You can find the hideout by going to the precise coordinates of the camp in the desert. Use your compass you got from following one of the maps you buy in town to make your way there.
slabdrill
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The main thing about "only some enemies can use spells" is that you have no way of knowing what enemies you'll encounter before you encounter them. Because you never know when you'll encounter another Astraea that basically requires Sanction, it just makes sense to have it always available.
I suppose you usually have a chance to change your loadout before the fight starts, but I never trusted that that would be an option.
Icely's video finally got uploaded so I gave it a try. I recognized the game from when you asked for help about how to make a choose-one-of-three-boxes in sokoban. I liked the joke in the last level. Game felt particularly easy compared to hempuli's games (I usually get stuck on them for a while); would've loved to see some harder levels.
Decent game. I feel like the overall structure makes it too simple compared to your previous game; it felt like there were barely any decisions I could make that actually had a significant impact, since all of the upgrades reduce in efficiency fast enough that you are always simply aiming for forward progress rather than anything else. (I don't think this is necessarily actually the case, but enough information is hidden from the player to at least give the illusion that this is the case.) Compared to the previous game, being able to see how expensive things are (...except the base chest opening cost, for some reason) is really nice, but due to the simplicity I found it is pretty much never actually relevant to worry about such details.
(Won in 75 loops, 4:46:25. Could've done it in less time if I was optimizing for that; there were a few loops I should've just ended at the end of 8 to get more coins to max the equipment faster. And I didn't run A enough so my brooch level was low.)
Checked out what's here so far; definitely looking forward to seeing more in the future!
My RAM usage spikes pretty hard sometimes, even with the fast graphics setting enabled. I'm not sure if it just doesn't properly save across sessions or something, but I'm pretty sure it only happened when it was raining but only sometimes. It's noticeable since my laptop's bad so when it uses enough the game just freezes.
I feel like using the april fools gacha slightly spoiled my experience, since it means you can completely ignore a lot of the progression measures (it gives you like 10 times the items you'd obtain in the same amount of time without it) and it wasn't telegraphed that it'd do that (since you get access to it before you see how much stuff you can get normally). But I ended up barely using items in combat (a few MP heals when a battle begins and I was at low MP, and some health pots for Astraea are the only important ones, I think) since combat is easy anyway, lag from the above issue aside.
Combat balance is a pretty tricky topic that I'm sure you'll need to finetune more in the future, but I spent most of my time running Holy/Sky. Holy felt like a must-take, perhaps partially due to game mechanics not being telegraphed enough--I'm not sure if "you can only counterspell a sanctioned enemy" means it just hits you without you getting a chance to counter it, but I assumed that that was the case and thus always started every battle with sanctioning the enemy since not getting hit is useful. And then Sky is just absurdly OP compared to everything else, of course; I think it definitely needs its wounds infliction reduced.
You can get there early enough in the loop (if you do the entire shadow realm instead of going for one of the low stats actions) that it was literally the second thing I went for (after Foxified since that one's earlier in) in the loop. You just kind of have enough stats with only putting a tiny amount of effort into getting more. Obviously doing it even earlier is better, but you get it *really* early.
As I said, I think getting +1 is fine. +2 is the one that comes way too quickly for how much work it takes to get. (+3 is interesting because going for it early involves wasting the absurdly good sleep action, but it really means you should start grinding long tasks in the midst of doing it and not exploring much. It's interesting and I think this one's okay; it just feels like this is the sort of consideration you could have for +2 instead.)
I didn't actually kill the Demo Lord (not that I was trying to; I'd be savescumming immortality if I was trying). I mostly meant you can stall for ages on the ones preceeding them for long enough to kind of just do everything on the map before fighting them. I got past IX just from doing normal exploration and not putting any thought into beating calamities (that greenhouse is expensive) just out of the fact that Vagrant's Sword allows (and encourages!) doing everything in the map to delay the calamity... and it turns out exploring the entire map actually gives you a lot of stats.
Lemonade stand being a thing you do passively makes sense. The main thing that made it tricky for me was that I only entered the lemonade stand because I wanted to get more Vagrant's Sword delay (this was an exploring run and not one I expected to make grand progress), only got my screaming mandrake late in the run, and didn't know if I'd survive the next calamity or not, so I was out of things to do.
Nice update! It feels weird having Vagrant's Sword able to make every run absurdly long; I went for way too long without a calamity because you can just keep delaying how long it'll be before it shows up. (Maybe if the first few upgrades to it weren't so easy to get? At +1 it still helps but not as much as the +3 you can get pretty quickly does.) Sure, once you finish the last calamity the Demo Lord naturally takes forever, but it was literally just the fact that you can stall the previous one for so long that I was able to finish it at all.
The lemonade minigame was a lot more bearable when bootstrapped with screaming mandrake money. Though it still takes forever... I like the secret benefit of having a 0.5s perpetual leisure action to train stats with Foxified though. I have a feeling this is the optimal way to train agi/cha.
I didn't expect this to be what the newspaper meant! Though it does make sense. I feel a bit more bad for her than the other heroes.
