Just wondering, are there a few variations for each region? Randomly picking from say, 3 or so different loading screens seems like it would be in line with some of the other variety features, such as the three-part music tracks or the three sad ghost dialogue lines per region.

First of all, welcome back! I've missed seeing your incremental dev updates, and am glad everything's going well now.

I can't say I'm too fond of this change though. At some fundamental level, alchemy used to be a crafting system. 1.1 took away from that somewhat (and made the third ingredient slot almost never used), but it was largely fine because it made recycling items more effective, particularly with the overall changes to how energy worked.

It already seemed a bit odd however to have items that weren't really 'crafted', but it makes sense for wands and missiles, and is at least tolerable for scrolls and potions. My gut reaction for this new proposal is that it just creates too many 1-item recipes, and in doing so alchemy seems much less like a crafting system. The assymmetry of the item types in the interface (some potions would show one option, others two or three, with a haphazard mix or exotics, elixers and spells) also seems quite inelegant.

There is also the fact that a visible catalyst option makes since in-world. What is energy? It's not very clear. However, why does putting a scroll in an alchemy pot create one thing vs another? One particularly noteworthy case is turning normal and exotic levitation into spells. How does that work? Using a scroll byproduct to make those spells seems far more concrete than simply using 'energy'. It is also somewhat irksome to have both a potion and a spell as outcomes for a single input, which are two different item classes.

I also think having at least some sort of item tradeoff is valuable. Scrolls are generally more useful than stones, and three stones vs. a scroll and a stone are not the same from a balance perspective. Sacrificing a scroll for a spell or a potion for an elixir is not prohibitive, but it requires a bit more thought by the player.

The only thing that I know of that was changed with disarming logic is that it now fails to teleport a weapon if it can't find a path to a tile in range, as might happen i.e. in the locked room beneath a broken floor room. It used to instead teleport the weapon to a random point of the level, but I pointed out that this could be used to lose the pickaxe in the mine as the result of a reclaimed trap spell. Evan had already prevented other ways to lose the pickaxe (i.e. dropping, transmuting) on that floor because you can't leave the floor without it in your inventory, so he opted to prevent this case from arising by reworking trap slightly.

Not sure if this is related to that or not though.

How will these talents work with Metamorphosis? They're very hero specific.

Basically.

My main mistake here was during a blast wave wand when I shouldn't have, because I forgot about knockback paralysis (usually it's not a big deal, but here it ran me into 3-4 other paralyzing attacks).

That being said, the Rock density is a pretty frequent issue because there are twice as many attacks as normal. There have been times when the Sappers and Geomancer have attacked at the same time, so there literally is no safe square to move to even in completely open space. More commonly, they will attack within a turn or two of each other, before you get to clear your surroundings. This is the fundamental challenge with this fight.

The most important talent on sniper is shared upgrades. You don't need a great variety of thrown weapons to kill just a few enemies, and each thrown weapon upgrade increases the bow's special attack by 30%. The tomahawk + followup strike can kill basically anything just fine, if you upgrade the tomahawk.

I've been keeping and eye on these posts forever now, and its hard to believe that we're almost here! A few thoughts:

On the Quest: The tester area, the few times I've gotten to check it out, have been fantastic. I've always found the avoidance gameplay to be just as interesting, if not moreso, than the direct combat, and I'm sure anyone who's played FIMA (not to mention higher-challenge runs) sees the appear as well. That being said, I almost wonder if there could be some enemies that are completely unkillable and thus are more akin to a permanent hazard, sort of like the Crystal Guardian from the Crystal Caves Quest. Are there going to be normal any wandering mobs in the vault? That might be interesting if that interacted with Swarm Intelligence (although I feel that Swarm Intelligence might not generally work well with the different mob logic, although we'll have to see what effect the new balancing for that challenge has on the quest if enabled). Based on the way you were talking about the dwarf tokens, it feels almost a given that those are only going to be dropped by mobs that spawn on floor generation, and not afterwards, right?

The other thing I noticed was that you alluded to a "boss." I can't help but wonder at the implications there. For all the previous quests in the game, there were different versions, whether those be different minibosses, different subregions, or different goals entirely (old cave quest, for instance). I know that there is quite a bit of variety in the vault already from standard procgen, but I'm not sure if that alone would help prevent it from being less interesting than the Prison or Caves Quest, if the bosses and enemies are all the same, and I'm strongly of the opinion that each quest should be more involved and varied than the previous, and I think you are as well. I'm wondering what your plans are for addressing this? (As an aside, I always hoped that one day down the road, a challenge would exist that would incorporate all quest versions in a single run.)

