Draft:Shiren 5 2020:Master's Footprint

Key Parameters
Initial Goal Floor	50F
Final Goal Floor	99F
Day / Night	Day
Bring Items In	No
Take Items Out	Yes
# of Allies	0
# of Rescues	3
Pre-ID'd Items	No
New Items	No
Shops	Normal (all 3 types)
Monster Houses	Normal (including pop-ups)
NPCs	Shopkeepers only
Spawn Rate	Normal
Winds of Kron	Normal (slow)

Master's Footprint is a difficult bonus dungeon in Shiren 5, with a wide variety of items but no healing items. You cannot take items, gitan, or allies into the dungeon, but you can request rescue up to 3 times, and you do keep any items you have on hand if you win. The dungeon is daytime only and the initial goal floor is 50F. After first victory, the goal floor becomes 99F permanently.

Gaining Access

This bonus dungeon is available in the Dungeon Center of Nekomaneki Village. Access is not restricted; you can play as soon as you can reach the Dungeon Center.

Unique Features

Compared to the Tower of Fortune, here are the differences:

• Monster difficulty ramps up more quickly
  • The difficulty ramp is steeper than Tower of Fortune, but not as steep as (e.g.) Lost Well, where you are expected to bring strong equipment in with you.
  • There seems to be a standard difficulty ramp for dungeons that don't allow you to take items in, and if so, this dungeon is about the same. (But this standard ramp is painfully difficult unless you're an expert Shiren player already!)
• Item distribution is radically different
  • It's difficult to be precise, but Master's Footprint seems to be closer to uniform probability of any given item to appear, at any given depth of the dungeon, than other locations.
    • It's not 100% uniform probability for every item at every depth. E.g., Synthesis Pot is more common than other pots, while Imabikiso is less common than other grasses.
    • Which means you can get some rare / weird items early in your run.
    • If you leverage your intuition on what unidentified items might be at given depths, and if your intuition is based on (e.g.) the Tower of Fortune, Inori Cave, or Lost Well, your intuition will be off.
    • OTOH, the item distribution may be similar to other difficult dungeons such as Primordial Chasm or possibly Rousing Paradise.
  • It *may* be possible for virtually any item to appear in this dungeon.
    • E.g., this is one of the few dungeons where you can find a Floramorph Pot.
  • There are 5 notable exceptions that definitely do not appear: Herb, Otogiriso, Heal Grass, Heal Bracelet, and Heal Pot.
    • Note that Life Grass does appear, as this item cannot actually heal you.
    • There may be other exceptions as well. I have yet to find a Water Pot, Heavenly Pot, Onigiri Shield, or Parry Shield in this dungeon. Heavenly Pot heals so probably can't appear.
  • New items are not available in this dungeon.
• No items are pre-identified except for the standard set
  • See the Bonus Dungeons section of the Shiren 5 Locations page for details
• There are no NPCs except for shopkeepers.
• The dungeon is daytime only.

Note that, if your baseline is a classic, painfully difficult, daytime-only, full/complete Shiren dungeon, with a wide variety of unidentified items, then Master's Footprint is virtually identical to this baseline with the only real difference being that you can't find healing items, making it more difficult than said baseline.

Final Reward

When you beat the 50F version of Master's Footprint, you get a Nirvana Board shield. This is the only known way so far to obtain such a shield outside of multiplayer trades. The Nirvana Board resets your stomach to size 1 but causes you to never lose fullness, so it's of questionable value. It can also be turned into a rune. It is assumed but not yet known if completing the harder 99F version of the dungeon will give you another Nirvana Board.

Farming Opportunities

Haha, very funny. Try farming somewhere else.

Strategies

A full discussion of how to beat this dungeon is out of scope for this page, as it really needs a dedicated page for "strategy on the hardest daytime dungeons where you can't take items in", and there are many dungeons like this. [TODO: link to such a page and begin writing it. Move content from this page to that page if appropriate.] But here are a few tips that may help.

If you don't get a decent sword and shield by 8F, consider abandoning the run.

