Pixel Dungeon

Today is July 26th; 10 years ago, watabou released source code for Pixel Dungeon, creating a modding community for it.

Community Pixel Dungeon is a symbol of community being able to achieve that and evolve this community into what we know today.

Thank you all.

Hey Adventurers, July is coming to an end and I owe you guys an update!

Unfortunately, I'm going to miss my earlier estimate of a beta during July. This is mainly due to v2.5.0 becoming a much bigger update than I originally planned. I'm now anticipating v2.5.0 will be ready for beta around the second full week of August. In the meantime though, let's go over some of the new stuff that's coming soon!

Read the Full Post Here

For the last month I've been trying to beat the game with 6 challenges enabled. Yesterday I finally did it, and I'm so happy, I even decided to (re)create Reddit account to brag about it, and then I learned the community has moved here, so I decided to brag here as well 😀

Here's the list of challenges I decided to enable

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Hostile Champions & Badder bosses — is an easy choice. Once you beat the game with every class, having bosses or monsters slightly tougher doesn't even require adjustments to your strategy.

Faith Is My Armor and Forbidden Runes — OTOH, is an easy choice to not enable. All my successful runs so far implied heavily upgraded plate armor, and I haven't figured, how to beat the game without that.

Pharmacophobia — would be possible without the Barren Land. But among the two, Barren Land seems easier.

Swarm Intelligence — adds a lot of action and challenge, but in a fun way.

Finally the last two: Into Darkness — that turned out much harder than I expected, but I realized, that having Eye of Newt would basically negate it, and so beating the game would become a matter of getting the right trinket. Similarly, On diet — appeared much harder, than I expected. More so, since Chalice of blood doesn't work while the hero is starving. But I figured, that Warlock's Soul Eater ability may make the run easier.

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So my strategy was this:

1. Get the Eye of Newt
2. Beat Tengu
3. Become Warlock
4. Max out Soul Eater

Reaching Tengu was, perhaps, the hardest part of the game. There I learned two thing

1. Play it safe. Once you've got the right initial setup, do not risk over saving an extra healing potion
2. You have to use some upgrade scrolls early in the game. Normally, I saved all my upgrade scrolls to the later stages of the game, surviving mostly on altar rooms and other sources of cursed, but likely, upgraded, items. But Hostile Champions with Swarm Intelligence can really give you a hard time. And being killed over a saved potion while carrying a high-tier armor of thorns or a grim weapon with the right trinket in you bag was ugh...

After becoming Warlock the game becomes much easier. Just a reminder, Warlock has a chance to mark a soul by zaping a wand. If Warlock successfully marks a soul, hitting it with a physical weapon heals Warlock and can trigger other useful effects. The most important one is the Soul Eater. It gives satiety when a marked soul is killed. Additionally, on-eat effects can be triggered (meaning wands recharging and increased damage).

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Wands recharging was another important point of my strategy, because sometimes it takes over a dozen of zaps to mark a soul. If you run out of charges, you run out of marked souls — and thus no healing and no food. That's why an armor of potential is extremely important. In a heated battle my wands would basically never reach zero charges. On later stages of the game, I would return to an upper level, just to heal and feed on newly spawned enemies.

Once again: Eye of Newt is an absolute killer. Once maxed out, it helps discovering hidden rooms, avoiding dangerous enemies, intercepting the easy ones... It really played a key role in the success.

Finally, for the last stage I decided to bring the crown back to the Rat King. Ability to turn enemies into rats was extremely helpful against Evil Eyes. Guess what happens when you turn an Evil Eye hovering over a chasm into a Rat 😀 It falls down — effectively an instant kill. The most important upgrade here was the cost of charge, followed by permanent Ratmogrification. Another helpful item for dealing with Evil Eyes was a Wand of Transfusion. As soon as Evil Eye prepares to hit with its devastating deathgaze, zapping it with the Wand of Transfusion and stepping to the side from the line of attack was a certain way to dodge the attack.

Like in every other run, I made sure to have as many Scrolls of Mind Mapping as I can get for the last stage of the game (it rarely was more than 4, though, and only during this game I've got more thanks to the Ring of luck).

Alchemly helped a lot on all stages. Turning seeds into potions was super helpful. Whenever possible I was brewing Elixir of Might (increases max health on top of Potion of Strength). Caustic potion was helpful against Tengu or any other boss. Elixir of Honeyed Healing sometimes saves the day before you grow into Warlock.

