mapping-elysium

[mapping-elysium]

I love Stardew Valley, it's such a comfortable game to play, but the plot feels a little light at times. I bet it would be more compelling if the farmer had amnesia, crippling substance dependence and was suffering so much mental degradation that he thought his clothes were speaking to him.

[mapping-elysium]

Don't look at me or my collection of Martin Luiga tweets about Jean Vicquemare ever again

[mapping-elysium]

Based on those lines from DE, I tried to estimate Harry's salary in USD, using prices in Ukraine as a starting-off point (pros of being Eastern European...?)

And I also estimated the price of Whirling's special borsht.

This is not a serious math solution; I took a lot of liberties to round the numbers and didn’t spend much time looking for equivalent products. I mostly settled for the cheapest items sold at big chains of supermarkets.

Methodology here is not great. This is just for fun. I'm not good at math and statistics, sorry TT

What I did:

found the UAH prices for analogues of some items sold in the game

averaged the UAH/reál ratio to estimate the price of 1 reál

then converted the final result to USD

Price of 1 reál

Starting from the game items to feature in those calculations, Frittte products are probably the easiest to find analogues for. As for pawn shop and book items from the game, it’d be hard to estimate, I think, the prices vary a lot. Especially for second-hand items that have lower prices.

FALN pants were an exception, because maybe Cuno sells you the new ones? I took the average price of sweatpants made by a local brand popular among young people.

With magnesium I’m also not sure, turns out it's rarely sold by itself without added minerals or vitamins, such as B6. Medications in Ukraine are most frequently sold in blisters, not small plastic bottles like the one in the game art, so I chose the price for a small tube of water-dissolvable tablets.

The price of Drouamine is taken from the price of Ibuprofen.

The final number was an average of all UAH prices divided by reál prices

So, with those loose calculations, the price of 1 reál is around 41,7 UAH, by today’s exchange rates it’s pretty close to 1 USD.

2. Harry's salary

This is the numbers we get.

With his monthly salary Harry can buy, uuuh, 91 bottles of Commodore Red or 152 bottles of Potent Pilsner or 19 112,50 hryvnias.

Just for comparison,

Data for salaries is taken from the biggest work searching website in the country. Couldn't find the median salaries, though.

The price of a motor carriage Harry destroyed is ~40 000 USD/1 668 000 UAH. It'd take him 7 years 4 months to repay.

3. Conclusions

For a competent detective with a high rank who spent 18 years of his life working in RCM? I thought it’d be more. For lower ranks it'd be much harder to get by, puts into perspective how he lived with Dora.

Vibe-based? Livable, especially if Harry owns an apartment and doesn’t have to pay rent. If we say he spends around half of his salary on rent+bills, he can survive on inexpensive food (if he wants to also by substances).

Genuinely scared of thinking how Jean lives with an even lower monthly pay. Judit has three children... oh god. I hope Harry bought them a lot of kebabs (the price of a very delicious big kebab a friend bought me once was 120 UAH /~3 USD).

4. Bonus: the price of Gorący's special borscht

That's right, we're so normal about borscht here that we have something called "Borscht index". It's the price of ingredients used to cook this essential dish that helps to track inflation.

Information from the Ministry of Finance of Ukraine (March, 2025).

If we say Gorący's pot is 20 L (19 L borscht + 1 L vodka), the price would be around 1394 UAH or 33 reál.

Unless he's cooking the Polish barszcz czerwony, which is pretty different from Ukrainian borscht, if I remember correctly.

So, yeah, if we use Ukraine as a stand-in Eastern European country for Revachol, it'd be like this. Thank you for reading! Sorry if the math is very bad TT

[mapping-elysium]

love these little ideology descriptions from the old za/um site that they slaughtered

[mapping-elysium]

Screenshots from Locust City – An Elysium Story (Project X7)

[mapping-elysium]

Locust city (X7) concept art

[mapping-elysium]

The Whirling-in-Rags sign is in Alba (2001), a Bauhaus font with rounded terminals and swashes. It is very disco.

