Shattered Pixel Dungeon v0.4.0: The Equipment Rework!

An update for Shattered Pixel Dungeon has been released!

0.4.0 is a complete overhaul to equipment, changing up weapons, armor, enchants, glyphs, curses, and a bunch of various odds and ends!

The update is available now through Google Play, and will be available to amazon and f-droid users (hopefully) within a couple days, along with the source release.

As always, especially with such a big update, your feedback is crucial! Please let me know what you think of these changes, and if you run into any issues. The best way is to email me.

Here’s the full changelist, plus change context below:

New Equipment Content:
- 13 new weapons, 12 rebalanced weapons
- 3 new enchants, 10 rebalanced enchants
- 8 new glyphs, 5 rebalanced glyphs
- 12 new curse effects

Equipment Curses:
- Curses now give negative effects
- Curses no longer give negative levels
- Upgrades now weaken curses
- Remove curse scrolls now affect 1 item

Equipment Balance:
- Tier 2-4 weapons do more base damage
- All weapons gain more dmg from upgrades
- Upgrades now remove enchants less often
- Upgrades reduce str requirements less
- All armors require 1 more str
- Encumbered characters can't sneak attack

Droprate Changes:
- Powerful equipment less common early
- +3 and +2 equipment less common
- Equipment curses more common
- Tier 1 equipment no longer drops
- Arcane styli slightly more common
- Better item drops on floors 22-24

Class Balance:
- Huntress now starts with knuckleduster
- Assassin sneak bonus damage reduced
- Fixed a bug where berserker was immune when enraged
- Gladiator's clobber now inflicts vertigo, not stun

Enemy Balance:
- Tengu damage increased
- Prison Guard health and DR increased

Misc:
- Scrolls of upgrade no longer burn
- Potions of strength no longer freeze
- Translation updates
- Various bugfixes

Holy Changes Batman!

So in terms of gameplay impact this is easily the largest update shattered has seen yet, and there’s just far too much to cover everything here without taking up too much space.

To put things simply, this is my attempt to bring in the game pacing improvements that degradation brought to the vanilla game, without any of the downsides. The common strategy of hunting for high tier gear early and pumping everything into it is massively less viable now. Players should be much more encouraged to use a variety of items throughout their run, and there is a much greater variety of items and effects to choose from.

More Forgiving Curses

A big part of these changes is to adjust how curses work to better encourage players to try on gear. Curses are no longer about game-endingly bad stats, but are instead about specific negative effects which can often be mitigated through smart play. As a tradeoff, curses are a lot ‘stickier’ now, so you’ll want to keep remove curse scrolls handly to reliably get rid of them.

Easier, Harder?

With so much changing up, the state of the game’s difficulty is somewhat up in the air. Personally I think things are a tad harder, but only time will tell as players discover new strategies that work with all this new content. I’m going to keep a keen eye on things and make changes as needed.