Echoes are the game's primary currency, and so the community often calculates their action usage with a very simple acronym: Echoes Per Action (EPA). Over time, the total EPA of the game has gone up and up and up, which made a lot of these aforementioned goals much more achievable for the people who want to stick with it. A thing I often say to people, is that there are 52k actions in a year, and if you want to keep playing Fallen London, you gotta spend them somehow. Optimization just naturally happens out of that desire to keep playing.

For the purposes of this conversation, I will be using two major lategame points of reference: The Overgoat (the second most expensive echo item in the game, and the one that's considered an "achievable goal" by most), and the Hesperidean Cider (the most expensive item in the game, the one considered the "pipe dream" goal.)

For those not familiar with the game, the Overgoat and especially the Hesperidean Cider are outliers - which also makes them perfect for this conversation. The third most expensive item in the game is a squad of armed rats that costs only 4.2% of what an Overgoat costs.

So, where do we start?

The Dark Ages of the Neath: The Hell of Sub 2 EPA.

We start in the year I started playing: 2016. The days right after the release of New Seeking, the Days where Sinning Jenny was still Mayor, Notability would soon become the Cornerstone of Lategame meta, people were still trying to figure out how to become Paramount Presences (without knowledge that it was impossible), and there were still murmurs of t4 professions, without knowledge that they would never exist.

Boxgrind

In these days, the gold standard for grinds was known as Boxgrind: Completing the "Affair of the Box" story and using its repeatable activity as much as possible to generate money as fast as possible. Boxgrind was considered the Gold Standard because, while other, better grinds existed, they all had their own drawbacks (that we will talk about in a bit).

Not to say that Boxgrind didn't have its issues: Every single part came with it the risk to click on the wrong option, and acquire the extremely bad "A Turncoat" quality which voided any potential immediate rewards and prevented you from progressing at all if you reached 3. This was particularly bad because boxgrind hinged on you being on one of two opposing sides, or else your payout would be significantly smaller. This meant that misclicking would put you on the opposite side, and then you'd have to "misclick" again to reach the correct side, earning you 2 of the quality immediately. This was such a problem that entire browser extensions were made to straight up prevent you from clicking the incorrect options.

Despite all this, it was the best we had, at a whopping 1.64EPA.

The Overgoat costs 11712.80 echoes to purchase, while the Hesperidean Cider costs 160000.00 echoes. Neither of these numbers are typos. This meant that it took you 7142 actions under Boxgrind to get an Overgoat, and 97561 actions to get a Hesperidean Cider.

Fallen London, as mentioned, has a 10-minute-per-action wait time, this means that every day you have 144 actions, and every year, you have 52560 actions. This means that, if you played in an extremely unhealthy way and never lost a single action - practically impossible since, even with the game's subscription service, you can only store up to 40 of them, meaning you'd never be able to get more than 6 and a half hours of sleep - it would take you just over 49 and a half days to get an Overgoat, or One year, ten months and a week to get Hesperidean Cider.

Is it any wonder that the first Hesperidean Cider ever acquired by the community came as a gift from the developers as part of a charity auction?

Spirifage

If Boxgrind was the Gold Standard, then Spirifage was Platinum. By using a Spirifer's Fork to reclaim stolen souls and returning them to their proper owners, we achieved a total EPA of 1.72. This was much better than boxgrind, not just because of the increased payout, but because you never had to deal with the Turncoat mechanic.

With a better payout than boxgrind and a less annoying mechanic to handle, the only downside to Spirifage was the monetary cost; specifically, it required you to play the Soul Trade Premium Story, which required you to pay irl money, and side with the Spirifers - as opposed to the Shepherds, who canonically are the ones actually supposed to be returning souls to their owners.

While Spirifers earned a very good source of souls to cash out into a proper payment, Shepherds got to pay souls for a large-scale menace wipe and favors - although back then, the conversion to the favours system wasn't fully complete.

