Talk:List of consumable items

From Golden Sun Universe
Latest comment: 26 April 2012 by HungryPaperweight in topic List of items exclusively used by enemies?

Hey, Tinctorius, good job with the tables. Well, the Djinn and equipment ones, at least. The one's here I'm not too sure about. I mean, they look good, and it's not like you took out anything out. It's just that I was planning to expand this section later on. Mostly I feel that there's more we could say about these items, but those kinds of explanations don't work well in table format (at least in my opinion). I think I'm at the rambling point, so let me just try to clear my mind and say this simply (more for my sake than for clarity):

Table-ifying the page was a good move considering how little and what type of information we had here. The problem is that I'm hoping to expand this page someday, and to do that effectively I may have to change it back to the list format.

Now, I don't know when (or even "if", at this rate) I'll get around to it, so I'm sure we've got plenty of time to talk this over, like if someone thinks expanding it is a bad idea or if they have an alternative in mind. The world's hungriest paperweight 22:46, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

An issue I'm not too sure about myself. While the Djinn tables and Equipment infoboxes are great, I think we should avoid tablizing everything possible (we should, for example, keep the List of Long Swords and the other equipment lists in their current paragraphish format). This page might be better off in the List of Long Swords descriptive-paragraph style because these consumable items pretty much appear in a lot of other articles in pretty much the same style of tabled format, so it'd almost be a waste to have the same minimally-descriptive table format here. Erik Jensen (Appreciate me here!) 01:01, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
I'll revert my changes here then. I do have reasons to do this kind of edit to every List-of-items page, but since it seems that not everybody agrees with that, I'll just keep my hands off of it for now ;) Another option might be the use of templates for items on these pages, just like I did with the Djinn. Their output format can easily be changed to the 'old' form (descriptive-paragraph style); I could even make it an option to the templates, if necessary.
Anyway, I agree that this edit looks kinda ugly. --Tinctorius 06:21, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

Shouldn't smoke bomb and sleep bomb follow the same format as the items they're listed with? Currently they don't list what spells they imitate, while all the others do.

I suggest smoke bomb be changed to "Smoke Bomb: Emulates the Mist Psynergy, attempting to delude the target. Can be sold for 22 coins." I suggest sleep bomb be changed to "Sleep Bomb: Emulates the Sleep Psynergy, attempting to put the enemy to sleep. Can be sold for 45 coins."

Well, this information about items emulating other abilities comes from looking directly at the games' code through Atrius' ROM hacking utility, which shows the ability effects for Oil Drop, Bramble Seed, Weasel's Claw, and Crystal Powder registered as the "Flare Storm", "Nettle", "Sonic Slash", and "Hail Prism" Psynergies. The Sleep Bomb and Smoke Bomb items have their ability effects registered as "Sleep Bomb" and "Smoke Bomb", however, which is unique to those items and different from the "Sleep" and "Delude"/"Mist" abilities both code-wise and gameplay-wise, as a matter of fact; those Psynergies have ranges of 3, while the bombs have ranges of 1, and the game code considers the bomb effects different from the Psynergy effects even though the end result uses the same status conditions. So, it would be incorrect to say that the Sleep Bomb and Smoke Bomb emulate sleeping and deluding Psynergies. Erik Jensen (Appreciate me here!) 07:49, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

Can we make separate articles?

Main article: /Herb article example

Lately, I've been wondering if we can justify making separate articles for some of these items, like Nuts and Psy Crystals. When this wiki was still young, we just had a bunch of lists, but then we gradually started giving more and more things their own articles, like generic equipment and individual Djinn. Well, I think we might be able to do the same thing with a lot of these items. Sure, the info we have right now isn't much, but if we have separate articles we'll have the space we need to add a bunch more info. To give you an idea of what I'm talking about, I wrote up an example of a possible Herb article. Just follow the link above (sorry 'bout the "main article" bit; I couldn't resist ^_^;) to see what I mean. P.S. Since this is just an example and might not get off the ground, I didn't go to the trouble of actually looking up all the locations. HungryPaperweight 14:16, 15 January 2011 (CST)Reply[reply]

