Draft:Shiren 5 Vita:Old Road

Key Parameters
Initial Goal Floor	38F
Final Goal Floor	99F
Day / Night	Both
Bring Items In	No
Take Items Out	Yes
# of Allies	0
# of Rescues	3
Pre-ID'd Items	Scrolls and Grasses
New Items	Yes
Shops	Normal (all 3 types)
Monster Houses	Normal, pop-ups possible
NPCs	Shopkeepers only? (confirm)
Spawn Rate	Normal
Winds of Kron	Normal (slow) -- 1@1700, 4@2000

The Old Road is a primary bonus dungeon in Shiren 5. That is, a bonus dungeon that advances plot and that is accessed via a special location rather than via the Dungeon Center, and one that was included in the original game design not added as bonus content later. It's on the harder side and has a unique real-time food consumption element. Once the unlock conditions are met, 3 of your allies disappear and can no longer be recruited until you beat the dungeon. At least prior to beating the dungeon for the first time, you can't take allies or items in, but you can request rescue up to 3 times and you can keep any items you have at the end. The dungeon experiences day and night cycles, and the goal floor is initially set to 38F. When you get to the bottom, you are joined by your 3 missing allies for a final boss fight, which is tougher than any boss battle you've yet faced. Since you can't take items into the dungeon, you'll need to muster everything you can find along the way to succeed even with the help of your allies. [CONFIRM] After first victory, the goal floor becomes 99F and stays there permanently. You no longer face the boss battle after beating it once, just like the other boss battles in the Tower of Fortune dungeon, but if you really want to replay any boss battle, you can do so by wishing for it in Inori Cave. [/CONFIRM]

Gaining Access

The entrance to the Old Road is the middle of the south edge of Inori Village. It's the same road you used to enter Inori Village and start the game way back when you first started playing. However, the dungeon is not available until these conditions are met:

• Beat the Tower of Fortune main dungeon
• Unlock the fox sisters (Koharu and Okon) as allies
  • Koharu is the fox sister that you can turn into a weapon or shield.
  • Okon is the fox sister that automatically morphs into a variety of monsters for 1 turn at a time.
  • I don't remember which you meet first.
  • You unlock the first fox sister by letting a fox out of a trap in a cutscene while ascending the Tower of Fortune.
  • I don't recall how you unlock the 2nd fox sister. According to this external page, she shows up in town eventually on her own.
  • Regardless, it's not hard and you'll likely unlock both without trying.
  • If you have one fox sister and not the other, and you've already beaten Tower of Fortune, try talking to all the NPCs in both villages, and talk to the other fox sister both in town and in the dungeon.
• Unlock Gen as an ally
  • Talk to an NPC in the 2nd house from the left in Inori Village to get catnip juice, then take it to Gen in his house in Nekomaneki Village.
• Level up Okon and Gen to at least level 10
  • Both of these allies gain experience the normal way. Have them in your party, and if anyone in your party kills a monster, you all get experience.
  • Like most allies, Okon fights during the day.
  • Gen only fights at night.
• Level up Koharu to be at least a level 2 sword/shield
  • Koharu doesn't gain experience like other allies. Instead, you must change her into a sword or shield and she gains experience like a sword or shield, though much more slowly than most swords/shields.

Once these conditions are met, the next time you return to Nekomaneki Village, you get a cutscene of the fox sisters telling you they are going to get vengeance on their father's murderer. The killer is... Gen! They ask you not to intervene. When you go to Gen's house, you see papers on the floor and you see that they have challenged Gen to a fight on the Old Road. When you go to the Old Road, there's an old man who is worried about the 3 who went out there, and he discourages you from following them. He also gives some info about how food consumption works in this dungeon.

At this point, you can access and play Old Road as often as you want. However, be advised that, once the above conditions are met and the cutscenes trigger, all 3 allies (Koharu, Okon, and Gen) are unavailable to recruit until you complete this dungeon. Also be advised that there is a final boss battle at the end which is tougher than the boss battles in Tower of Fortune, and these 3 allies do re-join you for this boss battle. So, making sure all 3 allies are high level before you trigger the conditions of this dungeon can help. See Tips below for more info.

See "Final Reward" below for how the story ends.