Still, between the ease of use and higher payout compared to boxgrind, all of these downsides were considered worthwhile tradeoffs. The extra 0.08EPA reduced a decent number of actions from the two big goals too! Under optimal play conditions, we shaved off 332 actions from the Overgoat grind, bringing us to 47 days and some hours, and 4537 actions from Cider, bringing us to One Year, Nine Months and A Week.

This was still hell.

Tanah-Chook

This was the Meta and the Reality of the Game until July of 2017 rolled around, when we got the Exceptional Story "All Things Must End", allowing us to explore the Tomb-Colonies of Tanah-Chook. Rather impressively for an Exceptional Story, we were actually allowed to go there at our leisure and repeat a lot of the actions we took there even after the story was done.

Eventually, after some finagling, a method in Tanah-Chook was found to achieve 1.74EPA. Suddenly, we had a grind with a bigger payout than the Soul Trade!

Unfortunately, this one came with a major downside: It required us to leave London, which meant that we lost access to the Opportunity Deck that allowed us to make progress on other things while we did those grinds. This was particularly rough for people who were engaging with the Notability system -- at this point, Paramount Presence had been formally released by allowing the playerbase to overcap more than one basic stat, which meant that Notability would become the defining factor of the Lategame. Being away from London meant that you could never engage with the mechanic at all.

This, coupled with the fact that you'd have to undergo the often 20+ actions of Zailing to return to London whenever you needed to be there - which would include things like getting your weekly payments from your profession - meant that people did not consider Tanah-Chook to be a viable, or even relevant alternative to Spirifage or Boxgrind. 0.02 extra EPA also did not remove an appreciable amount of actions from either the Overgoat or Cider.

Further compounding this fact, All Things Must End was still part of the Seasons system of Exceptional Stories, this meant that if you did not subscribe for the duration of July 2017, you would not be able to buy it separately until the end of the next season, which would only happen after the release of the Sinking Synod, in November of 2017.

Port Carnelian

Somewhere around this time, people started finding ways to optimize the repeatable actions in Port Carnelian. After a lot of study and lengthy maths, it was discovered that, when well optimized over a long enough period of time, Port Carnelian could very well break the 1.8EPA barrier. Exact numbers were difficult to acquire, so I will just be using 1.8 as a reference.

This was a big deal because unlike both the Soul Trade and Tanah-Chook, Port Carnelian is accessible content without paying IRL money. However, it suffered a lot of the same downsides of Boxgrind: An even more complicated grind, where now you have to manage three factions over the course of multiple runs, and much like Tanah-Chook, you were out of London, meaning no access to the Opportunity Deck, events, or weekly payments, and needing to pay 20+ actions to return if you ever had to.

One more thing that made Port Carnelian annoying was the fact that you couldn't "pause" the grind. Leaving Port Carnelian without finishing the carousel incurs a penalty with the crown of London, and if you let your Legitimacy with them reach 0, you have to undergo payments and annoying processes to be able to even start Port Carnelian again.

Still, the payout was appreciably higher enough that, while players of the Soul Trade still clung tightly to their forks, players that relied on the Boxgrind and were already used to an annoying grind started switching to Port Carnelian in order to speed up their goals. Under Port Carnelian, Overgoat took 6508 actions, while Cider took 88889 actions - 45 days and a handful of hours for a goat, and One Year, Eight Months and Just Over One Week for Cider.

The Bronze Age of Capitalism: Where Money Makes More Money.

This is how things stayed for a long while. Under this time, the Mayor shifted from Jenny to Feducci, we became allowed to Overcap several of our stats, unlocking the ability to become Paramount Presences and solidifying the absolute Hell that was Notability Grinding, functionally turning BDR into the God Stat of the Lategame.

And then, October of 2017 arrived.

Feeding Orphans to Tigers

October of 2017 brought with it the update to two pieces of content: We were now allowed to return to the Empress's Court if we were kicked out, and a continuation of the Dilmun Club storyline allowed us to proceed into the Fifth Coil of the Labyrinth of Tigers and establish rapport and connections to the Court of the Wakeful Eye and the de facto monarch of the Tigers, the Banded Prince.

