(For the best viewing experience, please read the original copy of this post on Shatteredpixel.com) Hey everyone, after a bit longer of a wait that I initially planned, Shattered Pixel Dungeon v2.5.0 is now ready for beta! In this post Im going to share some more of the new things coming in this update! [table noborder=1] [tr] [td]
[/td] [td]The beta for Shattered v2.5.0 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] Shattered is also on sale on Steam right now as a part of the No Time To Loot Festival from August 26th to September 2nd! During the sale you can grab Shattered at 40% off, which is a new all-time low price on Steam! There are also a bunch of other great dungeon crawler games on sale as part of the festival.

New Trinkets!

[hr][/hr] v2.5.0 is fairly light on new content, with most of the emphasis being on the things I talked about last time. There are some new trinkets Im adding though! Trinkets have been designed with lots of room for expansion, and in this update Im adding four more to bring the total number to 15!

• The Salt Cube is a fairly simple trinket that makes satiety from your food last longer at the cost of reduced HP regen. At +3 your food will last 50% longer, but at the cost of no passive health regen while youre satiated.
• The Vial of Blood is another simpler trinket that enhances the amount of healing from major healing sources at the cost of also slowing it down. Youll get 50% more healing at +3, but youll need to plan around healing much more slowly.
• The Chaotic Censer produces puffs of different harmful gas near to you. With good positioning you can stay out of these gasses while kiting enemies into them. Higher levels make the gas effect more frequent and increase the chance of more powerful gasses.
• The Shard of Oblivion increases your chance of finding loot from enemies for each unidentified item youre currently wearing. The trinket also comes with a built-in way to turn off passive identification, making it easy to Minmax which items you want identified or not.

Content Changes

[hr][/hr] While those new trinkets are the only direct new gameplay content coming in v2.5.0, there are also a bunch of smaller tweaks and changes that should impact game feel quite a bit: [table noborder=1] [tr] [td]
[/td] [td]Probably the biggest change in terms of game feel is some adjustments Im making to improve inventory management. This includes some specific changes to free up inventory slots here and there, and one notable change to alchemy. Energizing items now also identifies them, which gives players a new way to use up consumable items up in order to ID them.[/td] [/tr] [/table] [table noborder=1] [tr] [td]
[/td] [td]Now that cursed wands are being used more with Wondrous Resin, Its a good time to expand the functionality there a bit. v2.5.0 will feature 16 new cursed wand effects, ranging from common effects like shooting bubbles to rare and powerful effects like a massive supernova explosion! The bubbles are harmless, and the explosion is the exact opposite of that.[/td] [/tr] [/table] [table noborder=1] [tr] [td]
[/td] [td]Im making several changes to improve overall trinket balance. Most notably, the Dimensional Sundial is getting an effect during daytime, the 13 Leaf Clover will now only affect the heros damage rolls, and the Mossy Clump will generate less bonus dew. I hope these changes will make more trinket options appealing, increasing overall variety.[/td] [/tr] [/table] [table noborder=1] [tr] [td]
[/td] [td]Continuing with balance changes, Im also making some adjustments to the Duelist and Monk to follow up on bigger changes from v2.4.0. The Duelist is mainly getting buffs to specific weapon abilities (mostly extra damage) and talent bufs, and the Monk is getting an overall boost to her abilities to help her keep pace with the Champion.[/td] [/tr] [/table]

Region Splash Art!

[hr][/hr] Lastly, while it doesnt affect gameplay directly, there is one more major change coming in v2.5.0. In Shattereds 10th anniversary blog post I talked about new in-game pixel art, but Im also working with Aleksandar Komitov on some new splash arts for Shattered as well! That pixel art is still a long ways out, but some of Aleks new art is ready to go now! In v2.5.0 Shattered is getting five new full detail splash arts, one for each of the dungeons regions! These arts appear during the games loading screens, and will pause to display story text when you first descend to each region.
Much like the hero splashes, I think these region splashes go a long way toward enhancing Shattered's presentation, and help fill in some of the more subtle visual details that aren't present in the lower-res pixel art within the game. There are also lots of lovely new larger details in each art, some of which I'd love to better represent in the game itself at some point. You can see the sewers art above, and the metropolis art below, to see the rest you'll have to play through the regions in the game ;).
Mobile portrait users will get to see vertical slices of these arts during loading screens, instead of seeing them all at once, but I am going to experiment with adding a panning effect when story text is displayed. You can also minimize the story text to view the region splash arts on their own. [hr][/hr] I expect the beta for v2.5.0 to last a little longer than a week, as I've got to get a couple more trinkets functioning in it before release. 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.