayne said:

Keep in mind that the loss in power when "compounding" (tapping at a rate greater than the rate of storage) has been confirmed as being because power is expended to increase the rate of access. WoB (Note: this WoB is from before when "Compounding" was set as the canon term for using Allomancy to fuel Feruchemy)

  Hide contents

Brandon Sanderson       (Oct. 15, 2008)

It doesn't diminish. Or, well, it does—but only if you compound it. You get 1 for 1 back, but compounding the power requires an expenditure of the power itself. For instance, if you are weak for one hour, you can gain the lost strength for one hour. But that's not really that much strength. After all, you probably weren't as weak as zero people during that time. So if you want to be as strong as two men, you couldn't do it for a full hour. You'd have to spend some energy to compound, then spend the compounded energy itself.

Have you read Elantris? It might help understand what is happening. If you have read it (or don't care about spoilers - Elantris Ch 53):

  Reveal hidden contents

F-Gold is the opposite of this. Normal healing works slowly across the entire body. I.e. a gunshot wound won't stop your broken wrist from healing.

However, saved health in F-Gold us used only in healing the damage (unlike AonDor - where you need modifiers to get the same effect - which is part of the difference between self-healing and healing others). So just because a gunshot wound would need 3-4 months to heal without F-Gold does not mean that you need that much stored health to heal that injury. Part of the time is because natural healing can;t focus all effort on one injury.

You see a similar phenomenon in Stormlight Archive where Kaladin is healing multiple injuries and runs out of Stormlight before becoming fully healed. Investiture based self-healing heals the most dangerous damage fist and works though the injuries from most-severe to least sever - rather than like natural healing which is the same rate for all injuries at the same time (barring infection and other outside considerations).

 

Hmm, targeting healing is something I have not considered.
Do we see if F-Gold ferring can choose which wounds to heal and which not? Because if they can than this helps with the tension.
 

7 hours ago, HSuperLee said:

I'm about to be extremely pedantic, I apologize upfront for that.

Part of how I understand this is that f-gold doesn't storing healing, it stores health. Its about the overall quality of the body, not solely the body's ability to recover from injury. So when Wayne draws 10 days worth of healing from his goldminds over 10 seconds, he's not healing at 86,400 times the speed, he's increasing the current quality of his health by 86,400 times for those 10 seconds. Yes, that has the side-effect of making him heal faster, but that's not strictly speaking what the metal does. In short, it doesn't make him heal faster, it makes him more healthy, and those are two slightly different things. If you want to think about it this way, f-gold doesn't just store healing speed but also healing quality and efficiency, and thus tapping it has a much more dramatic effect than if it was just healing speed.

I will add the caveat that I think this is something Sanderson has changed since he came up with the idea. In Hero of Ages chapter 73 we have this quote:

This doesn't seem consistent with how we've seen healing work in Era 2, which seems to indicate to me that Sanderson has reconsidered the mechanics and their effects.

All that said, the loss from tapping large amounts still likely does apply to gold. So rather than 10 days worth of gold being used in 10 seconds being a 86,400-fold modifier, its probably closer to a 80,000-fold modifier, if not lower, but that doesn't make too much of a difference considering how much of a boost even a little extra health would provide a person. I also think we tend to underestimate the power of feruchemy. A person that is twice as strong as a normal person is going to be approaching the upper limits of human strength, and that's just at a two-fold multiplier, which a feruchemist can theoretically maintain for hours with proper preparation. At a 4-fold modifier, just tapping what you stored at twice the rate you stored it, a feruchemist will beat any noninvested person in a competition of that attribute. A brute tapping four-times strength will be stronger than the strongest man, a steelrunner will be faster than the fastest, a sparker smarter than the smartest, etc. We don't really have a metric for measuring overall health in real life, but a person tapping even four-times health would be clearly and dramatically superhuman.

My point is exactly that in every other quality what you put in is what you get out, i.e. spend one week half as strong, you can spend one week 1.5 as strong.

With health this should mean that you spend one week 0.5 as healthy, then you can spend one week 1.5 as healthy which would mean healing faster. Not sure why it would mean even greater increase in healing ability.

However, the inefficiency is realtively strong from the one WoB, so drawing 10 days worth of healing in 10 seconds should not result in only ~80 000-fold modifier but instead only in something like 1000 at most, which yes is still a lot, however far less then apparently needed.

[Treamayne]

3 hours ago, therunner said:

However, the inefficiency is relatively strong from the one WoB, so drawing 10 days worth of healing in 10 seconds should not result in only ~80 000-fold modifier but instead only in something like 1000 at most, which yes is still a lot, however far less then apparently needed.

I think two things are skewing your calculation here:

• The power lost is nearly a flat rate - not a proportionate decrease (though the numbers weren't exact as they were just off-the-cuff examples for the question)
• The WoB Example is by timing based on the multiplier, so the rate of loss for power based on time may be different.

In the WoB Example, 50% for 1 hr = 150% for 1 hr / 200 for 25 minutes / 250% for 10 minutes. This shows:

• The "Double" time doesn't change - what you put in comes out at the same rate and time
• The "Triple" compressions was a double-rate Tap - 1 hr ^ 2 = 30 Minutes then - 5 minutes of loss = 25 Minutes
• The "Quadruple" compression was a triple-rate Tap - 1 hr ^ 3 = 15 Minutes - 5 minutes of loss = 10 Minutes

In both examples the efficiency "loss" was 5 minutes (probably truly a bit less than 5 for the double-rate Tap - or - a bit more than 5 for the triple-rate). Since we don't have an investiture unit of measure (IU) we can't truly quantify this; but we can extrapolate. If single-rate Tap costs 0 (same in/out) then double rate costs 1 IU of investiture to compress the Tap, triple costs 2 IU, quadruple 3 IU, etc. It's possible that the compression is exponential (1IU, 2, 4, 8, etc.) but that isn't quite consistent with the text so it is hard to judge without more examples from Brandon or Peter.

[Trusk'our he/him]

14 hours ago, HSuperLee said:

I also think we tend to underestimate the power of feruchemy. A person that is twice as strong as a normal person is going to be approaching the upper limits of human strength, and that's just at a two-fold multiplier, which a feruchemist can theoretically maintain for hours with proper preparation. At a 4-fold modifier, just tapping what you stored at twice the rate you stored it, a feruchemist will beat any noninvested person in a competition of that attribute. A brute tapping four-times strength will be stronger than the strongest man, a steelrunner will be faster than the fastest, a sparker smarter than the smartest, etc. We don't really have a metric for measuring overall health in real life, but a person tapping even four-times health would be clearly and dramatically superhuman.