The latter process was done by paying several options of items - or favours - to the Fifth Coil, which functioned as Tribute paid to the Prince's Court. Tribute could be spent to gain access to the abilities and connections of the Prince's four Ministers, but much more importantly, you could pay tribute to spend time with the Ministers, and gain items as a result.

And then people figured out that feeding Orphans to Tigers was really, really profitable.

Y'see, one of the many items you can donate to the Tigers is a Winsome Dispossessed Orphan, a companion whose contract you can buy in the Bazaar for 64.8 echoes. You can have as many of these on your person as you want, and you could donate one of them as helpers to the tigers, and gain 25 Tribute in return. While going to the Court and spending time with the Ministers consumed 20 Tribute and always gave you 62.5 echoes worth of items.

This meant that for every four Winsome Dispossessed Orphans you donated to the Court (a total cost of 259.2 echoes), you could spend time with the Ministers five times, for a payout worth 312.5 echoes. That's 53.3 echoes in profit.

Which you could then use to buy more Orphans to give to the tigers again.

This grind had its downsides: For one thing, spending time with the Ministers took four actions each time, instead of the customary one, meaning that getting your payout took a very long time in general. This section of the grind also spent time outside of London, meaning it was yet another grind that locked you out of interacting with things like Notability, weekly payments or events. While you had to generate tribute inside of London, 80% of the grind was still spent out of it, and functionally could not be paused without adding more actions to the deal to sail back to the court.

The catch, though, is that you could stockpile an infinite amount of tribute. This meant that you could spend so many actions generating tribute, and so many actions cashing it out, that the number of actions spent zailing become completely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. What's 20 actions when the grind takes place over 10k+ actions?

When the math was finished and the reports became public, the playerbase gasped at the discovery that the final number was a ridiculous 2.2EPA.

This absolutely blew all existing grinds completely out of the water. Boxgrind's relevancy disappeared over night, Spirifers blankly held their forks as their Shepherd counterparts felt vindication in their choice of story - some even paid extra to reset the Soul Trade and take the other part, as the main selling point of Spirifage was now gone - and what few visits Tanah-Chook got dried up immediately.

Port Carnelian stayed relevant only because one of the factions you have to pay attention to in that grind are the Tigers, and completing a carousel for them now started paying out in tribute. Once the calculations were complete, Port Carnelian ended up at 2.36EPA - a significant increase over dedicated Orphangrind, which made it popular since it held a lot of the same weaknesses of Orphangrind still, although it was much more complicated.

One niche, but certainly welcome bonus from Orphangrind, was that it let you liquidate your resources and "hoard" them into Orphans, something which came in handy for anyone Seeking the Name, as losing most/all of their resources was necessary to go through Winking Isle.

Under the 2.2EPA meta, getting an Overgoat had about 1200 actions shaved off, and the total time was reduced to 37 days! Cider had over 16000 actions shaved off. The time was now down to only A Year, Four Months and just about Three Weeks!

If you were doing the Port Carnelian version, the numbers were even more crazy. Overgoats were now below 5000 actions, at only 34 and a half days of grinding, whereas Cider became achievable in only One Year and Three And A Half Months of Perfect Grinding.

(Can you tell that this community is Insane yet? I love it.)

Needless to say, this shit blew the lategame moneymaking meta wide the fuck open. The entire community expected this to get nerfed within hours.

To this day, neither Orphangrind nor Port Carnelian have been nerfed - and in fact, have only been made stronger with changes to the game since.

Archaeology Can Be Profitable Too

This was the truth to Fallen London for a very long time, it would take almost a whole year before a new competition for grinds became available.

That competition would come on September of 2018, in the form of a new Archeological Expedition called the Tomb of the Silken Thread, which had an abnormally high payout for expeditions in the form of two 62.5e items - 125 echoes worth of stuff.

Archaeological Expeditions require you to provide supplies to your crew, which need to be sourced from somewhere. There were many, many ways to generate supplies, which meant that this grind required us to figure out the least costly (and therefore most profitable) way to go about it. Docks Favours was quickly found to be the best bet, but gaining Favours is unreliable even at the best of times, and calculating the exact EPA when you take into account that many sources of favours have costs associated with them is a nightmare. Assuming a level of luck that guaranteed you were cheating at the game, you could break 4.5EPA with this.

