Draft:Shiren 5 Vita:Bizarre Tower

Key Parameters
Initial Goal Floor	45F
Final Goal Floor	45F
Day / Night	Both
Bring Items In	No
Take Items Out	Yes
# of Allies	0
# of Rescues	0
Pre-ID'd Items	All except Bracelets, Scrolls, and Staves
New Items	No
Shops	All 3 types can occur; they are forced on some floors
Monster Houses	All types can occur, and pop-ups are possible; they are forced on some floors
Characters	Shopkeepers + emergency Characters only (confirm)
Spawn Rate	Normal (1 monster every 30 turns)
Winds of Kron	Normal (slow) -- 1@1700, 4@2000

Bizarre Tower (or "the Bizarre Tower") is a bonus dungeon in Shiren 5 where the player chooses the order in which they face 15 mini-dungeons, each of which has known, unique attributes. You can't take allies or items into the dungeon, nor can you request rescue, but you get to keep the items you have on hand if you win. The dungeon has both day and night elements in it, but time does not cycle in the normal way. The goal floor is 45 F. Unlike most bonus dungeons, the goal floor does not change after first victory, so this dungeon does not get harder after you beat it for the first time.

Per this external webpage, this bonus dungeon is well-liked by the player community.

Gaining Access

You can't access the Bizarre Tower until you've unlocked it. The details of Tao's storyline / sidequest are not perfectly documented, but basically you must complete it before you can get access to this dungeon. At a high level, you must beat the Tower of Fortune first, then reach the top of the Tower of Fortune again with Tao alive in your party. You must also see the event related to Tao at Sparrow's Inn. It's not known if this must occur in a separate run or if it can occur in the same run where you eventually take Tao to the top of the Tower of Fortune, but in any case, you need to do both. Tao's side quest can be a bit confusing if you experience things in the wrong order, which can happen. At one point, there may be no obvious way to find Tao and thus no obvious way to advance the quest. But if you play and re-play the Tower of Fortune, trying to take Tao with you whenever you can, and talking with Characters at rest areas along the way, especially at Sparrow's Inn, you'll eventually complete it. If you can't find Tao, make sure you've checked both the Beginner House in Inori Village (building 4) and the Tower of Fortune Entrance, as she appears in both places at different points in your game state progression.

There's apparently another gotcha that can interfere with unlocking this dungeon. There are at least two side quests that can trigger events at Sparrow's Inn—the lost sparrow side quest and Tao's side quest—and if you happen to have met the conditions for both of these events to trigger, the lost sparrow event will trigger and will block the event related to Tao. If this happens, it's not a big deal, because the lost sparrow quest will now be completed and never needs to be or can be done again, so just return to Sparrow's Inn under the same conditions to trigger the event related to Tao's side quest. If your primary objective is to trigger the event related to Tao, you can avoid escorting the lost sparrow on that run and look for him on a future run, but be aware that completing the lost sparrow quest is very helpful. Once you've rescued the lost sparrow, any time after that (or at least on any future run), if you're ever critically wounded, the formerly-lost sparrow will come to you and offer to heal you to max HP (and IIRC he also restores strength to max and removes any status ailments) for 500 Gitan. The formerly-lost sparrow can't reach you in every dungeon, but he can reach you in many dungeons (including the Bizarre Tower), and he'll only offer once per run the first time your HP goes red (confirm). If you don't have enough money, he'll apologize profusely that he's not allowed by the Sparrow code to help you for free and then leave you to die. :^) In any case, the point is, if you meet the conditions for both of these events to occur at Sparrow's Inn on your current run, only the lost-sparrow-completion event will occur on that particular run.

Once you've completed Tao's side quest, return to the Tower of Fortune Entrance, and there will now be a raccoon (tanuki?) on the right side near the Tower of the Future's entrance. Speak with this raccoon to access and play the Bizarre Tower.

Unique Features

This dungeon is definitely unique. The game attempts to teach or remind you how this dungeon works three times:

1. The raccoon / tanuki explains how the Bizarre Tower works, via a series of text boxes only, the first time you speak to him, then never again.
2. He explains basically the same material again, but this time with more detail and visual aids, the first time you play the dungeon. (Confirm: can you see this explanation every time you try to play this dungeon, or is it also only available the first time you play?)
3. There is also the usual reminder one-line description of the dungeon on the "enter dungeon?" confirmation screen

If you missed or forgot #1 or #2 above, fear not, you can read all about how this unusual dungeon works here. But be advised that #3 is buggy or at least confusing/misleading. The text displayed is, "Note: Reach the Floor 15 stairs, which lead to a special floor". There does not appear to be anything special about the exit stairs on 15 F, or anything special about floor 15 F at all. What it's probably trying to say is that you need to beat the 15th mini-dungeon to win and thus earn a special reward. (Is there something special about 15 F after all, or any special floor of any kind that isn't already documented here? As always, if anyone reading this page knows any more secrets about anything in this game, please update the wiki!)