I think that you're absolutely right.

We seems that people often think about needing to tap attributes at ten to twenty times as much as a human normally has to be useful (at least that's what the vs threads say), but even just doubling or tripling the right attribute would be a major enhancement.

Speed especially; you don't really need to go mach 4 as a Steelrunner to be incredibly dangerous, even going twice as fast as a normal human would allow you to overwhelm most non-Invested opponents in fight.

15 hours ago, Treamayne said:

Have you read Elantris? It might help understand what is happening. If you have read it (or don't care about spoilers - Elantris Ch 53):

  Hide contents

F-Gold is the opposite of this. Normal healing works slowly across the entire body. I.e. a gunshot wound won't stop your broken wrist from healing.

However, saved health in F-Gold us used only in healing the damage (unlike AonDor - where you need modifiers to get the same effect - which is part of the difference between self-healing and healing others). So just because a gunshot wound would need 3-4 months to heal without F-Gold does not mean that you need that much stored health to heal that injury. Part of the time is because natural healing can;t focus all effort on one injury.

You see a similar phenomenon in Stormlight Archive where Kaladin is healing multiple injuries and runs out of Stormlight before becoming fully healed. Investiture based self-healing heals the most dangerous damage fist and works though the injuries from most-severe to least sever - rather than like natural healing which is the same rate for all injuries at the same time (barring infection and other outside considerations).

 

Yeah, Feruchemical gold doesn't actually mimic natural healing in its mechanics, which makes sense, since you'd have to spend too long storing health for it to be an interesting power on its own. 

A similar thing happens with Feruchemical iron and Allomantic bendalloy; the powers don't quite work the way we expect them to, since narratively they wouldn't be useful enough- or too useful- to be interesting.

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The Alloy of Law Annotations (Nov. 30, 2015)

Brandon Sanderson

Chapter Twelve

The group investigates the railroad tracks and canal

So, let's talk about the realities of speed bubbles. I did research on this, and got different answers from people on what really should happen if you could slow time like this. One of the issues is that light doesn't change speeds based on this sort of issue, so there was discussion of what things would look like inside looking out or outside looking in. It seems likely that there'd be some sort of red shift, and also that things might grow more dim inside a speed bubble. This is all really very theoretical, however, and so, in the end, I decided that there was enough disagreement among scientists with whom I spoke that it wouldn't be glaringly irregular if I just had the shimmer at the borders and stayed away from dealing with speed of light issues.

There's a much larger issue dealing with slowed time that rarely gets addressed by this type of fiction. I considered using it, and it's this: conservation of energy. Inside the speed bubble, Wax and Wayne are moving far more quickly, and therefore have a ton of kinetic energy compared to those outside of it. And so, a coin tossed from inside the bubble going outside would suddenly move with a proportional increase in speed (proportional to how much slower things were outside).

In essence, speed bubble = railgun.

This is dangerous for narrative reasons. I've often said that the limitations of a power are more interesting than the powers themselves. (It's Sanderson’s Second Law of Magics: Limitations > Powers.) One of the reasons for removing Mistborn and Full Feruchemists from the setting was so that we could focus in on the usefulness of the individual powers in Allomancy and Feruchemy. That falls by the wayside if any of the individual powers become too strong on their own.

I didn't want Wayne to be able to slow time, then sit inside his bubble and leisurely pick off enemies one at a time. And so, I had to place strong limitations on the speed bubbles. (Much stronger limitations than on other aspects of Allomancy. Pushing and Pulling, for example, have their limitations based in solid science. With speed bubbles, I eventually decided that solid science made them way too powerful. So I had to change things.) Therefore, the rules became: No shooting/throwing things out of speed bubbles, no moving speed bubbles, and a required couple second cool-down between creating different speed bubbles. The first rule broke required objects to be deflected when leaving the bubble and that we have the bubble absorb excess kinetic energy when something leaves it.

Disappointing for the scientists, I know, but it makes for a stronger story.

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General Reddit 2016 (Feb. 19, 2016)

Phantine

I actually asked Peter Ahlstrom (who tends to handle math and magic system interactions with physics for Team Sanderson) about this a little while ago

A couple of friends and I are discussing if the iron feruchemy causing changes in speed is a retcon (since there's a mention in AoL that "increasing his weight manyfold would not affect his motion"), or if the effect is just more complicated (like only causing an instant change in speed if Wax changes weight while actively pushing on something).

Are you willing to weigh in on that, or is it just something we shouldn't be thinking too hard about?

Thanks

And his response was

I just don't know the answer to this question.

So I personally think the explanation is either 'Brandon thought it would be cooler for shifting your weight to change your velocity, and forgot he had mentioned it a couple times' or 'this is Wax's twinborn perk'. I'm leaning towards the latter, since the person who writes the magic system summaries at the end of the book specifically interrogated Wax about the effects, and mentioned she specifically was interested in his very unusual power combination.

As for the density thing, there is an explicit mention that you appear to get stronger when tapping, but only to the extent that you can still stand up and walk around - you still have more difficulty moving around overall. So (to pull out random numbers), if you're at 200% normal mass, you have 180% normal strength, and at 50% mass you have 60% normal strength. That means Wax habitually going around at 75% weight so he's 'light on his feet' makes sense - even if he's weaker overall, he's proportionally stronger.

The way I personally think about things for bullets or whatever, anything 'inside' the body (where 'inside' is defined in the same way that pushing/pulling metal 'inside' the body uses it) interacts with your body as if it were normal. So tapping iron doesn't cause your ultra-massive blood to be impossible for your heart to pump, but it also doesn't prevent a bullet from passing through your flesh. That seems to be consistent with how it's portrayed in the books.

Brandon Sanderson

Just a note: in the quote of mine above, I was trying (I believe) to find a way for Wax to indicate that weight doesn't influence the rate at which he falls. IE, acceleration in regards to gravity. It's tough, and I made the call (perhaps incorrectly) not to use modern physics terminology in the W&W books. It has been very hard then to explain:

1). Wax changing his weight doesn't change the pull of gravity on him, or the rate at which he falls. 2) He DOES follow the laws of conservation of momentum.

My talking around these things has let me to tie a few paragraphs in knots.

