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.
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!
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.
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).