Draft:Shiren 5 Vita:Pitfall of Life

Pitfall of Life
Information
Entrance Location
Final Goal Floor	25
Total Floor Count	99
Backtracking
Bring Items In?	No
Bring Items Out?	Yes
Bring Gitan In?
Time	Day
Can Find Adventure Allies	0
Rescues	3
Characters
Pre-ID'd Items	All
New Items	No
Visibility
Shops	All 3 types.
Monster Houses	Normal, Pop-up
Monster Spawn Rate	"Normal"
The Winds of Kron	2,000
Boss

Pitfall of Life is a bonus dungeon in Shiren 5 in which you cannot gain experience or level up. It is otherwise notable for being an equipment upgrading paradise and for the valuable reward item you can win. You cannot take items/Gitan or allies in, but you can request rescue up to 3 times, and you get to keep the items you have on hand if you win. The dungeon is daytime only and the goal floor is initially 25 F. After beating the dungeon once, the goal floor becomes 99F and stays there permanently.

Gaining Access

The entrance to this bonus dungeon is hidden and you must first unlock it before you can see it and play it. You can unlock it as follows:

• Beat the main dungeon (Tower of Fortune)
• Recruit Kojirouta (the rich man's son) from his home in Inori Village (left-most house) and bring him to the top of the Miracle Alcove at the top of the Tower of Fortune
  • Unlike most allies, he tends to wander off and engage awake monsters on his own, and thus dies more easily
  • So you'll likely need to recruit him many times on many runs and level him up a bunch
  • And you'll need to actively try to protect him, sometimes by stepping between him and harm, or swapping places with him to move him away from a monster
  • In particular, don't change floors when he's chasing a monster or he may not follow you to the next floor
  • At the Miracle Alcove, he's pretty cocky when he talks to the god and rolls the Dice of Fate, and gets burned to a crisp (but like everything in this game, he's not dead permanently)
• Return to the rich man's house in Inori Village and talk to the rich man (Kojirouta's father)
  • IIRC he mentions some sort of reward at the N end of his house—basically he's trying to trick you into opening the big red box at the N end of his house
  • This springs a big Pitfall Trap, but you manage not to fall in
  • The rich man ("Elder") explains the dungeon mechanism of not being able to gain experience—like a metaphor for poverty—and dares you to dive in

After the above, you can access and play the Pitfall of Life whenever you want via the same big red box at the north end of the left-most house in Inori Village.

Unique Features

• There does not appear to be any way to gain experience or level up in this dungeon.
  • Killing monsters does not give you experience
  • Student Shields have not yet been seen in this dungeon
  • Growth Bracelets have not yet been seen in this dungeon
  • New Items are not present in this dungeon
  • You can't take allies in, so there's no possibility of using Koharu's Enlightening ability to boost experience gained
  • Gambler's Scroll does appear, but the level raising effect doesn't do anything at all
  • Cheery Grass can appear, eating one does nothing (you'll be told you can't gain any more levels)
  • Are there any other ways to gain experience?
• But, virtually everything you could possibly want to upgrade equipment does appear and in greater quantity than normal—see Tips below for more details
• Items are pre-identified, which also makes it easier to upgrade your equipment quickly and effectively
• Dungeon is daytime only

Final Reward

Every time you beat the dungeon, you get a True Knife. The True Knife is extremely rare; in fact, there are no other known ways to get one other than by beating this dungeon or trading for one with other players. The weapon itself is weak but it never misses, and this effect can be synthesized onto another weapon to make the "Accurate" rune.

Farming Opportunities

Beating this dungeon is the only known way to get a True Knife in single player mode, but it's the final reward item so doesn't really count as a farming opportunity, plus it's not very easy.

This dungeon may have more Fever Pots than any other dungeon, and they're pre-identified too! But, if you're interested in farming them for use at home, it's not always trivial to find a way to take them out of the dungeon without actually winning the run, plus, saving the Fever Pot rather than using it will make it harder to win the run. Pick-A-Choice shops in Inori Cave are an easier, more reliable way to get Fever Pots. However, if you do Adventure While Awaiting Rescue in this dungeon you can easily get plenty of these.

There are tons of crafting materials in this dungeon, but none of them are particularly rare or valuable, and again it's non-trivial to farm things out of this dungeon.

Strategies

Needless to say, because you don't get experience for killing monsters, don't kill monsters unless you really need the experience for your equipment or unless you're reasonably certain to get an item from them, you'll need to upgrade your equipment fast.

