Draft:Shiren 5 Vita:Warning Valley

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Key Parameters
Initial Goal Floor	50F
Final Goal Floor	99F
Day / Night	Day
Bring Items In	Yes
Take Items Out	Yes
# of Allies	0
# of Rescues	3
Pre-ID'd Items	All except swords, shields, and bracelets (confirm)
New Items	No
Shops	Regular, VIP, and Pick-A-Choice
Monster Houses	Normal
NPCs	Shopkeepers only (confirm)
Spawn Rate	Normal
Winds of Kron	Extremely fast

Warning Valley is a bonus dungeon in Shiren 5 featuring an aggressively short turn limit for each floor and without any obvious unique reward. You can take items/Gitan in (and must do so to have a chance to win), but not allies. You can request rescue up to 3 times. You keep the items you have on hand if you win. The dungeon is daytime only, and the initial goal floor is 50 F. After first victory, the goal floor becomes 99 F and stays there permanently.

Gaining Access

Warning Valley is available from the Dungeon Center in Nekomaneki Village. Access is not restricted; you can play as soon as you can reach the Dungeon Center.

Unique Features

• There is an incredibly low turn limit on each floor compared to baseline play.
  • It feels like ~1% as many turns as you're normally allowed.
  • Best estimate is 250 turns per floor.
  • On a typical floor, Maneater family monsters will begin to appear before you make it to your 3rd room.
  • On a typical floor, the first Wind of Kron will blow before you've explored half the rooms.
  • On a "big loop" floor (a single big, rectangular loop of rooms around the outside edge of the map), you *might* be able to circle the floor once and make it to the stairs without losing due to the Winds of Kron.
• A reverse temperature bar graphic appears in the lower right corner of your screen, counting down until you run out of time on the floor.
• Item distribution differs significantly from baseline.
  • Swords, shields, and new items cannot appear at all.
  • Common items (except for swords and shields) are more common than usual.
  • There are virtually no uncommon or rare items at all, with the possible exception of bracelets.
  • Fate Scrolls and Earth Scrolls are particularly common, which is especially ironic given swords and shields do not appear.
  • No torches.
• The monsters seem to start at a much higher level than usual.
• The dungeon is daytime only.

Final Reward

Every time you beat the dungeon, you win a Time Stop Bracelet. This is ironic given the Time Stop Bracelet does nothing at all to slow the Winds of Kron. It's also unfortunate because you can find them in multiple other dungeons as normal drops.

Farming Opportunities

Though you can take items in, which means it's easy to farm things out of this location, there isn't a lot of great stuff to bother farming out, and, you have to move quickly so you may not even get to see everything available. You may be able to get more Fate and Earth Scrolls than normal, though these aren't super valuable. If you really want to farm here, consider bringing a Blessing Pot full of Collection Scrolls and more pots full of Extraction or Blank Scrolls (upon which you can write Extraction), so you can move aggressively to the exit, then collect all items on the floor to your feet by reading a single blessed Collection Scroll (then putting it back in the Blessing Pot to re-bless it).

Strategies

I can't find a great reason to play this dungeon. The pre-placed items and monster drops are common, you frequently don't have time to check all pre-placed items anyway, and the final reward is not very uncommon either. You can accumulate a fairly large supply of Fate Scrolls and Earth Scrolls along the way (~10 each across 99 floors), so it might be worth it to go into this dungeon with a secondary weapon and shield in your inventory so you can consume those scrolls for something useful rather than clogging up your inventory with them or passing them altogether. Another possibility is a bit obscure, but if you happen to have a new item bracelet with the charge effect on it (which has a chance to add 1 charge to each staff in your main inventory every time you change floors), you'll find plenty of common staves in this dungeon. Between lots of common staves + charge bracelet + incentive to change floors very quickly, you'll build up a large number of staff charges more quickly than you're used to. (OTOH, if you have anything that has a chance to improve based on changing floors, you can do that in any other dungeon as well.) You can also find a decent amount of cash from the various monsters (Gold Mamels, high-level Froggos, Gold Hypnotizers, etc.), and, a large number of HP-adding herbs, even moreso if you carry around extra Preservation Pots and let shovel monster throw dirt into them, but none of this is particularly useful. (If you want to accumulate cash as fast as possible, see tips on the Merchant's Hideout location page.)

You must bring in very strong equipment to have a chance to beat this dungeon, as the monsters seem to start at a high level and are very powerful in later floors. If you haven't yet created a set of ultimate gear with maximum upgrade/bonus values and plenty of useful runes, you should do so before attempting this dungeon. Runes that are particularly helpful include: Tri-Direction (so you can clear monsters in your way as fast as possible), Dispersing (same), Unmoving (so you're not yanked far away from the exit with no way to get out in time), Healing (so you can keep moving constantly without having to heal up between major battles), Anti-Hypno (as there are high-level hypnosis monsters in this dungeon), and Max Wall Dig (so you can cut your own shortcuts as needed). A Monster Detector Bracelet, Scout Bracelet, and/or Alert Bracelet are probably good ideas as well. OTOH, you may want to consider not having an Unmoving rune so you can take advantage of Pinning Staves and Swap Staves without having to switch or remove your primary shield. (If you have time and inclination to do so, you could create two identical shields except one has the Unmoving rune and the other does not, so you can switch back and forth between them at will without degrading your defense.)