Unique Features

Here are the differences as compared to "baseline play" (e.g. Tower of Fortune, Underground Manor, etc.):

• The distribution of monsters and items differs from baseline, though it's hard to be very specific. Generally speaking, you can find a wider variety of equipment and pots on early floors than compared to baseline.
  • E.g. You frequently find Hatchets in the first few floors in the Old Road, but not in the Tower of Fortune.
  • E.g. Your intuitive guesses as to what a given pot is likely to be based on baseline gameplay are more likely to be wrong than usual.
  • E.g. Mixer monsters may be available earlier than usual, though that may be just an illusion due to the fact that you need them to a greater extent than compare to baseline.
• The difficulty seems to ramp up more steeply than baseline, but that may also be just an illusion due to the fact that you can take better equipment into Tower of Fortune and not into this dungeon.
• Food consumption is not based on the number of turns taken but is instead based on the amount of real time that passes.
  • If you tend to play quickly, you'll likely use less food than you normally would.
• Stomach size also decreases slowly over time. [CONFIRM] Your stomach only shrinks sometimes when you change floors. [/CONFIRM]
• Scrolls and grasses are pre-identified.

Final Reward

When you reach the boss battle, you see the fox sisters accusing Gen of murdering their father and preparing to attack. Gen swears it wasn't him. Just then, a 2nd one-eyed hunter also nicknamed "Gen" appears and brags about having killed the fox sisters' father and so many others. Rather than being a gruff-but-lovable cat, this 2nd Gen is "the demon from the north" and is accompanied by a posse of high-level monsters, and he can summon more monsters trivially. The fox sisters state their intention to attack the demon, cat Gen joins them, and you do as well (with Koppa urging you on, of course). Thus, it becomes a boss fight with you and your 3 allies against the demon who starts with 4 tough monsters around him and he can summon several more in a single turn.

Should you die in your attempt, you awake in Nekomaneki Village with Koppa urging you to hurry back, as your friends need your help. On subsequent boss battle attempts, you get a different cutscene where demon Gen and his minions have your allies surrounded and are moving in for the kill. (The fact that your allies may have died during your earlier attempt(s) doesn't seem to matter.) After the alternate cutscene, you get the same boss fight.

Upon victory, you get another long cutscene of demon Gen's near-death—he manages to escape just before you kill him—and you and your allies return home. All is now well between the fox sisters and cat Gen, and you can now once again recruit any of them for any future dungeon runs.

There is no reward item for completing this dungeon.

Farming Opportunities

There are no known farming opportunities in this dungeon. (That is, there are no valuable items for which this is the easiest or at least an easy way to get out multiple copies). But, this hasn't been thoroughly researched so could use more thought / testing.

Strategies

Needless to say, don't leave your game on. Aborting/saving and putting the game down for an extended period does not affect your stomach. I *think* sleeping the PSVita without aborting/saving also does not affect your stomach but that should be confirmed. But leaving the game on without doing anything definitely burns food.

That being said, it's probably best to just ignore how food works entirely rather than panicking and trying to play too quickly. If you play reasonably quickly, you'll actually consume less food than you would normally burn, so there's no reason to alter your gameplay worrying about hunger. (At least, this is true in my limited experience playing the initial version of the dungeon when the goal is 38F. It may not be true in the full 99F version. Also, at least some top players play slowly and deliberately, to minimize every possible risk and maximize the ROI of every situation, but such a play style might be difficult in this dungeon.)

It may be worth grinding Koharu, Okon, and Gen to high levels before triggering this dungeon. E.g., always take Okon and Gen with you, and grind with them a ton to get them to be very high level, while not giving any experience to Koharu. Then, use the Gambler's Scroll + Blessing Pot trick from the Tips and Tricks page to max out Koharu's level in a single run. Having 3 strong allies could definitely help on the final boss battle. OTOH, even 3 strong allies will in no way be sufficient to win, so maybe it doesn't matter that much.

As with the previous boss battles in the Tower of Fortune, this boss can repeatedly summon enemies. Unlike past boss battles, this one seems to be tougher, and even if the bosses are actually equivalent, you can't build up great gear and take it with you into this dungeon, you have to make do with what you can find (or create) along the way, which is significantly more challenging. Scrimp and save everything for the final battle that might help against a boss that can summon other monsters. Specific things to try to save until the boss fight include Swift Grass, Invincibility Grass, area-effect scrolls of all kinds, possibly talismans as they can affect multiple monsters at once, and of course Revival Herbs and Undo Herbs if you can keep them. One thing that definitely won't help is a Sanctuary Scroll. If you drop one in this boss battle, it says something about not working in a mystical place and doesn't create the sanctuary you so desperately need. (Working theory: the floor tiles of all boss battles are the same as or equivalent to floor tiles of shops; scrolls that normally trigger by dropping them apparently don't trigger in any of these locations, though in the boss battle there is an explicit log message about it not working, which is not the case in shops.) If you did drop a Sanctuary Scroll, it wouldn't trigger or stick to the floor so you could theoretically pick it up again, but you probably couldn't afford the turn it would take to do so, given how much danger you're in during a boss fight. (Sanctuary Scrolls aren't valuable enough to risk losing a boss fight over. Once you've read one of them, you can write one of your own on Blank Scrolls that you can buy from the Points Shop in Nekomaneki Village for 200 points each.) Regarding these items that would be good in a boss fight, if you find you're needing to use them just to survive and make it to the boss fight, you may be falling behind the power curve necessary to win the boss fight; try to find other creative ways to survive and grow while saving what you need to beat the boss.