Compared to other bonus dungeons in this game, which are normally hard or abnormally brutally hard, this dungeon feels downright generous. Everything you might possibly want to help you upgrade your equipment appears here much more frequently than normal. This dungeon is an equipment upgrading paradise. Specifically:

• You can find good base equipment on early floors, including Red Blade and Red Shield
• Fate Scrolls and Earth Scrolls are extremely common
• Blessing Scrolls, Exorcism Scrolls, Plating Scrolls, Monster Scrolls, Blank Scrolls, and Extraction Scrolls are not uncommon as well
• Synthesis Pots are fairly common
• Both Mixer monsters and the items that can be used in Mixer recipes can also be found here, though neither seemed more common than they usually are
• Blessing Pots, Fever Pots, and even Modder's Pots are also not uncommon as well
• You can even find the occasional Gambler's Scroll, Bunch Bracelet and Upgrade Seed, all of which can help you upgrade your equipment
• There don't appear to be New Items, which means you can't start with super buff items, but it also means the random items you do find are not diluted with New Items
• And everything is pre-identified for you!

If you spend time crafting equipment in the Nekomaneki Village storehouse, you're probably very familiar with how to use all of the above stuff to improve your equipment, but you might be surprised to find everything you need to leverage these same techniques while on a single dungeon run. See the Crafting pages in the Strategies section for more info.

Given that you can find the above set of items pretty easily, don't rush to use your Fate Scrolls and Earth Scrolls on your equipment. If you're not having trouble surviving at your current depth and not tight on inventory space, save them up for a bit, as you can likely find ways to amplify their effectiveness. Examples:

• Remember, reading a blessed scroll consumes the blessing not the scroll (except for a blessed Extraction Scroll). So rather than just reading your Fate and Earth Scrolls right away, wait until you can bless them first.
• If you find a Blessing Scroll, you could use it right away to bless either a Fate Scroll or Earth Scroll, whichever you feel you need most, then read the Fate or Earth Scroll once to consume the blessing but leave the original intact.
• Or you could wait until you find a Blessing Pot and fill it with Fate and Earth scrolls, then fill any remaining space with Blessing Scrolls as well.
  • And of course, rather than simply breaking the Blessing Pot to get the contents out, you can magnify the impact of the Blessing Pot even further with an Extraction Scroll or a Blank Scroll upon which you can write your own Extraction Scroll.
  • A Blank Scroll can become a Pot God Scroll to increase the size of your Blessing Pot if it's less than 5 spots and thus increase the value of any Extraction Scrolls.
  • That being said, Blank Scrolls are incredibly valuable so that may not be the best way to use them (maybe create a monster house instead to get more items).
• Monster Scrolls can appear occasionally in this dungeon, you can bless them to get even more loot.
• Save up 3 of a kind Fate and Earth Scrolls to use them in a Fever Pot and double them that way.
• If you don't have any Blessing or Exorcism Scrolls, consider saving a Fate Scroll and Earth Scroll on the side to help test your equipment. More on this below.

That being said, it's better to prioritize blessing Undo Grass, Revival Grass, and probably Strength Grass as well, and there may be other things to consider blessing ahead of Fate and Earth Scrolls. For example, if you bless an Electric Staff, each bolt does double damage (50 rather than 25) and of course chains to all adjacent creatures. Then you can merge multiple Electric Staves in Synthesis Pots or Mixer family monsters (making sure to insert the blessed one last) to keep adding more and more charges to the staff that does double damage. Blessings on staves eventually run out as you use them, but empirically, you can usually get more than one staff's worth of blessed bolts out of a single blessing this way.

On late floors, you can keep Gitan bags from Gitan Mamels and Ultra Gazes as projectiles to take out instantly a monster that is giving you trouble. Bags of 2,000 and 5,000 Gitan can kill anything in one hit, and even more if they are blessed.

Once you get level 8 equipment, killing monsters becomes practically useless; you'll probably want to avoid them at all costs, especially at floors 81-99 where Ultra Gazes and Fear Radishes appear (Gaze Shields and Immunity Scrolls don't seem to appear in this dungeon, and these monsters can ruin your day from a long distance).

Having a strong shield here is far more important than a weapon, you don't have many hit points and monsters can take you out easily. Strength is also important as it lets you do more damage even while being level one. Some useful runes include the Day Shield, which can considerably reduce damage from monsters, and because this dungeon is daytime only you should really get one. Also, extra damage runes and the Breeze Blade rune for your weapon can greatly help you.

As for bracelets, try to switch them constantly as you change floors (for example, a Staunch Bracelet on floors where Polygon Spin monsters appear). Having a sword and shield resonance that lets you equip two armbands also helps, you can equip them when the situation calls for it, protecting you from two different status ailments at once.