On the Enchantments: I did have my reservations on these at first, just because I was well aware with your rationale for removing some of them, even if I didn't start playing until 1.0 myself. That being said, I do find your logic fairly compelling. I'm also aware that despite the power of blazing, some newer players don't know how to play around it terrain-wise, and sometimes even insist that it should be a curse as a result. I think that Vorpal and Venomous are more approachable for new players as a result. Eldritch (misspelled? as Eldtrich in the blog post but hopefully not the game) seems like a fun utility enchantment; Crystal I'm just sort of neutral on.

Pressurized is a cool enchantment, and reminds me of the time I died to an Aqua Brew. Will it deal any damage (a la Explosive) aside from taking knockback against a wall? Wondrous seems chaotic, and does make me wonder if it will make Cursed wand effects less interesting by comparison. Seems like a wondrous throwing hammer, for instance, will often be better than a cursed wand.

How will the transmutation cursed effect interact with thrown weapon stacks? When a melee weapon turns into another item type, that would work the same as a cursed wand transmutating currently does, but for a thrown weapon, does that affect the item that was just thrown or the stack in the inventory? For that matter though, I feel like the cursed wand version of that effect might make sense to just always transmute the wand into a wondrous weapon at this point.

On the Graphics: I'm not sure the item sprites are working for me, I'm sad to say. I know that there was some amount of pushback when you first announced you were looking into changing the art style of the mod a few years ago, and I don't see anything meaningfully different now. Based on the comments you made on the scrolls, I do think that the version that you showed in the graphic was outdated, but it's not something I anticipate liking once the final version gets revealed. The one improvement that I do see coming out of this is the fact that Blinding Darts will finally appear meaningfully different than untipped Darts. The similarities between those two sprites have always been confusing.

The tiles visuals, though, are a lot more promising. I think its cool that the different treasure rooms are finally going to have actually unique aesthetics to differentiate them, and it seems like the logical next step after all the work you did on the ordinary rooms. You were right about all the new room types and terrain features making the normal rooms more varied and less boring; now this does the same for loot rooms. Are there plans on making the Secret Alchemy room different than the normal one? right now that difference is down to the extra energy crystals and the location of the pot, and based on the teaser image the pot location changed, so I imagine there will be other differences?

Misc. Please Remove the Grim Reaper Badge.

One of them is lore entries, because that tab had been removed from the bottom? A bestiary would wish be nice.

When you say not curses, do you mean that you can't spell cursed equipment or that the spell stacks with the curse? The latter could potentially be strategically interesting, but might not be balanced considering Curse Infusion is a thing.

Doesn't that make permanently locking the player out of winning trivially easy? Back in my day you had to abuse multiple teleportation glitches for that!

I do think that highlighting the current floor would be a nice UI tweak though.

A few notes. First, a shuriken is a thrown weapon (sometimes called missile weapons), not a melee weapon.

Secondly, I have two runs on record where I used only only tier 1 gear, with additional stipulations. The first was a warden run where I finished with strength 6, having used no strength potions and equipped two cursed might rings, on in the caves and one in the halls. For that run, I ended with +10 armor to avoid encumbrance, but both my +3 gloves and my +5 bow were too heavy, though I used then anyways.

The second run was a completely potionless/scrolless rogue run. I ended with the same gear I started with, and didn't end up with any additional rings or artifacts either because I couldn't confirm any were uncursed. Now, I have done potionless/scrolless with three classes total, but in the other cases I either had a lucky armor drop (leather +3 for Warden), or I found a great shield (for mage; I couldn't attack with it, but melee combat wasn't a good idea anyways so that wasn't really an issue), so that rogue run was the only one of those that was all T1.

That's due to how sewer pipe rooms specifically generate. They first start completely filled, then

—(with 3+ adjacent rooms) the shortest path connecting all adjacent rooms is carved out of the perimeter

—(with 2 adjacent rooms) a straight-ish path is carved through the middle to connect them

—(with one adjacent room) a path is carved from the adjacent room to the center of the room

This case is a merging of type 1 (lower room) with type 3 (upper room). Merged sewer rooms are responsible for many of those s-shaped dead ends.

Just wondering when you plan on releasing this update in alpha? Its close to the date you had anticipated after the last update.

I feel the obvious strategy is to try and find a ring of elements and get it pretty high leveled.

But with a sapper also appearing every stage, that frequency doubles and that can be a real problem.

Can you possibly find some seeds where:

1. All floors have a depth feeling (except 1/26/ boss floors)
2. Given 1, All floors within the same region have the same depth feeling (except floor 1/26/ boss floors)
3. Given 2, Each region has a different feeling from other regions.

I still never understood why magical porter was removed. Yes, alchemize replaced the merchant beacon, but magical porter served a different role. At the very least alchemize should allow the old porter effect as an option, which would be another way to help with inventory management.

Currently the tiers have 5/7/6/7/7 weapons, although the 7th tier 2 weapon is the pickaxe which isn't pictured here.