Fortunately, there was a much more easily available way to calculate things. While the most profitable way to generate supplies was by using Dock Favours, we could instead use Strong-Backed Labour acquired through the Bazaar Side Streets. There were other sources of Strong-Backed Labour, of course, but the Bazaar Side Streets were the simplest by far, and using them we reached an impressive 2.27EPA.

The grind itself was also very simple: Start the Expedition, use the action to go as fast as possible, and finish it when you get to the end. Sometimes you even got a lucky 5% roll that let you make progress without consuming supplies.

The only downside to this grind was its stat requirement. While we were firmly into "everyone can overcap any stat" territory by now, Notability Grinding was still Hell, and even overcapped you only had 215 Watchful to work with. You needed a minimum of 267 to do this grind to its fullest, which would require a lot of expensive equipment, and most likely, at least for you to already have an Overgoat and its massive +20 Watchful bonus (or perhaps even better, the Ubergoat, attained by fusing together two Overgoats and increasing the Watchful bonus to +30).

Of course, 2.27EPA was the baseline, and this grind had the benefit over Orphangrind and its Port Carnelian variant that it took place entirely inside of London, this meant that you had access to the Opportunity Deck, which of course, naturally led into...

The Nice And Profitable Grindings of mp, georg

"average londoner draws 200 opportunity cards a day" factoid actualy just statistical error. average londoner draws 6 cards a day. mp. georg, who is a dachshund and draws over 77777 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

Over the course of all of this, mp, Fallen London player and beloved community Dachshund, created a guide for a grind based entirely on the player's Opportunity Deck.

You see, Fallen London had a known glitch at this point in its lifetime. Ordinarily, a player can draw one card from their Opportunity Deck every 10 minutes, but for some specific locations, the game allows you to draw infinitely from the Deck, as a form to introduce randomness to a specific action you can take.

Unfortunately, due to the way the game was coded, entering a location with infinite draws and then leaving fully refreshed your deck.

In most areas where you had an infinite deck, leaving them took too many actions to be profitable or usable in any way. Flash Lays were the exception: It was possible to start a Flash Lay and immediately get kicked out by carefully manipulating your equipment and current menaces, which led to the hilarious image of your player character spending days creating a fake identity to trick a person into giving them money and immediately failing as soon as they meet the target because they were dressed with some red stockings, an ugly bonnet, a barrel, and literally nothing else.

The grind was simple: Make your deck as good as possible by populating it with good and profitable cards and removing as many bad cards from it as you could. Get into a Flash Lay, immediately get kicked out, draw your entire deck, play any good cards you drew, rinse and repeat ad infinitum.

This was a popular grind not just because of its monetary gain, but because the Opportunity Deck was the main source of Favours for any faction. This allowed players to complete their Renown grinds significantly faster, and any Docks Favours that they acquired could be used on the aforementioned Archeological Expeditions for bigger profit, alongside any profit they naturally got from other cards in their deck.

Calculating the exact EPA of this was literally impossible, as it would vary wildly from person to person. However, with a good enough deck, it was easily comparable to Orphangrind and Port Carnelian, and once Tomb of the Silken Thread was released, could easily surpass both of them. This grind also kept you entirely within London, which allowed access to all of the usual London activities. Due to the complexities of thinning your deck - especially at the time when the whole concept was not exactly supported by the developers - this grind was not the most popular, but it was definitely worthwhile.

(Inception Sound Effect)

Eventually, and after so many Orphans had been given to the Tigers that they most certainly started eating them, October of 2018 arrived, and Hallowmas - the game's yearly Halloween festival - came with it. Back then, Hallowmas was the most experimental of the seasonal events, having completely new mechanics and completely new story every year. In 2018, the dream city of Arbor decided to open its doors to London, and look for an Ambassador between their peoples.

