Hey Dungeoneers,
The next Shattered Pixel Dungeon update is going to have a variety of smaller changes, including four new badges to earn! These badges range from fairly easy to quite difficult, and are all about specific challenges. Here are some hints:
- Defeat enemies with the help of terrain (traps, plans, chasms)
- Have lots of buffs or debuffs at once
- Survive the ascent with the amulet's curse peacefully
- Beat the game using a very, very high level pickaxe
(Image Description: An image showing the four new badge being added in the next Shattered Pixel Dungeon update. The first one is golden (medium difficulty), then one is platinum (high difficulty), and the last two are diamond (extreme difficulty).)
That's a bit unfortunate to anyone doing a max-badges run. Grim Reaper was already heavily luck-based in such a run, but now it's close to complete luck as to whether you find the right enchantment or not, if you need to use all your upgrade scrolls on the pickaxe.
Obviously I don't want to actively work against specific player-created challenge games like that, but I'm afraid trying to cater to it would limit my design space a fair bit. I expect that I will add more specific badges in the future which will probably put things further in that direction.
Really the problem there is that the grim reaper badge is the worst badge in the entire game, becaus all it does is measure if you were lucky enough to find a specific enchantment. There is close to no actual skill involved, and that sets it apart from any other badge in the game.
I think the badge requires a reasonable amoutn of luck given that you can easily fish for more rare enchants using stones or scrolls of enchantment. I definitely don't plan to add too many of these badges (it could get tedious very fast) but I wouldn't mind a few more over time.
But even if you burn all 15 scrolls of upgrade for stones, you have a 35% chance of not getting it, and you would have had to play the game without any upgrades to even get to that point. The only way to get it consistently is to find some way to farm weapons or enchantment stones, and that can take ages in a random run.
Yeah, and most players do not need to worry about getting that badge in a specific run, which is why I think it's fine. Too many of those badges though and the player will definitely be unlucky on some of them and end up having to send runs specifically for those badges though, which would suck.