Mad alchemist's purity grind:

Consider the following puzzle piece in the bigger puzzle that is crop purity : Wooden boards.
Wooden boards are used to build the so very influential compost bins that as we all know by now has a hefty say in what humus we actually produce, and considering this fact it's quite easy to conclude that better boards are in very high demand to forward one's grind.
Now there are two factors to also take into consideration, compost bins take any board, not just fresh, and with alchemy one can increase one element's value in items, boards included.
Please note the following estimates on the success rates of various in-game processes are not entirely accurate, but I consider them accurate enough for this little mental exercise.
1) Lucky result of boards drying : 90% dry.
2) Lucky result of planing with decent H&N skill : 60-70% planed, let's say 70% success rate for optimism's sake. (it's needed)
3) Lucky result of getting oiled boards: 70%ish as well.
4)Assuming even distribution of possibilities for each possible shift in elements, you'd have a 5/14 chance to get some sort of increase to the element you have your eyes on, and if lucky that shift will average to 1 per successful tick, again, for the sake of optimism.
5) You need 6 successfully increased boards to get the best bin you can out of the initial boards.
6) The best result with 1 tick per each stage of boardyness would be with 4 consecutive increases.
7) After one tick of tubing about 95% of items, in the best of cases, survives a first tick disintegration.
So taking into consideration all of that, let's see how many initial boards we would need to process through test tubes to get the much desired set of six +4 boards. 6 successful oiled boards times 14/5 to account for the boards that went down in the desired element, times 10/9.5 to account for exploded boards (we'll call these last two steps "tubing" and reapply each time), times 10/7 to account for warped boards, times 2.95 for planed tubing, times 10/7 for planing, times 2.95 for dry tubing, times 10/9 for mouldy, times 2.95 for fresh board tubing.
To sum up, for that set of +4 boards you would need to have an initial 1030 fresh boards, as high as you can get them. Now for you casuals that want something to grind, have at

Next step is for those hardcore grinders that really want to waste a lifetime being the very best. You can go for two ticks per each board stage, which would mean that the initial board number would be multiplied during each stage by another 14/5 , a 2/1 to account for the removal of "clearly unstable" boards, another 2/1 to account for the very optimistic result of only half of them exploding (hopefully without taking the table with them). Apply all the new multipliers, and you get your goal number of initial boards.
To get a set of six +8 oiled boards, you'd have to accumulate and process a total of 16,207,249.408 fresh boards, praying to whatever great/greater spirit that none of the second tick results takes a table with it.
Well then, good luck with your grind pilgrims! Achieving high purity should now be a cinch for you
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