I think it could work well. Wikis like World of Warcraft have separate articles for all of the separate tiers of the same series of healing and mana potions, for example. Erik the Appreciator 14:19, 15 January 2011 (CST)Reply[reply]
Well, I haven't heard anyone say it's a bad idea, so I'm gonna go ahead and make the actual Herb article. I might start articles for other items, too, but they'll probably just be stubs for a while. I'm currently working on gathering Herb locations for Dark Dawn (among other things), but wasn't thinking about other items at the time, so... HungryPaperweight 15:51, 18 January 2011 (CST)Reply[reply]

Naming conventions

First of all, this has less to do with this page and more to do with consumable items in general. That being said, this isn't a major issue, but since I'm working on expanding the consumable item articles, I feel like bringing it up. In the GBA games, items like Psy Crystals and Mist Potions were spelled with each word capitalized. In DD, though, items are spelled "normally", and I don't just mean new items like dried lizards and Khiren water: old items are re-spelled "psy crystal" and "mist potion" (Water of Life appears unchanged, oddly enough). So, do we spell the article names - and, for that matter, the names of the items when brought up in other articles - with capitalization, like in the original games, or just as normal words, like in DD. Like I said, not a huge issue, but here it is. HungryPaperweight 18:04, 19 January 2011 (CST)Reply[reply]

Because these are all *names* for the items, the conventions should be kept at capitalizing every word. Erik the Appreciator 18:25, 19 January 2011 (CST)Reply[reply]
I guess... But their actual, in-game names aren't spelled with capitals in Dark Dawn (well, aside from the first letter), so I was just wondering if we should change to match. Or maybe I'm just over-thinking this... (wouldn't be the first time ^_^;) HungryPaperweight 18:49, 19 January 2011 (CST)Reply[reply]

List of items exclusively used by enemies?

I had made very quick placeholder pages for Firecracker and Fireworks while uploading item icons both to establish the namespaces (very few names related to Golden Sun do not have an article or a redirect to an article by this point, so these stuck out like sore thumbs) and to state for the record their battle effects, which would help editing for whether we'd decide between turning them into articles or merging them elsewhere. Before putting those up, I had asked whether these were worth their own actual articles, and in retrospect my making those placeholder pages right afterward does make it look like I was going ahead with actual articles without waiting for feedback, so sorry 'bout that. While I was uploading all the rest of the item icons, it had occurred to me that Firecracker and Fireworks are just like the Signal Whistle in being exclusive to enemies. Since we have a page on Psynergy exclusively used by enemies, I started to think of proposing putting these three items into a List of items exclusively used by enemies, and I'm proposing it now. Erik the Appreciator 14:37, 26 April 2012 (CDT)Reply[reply]

Well, they say that hindsight is 20-20, and I'll admit that I don't usually consider intentionally making stubs that can later be switched into redirects, so I guess we both jumped to conclusions. Anyways, I also considered suggesting a new article, but my idea was List of unacquirable items (which would correspond with this category and the page List of unacquirable Psynergy). Your name sounds more accurate than my idea, though. My only problem is that I think article titles should be relatively simple and "exclusively" sounds just a bit too eloquent. How about List of items only available to enemies? The World's Hungriest Paperweight 21:48, 26 April 2012 (CDT)Reply[reply]
A "List of unacquirable items" that already includes items that don't even appear in enemy hands would be a fairly good place to have a subsection dedicated to items that do appear in enemy hands, I think. It may be just as good, or better, to do it like that than to split off the small number of enemy-only items to their own little page. But if we're doing that, the question would then become this: Would it be better to not have List of Psynergy used by enemy Adepts separate from List of unacquirable Psynergy? Erik the Appreciator 22:14, 26 April 2012 (CDT)Reply[reply]
Well, there are only three enemy-only Psynergies, much like there are only three enemy-only items, so merging them is a definite possibility and one I would support. The World's Hungriest Paperweight 22:36, 26 April 2012 (CDT)Reply[reply]