Dyes: cancel still costs one, palettes reshuffle every try
✍️ Alice・愛麗沙
Rule one: the moment the dye minigame starts, the dye is spent — press cancel and the colour stays the same while the dye is gone. That is written in the official dyeing guide, not a player complaint. So the right way to use a general dye is to decide what this bottle is for before you start, not to go in, look around, and back out. Rule two: the palette reshuffles every attempt, and every part has its own material palette — the red palette simply has no pure white, a wooden palette is mustard-brown however you spin it, and the same colour code does not look the same on another material. Rule three, the consensus among Taiwan’s veterans: one general dye colours at most 3 slots — lock 1 colour, find the 2nd, give up on the 3rd and hand it to a specified dye, which the cash shop’s daily free item already hands out. And do the dye-powder maths: salvaging an Elite gives 27 powder, but building one Elite eats 46 Advanced pieces on average, and those 46 salvaged directly give 138 powder. Ascending in order to salvage throws away four-fifths of the powder.
The four rules the official guide hard-codes
Everything about dyeing is in the official game guide. These are the four lines that decide how much you spend:
- Only Elite (purple) and above can be dyed. Advanced and Rare pieces arrive with a random colour and cannot be re-dyed — if you want your own colour, you have to ascend the piece to Elite first.
- A piece has between 1 and 6 dyeable slots, and it differs per item. “Three slots per group” is not a rule; a hat may have 1 slot, a top may have 5.
- General dye: pick colours in a minigame, up to 3 slots at once; the palette and the colour-selection area change every time.
- Cancel after the minigame starts and the colour is kept, but the dye is gone. That single sentence is the biggest money-saver in this whole guide.
A specified dye is a different thing: it sets 1 part to the preset colour shown on the item icon — no minigame, no chance to miss.
Why the palette is always slightly off
The board is a rotating pattern, not a full colour spectrum. The Korean community write-up puts it at about ten boards in rotation, and Taiwan players have noticed “it feels like a few pictures on repeat.” The board you drew may simply not contain the colour you want — that is not slow hands, that bottle could never have produced it.
Every part has its own material palette. Taiwan players report that different parts of one outfit use a standard palette, a near-greyscale palette and a red palette; the standard and greyscale ones have black and white, the red one has no white. Wooden materials such as bow limbs and staves have palettes that are mustard-brown end to end, so only a specified dye works there.
The same colour code looks different on a different material. One forum line puts it best: the same colour number feels different on a different material palette, and that holds for specified dye too. That is why “the black on my hands and feet isn’t the black on my body” — you didn’t dye it wrong, the material reflects differently.
How to fine-tune. On PC, the mouse wheel slides the palette past in fixed steps, which is more precise than dragging. When framing three colours, first rotate until the 1st and 3rd colours are about the right distance apart, then nudge to bring the 2nd into place.
The arithmetic: dyes per piece, and what to salvage for powder
Start with slots. A general dye covers up to 3 slots per bottle, a specified dye covers 1:
| Dyeable slots on the piece | General dye only (minimum, every attempt perfect) | “Lock 1, find 2, specify 3” (general + 1 specified each) | Specified dye only |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 slot | 1 | — | 1 |
| 3 slots | 1 | 1 general + 1 specified | 3 |
| 5 slots | 2 | 2 general + 1 specified (or 1 general + 2 specified) | 5 |
| 6 slots | 2 | 2 general + 2 specified | 6 |
The second column is a theoretical floor: every bottle has to frame 3 colours you are happy with on the same board. In practice the board reshuffles and the material palette limits colours, so the bottle that nails all three is the exception. Handing the 3rd slot to a specified dye swaps “the hardest slot” for “the slot that always works.”
Then the sources. Four are visible in Taiwan right now:
- Cash shop daily free item: Taiwan players report it can roll a specified dye, for free.
- Cash shop daily-limited purchase: Taiwan players report a dye limited to 10 a day (200 deka).
