Draft:Shiren 5 Vita:Onigiri Hollow

Key Parameters
Initial Goal Floor	20F
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	None? (JP wiki says otherwise—confirm)
New Items	No
Shops	Normal (all 3 types)
Monster Houses	Normal (JP wiki says pop-ups cannot occur—confirm)
NPCs	Shopkeepers + wandering non-allies, but not wandering allies (confirm)
Spawn Rate	Normal
Winds of Kron	Normal (slow) -- 1@1700, 4@2000

Onigiri Hollow is a bonus dungeon in Shiren 5 that is particularly long and grindy to unlock (but not particularly difficult to beat) and which has a unique dungeon collapsing mechanism. You can't 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, which seems particularly ironic given you're supposedly descending into a collapsing mountain. The goal floor is initially 20 F, but after first victory the goal floor becomes 99 F and stays there permanently.

Gaining Access

This is the most complicated dungeon to unlock, or at least the longest and grindiest. Basically, you need to complete Decchi's side quest. He's the secretive man with the blond spiky hair that sometimes appears in different places around the starting villages. If you regularly go around talking to all the NPCs between dungeon runs and doing what they hint you to do, you'll eventually unlock this dungeon and probably everything else that can be unlocked as well, but if you did that you'd end up talking a large number of NPCs over and over again even though they usually don't have anything new or unique to say. Here are the specific steps (taken from this external webpage):

• Talk to the lady in front of the Storage building in Nekomaneki Village. (Her name is just "Lady". She has blue and purple hair and walks a little bit rather than standing still.)
• Go into a dungeon and come back.
• Talk to the same lady again.
• Talk to Decchi in the NW area of Nekomaneki Village.
• Go into a dungeon and come back.
• Talk to Decchi in the SW area of Nekomaneki Village.
• Check all the cat statues in Nekomaneki Village. There are 6 in all: 2 in front of the Point Shop, 2 in front of the Dungeon Center, and 2 in front of Hotel Nekomaneki.
• Go into a dungeon and come back.
• Talk to Decchi again in the SE area of Nekomaneki Village. You'll get an Undo Herb.
• Go into a dungeon and come back.
• Talk to the lady in front of the Storage building again.
• Go into a dungeon and come back.
• Talk to Decchi in the W area of Inori Village.
• Go into a dungeon and come back.
• Talk to Decchi in the E area of Inori Village.
• Check all the pots in Inori Village. There are 2 outside, 2 in the middle house, and all the other houses except the leftmost house have 1. That should be 7 in all.
• Check the well in Inori Village. You'll get a Kabura Katana.
• Go into a dungeon and come back.
• I think at this point you also need to talk to Decchi one more time, in the E part of Inori Village, where he says goodbye and disappears for good.
• You may also need to go into another dungeon and come back one more time.

Presumably, going into the dungeon means advancing the run counter, so doing things that don't advance the run counter probably won't work to advance this unlock. Needs confirmation. In any case, after completing all the above steps, the next time you enter Inori Village, you should now see a cutscene of a little girl losing her mom's special onigiri as it rolls into a hole in the rock wall in the NE part of Inori Village. As usual, Koppa offers up Shiren's help, and Shiren agrees. Shiren then punches the rock wall where the onigiri disappeared, opening up the entrance to Onigiri Hollow. You can now play Onigiri Hollow whenever you want from this location.

Incidentally, if you talk to the lady in front of the Storage room again, she now seems to have fixed text mentioning that Decchi Man has gone away in search of his happiness.

Unique Features

• You are given a partial map of every floor.
  • It's not a full map like you get with a Navigation Scroll.
  • You aren't shown the locations of monsters, NPCs, or items in rooms you haven't visited.
  • But you are shown all the rooms, all the passageways, and the staircase.
• After you enter a room then exit it, the room collapses, with every space turning into a wall.
  • Shops and the room with the staircase do not collapse, but all other rooms do.
  • This kills all monsters and traps inside, but items remain and could be dug out again if you so desired. (Tested with item detector)
    • Monsters killed in this way don't drop any items or give EXP, similar to those killed by explosions.
  • Standing in the doorway lets you see into the room, and monster can see you and move toward you, but it doesn't count as entering the room so leaving the doorway doesn't cause the room to collapse.
• As with most bonus dungeons, item distribution differs from baseline.
  • Items that let you survive being trapped are much more common than usual. These include:
    • Rusty Pickaxe
    • Boring Staff
    • Warp Grass
    • Blink Bracelet
    • Black Hole Pot
    • You can find both Escape Scroll and Blank Scroll, but it's unclear if they are more common than usual.
  • There seems to be a wider variety of stuff available in general than baseline, at least in terms of grasses and pots, but this is harder to quantify.
• The dungeon is daytime only.
• Bracelets, Pots, staves, and grasses are unidentified, while talismans and scrolls are pre-identified.

