Posted May 10, 2024 by madodev
Up to now there were four plants, two alraunes, a flower, and the vines. Ad part of the content expansion, this now gets updated. First, there are three extra flowers (acid, love, and fire) each with unique effects:
Second there are five new Alraune variants (warrior, devout, alchemical, maternal and horticultural). Especially the last two are unique. The former has an incubate ability that stays active between dungeons (and gives an item after a couple of them), while the latter continuously spawns vines as reinforcements.
Finally, there are two new big Alraunes (warrior and alluring). The latter functions a bit like the Flesh in Darkest Dungeon 2. It gives of an alluring scent that triggers your adventurers to come closer (if they fail a WIL check). If they are in first rank, they can't help but skip their turn and smell the flowers.
There are two common complaints about the difficulty of the game, it is too hard for newbies and too easy for experts. There's a reason for this. Dungeons have four difficulties (Novice - Adept - Veteran - Elite), and there are three encounter difficulties (Easy - Medium - Hard).
From the easy side, even on Novice you could get some Medium encounters. While those are uncommon and mostly can be avoided, new players don't know which ones they are. So that can be solved easily, Novice dungeons now only exist of Easy encounters. Note that Easy encounters are very easy, most often they don't even have 4 enemies, but it should help new players get used to the game.
From the hard side, I added a new encounter difficulty: "Elite". These are very difficult encounters, most often containing resources or special field effects. They will now spruce up the Elite dungeons. This allows to spread the difficulty a bit, Novice dungeons are a lot easier, Adept slightly easier, Veteran more difficult, and Elite will now contain some of these Elite encounters.
Then finally, there is the Elite+ difficulty. These consist only of Elite encounters and have a larger dungeon size. Gear rewards have also been shifted, so Elite only gives Very Rare items while Elite+ gives the Legendary ones. You can finish the game without ever fighting an Elite+ dungeon(if you're patient) and they serve as a challenge for those with "meta" teams. This should solve the requests for more difficulty.
Most enemy types don't have elite encounters yet, so for the non-slime non-plant encounters the game falls back to Hard encounters. This means that the Elite+ difficulty won't be as hard yet.
The Alraune update, and mostly the bugfixing after the public release took quite some time (and I didn't even get all of them), so the seedbed boss dungeon is coming next week. Here's the dungeon layout already though:
If you're updating, please be careful for wearers of the Equine Brand and Staff of Unconditional Support, you may want to unequip them!
Major:
Minor:
Bugfixes:
If you want early access to these changes (and a debug console), support me here: