[DEV] An upcoming change to crystal path rooms in Shattered
(old on left, new on right)
I'm putting some smaller feedback-driven changes into Shattered Pixel Dungeon's next update, as usual. Here's a change to crystal path rooms that gives the player a lot more choice in terms of what loot they get.
I'm afraid it's really not in the cards for these rooms to give equipment loot, as enough rooms already do that, but I can at least improve player choice here, to make these rooms feel a bit more like their crystal key counterparts.
I like this a lot, actually. I always felt the crystal key quest was just a foregone conclusion to getting the loot - this definitely makes it more interesting.
The layout itself will be pretty much the same every time, but the items that appear in each room are semi-random. The most valuable items are always in the furthest rooms. Generally room spawns do not interact with each other (with a few exceptions, e.g. only one crystal key room per floor). There's no interaction between crystal key rooms and well rooms.
People generally felt that finding a 2nd and 3rd crystal key was a disappointment because crystal path rooms had worse loot than the alternative crystal key rooms.
To an extent this is unavoidable. Crystal chests have amazing loot and I can't really have too many rooms like that. With this change though crystal path rooms will have a bit more unique value though, which should hopefully help.