You begin this dungeon in a "launch room" (rest area) with 15 staircases arranged in a grid of 3 rows of 5 staircases each, which are in effect 15 mini-dungeons with different attributes. The attributes of each mini-dungeon are fixed, but you choose the order in which you play them. Each time you beat a mini-dungeon, you return to the launch room, that mini-dungeon's staircase is now gone, and you must choose to play any other mini-dungeon that you haven't already beaten on this run. If you beat all 15 mini-dungeons, you don't return to the launch room but are instead returned to the Tower of Fortune Entrance for a cutscene with the raccoon/tanuki you spoke with to launch this dungeon, then you're returned to Nekomaneki Village with a victory as normal.

In reading order, the mini-dungeons are:

1. 1 floor where the only pre-placed items are swords and shields
2. 3 floors where the only pre-placed items are swords and shields
3. 3 floors where the only pre-placed items are grasses
4. 1 floor where the only pre-placed items are scrolls
5. 3 floors where the only pre-placed items are scrolls
6. 1 floor where the only pre-placed items are pots
7. 3 floors where the only pre-placed items are pots
8. 4 floors where the only pre-placed items are Gitan bags
9. 2 floors where HP regeneration is disabled and there are lots of traps
10. 4 floors where HP regeneration is disabled and there are lots of traps
11. 3 floors at night (all the other mini-dungeons are daytime-only)
12. 2 floors with some kind of store on every floor
13. 5 floors with lots of Mixer family monsters
14. 3 floors with some kind of monster house on every floor
15. 7 floors with some kind of monster house on every floor

The difficulty curve/ramp for this dungeon appears to be the same as baseline for other bonus dungeons. E.g. it seems to ramp up at the same pace as (say) Template:Shiren5. Note that the mini-dungeon attributes are independent of the difficulty ramp. E.g., mini-dungeon #15 will have very different monsters and items (and maybe traps too) if you choose it first as opposed to choosing it last.

This dungeon seems more generous with pre-placed items than the average bonus dungeon. Each floor seems to have roughly 5-8 pre-placed items. Pre-placed items seem to ramp up at roughly the same rate as they do in other dungeons as well, modulo the fact that they may be constrained by mini-dungeon constraints. New items do not appear in this dungeon.

Both day and night appear in this dungeon, but they don't cycle like they normally do. Instead, 14 of the mini-dungeons are daytime-only, and 1 is nighttime-only. There doesn't appear to be any way to force day and night to switch (e.g. I've never found a Night-Day Scroll, Blank Scroll, or Time Switch Trap). However, you can find torches, peaches, and probably other items that are relevant to night time play in the daytime-only mini-dungeons. (Usually, dungeons that are daytime-only have no items that are only used at night or only used to control the flow of day and night.)

Unlike most bonus dungeons, this dungeon only has one level of difficulty, and after beating it for the first time, the difficulty / goal floor does not increase. You can also win expert badges on your first run! (This happened to the original author of this wiki page, so it's definitely possible.)

I have never yet seen a store or monster house outside of the mini-dungeons that explicitly compel them, though it is possible to create a monster house with a Monster House Scroll. More testing would be needed to determine if monster houses and shops can be found naturally outside of mini-dungeons that compel them. However, you can find Mixer family monsters at their "normal" floors even if you're not in mini-dungeon #13. (#13 seems to override a portion of normal monster randomness with Mixer family monsters, so theoretically, if #13 overlapped with floors in which Mixer family monsters normally appeared, you'd see an exceptionally high rate of them.)

In mini-dungeon #12, you can definitely get regular shops or VIP/Elite shops. Pick-A-Choice shops have not yet been sited, but the mini-dungeon description and the Japanese wiki imply they can appear.