Of course, you'll want to make great use of Synthesis Pots and Mixer monsters. This applies to the majority of dungeons under normal circumstances but applies here as well. When it's safe to do so, it's a good idea to test every sword and shield by putting it on once. This lets you determine if it has any modifier (cursed, sealed, or blessed) and it's upgrade value. You should also do this for bracelets, though putting them on won't immediately tell you their type nor do they have upgrade values. Knowing the modifier status and upgrade value of every sword and shield allows you to maximize synthesis. It may seem pointless to test an Ordinary Stick, but even an Ordinary Stick can have a +3 upgrade value, which is definitely worth synthesizing onto your main sword. And it may seem pointless to test a Glass Dirk, but if it's a Glass Dirk +1, it's still worth synthesizing onto your main sword when your main swords is maxed out on good runes already. And even a plain Ordinary Stick or Glass Dirk with no modifier (no curse, seal, or blessing) and no upgrade value can still be used to remove the curse or seal off another item by synthesizing the cursed/sealed item first then the item with no modifier. In any case, the point is, fully identifying all your swords and shields when you get the chance allows you get all the good runes you want, avoid all the bad runes, get all the upgrades you can hold, and never waste an upgrade by hitting your max.

Under normal circumstances in the majority of dungeons, you usually have to wait to do all this equipment testing until you find a safe way to deal with curses, such as a Strip Trap, a shop (where you can price check items), a Blessing Scroll, or an Exorcism Scroll. Or you just throw caution to the wind and risk getting stuck with a bad cursed item and possibly losing the run because of it. But in this dungeon, you have far more opportunities to deal with curses/seals than normal. Nymph Grass, ordinarily quite rare but more available in this dungeon, will also let you remove any cursed items. You can also use a Fate Scroll or Earth Scroll to remove a curse/seal from a sword or shield respectively, or a Plating Scroll to remove a curse/seal from either a sword or a shield, and these scrolls are so common in this dungeon that you can virtually test equipment any time you want to. And while it might seem like a waste to use a good scroll to remove a curse, odds are high you'll be able to find a way to synthesize the formerly-cursed item onto your main equipment soon, so it's really not much of a waste or a big risk, especially if that item makes a good rune. So, knock yourself out, test everything you want to test. See Blessings, Curses, and Seals in the Strategies section for more info.

Alternatively, there are so many ways to deal with curses/seals that you can just synthesize blindly. This risks waste—that Ordinary Stick may in fact have no upgrade value or even a negative upgrade value, or, it may put you over your upgrade limit wasting some of the upgrade value—but odds are extremely good that you'll be able to deal with any unexpected curses/seals you end up even if you blindly synthesize. So long as the last item you synthesize is not cursed or sealed, the resulting item won't be either. You may want to do this if you have an abundance of Synthesis Pots and things to synthesize and are limited on inventory space, or if you're starting to fall behind the power curve, so aren't willing or able to wait for a safe opportunity to test everything.

As usual, make sure you have room for the runes and upgrade values you're trying to synthesize onto your main equipment. In fact, you may want to hold off on mixing in lesser runes such as Lively to ensure you have plenty of room for more important runes. And given how many opportunities you will have to remove curses/seals, don't throw away equipment that has a good rune but is also cursed/sealed.

If you're tempted to throw away equipment that you don't plan to synthesize, but you're not tight on inventory space, hold on to it anyway. For one, you might find a Bunch Bracelet, which increases the value of your equipment if you have more pieces of the same family of equipment in your main inventory, and for two, Curse Girl family monsters can randomly curse items in your main inventory so it's good to give them some useless targets to hit if you're not 100% tight on inventory space, unless you have a Curseless Bracelet handy.

Even if you do wonders upgrading your equipment quickly, it's difficult to survive for long at just level 1 with just 15 HP. Remember that you can use Herb, Otogiriso, Heal Grass, and Life Grass in multiple ways. Using them to heal yourself is the worst way to use them in this dungeon unless you're truly in a bind and have no other choice. Also, note that Life Grass doesn't heal but adds max HP instead. It's better to either mix them onto your equipment (via Mixer family monsters) to make good runes that give you a lot more hit points when those items are equipped, or to eat them while full on HP to give yourself a few more hit points. Assuming you don't have a disaster and lose your primary equipment, you only need to save at most 2 of each type of grass to mix into runes and you should eat the rest while full on HP to raise your max HP. And odds are good that you'll be tight on rune space in your primary equipment, so it might be better to just use them right away to raise your max HP rather than saving them. Odds are decent you'll find more of them later anyway, when you have more rune space to mix them onto your equipment, but not if you die before you can get that far. (One data point: the original author of this wiki page ate them as soon as he found them every time, never making them into runes, and was able to beat the 99F version of the dungeon this way.)

If you have great tips for winning the expert badges on this dungeon, please update this wiki!

Expert Badges

1. You conquered a dungeon without equipping any weapons!
2. You beat a dungeon without using a shield or bracelet!
3. You conquered a dungeon without eating any food!
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 with your max HP at over 250!

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/%bf%cd%c0%b8%a4%ce%cd%ee%a4%b7%b7%ea (Japanese wiki page for this location)

Open Questions

• Do Growth Bracelets not exist in this dungeon, or do they just not give you experience here?
• Itemize all the possible ways to get experience and test them all in this dungeon.