 

Edited March 6, 2023 by Trusk'our

[therunner he/him]

2 hours ago, Treamayne said:

I think two things are skewing your calculation here:

• The power lost is nearly a flat rate - not a proportionate decrease (though the numbers weren't exact as they were just off-the-cuff examples for the question)
• The WoB Example is by timing based on the multiplier, so the rate of loss for power based on time may be different.

In the WoB Example, 50% for 1 hr = 150% for 1 hr / 200 for 25 minutes / 250% for 10 minutes. This shows:

• The "Double" time doesn't change - what you put in comes out at the same rate and time
• The "Triple" compressions was a double-rate Tap - 1 hr ^ 2 = 30 Minutes then - 5 minutes of loss = 25 Minutes
• The "Quadruple" compression was a triple-rate Tap - 1 hr ^ 3 = 15 Minutes - 5 minutes of loss = 10 Minutes

In both examples the efficiency "loss" was 5 minutes (probably truly a bit less than 5 for the double-rate Tap - or - a bit more than 5 for the triple-rate). Since we don't have an investiture unit of measure (IU) we can't truly quantify this; but we can extrapolate. If single-rate Tap costs 0 (same in/out) then double rate costs 1 IU of investiture to compress the Tap, triple costs 2 IU, quadruple 3 IU, etc. It's possible that the compression is exponential (1IU, 2, 4, 8, etc.) but that isn't quite consistent with the text so it is hard to judge without more examples from Brandon or Peter.

Problem is that the loss has to be increasing the more you compress, otherwise TLR would be able to use F-Atium to be immortal indefinately, however that is not the case per WoBs.

Eventually he would be unable to get enough attribute to stay alive, because the loss would be too much. The WoB in question (https://wob.coppermind.net/events/188/#e3923) and the relevant paragraph
 

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Doom-Slayer

So how do the exact mechanics of Feruchemy in relation to Compounding work?

This confusion is primarily around how [the Lord Ruler] gets his near infinite age.

Okay. So first off, I understand the concept of how they work. Feruchemy is net zero, Allomancy is net positive, combine them and you end with a net positive Feruchemy ability.

So how Feruchemy normally works... you take say weight, store half your normal weight and then you can access it whenever you want. So you (originally X weight) are taking A weight, storing it, and then you are at (X-A) weight, with access to A. So we have a metalmind that store magnitude with the efficiency of how its received based on how quickly or slowly it is drawn upon.

All the metalminds except atium seem to act this way. Atium seems to work as storing magnitude/time rather than just magnitude. The way I understand it is that say a 30 year old person becomes 50 years old for 1 day, this would give access to 20 years difference for a 1 day period.

The Lord Ruler then exploits this by gaining access to say 20 years difference over 10 days (magnification by Compounding) which he then slowly feeds into himself to lower his age.

Why this difference? I'm assuming its to maintain a neutral "body age" because with just magnitude a person could permanently make themselves younger by Compounding.

With just magnitude of "20 years of youth" being stored, if the Lord Ruler magnified it, he could turn it into "200 years of youth" and then he would never need the constant stream off youth (and wouldn't have died without the bracelets)

Hope this makes sense.

Brandon Sanderson

All right, so there are a few things you have to understand about cosmere magics to grok all of this.

First, is that magics can be hacked together. You'll see more of this in the future of the cosmere, but an early one is the hack here--where you're essentially powering Feruchemy with Allomancy. (A little more complex than that, but it seems like you get the idea.)

The piece you're missing is the nature of a person's Spiritual aspect. This is similar to a Platonic idea--the idea that there's a perfect version of everyone somewhere. It's a mix of their connections to places, people, and times with raw Investiture. The soul, you might say.

(Note that over time, a person's perception of themselves shapes their Cognitive aspect as well, and the Cognitive aspect can interfere with the Spiritual aspect trying to make the Physical aspect repair itself.) Healing in the cosmere often works by aligning your Physical self with your Spiritual self--making the Physical regrow. More powerful forms of Investiture can repair the soul as well.

However, your age is part of your Connection to places, people, and times. Your soul "knows" things, like where you were born, what Investiture you are aligned with, and--yes--how old you are. When you're healing yourself, you're restoring yourself to a perfect state--when you're done, everything is good. When you're changing your age, however, you are transforming yourself to something unnatural. Against what your soul understands to be true.

So the Spiritual aspect will push for a restoration to the way you should be. With this Compounding hack, you're not changing connection; it's a purely Physical Realm change.

This dichotomy cannot remain for long. And the greater the disparity, the more pressure the spirit will exert. Ten or twenty years won't matter much. A thousand will matter a lot. So the only way to use Compounding to change your age is to store up all this extra youth in a metalmind, then be constantly tapping it to counteract the soul's attempt to restore you to how you should be.

Yes, all of this means there are FAR more efficient means of counteracting aging than the one used by the Lord Ruler. It's a hack, and not meant to be terribly efficient. Eventually, he wouldn't have been able to maintain himself this way at all. Changing Connection (or even involving ones Cognitive Aspect a little more) would have been far more efficient, though actively more difficult.

Though this is the point where I ping [Peter Ahlstrom] and get him to double-check all this. Once in a while, my fingers still type the wrong term in places. (See silvereye vs tineye.)

General Reddit 2015 (Nov. 20, 2015)  

So the loss is increasing the more 'unnatural' the result of tapping.

[Treamayne]

3 minutes ago, therunner said:

Problem is that the loss has to be increasing the more you compress, otherwise TLR would be able to use F-Atium to be immortal indefinately, however that is not the case per WoBs.

Eventually he would be unable to get enough attribute to stay alive, because the loss would be too much. The WoB in question (https://wob.coppermind.net/events/188/#e3923) and the relevant paragraph
 

So the loss is increasing the more 'unnatural' the result of tapping.

There are two major differences here:

• The WoBs you are quoting are about Compounding (actual compounding - using Allomancy to fuel Feruchemy rather than the Compression of Feruchemical Stores which Brandon used to call compounding in older Words of Brandon)
• The specific example of compounded age is because TLR was trying to prevent his body's age from matching his actual age as "known" by his Spiritweb. 

I understand what you are saying, and I don't really disagree - except in quantity of loss. your example:

7 hours ago, therunner said:

drawing 10 days worth of healing in 10 seconds should not result in only ~80 000-fold modifier but instead only in something like 1000 at most

Implies a 99% loss of stored investiture to "Compression cost." That simply does not match what we know of compressing Feruchemical stores (by simply tapping at a rate faster than it was stored). 