Wandering Characters do not appear in this dungeon, but both emergency Characters can and do appear. If you ever fall critically low on HP, the formerly-lost sparrow will warp to your side and offer to rescue you in this dungeon, provided you've already completed his side quest once. Also, if you saved the young woman more recently than she saved you, she will appear to revive you once in this dungeon. (But unlike most things in Shiren 5, the side quest involving the young woman and her younger brother can be completed multiple times. It's like a toggle switch. First you rescue her, then she rescues you, then you must rescue her again, etc.. The only problem is, wandering Characters do not appear in this dungeon, so you can never find her to rescue her and thus reset your own future rescue in this dungeon. If this happens, you can play some other dungeon—Template:Shiren5 maybe? -- and complete their side quest, then the toggle is reset and you have a free revive waiting for you, which can be redeemed in this dungeon.)

Final Reward

Every time you beat this dungeon, you receive a Sturdy Hammer. This appears to be the only way to acquire this item in the game aside from trading with other players. The Sturdy Hammer destroys traps and items on the ground without ever breaking, and can be synthesized onto another sword as the "Trap Killing" rune to do the same thing.

Farming Opportunities

This is a decent place to farm Fever Pots. Fever Pots appear in this mini dungeon about as frequently as they do in Template:Shiren5, but this dungeon is a lot easier to beat, and it doesn't get harder after you beat it once. If you want to try this, you may have to play around with the right mini-dungeon pathing to maximize the chances of a Fever Pot appearing. (E.g., taking the pots, monster houses, and stores mini-dungeons later in the run may be helpful.) You may be able to find a way to escape, either before or after finding your prize, but even if you don't, it's not particularly difficult to make it through all 45 floors / 15 mini-dungeons. This being said, you'll get at most 1, maybe 2 Fever Pots from a full run of this dungeon, so you can probably collect more Fever Pots faster from Pick-A-Choice shops in Template:Shiren5.

Applying the above technique more broadly, if there's any item you want, you might have a decent chance of farming it out here, as you can control what types of items are generated at what depths of the dungeon. Again, it may not be easy to escape quickly, but beating the full 45 floors isn't extremely difficult. No one has yet documented what rare/valuable items can appear in this dungeon.

Though technically not a farming opportunity because it's the final reward for this dungeon, this may be the only place to get Sturdy Hammers. Even if it's not the only place, it's probably the best place and it's certainly not hard to collect them here. Sturdy Hammers are of questionable utility though. The Trap Killing rune (which can be made from a Sturdy Hammer) is definitely superior to the Trap Busting rune (which comes from the Old Mallet), as the latter can cause your weapon to break. It might be nice to have the ability to destroy traps and other items at will. But on balance, these runes are probably more dangerous than helpful, as you'd have to be very careful to make sure you didn't accidentally destroy items by mistake.

Strategies

The ability to choose when to consume different dungeon attributes adds a new and interesting dimension of strategy to Shiren. It's doubtful there is a single best or ideal order in which you should face the challenges, and even if someone laid out a strong case for a specific order, odds are you might want or need to adapt the order based on the specific circumstances of your given run. For example, if you've equipped something cursed and lack the means to deal with it, you could re-route through the scrolls or grasses mini-dungeons earlier than you intended, because there are multiple scrolls that can remove or destroy a cursed item, and Nymph Grass is relatively common in this bonus dungeon. (This happened to the original author of this wiki page, and re-routing worked to clear the curse and save the run.)

That being said, here are some considerations to help decide an order:

