Octopath Traveler: Data Gathering Session 1

So, I have a slight issue with the way Octopath Traveler handles the player's acquisition of new equipment.  It's basically spread out among a bunch of towns, and they just say "figure out what's best yourself lol".  Unless you're like me, you'll probably have to fast travel around comparing stats and whatnot to find what you need.

I've never been one to pass up an opportunity to make myself a solution.  I've also always had issues with the ways that games present information, usually it's not in a manner that I can easily digest.  If you recall, I made a PHP/MySQL application a while back for the StreetPass game Flower Town, just so I could track my progress and see what I had left in a way that much more completely and concisely told me what I had and hadn't done.

It should come as no surprise that I started work on a spreadsheet of all the equipment available for purchase from shops.  It may come as no surprise that I'm also including consumable items in this spreadsheet.  I've been asking myself "where did I get this thing?  If I knew, I'd go back and get more!", and that's precisely what this spreadsheet will tell me.  Well, not completely.  If I got it from a chest, or boughtstole it from an NPC, it won't be in the spreadsheet.  At least, I'll have a pretty good indicator as to which items I can readily get more of.

This is a fairly time-consuming process, hence my actual game progress has come to a halt.  I even restart the game periodically so the time I spend standing there with one or another shop's menu open won't count towards the gameplay time on my save.  Up until the time of this writing, I've got half of the game's shops documented.  I need to get the other half, and then I need to get Alfyn levelled up more so he can Inquire about things, since one of the things you can get from that is additional stock at shops.

Making this spreadsheet has been an interesting journey of writing formulas, using the hell out of named ranges, and adding in data verification and conditional formatting.  These sheets are designed more like database tables, to be honest.  I'm using VLOOKUPs all over the place.  I have a duplicate equipment protection conditional formatting rule in my equipment sheet that takes so pointlessly long to actually apply its formatting that I might as well not have it.  The performance issue is either due to the fact that it has to compare what I've entered to everything else in the column, or that every row on the sheet is subject to a VLOOKUP from my main equipment sheet with all the pretty formatting, to pull in item stats and whatnot so I didn't have to keep typing them out over and over again, and every time I change a cell the VLOOKUPs are getting re-evaluated even though the sheet they're on isn't even visible.  There's probably a way to optimize it further than I already have.  Do I know what that way is?  No!

In my typical fashion, I'll post a link to this spreadsheet once I'm done making it, so everyone can bask in its glorymake use of it.