Really, based on the examples from Sazed fighting at the gates (WoA) and Wax demolishing the shack with a weight-enhanced Push (AoL) I beleive the closest generic formula we could use to describe the rate of Tapped investiture would be something like:

• Given a storage rate of 1IU per second; the rate Taps at:
  • Single: 1IU per second
  • Double: 2.1 IUs per second
  • Triple: 3.3 IUs per second
  • Quadruple: 4.6 IUs per second
  • Quintuple: 6 IUs per second
  • etc.

Compressing the storage means you are not only using more of the storage to get the compressed result; but you are using that storage faster because there is investiture lost in compressing the trait. To equate that to an in-world example - WoA:

Spoiler

Ch 19

Quote

 

 He held firm to the tip of the tree, thinking quickly. Several koloss were already pushing their way into the stand. If he dropped to the ground, he’d be too slow to escape. As always, he wore a pewtermind; he could easily become as strong as ten men, and maintain it for a good amount of time. He could fight, perhaps….

Yet, the koloss carried crude-looking, but massive, swords. Sazed’s notes, his memory, and his lore all agreed: Koloss were very dangerous warriors. Strong as ten men or not, Sazed wouldn’t have the skill to defeat them.

 

Ch 52

Quote

 

But if I don’t do something, nobody will.

He tapped pewter.

His muscles grew. He drew deeply upon his pewtermind as he dashed forward, taking more strength than he ever had before. He had spent years storing up strength, rarely finding occasion to use it, and now he tapped that reserve.

His body changed, weak scholar’s arms transforming into massive, bulky limbs. His chest widened, bulging, and his muscles grew taut with power. Days spent fragile and frail focused on this single moment. He shoved his way through the ranks of soldiers, pulling his robe over his head as it grew too restrictive, leaving himself wearing only a vestigial loincloth.

 

Ch 53

Quote

Sazed stood, gasping. I’m using my strength up so quickly, he thought, releasing his pewtermind, his body deflating like a wineskin. He couldn’t continue tapping his reserves so much. He’d already used up a good half of his strength—strength that had taken decades to store. 

Quote

Sazed fought on. He was no warrior; he didn’t have honed instincts or training. He calculated that he should have died hours before. And yet, somehow, he managed to stay alive.

Perhaps it was because the koloss didn’t fight with skill, either. They were blunt—like their giant, wedgelike swords—and they simply threw themselves at their opponents with little thought of tactics.

That should have been enough. Yet, Sazed held—and where he held, his few men held with him. 

 

So, we know that Sazed says in Ch 19 that he could be as strong as ten men for a long time (but no telling what he thought a long time was in that situation); and we know he used up most of his Pewtermind in half-a-day (ish - the attack started in the morning and Vin arrived shortly before sunset).

So, if we hypothesize that Sazed was storing at 5 IU per second to be half-as-strong while storing; then to be as strong as ten men he would need to be tapping at roughly 20 times compression - which would normally be 100 IU per second.

With loss - based on your example, he would be tapping at 1000 IU per second - which does not seem sustainable for a nearly full day of fighting Koloss.

In my example, with loss he would be tapping about 142 to 154 IU per second (depending on the progression trend used for math and whether it is a incline or a curve progression).

The reality is probably somewhere beween the two extremes - but I don't think we have enough data to refine the hypothesis. 

[Trusk'our he/him]

56 minutes ago, therunner said:

Problem is that the loss has to be increasing the more you compress, otherwise TLR would be able to use F-Atium to be immortal indefinately, however that is not the case per WoBs.

It is also worth noting that TLR was a F-Atium Savant, which would have made the process much more efficient.

Quote

Warsaw signing (March 18, 2017)

Oversleep (paraphrased)

Allomantic strength. There are stronger Allomancers, they can burn metals faster, right?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

Yes, they can also squeeze more power out of it. They can use it more efficiently.

Oversleep (paraphrased)

So there is some loss of power along the way? How do savants work into that?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

Savants can use it way more efficiently. They are more Connected to the Shard. Closer to Spiritual Realm.

 

Edited March 6, 2023 by Trusk'our

[Mistchemist16]

2 hours ago, Trusk'our said:

We seems that people often think about needing to tap attributes at ten to twenty times as much as a human normally has to be useful (at least that's what the vs threads say), but even just doubling or tripling the right attribute would be a major enhancement.

Speed especially; you don't really need to go mach 4 as a Steelrunner to be incredibly dangerous, even going twice as fast as a normal human would allow you to overwhelm most non-Invested opponents in fight.

It’s also funny because A-Pewter is a x2 boost burned or times x3 flared. Yet, it is consistently regarded as one of, if not the best metals. And even relative to pewter burners, a Steelrunner wouldn’t even need double digets to run circles around the former. It also helps that most Fercuhemists don’t actively need to draw on their metalminds every second. Even in Compounding, the only attributes you should always leave on to some extent are F-Tin and F-Zinc, since not having them on means you miss things. But barring threat of ambush or active combat zone, you can keep most of your attributes in reserve.

Sandastron

I’m very curious about pewter. How much Feruchemical pewter, steel, and gold would you have to take in in order to be equal to burning pewter and flaring.

Brandon Sanderson

Oh…um, okay. So you wanna...ok, let’s back this up. So you wanna know feruchemically what would it take to match burning?

Sandastron

Yes.

Brandon Sanderson

Okay. So burning pewter, I kind of imagine...roughly doubling. Roughly.

Sandastron

Double your strength?

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah. But without the muscle mass change, it’s a magical boost. So because of that it has some pretty dramatic effects, like when Vin jumps and things like that.

Sandastron

So it’s only a double, so would flaring it bring it any higher?

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah. Flaring would go higher.

Sandastron

Would it be like triple?

Brandon Sanderson

Maybe like triple.

Sandastron

Maybe like tripling...that’s fascinating. So I always thought normal burning would triple it and flaring would quadruple.

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah I always felt kind of double. You won’t see people burning pewter and lifting a car.

Sandastron

Right, exactly.

Brandon Sanderson

You see people burning pewter and delivering a really solid punch.

Sandastron

Gotcha, thank you. That is fascinating…and would it be about doubling speed and healing ability?

Brandon Sanderson

I haven’t worked out the numbers on that exactly. I have an instinct that says thatburning pewter, healing goes a bit faster but I have to look in the books and see what we’ve done in the past and then kind of canonize it.

