Okay, I've been doing a lot of digging into the Luck mechanic. There's a LOT of misconceptions about what Luck actually does or does not do, which is a topic I will go into at a later time, complete with my typical number crunching and data presented for peer review. This topic, however, is an associated one, which I need to iron out before actually presenting my thesis on the effects of luck, which is to say, the effect of food with a luck bonus. Now, every day, you will get a random factor between -0.1 and 0.1, which is what the Welwick Oracle reports on, so roughly a 10% swing either way. Which, honestly, isn't all that much. What I'm trying to determine if the luck +1 from food equates to a +.1 or roughly a 10% swing, or a +0.01 or a 1% swing. If it is +.1 per level of luck, then one luck food item is going to completely offset even the worst luck for a day, and something like the Lucky Lunch will swing from a 10% deficit to a 20% surplus. This makes the daily luck almost irrelevant when you really need it to be. This means that, more than Dish O' The Sea, it should be a Lucky Lunch you consume before going fishing if you need artifacts since the chances of a chest would be significantly increased. However, it is simply a +.01, then any luck-based food is essentially meaningless and reports of its usage is largely due to placebo effect or confirmation bias. Does anyone have any answers to this question?
I believe your calculations are (as they frequently are) correct-- at least given the numbers on the Wiki being accurate. (It would take some spelunking into the code to confirm that.) As I once observed on another thread, the daily luck penalty or bonus from the Fortune Teller is negligible compared to the swing you get from even a lowly +1 food buff. The question remaining is: where do the Wiki numbers come from? Who actually pulled that mechanic out of the game and dissected it to get the actual numbers? EDIT: reviewing the history of that Wiki article reveals something interesting-- in the first few iterations of the article, the luck bonuses for random daily fortune were all listed as whole numbers, not fractions. Curious. EDIT REDUX: It appears the 'correct' (current) numbers are derived from this reddit thread https://www.reddit.com/r/StardewValley/comments/4c2gx4/a_comprehensive_guide_to_luck/ and are said to be taken from the source code to the game.
Huh, interesting link Lilliput. I could've sworn that luck impacted what fish you hooked, but from that code-reading I guess it doesn't.
Thank you for that link, it contains a lot of useful information that I will be citing in my thesis in progress.
Reading that link was like reading a government declassified document. All the redactions were painful. hahaha
