Draft:Shiren 5 2020:Item

Overview

• • Importance of Items
  • Main Inventory & Pots
  • Taking items into and out of dungeons / The Dungeon Barrier
  • Using, throwing, dropping, selling
  • Good and bad are reversible in most cases

Oddly, some items such as Dirt and flowers are tracked as real items in your Item Book, but they can never exist outside of Pots.

Getting Items

• • Completing Item Book / See Item Lists
  • Any I've missed?

Primarily In Dungeons

• • • Pre-Placed
    • Sparkly Ground
    • Monster Drops (some of which can be special)
    • Monster Houses
    • Monster-Generated Items (Trowlies, Mutaikons, Field Knaves, etc.)
    • Stores (3 types)
    • Wandering NPCs
    • Pots (Presto Pot, Floramorph Pot, Monster Pot, Zalokleft Pot, open-type pots)

Primarily At Home

• • • In-Dungeon Methods At Home (pots, monster houses, etc.)
    • Shops and NPCs at home
    • Lots Game
    • Crafting / New Items (see below)

Item Attributes

• • Durable vs. Consumable
  • Equipment vs. Non-equipment (and methods of use in general)
  • Projectiles / Stackables
  • Category
  • Type (Name)
  • Modifiers (blessing/curse/seal/none, charges, spaces, etc.)
  • Runes
  • Price

Identification

Item identification is a key gameplay element of many roguelikes including Shiren 5. Identification is not boolean for an individual item; depending upon the circumstances (such as where you are located), for each instance of each item, the attributes listed above may or may not be identified in the game state. For example, the game may display that a given staff is a Pinning Staff (for example), but it may not reveal if the staff is sealed or how many charges it has. And in rare circumstances such as after eating an Amnesia Grass, the game state may reveal how many charges the staff has but not its type.

Over and above what information is currently "identified" and thus being displayed, the player may be able to derive some or all of these attributes without them being identified in the current game state. The player may name and rename items for which the type is not identified, and the game remembers the chosen name when items of the same type are found again. Names are per type, not per instance. The game makes it easy for you to choose a name from the list of types you've ever identified in the past (in any run), and to tell you which names you've already used in your current run, which are helpful convenience features. The player can also choose arbitrary names if so desired.

When all aspects of an item are identified within the game state, it is displayed in the normal item color (salmon? pinkish-brown?). When any aspect is not identified, it is displayed in yellow. But, if the player has named it, it is displayed in green. And for swords and shields, if they have any runes, this also overrides the color to be blue.

When an item's (blessing/curse/seal/none) state is not identified, a little ? is overlaid on part of the icon. When it is identified and blessed, a bell is overlaid. When it is identified and cursed, a gray skull is overlaid. When it is identified and sealed, a red X is overlaid. Of course, there is no overlay on the icon if it identified but not blessed, cursed, or sealed.

Mastering the art of identifying items is key to mastering Shiren 5. See the Shiren 5 Strategies pages for Identifying Items and Blessings, Curses, and Seals for more information.

Price

Almost every item has a base buy price (the price at which you can buy an unmodified copy of the item from a vendor) and a base sell price (the price at which you can sell an unmodified copy of the item to a vendor). A small number of items (e.g. a Points Card) are "priceless" and cannot be bought or sold. For almost all items with prices, the base sell price is 35% of the base buy price; catstones are a notable exception.

The final price of an item is affected by modifiers. These have not been fully mapped out, but here's what's known:

• Blessed == +10%
• Cursed or Sealed == -20%
• Each staff charge == +5%
• Each empty pot space == +5% (confirm)
  • Working theory: filled pot spaces do not add to the pot's price, but, the content item's price is added to the pot's price.
  • In other words, you can *decrease* the price of a pot by putting a cheap item into it.
  • Which actually would make sense if it's true, given you can't remove items at will from most types of pots.
• Runes and upgrade points on swords and shields also increase the price, though no one has yet mapped out by how much.
• It is unknown if tags or experience on swords or shields affects the price.
• A stack of items is priced as you'd expect: the base item price times the quantity. (There are no bulk discounts.)
• Any decimal remainder is truncated (not rounded).