Calamity Philadelphia signing (Feb. 20, 2016)

 

Edited March 6, 2023 by Mistchemist16

[Trusk'our he/him]

8 minutes ago, Mistchemist16 said:

It’s also funny because A-Pewter is a x2 boost burned or times x3 flared. Yet, it is consistently regarded as one of, if not the best metals. And even relative to pewter burners, a Steelrunner wouldn’t even need double digets to run circles around the former. It also helps that most Fercuhemists don’t actively need to draw on their metalminds every second. Even in Compounding, the only attributes you should always leave on to some extent are F-Tin and F-Zinc, since not having them on means you miss things. But barring threat of ambush or active combat zone, you can keep most of your attributes in reserve.

Definitely true.

I remember Ham talking to Vin about needing to conserve your metals in a fight, since pewter burns fast, so you should fluctuate your burning to make the most use of it. Feruchemy would benefit way more from this strategy though.

I once had an idea for a full Feruchemist warrior, with them being like a barbarian in D&d- inhumanly well-muscled, tough as a brick (about as bright as one too), and with a primal sense of power.

I now think that the ideal full Feruchemist warrior would be more like a D&d monk- incredible control over their body and mind, being "enlightened", having a "sixth sense" (F-chromium), and not using more power than is strictly necessary for a given situation. Even if tapping the strength of fifty people at once would be fun 

Edited March 6, 2023 by Trusk'our

[Mistchemist16]

1 hour ago, Trusk'our said:

Definitely true.

I remember Ham talking to Vin about needing to conserve your metals in a fight, since pewter burns fast, so you should fluctuate your burning to make the most use of it. Feruchemy would benefit way more from this strategy though.

Well, both do still benefit from being more efficient. However, Allomancers are punished far less for not doing so. An Allomancer who runs out can just drink another vial, which also makes duralumin viable in the first place. But a Feruchemist who runs out has basically no hope of getting their powers back for not only that fight, but any others in the next few days. On top of that, a Feruchemist punishes their own body and mind to make metalminds, but Allomancers can buy as many vials as they can carry. Given that many battles won’t even last the 10 minutes to burn through one vial of pewter, Allomamcers really only need to conserve to get an edge over experts, not to function at all.

It’s also one more reason why Feruchemy makes more sense as the sole Preservation system, while Allomancy is the better dual system. 
 

Allomancu as an end positive system actually works well with the point that Ruin and Preservation together are needed to create. Allomancy is the only one that adds to a system with no strings attached. No keeping things for later (Feruchemy) or destroying someone else and taking their stuff (Hemalurgy). It also destroys metals and leaves no real incentive to preserve. You just create without really thinking about it. Which helps explain why Allomancers are easily oriented towards combat.

Meanwhile, Feruchemy makes lots of sense as Preservation. You take part of the system and preserve it until you need it. Plus, the memory storage and its synergy with the Keepers also screams Preservation. Combine with the active incentive to save your metals and not burn them randomly makes it even stronger. Also, losing attributes does not make the system less of Preservation since you generally can’t use something if you’ve stored it away. If I have money in the bank account, I can’t use that to buy stuff unless I take it out. But if I earned more money in the meantime, I can take out the stores to achieve greater results. Sounds like Feruchemy, doesn’t it? 
 

Of course, canon is canon. Allomancy is of Preservation and Feruchemy is dual. But honestly, I really don’t believe there is anything that favors the canon arrangement over the swapped version.

1 hour ago, Trusk'our said:

I once had an idea for a full Feruchemist warrior, with them being like a barbarian in D&d- inhumanly well-muscled, tough as a brick (about as bright as one too), and with a primal sense of power.

I now think that the ideal full Feruchemist warrior would be more like a D&d monk- incredible control over their body and mind, being "enlightened", having a "sixth sense" (F-chromium), and not using more power than is strictly necessary for a given situation. Even if tapping the strength of fifty people at once would be fun 

I don’t remeber everything about D and D, but I believe barbarians also get a temporary boost of strength, which also works for pewter Feruchemy

As for monks, this is definitely true. The most successful Feruchemists are not only those who know when to tap their metalminds, but those who can tolerate being weaker to charge up. Plus, Feruchemists are naturally inclined towards not just non combat abilites, but scholarly abilities. Sazed even comments that it was better for TLR to use Allomancers instead of Feruchemists because the latter would be knowledge seekers and harder to control

Edited March 6, 2023 by Mistchemist16

[HSuperLee he/him]

Speaking of feruchemists as monks, I'm still waiting for the day we see a full feruchemist tap strength while storing weight and reach a point where their own body weight is basically negligible to them, allowing them to climb brick walls with just the strength of their fingertips and leap over houses. F-iron is almost cheating in how good it is for both storing and tapping.

[Tamriel Wolfsbaine]

20 hours ago, alder24 said:

Wayne stores the health of his entire body, and taps it to heal just a very small portion of his body, thus health is healing just that part, and it is much more focused, and he can heal more and faster if wounds are small. I believe loss should still be there, and I think even it was told in Era 2 when Wayne didn't have enough health, he had to heal much slower because he couldn't heal it all at once, which tells that loss is still there. No idea where it was said, or how, I just remember something like that mentioned. 

From AoL, 2 weeks for healing 3 gunshot wounds:

The feruchemical loss is because of the compression of investiture to facilitate faster burning rate, not "fight against spiritweb". 

  Reveal hidden contents

Sporkify

This is more towards the whole physics stuff, but is Feruchemy really balanced? If it gives diminishing returns, wouldn't this end up as a net loss of power?

Brandon Sanderson

It doesn't diminish. Or, well, it does—but only if you compound it. You get 1 for 1 back, but compounding the power requires an expenditure of the power itself. For instance, if you are weak for one hour, you can gain the lost strength for one hour. But that's not really that much strength. After all, you probably weren't as weak as zero people during that time. So if you want to be as strong as two men, you couldn't do it for a full hour. You'd have to spend some energy to compound, then spend the compounded energy itself.

In more mathematical terms, let's say you spend one hour at 50% strength. You could then spend one hour at 150% strength, or perhaps 25 min at 200% strength, or maybe 10min at 250% strength. Each increment is harder, and therefore 'strains' you more and burns your energy more quickly. And since most Feruchemists don't store at 50% strength, but instead at something like 80% strength (it feels like much more when they do it, but you can't really push the body to that much forced weakness without risking death) you can burn through a few day's strength in a very short time if you aren't careful.

