(For the best viewing experience, please read the original copy of this post on Shatteredpixel.com) Hey Dungeoneers! After some disruptions back in February and March, Shattered Pixel Dungeon v2.4.0 is finally ready for beta! Read on for more details about what's coming in this update. [table noborder=1] [tr] [td]
[/td] [td]The beta for Shattered v2.4.0 is live right now! To access it on Steam, go to your game library, right click on Shattered and select 'properties' then go to the 'betas' tab and select the beta from the dropdown list.[/td] [/tr] [/table]

Trinkets

[hr][/hr] The major new content in v2.4.0 is an entire new category of item: Trinkets! Trinkets are produced and upgraded via alchemical energy, and are more about tweaking gameplay variables than giving direct power or utility. Look out for a magical catalyst in the early stages of the game. You can use this catalyst and a bit of alchemical energy at an alchemy pot to produce a trinket. You'll get three different trinkets to pick between each run.
Once you have a trinket, its effect will passively apply for the rest of your run (unless you decide to drop it), and can be upgraded using more alchemical energy. At +0 most trinket effects are fairly minor or subtle, but they can be made quite a bit more pronounced when upgraded to the max at +3.
These effects are all about mixing up the variables of a run a little bit. You might encounter rare enemies more often with the rat skull, find exotic potions/scrolls instead of regular ones with the exotic crystals, hit for max or minimum damage more often with the 13-leaf clover, encounter enchantments and curses more often with the Parchment Scrap, or encounter visible traps and chasms more often with the trap mechanism. I'm planning for v2.4.0 to have 10-12 trinkets in total when it releases. It's my hope that trinkets will add another layer of variety on top of every run, making the game feel more fresh and varied without changing things up enough to disrupt regular gameplay. There's also a lot of room to add more trinkets in the future, which will mix things up even further!

Alchemy Changes

[hr][/hr] To go along with trinkets, v2.4.0 also includes some very substantial changes to the alchemy system.
Alchemical and arcane catalysts are being removed entirely in favor of having recipes just require more energy instead. This makes recipes more flexible, simplifies the process of creating a bunch of items, and doesn't actually change the cost of creating anything. Many recipes are also getting small or large balance changes (mostly buffs). These changes should hopefully continue to push the alchemy system away from needlessly complex recipes and toward it's original goal: giving players more control and choice when it comes to consumable items. I am sorry that alchemy recipes itself are becoming less detailed as a result of this, but it's very clear to me at this point that the alchemy system is at its best when its streamlined and gets out of the way as quickly as possible.

Duelist Weapon Abilities

[hr][/hr] I'm making some big changes to the Duelist by scaling back her weapon ability charge speed quite a bit, but am also buffing weapon abilities across the board.
Every single weapon ability has been made stronger, received mechanics changes, or had its charge cost reduced. The goal here is for abilities to be less frequently available, but also **MUCH** more impactful when the player does use them. This better fits their nature as an addition to weapons, which already have a default attack that has unlimited availability. I expect this to both feel much stronger, and actually be stronger as well. I'm also taking this chance to streamline the champion a bit. Her two weapons will now share a single charge meter, but with a bigger cap and faster charge speed. The secondary charge talent is also being replaced with a new talent that rewards using varied weapon abilities with even more charge boosts. This should hopefully make the champion a bit less fiddly to use while still encouraging varied and frequent weapon ability use.

Side Content

[hr][/hr] And, of course, v2.4.0 has a bunch of smaller changes and additions as well. Most notably:

• I've added a new standard room type to each of the five regions of the dungeon, and added two new variants for entrance and exit rooms to each region as well! These new rooms further increase level variety and substantially reduce the number of plain empty rooms.
• I've added a second batch of new holiday items for events later in the year. Expect to see holiday overrides to the cornish pasty during Pride, New Years, and the birthdays of both Shattered and the original Pixel Dungeon.
• In addition to Duelist talent tweaks, I've also changed up some of the less popular T1 talents. The Mage and Warrior get a new damage-boosting talent, and the Rogue's cached rations talent has been changed up.

[hr][/hr] The beta for v2.4.0 isn't quite content-complete yet, so I expect that it'll last a bit longer than normal, perhaps 2 weeks. If you'd like to keep up to date on that progress, or get more updates in general, you can subscribe to the Shattered Pixel Newsletter, or follow me on Mastodon. Folks who's been following those have been getting little bite-sized trinket teaser for almost the last two months now. You can discuss this Blog Post here on the Steam Community, or on the Pixel Dungeon Lemmy Community.