Alba is free for non-commercial use. There's also a paid version with more styles, including a Duoline style like Yagi Double.

[mapping-elysium]

UPDATE I made an updated version everyone look at that instead

Hi! I made a height chart of some disco elysium characters using their actual 3D models! Harry's height is stated in the game to be around 180 cm/5'11ft so I used that as a baseline to scale the chart. More talking under the cut.

also I fucked up cindy's placement she should be more like 5'2

edit 2 i have no idea how I didnt realize soona's hair was making her taller lol pretend i wrote down like 5'5 or something

Yeah, this post certainly doesn't have all of them. A lot of the models I have are comically tiny and would have to be tediously resized using collage mode references or something and I straight up forgot about most others, this was moreso done to see if this project idea was even possible to do. It's possible I'll make a follow-up including EVERYONE though! :) eventually

I also fumbled something while extracting files, certain files were missing and now I cannot extract files At All, this is why Garte and Klaasje are messed up and it also kept me from including some characters entirely.

[mapping-elysium]

What I find remarkably fascinating about the Norse is that they seemed to depend upon being in certain places to access certain kinds of thinking; they correlated “using certain modalities of thought” with “traveling to a certain place” in their stories.

We actually still experience this phenomenon today. Ever wonder why you work more productively sitting in an office/coffee shop/library vs your bedroom or couch? Or how about when you walk into another room and forget what you came in there for, only to remember when you return to the other room?

There’s also the fact the Norse existed during a time when humanity hadn’t developed the ability to read silently yet. I think it’s all super fascinating.

[mapping-elysium]

Hey! It's the first pre-order day for @delysiumzine: After Death, Life Again.

Here's as much of a preview I can give for the cover I made for it.

Incredible work inside by the other participants, as you can see if you follow the zine page and tune in for the incoming wave of updates this month!

[mapping-elysium]

Want to get these on tumblr since I only ever posted them on twitter... various reference collages of official art for disco elysium stuff! Harry, Kim, & Kineema (from 2023)

[mapping-elysium]

Second round of signups open until tomorrow! All info in the link! Come join the fun*!

*

[mapping-elysium]

Nix Gottlieb is very much based on a real person. With the house Luiks interited there came a bunch of black and white photos. We started using these photos as blueprints for characters. All real people, all deceased by now. And one of them was a picture of a man with monk’s hair, glasses, and this strange, strange smile. This was a drinking buddy of Luiks' father. If you had to describe him in a sentence you would say ‘one horrible cunt.’ Absolute terrible fucking human being, but also a legend in this drinking circle back in the day.

This is a real story: there's a party that Luiks’ dad is at, and this guy ‘Nix’, he’s an actual doctor. Somebody at the party complains of a stomachache and Nix touches his stomach and diagnoses him with appendicitis. He literally takes him into a bedroom and operates. He cuts out his appendix and it turns out it’s close to the point where it’s going to explode, so it was very good that he intervened at the last moment. Two days later this person runs into Nix on the street and thanks him. And it turns out Nix was so drunk he has no memory of it. When he finally understands it’s not a prank, all the color drains out of his face, because what are the chances he didn’t kill the person by accident?

There was so much about this real person that was not an adaptation, we just put it into the game.

– Argo Tuulik

[mapping-elysium]

CANON PRECINCT 41 LAYOUT LETS FUCKING GOOOOOOOOOOO

[mapping-elysium]

CANON PRECINCT 41 LAYOUT LETS FUCKING GOOOOOOOOOOO

[mapping-elysium]

"Something we used to say was that the only reason Jean Vicquemare hasn’t killed himself is that he is fascinated by the extent of his depression. The thing that joins Harry and Vicquemare is ‘we have to get back to work.’ Work is the one redeeming thing that gives them purpose. With Vicquemare, we know that he works out like the devil’s on his back and he cracks cases with Harry. But more than anyone else around Harry, Vicquemare is affected by his antics. Harry wasn’t always like this. His decline hasn’t been so gradual as watching trees grow where you don’t see it happening. You still remember your partner as the person they were. There’s definitely gentleness and caring in Jean." – Argo Tuulik