But Alchemy was absolutely necessary for the last boss. After a couple of failed attempts to beat the final boss I learned to brew

• Elixir of Dragon's Blood (to gain fire immunity against Fire Fist)
• Potion of Cleansing (against Rust Fist IIRC)
• Scroll of Anti-Magic (against that dark and that light fists, I forgot the names)
• Scroll of Challenge (generally helpful)

With all these in my backpack I believe I had to use only one potion of healing during the entire final boss fight. Without those items I was quickly running out of healing potions.

Of course to brew all these, I had to get energy somewhere. I rarely use Scroll of Sleep, so all of them wen't into energy. Scrolls of Recharging are useless once you've got an armor of Potential. I almost never use Paralytic Potions (sometimes I brew them into the potion that gives additional armor). Just before the fight, when I know, I have my weapon, armor, rings and everything, I sacrificed all my stashed Scrolls of Identity, Scrolls of Remove Curse, etc..

PixelDungeon is an amazing game. I think, the last time I had to think so hard trying to beat a game was when I played either Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale. I know, it's a whole different genre, but in terms of fun they are on the same level for me. An absolute classic!

I swear this game has vendettas.

Chose to invest in attack, and hold out for better armour, and paid for it.

Armour first and always.

No cheese for me haha

Quick question. Armor augments sacrifice evasion for blocking power or visa versa. Glyph of Stone removes all evasion chance in exchange for blocking power. If you were to augment armor with Glyph of Stone, would you get more damage reduction from augmenting for defense, evasion, or neither?

This is my mage at the end of dungeon level 9. He's level 13, and he also has two potions of healing. Two challenges are active (badder bosses and swarm intelligence). The unidentified scroll is not "remove curse" (nor "identify"). There are no more spells nor potions in the level-6 shop. The scale armor has a curse of displacement. How would you continue?

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Update: I thought this was an interesting scenario, with several different ways to proceed with no obvious winner. Thank you to all who posted ideas; I hadn't considered most of them! SPD is such a complex game.

As to what I did: since BB Tengu is a PITA, I decided to dump 3 SoU on the scale armor; in addition, I was lucky and got a glyph of affection. I used the other 3 SoU on the staff, leaving the magic missile wand imbued and relying on its magic charge ability to pump the lightning and prismatic light wands. It was a hard fight but Tengu was free at last!

Then I made it through the caves without too much trouble. This is the mage at the store in level 16. I still have two SoU which I will probably use on the staff. I'd like to attempt finishing the game with an imbued wand of primatic light, which I've never been able to do before. Suggestions welcome!

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This mod has been conceptualized back in October as dedicated thing for 10th anniversary of Pixel Dungeon becoming free and open source software, but only now I dedicated the time to start making it. The core idea is that I am not the one, who design the features and new items, it’s people from community of this game!

This pre-release adds 17 more ideas to the pack, including ideas from Reddit and Lemmy posts and ideas from archived ideas channel on PD discord, bringing total number up to 37, all of which can be seen here: https://gist.github.com/TrashboxBobylev/98aa9c667af73c56bbae91413fe22a24

Hey folks, one more small update about UI improvements before a bigger blog post next week. I'm afraid Shattered Pixel Dungeon v2.5 isn't going to be ready for beta in July, but it's very close!

v2.5 includes a few other UI improvements in addition to all the ones I've shown off: a display for badges in the in-game journal window, a better alchemy UI layout for larger screens, and a full journal UI from the main menu (pictured here)!

(Image Description: An image showing new Journal UI from the main menu. Badges are currently being shown (which is unchanged), but there are new tabs for catalogs, the dungeon guide, and alchemy.)

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Just picked up an enchantment stone 8 turns before death and instantly used it got vampiric on the greatsword... Anti-magic spinner surprises me and gets me poisoned. This was the RUN!!!

those damn pesky focused parrying and blocking beasts they hit so many damn times, parry and block heck they even parry the supposedly "guaranteed to hit" duelist special weapon ability attacks like glaive's "spike", i hate them so much smh

so i lured a slime to an adjacent tile of explosive trap threw exotic crystals on the trap but except the obvious of slime taking damage, toxic gas (as you can see in the image) started to spread from the explosive trap tile i threw the crystals on, why is that?