Figure I should post this here for anyone who wants to give it a go: 204 in 1 is possible! You need to hardcode solutions to the test cases in a level or two, before you get enough tools to allow you to do slightly less hardcoding.
(Thanks to vpumeyyv for figuring out the main trick that makes it work. If you want the solution idea: Gur pubfra jbeq vf Ercynpr. Vg pna or hfrq gb uneqpbqr Genafyvgrengr, gura lbh pna znxr jbeqf yvxr Gnp hfvat pnershyyl cynprq punenpgref naq n genafyvgrengr vagb (()). (Lbh pna oernx vagb gur Qb-yvxrf jvgu Noqhpr.))
For a useless example, here's a solution to Caesar: (narcissus) 3 dip 3 dig (16) (23) between do
A definition of Narcissus that makes this solve work is: 3 zap(3 zap(?)(3 caesar)zap copy format)(3 caesar)zap copy format
You could imagine applying this to something with a long solution like Thirteen to save some symbols on Thirteen, though of course at the cost of making Narcissus longer. You can also construct an even better definition of Narcissus that can detect the input (especially for levels where it is significantly different than those in Narcissus) so you don't need the between.
If you haven't solved Narcissus yet on the savefile, I'm pretty you can just put some code in and it can be used in other levels despite not actually being a quine, so you could just throw a "3 caesar" in Narcissus' textbox with no problem. Once the level is solved once this seems to not work anymore though.
P.S. I removed a bunch of the solutions you added to the side because this isn't a resource for casual solves; it's specifically for symbol optimization. The multiply solution was cool though, so I optimized it a bit and left it in.
I'm at 15 right now. And I don't see anything as being "cheese" for an optimization challenge like this, anything that the game allows is fair for me. Like, I have a proper solution to behead, but there's no reason why I'd pick behead as a fundamental word (as you did) over between when between exists.
Simplest Box I know is ((?)) format. (edit: wrong word lmao) (well, for the golf metric it's something else with fewer chars, but you're not going to define split without some sort of box already defined.)
Actually, Tac is just ?? format. I suppose that one can be used in place of cat as a fundamental.
Kind of curious what words you ended up going for.
do, maycopy, zap, swap, buryd, cat, between (you can define head ((1) (1) between) and behead ((2) (99) between) easily, so there's no reason to use anything else), same (or equivalent? pretty sure any of like replace or the substring searches can pull it off too) are all seemingly obvious choices, but it feels like nothing else should actually be necessary and making everything is awful. or is it possible to go without even all of those (or equivalent that ends up being the same amount of words)? I also haven't unlocked all the words yet, so there might be something useful in the later ones that can replace multiple of these.
Or some weird behavior you can't replicate using these somehow; I haven't made all the earlygame words either, since I was too lazy to work on fundimentals and just wanted to find the silliest solutions to the words that don't use loops... but I'll probably have to give this a go sometime. Or I might've just forgotten some behaviors you need that are pretty obviously not replicable with that list (I added the Same equivalent in an edit lol)
Also, there are some other useful things to know that are just unclear and as far as I know not mentioned anywhere ingame. The two I have for my current progression point are:
* Where do I find Velvetia (and co.) to be able to ask her to grind soul gems for me? Those three vanished from Fortus after doing a Lucina warp to one of the demon general areas, and I was kind of relying on that ability because grinding got boring a while ago.
* How do I take off the black slime (forgot her name lol) clothes? This equipment is a lot less useful than any of the similar clothes and hinders soul gem grinding.
These are things that I'm pretty sure were added very recently (my main events count is at 99% and the last one is probably behind the soul shard cost to the next area that I don't want to grind, and these games tend to be made somewhat sequentially) so it makes sense that there wasn't enough feedback to know that finding this information is too unintuitive to find yet. Content later in a game is almost always less polished than earlygame content just due to less people giving feedback about it.
The fortune teller (at least, before this point) was a pretty reliable way to pick up the next thread to follow, in that if it tells you you can't continue the relationship right now then you can't, and if it tells you can by doing X then you can do X to continue. The only other misleading thing so far was telling you to go to the masquerade for demonea before you unlock that event, but it was very obvious that that was referring to something that hasn't been unlocked yet. "Talk to Elith" is something that has been unlocked by this point. And is the first thing I tried before even trying checking the fortune teller to see what specific condition it wanted.
If it tells you to do something to continue the relationship right now, it doesn't make sense for doing that thing to not actually do anything. This is as well treated as a suggestion to the dev (since they do read these comments) as an actual request for help.
A useful answer to my question would be "you need more story progress for the event you asked about, despite how the game doesn't tell you this". A not-useful one is one that only tells me the things that I obviously already knew considering I was asking the question in the first place.
It's possible that this particular fortune teller message was fixed in 0.74; I wouldn't know. But things like this are the sorts of feedback I tend to give most freely since there's pretty much no reason to not report player experience issues like this.
Another progression question. I got Elith to 0.9 (I think it was having Violet on that caused the bug last time) and the relationship person is telling me to talk to Elith to continue. Doing this action doesn't seem to actually do anything, though; I just get the normal stuff that was happening with no special events.