How Draws Work
Several corners of the castle run on luck: a numbers game at a bar, a bag of beans that means it when it says "every flavor." Luck, left entirely to itself, has a tendency to take more than it gives. So the random draws have been fitted with the kind of safeguards a sensible bureaucracy bolts onto anything that separates a person from their money — published odds, a pity counter, a daily ceiling, and a firm rule that nothing you win can be quietly traded away. None of this makes you lucky. It just makes the luck honest.
Published Odds
Every draw screen now prints its own odds before you commit. No deriving probabilities in your head between butterbeers; the number is on the wall.
- The Magical Numbers Game (lottery): there are 715 unique sorted four-number combinations, so a single ticket wins with probability 1 in 715 (about 0.14%). Printed at Aberforth's bar. Tickets cost gold — the ordinary, earnable kind.
- Bertie Bott's bean event: 12 good / 9 bad of 21 flavors, each equally likely — about 57.1% pleasant, 42.9% unpleasant. Printed on the bean screen.
The odds are not a courtesy; they are the actual weights the game rolls against. If they ever drift from reality, an alarm goes off in a test somewhere and a developer has a bad afternoon.
Pity (the Guaranteed Good Outcome)
A pity counter is a tally of consecutive misses that the game keeps for you, on the server, where you cannot reach it. Once the misses pile high enough, the very next draw is forced to a good result and the counter resets to zero.
Read the wording carefully, because it is precise and slightly counterintuitive:
- Bertie Bott's beans: after 5 unpleasant beans in a row (the default; an admin can change it, and 0 switches it off entirely), your next bean is guaranteed pleasant — specifically Chocolate. It is the bean after the fifth bad one that is protected, not the fifth bean itself. The streak only counts what you actually drew; you cannot suggest to it that you have suffered more than you have.
The lottery has no pity, and this is deliberate: its jackpot is a single shared pot, not a private draw against your own rarity table, so there is no per-player streak to take pity on. Its protection is the cap below.
Caps (Limiting Your Exposure)
A cap is a ceiling on how much a draw can cost you in a day, regardless of how persuasive the in-game salesperson becomes.
- Lottery: one ticket per day. You cannot buy your way to better odds, and the game cannot drain more than one ticket's worth of gold from you in a day.
- Bertie Bott's bean boxes: at most 2,000 donator points per day may be spent on boxes of beans (the default; 0 means uncapped). The limit is checked at the moment of purchase, under an account lock, so clicking "buy" twice in quick succession cannot slip a second box past the ceiling. The remaining allowance is shown on the buy screen.
What is and isn't capped: only the donator-point bean-box purchase is capped. The forest bean event is free — beans you find while traveling, in the forest, or in the village cost no donator points and are never capped. The lottery costs gold, which is free to earn; its cap is the one-ticket rule, not a currency ceiling.
The Non-Tradeable Guarantee
Everything a draw can grant you stays with you. Lottery winnings land in your own Gringotts vault. A bean's outcome is a regeneration buff, a sickness debuff, or a count in your own candy stash. None of it is an item you can hand to another player, sell, or gift. There is no draw in the game that mints a tradeable reward, which means there is no draw a clever player can turn into a market — the luck is yours and stays yours, for better and frequently for worse.