This would culminate only in August of 2019, where everyone with access to their own Lodgings could now draw the Arbor card in their opportunity deck. This would let them visit the city for a couple actions - the mechanic was that you could spend a limited time in Arbor, and while in there, you could gain some resources as you went. You were considered to be out of London while in Arbor, even though you were dreaming, presumably, in your home (which is in London), so you still couldn't do things like Notability or weekly payments.

The main resource gain from Arbor is Attar, and Attar could be given to Arbor's queen for some resources. However, it was very quickly found that donating your Attar to the Queen had a 25% chance that, instead of consuming 4 Attar and giving you 1 item worth 12.5 echoes, it would consume all of your Attar at once and give you an equivalent amount of 12.5e items.

A new strategy quickly formed: Attain as much Attar as you can, and when you are almost out of Permission to Linger, perform actions to regain as much time as you can. Much like Orphangrind, you repeat this process as much as you possibly could so that any travel actions, and actions spent fishing for that 25% chance, become irrelevant. And with a staggering EPA of 3.125, Forever Arbor was born.

This grind had many of the downsides of Orphangrind, but did not require an initial monetary investment, could potentially be done significantly earlier (the only requirement was a modified Watchful of 167, which is easily attainable by the midgame), and, importantly, had almost an entire extra echo-per-action worth of payout.

With it, the total actions required for an Overgoat dropped well below 4000, and the real time investment was now 26 days - we had finally breached the Less-Than-A-Month barrier. A similar threshold had been breached with Hesperidean Cider, which now required a clean 51200 actions to complete - officially less than a year.

This also created a new addition to the Opportunity Deck refresh grind; every time you enter Arbor, you lose 1 Attar, but you gain 5 Opportunity to Linger for free. If you stuck with only doing Attar gain actions when you drew the card from the Opportunity Deck - which could be often if you were following the deck thinning strategies given by mp - you didn't care at all about Permission to Linger, effectively removing half of the actions from the grind. Done over a long enough period of time (and hundreds of Arbor card draws), you could easily break 4.5EPA with what had been called Opportunity Arbor. A weaker version of the grind, available to anyone with less than 167 Watchful, could easily break 4EPA.

These jumps in profitability were huge, but for as much as parts of the playerbase complained, they had seen nothing yet.

The Fallen London Renaissance: Welcome to the Hinterlands

January of 2020 rolls around. Fallen London is officially 10 years old; the Ambitions, the closest thing the game has to a main storyline, and something long thought to never be completed, will see their final update in May. The Fallen London app has been killed off for over a year at this point, the entire game has received a major UI overhaul, in only a few months, we would be getting an entirely new Map to the game. The rework to Paramount Presence, and the resulting death of Notability's reign as The God Mechanic of the Late Game, is announced, to much rejoicing, and the Opportunity Deck Refresh Glitch would be patched at the end of the year, bringing an end to the cozy grinds pioneered by our venerable dachshund.

Sunless Skies has been released and post-release support is winding down, as Failbetter Games announces, proudly, that Fallen London has over 2.5 million words worth of content, and unbeknownst to the playerbase, and even to them, that number was about to balloon.

On January 28th, the first ambition gets their finale. Nemesis players get to finally realize their dreams of Murder, and attain the reward of their Ambition. However, something is strange; the items given for completing the Ambition have a new stat to them: "Kataleptic Toxicology". This would be an omen of things to come.

February comes and goes with no new grinds added. The Feast of the Exceptional Rose, Fallen London's Valentine's Day event, adds Nuptial Phantasies to its list of content, but otherwise little changes. March comes, and with it, the three-part conclusion of Bag a Legend, the second ambition to finish. It introduces to us two new pieces of content: The University Laboratory, and the Parabolan Base-Camp. For the moment, they are exclusive to Bag a Legend players, though the developers promise that they will be open to others soon.

March ends, and April begins. The three-part finale of Light Fingers starts to release, and midway through, the Laboratory and Base-Camps become available to the wider playerbase, alongside a new piece of content: The Bone Market.

And that's when things start to get crazy.

