Now I've (almost) completed the game, it's time for me to write a review.
(spoiler warning)
TLDR: Overall, I think the update is great, and still needs polishing. Some balace still need tuning.
1. Centipede and Ghoul droppings are too weak, and don't match their strength.
Centipede drop only gives 1 poison when distilled. For comparison, a toad drops a slime gland, which also gives 1 poison when distilled.
I suggest buff the centipede drop to 2~3 poison.
Ghoul drop gives 0.4 sanguine when distilled. For comparison, a Leech pouch gives 0.5 sanguine when ground in a mortar.
The ghouls are rather frightening, I suggest change them to give sinister instead. Compared to the abundant spider silk (0.25) and fiend powderbox (0.4), and another frightening monster Chimaera (1), I suggest they should give 0.6~1 sinister.
2. Efreet and Centipede show the design intention that I should avoid them, but in practice, they have high speed, and there is often not enough space to sneak by, so I have to kill them. This way I'm no longer outwitting my enemies, instead I'm brute forcing them with my vast potion supplies, and this feels a little wrong.
I suggest add 'dashing' equipments, which can help with sneaking past these enemies. Dashing could work like "the stardust", speed up movement but cost hp every move, and maybe accumulate fatigue so the player can't dash indefinitely.
3. Exploration of T3 fey lake is almost identical to T2 forest, aside from the fairy and the moat.
I hope the forest can have some new threat than the T2 forest, rather than having the riddle be the only difficult part. Maybe some normal creatures like bears? Or some mystical fey creature?
4. Where is the sulfur? So far I have only seen sulfur in a variant of T1 farm, and nowhere else. I hope there are more sulfur later.
5. Flame spire have some rooms with wooden barrels, that start to burn very soon after I enter the map. It's as if they are in chronostasis before I entered the map, which breaks the immersion. I think they should either be burnt at start, or simply not flammable, or be locked well and have no efreet inside.
This save has 2.5 years, and have hoarded a huge amount of items. I have 2k gold, 8k fuel, 1k metal, 12 complete map and 6 unexplored T3 zones. I also have enough materials to make 20 elixir of youth.
Although there is no time contraint, I still try to optimize in-game time usage, and use this to estimate potion costs.
The T3 maps:
Sorting in difficulty, I think it's Spire = Mine = Grave >> Lake. The lake riddle is not taken into account, because the tree trunks give a huge amount of reward without needing to complete the riddle.
I have completed 3 Spires, 5 Mines, 5 Graves, 4 Lakes (but failed all the riddles).
The forest part of spire:
The forest is all burned, and I need to avoid the Efreets. The good part is, the forest is all burned, so the vision is clear, and I don't need to worry about being ambushed around a corner. There is usually enough space to maneuver around them, and I can destroy burned trees to create paths when in need.
It's relatively easy to reach the spire without needing potions. However, the forest have some good materials, and to collect those, I need to kill some Efreets. The rule of thumb is, use a frost potion whenever it could kill 2 Efreets or more.
The magmoss is useful, it's a good source of telluric.
The scorch leaves is less useful, it can be refined into either lawless or volatile, but neither are important.
The smoulderfly is simply not worth gathering. It requires hushing sands to gather, but only gives 1.5 volatile, which is already abundant. I suggest buffing it to 2~3 volatile, and maybe make it take sorting instead of grinding.
Inside the spire:
My biggest problem with it, is the rooms with wooden barrels. They start to burn soon after I enter the floor. When I reach the rooms, I usually see them burn in front of me.
In my opinion, they should either have already burned up before I come to the spire, or be entirely immune to Efreets. Maybe the barrels and chests should be made of metal, or some magical crystal that can be collected for later use.
In the spire, there is usually no longer enough space to sneak around the Efreets. I simply use frost potion to kill all of them. The rule of thumb is, use a frost potion whenever it could kill 2 Efreets or more, and also if a single Efreet is blocking the path.
On average, I use about 20 frost potions each spire.
I also tried using Corpselight potion against Efreets, because the potion description says "freeze all nearby creatures", but it seems to have no effect on them.
Pirate graves:
These are mostly fine imo.
The Ghouls are designed as need to be killed. Each cost 3 fireballs, or 1 black fire + 1 fireball.
The ghoul drops are underwhelming compared to their strength.
On the ground, it's possible to cheese them with crystal potion. I can use a crystal potion on each ghoul and then push them into deep water.
Sometimes, it's possible to crystal a ghoul and put it in a side room. If it has lost track of the player, it will stay dormant and not try to break open the doors. Not having to kill it can save some potions.
The 3 sarcophagus can be solved with the whisper candle, but I always drink a phoenix potion before opening it, just in case.
Mines:
The entrance has renewable sources of glacial water. However, I find it not worth to go there again just for that water.
The mines require having hushing sands active almost all the time. I also use restlessness to make hushing sands last longer, and use food instead of calming infusion to recover health.
The centipedes are deadly. They have 130% speed, and deal 4~6 damage on bite. After the bite, there is also a 50% slowdown, which makes it hard to either continue sneaking or retreat.
There is usually not enough space to sneak around them. With muffled footsteps, they act similar to Efreets, but are somewhat harder to kill.
Sometimes there are very tight corners which blocks most of vision. A centipede can be very deadly in this case.
It's possible to leave some of the centipedes alone, but they usually guard some treasure and valuable ore behind, so I still kill them.
Killing each takes 1 fireball + 1 embers. A single black fire potion can also do the job, and becomes the best option when it can affect 2 or more targets.
