Pixel Dungeon

Hey Dungeoneers!

I've just released Shattered Pixel Dungeon v2.5.3! This patch includes a few changes in response to feedback and gameplay data from v2.5.0. There is a new way to identify items, a few items have been buffed/nerfed, and bombs have been buffed across the board!

The dev has been on point for years but I'm definitely not a fan of repurposing the Stone of Disarming to help ID items.

The exploding trap item ID "exploit" is way overblown IMHO. It came at the cost of losing and not using or selling non-upgraded items in shops. It was also plausible that higher quality upgraded items are built better to withstand the explosion.

I've never had to rely on it as there's lots of ways to ID items and don't care if others use the trap as the game is all about having multiple ways to accomplish goals. If it bugs most players then ok fine... nerf it... but not at the cost of other very useful items. It's not like the trap is that common where it's game breaking though. You might not even encounter one before slotting the items you want to use for the rest of the game.

The change came at the cost of providing much fewer ways... and in some case the only way... to deal with traps. The biggest one is being forced to duke it out in summon trap rooms if you don't have a potion of levitation which mainly only drops to fly over other trap rooms. Another is running from a mob on low health and being stopped by a nasty undiscovered trap in a hallway with no other item or skill to leap over it. It also uses up items that players use to do and craft other things.

Also, I saw that bombs don't work on wood walls in the stone of enchantment room anymore? Items that make fire are easier to get but it's annoying when you don't have something earlier in the game so you have to keep going until you find one then trudge back at the cost of satiety... and it may have dropped for a wood walled up door so you have to repeat the process.

Anyway, no complaints to add a new stone of detection rather than replacing a useful one which reduces the interesting and plausible ways to do things.

I've gotten to demon halls a handful of times, but always died in the first few floors. This is my first time making it as Sniper (or Huntress at all, actually).

I have a +6 Grim crossbow, a projecting spirit bow, a ring of arcana, a +2 ring of haste, and +1 plate armour of swiftness. I also have a horn of plenty which I intend to transmute, and rings of tenacity, might, and evasion which I plan to sell.

Which crown upgrade do I want? I'm not sure which one plays best for this build. Does anyone have any other advice for not dying in the Halls?

Update: Yog is dead. Thank you so much for the help! I went Hawk and dumped the rest of my scrolls into Haste for maximum kiting.

After playing for maximum score on 6 challenges forever, I finally bit the bullet and went for a 9 challenge perfect score run. This general strategy got me there in surprisingly few tries:

• Pick Huntress for the spirit bow. The combination of no armor and almost no healing means we can't afford to melee past sewers. Later we pick Sniper for extra vision and armor piercing bow, Warden is sadly gutted due to the Barren Lands challenge.
• Fish for a Ring of Haste as much as possible (always pick rings from crystal chest and pick the chest room behind crystal doors; transmute other rings).
• All upgrade scrolls go into the Ring of Haste.
• Once we've got haste up and running, kiting is the name of the game. Use vision (Rejuvenating Steps and Heightened Senses talents are amazing) and trick shots to deal with ranged threats.
• All healing potions go into energy, we'll use alchemy to get past Tengu, and the King of Dwarves. Keep an Elixir of Feather Fall around to safely do pit rooms.
• Skip sacrificial altars for the ascent, and save 3-4 Scrolls of Magic Mapping for the ascent as well. We'll turn them into Scrolls of Foresight and comb every regular floor for full exploration score.

Potions of Shrouding Fog trivialize Tengu, who is otherwise a huge obstacle for a 9 challenge run. The new bombs also feel great, they do decent damage and have good utility. I used a couple of them to beat down the final phase of the dwarf king. Finally, once you make it all the way down to Yog he actually falls wuite easily to the bow 🙂 One thing I didn't think of was to pick up the darts from the shops, and craft some blinding darts - they'd have saved me a lot of headache against scorpios and warlocks.

I will say that 9 challenges is a lot less fun than 6 challenges, so I'll probably go back to that. Barren Lands in particular feels like it makes the game less interesting, disabling plants entirely just removes so many tools from the player.

