The Spice Loop
The Spice Loop was a way of using adventures to gain spices on a one-for-one basis. It relied on three properties of the game:
- When you bring a Ten-leaf clover to the sewer, you get to pick three items of your choosing in exchange for the clover, rather than getting one random item.
- The worthless trinket that you can choose as one of your items from the sewer can be redeemed at the hermitage for another clover.
- On randomly selected days, the Hermit used to have an unlimited number of ten-leaf clovers.
This lent itself to a popular pattern: on those days in which the Hermit had clovers in stock, it was possible to load up on your clovers and use them at the sewer until you were out of them (or out of adventures). This technique would allow a player to collect one spice, one worthless trinket, and one newbie item (seal-clubbing club, etc.), and finally, exchange all of the new worthless trinkets for clovers (this last step took no adventures).
The net result was that a player ended up with all of the clovers he had before, and had spent one adventure and one chewing gum on a string (and one hermit permit, if he had not yet been hax0red) per clover used, but he gained one spice and one other newbie item per adventure.
As a result of an update to the Hermit's behavior as of October 4, 2006 to allow only a limited number of clovers to be obtained each day, this sequence is no longer possible to follow (indefinitely, anyways). With the October 5, 2010 changes to chewing gum on a string and the removal of The Sewer, spices can no longer be obtained this way at all.
