Nope. I only know them out of having played the game enough (and reading patch notes) to learn them. Though I suspect they'll add one at some point.
slabdrill
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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.
How do you avoid getting softlocked when losing to Elith? They appear to have zero attacks they use on you if you're bound and sleeping, so the battle just never ends, even after pressing Give Up.
(This didn't happen on the first time I encountered her so I'm assuming there's some weird equipment condition that caused it to bug out, but I'm not sure if it was just the quantum violet state (where they get taken off stat-wise but not visually) or something else. Regardless, I never tried again in different conditions, so it'd be nice to know what the conditions are for me to avoid this probably-bug.)
Also, more general non-niche questions, what are you supposed to do for Faylen 4.9->5? The relationship teller saying to check if she's being herself doesn't actually tell me how to do anything. And Ceres at 3.0 says to first improve your relationship with Ceres as a full ! task rather than a grayed out one...
This is a good change; it makes sure people will still be able to get shadow comprehension even if they haven't found the specific nodes that reward it, so the growth should be a bit less slow earlygame now.
I accidentally pressed R and lost one of my runs somewhat far in; it would be nice to have a confirmation of some sort for that.
Bug report: When loading a save, swap scroll usage is used at the location of the previous action, before moving away from that spot to reach the next. If the path between these actions has a gate, the loading can fail to find a path after the swap as it was used at a different time than in the original run being loaded.
(By the way, got 1882 1998. Fun game to optimize.)
It's perfectly fine to have content you're extremely unlikely to see. If you get it, you have a single opportunity to explore beyond your means. One single opportunity, with which you're almost certainly not going to be able to do everything and so will have to pick and choose what you actually want to use it for. If you're intentionally aiming for the good luck, of course the rates will feel ridiculously low - because you're not supposed to be intentionally aiming for it, instead just immediately pivoting your run the moment you hit the good luck. In the end, you're not going to be able to achieve much without repeated runs that get far enough to be able to actually experiment with things. (Or at least that's the obvious idea of the game design. Whether they manage to pull that off is up to how well they can actually design the game's challenges.)
Similarly, if you get unlucky on something that has a high chance, then you got unlucky and that's that. You can pivot and try one of the other options you still have open, or just treat it as a run for grinding comprehension instead.
(I don't treat savescumming for RNG as something that needs to be worth considering in balance. You're obviously not supposed to do it since if you were they wouldn't include the RNG in the first place.) (6% isn't even that low of a chance. Are you not doing like 15 runs just to learn all the actions on the map anyway??)
I mentioned this in my other new comment (now that I played the game more), but the main problem with Shadow Comprehension is actually that I had missed the actions that led to giving more of it, leading to me assuming that they weren't present in the game at all. I still haven't found more than 32 total in the entire game, and by now I believe I actually *have* seen most of the game... and all of those except the exam one are like a minute from the start position.
If the game gives me a reason to believe that map knowledge is actually worthwhile (for the primary goal I'm aiming for which is "getting shadow comprehension"), then I become way more incentivized to look for it. But when literally every action I do doesn't lead to getting any more, I have no reason to keep looking.
It probably doesn't fully help that mapping things out in my head is hard and I can't actually remember which actions I haven't checked for any actions behind them yet. If I knew which actions I had to check it'd be a lot easier to devote a run to just checking that action... though of course this only helps in the event of most unchecked actions having something behind them. The reason why I stopped checking a lot of them was that most of the options I was checking early on were leading to long action chains, and trace amount of stats don't really matter and they just never were leading to anything better. Making the game explicitly communicate which actions you haven't checked for followups is also a strong motivator that that is something that the player should be using as a progress metric.
Allowing random lucky runs is fine. Normal incrementals are usually treated as specifically curated experiences, but they don't have to be, and they're usually more fun the more it feels like you're sequence breaking.
Incremental game players usually hate RNG in their games because it means you can't just brainlessly follow a guide, and allows you to blame bad RNG instead of your strategy. It's best to make sure you always have an RNG-less path to success in general anyway, though if it's possible to get extremely unlucky (e.g. getting 0 truffles if there's no alternatives) it'll be frustrating when it happens anyway.
In current balance, I'm pretty sure the haste potion is more important than the screaming mandrake for getting good runs, anyway. That one I'm curious about how you'll keep from being essential to get on every good run in the future, since it's kind of boring needing a specific RNG roll on that action (which has to be done pretty late in the run too, because of the no calmness gain side effect)