Upon seeing the new trinkets I had already started theory crafting this build, very glad I could pull it off.

The idea of the entire thing is to get vision of the enemies via either wards, talisman, potions of mind vision, or the eye of newt, then using disintegration to snipe them across the map and walls. The stars really aligned for this run to occur.

The seed is QRF-LTQ-ZSJ if any of you would like to give it a go.

Got my first win a month ago and it got me really excited so I kept playing with other classes and got some good streaks, eventually winning with all of them. Interestingly I started finding the start of the game the most interesting... once you get lucky enough times it starts becoming clear that the run is "over" and you just have to go through the motions.

This game has been a lot of fun though but I will defs be saying goodbye to it for a bit at least. Started finding myself playing it idly/mindlessly/passively whatever ppl wanna call it.... playing without intention I guess. Not the game's fault tho, probs because I did two of those winning runs in a single 8-9hr session each (thanks plane flight)

Lovely community and lovely people <3

I was playing with the badder bosses challenge. Fortunately a couple of wand zaps finished Tengu off before the mage was carbonized!

Freerunner made it

After getting requests for years, I am finally adding support for custom notes in Shattered Pixel Dungeon!

You can make plain text notes, or attach them to a dungeon floor or item. These are a great way of keeping track of information between play sessions, or deduced properties of unidentified items. Custom note titles will even appear in the descriptions of their items!

(Image Description: An image showing the various UIs for adding custon notes. A selection window for adding them is shown on the left. A cropped window is on the top-right, showing five custom notes in the adventuring notes UI. Another cropped window is in the bottom right, showing a custom note appearing in an item's description.)

After zapping magic missile I had this empowering effect ( at the top ) activated but, as you can see, the effect doesn't actually happen - no increase to other wands levels

AFAIK any wand will have a +1 increase in level the moment you zap magic missile, or am I getting it wrong?

Posting the issue for investigation.

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Had another base ring of haste, I was zippin', a second ring of accuracy +3 which was completely unnecessary, and an insane amount of food during the run.

Bow enchant is projecting.

Didn't really play her like a monk, but I only need the freerunner and sniper now to get to the top and I've done them all

I'm also using the new Grid UI to overhaul Shattered Pixel Dungeon's journal notes page! The automatic adventuring notes, which record keys and landmarks, are now presented in a much more compact form! I've also added a few new landmarks, such as special floor types.

You might notice that there are a couple of other new things in this UI as well, more on that next week...

(Image description: An image showing the new 'adventuring notes' UI in the journal on the left. Notes are organized by dungeon floor with icons the player can tap for more info. On the right two example note descriptions are shown)

Got chased by burning champion flies into a gas trap. Got the plates from the sad ghost.

Seed is BQY-NNY-BCZ.

Picked up a +2 greataxe on floor 2 and a ring of might. By floor 9 I picked up +1 plate armour, wand of fire and corrosiom. Chains allowed me to destroy Tengu with barely any damage. Think it will soon be time to try Doom Slayer...

With a +10 ring of Arcana, stepping on grass grants you 32.5 turns of invisibility.

Attacking with the blooming scythe spawns a ton of grass as well.

And as the assassin, spending 9 turns while invisible provides a guaranteed one shot kill.

Deadly combo.

Why is Pixel Dungeon so underground? To me, it seems basically like a turn-based souls game. I am playing this game for 2 years now (The OG Pixel Dungeon) and i still find new content, like its infinite.

Apart from 3 slots (1 artifact, 1 ?, 1 ring) I feel there's a strong need for another column which will also provide much needed expansion for backpack to store few more items too.

But my focus is on the additional slot. Is it fair to have one? I know people will quickly find it problematic on game balance were we allowed to have more but can't there be something interesting that doesn't offset the challenge?

My suggestion is to have 1 more SLOT exclusively for artifact!

BUT it becomes permanent and can't be unequipped to ensure player chooses carefully with consequences in mind. Also this slot becomes available after defeating 2nd boss.

This will solve a major issue I have playing as Rogue or finding a good artifact drop later in the game and prefer not to swap existing artifact after upgrading them to maximum

I am also open for any other use case for 1 more SLOT apart from artifact

Would like community views on this question

Continuing the trend of interface improvements coming to Shattered Pixel Dungeon in the next update, I'm adding a new window when you try to upgrade items!

