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Now that I've won nightmare, some thoughts:

0. The reworked Prospect is excellent, just the right balance of usefulness/cost. No longer too weak nor too strong.

1. Level 1 is still boring especially having to play it over and over again - I wish you'd just remove it from the harder levels and start them in the shop. It was briefly a lot more interesting (the variable sizes looked fun), until I realised that its the identical cards every time. No point playing the level, its almost identical, no choices to make. BETTER IF: you randomise the starting cards

1b. ... EVEN BETTER IF: you randomise their 'inert' levels: that would immediately provide interesting choices (which to upgrade?). This would also help nightmare by making some currently "worthless" cards (upgrade-related) potentially useful

2. There are now a few different outcomes to level 1, if you play perfectly you can finish with 54, 53, or 52 in most games, or 51,50,49,48, if you play imperfectly, or less if you play stupidly. But the shop prices are so huge that there's no effective difference between 50/51 and 53, and the easy path is to always get 52, so ... the level and the skill is useless.

3. Pricing in the shop is still broken. There are multiple rare cards that if you buy them early in the game you INSTANTLY lose the game (e.g. Crystallium == instant death, e.g. the mace (cant remember the name) = usually instant death, etc), simply because the price is so high. Note that Crystallium in the early levels not only takes all your cash (killing you) but ALSO is comepletly useless since until it's been upgraded a few times it has no special feature (on first two shops it only has 4 strength, I think I even saw it at 3 strength a few times). 

4. ... cost to re-roll the shop is much too high. Would be better if it was a constant low value - there's no need for the escalating cost, money is already tight enough that any reroll cost > 0 is punitive.

5. a lot of cards are mostly useless on nightmare, would be better to remove them from the game or rebalance them. They dont make it harder, they are just literally wasted slots that cannot do anything (fun in easier levels, but useless in nightmare).

6. Raise the cards-in-hand limit in nightmare (this would immediately unblock some of the cards that currently dont work: hard to build a large hand in nightmare, but at least it would make those cards useful. Right now they scale too slowly and/or provide no tangible benefit, they are less valuable than the starting cards).

7. nigthmare's final level is great, a suitably hard challenge (requiring you to spend the entire game planning for the ending, which I think is right for this difficulty) .. BUT .. it feels weird that there's no foreshadowing, nothing to indicate it will happen. This isnt so bad,after you see it the first time you know whats coming, but it feels like there's a missing story beat to explain it / warn about it.

8. the reworked pickaxe thats the only way to mine a card while spending 0 (and unlike the old dagger (?) that did that, it's a useful card in its own right so you buy and use them) is great. It means that a well-designed deck typically has a few of them in and when you've got one last energy and a choice between playing a higher score/money card or triggering card pickups (eg with axe) ... there's real value to the card pickups (previously there was none: you have 0 energy left and the smelter, torch, etc require at least 1). This makes the choice meaningful.

Overall great, by far the best iteration of the game.  

Nightmare is now suitably difficult - completed but tough. Technique: buy a 18-yellow sunstone and immediately scramble it and hope for somethign that doesnt suck (I got the 0-cost meteorite) ... then just try to survive until you get a yellow cube ... then cross your fingers for a cave painting. With the cave painting you can upgrade the cube every turn, and eventually it gets big enough (100 or so) that you can actually win the final level.

Much better balanced now - a far cry from the early builds where most things were useless in the long run. The starter upgrade card works well with the +5 bonus.

The persistent green cards are great, and finally give enough control that you don't continually snowball / fail entire runs purely based on random draw-order (because they persist, the player has some deck control).

I am VERY SAD at the 10-card hand limit, takes a lot of the fun away at the harder levels - also makes some of the new cards (eg the one that prevents discards) not only 'useless' but 'actively harmful' because you almost immediately have a full hand and it actively prevents you from picking up the cards you would need in order to spend the hand.

