Testing the Cooldown on Green Furniture

sleepy_worm

• Null hypothesis: Green plans drop at the same rate if you switch characters or stay on one. It's just RNG.
• Alternate hypothesis: Green plans have a character-specific 10-minute cooldown. When staying on one character, the average time will be demonstrably higher than when switching characters and never below 10 minutes.

Methods
Park characters in Outcast Inn. To test "Changing," I looted containers until I got a green furniture plan, then switched characters. I tracked the time between each character's green plan. To test "Staying," I looted containers, getting a green plan from one container and another green plan from another container. I tracked the time between the two containers.

Results

Changing characters, I got another container with a green plan in it on average 1:12 after the previous with a standard deviation of 0:18. Most of this time was spent changing characters. The 99% confidence interval was 1:05.7 to 1:18.3, meaning that if the drops are truly random (normally distributed), I am 99% confident that someone doing what I did would get a value somewhere in that range.


Staying on one character until I looted 2 containers with green plans in them, I got an average time between containers of 10:19 with a standard deviation of 0:20. The 99% confidence interval was 10:13 to 10:25. The lowest value was 10:00.

These two averages are sufficiently distant from each other to conclude that switching characters has a significant impact on lowering the time between green plans. In addition, the minimum sample value being 10:00 supports the alternate hypothesis that there is a 10-minute cooldown.

Raw data and spreadsheet available here:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/q94flgw8yp8ilnn3wfn3o/AJp2x2U9pmYRI4ABGpkYAkM?rlkey=reuh6woc3l7yyxb4mqmbd5ilv&st=u3cimksj&dl=0

holymacaronee

Great work, Sleepy. This is very helpful knowledge. Thank you for putting in the time to do this!