Footnote: This question was asked when fueling Feruchemy with Allomancy had only been seen in Rashek. As such, the term compounding is used purely to reference tapping at a higher rate than can be stored.
Hero of Ages Q&A - Time Waster's Guide (Oct. 15, 2008)

 

 

22 hours ago, therunner said:

So, Gold healing does not make sense to me.

Basically, one thing we know about Feruchemy is that tapping a lot of attribute at once leads to losses, which means regular Ferrings could easily waste all their resources in very inefficient manner.

However, Wayne can heal gunshot wounds in minutes, despite only having few weeks worth of health in his metalminds. However, gunshots typically take few weeks to heal with modern medical care, and more on their own.
So if there is loss in Feruchemy, how come Wayne can seemingly tap nearly all his health at once without worry and heal all that damage ~360 000x as fast as naturally? Based on the loss he should run out after like a milisecond, and not heal nearly anything.

The only explanation I can think off is that the usual loss in tapping large amounts does not happen for F-Gold, because the origin of the loss is that Feruchemy 'fights' against spiritweb to maintain the changes. However, since F-Gold heals by restoring physical body according to spiritual ideal, this 'fight' does not happen there. This would allow Wayne to heal gunshot wound in minutes with only few weeks of stored health, because the loss would not be there so he could tap nearly all of it at once.

Thoughts?

I think @alder24 has a good point here. 

When storing your entire whole becomes sick and an issue.  If a person were to store in a safe enviorment they could likely land themselves nearly comatose and septic while storing without killingthemselves as they don't have to heal back to get to normal they simply have to stop storing. 

I also think for this reason storing health actually gets to store way faster and easier than other attributes because it is the whole being stored and when tapped it is the wholes storage being applied to one specific area to bring it back to homeostasis. 

Each injury is completely different as well and Wayne never needs to truly heal the entire wound back to 100%  so long as he is able to heal back enough to stop from dying and enough to continue being effective in a combat role he could be saving there as well.

I picture a world where the majority of health goes to stopping the immediate death and then slowly trickling more healing into those areas to finish the healing up slower but still completing it.  

Health is such a broad area to consider.  A person with a bulletwound needs a lot of immediate attention, 100% depending on where that shot is at, and once plugging the leak the healing takes weeks to finish off. But this doesn't mean that the severity and complications are as challenging during that healing process back to 100%. Everyday past the initial emergency surgeries the patient does better and better.  Same with a lot of traumas. A ton of upfront attention is needed but it tapers off really fast as the body finishes its work.  

Looking at stuff like wide spread sepsis and cancers or full on ARDS or multisystem failure I think it would take far more healing to fix that.  These patients spend weeks and weeks needing a gigantic amount of meds and constant attention.  Its a totally different ballgame from traumas. 

But I think that is exactly the difference.  When you store you are putting yourself into a multisystem deficit.  I see the biggest hurtle for a gold ferring to jump would be, how sick are they willing to make themselves?  

For someone who isn't in danger and need of healing super often a small cold for a few days could probably do all the storage they need to get over a more major sickness later on.  For someone like Wayne? 

I think Wayne is a bit of an outlier for a few reasons... 

1. Wayne knows he needs the health. He has been in enough scraps that he knows every ounce of healing is worth... well its weight in gold I guess.  

2. Wayne is a bit of a masochist. He is constantly looking for ways to punish himself because he doesn't feel like he is worth much and thinks he deserves the pain. 

These 2 points make Wayne a dangerous gold ferring. I bet Wayne is capable of pushing far past other ferrings ability to let themselves feel on the brink of death.  When Wayne says it took 2 weeks laid up in bed for that health I would put money on his "laid up in bed" being far far different than the average humans "laid up in bed". 

 

[cometaryorbit]

Yeah, I think the health vs healing distinction is genuinely relevant here, because Feruchemical health is just weird. Per WoB it can heal Spiritual wounds*, but what's stored seems to just be physical healthiness.

So I think a broad general health is stored, and then when tapped gets applied to *specific* injuries - so it seems much more powerful. That 2 weeks isn't just 2 weeks worth of diminished wound-healing-rate, it's also the "health power" being stored up from having a depressed immune system and a headache and such... which all gets stored as "generic health power" and can all be applied to that bullet wound as wound-healing-rate.

*something which I am not entirely fond of - it makes Feruchemical healing feel less balanced and it's strong enough without it - but it seems to be canon, and is probably simpler than trying to make Feruchemical Health a strictly biological thing (which might introduce problems with a super-strengthened immune system causing autoimmune problems, etc).

So I think F Gold just turns everything stored into "generic health power" and then it's applied however needed when tapped.

It says somewhere in era 2 that F Gold is better for wounds than diseases. Maybe that's because wounds are generally in one spot so the power is applied more effectively.

[Tamriel Wolfsbaine]

1 minute ago, cometaryorbit said:

Yeah, I think the health vs healing distinction is genuinely relevant here, because Feruchemical health is just weird. Per WoB it can heal Spiritual wounds*, but what's stored seems to just be physical healthiness.

So I think a broad general health is stored, and then when tapped gets applied to *specific* injuries - so it seems much more powerful. That 2 weeks isn't just 2 weeks worth of diminished wound-healing-rate, it's also the "health power" being stored up from having a depressed immune system and a headache and such... which all gets stored as "generic health power" and can all be applied to that bullet wound as wound-healing-rate.

*something which I am not entirely fond of - it makes Feruchemical healing feel less balanced and it's strong enough without it - but it seems to be canon, and is probably simpler than trying to make Feruchemical Health a strictly biological thing (which might introduce problems with a super-strengthened immune system causing autoimmune problems, etc).

So I think F Gold just turns everything stored into "generic health power" and then it's applied however needed when tapped.

It says somewhere in era 2 that F Gold is better for wounds than diseases. Maybe that's because wounds are generally in one spot so the power is applied more effectively.

I pretty well agree across the board here.  Healing a cold is harder than gluing a cut.  We see trauma and think how horrible it is... but trauma is a mechanical broken thing usually and that is easier to put back together than to purge ones body of something like multisystem failure.  

