I just checked, and here's the One Ring's entry in artifact.txt:

Specifically, note the A: line. Rarity of 1. Meanwhile, Grond has a rarity of zero because it's never supposed to be generated "naturally", only by being forced into Morgoth's drop.

Ah, too old, I used old info.

Phew. I started to think that I don't understand angband code at all. Good to know that this is just having wrong initial assumption.

Which btw reminds me conversation with Magnate. I think this should go other way around, most common item should have lowest number and rarest arbitrary high number.

Maybe something like

Would be better. Then you could make insanely rare "game breaking" artifacts. Now the whole range is 1-100 and that's it.

It's 1-1000 in v4, which is a lot better, but you can't really have arbitrary rarity while you're limited by integers. Pyrel has infinite rarity gradations because alloc_prob can go down to .0000001 etc.

I don't think I understand the need to have rare items have a high number though; alloc_proc seems equally if not more intuitive to me (number of occurrences on the number line).

I also don't understand why people won't let this bloody thread die. Ho hum. Perhaps pav could lock it :-)

"Night of the living thread"

Nooooo dont you lock my favourite thread. I love what Magnate has done to the randarts and all, but regardless, swinging the thread-close hammer when the topic is unpleasant isnt fair! Dont go there!

Of course I mostly hope to see awesome randarts posted here.

Keep in mind that the only reason Magnate doesn't want to see this thread closed is because reading it is unpleasant using the threaded view. He has nothing against the thread content.

...is anyone else on the forums using the threaded view?

I'm using hybrid. I have tree in top of the screen and I see all the posts from starting point in that tree below it. That way I can see who answers to who and all the posts thereafter.

Well, as I said you could then make hyper rare insane things without having any limits (except length of the integer bitwise).

I don't see how this is intuitive: "how rare is the thing? One." One what? You need to know the source to understand the limit. If you have it other way around IE one time in <rarity> then that's very intuitive to use to me.

I like the way that in discussing why Magnate dislikes the thread, we are making it longer :)

Except that then you can't handle monster drops as "this monster drops up to N items". That is impossible to do if you want to specify rarity in terms of "this item has a 1 in X chance of dropping."

There's a large pool of items, and they all have different rarities relative to each other. Then the game picks from that pool. You don't really need to understand the source, but you do need to know what the total size of the pool is (i.e. the summation of all rarity values).

If there's only 1 droppable item, then it doesn't matter what its rarity is; it'll drop every time. If there's 2 droppable items, one has a rarity of 99, the other has a rarity of 1, then the latter will drop 1% of the time. Et cetera.