How to know is ingredient is rare
Its not about personal preferences its about hard numbers and facts.
Ok first of the general rare items
Flour/Tomato/Potato/Salad
Why are these rarer then the rest?
Simple
You only get 2 chances of getting them per day. And you cannot improve the odds.
For daily ingredient and daily quiz you can get the every single ingredient there is.
But for first friend visit ingredients you will NOT be able to get the 1-Star items and Prawn.
Hence these items are considered rare. Because even if you visited a million friends you will never get a single prawn or 1-star ingredient from them.
The market has diminished the INSANE rarity of prawn and its now just a regular rare.
In demand ingredients that you need a lot of to complete your 53 dishes. The current ingredient in highest demand is CHEESE.
You currently need a 90 pieces of cheese to finish all your dishes.
You need 70 Flour to finish all your dishes.
But why is Flour priced higher then Cheese? because its harder to get Flour
Also mushrooms and lime are equally as rare as Flour but you need less of them and thus they are priced lower then Flour
Again please IGNORE the pricing of the market because that is another factor completely as the prices fluctuate and the ingredient is random daily.
Simple maths just incase its hard to understand.
Lets use Flour Compared to Cheese
Lets say the chance of getting both of these items is the same so 1% chance.
For cheese if you add 98 friends in one day u have a 100% chance of getting cheese
For flour or other 1-star ingredients and prawn, if u add 98 friends in one day u still only get 1% chance to get the item ^-^
Hence the 1-Star stuff and Prawn is rare.
Hope this helps to educate many new players on why some stuff are rare
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you've always been able to get one star ingredients from friend visits. this is a post that proves my point exactly. i've gotten a bunch of 1 stars from friends at different points (at one point i had over 10 bayleaf and sweetcorn each lol) while this person has got none.
no ingredients are rare, rarity doesn't exist. ingredients are only high in demand, or, if you want a one word way to describe it, popular. PLEASE people start using the word popular, it's much more accurate of a description. popular ingredients are those like salad and tomato and cream where everybody's leveling up those dishes so the demand is high and the supply is average, thus they're hard to come by. that doesn't, however, mean it's rare.
the only ingredient that i would have previous accepted as rare is prawn because it was a known fact that in whatever system playfish uses to calculate what ingredient you get and how often you get it, that prawn was programmed to happen less. it was programmed to appear way less as often than the other ingredients.
however all the other ingredients pretty much appear at a common pace. it's just people themselves see little of an ingredient and assume it's rare. however, that doesn't mean that. you have to take the game as a total into account, and not just yourself. me? i get cream quite often. in the past week i've probably gotten 4-5, which is about as many as most of the other ingredients i get. however, for some reason it's considered "rare." just like salad. salad is considered rare and yet the garden salad starter was the one i had the least trouble leveling up! for the first two months or so that i played this game, i never once came across a saffron, yet the forum considers it a "junk" common ingredient.
and to gwc123 - you did an excellent job explaining supply and demand and high demand ingredients. your idea of "rarity" though is flawed because it leaves out one key element: how often an ingredient is given out through the game. it may not be often for you, but overall it's probably average and about the same as all the other ingredients because while you see that ingredient maybe once a week, another person gets it at least four times as often. that's how the game was designed, that way we're forced to invite our friends and add other people and visit them to get more ingredients and trade with them to get ingredients we don't have. it's a social game, and it was designed to be as such.
INGREDIENTS ARE NOT RARE, THEY ARE POPULAR.