Currently the only way to know how the stats of an item change with upgrading is to actually spend an upgrade scroll, but with this new interface you'll get a helpful little summary first! The window includes almost every stat in the game that scales with item level.

Finally got my first ten wins today and I'm beyond proud of it! As an achievement hunter, the badges system really motivates me to keep pushing further.

Some details in case anyone's curious:

• Rankings 6 to 10 are 0-challenge runs and I got these first before enabling challenges. (Assassin * 2, Gladiator, Battlemage, and Champion. I didn't understand how to play the Huntress yet.)
• Ranking 5 is a Badder Bosses + Doom Slayer run with the Sniper. I was confident with the build enough so I left all the Spawners intact and indeed totally dominated the boss fight.
• Rankings 1 to 5 are 3-challenge runs (Badder Bosses + On Diet + Swarm Intelligence) with the other subclasses (Berserker, Warlock, Monk, and Warden. I still haven't understood Freerunner yet.)

Some particularly fun moments so far:

• During my 3-chal (including On Diet) Monk run, I got a Horn +0 in the Prison, so I started keeping only one safety ration in my inventory and feeding all the rest to upgrade the horn. Turned out Monk's Combined Energy + Focus talents totally broke the On Diet challenge and by the time I was in the Demon Halls, I had 6 rations, 3 pride potions, 6 mystery meats + 1 phantom piranha meat and the Horn +10 was still frequently near full. This is also the only run so far where I managed to bring four blessed Ankhs to the surface!
• The Warden run was blessed by RNG! I got the Rotberry seed quest, got a Wand of Corrosion +2 in the Caves so I immediately started dumping into it the SoUs I had hoarded, and later only used a single Enchantment Stone to get the Elastic glyph on my Bow. Basically I could hunker down in the bushes at will w/ the seed, cast a highly upgraded corrosive gas and keep knocking enemies into the gas and paralyzing them :D

How do you use the crossbow? Every attempt I've made to use it results in it being used as a melee weapon.

Ring of Wealth went super strong for this rogue run. Went assassin when I found a ring of sharpshooting and dumped the SoU on it and crossbow. Now I've got a stone gauntlet and ring of furor +2 and a ring of haste that needs a scroll of remove curse. Should I stick with my build or make the plunge for a faster, melee focused one?

Image description

Screenshot of Shattered PD's global Steam achievement list, showing the unlock percentages of two adjacent achievements:

• Master Gourmet (Eat food 40 times in one game), 15.1%
• Starved (Die from hunger), 14.7%

Also, Hello (Lemmy) World! :D

I stopped using Reddit since it f*cked over all the third-party clients but always assumed the hobbyist communities didn't form yet on Lemmy (my mistake). Imagine my delight when I found out about c/pixeldungeon on shatteredpixel.com!

This mod has been conceptualized back in October as dedicated thing for 10th anniversary of Pixel Dungeon becoming free and open source software, but only now I dedicated the time to start making it. The core idea is that I am not the one, who design the features and new items, it's people from community of this game!

Currently this mod has 20 unique features from ideas of 21 people on PD's discord, all listed here: https://gist.github.com/TrashboxBobylev/98aa9c667af73c56bbae91413fe22a24

The number of times a run gets ruined or I just die outright because I accidentally tap the wrong place or just accidentally tap the screen at all is making me want to stop playing entirely.

Nearly every time it's entirely out of my control and something causes it to happen.

That gap between the search and quick slots? You can click there and your character will move. Many times I will be trying to search and my character will go kill themselves instead. !

I desperately need to be able to select a tile and confirm the action to move or attack.

Edit: Another small thing this would resolve is when I intend on examining something and I thought I hit the examine button but apparently missed, then I end up doing something I did not intend on doing. This literally just happened to me where I was trying to examine the two crystal chests in a room to determine what kind of items are inside, and instead of examining one of them I just opened the chest.

Many games have a feature where you can clear the saved data and begin fom scratch. Reinstalling the game does not do this if you have Google play games on your phone, so could there be a way to do this in the app?

Yea i just wanted to hare it because it took me years to actually do this!!! And with the wand of warding too, one of my favourites (the hero's robe ability was the warp)