There is soooo much that goes into trauma care.  We had a person stabbed in the gut with a 12 inch chef knife come through the ER and once scanned it was determined that this thing ran directly under the diaphragm and hit nothing vital.  The guy was in the OR for less than an hour to get it removed and went home the next day to finish his recovery there.  I believe Wayne had a destiny and a high base fortune level compared to others as well.  To be shot through fleshy bits of the arm would be less to heal than being shot through the spine. To be stabbed like that patient we had would take a lot less healing than it would have required if the GI tract had been hit and GI juices were leaking around in the gut.  I think healing a severed artery would probably take less healing than a shattered bone... a broken hip won't kill you as fast as a sliced throat but soft tissue likely heals more efficiently than bone in a magical sense.  

And the spiritual self likely targets, directly, the space that is out of homeostasis until it has returned to it.  Like triage, the magic will heal the most immediately life threatening wounds first.

 

[cometaryorbit]

25 minutes ago, Tamriel Wolfsbaine said:

I pretty well agree across the board here.  Healing a cold is harder than gluing a cut.  We see trauma and think how horrible it is... but trauma is a mechanical broken thing usually and that is easier to put back together than to purge ones body of something like multisystem failure.  

There is soooo much that goes into trauma care.  We had a person stabbed in the gut with a 12 inch chef knife come through the ER and once scanned it was determined that this thing ran directly under the diaphragm and hit nothing vital.  The guy was in the OR for less than an hour to get it removed and went home the next day to finish his recovery there.  I believe Wayne had a destiny and a high base fortune level compared to others as well.  To be shot through fleshy bits of the arm would be less to heal than being shot through the spine. To be stabbed like that patient we had would take a lot less healing than it would have required if the GI tract had been hit and GI juices were leaking around in the gut.  I think healing And the spiritual self likely targets, directly, the space that is out of homeostasis until it has returned to it.

Hmm, that's another thought. The diminishing returns may not hit Health as hard since the self 'wants' to be healthy/healed.

TLR's atium Youth had accelerating costs because he needed to use more and more to stay in the same place, since it was an actively unnatural change against what his Spiritual 'knew' to be true (that he was actually super old) and it 'wanted' to snap back; Health might be the opposite, where diminishing returns are less bad because it's trying to put you in a natural state rather than give you extra powers per se.

[therunner he/him]

10 hours ago, cometaryorbit said:

Hmm, that's another thought. The diminishing returns may not hit Health as hard since the self 'wants' to be healthy/healed.

TLR's atium Youth had accelerating costs because he needed to use more and more to stay in the same place, since it was an actively unnatural change against what his Spiritual 'knew' to be true (that he was actually super old) and it 'wanted' to snap back; Health might be the opposite, where diminishing returns are less bad because it's trying to put you in a natural state rather than give you extra powers per se.

That is basically what I was trying to say, but put much more eloquently.

[alder24]

14 hours ago, cometaryorbit said:

TLR's atium Youth had accelerating costs because he needed to use more and more to stay in the same place, since it was an actively unnatural change against what his Spiritual 'knew' to be true (that he was actually super old) and it 'wanted' to snap back; Health might be the opposite, where diminishing returns are less bad because it's trying to put you in a natural state rather than give you extra powers per se.

3 hours ago, therunner said:

That is basically what I was trying to say, but put much more eloquently.

Yeah, now that makes sense to me. Sounds very likely.

 

[IlstrawberrySeed]

On 3/5/2023 at 4:14 PM, HSuperLee said:

I'm about to be extremely pedantic, I apologize upfront for that.

Part of how I understand this is that f-gold doesn't storing healing, it stores health. Its about the overall quality of the body, not solely the body's ability to recover from injury. So when Wayne draws 10 days worth of healing from his goldminds over 10 seconds, he's not healing at 86,400 times the speed, he's increasing the current quality of his health by 86,400 times for those 10 seconds. Yes, that has the side-effect of making him heal faster, but that's not strictly speaking what the metal does. In short, it doesn't make him heal faster, it makes him more healthy, and those are two slightly different things. If you want to think about it this way, f-gold doesn't just store healing speed but also healing quality and efficiency, and thus tapping it has a much more dramatic effect than if it was just healing speed.

I will add the caveat that I think this is something Sanderson has changed since he came up with the idea. In Hero of Ages chapter 73 we have this quote:

This doesn't seem consistent with how we've seen healing work in Era 2, which seems to indicate to me that Sanderson has reconsidered the mechanics and their effects.

All that said, the loss from tapping large amounts still likely does apply to gold. So rather than 10 days worth of gold being used in 10 seconds being a 86,400-fold modifier, its probably closer to a 80,000-fold modifier, if not lower, but that doesn't make too much of a difference considering how much of a boost even a little extra health would provide a person. I also think we tend to underestimate the power of feruchemy. A person that is twice as strong as a normal person is going to be approaching the upper limits of human strength, and that's just at a two-fold multiplier, which a feruchemist can theoretically maintain for hours with proper preparation. At a 4-fold modifier, just tapping what you stored at twice the rate you stored it, a feruchemist will beat any noninvested person in a competition of that attribute. A brute tapping four-times strength will be stronger than the strongest man, a steelrunner will be faster than the fastest, a sparker smarter than the smartest, etc. We don't really have a metric for measuring overall health in real life, but a person tapping even four-times health would be clearly and dramatically superhuman.

It does say it stores health on the fuerochemical chart. I am adopting this idea.

On 3/6/2023 at 3:43 AM, Treamayne said:

I think two things are skewing your calculation here:

• The power lost is nearly a flat rate - not a proportionate decrease (though the numbers weren't exact as they were just off-the-cuff examples for the question)
• The WoB Example is by timing based on the multiplier, so the rate of loss for power based on time may be different.

In the WoB Example, 50% for 1 hr = 150% for 1 hr / 200 for 25 minutes / 250% for 10 minutes. This shows:

• The "Double" time doesn't change - what you put in comes out at the same rate and time
• The "Triple" compressions was a double-rate Tap - 1 hr ^ 2 = 30 Minutes then - 5 minutes of loss = 25 Minutes
• The "Quadruple" compression was a triple-rate Tap - 1 hr ^ 3 = 15 Minutes - 5 minutes of loss = 10 Minutes

In both examples the efficiency "loss" was 5 minutes (probably truly a bit less than 5 for the double-rate Tap - or - a bit more than 5 for the triple-rate). Since we don't have an investiture unit of measure (IU) we can't truly quantify this; but we can extrapolate. If single-rate Tap costs 0 (same in/out) then double rate costs 1 IU of investiture to compress the Tap, triple costs 2 IU, quadruple 3 IU, etc. It's possible that the compression is exponential (1IU, 2, 4, 8, etc.) but that isn't quite consistent with the text so it is hard to judge without more examples from Brandon or Peter.

