Thanks so much for the kind words! I’m glad to hear that you’ve enjoyed Shattered for so long, and that it’s been helpful to you in its own little way.
Shattered Pixel
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Hm okay, assuming that is x64 windows and not x86 then I’m not entirely sure. The two big hurdles on Windows tend to be 64-bit and openGL 2.0 support, both of which your computer should have.
You could try downloading the plain .JAR version from github, and installing your own version of Java separately. https://github.com/00-Evan/shattered-pixel-dungeon/releases
I would recommend Adoptium Temurin JRE, Java 11+ : https://adoptium.net/temurin/releases?version=11&os=windows
Often this sort of error happens when save files become corrupted, which is generally an error that’s out of Shattered’s hands unfortunately. Is there any more particular info you can give? “Game Initialization failure” isn’t an error message that Shattered gives, any actual error message reported by the game would be helpful.
It’s fairly common for java-based applications to falsely trigger antivirus software. I can assure you that there’s no malicious code in the game, the code for the free version is actually entirely open source: https://github.com/00-Evan/shattered-pixel-dungeon
Sorry to hear the game isn’t working for you. Do you get any response at all or does the game simply not launch?
You can find an archive of old releases on Github here, do either v3.1.1 or v3.0.2 work for you? https://github.com/00-Evan/shattered-pixel-dungeon/releases/
Thanks for the offer! Shattered has a public translation community here: https://app.transifex.com/shattered-pixel/shattered-pixel-dungeon/
If you’re downloading the game from here then there’s no reason to download a separate version of Java, there’s already one bundled with the game. If you are downloading the .JAR version from github, then it’ll be entirely dependent on which version of Java you use, I’d suggest a modern version built for 64-bit Windows 11.
Thanks for the kind words!
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I agree that the current alchemy UI background is a bit sparse on larger displays. It’s not a priority currently but it is something I’d like to make a bit more detailed.
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I don’t currently have plans to add a 7th+ hero, each new hero is a lot of work and I want to be very confident that they’ll fit well into the game before making them. I would like to expand existing hero options at some point though, such as with more talents or subclasses.
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More lore will also hopefully be added at some point in the future. Now that all six of my planned heroes are in the game I would like to add a bit of writing that focuses on them.
The Warrior actually has the highest winrate among all the heroes, but it doesn’t feel like he’s very strong as one of his biggest sources of power (the broken seal’s shielding) is very passive and incremental. I’m actually going to be changing that up to try and make his power more noticeable in the next update.
Honestly it’s hard to pick a specific thing that’s different between Shattered and the original Pixel Dungeon, there are fewer things that are similar at this point! Almost everything is different gameplay-wise aside from the very core gameplay loop, but if you’d like a little summary of the biggest visual changes I did write a blog post about that semi-recently: https://shatteredpixel.com/blog/ten-years-of-shattered-pixel-dungeon.html
Unfortunately there isn’t any difficulty selection. I have considered adding a ‘start mode’ at some point, but it would probably end at floor 10.
In the meantime though, you shouldn’t be afraid of dieing, trying and failing and trying again is the best way to learn. There’s also an in-game guidebook meant to help point you in the right direction.
I double checked to remind myself and this is due to Shattered being a ‘pay what you want’ game on itch.io. Due to the way itch’s system works, ANY payment, even $0.01, would entitle someone to a Steam key. I can’t set a minimum payment threshold like I can for the separate ‘paid’ files you can download directly from itch. Because of this the only way to offer Steam keys here would be to also remove the free version and only charge $10 up-front.
If you would like to play on a 32-bit computer, there is actually a legacy .JAR build available on github: https://github.com/00-Evan/shattered-pixel-dungeon/releases
Note that it requires a separate Java installation on your computer.
Unfortunately multiplayer isn’t really feasible to add. Aside from all of the networking code I would need to add (even on LAN), the game itself is entirely designed around one player. Most of the game’s systems would break or need serious changes to work in multiplayer, and even then gameplay would be very awkward as you would spend most of your time waiting for other players to take their turns.
I can’t say what might be causing the cursor to disappear in particular, but it’s likely some mix of the new record function and the custom mouse cursor that Shattered uses. You might consider seeing if there’s an ‘enable mouse cursor’ recording setting, or using more well-tested recording software, such as OBS.

