Shattered Pixel Dungeon v2.4.0!
shatteredpixel.com
Hey Dungeoneers, Shattered v2.4.0 has been released! v2.4.0 features a new category of item: trinkets! They are more about tweaking gameplay variables than giving direct power or utility. There are also a bunch of smaller additions and tweaks, most notably to the Duelist and to Alchemy. Be sure to check the changes screen for full details.

Hey Dungeoneers, Shattered v2.4.0 has been released!

v2.4.0 features a new category of item: trinkets! They are more about tweaking gameplay variables than giving direct power or utility. There are also a bunch of smaller additions and tweaks, most notably to the Duelist and to Alchemy. Be sure to check the changes screen for full details.

  • Audalin@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    6 months ago

    Yeah, I win 1/3 of my runs consistently, but without challenges. I’m still figuring out which challenge would be the easiest to try. Probably the boss-boosting one.

    What do you tend to craft with challenges enabled?

    • chonglibloodsport@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      6 months ago

      A ton of stuff!

      • Potion of cleansing (exotic purity) removes all debuffs including hunger/starvation. This means potions of purity become a major food source when On Diet is turned on.
      • Elixir of aquatic rejuvenation gives more healing than a regular healing potion and allows you to control when and how much healing to apply (by standing in water) to let you avoid wasting healing at full health. This is crucial with On Diet + Barren Land because food is a scarce and precious form of healing, dew drops and sungrass are out of the picture, so you don’t want to be sitting at full health unless you’re starving.
      • Elixir of honeyed healing is another source of nutrition.
      • Elixir of dragon’s breath makes you immune to fire and imbues your attacks with fire. This is extremely useful against the fire hand and the grass hand in the final boss fight.
      • Elixir of toxic essence makes you immune to poison gas and causes you to constantly emit toxic gas. This protects you against the toxic gas hand and also gives you more damage against some of the other hands.
      • Transforming unidentified scrolls into runestones in order to identify the scrolls. Once you have scrolls of upgrade and remove curse safely identified it’s generally a good idea to turn all unidentified scrolls into runestones. Many of the scrolls are actually more useful in runestone form (especially rage and teleport) and getting all scrolls identified quickly gives you more options.
      • Upgrading unidentified potions into their exotic form. Once you have potions of healing identified (which you can do by observing flies/necromancers/vampire bats drop them) you are safe to turn all unidentified potions into their exotic form. This allows you to identify potions by drinking them in exotic form which is much safer to do. The only dangerous exotic potion is corrosive gas which you can mitigate by standing diagonal to a door and running out of the room to escape the gas (which will stop spreading when the door closes). If you wait until you’re starving and moderately low health to identify your unknown exotic potions then you won’t waste a potion of cleansing should you happen to have one.
      • Aqua blast spell (crafted starting with a potion of levitation) gives you 8 charges of a spell that lets you create pools of water anywhere. This is extremely useful for getting rid of traps. 2 casts will clear the toxic gas vents in the treasure room, letting you loot a bunch of gold without spending your potion of purity (which is much more valuable as a food source). Aqua blast is also great against blazing champions, fire elementals, and the fire hand.
      • Feather fall spell (also from levitation) gives you 2 charges that let you loot the drop-down rooms without spending any healing or food resources.
      • Beacons of returning (crafted from scrolls of teleport). You get 5 of these which are basically get out of jail free cards that will save your life. They are also great for backtracking to a shop without spending tons of food running there. Even more powerful is to combine one of these with a scroll of passage (exotic teleport). First you save the current location (using the beacon), then scroll of passage to get back to the shop, then use the beacon to return to where you started. An expensive use of scrolls but saves a ton of food. Very powerful use for the Unstable Spellbook (which can basically give you a free scroll of passage) but you need to be prepared for it.
      • Potion of Divine Inspiration (exotic experience) gives you 2 bonus talent points in a tier of your choice. Extremely good! From T2 onward you generally want as many talents as you can get!
      • Scroll of Metamorphosis (exotic transmutation) lets you swap out any talent for a random talent of the same tier for another class. Very good for swapping out situational or obsolete talents (extra food or identify faster T1 talents) for something more useful!

      There’s far more stuff than all this. Pretty much everything in alchemy is useful if you’re creative enough about it. This is really important as you add more and more challenges because resources become scarce, damage you take increases (a lot), and a lot of easy strategies are disabled.

      • Audalin@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        6 months ago

        Oh! I didn’t remember anything about cleansing taking care of hunger. Now I can see the food challenge being feasible.

        Identifying things via alchemy is a nice trick! (if the game actually identifies them and it’s not you writing the result down on paper or something)

        I thought most traps could either be used against enemies or triggered by throwing some item. Perhaps aqua blast is somewhat useful against the first phase of Tengu if you can’t afford the HP to take a longer walk around the traps? If it works there at all. Otherwise idk. Well, poisoned treasure rooms, but they’re few.

        Other than death prevention, why would you teleport to a previous shop instead of carrying the things to the next one? I can see the act of going downstairs through the cleared levels taking a toll on HP if there’re challenges enabled. If you’re out of slots, you can drop things near stairs while you finish the level.

        • chonglibloodsport@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          6 months ago

          Turning a scroll into runestones positively identifies the scroll in the game so that you’ll recognize it automatically the next time you see it. This is because each scroll turns into the same runestones every time and runestones are always identified.

          The same is not true for potions. You have to actually drink the exotic potion to identify it. Making it exotic just makes that task safer (and avoids wasting a precious cleansing potion).

          You can however identify potions via alchemy another way: turn 3 seeds of the same type into a potion will identify that potion for you. This can be an absolute game changer if you find 3 seeds of mageroyal early on but that’s rare. Getting any potion identified for free is valuable though, and using seeds to do it is totally free (doesn’t cost any energy) plus with the Barren Land challenge you can’t plant seeds anyway.

          Seeds do have other uses besides making potions. Using them to tip darts is another extremely useful thing to do in challenges (and can be totally ignored otherwise). Seeds of blindweed and earthroot are especially valuable for tipping darts because they give you blinding and paralyzing darts respectively. Those two darts can save you from a lot of damage at the hands of annoying ranged attackers like gnoll shamans and dwarf warlocks.

          I actually don’t use aqua blast against Tengu. There’s another potion you can make which is extremely valuable for that fight (and 2 other boss fights): shrouding fog. This is the exotic version of invisibility and it’s extremely good at protecting you from ranged attacks while still letting you fight normally (unlike invisibility which goes away the instant you attack someone).

          Aqua blast pays for itself even if you use it to loot just one of those poison gas treasure rooms. Its other uses for putting out fires, attacking flaming enemies, and creating water (which you can use with aquatic rejuvenation and/or glyph of flow) are more specialized uses but super strong if used correctly. If you have a wand of lightning then aqua blast becomes extremely strong as a combo to get enemies into water so you can fry them all with lightning arcs.

          Returning to shops is the only way to buy stuff from them. Going forward to a future shop will not get you the items in the previous shop. When you play with a lot of challenges you tend to want to get as much value as you possibly can out of each shop. Plus the prices at the shops increase the deeper you go into the dungeon. Buying anything from the first shop (in the prisons) is far far cheaper than it is from the ambitious imp (last shop in the game). A potion of healing costs 300 in the first shop but 750 in the last shop (goes up by 150 each chapter).