Consult the Monsters by Dungeon tables (external link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1C1h9IRPQPLg9g7aE48wlyw8IudHIStawK4mR3kuggto/edit?usp=sharing) so you can plan for what monsters you will be facing soon. In particular, prep for and make great use of Mixer monsters, and refer to the Runes table (external link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mGBY1txjWch9mckciV7WqbcO6a5VF1P3exPNOsaK580/edit?usp=sharing) so you can figure out which items you should be saving to synthesize onto your main equipment. This doesn't mean synthesize anything it is possible to synthesize. In particular, while it seems like synthesizing Life Grass would be critical, there is a chance this actually makes things harder for you, as it *may* increase the time it takes for you to heal up between battles. (This needs more testing.) Also, keep in mind that most equipment has a rune ceiling and some runes are more valuable than others. Some particularly important runes for your sword if you can get them are Tri-Direction, Critical, Redeeming, Rustproof, Flame Shot, and runes that inflict status ailments on monsters. Some particularly important runes for your shield if you can get them are CR Diet, Anti-Fire, Retribution, Agile, Anti-Blast (1), Anti-Blast (2), Rustproof, Anti-Hypno, and Diurnal. Refining might be a game-winning rune if you can ever get it, but if Upgrade Pots exist in this dungeon, they don't appear very commonly. Level 1 Mixers appear on floors 8-10, while level 2 Mixers appear on floors 31-33. Mixers appear on deeper floors as well, but no others will be useful to beating the 50F version of the dungeon, so make sure you take advantage of those 6 floors. Beware that mimic monsters (e.g. N'twyn) can appear as yellow items (partially identified) or green items (named) and these can throw off your mixer recipes.

Another great opportunity that should not be missed is the use of a Dodger Pot on floors with arrow-shooting carts. Rack up 300 arrows or even more before moving on from these opportunities. In addition, if you ever find an arrow trap, you can throw items (e.g. rocks) onto it to trigger the trap and generate arrows that way.

You can't heal as easily as you're used to in other dungeons, so it becomes important to avoid taking damage whenever possible. If you can't kill the monster you're about to face in a single swing, fire an arrow or two to soften them up before you finish them off with your sword, to minimize the chance they can reduce your HP at all. It may even be a good idea to fire arrows down hallways before you head down them, and fire another arrow every couple of steps, though beware causing damage to a shopkeeper is a really bad idea.

If your main sword or shield isn't very good, consider saving up any Upgrade Grass you find until you find a strong sword/shield, then consider saving it up even more until you find a monster house. I once found a strong weapon late when my main weapon was already level 5, but with a single blessed Upgrade Grass, I was able to get the new weapon up to a high enough level to accept all the runes I had already accumulated, in 1 floor.

Try hard to find a Monster Bracelet, Scout Bracelet, and maybe even save that Monsterphobic Bracelet. Anything that can help you know what danger you're walking into it super helpful.

If you do have the Tri-Direction rune, retreat back to a bend in the hallway to get an extra strike on your foe around a corner where he can't fight back. In fact, you can beat a whole monster house of monsters that take 2 hits to kill with just a Tri-Direction rune and a bend in a hallway. If you don't have Tri-Direction, use the bend in the hallway to shoot an arrow of other projectile.

Aside from just walking around / passing time, you can heal yourself by creating your own Grilled Onigiri and eating them. You can put any type of Onigiri into a Grilling Pot to grill them that way, but it's hard to find a Grilling Pot. Instead, if you keep any type of Onigiri in your main inventory, they may become grilled in a few ways, such as by taking fire damage from a monster or triggering an explosion trap. Huge Onigiri and Special Onigiri may still be too useful to allow to be grilled so consider saving them in pots or consuming them before they get grilled accidentally, but this is a particularly great thing to do with Rotten Onigiri in every dungeon, and with regular Onigiri and Large Onigiri also in this dungeon.

If you make it this deep, F0-UZZ (FO-UZZ?) appear on 72F and 73F, and you can hunt them for Revival Grass (needs confirmation).

Expert Badges

[CONFIRM] 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/%b8%bc%bf%cd%a4%ce%c2%ad%c0%d7 (Japanese wiki page for this location)