So I'm one of those people who likes to snoop around and try to get a better understanding of every game I play. Certain things are fun for me to learn, while others I piece together at later times. Today, I was on our Spiral Knights discord channel and was inspired to try to determine the "intended" cost for energy.

While energy is, by design, supposed to fluctuate, certain design elements had to be taken into account to find a proper balance. The first step, of course, is to determine what is a proper ratio between crowns and energy using in-game determinations. Luckily, there are crown and energy costs for all star levels of gear.

Energy costs for gear is easy since it is on the supply depot. Crown costs are a bit trickier, but have been in front of us for quite some time. You may have noticed in the past that when you vendor certain star level items, you get a certain amount of crowns back. The three most common ones are the items you sell from boss missions -

5* items sell for 30k crowns, 4* items sell for 10k crowns, and 3* items sell for 3.5k crowns.

Now, the 3.5k crowns is actually seen elsewhere in the game - when you're purchasing an item from vendors! You'll notice that stranger merchants sell 3* items at 35k crowns, 2* items at 7.5k crowns, and 1* items for 3,000 crowns. Since you can sell a 3* item for 3.5k crowns, and buy one for 35k crowns, that means a vendored item is sold for 10% of its crown value.

So with this information, we can assume the following:

5-star items are worth:
3,500 energy, or 300,000 crowns

4-star items are worth:
1,600 energy, or 100,00 crowns

3-star items are worth:
500 energy, or 35,000 crowns

2-star items are worth:
150 energy, or 7,500 crowns

1-star items are worth:
65 energy, or 3,000 crowns

Now if we take the energy cost, multiply it by 100 to convert it to crowns, and then divide the energy cost by the crown cost, we get the following numbers
5* - 1.166666
4* - 1.6
3* - 1.428
2* - 2
1* - 2.166666

Adding up these ratios, we can find an average ratio - roughly 1.67. Now what does this mean?

Well, first let's find an equation we can use for this. The one I'm using may be flawed because I haven't math'd in a while, but I believe it works:

100E = R * 1/100C

Where E = energy, and C = crowns, and R = ratio. So what about our average ratio?

(100E / 1.67)*100 = ~5988

So the game was designed around energy being roughly 6k crowns!

Let's take this a step further though, and use our formula on the highest "designated" rate, and the lowest "designated" rate.

(100E / 1.1666)*100 = ~8571
(100E / 2.1666)*100 = ~4615

And one final calculation!

(8571 + 4615)/2 = 6593

This makes a lot sense from a design angle, seeing as around 6.5k crowns is what you can get from a good T2 arcade gate, and what you should get as a bare minimum from a T3 arcade gate - this is all before the new difficulties came out and inflated crown prices. You were supposed to be able to break even with energy after reaching tier 2 back when elevator costs were a thing!

So the TL;DR is: Energy is designed to be between 4615 to 8571 crowns, with the "designed" cost being somewhere around 6250 crowns or so.