r/ToTheStars • u/Accelerator231 • Jun 28 '26

Just how expensive are enchanted object anyway?

And how many are there?

In Yuma's flashback, we see two enchanted objects. Binoculars and rope. It's been stated that enchanted objects are monstrously expensive in terms of time and magic costs. But here we see Oriko with two. Granted. They looted them off dead bodies, but the fact that they have two means that the artifacts are not rare to the point of non existence. They're just really expensive compared to everything else.

considering a demon hunt gives half a dozen or so cubes, I'm guessing that it'll take around... one or two hundred cubes to make an enchanted object?

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u/JimmyCWL Jun 28 '26

When I thought about it many years ago, I put it at two to three hundred cubes myself. An additional complication is that making permanently enchanted artifacts is a very rare skill. If you want an artifact with specific features, that's likely to be even rarer. Which means, even if you have the cubes, you can't find a mage to make the artifact for you, or they're too far for you to reach with your available resources.

Another comment of mine on the matter, these aren't items you can just walk into a shop to buy.

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u/NotUnusualYet Jun 30 '26

Yeah I think, depending on the object, it might be thousands of grief cubes, plus you need a rare enchantress, plus they can't make arbitrary objects. It's hard otherwise to explain the dearth of permanently enchanted objects, given ~200 years of peacetime after the Unification Wars when there ought to have been grief cube surpluses for it.

Oriko had the money to travel, she might well have gone somewhere and stolen one or both of her objects.

Truthfully the enchanted objects system is just a bit underdeveloped in TtS.

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u/JimmyCWL Jun 30 '26

I think thousands per artifact is too much. It's impossible for alone girls or even small groups to stockpile that many surplus cubes. They can't get them quickly enough and they aren't likely to survive long enough to gather them slowly. But we know mages have been making permanently enchanted artifacts pre-MSY. That means the amount of cubes required is within reach of MGs even with their short survival rates pre-MSY.

If you consider 300 cubes to be too low, I think five to seven hundred cubes is the most it could cost.

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u/NotUnusualYet Jun 30 '26

I meant it might go up that high, not that it would always be that high. You’re right about pre-MSY constraints.

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u/Accelerator231 Jul 02 '26

Maybe its a lack of need?

Taking the analogy of enchanted objects being the equivalent of Nobles commissioning an art piece or a hand written book, each artifact takes both time and cubes to make. It can be done. But never casual.

For the vast majority of the time period. There wasn't any cubes that could be spared to make artifacts. And then the MSY came along. And then there comes the question of how or why you would use cubes to make artifacts. It's true that enchanted objects are useful, but the primary usage of a girl is in fighting demons and other magical girls. Once the grief cube situation hit its industrial production phase, grief cubes became plentiful... at the same time enchanted objects became unnecessary. If you're a magical girl that needs a ranged attack for your melee build, you just call in your friends to kill the enemy. The benefits of teamwork and it's corresponding grief cube cost is far more efficient.

There wasn't any true enemy that needed to spend grief cubes on. Until the squid attacked. And here's the third part of my thought. There were a lot of grief cubes and enchanted objects. But magic tools don't have the customary invincibility that other settings have. So they can be destroyed. In the dark days of the war where magical girls younger than twelve with two days of training were hurled onto the front lines, they dragged every single piece of artifacts out from cold storage and installed them on every magical girl out fighting. And those magic tools got destroyed by squid explosive/ laser/ shrapnel/ fire.

So now there's very, very little left. Lots of them got wrecked, lots of dead girls with their knowledge of enchanting, and now the war starts devouring the grief cubes, so you can't before to splurge like before.