2 things. I don't think fill rate effects tap rate efficiency. I think attribute turns into investiture, some (linear, but doesn't have to be) of that investiture is used to move it to the metal, then tapping rates are constant. 2, Double isn't 1 to 1, at least in era 2.

On 3/6/2023 at 6:42 AM, therunner said:

Problem is that the loss has to be increasing the more you compress, otherwise TLR would be able to use F-Atium to be immortal indefinately, however that is not the case per WoBs.

Eventually he would be unable to get enough attribute to stay alive, because the loss would be too much. The WoB in question (https://wob.coppermind.net/events/188/#e3923) and the relevant paragraph
 

So the loss is increasing the more 'unnatural' the result of tapping.

See above. IT As TLR was tapping large amounts at once, the compression would increase. If he has to tap at over 800 years, then the linear increase would be at about X=50, if not greater.  

On 3/6/2023 at 7:24 AM, Treamayne said:

There are two major differences here:

• The WoBs you are quoting are about Compounding (actual compounding - using Allomancy to fuel Feruchemy rather than the Compression of Feruchemical Stores which Brandon used to call compounding in older Words of Brandon)
• The specific example of compounded age is because TLR was trying to prevent his body's age from matching his actual age as "known" by his Spiritweb. 

I understand what you are saying, and I don't really disagree - except in quantity of loss. your example:

Implies a 99% loss of stored investiture to "Compression cost." That simply does not match what we know of compressing Feruchemical stores (by simply tapping at a rate faster than it was stored). 

Really, based on the examples from Sazed fighting at the gates (WoA) and Wax demolishing the shack with a weight-enhanced Push (AoL) I beleive the closest generic formula we could use to describe the rate of Tapped investiture would be something like:

• Given a storage rate of 1IU per second; the rate Taps at:
  • Single: 1IU per second
  • Double: 2.1 IUs per second
  • Triple: 3.3 IUs per second
  • Quadruple: 4.6 IUs per second
  • Quintuple: 6 IUs per second
  • etc.

Compressing the storage means you are not only using more of the storage to get the compressed result; but you are using that storage faster because there is investiture lost in compressing the trait. To equate that to an in-world example - WoA:

  Hide contents

Ch 19

Ch 52

Ch 53

 

So, we know that Sazed says in Ch 19 that he could be as strong as ten men for a long time (but no telling what he thought a long time was in that situation); and we know he used up most of his Pewtermind in half-a-day (ish - the attack started in the morning and Vin arrived shortly before sunset).

So, if we hypothesize that Sazed was storing at 5 IU per second to be half-as-strong while storing; then to be as strong as ten men he would need to be tapping at roughly 20 times compression - which would normally be 100 IU per second.

With loss - based on your example, he would be tapping at 1000 IU per second - which does not seem sustainable for a nearly full day of fighting Koloss.

In my example, with loss he would be tapping about 142 to 154 IU per second (depending on the progression trend used for math and whether it is a incline or a curve progression).

The reality is probably somewhere beween the two extremes - but I don't think we have enough data to refine the hypothesis. 

2 things again single isn't 1 to 1, at least in Era 2. I know I keep bringing it up, but I will keep bringing it up if I am responding anyway. Second, I think your loss is incredibly reasonable. I don't think it's exactly accurate, but I do believe that it is the right ball park.

[alder24]

22 minutes ago, IlstrawberrySeed said:

2 things again single isn't 1 to 1, at least in Era 2. I know I keep bringing it up, but I will keep bringing it up if I am responding anyway.

I know you like this WoB, but it's just "a little bit weaker", so in our calculation it's negligible, compared to compression happening when tapped 2x. So for all intended purposes it is 1:1, as 0.1% loss is not that much. 

Spoiler

Yoonseo Chang

Looking at Allomancy, you've mentioned that over time the power dilutes and each ability becomes less powerful. (for example a Tineye in Era 2 will generally be less powerful than one in Era 1) Does the same effect happen in Feruchemy as well? How would Feruchemy become less pure or diluted (other than Ferrings appearing)?

Brandon Sanderson

I have not gone as far with Feruchemy in that regard. I would say that if you're going to get a weakening of Feruchemy, which you're asking about, is the amount of stored attribute you get for lost attribute. There is decay there, you don't get a 1:1. Feruchemy generally I would say is not much weaker than it was before, a little bit but not much. This was done partially for narrative reasons. I wanted Allomancy... I wanted to back off a little on Allomancy and tell stories with it a little bit weaker. Again, mostly narrative reasons at this point. At this point on Scadrial, it's weakened about as much as it's going to because by this point people are having children that are more powerful because of the certain mixing. I'm not saying it's going up, I'm saying they have hit an equilibrium on Scadrial for the most part, at least in the Basin.

YouTube Spoiler Stream 2 (June 3, 2021)

 

[cometaryorbit]

I think loss rates with high rates of tapping become very extreme (huge diminishing returns). Gold is hard to measure, but on things we can clearly measure, the only two examples of super high multipliers (Wax heavier than a building & supersonic Marasi) appear to have burned through storage in a very extreme way.

I don't think Sazed at the end of WoA is more than say x30 strength. I doubt the largest koloss are more than that (if a base koloss is a bit under x5 due to Hemalurgic decay ... say x4.5... even if their extra Hemalurgic strength increases as fast as normal strength with muscle area, by the square cube law you'd expect a 12' koloss to be about x25. If only the normal strength increases by square cube law it'd be more like x10).

[Stick The Savant]

11 minutes ago, cometaryorbit said:

I think loss rates with high rates of tapping become very extreme (huge diminishing returns). Gold is hard to measure, but on things we can clearly measure, the only two examples of super high multipliers (Wax heavier than a building & supersonic Marasi) appear to have burned through storage in a very extreme way.

I don't think Sazed at the end of WoA is more than say x30 strength. I doubt the largest koloss are more than that (if a base koloss is a bit under x5 due to Hemalurgic decay ... say x4.5... even if their extra Hemalurgic strength increases as fast as normal strength with muscle area, by the square cube law you'd expect a 12' koloss to be about x25. If only the normal strength increases by square cube law it'd be more like x10).

the larger Koloss would also be heavier which means that more of their muscle would need to support their own body