From a my perspective (pixeldungeon memes on lemmy🥲)

This is the last official version of Experienced Pixel Dungeon, Redone or otherwise. No more bugfixes, ports to latest Shattered, or new content. That's the end of the line.

2024 is anniversary to many things, including this mod, as 4 years have passed since the first release of that silly grinding mod with many things to do; but since then, the tumor has only grown larger...

You might have noticed, that large amount of content haven't really changed since its first year of 2020-2021. After that, I just fixed bugs and ported Shattered's new releases, with big things only happening once a year. It almost became an another job, that I did to keep its legacy going further and further, sometimes even at expense of project I actually enjoyed, like Summoning.

And then it really took off in 2023. My email started being flooded with reviews and emails about how it is the best game they played, or reported game breaking glitches. The legacy design didn't stand up very well, and breaking integer barriers is bond to make things wrong. But I kept going. For honor, for people, to keep the tumor alive...

I hated it, but I told myself, than I should do it. It's the most popular mod of mine, why I would cancel it? What would happen to those PD fans, that enjoyed grinding? But just like cancer, playing or making ExpPD results in never ending pain.

So I am ending it. For my own sake. You may not be happy. But I am happy. Than the beast is slain.

I could be missing it, but I feel like I've combed all through the journal, and don't see an entry for these in the new journal. I honestly even forgot these existed until I decided to randomly make a weaponized blandfruit since I had too much food.

(First floor.) Ration of Food blocks the door. Mage pretty much starts with everything you need to solve that room.

Edit: This seed is crazy, already with artifact and wand on the first three floors. LBX-MZH-SYDv2.5.2 (Mage; On Diet&Faith Is My Armor&Forbidden Runes)

Combo of blooming and camo worked super well with a high damage glaive

This run was nothing special. Nothing bad happened. Nothing good happened earlier than expected. It was just an easy run.

I don't really play to maximize wins. I just do it to fill time.

I started wondering whether this breaks Roguelike-ness, since a run gets influenced by external factors.

Spirit bow has blooming and speed augment. Spawn grass and burn everything at range with the blazing crossbow buffed darts and sniper's mark ability, artifacts and haste armor ability to get away or run through the fire. This build did monstrous aoe damage, spawning massive blazes nearly every fight

The real star of this run was the parchment scrap. Since the update where energizing potions and scrolls identifies them, it feels very viable to identify all of the extra scrolls and potions from the first 4 floors by energizing them and pumping that into the parchment scrap. 10x enchantment/glyph find and 0x curse find on armor and weapons is a wild effect to have before floor 5. In the posted run I got a lucky weapon early with this strategy which snowballed into RoW drops, making a build that felt very strong starting on floor 4 and continuing for the rest of the game

Shattered Pixel Dungeon- v2.5.2 Desktop Linux, github version https://github.com/00-Evan/shattered-pixel-dungeon/releases/download/v2.5.2/ShatteredPD-v2.5.2-Linux.zip

I am a daily tor user (and an Edward Snowden supporter- read his book, Permanent Record, if you have not already), so I have an interest in this sort of thing. If check for news and check for updates are turned off, will Shattered Pixel Dungeon still ping the internet and thus reveal my ip address? Or will it not communicate with the internet if both of these are clicked off?

I can of course play with the internet off or within Whonix-Workstation, but both are somewhat inconvenient.

Thank you for your help.

Shattered Pixel Dungeon- v2.5.2

So I was playing a game with wand of transfusion a while ago, but I forgot to ask questions about it here.

In the prison area, the guards and the thieves are undead monsters now, so they take damage from the wand of transfusion. However, the necromancers also take damage from the wand of transfusion. The description for them says that they are apprentice mages from the surface who came to practice their craft. Wouldn't that make them non-undead enemies, despite specializing in summoning undead creatures?

Also, Tengu appears to be charmed from the wand of transfusion instead of taking damage. Is Tengu not an undead creature, despite the guards and thieves being undead?

Also, the machines like dm-100 are susceptible to being charmed. Obviously they are non-undead creatures. However, they are also non-biological creatures. So should they be vulnerable to being charmed?

