I’ve been keeping and eye on these posts forever now, and its hard to believe that we’re almost here! A few thoughts:

On the Quest: The tester area, the few times I’ve gotten to check it out, have been fantastic. I’ve always found the avoidance gameplay to be just as interesting, if not moreso, than the direct combat, and I’m sure anyone who’s played FIMA (not to mention higher-challenge runs) sees the appear as well. That being said, I almost wonder if there could be some enemies that are completely unkillable and thus are more akin to a permanent hazard, sort of like the Crystal Guardian from the Crystal Caves Quest. Are there going to be normal any wandering mobs in the vault? That might be interesting if that interacted with Swarm Intelligence (although I feel that Swarm Intelligence might not generally work well with the different mob logic, although we’ll have to see what effect the new balancing for that challenge has on the quest if enabled). Based on the way you were talking about the dwarf tokens, it feels almost a given that those are only going to be dropped by mobs that spawn on floor generation, and not afterwards, right?

The other thing I noticed was that you alluded to a “boss.” I can’t help but wonder at the implications there. For all the previous quests in the game, there were different versions, whether those be different minibosses, different subregions, or different goals entirely (old cave quest, for instance). I know that there is quite a bit of variety in the vault already from standard procgen, but I’m not sure if that alone would help prevent it from being less interesting than the Prison or Caves Quest, if the bosses and enemies are all the same, and I’m strongly of the opinion that each quest should be more involved and varied than the previous, and I think you are as well. I’m wondering what your plans are for addressing this? (As an aside, I always hoped that one day down the road, a challenge would exist that would incorporate all quest versions in a single run.)

On the Enchantments: I did have my reservations on these at first, just because I was well aware with your rationale for removing some of them, even if I didn’t start playing until 1.0 myself. That being said, I do find your logic fairly compelling. I’m also aware that despite the power of blazing, some newer players don’t know how to play around it terrain-wise, and sometimes even insist that it should be a curse as a result. I think that Vorpal and Venomous are more approachable for new players as a result. Eldritch (misspelled? as Eldtrich in the blog post but hopefully not the game) seems like a fun utility enchantment; Crystal I’m just sort of neutral on.

Pressurized is a cool enchantment, and reminds me of the time I died to an Aqua Brew. Will it deal any damage (a la Explosive) aside from taking knockback against a wall? Wondrous seems chaotic, and does make me wonder if it will make Cursed wand effects less interesting by comparison. Seems like a wondrous throwing hammer, for instance, will often be better than a cursed wand.

How will the transmutation cursed effect interact with thrown weapon stacks? When a melee weapon turns into another item type, that would work the same as a cursed wand transmutating currently does, but for a thrown weapon, does that affect the item that was just thrown or the stack in the inventory? For that matter though, I feel like the cursed wand version of that effect might make sense to just always transmute the wand into a wondrous weapon at this point.

On the Graphics: I’m not sure the item sprites are working for me, I’m sad to say. I know that there was some amount of pushback when you first announced you were looking into changing the art style of the mod a few years ago, and I don’t see anything meaningfully different now. Based on the comments you made on the scrolls, I do think that the version that you showed in the graphic was outdated, but it’s not something I anticipate liking once the final version gets revealed. The one improvement that I do see coming out of this is the fact that Blinding Darts will finally appear meaningfully different than untipped Darts. The similarities between those two sprites have always been confusing.

The tiles visuals, though, are a lot more promising. I think its cool that the different treasure rooms are finally going to have actually unique aesthetics to differentiate them, and it seems like the logical next step after all the work you did on the ordinary rooms. You were right about all the new room types and terrain features making the normal rooms more varied and less boring; now this does the same for loot rooms. Are there plans on making the Secret Alchemy room different than the normal one? right now that difference is down to the extra energy crystals and the location of the pot, and based on the teaser image the pot location changed, so I imagine there will be other differences?

Misc. Please Remove the Grim Reaper Badge.

So, why exactly? I thought that you removed them because you wanted enchantments to be less about directly increasing the damage?

Counterpoint on darts specifically: the fat tip can be for tipped darts. Currently, blinding dart looks way too similar to the untipped dart; fattening the tips on tipped darts is one solution.

Doesn’t that make permanently locking the player out of winning trivially easy? Back in my day you had to abuse multiple teleportation glitches for that!