• All else being equal, it's better to take the sword/shield challenges before the pot and Mixer family challenges, so you have lots of things to synthesize/mix.
  • In my limited experience, taking both sword/shield challenges first, and collecting 100% of pre-placed items and trying them on right away, I have almost never found a sword or shield that was cursed or sealed on the first 4 floors of this bonus dungeon. The rate of cursed swords/shields on the first 4 floors, when taking both sword/shield mini-dungeons first, is ~1%. I assume the rate of cursing goes up the deeper you go into the dungeon though. In any case, testing all the swords/shields right away to see which ones you might want to synthesize/mix and which ones you might want to dispose of in other ways seems to be a workable approach. The only time I ever got hit with a cursed sword/shield, I also had a Nymph Grass that was dropped by a grass monster.
• All else being equal, it's better to take the Gitan challenge before the store challenge, so you have more purchasing power.
• All else being equal, it's better to take the store challenge after you've accumulated a lot of expensive items you don't need / when you're full on inventory, so you can sell otherwise less-useful items that you might just end up throwing away and thus have more purchasing power.
• All else being equal, it's better to take a risk earlier when you have less to lose. E.g. maybe take the no-HP-regen challenges earlier in your run.
• All else being equal, it's better to have at least one emergency item such as a Warp Grass or Hide Pot before choosing to face monster houses.
  • Keep in mind that you may start a floor in the middle of a monster house.
• All else being equal, it's better to experience monster houses on floors that either can't have or are less likely to have monsters that are particularly dangerous in monster houses. See the Monsters section of this page if you want to plan for this.
  • E.g. Fearrabbits are particularly dangerous in monster houses because they can yank you into the middle of the monster house, surrounded by a dozen other monsters.
  • E.g. the monsters that can throw status ailment-inducing grasses (Mutaikon?) can be particularly dangerous in monster houses, as several of them can afflict you with status ailments from a distance and without needing to be in a straight line.
  • E.g. Bored Kappas and Field Knaves are particularly dangerous in monster houses because they can destroy all their value, and the Bored Kappa will even damage you from a distance and even when not lined up with the very items you're trying to acquire.
• Also per the Monsters section, Mixer monsters appear naturally on floors 8F, 9F, 10F, 31F, 32F, and 33F. All else being equal, it's better not to choose the night mini-dungeon or the Mixer family monster mini-dungeon to overlap with these floors, so you can maximize your opportunities to synthesize/mix items.
• If there are floors you are tempted to skip due to the types of monsters that can appear there, it may be better to plan to do a no-HP-regeneration mini-dungeon over those floors and simply exit those floors as quickly and as safely as possible.
• All else being equal, it's better to have some sort of healing items before taking on a no-HP-regeneration mini-dungeon, even if you plan to skip past them as quickly and safely as possible.
  • You can get healing grasses both from the grasses mini-dungeon as well as from grass monsters. Maybe hold off on using that Otigiriso to add 2 max HP if you still have a no-HP-regeneration mini-dungeon in your future.
  • You can also get Heal Pots from the pot mini-dungeons.
• This is dangerous, but theoretically, you could use a Foly monster (when it's green!) to heal you on floors where you can't otherwise regenerate HP.
• If you've fully maxed out your night abilities, and if you've configured them to include Stairlight and many copies of strong attack abilities such as Kaboom Bullet, it is trivial to skip past night floors very quickly and safely, regardless of how deep/late you experience them. This is especially true if you've saved a single torch, which is plenty to last all the way through 3 night floors. Because of this, and because of the difficulty of safely harvesting items and experience out of night floors, it may be best to just do the night floors last and skip past them.

Here's an external forum post that details the pros and cons of one specific route through the mini-dungeons.

Food isn't particularly tight in this dungeon, especially if you harvest monster houses, so it's probably best to rest on the stairs before completing any floor or at least before completing your current mini-dungeon (except for the no-HP-regeneration ones), so you keep your options open to more safely consume a dangerous mini-dungeon next. (Corollary: if you barely made it out alive from a mini-dungeon, hopefully you still have an easier dungeon with healing opportunities available.)

As tempting as it may be try to harvest valuable items and/or experience from the no-HP-regeneration mini-dungeons, the ROI of trying to do so is probably negative and trying could well get you killed. Keep in mind that these mini-dungeons also have much higher than normal trap density, which can be easy to forget when you're focused on the no-HP-regen aspect. The best strategy for these mini-dungeons by far is to leave them as quickly and safely as possible. Consider using Navigation Scrolls, Trap Deletion Scrolls, Transient Staff + Monster Detector if you have these items (you can find the stairs quickly by zapping a monster with Transient and watching your mini-map closely to see where he lands), pinning past long empty stretches of room, swapping places with monsters across big stretches, Trap Deletion Staff to clear your path, etc..

Tangent: This dungeon offers a unique glimpse into the mechanics of Shiren and presumably roguelikes in general. It's clear that there are multiple input parameters that go into floor/dungeon generation, only one of which is the depth. For the curious, some roguelikes have open source code.

Tangent: The designers seem to have passed up a golden opportunity to make the mini-dungeon constraints randomly generated. E.g. you could still have 15 mini-dungeons to choose from for a total of 45 floors, but the constraints of each mini-dungeon could have been randomly generated for each run. Would this have been more fun or less fun than the way it is now? Unclear, but it would have been nice to have been able to try it both ways! Maybe the designers decided it was too dangerous or frustrating for gameplay balance to have random constraints.

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 synthesizing!

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/%b0%db%bc%a1%b8%b5%a4%ce%c5%e3 (Japanese wiki page for this location)