Shattered Pixel Dungeon v0.2.3: The Artifact Booster Pack!

After a pretty big delay, the last update before 0.3.0 is here! This update features a while bunch of tweaks and improvements, as well as some additional content including 4 new artifacts! Quite important as well, it is now possible to donate to support the game!

The update should populate to Google Play and Amazon shortly.

There’s a lot of stuff in this one so I’ll try to be a bit more brief than usual where I can be. 0.2.3 is the last update before 0.3.0 so I took it as a opportunity to improve on content added from 0.2 to 0.2.2, while also adding some new stuff.

Artifacts

Curses!:

All artifacts now come as unidentified, and have the potential to be cursed! Expect cursed artifacts to give malicious versions of their non-cursed effects, and you get no say in how/when they activate! You can’t upgrade cursed artifacts, so make sure to have a scroll of remove curse handy.

Quality of Life & Utility Improvements:

All existing artifacts have had some tuning and general improvements made to them. Bugs have been fixed and all applicable artifacts can now be quickslotted. Artifacts can now also be used with a well of transmutation, and artifacts are now unique over a run! If you are ever able to have more than one of an artifact (excluding existing saves), that is now a bug.

Cloak of Shadows:

Now a rogue exclusive item, no longer attainable as a drop! The Cloak’s recharge rate has been nerfed slightly, it will now charge faster the more charges it is missing, keep using it to help it charge faster! The cloak now requires at least 2 charges to be used, it seemed pointless to let the player use one charge and then instantly lose stealth.

Cape of Thorns:

Buffed! The cape should now be a much more worthwhile item, it charges and levels notably faster, and its active duration is longer.

Armband:

Small nerf, now loses 25% of charge when unequipped. I don’t want to encourage people to constantly juggle items in their misc slots, this means you have to commit to wearing the armband to get its full effectiveness.

Horn of Plenty:

Small buff, now charges faster initially, charge rate at max level unchanged.

Chalice of Blood:

no changes.

Talisman of Foresight:

rebalanced, now weaker initially, but benefits more from levelling up.

Sandals of Nature:

Buffed slightly, now gains charge proportional to max HP, should charge faster overall.

New Artifacts:

• Alchemists toolkit, for superior potion mixing after some puzzle solving.
• Unstable spellbook, for some chaotic, but renewable, scroll effects.
• Timekeeper’s Hourglass, for manipulating time to your advantage.
• And the return of the Dried Rose! Perhaps the sad ghost will have a second chance to be a hero…

Freerunner Buffs

As the cloak of shadows is now rogue exclusive, it made sense to more tightly tie it to the rogue class. The Assassin already greatly benefits from the cloak, and is generally the stronger subclass, so I took the opportunity to give the freerunner some love. Firstly, the base movespeed bonus on the freerunner has been reduce very slightly, and the freerunner no longer gains bonus evasion while moving. The bonus evasion was fairly worthless as you can’t fight and move in the same turn, meaning it only helped a freerunner running at/away from a ranged enemy. Now, instead, the freerunner’s bonus speed is increased MASSIVELY whenever he is invisible. The freerunner can now move at speeds that would make a +5 ring of haste jealous.

Ring of Force

buffed significantly, due to some poor arithmetic on my part (ooops) it was very weak before. The ring now scales with player strength and its own upgrades. The ring should now be about as strong as whatever tier weapon you currently have strength to use, but it can scale past 18 strength. Combine with a warrior, extra strength potions, or a ring of might for excellent results. Note that this has not changed the fact that the ring of force does not work with knuckeldusters, I’ll evaluate this as a potential change after I’ve seen the impact of this initial buff.

Ring of Evasion

Reworked! … again! the initial rework on this item kinda sucked, it rewarded the player for standing still which both didn’t synergize with any other items/effects very well, but also didn’t thematically fit. The new ring of evasion now encourages the player to be sneaky, rewarding players that remain unseen with higher evasion and reduced detectability. It’s like if the old ring of evasion and old ring of shadows had a baby. The ring should now work as a sneak-incentive for other classes, and have wonderful synergy with the rogue. I’ll continue to evaluate this ring, I’m very happy with the new gameplay but this change may make evasion very OP again, if so I’ll be ready with the nerf bat.

Blandfruit

The varieties of cooked blandfruit that were once harmful now instead give unique buffs when eaten! Try imbuing your hero with the powers of firebloom, sorrowmoss, or earthroot!

Health Potion farming

Firstly, fly swarms have been reverted back to their original state, meaning they are once again relatively good to farm, but - ALL MEANS OF FARMING HEALTH POTIONS HAVE BEEN NERFED! Here’s how it works: every single potion drop will reduce the odds of the next one from that particular source. This means that the longer you try to farm health pots, the less likely they will be to drop. There are 6 distinct sources in total: the 4 mob types which drop health pots, making health pots through alchemy, and blandfruit seeds (as blandfruit can be made into healthfruit). All of this means that, similar to scrolls, there is now a finite number of health potions that can reasonably appear in a given run. This change should only seriously affect players who incorporated significant potion farming into their strategy. Note that this is also a nerf to the wand of regrowth, as that wand no longer lets you build up a stock of seeds and turn that into many health potions, due to alchemy being one of the nerfed sources. Sources of non-instant healing, such as sungrass seeds, dew drops, etc, are not affected by this change.

Save Tweaks

I have made changes to the way the game handles save failures. This may result in short term annoyance, as the game will crash instead of hiding save exceptions, but this will also allow users to send me google play bug reports, which will make fixing save issues MUCH easier.

Interruption Tweaks

Player interruption has been reworked. The character will now stop whenever they take damage, meaning that fat-fingering while fighting a ranged enemy will no longer instantly turn you into a pincushion. There are two exceptions to this however: Starving damage will not interrupt you, meaning players can move freely while starving. Pressing the ‘continue moving’ button will make the player ignore damage interrupts until they stop moving, which means you can force your character to keep moving when you’re hit by damage over time effects, rather than having to tap a million times.

Stealth Tweaks

Invisibility, and the effects of the new hourglass artifact, are now interrupted when the player hits an enemy with a thrown weapon, as well as melee ones. While I appreciate that this does close an avenue for strategy, going invisible and attacking 15+ times with the huntress was ridiculous. Utility items like potions can still be thrown without issue.

Donation System

It is now possible to donate to support the game! For a full explanation of this system you can check out my previous post HERE. Note that the TBA feature has become the Hall of Heroes.

Rankings Improvements

One of the new donation features, Hall of Heroes, adds a lot of space and customizability to the rankings page. It has been a common request that I look into reworking rankings, and while I’m happy people will like the Hall of Heroes, it would be wrong to lock a fix to the rankings system behind a paywall. Therefore, in addition to donators getting access to the Hall of Heroes, everyone will get access to an improved rankings page! The improved page features UI tweaks which make records more condensed while providing more information, and space to squeeze in 5 additional rankings! This means the rankings page now your top 10 + your most recent. While the Hall of Heroes provides even more rankings space for those that want it, I’m confident this rework will solve the rankings problem for EVERYONE, it is not my intention for donation features to solve problems, they are strictly extras.