Draft:Shiren 5 Vita:Gorger's Manor

Key Parameters
Initial Goal Floor	50
Final Goal Floor	50F
Day / Night	Day
Bring Items In	Yes
Take Items Out	Yes
# of Allies	3
# of Rescues	3
Pre-ID'd Items	Pots
New Items	No
Shops	Normal (all 3 types)
Monster Houses	Normal (pop-ups possible)
Characters	Shopkeepers only
Spawn Rate	Normal? (1 monster every 30 turns per JP wiki)
The Winds of Kron	Normal (slow)

Gorger's Manor is a bonus dungeon in Shiren 5 focusing on Special Onigiri. (Strange but true!) You can take items and up to 3 allies into the dungeon and you can Rescue up to 3 times. You can also keep the items you have on hand if you win. The dungeon is daytime only and the goal floor is 50. Unlike most bonus dungeons, the goal floor stays fixed at 50F no matter how many times you beat the dungeon.

Gaining Access

This dungeon can be accessed from the Dungeon Center in Nekomaneki Village. Access is not restricted; you can play as soon as you can reach the Dungeon Center.

Unique Features

Here are some obvious differences between this location and other locations:

• It's as if the entire dungeon is a compressed version of other bonus dungeons, with things happening twice as fast (aka at half the depth) as compared to other dungeons.
  • The difficulty ramp is much, much steeper than normal. Gorger's Manor may have the steepest difficulty ramp of any dungeon.
  • E.g. there are black Froggo's on floor 1 which drop ~1500 Gitan each.
  • E.g. each Points Trap on 48F - 50F is worth 200 points.
• Item distribution is of course different though it's hard to be very specific:
  • Each floor has roughly 2-4 items pre-placed on the ground, which is less than in the Tower of Fortune.
  • There are loads of Special Onigiri pre-placed on the ground, averaging about 1 per floor.
  • The item distribution seems narrower, or maybe that's just an illusion because there aren't many items.
  • There seems to be a higher concentration of common healing grasses than normal.
  • But you can occasionally find something here that seems oddly early, such as rare bad grasses that might be found much deeper in other dungeons.
  • More items seem to be unidentified by default than compared to baseline. (If I'm reading the Japanese wiki correctly, perhaps all pots are pre-identified—over and above the normal 12 pre-identified items—and every other item is not pre-identified.)
• The dungeon is daytime only.

Final Reward

Every time you beat the dungeon, you're given a Frangible Shld. This is basically tied with Froggo's Fury as the single worst reward item of any dungeon that gives a reward item. I'm not sure which is worse. You can take items into Gorger's Manor, so you can very reliably get its near-worthless reward item, but you can't take items into Froggo's Fury, so you might have to try hard to get its near-worthless reward item. The Frangible Shld is the ultimate / level 8 form (L8) of the Glass Buckler. It does have the highest innate power value of any shield in the game, but it can also break if used. Getting this item in its L8 form apparently doesn't even give you the L1-L7 forms of the Glass Buckler in your Item Book, which would have had some value and thus it would have made sense as a reward item, but at least you can achieve this using the Level 8 Equipment Easy Trick. (A certain wandering Character may also be able to upgrade the rank of swords and shields, and, you may be able to use Upgrade Pots / Degrade Pots to rank up / down swords and shields.)

Farming Opportunities

You can take items in so you can easily farm items out. What's good here?

It's the single best place to accumulate lots of Special Onigiri. In fact, it's so easy to get more Special Onigiri here that it's not really worth it to save Special Onigiri to try to replicate them in Fever Pots at home, should you have ever been tempted to do so.

You can also collect plenty of talismans of various types from the ground, though perhaps no more or less so than other locations. Accumulating massive numbers of talismans can help max out the bank for a PSVita trophy if that is of interest; see the Merchant's Hideout location page for details.

You might want to bring in gear appropriate to (ab)use Pick-A-Choice shops. The best farmables I've found so far, all from a single Pick-A-Choice shop on 45F in a single run: catstones, Heal Bracelet, Anti-Parry Bracelet, Scout Bracelet, Hatchet, Swap Shield, Anti-Gaze Targe, and misc. other less-rare items. I have not yet found a Fever Pot anywhere in this dungeon, despite trying hard to find one via (ab)using Pick-A-Choice shops.