Spooky Scary Skeletons

The basis of the Bone Market is very simple: Source skeleton parts, form them into a complete skeleton, sell them to a buyer. Skeleton parts add certain characteristics to your skeleton which make them more or less desirable to certain buyers, and now your Bizarre, Dreaded and Respectable qualities are necessary to attract said buyers, especially the really profitable ones.

People quickly started to create recipes for the most profitable skeletons. The laboratory became a source of forgeries as thigh-bones of a saint, which could be sold to a gullible buyer, creating the meme that St. Fiacre was a very leggy fellow.

It is impossible to truly track the EPA of every conceivable skeleton recipe from back then, but we don't need to, because we have a baseline. To create a skeleton, you have to start by giving it a torso piece; the most basic torso piece is a Human Ribcage, which the game values at 12.5 echoes. As a sort of fallback in case you create a skeleton that you don't need anymore, if you decide to remove your skeleton, it gives you back the ribcage and half of its total value in Whispered Hints if you succeed a check - or 1/4th of its value in bone fragments if you fail. It also gives you back the ribcage.

Do you see the problem?

Putting a Human Ribcage worth 12.5 echoes up for display, and then taking it down, would give you 6.25 echoes worth of items, in a process that takes two actions, for a total payout of... 3.125 echoes per action. You have just achieved in two actions and zero proper downsides what it took Arbor a card draw and an infinity amount of actions to get to.

Granted, Arbor had lower requirements. 167 Watchful is much easier to acquire than the 250 Dangerous to 100% the Bone Market check. But 250 Dangerous is far from an impossible goal, and even on failure, the gain of 1,56EPA is still only slightly worse than Boxgrind - the Gold Standard from four years prior!

This would become a trend.

The Laboratory

When the Laboratory became available to the playerbase, it came with several different types of research they could do; as 2020 progressed, several new research experiments became available. The new item, Cartographer's Hoards, became the first source of potential grinds for the playerbase, with a payout of 2.38EPA if you didn't have the FATE upgrade for your lab, and 2.71EPA if you did. Later, people would try to work with Impossible Theorems, generating 2.54EPA without the FATE upgrade, or 2.95EPA with it. Still nothing that surpassed simply putting up a skeleton and taking it down, of course, but it didn't need to.

2020 introduced Advanced Skills to Fallen London. Kataleptic Toxicology was the first one, but another one was Artisan of the Red Science.

First, a unique Lab Assistant - Cora Bagley - became available to all Heart's Desire players once they got their finale in May, and she works really well with Impossible Theorems. Without the fate upgrade to the Lab, she could eke out 3.03EPA out of it, and with it, she could reach the heights of 3.46EPA - on a grind with zero actual downsides.

Or, if your Artisan of the Red Science was high enough, you could reach an absolutely ridiculous 3.71EPA.

A similar grind involving Queenly Attar and Kataleptic Toxicology was also available at this time, reaching a smaller but still respectable 3.55EPA.

As new items with these Advanced Skills got added, it became clear that the Laboratory was going to dominate the EPA discussions for the foreseeable future, which is why the entire Laboratory was eventually reworked, and the basis of these grinds was removed entirely. I made a spreadsheet to calculate their future potential at the time, and using current achievable numbers for both of these stats, the Queenly Attar grind would've broken 7.5EPA, and be exactly at 8.5 with the Silk-Clad Expert - the Impossible Theorem grind would've broken 9.

The Fumbles

I cannot talk about this era of Fallen London grinding without talking about the problems that appeared. Y'see, Fallen London is a Really Big Game, and when you make stuff as a small indie studio - like FBG is - sometimes you miss some potentially really obvious stuff.

The 20-action Cider

In June, the celebrations officially ended with the release of the Great Hellbound Railway, and the first station: Ealing Gardens. This gave us access to the Hinterlands, an area not super unlike London, with its own Opportunity deck, and its own version of the Bazaar.

Alongside this, and in the previous months, they had introduced to us a new currency: Hinterland Scrips, which would replace Echoes as a currency when talking about Hinterlands content. When the Hinterlands were first released, players were allowed to sell certain specific items for their equivalent value of scrip - Scrips were valued at half an echo each.

