the encounter rate is crazy low i just went through the whole first floor and only got in 3 fights, can an increase in difficulty also increase encounter rate?

update: the encounter rate is still crazy just different once you get to higher levels, there's 0 breathing room on floor 8 and 9 i literally have 4 different fights back to back multiple times just walking through to the next floor

The encounter rate is balanced to be realistic (according to the source material), I can get on floor 5 by encountering around 10 mobs (Which is used as a metric for many of the main quests). It's not affected by difficulty (Although Normal locks the maximum monsters in a fight to 5).

If you want to increase or stop encounters, you need to buy the necessary items at the market: "Monster Lure" to increase the encounter rate to a near 100% and "Morbul" to set the encounter rate to 0%.