The bottom floor has lots of pits. It's possible to use crystal potion + push to kill centipedes. The wyvern is no more difficult than the fort one, so it's just a piece of cake.
When exploring the bottom floor of water variant, I noticed a problem: When I cling to a wall with gecko potion, deep water have no movement penalty, but shallow water still have movement penalty. I think this needs to be fixed.
Fey lake:
The lake can be passed through costing 2~3 floating potions. There's nothing interesting about the lake itself.
The forest is almost identical to the T2 forest. There are no additional threats. There are additional resources, the mandrake and the resources in tree trunks. The fairy dust and strange drinks are all useful materials, and if I fully explore the map, it can give far more than 4 map fragments.
The fairy riddles are very difficult for me. So far I have tried 4 times, and no success. Some riddles are clear enough that I'm confident of the answer, but some are vague, and I need to guess and end up failing. Maybe I need to ask ChatGPT for help?
I'm not asking for a nerf to the riddle difficulty, I just hope there's nothing important locked behind them in
The hotbar is a huge QoL improvement, now I can't live without it. Unfortunately it only has 10 slots, which is not really enough for late game builds.
It partially solved the frequent equipment switching problem, by making the switching easier.
There is a cheese with repeatedly turning lights on and off to trick bats. It already existed in old versions, but the hotbar makes it actually viable.
The ability to unequip potion in also very helpful, especially when combined with the hotbar. It has prevented misclick many times.
New Items (and changed items):
1. Black fire:
This update buffed its damage, and added 2 types of enemies that can be affected by it: Ghouls and Centipedes. Black fires now deal about 1.8x damage of fireballs at 2.4x cost, which makes it a direct upgrade.
While this sounds like less cost-effectiveness, it can make good use of oppertunities when a single potion can affect multiple targets. The spread is still hard to use, but it's good enough without the spread. Overall I think it's well-balanced.
2. Unruly flame:
Its damage is too unstable and unreliable for main dps. I had a try at it, but it can't even reliably one-shot ghouls. At this price, it's not very useful.
3. Rime potion:
It's now in a strange position. Currently it's used only in the spire, but it's unlocked very early, and the spire is a late game T3 map. So there is a very long time, I have unlocked rime potion but have no need for it.
4. Chaos potion:
For the drinking and applying part:
When I want to apply a buff on myself, in most cases, only 1~2 of the buffs are needed. The chances of rolling the needed buff is low. For drinking, it's a little better, because it can give healing, but this usually results in overflow, so it's not useful either.
For the throwing part:
It's possible to use this as a damage potion. While there are many different thrown potions, a good number of them deal damage in some way, so there's a good chance to deal some damage.
However this has some problems. The first problem is the rift potion. You can accidentally exchange your position with the target. So it's only useful when fight a single enemy. Otherwise you may end up in the middle of a group of enemies, or dangerously close to a strong enemy. The second problem is immunities. Some enemies can be immune to some of the potions, reducing the chance of dealing damage.
I've tried using chaos potions to deal with single centipedes in the mines, but the result is far from ideal. It usually takes more than 6 to kill each.
The cost of the potion is not trivial. Overall it's still not useful.
5. Poison gloves:
The passive effect is very useful. It allows curing rot effect, which is useful for the ghouls in graves.
The melee effect is somewhat useful. I can now kill bats in 1 hit, which needs less turning lights on and off.
The poison cloud buff is useless. All major threats in T2 and T3 maps are immune to poison.
6. Restlessness potion:
This potion multiplies player speed by 1.15x. This is not useful for sneaking past Centipedes and Efreets, because the player has no way to tell when the extra turn will occur.
The main use of it, is to pair with hushing sands and gecko potion, so these potions last longer.
The loss of calming infusion is actually not a big problem. Calming infusion often results in healing overflow, so it usually heals less than the theoretical 60 hp. Food from richardo is cheap enough to be a good alternative.
7. Dream catcher: This is rather helpful, as it can generate lots of high tier materials. Holy, Sinister and Semipiternal are all very useful.
8. Phoenix potion: This seems to be a specialized potion for solving the pirate grave. I usually keep a few in inventory, but not use them often.
9. Whispering candle: This item reveals some interesting lores. I have tried listen to them in each type of map. They are mostly useful in pirate graves, to steal the secret from the pirate. In other places it's mostly just cool.
10. Potion of blood transfiguration: This potion is more expensive than fireball, and fireball can do its job nicely.
11. "The Stardust": The Fey lake area gives tons of fey essence (hundreds), so I can brew lots of them to sell. Still have nowhere to spend that much money though.
12. Shadowbane potion: It's throw effect is useful at clearing densely packed shadow clouds. However, it's also ok to just rush through the cloud, it only costs 3 hp.
The drink effect lasts too short to be useful. I think it should be at least 40 turns to be a worthy alternative.
13. Kingsblood: Works as intended, but not useful outside of unlocking their locks.
Kingsblood can be used to fool the living armor of the T2 mansion. However this doesn't work in practice, as 15 turns is not enough to loot the main treasure. I can use 2 potions, but it's no longer cost-effective this way.
14. Floating: Works as intended, but no use outside of the fey lake. Duration is too short for other use cases.
I haven't used either potion of recollection or discord. I think discord could be useful when it's affecting 2 ghouls or centipedes, but haven't tried yet.
Richardo T2 shop adds something useful in late game. The important goods are: Metal sun symbol, ivory dice, ink, black feather. Bloodstone and black quartz can be useful, but I found them not cost-effective.
It's getting tedious to check the shop every in-game day. I hope the T2 shop can have bigger capacity and restock slower.