But, and crucially, they also added a new item called Tinned Hams, which were actually intentionally valued slightly higher than they were supposed to. While they can be bought for 125 Scrip - equivalent to 62.5 echoes - they could be sold for 63.5 echoes. It was supposed to be a very minor way to convert scrips back into Echoes.

And out of what was most likely a good faith design decision made to be nice to the playerbase, was born Fallen London's infinite money glitch.

It was very very simple, really. Go to London, spend all your money on Red-Feathered Pins, worth 40 echoes each. Spend one action to go to the Hinterlands, sell all of your Red-Feathered Pins for 80 scrips. Spend all of your scrips on Tinned Hams, then go back to London, and sell all of them for a 1-echo profit each time. An infinity amount of echoes and scrips generated over a loop that costed a mere two actions.

In the few hours that this exploit existed for, at least one player earned enough echoes to purchase multiple Ciders. This was the first, and to my knowledge the only time where FBG had to issue account rollbacks to any players, while simultaneously patching the exploit. Red-Feathered Pins are now sellable for only 1 scrip.

But this was not the only exploit, oh no.

LEVIATHAN LEVIATHAN

Remember the simple grind I explained involving the Bone Market? Put up a skeleton, take it down, repeat ad nauseum? That grind used a Human Ribcage, the absolute lowest tier torso you can have in the game. At the time, this was fine, as all existing ribcages had the same value.

And then the players found a source for Leviathan Frames, the biggest and most valuable of the ribcages, worth 312.5 echoes. That simple two action grind now had a payout of 156.25 echoes - over two actions, that's an EPA of 78.125.

Needless to say, that was patched within an hour. I am not sure if a rollback was issued for this one. Nowadays, the original grind using Human Ribcages and equivalent value Skeleton Torsos still exists, unchanged, but any torso piece worth more than 12.5 echoes now disregards the value of the torso piece itself when giving you half of the skeleton's value.

Modern Times: The Moneyed Future

Unfortunately, that is around where my knowledge of the history ends. At that point, I had been almost religiously playing Fallen London for 5 years, and I had started my own guide to help figure out all the grinds that were exploding around the Renaissance, which included manually taking over 3300 data points for the students in the University Laboratory before it got reworked. I eventually came to the conclusion that I needed a break, so I took a long Hiatus from the game. I barely touched it for all of 2022; my last real memory of the game is Mr. Chimes's Grand Clearing Out in July of 2021.

I only seriously came back to participate in this year's Estival, the Horticultural Show, and have only returned ever since. I completely missed last year's Estival, which had an exploit for over 26EPA that did not get patched for the duration of the event. For those of you who still care, at 26EPA an Overgoat is achievable in only 451 actions - barely over three days - and Cider in only 6154 actions - somewhere around 42 days and 17 hours. The event only lasted for two weeks, and the grind itself was only available for less than a day, but I am afraid I only know of it from hearsay, as I was not there to experience it.

Another exploit was also found when the Rat Market was opened, where it was possible to bith buy and sell Ivory Organza at it, for a profit of 82.5 echoes an action.

Somewhere along the way, Forever Arbor was canned from the game, as there is no longer any way to generate Permission to Linger, but the changes to Arbor also ended up buffing Opportunity Arbor, bringing it to the heights of 5EPA at the lowest, and 6 at the highest.

Fallen London now, however, is a game about much more than just the moneymaking. In 2016, while the game had plenty of content for the early and midgames, the later stages were completely barren. Money making wasn't just "a thing to do", it was effectively the only thing to do, aside from wait for new content, which back then was a massive rarity.

Modern Fallen London has several different activities to occupy your time - from the latest report I can find, which is from May of 2021, 30% of the game's total word count came from stuff added in or after January of 2020, which meant that at the time, Fallen London was at around 3.5 million words. And it's not like the game hasn't been updated since.

There are many things to do in Fallen London other than just do the Same Activity Over and Over Again, too. With the addition of World Qualities, certain aspects of the game shift from week to week - the Bone Market has been reworked to prevent repeated uses of particularly profitable skeletons, but there are still tricks you can pull to make good money out of them. The rat market has opened, with a semi-randomized selection of items you can sell for a higher-than-bazaar-value every week, which has severely boosted the value of Tribute.