In dungeons, an item's price is usually not visible, unless it is owned by a shopkeeper. You can also ask shopkeepers to tell you how much they would pay for all the items they don't own that are on the floor of their shop. You can use this trick to (e.g.) place a single item on the ground and ask the shopkeeper for a price check, and thus get an important clue as to what that item is. The game designers seem to have deliberately made only a few price tiers per item category, and to have deliberately placed "good items" and their "evil twins" in the same price tier, to prevent players from using a price check to get too much useful information about items. See the Identifying Items page under Shiren 5 Strategies for details.

There are no concepts of haggling, item quality, or item wear in Shiren 5. Every item of the same type with the same modifiers is identical and will always buy or sell for the same price.

Crafting

Shiren 5 has the most complex crafting model of any game in the series, though not as complex as craft-heavy games like Minecraft. There are a large number of ways to improve items and you can even create up to 64 new items. Mastering this topic is key to winning both dungeons where you can take your best items in, and dungeons where you can't take items in at all but must craft on the fly. See Crafting under Shiren 5 Strategies for details.

Non-Items

Shiren 5 occasionally refers to "items" such as "the dice of fate" or "mom's special onigiri". These are not actually items per the game mechanics and they do not show up in your Item Book. Some of these are tracked as game state within your game diary, and others are just for color. See Goals for more info.

There is also a family of monsters similar to mimics in D&D that pretend to be items, revealing themselves upon various events such as trying to pick them up or trying to use them. Some of these can exist in your inventory and appear to be items for extended periods of time. These are not tracked in the Item Book but are tracked in the Monster Book.

Secret Items / Easter Eggs

There is one known item which behaves like an item in every respect but which does not appear as an entry in your Item Book and thus is not required to complete your Item Book. It's an Easter egg! No more info has been added here to avoid spoiling readers, but if you really want to find it on this wiki rather than in the game, look at the final reward items for the various Shiren 5 Locations pages.

Item Categories and the Item Book

The huge number of items in Shiren 5 are broken down into these categories, which appear in this order in your in-game Item Book. Click on a category name to see details about the category and all items in the category. Your game diary (meta game state) tracks which items you've ever identified (and for scrolls, which you've ever read), which can then be used to name items in the current and future runs. There is also a trophy for completing your Item Book; see Shiren 5 Goals for info.

Category	Icon(s)	Notes
Swords		Durable equipment that usually increases your offense, and can have magic properties as well.
Torches		Consumable equipment that takes the place of your sword, but is very helpful at night.
Shields		Durable equipment that usually increases your defense, and can have magic properties as well.
Bracelets		Durable equipment with a magic effect that is sometimes subtle and hard to figure out.
Grasses		Consumables with a wide range of special effects, and which can often be made into runes too.
Scrolls		Paper usually containing a magic spell, and which is usually consumed after reading it once.
Pots		The only container object in Shiren 5. Any non-Pot objects can be put inside, but it may alter or destroy them or have some other magic effect.
Staves		Think magic staves or wands from D&D and other roguelikes. Can have a wide variety of magic effects at great distances provided line-of-sight.
Talismans		Magical projectiles that affect all living creatures (except you) in a 3x3 grid around the creature you hit.
Onigiri		Food that doesn't normally rot but can rot or be grilled in certain situations. Some have magic effects too.
Peaches		Food that can ripens and rots normally and that can have magical effects as well.
Arrows		Common physical and/or magical projectiles. There is no such thing as a bow in Shiren; you can shoot any of these at any time.
Stones		Heavy projectiles that usually do fixed damage and can only be thrown 3 tiles rather than the usual 10.
Traps	(Multiple)	Traps are items too! Though you usually can't pick them up.
Others	(Multiple)	A grab bag of miscellaneous items, often special, that don't fit into the other main categories. (E.g. Gitan Bag, Dirt, etc..)

Player-Made Checklists

These excellent external references may have better and more complete information that has not yet been replicated to this wiki:

• https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sxAH3pZOZVdIk92PEJKpEty8FF6ZzlAJag3tsE5GAYM/edit?usp=sharing
• https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mGBY1txjWch9mckciV7WqbcO6a5VF1P3exPNOsaK580/edit?usp=sharing

The above two links have been replicated to all sub-pages for item categories because (at least for now) they have lots of information that hasn't yet been fully replicated to this wiki. Here are two additional, condensed item checklists, suitable for either printing and carrying with your PSVita, or viewing on a mobile phone especially in low light:

• https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/106641-shiren-the-wanderer-the-tower-of-fortune-and-the-dice-of/77134763