TL;DR: If you're keeping the 10 card limit I hink you need a 'discard hand' button. But I'd prefer relaxing the 10 card limit on harder difficulties - let the snowball runs return!

My best final cash is now just over 1k on Brutal.

I couldn't get nightmare to work at all - I think I had to win on brutal first? - but it seems unlocked now ... so off to see how high I can get (But with the 10 card limit I think very little).

Max everything, then start nuking it as soon as it appears on screen. Still defeatable

Soooo close to 10k...

... first 3 cards were originals that got converted in shop or by badger. Aimed for 10-15% of deck torches, 10% axes, and as many 0-cost cards as possible.

Deck was too efficient :(. Could probably have harvested 10k but I kept running out of cards (almost every turn).

But finished last level with 2000 red on nightmare, new personal best

Nice start.

There's some kind of bug in the tax calculation. Start of game after 1 prestige immediately get hit with $250k tax bill. After 2 prestiges get hit with $600k tax bill.

when bubblite upgraded, moonstone did not :(

on level-select screen, type: nightmare

Finally finished Brutal with over 1000 ore.

Nightmare is almost too easy now I've got the hang of it

Inspired by @connman116 and @mfcjpg (and thanks to @FleshHuman (A.K.A. D99) for unlocking Nightmare) - finally figured out how to get nightmare victories in current build. I can retire now :D.

Goal was "buy as few cards as possible, only buy the smallest number of cards you need to win the final level" -- which was 2 x axes + 2 x wrenches + any of the 0-cost-pickup-1 cards I was offered (only one in the end). Everything else was because I was waiting for wrenches.

I got the yellow cube at about 16 strength, and just kept upgrading using the freebie.

I got the 0-cost 17-scorium by tumblering a basic scorium to get rid of it.

Please please please start the game in the shop. There are zero choices to make in the first round, so its sole purpose is to artifically make you wait longer before you can start playing the game, and make the whole 'reroll until I get a decent shop' take longer.

Since new update ... 'Run Game' now broken on itch, it opens a new window? That's quite a big problem, messes up. If we want to go fullscreen, itch supports that from inside the page, but if you let itch open a new window it screws up on resolution and Godot animations go jerky and horrible.

(but I really like all the new cards and shop features - just wish the shop would retain the last purchase options when next level ends, otherwise you pay for refresh and often can't afford anything, but when your cash refreshes, you lose access to the re-roll you paid for)

Excellent work. How many attempts to get the planets to align and give you the options you felt you needed in the shop to pull this off?

... I want this (nightmare difficulty) :D

e.g. won like this multple times - after wrenches, axes still dominate the game due to balancing issues (better to be able to shoot through the deck fast, since the game doesnt let you keep cards in hand and decide when to play them. This is the core balancing problem: player has very little control, so things that make up for the lack of control win much more often)

I literally did not say that. I have won multiple times on brutal without wrenches. But it requires a lot more luck - luck that the shop will give you the cards you need (with very little tolerance, most attempts fail because shop just never gives you enough) and luck that the large deck in midgame wont screw you with a bad deal that ends the game early.

Wrenches do not have this problem.

(pre balance patch): Prospect. Or a variation on it.

forgot victory shot:

Balancing: much better

Brutal: I often got (literally) within *1 point* and died :D, until I used Wrenches.

Wrenches: OP

Everything-not-wrenches: (that you can reliably 'choose'; so e.g. getting enough nmineshafts is great, but it requires a lot of luck to get enough): not good enough, no strategies really work; they *can* work but see below (basically: it becomes random luck more than strategy - one bad deal and you die)

Balancing still needed:

 - more items in the shop (because you still can't choose your strat - escalating shop costs are just not good for balancing) ...