The Great Hellbound Railway has completed, giving us access to a new way to spend all Favours in Jericho Locks, which effectively gives every favor in the game a minimum payout of 5EPA. In fact, while 3.125 seems to be the "default" payout for very low commitment and repeatable grinds nowadays, 5EPA seems to be the new Gold Standard, it's a number that can be seen on several different grinds throughout the lategame stages.

Just today/yesterday, even, a new activity was released with the new Premium Story, where the devs explicitly said that they were looking for a payout of around 5EPA, and were discussing with the playerbase about how they were getting payouts of 5.9EPA or higher. This is an intentional goal from the devs, a total payout more than triple of the Gold Standard that used to be the Boxgrind.

Deck thinning is now also an officially supported activity, where several cards that used to plague the London deck can now be removed through several means. This, alongside the other changes mentioned here, have also brought the Venerable Dachshund out from hiding, reigniting the power of the grinds into something north of 6.3EPA through a convoluted set of actions known as Mammoth Ranching, which includes creation of Spider Popes.

This has also fundamentally shifted an important part of the game: Low tier item accumulation. Before, you spent actions to acquire items from activities specifically designed to give you said items. Now, you spend actions on very high profit grinds, and use the raw echo value gained to purchase these items from the Bazaar, as it's simply more action efficient.

Rather impressively given the idea this summary might've led you to, modern Fallen London is significantly less about the Raw EPA of its actions. Its economy has expanded to more than twice of its previous size, so different grinds to acquire different items becomes more and more important.

The addition of the 777 qualities also gives the players something to strive towards outside of just Raw Big Number, and the playerbase has even created The Most Vain Order of the Grey, an informal tracking document for people who wish to collect all of the 777 qualities.

And the addition of new large scale serial stories, such as the Great Hellbound Railway, Evolution, and the soon-to-be-released City in Silver, helps keep the playerbase engaged beyond the simple desire to spend actions because they are there. This is coupled with things like the newly reworked Fruits of the Thee festival, the addition of Whitsun as an in-universe stand in for Easter, and the yearly Estivals, which are always a new experience.

It also helps that certain newer economy items can't be simply sold for a profit, and instead have to go through a more convoluted process to be sold. The game's optimization is significantly less repetitive than it used to be.

What I've learned in making a guide trying to keep track of all the new grinds is that the game is so expansive now that it's impossible to predict the exact value of an activity without a lot of research, even the most extremely unintuitive ones. When Zailing received a much-needed rework, dying at Thee without doing dumb things like "letting a giant thee monster tail your ship" means that you got crushed by a rock made of precious material, which you could keep and sell once you were back to life. If you already owned a cider, Death goes from a 20-30 action annoyance to a 1 action mild inconvenience, turning "getting crushed by a rock and dying" into a profitable action that had to get patched out so that after the 7th time you go insane by the calculations you make to prevent yourself from being crushed by a rock.

Hell, even this year's Estival had an especially short lived grind with an EPA in the dozens because the developers briefly forgot to cap Rubbery Skull gain to 1.

And more recently, a companion that explicitly only made your character Suck At Everything had to get nerfed into oblivion because it was so good at its job of Making You Suck that it ended up being very good, by being the best deck thinning tool the game has ever had. It still is, though the amount of Profitable cards you can get from doing this has greatly diminished.

There is enough flexibility and enough wiggle room that you don't need to care about 100% optimization anymore. Which is good, because caring about that too much is what made me quit for over a year, though I do still appreciate that stuff like this exists.

And if you still care, at 5EPA, an Overgoat takes 2343 actions, or just about 16 days to complete; Cider, on the other hand, takes somewhere around Seven Months and Ten Days. At 6EPA, the Overgoat goes below 2000 actions at 1953, and takes just shy of two weeks to complete, while Cider just barely misses the six month mark at 185 days and some change to completion - and going beyond 6EPA is far, far from impossible if you really care about it.