This may also be the single best dungeon from which to collect points. The point values seem go up higher and faster here than in any other dungeon. It's as if the full range of difficulty available in Shiren 5 has been compressed into 50F rather than spread out across the usual 99 F. By 48 F, each Points Trap is worth a whopping 200 points, though it doesn't go up any higher for the last 2 floors. This is more points and on earlier floors than in Lost Well, Merchant's Hideout, Inori Cave, and Tower of Fortune. By contrast, Points Traps on 99 F of Lost Well are worth 220 points each—twice the depth but barely any more points. Warning Valley is the only other dungeon from which you can possibly harvest points. (You can only collect points from dungeons that let you take items in, both because you need your Points Card and because Points Traps do not appear in dungeons that don't let you take items in.) I don't recall how quickly the points go up in Warning Valley, because the step limit is so low you have virtually no extra time to explore, you have to just head towards the exit on every floor immediately, making it a bad dungeon to try to farm points (or anything else) from anyway.

I've also tried creating monster houses on "deep" floors of this dungeon, hoping to create more valuable items, but was disappointed with the results. It seemed like about half the items in the monster house were Special Onigiri, and several of the others were common grasses! OTOH, I once found a rare bad grass, the Imabikiso, in a shop on 7F, so perhaps it's worth trying to spawn more monster houses at a variety of depths to see what you can come up with.

Strategies

There are no special tricks needed to beat this dungeon. Just go in fully prepared with your ultimate gear including ways to escape the dungeon and other emergency gear.

One thing you won't have to worry about is starvation, at least not if you manage the Special Onigiri you find correctly. Where possible, keep them in pots, because Decay Traps seem a lot more common than usual in this dungeon, and of course Landmine Traps and Big Landmine Traps can also convert them into Grilled Onigiri, ruining their special abilities. If you can't store them, maybe just eat them as soon as you find them, because they are so common in this dungeon.

Trivia: there are 6 possible effects from eating a Special Onigiri:

• Gain Insomnia status: you cannot be put to sleep on the current floor.
• Gain Knowledgeable status: any item you pick up will be identified while you are on the current floor.
• Gain Ninja status: you will not wake sleeping monsters even if you approach them on the current floor.
• Gain Satiated status: your fullness will not decrease on the current floor.
• Gain Unwavering status: your strength cannot be decreased on the current floor.
• Gain 1 strength. Acts like eating a Strength Grass, aka, raises current strength by 1 and raises max strength by 1 if you were at max when you ate it.

For the first 6 Special Onigiri that you eat on a given floor, you get one of the above effects that you haven't already received on the current floor, in any order. Eating more than 6 Special Onigiri on a single floor will still give you food value and increase your stomach capacity if you were at max when you ate it, but you won't get any more special bonuses. The 5 status effects all clear when you change floors, but the strength gain is permanent (or as permanent as any strength gain is in this game). Then on the next floor, you can experience all the same effects again, including the permanent-ish strength gain. One possible way to use this to your advantage is to save up Special Onigiri until you have 6 of them, then eat them until you get the strength gain, then stop eating them until the next floor, then start saving up again until you have 6 and repeat. This would allow you to increase your strength quickly and reliably. Why is the strength gain the most important effect? Because when you can come into the dungeon equipped with ultimate gear, there isn't much that can really improve your already high chances of winning. For example, getting Knowledgeable status from a Special Onigiri in a hard dungeon that doesn't let you take items in is extremely helpful, letting you fully identify everything you own and everything you see on that floor, radically improving your outlook for that run. But here, you can just bring in an Identify Bracelet (or better yet a new item bracelet with Identify as just one of several great effects), so the Knowledgeable status doesn't help you much. So, playing around with Special Onigiri magic effects is kind of fun, but they don't really help you win given you brought great stuff in with you, so maybe the best thing to do with all these Special Onigiri is save them up to feed them to Superspy Daisaku back at home, or sell them, or just eat them to get rid of them and maybe increase your stomach capacity.

(Note: you can certainly bring Strength Grass with you into any dungeon as well, but as it's a consumable, and as using dozens of them could give each you marginal benefit, and as you really don't need any of them given you can bring in fantastic durable items, it's not practical to try to gather up lots of Strength Grass to bring them into a dungeon with you. That being said, if you made a new item Strength Grass, it might be worth it to always bring one of these in with you and eat it right away, to give you 9 strength, which is the minimum needed to dig up the most stubborn Shiny Objects buried in the ground.)

UPDATE: There may be a 7th effect from a Special Onigiri. It seems that Special Onigiri may refill your HP if you're low. It's unclear what triggers this effect, if it works in every dungeon, and if you can experience it multiple times on the same floor. More testing is needed. If you can reliably use a Special Onigiri to refill your HP, this might be very helpful in other dungeons.

Expert Badges

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/%bf%a9%a4%a4%a4%b7%a4%f3%cb%b7%a4%ce%b4%db (Japanese wiki page for this location)

Open Questions

• If you feed Superspy Daisaku dozens or hundreds of Special Onigiri, will he tell you different hints?