Congrats on the new release!
this post was submitted on 15 May 2024
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Pixel Dungeon
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Lets go! Could we have a new achievement linked to trinkets?
New badges were a bit out of the scope for v2.4.0, but I do agree trinkets could use a badge.
i love the rat skull trinket
Holy god I was excited for this update, the thing is my ipad fsr doesn’t have it, it says in the news section that the update came out but the changes doesn’t have it, idk if it’s bugging or idk, I’ll try updating the game if I can and testing more, I love your game!!
EDIT: Oh ok I updated the game 😅 Thanks for this update!! I’m so excited! 😆
It can take a little bit for updates to propagate to all the right places.
Has the DM-300 boss been buffed? I just fought it in 2.4.0. I remember being able to evade the toxic gas quite easily, but this time it was almost impossible not to get surrounded by it for at least two or three turns. This made the fight considerably more difficult.
There was a change to DM-300 a few updates ago that might affect the very first turn the gas is shot, but otherwise that mechanic is unchanged.
Thanks for the reply. I would have bet it was aiming two or three tiles behind me (in 2.4.0) compared to directly at me (in 2.3.2), but it's likely me doing something different.
Yess! Thank you!
Can we use savefiles from 2.3 with v2.4
There can sometimes be little hiccups with resuming runs from previous updates, but everything should work.
Cool! Will try once the F-Droid version updates.
Looks like there're going to be some actual uses for alchemy aside from pies, honey potions and healing fruits. (Other shiny things are nice, I tried most of them at some point, but they usually don't provide enough advantages to take up an inventory slot just for this unique crafted item. Perhaps they're more useful if you turn some challenges on.)
I take it you're not a challenge runner. At higher numbers of challenges it becomes essentially mandatory to use alchemy to survive. I am finishing up 6-challenge wins with every class (just need to do Huntress) and I use alchemy a TON. If you'll note one of the alchemy changes is that alchemy pots now only spawn on either the 3rd or 4th floor of each area (instead of possibly the 2nd). This is actually a BUFF to alchemy that makes a big difference for challenge players. Why would we want alchemy pots to come later? Because it reduces the amount of backtracking we need to do and backtracking is really expensive with only 1/3 the usual amount of food (On Diet challenge).
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?
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.
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.
Oh I forgot to mention: the poison gas rooms aren’t the only rooms where you can use aqua blast to get loot! You can also use aqua blast to clear traps in those rooms that are completely full of traps instead of using a potion of levitation (which you could make into another aqua blast)! If you aim it correctly you can usually clear a path to the treasure with only one charge of aqua blast!
Great! I'll try these things with some challenge once I get the update. The trickiest one is to figure out how/when/how often to use darts to make them something better than dead burden when all is fine and an underwhelming response when you're in a pickle. E.g. is it worth upgrading them, or letting them break and buying replacements, or melting other thrown weapons to repair them (as opposed to, well, throwing), or sometimes using them without tips for damage rather than special effects? And sometimes you aren't confident you'll be able to pick a thrown weapon up after using it with the pressure you're facing in some places (especially during ascension, but also in the open areas of demon levels when an eye pops out every now and again).
Darts never break. They have infinite durability. Only the tips wear out, which can be easily replaced by using another seed. Darts with no tips can be thrown an infinite number of times but the damage is low with T1 scaling.
If you wield a crossbow then darts you throw use the crossbow’s damage instead of the dart damage. A highly upgraded crossbow can do a ton of damage with plain (untipped) darts, and tipped darts do the crossbow damage plus the effect of the tip.
Each of the 4 shops in the game always sells one pair of darts for a total of 8 darts in the game. If you buy all 4 pairs then you’ll have 8 darts for the rest of the game and can throw them as much as you want. If you use a ring of sharpshooting or play as a huntress (especially warden) then you can increase the durability of the dart tips so that you get more throws out of each tip, helping you conserve seeds.
I knew all that except the "darts never break" part and T1 damage (which I also knew once, but the last time I used darts was somewhere pre-1.0 and I forgot the details). But thanks anyway.
Other people reading might not have known.
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).
I usually recommend to go for the challenge that you think is the most interesting/fun instead of directly easiest. Champions add quite a bit of variety to combat, badder bosses make interesting tweaks to bosses, FIMA forces you into a playstyle where you avoid taking hits as best as you can, pharmacophobia forces you to proactively avoid bad situations by taking away the easy solution to all problems, etc. Choose whatever you like
I'd say you can't go terribly wrong with choosing a first challenge, even the hardest challenge (pharmacophobia) doesn't make the game terribly difficult if it's the only thing you enabled (it was my first challenge even), so don't worry