Is this the highest elevator income will go?
I apologise in advance for writing up such a long post again :D While the following shouldn't affect anyone while playing, I felt like posting this anyway just for the fun of it :) I hope some find it just as interesting as I do. TLDR is at the bottom.
Recently I was building fairly tall towers on an account with 100k+ GTs. On elevator rides to higher up floors I was noticing, that the ingame elevator payout was significantly lower than what the known elevator formula predicts. After doing a bit more testing I came to the conclusion, that I was hitting the maximum elevator payout possible on higher floors. Here's why:
Let's look at my in-game coin payouts to the following two floors and what the known formula predicted they should have been:
* 113.5 billion coins shown at floor 1,185, formula predicted 113,516,921,371 coins. (correct prediction) * 199.9 billion coins shown at floor 1,836, formula predicted 270,411,643,008 coins. (false prediction)
These are only two of many payouts I recorded, but everything I recorded supports the following conclusion:
The reason for the payout spread seems to be, that the elevator base payout has reached the 32 bit integer limit of 2.147 billion. By 'base payout' I mean the elevator formula prior to the tech tree.
The current elevator payout is determined by:
payout = (1+EG*F+LBT+SF)*(F*FPS*(1+GTs)+50)
EG = Exponential Growth multiplier, F = floor number, LBT = Lift Boy Tips multiplier, SF = Sci-Fi collection multiplier, FPS = Elevator speed in fps, GTs = Golden Tickets
The 'base payout' part here would then be:
(F*FPS*(1+GTs)+50)
This part seems to cap at 2.147 billion, meaning that the total elevator payout on these floors will not increase with an increasing GT count. Assuming all other bonuses from Tech Tree and Legendary Lounge are maxed, the elevator payout for any specific floor is now also maxed.
By transforming the formula for base payout and solving for floor number we can determine the cutoff for "normal" elevator income at any given GT count. At 10k GTs the cutoff is at floor 19,087 and at 50k GTs it would be at floor 3,818. It should be obvious, that these are numbers which will in the foreseeable future only ever affect a very small handful of players (if even any :D). To experience the cutoff at 100 floors you would need roughly 1.925 million GTs. And even then, the payout would still be 13.7 billion coins, so more than anyone reasonably needs on a single tower.
Using this knowledge, the maximum payout for a ride to floor 2 can also be determined, and with it the maximum amount of GTs, after which gaining more won't increase elevator income to all floors any further. If the payout formula doesn't break anywhere else, this would be at 95,443,715 GTs, which with all other bonuses maxed would pay out 3,221,225,471 coins. I guess we'll have to wait until next century to see someone reach 95 million GTs and be the first player to truly "finish" Tiny Tower :D
All other floor specific maximum payouts can be determined by inserting 2,147,483,647 in place of the 'base payout'.
Boosters:
It is a known but unconfirmed bug, that an active tax bonus booster caps all elevator payout to 2.147 billion coins. It doesn't matter whether there is a sales booster active or not, the payout will be capped.
An exclusive sales booster is still able to triple the total elevator payout, even after the 'base income' reaches the integer limit.
Maybe some people with more coding knowledge can chime in here and correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the capped payout would make it very difficult to ever reach a limit to banked coins, since that limit would probably next be somewhere in the quintillions, which would take literal tens of thousands of elevator rides on a very tall and broken tower to reach. I know at least from own experience, that the coin bank can reach several hundred trillions.
**TLDR:** There seems to be a floor specific limit to elevator payout, but it should only start becoming noticeable during normal gameplay with several millions of GTs. Also the elevator payout would presumably only be capped, meaning it would still pay out more coins than anyone reasonably needs :D
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^(This behaviour was tested on version 4.33 of Tiny Tower)