As with any dungeon that lets you take items in, always take in reasonable emergency gear as well. At the very least, always have an Escape Scroll or Undo Grass, in case you run dangerously low on turns in a given floor and need to exit the dungeon before losing, and such emergency items should always be blessed. Multiple Blank Scrolls are always a good idea as well, and again, there's no good reason not to have them blessed in advance. Don't carry all your emergency items in the same pot, and do make sure all your pots are blessed as well (to help prevent their destruction).

Other useful supplies include Navigation Scrolls, Pinning Staves, and Swap Staves, all of which you can find in relative abundance within the dungeon itself, though it wouldn't hurt to bring in a small supply of blessed Navigation Scrolls, as you frequently run short on time and aren't sure which way to turn to find the exit. With a Monster Bracelet and a Transient Staff, watch your map carefully as you blast your first monster, and you can immediately find the location of the stairs. Just make sure to pay attention to where the little red dot appears on your map.

One fancy way to be really prepared, thought it would take more preparation, would be to create a new item staff which has the Transient effect then the Swap effect. Theoretically, this should teleport the target creature to the real staircase (not to a trap that looks like the stairs) and then you'd swap places with it, magically teleporting yourself to the staircase in a single turn, provided you can find any monster to shoot. (Needs confirmation.) Ideally, the staff might have Balance on it as well, so it could also help protect you from Trip Traps which might otherwise cause you to drop and break some of your pots. To keep the charges high on this magic teleport-me-to-the-stairs new item staff, also equip a new item bracelet with the "boosts # of charges" effect on it, causing every staff in your main inventory to gain a charge a healthy percentage of the time every time you change floors. (This is confirmed to work.)

Once properly prepared, the only real challenge is to make sure you're always moving very aggressively to find the stairs and exit, on every floor. If you take your time on any single floor, you may have to bail with an Escape Scroll, losing your progress, before the Winds of Kron blow you off the floor. None of the items in the dungeon are that valuable, not even in the shops, and if you have ultimate gear, you don't really need to kill the monsters for experience either. There are plenty of points traps, so do bring your points card, but going far out of your way to get them may cost you the run. This dungeon has a special "winds countdown" UI element—keep on eye on it so you know how close your are to losing due to wind.

Another thing that can help is having a good intuitive feel for the different floor layouts. Shiren floors are not generated as randomly as in some roguelikes. There seems to be a not-very-large set of pre-created dungeon floors which may be adjusted in various ways including where the hallways, rivers, void rivers, staircase, items, and monsters are placed, as well as what background tileset is used. When you know all the floor layouts that exist, you can get a good feel as to whether you'll easily be able to find the staircase in time on your own, or whether this is a good time to read a Navigation Scroll as you enter the floor. Some floors you're pretty much guaranteed to find the staircase in time, such as the floor with 4 large rooms in the corners of a square, or the floor with 4 rooms laid out in a plus pattern connected by 2 concentric rings of hallways (use the inner ring!), or the floors with just three small rooms closely packed. Other floor layouts have many small rooms spread far apart, and if you can tell that you're on one of those floors, use a Navigation Scroll right away and avoid the chance that you'll need to bail on the run. [TODO: it would be great if someone wanted to document the full set of possible floor layouts!]

It helps to know a bit more about the Maneater family of monsters and the Winds of Kron. It's not clear exactly how many turns you are given on each floor, but it seems to be 250 turns on every floor (in this dungeon). Maneaters don't appear on the earliest floors, but later, they start appearing after you've consumed ~50% of your available turns, and as you go deeper still, they start appearing after you've consumed only ~25% of your available turns. In this dungeon, the first Wind of Kron blows with 60 turns remaining, then another wind blows with 40 turns remaining, then another wind blows with 20 turns remaining. 60 turns is less than it might sound; if you're not already close to the stairs when the first wind blows, you might be in danger of not making it to the exit in time. Don't push it too close to the turn limit, because once Maneaters start appearing, they are the only type of monsters that will spawn, and Maneater roars can paralyze you, soaking up a bunch of turns. E.g. you might be 5 steps away from the staircase with 15 turns to go, then a Maneater might roar from far away and paralyze you, causing you to lose even though it never touched you.

Expert Badges

Expert badges are not available for this dungeon.

Monsters

The types of monsters that can appear in this dungeon have not yet been replicated to this wiki. Here are good external resources:

• https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1C1h9IRPQPLg9g7aE48wlyw8IudHIStawK4mR3kuggto/edit?usp=sharing
• http://seesaawiki.jp/w/shiren5/d/%b7%d9%b9%f0%a4%ce%c3%ab (Japanese wiki page for this location)

Open Questions

• If you lose your run due to the Winds of Kron, do you lose your items as well? (Is it more like dying or more like escaping?) Do you get a PSVita trophy at least?