As far as I understand it, purity affects certain things now - mainly inspirationals and food. (There may be more things it affects in the future.)
The easy thing to understand is inspirationals. The higher purity percentage translates to a greater value. So a Lover's Locket made with a 10% Iron Bar will give out better stats than a Lover's Locket made with a 0% Iron Bar. There's loads of inspirationals affected by stuff where you can get better purity of the base ingriedients, such as anything that uses food, cotton cloth, or iron bars.
The slightly more complex thing is food. If you look at the stats of food, you'll see four values under "Heal". That's how much of each of the four humors the particular food heals when you eat it. There's an additional four sets of four separate values in different colors underneath that. Here, take a look at the stats for a Crispy Cricket:
Crispy Cricket
Salt: 25.00 Mercury: 25.00 Sulphur: 25.00 Lead: 25.00
Heals: 7.5, 10.0, 7.5, 5.0
Events:
0.0 0.0 0.0 7.0
0.0 0.0 4.5 3.5
0.0 2.5 0.0 3.5
2.0 0.0 0.0 4.5
Right, so, the "Heals" part is pretty straightforward. The numbers are (in order) Blood, Phlegm, Yellow Bile, and Black Bile. This same numbering format applies to the Events part.
The "Events" part is what happens during Gluttony. The purity stats at the top (all 25.00 in the example, a pure baseline item) mean that each of the four events has a 25% chance of happening. When an event happens, those are the values that get added to your gluttony meter when you're slamming down loads of food.
Now, let's say you were really trying to get your Black Bile up. The best "Event" in this is the red one: It gives 7.0 to Black Bile and 0.0 to everything else. No chance of accidentally levelling up Blood or something like that! So, you want to increase the chances to have that one go off as much you can.
Say that you somehow get your hands on a Crispy Cricket with Salt 75, Mercury 10, Sulphur 10, Lead 5. Those purity values of the four elements represent the % chance of the event happening. So if you eat this particularly nice Crispy Cricket during Gluttony, you have a 75% chance to get the Salt (red) values under "Events", a 1% chance to get the Mercury (green) values, a 10% chance to get the Sulphur (blue) values, and a 5% chance to get the Lead (yellow) values.
It's a bit more difficult to handle things you get from animals as there really isn't a way to affect their purity other than finding them like that, but you *can* affect a lot of things. One of the most common things is baking. Mushroom pies, for instance, raise Phlegm rather nicely while eaten during Gluttony, so you want to try to get flour made from seeds with purity values so you get the best possible chance of the highest amount of Phlegm during Gluttony (and not other stuff).
So, the
tl;dr: is that purity increases the potency of inspirationals & food (for healing & gluttony), and the specific makeup of the elements can affect which event occurs when you eat it (and therefore which bile bars you fill up).
Lastly, when it comes to purity for, well, everything, it's affected by the area you're in. I have a character in a smallish Autumnal Forest, and all of the crops I grow have high Lead content as their purity increases. (Some 15% seeds have a Lead value of about 40.00-45.00.) If I used Cereal to make grains (and then flour) to make pies, well, whatever particular pie where Lead is the best event works out rather nicely for me! However, Lead might be crappy for one (or more) of the other pies, so I could trade my high-Lead flour (or pies) in exchange for flour (or pies) high in another element to improve my chances of getting the result I want.
*whew* that was a bit longwinded, but I hope it helps.
by Luc32 » Sun Dec 23, 2012 7:24 pm 
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