#dr hollcrofts

[brinaarcadia]

This Lamb woman's powers of manipulation are almost scary… her people are using the girls from the surface to gather ADAM from Lamb's followers… it's in the blood -- and eventually they give themselves over, like dying is an honor. I'd almost feel sorry for them… if they didn't have my daughter. I'm going to find Lamb… and take Cindy back, one way or another.

[heavy-weapons-spy]

The cost of ADAM

We are never given a price for ADAM but in Rapture you can put a price on anything, so lets do that. Firstly ADAM is not given any unit of measurement. Diane Mclintock actually refers to ADAM simply with a number in this audio log, We know that saving a little sister gives the player 80 ADAM and saving a sea slug gives the player 160 ADAM and a crippling guilty conscience.

Looking at these images of a sea slug and an internal view of it.

We can estimate the volume of the ADAM inside of it. If that is 160 ADAM then I will assume 1 ADAM means 1 millilitre of ADAM as that is about how much space 160ml would take up and it would make sense for them to use an existing unit. 

Note: Plasmids come in much larger bottles, but since they can be purchased for less ADAM than a single slug it is safe to assume they are mixed with other ingredients and are not 100% ADAM.

But now we need to put a price to it. Other than plasmids and tonics only EVE hypos and Dr. Hollcrofts cure all contain ADAM. Very fortunately Dr. Hollcroft mentions buying ADAM in one of his 2 audio logs on the Cult of Rapture website.

“ Two ounces of pure ADAM, that's forty-five dollars to Ryan...”

Now we just have to do some maths to discover how much Two ounces is in mililitres.

Its time to make an assumption. I will assume that ADAM has the same density as blood rather than water. Blood is 5% denser than water, so if this is wrong then it will still be very close.

1 ounce is 28.35 grams and 1 gram of water = 1 ml of water.

So 1 gram of blood = 0.95 ml of blood.

so 2 ounces of ADAM is  53.864 ml of the stuff, which costs $45.

Which gives us  $0.835 for 1 ADAM!

The Gatherers Garden actually uses a funnel rather than a coin slot. 

So the ADAM is just poured in. (And hopefully nobody ever pours anything else in there.)

A few Prices for reference:

Incinerate! costs 90 ADAM or $75.15

Winters blast costs 60 ADAM or $66.80

And in the first game most tonics just cost 20 ADAM or $16.70

When I first calculated this it seemed a bit cheap for the plasmids, but I suppose it is a very expensive for a lighter but very cheap for a flamethrower. Considering the addiction caused by the drug it is likely that are sold for this price and pretty much everyone in the city is spliced. Ryan is determined to meet demand by sending the little sisters out to collect from corpses rather than to keep them in the orphanage and raise the price of ADAM instead. 

Thanks for reading and feel free to ask me questions or correct me if I made any mistakes. :)

[brinaarcadia]

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