- Dye Selection Box: 500 cash-shop points, 10 per month, pick 1 of 5 specified-dye colours — the most expensive exchange in the whole point store, worth it only when the colour you want happens to be one of those 5.
- Salvage fashion → dye powder: Taiwan players report Advanced 3, Rare 9, Elite 27 powder; 10 powder makes 1 dye, with a chance of a great success that doubles it.
Finally, salvaging. A failed ascension returns the main material, so the average number of pieces one ascension needs is 2 ÷ success rate + 1. With Taiwan’s published rates:
| Ascension step | Official probability | Extra materials |
|---|---|---|
| Normal → Advanced | 50% | None — three pieces of the same slot and grade is enough |
| Advanced → Rare | 40% | Advanced → Rare accepts any three Advanced pieces, from any slot |
| Rare → Elite | 30% | From Rare up, the three pieces must share both slot and grade |
| Elite → Epic | 25% | Also needs Magic Thread, a cash-shop item |
| Epic → Legendary | 25% | Also needs Magic Thread; one of the material slots may be filled with Mysterious Fabric instead |
Three fashion pieces of the same slot and grade — any slot for Normal → Advanced — give alchemy a chance at one piece a grade higher. Besides the lucky box, this is one of only two ways to start acquiring fashion without paying. But Elite → Epic and Epic → Legendary both additionally require Magic Thread, and Magic Thread has never carried a standalone price in Taiwan: the only retrievable source is a time-limited, purchase-capped abyss fashion support bundle. A free player can ride alchemy all the way to Elite for nothing, and the wall stands where it always did — above Epic.Spending guide
| Route | Advanced pieces in | Dye powder out | Equals this many dyes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Salvage the Advanced pieces directly | 46 | 46 × 3 = 138 | 13.8 |
| Ascend into 1 Elite first, then salvage | 46 on average (6 per Advanced→Rare, 7.67 per Rare→Elite) | 27 | 2.7 |
From the same pile of Advanced pieces, salvaging directly gives 5× the dye powder of ascending then salvaging. The forum line “green 3, blue 9, purple 27 sounds like a fair one-for-three, but it ignores the brutal ascension failure rate” works out to exactly this gap.
The most common mistake: “copy the colour code and it’ll match”
The most-asked question on the board is “can someone give me the code for black?” You can have it, but a colour code only carries over on the same material palette. If the hands, feet and body of one outfit sit on different materials, the same 000000 comes out glossy on one, matte on another, purplish on the third. To make a whole outfit “look like one black”, match by eye, not by number — which is why some players relaxed their standard from 000000 to “anything starting 010 passes.”
The second mistake is “if I don’t get it, cancel and try the next bottle.” The official guide is explicit: the cancelled bottle is already gone. Decide this bottle’s floor before entering the minigame — say, “I only need the black on slot 1; if slot 2 is close enough, take it” — which saves more than hesitating in front of the board.
Do now, ignore for now, and what would overturn this
Do now:
- Check the cash shop’s daily free item every day and stockpile specified dyes as insurance for the last slot.
- When using a general dye, follow “lock 1, find 2, specify 3”: lock one colour, find the second, hand the third to a specified dye.
- Duplicate Advanced and Rare pieces — salvage them straight into dye powder; the only set worth keeping for ascension is the one you actually want to wear at Elite or above.
- For wooden palettes (bow limbs, staves) and any part on a red palette that you want white, plan on a specified dye from the start.
Ignore for now:
- Pure 000000 / FFFFFF. Materials render colour differently anyway, and the last bit of difference is hard to tell on a screen with the naked eye.
- The Dye Selection Box. Unless one of its 5 colours is the one you want, it is the most expensive slot in the point store.
What would overturn this:
- The official rule that a cancel still consumes the dye is rewritten, or the palette becomes a fixed spectrum.
- Taiwan’s powder conversion (10 powder per dye) or the daily purchase limit differs from the player reports — trust the in-game value and scale the multiplier in the salvage table accordingly. As long as the ascension success rates don’t change, the direction “salvage directly beats ascend-then-salvage” stays the same.