Thank you for your help.

Had an early RoW, dumped 6 upgrades into it ASAP. Ended up with tons of +3 gear drops throughout the rest of the game. The grim greataxe with +8 ring of Arcana and +7 Ring of Furor meant that all enemies were executed within 1-3 hits. I had a ton of scrolls of transmutation as well with which I gave myself almost all of the desirable abilities from other classes. The only thing that I couldn't get to make it even more overkill was a camouflage enchantment on my armor.

Seed: FQT-ZHV-WLL although since most of this gear was a random RoW drop or the result of a lucky transmutation, your results may vary. There is also a very useful unstable spellbook early on. The imp also gives you a +4 ring which at that point you can transmute to whatever you want.

Had some time to kill so I finally ascended my seeded tier 1 run. It was fairly easy tbh, a nice break from the high chal runs I'm grinding

Only relevant mistake I made this run was not keeping the rotberry seed for making grass

And if you want the seed.

Just a quick comment to say that the new artwork in v2.5 is awesome! Beyond the visuals, it helps to keep the mood between levels. Great work, evan (and the artists!).

For a while now, I've been playing with a self-imposed challenge: don't use or equip any melee, ranged, or armor item above a certain tier. Higher tier items can only be picked up and sold, or be thrown into traps and doors.

I completed a Tier-3 challenge (with the swarm intelligence challenge) with a gladiator. Then I did a Tier-2 challenge with a sniper. Then I did a semi-T1 challenge, where I allowed a sniper to have a T2 ranged weapon (since the only T1 ranged weapon available to her is not upgradable and not transmutable).

At that point I became convinced that a pure T1 run was impossible. Several comments in my previous posts convinced me otherwise, so I decided to keep trying.

I tried again with a sniper (using a puny dart), and died in level 21. Tried with a battlemage a few times, once dying in level 23. Tried with a warden, and died in level 24, right in front of the stairs going down to lvl 25!

I just tried with a warden again, and this time I was successful! The key was getting a RoSS and a RoH. I had never tried kiting before, but it turns out to be a very powerful technique (but a bit boring). It consumes a ton of food, though, but I was lucky again and scored a horn of plenty early on.

I had a blocking enchantment on the bow (don't love it, but useful). The bow was also enhanced for speed. The cloth armor was enhanced for evasion (since it can't even reduce damage from a mosquito).

I also had luck with the wands, even though I only found three in the entire dungeon. First wand, from the mage in the jail, was regrowth +2. I hate this wand, even though many people love it. I transmuted it and got (arghh!!) a wand of magic missile. Luckily (again!) I found another transmutation scroll and this time I got a wand of lightning (yayy!!).

Later on I found a wand of disintegration +2 and another WoL +0, which were useful to harass enemies.

I wasn't super thorough clearing up every level, especially in the demon halls, but I didn't try to rush through the dungeon either. I ended up with 402 kills, level 29, and all SoU and strength potions.

I'm very happy to finally be able to show that a T1 run is possible (even though it requires a ton of luck). I'm going to take a break from SPD for a while (this time for real, I swear!), but I'll keep reading this forum. I'd love to see reports of others trying similar challenges (and I'll try to answer any questions as well).

What should I do now? That gnoll is blocking the way out.

Shattered Pixel Dungeon v2.5.2

When I level up, the screen says +Accuracy, +Evasion, +5 HP! +1 Talent Point!

I can see the hp and the talent points at any time. But I do not see where I can see my character's accuracy and evasion statistics. Where can I see them? Also, do the base accuracy and evasion stats differ depending on which class you start out as?

Thank you for your help.

This release ports stuff from Shattered 2.5.2. Nothing else to say, really, the merging process went relatively smoothly.

Is there any other way to deal with this room besides killing the fish?

I am playing on a file where they appear on floor 3. I am not strong enough and do not have enough projectile / wands to kill them. Is there any other way to bypass them (besides using ethereal chains or teleporting them away, both options which are not available to me at the moment) without fighting them?

Thank you for your help.