 - ... and more cards (so that the previous item doesnt let players 100% choose their own strategy; your core game-design is 'prevent players choosing a strategy, force them to react to the random roll')

 - reduce the cost of deletion: I lose SO MANY brutal rounds because I get 1 unlucky deal in the last level or penultimate level (this is a sign that there are too many cards in my deck, and I'm at the mercy of random deals, and that that is overshadowing my choice of purchases)

I'm a bit disappointed that you block picking up cards when the deck runs out - most games will shuffle the deck at that point. Score would have been higher but I kept having to end turns early beacuse I ran out of cards.

Love the downvotes. If you do the maths, most cards in the game are completely useless - because of the artificial limits there is a very low maximum number of turns that can happen, a very low number of reshuffles that can happen, which breaks most cards (they would work fine in a normal, non-limited, game). Only a very few actually scale as fast as the game increases the required limit - if you stick it in a spreadsheet issues like this become much easier to see.

80% of runs are lost in the first round - if you don't get the 2x ore required each turn not much point in playing on (you'll miss out on the +1 turns). More restartminer than retrominer. It's not so much 'a difficult game' as an unbalanced one - if you can tweak the balance I think it would be great, but right now most strategires and combos are irrelevant, they are overwhelmed by the "play it exactly one way or else you are guaranteeed to los", making it more of a puzzle (second-guessing the designer's preferred combo) than a game.

Tutorial is broken or is missing basic core info. It says I "won in 1 turn" but I never did any damage to the enemy. I "won" the next two battles without doing anything other than picking up cards, and then in the third I did the same but this time magically the enemy took no damage for no reason.

The dagger card could never be used despite me having the cost avaialble. Clicking does nothing.

Buying a second dagger said it would upgrade the card but it had no effect.

Either there's a lot of bugs here or tehre's some fundamentals of what the heck is going on that the tutorial desperately needs to explain.

I hadn't run out of power yet, had a few dots left, but whenever I stepped on to the 'I' by the river it said the bridge wasn't wokring and needed some power or it was drained or something. All other items worked fine.

Yep, I have all 5 items, including the bridge. it keeps saying I have no power for it. But I have no idea how to power it.

Great, big improvements, works nicely.

I found 5 items, 4 corpses, but couldn't find a way to recharge the bridge. Walked everywhere, couldn't figure out what was missing

WTF. Radeon 7600 and you're saying it can't handle AO???

AO has literally nothing to do with this. Unless 'disablign AO' also 'removes all your broken shaders that do something absurdly wrong'?

It will take litearlly 5 minutes of waiting while my machine grinds to a halt for me to get into the menu to be able to try this - that's how bad the current build is.

Oh! yes! You need to fix this: there's a high probability that the game is impossible because you generate starts where the only actions require gold. Which is completely unplayable. You need to change your startup routine so that it always (randomly) includes AT LEAST ONE action that doesn't cost gold to use.

So .. you start with 0 gold, but all actions require gold. There's no information, and no buttons work. Is this just super buggy and broken?

Ah! That explains it, I was completely confused by that - thanks!

Have you fixed the performance problems? Less than 1 FPS on a machine with 64 GB RAM and a 16GB GPU and 4k monitor is :( :( :( :(.
(it was always slow, but the earlier builds ran OK on high-powered machines)

Liked the idea but needs some significant work in improving the info about what's going to happen.

e.g. I had an enemy villager step next to my knight (docs say this is impossible, knight was defending adjacent squares. Docs are wrong? But this seems a basic gameplay feature).

Very hard to know what's going to happen, you just have to keep guessing and hitting UNDO each time something seemingly impossible happens.

Blockage still broken, still cannot build on planets it returns.

New build now also broke Pirates - after the first time it returns the stolen production, on all future turns it only steals production never returns any.

Latest build performance is even worse (didn't think it was possible) - radeon 7600XT, 6 core 5600x CPU maxed, 13 GB RAM used, on a Radeon total of 1 FPS or less. Whatever you're doing with the rendering you really need to re-think it :(.

Final update: changed the loading screen to have a link to the followup game (where I'm adding all the features and content I didn't have time for during the gamejam): https://tmachine.itch.io/shadowlink-2025