Finding dark gold
Finding dark gold
Is there any clue to where dark gold ore will be in the new area? I'm at 39 pieces in one of my runs and stuck just mining through random walls.
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I had this problem once. I eventually just left because I was getting obliterated from all sides, and found I got partial rewards based on how many I found.
Lately the game seems to have gotten much harder. I'm being ganked by pop up mobs that come from three directions at once while I'm starving on cleared levels after roaming multiple levels unable to find food.
One recent death happened because a spider somehow webbed the hall behind me while two other mobs took me out with attacks that seemed to cut through all my armor like a hot knife through butter. It's starting to lose it's fun, really. No matter how well you play if the mobs are non-stop, you will eventually run out of healing potions and weapons.
I had a bat kill me after I went through two healing potions to survive the combat, and I had enhanced armor. Usually they are pretty easy to kill. It's as if there is a random "you're fucked" generator in this game.
No matter how well you play if the mobs are non-stop, you will eventually run out of healing potions and weapons.
The game is not designed to let you wander around or "farm" enemies and such. The game's mechanisms like limited food, potions, and thrown weapon degradation are there to make you clear a level and move on. It's a constant battle of attrition, and you're not supposed to dawdle. You even stop earning XP if you kill too many enemies on a level. The enemies are non-stop, and that's why you have to keep moving.
The bats are jerks because they randomly heal when they hit you. If you aren't doing enough damage to them, you're basically doing 0. I've had a couple runs where I made poor upgrade decisions and poor timing (on things like wand charges) and literally couldn't kill a bat. Usually there's something you could use to get away, though. At least from that one fight. A Stone of Fear, a Swiftthistle Seed, a Potion of Invisibility. Heck, even jumping in a pit is better than dying as long as you have one Potion of Healing to survive the fall.
But RNG is RNG. Every once in a great while the game is really stacked against you. But skill is 100% more important. There are so many tricks in this game. For one, like the other reply says, throwing literally any item at a web breaks it. You only lose one turn at most. That trick can save your life. There are countless more.
There are also strategies that work and many that don't. You just have to learn the strategies that work and then the fun is executing them well. By strategies I mean how and when you spend your upgrade scrolls, mostly. For instance, having a good weapon is usually more important than having high armor. I haven't upgraded armor past +3 or +4 in a long time, and I won't do that unless it's at least scale armor. I wear whatever I can find in the meantime. And I try to save the majority of my scrolls for a tier 4+ weapon and then dump 6 scrolls into it all at once, but only when I have the strength to actually use it. +6 upgrades reduces the strength requirement of a weapon by 3, so that means only 13 strength for a tier 4 weapon, and you will have 13 strength after floor 7, guaranteed. You just also need to find 6 scrolls first. Having a +6 tier-4 weapon in the early/mid-game is godly, and you just snowball from there. But you can also do the same thing with certain wands. But if I'm doing a wand strategy, I don't wait to use the upgrades. I'll just dump every one I find I to the wand or Mage's staff, and eventually 2 or 3 into some armor.
I'm at the point now that if I survive the first 4 levels, I can beat the game every time. Assuming I have zero challenges enabled. I've even beaten it with up to three challenges enabled. I couldn't do 6 and stopped wanting to try. Now I just play 0-challenge for fun.
There's a particular Twitch streamer who randomly pops on and streams Shattered who does high challenge levels and explains everything he's doing. I learned a lot of new tricks after watching his stream a few times. Ones I might never have discovered myself. If that's something you're interested in, I could go find a link.
EDIT: you would never guess his Twitch name:
https://www.twitch.tv/shatteredpixeldungeon
I recommend the mobile app, then Follow this account, turn on notifications, and watch when he randomly pops on. I find it fun and educational to watch someone much better than me play the game.
There are a lot of things in shattered that need strategies, which weapons/amor/seeds/potions/scrolls you wanna keep, what you spend your skills on, what artifacts and enhancements/glyphs you prefer. Alchemy can do a lot and you have to decide what to keep and what to turn into energy. A lot of things can be accomplished in various ways (alone how to identify scrolls and potions) and it all has their pros and cons.
My mage strategy is often to dump all upgrades into magic missile staff. And the new blacksmith into armor, which is equivalent to three scrolls of upgrade.
Shattered also introduced some mechanics that allow farming, at least more than in PD.
I didn’t manage to ascend yet. But I agree, I either die early on or I get to the final boss. For a long time I didn’t even get to the king.
There can be always situation that can get you killed, but on average it works. In my last run I stepped on a distortion trap which I didn’t discover yet and the monsters triggered a summoning trap and these monsters triggered a storm trap … among the spowned things were an evil eye, a normal scorpion and an acid scorpion. You can just have horrible luck sometimes, but I still managed to get out of there with teleportation scroll … and a health potion and blessed ankh when I ran into the acid scorpion later.
And I’d really recommend the desktop version, that’s where I got to the last boss for the first time. Keyboard&mouse input is less error prone than touch, you see a lot more on a bigger screen and steam allows to take notes (where and how you got what kind of potion/scroll and rooms you didn’t finish or find) which can be overlayed with transparency.
Thanks for the advice, I will give the channel a try. As for the webs, I haven't had luck clearing them without a wand of disintegration or fire. Objects are stopped at the web.
Objects hit the web and then you can walk across that square freely. It breaks the web.
Disintegration, fire and any solid projectile (wand or throwing weapon) will clear them but it takes some seconds for the visual effect to fade out. The web is gone after the missile hits it, just watch for it to fade. If I don't want to use a wand on them I just keep a stack of missile weapons on a quick slot to throw at web tiles, this destroys them and costs no durability. Fire will spread through webs like grass too so be careful, or use that to catch multiple enemies and burn them.
After some experiments, I did see that objects do work, thanks
There's some amount of guaranteed food per floor, unless you're playing On diet there's no reason you should run out unless farming for a while. As for spinners, you can throw an item at the web to remove it, so you can walk through safely if you sacrifice 1 turn. Or for free if you have shurikens and just moved
Do thrown weapons not get used up by that? (never use them, since I use wands)
Some wand can even take out multiple webs at once
They don't; it's just like dropping them. But you can throw literally anything. It doesn't need to be a ranged weapon. Like an unused piece of armor or some mystery meat.
I just expected the throwing to work differently for ranged weapons. I started to take the free pickage and throw it on traps that destroy what’s thrown on them.