Once upon a time, there was apparently an exploit in which Damaged Fiery Beetle Mandibles could be turned into the undamaged variety by packing them into alchemy bottles in a certain way. I never realized that was going on, but probably did it many times by accident. This exploit has been fixed (apparently -- I haven't tried to do it on purpose), as I have found since returning to the game after a long break. The problem is that, in my opinion, the cure is worse than the disease ever was.
When using beetle mandibles for alchemy, there is no difference between damaged and undamaged ones. They have the same output and DC. The only difference is in whether Navarre, in the cabin in the northwest of Vallaki's western outskirts, will take them. He pays for the undamaged ones, but not the damaged ones. You'd think that might be a big deal, that a person could gain a lot of money, but even on a really good beetle spawn, that's probably only a difference of 100-200 GP in payout. That's the only harm of the exploit: A couple hundred GP to someone who RNG didn't favor with undamaged mandibles.
The reason I say, now, that the cure is worse than the disease, is that there has been a side effect of this exploit fix. When attempting to pack (or unpack) mandibles into alchemical reagent bottles, if there are both damaged and undamaged mandibles in a target container, there will be a lot of error spam generated. You can, through persistence, pack the reagents into the bottle anyway, but only one at a time, with the errors repeating for every successive ingredient-packing attempted after the one success.
This is really annoying, tedious, time consuming. I suggest that the best fix would be to either make bottles easy to pack full of mixed mandibles again, even if the exploit is still present -- or have the containers work just like they do when you try to pack a bag that is full of, say, skulls and slime balls. Mandibles are getting some kind of special treatment, but if that were to stop, we could just pack damaged mandibles in one container, and undamaged ones in another. Use flask on bag, flask iterates through container contents to find first instance of a packable ingredient, then packs all matching ingredients, up to capacity, and does not attempt to pack any mismatching ingredients. That's how it works for everything that isn't a beetle mandible right now, and would -- to me at least -- be a better way to handle mandibles.