Final Reward

When you descend past 20 F, you come to a dead end and meet the Mountain Lord. He asks if you've lost something, and gives you the choice of a Gold Onigiri, Silver Onigiri, or mom's special onigiri. The Gold Onigiri and Silver Onigiri are exceptionally rare and getting them as a reward item from this dungeon may be the only way to get them at all (aside from trading with other players). Neither will rot, be grilled, or destroyed by monsters or traps, and having them in your main inventory apparently causes you to get more Large Onigiri (Gold) or regular Onigiri (Silver) in your dungeon runs, possibly from monster drops. Mom's special onigiri is not something you can hold and is not even an item by the game's tracking system, it's just a state of completing the little girl's quest. It is unknown what happens if you claim the Gold Onigiri or Silver Onigiri from the Mountain Lord, but if you claim mom's special onigiri, he likes your honesty and gives you all 3. (So you'll need 2 inventory spaces to carry the Gold Onigiri and Silver Onigiri but you won't need an inventory space for the non-item mom's special onigiri, and as usual, the game lets you organize your inventory and discard items if you don't have enough room to hold the special rewards.) You then get a cutscene of returning mom's special onigiri to the little girl, making her very happy, and thereafter you no longer see her crying in front of the Onigiri Hollow entrance, but you can still play the dungeon with the goal floor set to 99 F.

[TODO: what happens when you beat the 99 F version? What about expert badges? What happens if you claim a different onigiri the first time you meet the Mountain Lord?]

Farming Opportunities

They are final reward items so not technically farming opportunities, but this may be the only place you can get Gold Onigiri and Silver Onigiri in single-player mode.

It is possible to find both Escape Scrolls and Blank Scrolls [TODO: confirm if Undo Grass can also be found], so it is at least possible to farm items out, but it is not particularly easy. OTOH, you can definitely find Grilling Pots here, which are impossible to find in many dungeons but which can be found very rarely in some dungeons that have a wide item distribution. This may be a good location to collect Black Hole Pots. It's definitely a great place to find Blink Bracelets, though they are of questionable utility. But generally speaking, you can probably find most of what you might be looking for in other dungeons, such as by finding elite shops and/or (ab)using Pick-A-Choice shops in Inori Cave.

Strategies

Beating the initial 20F version of this dungeon isn't terribly difficult. Needless to say, you should plan out your search route through the rooms and passageways before you leave your first room, so you can maximize exploring the floor before leaving (or just rush for the exit if you prefer). If you haven't found one of the many ways to deal with being trapped in a tunnel yet, make sure to end your search pattern at the room with the staircase. Keep in mind also that you can safely explore *every* room adjacent to the room with the staircase (and every room adjacent to a shop for that matter) so long as you always exit back towards the room with the staircase. But soon enough you should get multiple Rusty Pickaxes and Boring Staves which free up your ability to explore all rooms on floors where there is no pre-tunneled path that lets you visit every room exactly once and end at the room with the staircase. Just don't rely on the Rusty Pickaxe to be able to dig you out of trouble. Make sure you have a Boring Staff or Blink Bracelet before you try any dangerous routes. If you have the option of using either a Rusty Pickaxe or a Boring Staff and you need to dig through 5 walls or less, it's probably better to try the Rusty Pickaxe first to try to preserve Boring Staff charges. [TODO: figure out exactly what controls Rusty Pickaxe breakage. Is it a low percentage chance every time you dig, or does wear and tear accumulate in some way eventually leading to a break?]

Because the Blink Bracelet is so common, avoid testing an unknown bracelet that might be a Blink Bracelet until you're done searching the floor and the only room left is the room with the staircase. Then try on the unknown bracelet for a few turns and see if you teleport. This way, you won't accidentally teleport away from a room before you were ready, destroying items you wanted that were still on the floor.

Warp Grass can also let you do a dangerous search pattern, though you have to be careful how you use it. For example, you can explore all rooms in a chain that ends far away from the exit room, and still be certain you can get out (provided the Warp Grass is not sealed!). Just make sure to leave the room you're in by entering a hallway, forcing that room to collapse as well, so that there is only one room left standing—the exit room—and then eat the Warp Grass. (If you eat the Warp Grass before destroying the room you want to leave, you may warp into the same room.) Warping always places you inside a room, never in a passageway, so you want to make sure you can't possibly land in a room that has no route to the staircase. [TODO: confirm that you can't warp to land inside a maze either. Probably not, since a maze is shown as a hallway in the map and doesn't collapse after leaving it.]

Rusty Pickaxes can only break when used to dig a wall, not when used to attack a monster, so they can make decent fallback weapons, esp. when you're using a Mixer monster to add runes to your primary weapon.

This dungeon appears to offer a wider variety of grasses than normal, and they aren't pre-identified for you, so just be aware of that fact before you go eating all the unknown grasses you find.

[TODO: give more tips for beating the 99F version.]

Expert Badges

1. You conquered a dungeon without using any grass!
2. You conquered a dungeon without using any scrolls!
3. You conquered a dungeon without using any staves!
4. You conquered a dungeon without using any talismans!
5. You conquered a dungeon without using any pots!
6. You conquered a dungeon without collapsing even once!
7. You conquered a dungeon without doing any direct attacks!
8. You conquered a dungeon without breaking a wall!

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/%a4%aa%a4%cb%a4%ae%a4%ea%b7%ea (Japanese wiki page for this location)

Open Questions

• What happens if you eat the Gold Onigiri or Silver Onigiri? What happens if you give them to Superspy Deisaku? Can you ever get more copies again? What if you get several copies and replicate them to feed many copies to Superspy Deisaku?
• If a monster normally drops something special, but you have the Gold or Silver Onigiri in your inventory, does that negatively impact the odds that the monster will drop the special thing?
• Does a Gold or Silver Onigiri affect other item generation, such as items pre-placed on the floor or items found in shops?
• What happens if you select either a Gold or Silver Onigiri from the Mountain Lord the first time you meet him?
• What happens when you beat the 99F version?