Take full advantage of Mixers. Make sure you know all the different runes you can add and what you need to add them. [TODO: link to mixer recipe page.] You may find a Synthesis Pot, but you'll have to take pains to identify it, and, to distinguish it from a Modder's Pot. Mixer monsters on the other hand can do everything Synthesis Pots can do and a lot more, and they're easier to identify. (One data point: across 8 attempts, the original author of this wiki page never saw a fake Mixer monster on any floors between 1F and 38F. To be certain the Mixer you've found is a real Mixer, consult the Monster section of this page, to see if both Mixer family monsters and Crow Tengu family monsters can appear on your current floor. If so, be very careful to positively figure out what type of monster it really is before you try mixing your valuable stuff. One way to tell the difference is to lure the monster over water or void tiles. Mixers don't fly but Crow Tengus do.)

Normal mixing strategy and techniques apply. Thankfully, mixing is easier here than in many bonus dungeons because the Winds of Kron are not fast and because grasses are pre-identified. (For some reason, the game designers chose to use grasses for a lot of runes, especially on swords.) Save up everything you want to mix, including 2x Herb, 2x Otogiriso, 2x Heal Grass, 2x Life Grass, and anything else that can become useful runes. Isolate a single Mixer monster, preferably several steps away. Throw the items into it, making sure you still have a way to kill it safely to get the merged item out again. If one of the items is cursed or sealed, mix that item in first to get rid of the curse/seal. Then stay on the same floor to keep spawning more Mixers until you've mixed everything you want to mix. If you have more possible runes than can fit on your equipment, that's a good problem to have, and you should obviously prioritize them to mix the most valuable runes on first. One great way to deal with having too many runes is to mix them on spare pieces of equipment, preferably only 1 rune per spare piece of equipment. This way, you can convert everything to a rune when you have Mixers available, then merge them in later onto your main equipment using Synthesis Pots (or Mixers if they are still available) when there is room for the extra runes. Alternatively, the Winds of Kron are not fast in this dungeon and food consumption is not based on turns taken, so you can grind here better than in most dungeons, letting more monsters spawn and killing them to hopefully level up your equipment while you still have Mixer monsters available. See the Crafting pages under the Strategies section for more information.

If you haven't already been playing around with Secret Pots and New Items, you definitely should be now, because new items can appear in this dungeon. (Working theory is that new items are typically only available in the original, built-in bonus dungeons, and rarely or never available in the Dungeon Center bonus dungeons.) The more powerful new items you create, the better. Create multiple level 8 swords and shields and use them as base items in Secret Pots. Create great grasses, scrolls, staves, bracelets, and maybe even talismans too. Avoid creating New Items which are only marginally better than stuff you can normally find, swing for the fences. Again, see the Crafting pages under the Strategies section for more details.

Be very careful with your equipment. Make sure not to lose bonuses to slime monsters or rust traps. I have no idea what bracelet to prioritize for the final battle—Strength maybe, or possibly Blink? Or maybe a New Item bracelet that has a bunch of great effects on it including Strength?

Expert Badges

1. You conquered a dungeon without eating any food!
2. You conquered a dungeon without using any grass!
3. You conquered a dungeon without using any scrolls!
4. You conquered a dungeon without using any staves!
5. You conquered a dungeon without using any talismans!
6. You conquered a dungeon without using any pots!
7. You conquered a dungeon without collapsing even once!
8. You conquered a dungeon without using any special abilities!

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
• https://seesaawiki.jp/w/shiren5/d/%b5%ec%c6%bb (Japanese wiki page for this location)

Open Questions

• Does sleeping your PSVita without aborting/saving the game prevent food consumption? Confirm and update the Tips section above.
• Do the constraints of this dungeon change when you beat it for the first time? In particular, can you take allies in after that?
• From what I've read, there is never a reward item for beating this dungeon, but beat the 99F version and confirm. If you can take allies in for the 99F version, try taking them to the end too.