Draft:Shiren 5 Vita:Storm Forest

Key Parameters
Initial Goal Floor	50F
Final Goal Floor	99F
Day / Night	Day
Bring Items In	No
Take Items Out	Yes
# of Allies	0
# of Rescues	0
Pre-ID'd Items	All except bracelets
New Items	No
Shops	All types? More common? Fewer items?
Monster Houses	Normal + always a great hall MH on floors ending in 4
NPCs	Shopkeepers only
Spawn Rate	Normal
Winds of Kron	Normal (slow)

I finally got my autographed copy of "My Days of Love and Sadness, volume 13" from the old wandering hermit!

It's all about this dungeon.

(Cue comic drum rimshot.)

Storm Forest is a bonus dungeon in Shiren 5 focusing on the Field Knave and seems deliberately designed to frustrate you. It's harder than most bonus dungeons and definitely more annoying. If you ever needed a truckload of Weeds, this is the dungeon for you. You cannot take items, gitan, or allies into the dungeon, nor can you request rescue, but you can keep all the Weeds (er, items) you have on hand if you win. The dungeon is daytime only and the initial goal floor is 50F. After beating the dungeon once, the goal floor becomes 99F and stays there permanently.

Gaining Access

You can access this dungeon from the Dungeon Center in Nekomaneki Village (NW desk). It is not locked; you can play it as soon as you can reach the Dungeon Center.

Unique Features

• The floors are more sparsely populated than in most other dungeons.
  • Floors 1F-3F in particular have less rooms and items than normal.
  • There are few pre-placed items on most floors. (The Japanese wiki seems to say only 1 pre-placed item per floor -- needs confirmation.)
  • Regular shops only carry 3 items rather than the usual 9 (but VIP shops carry the usual 6).
• Every floor with 4 as the last digit (4F, 14F, etc.) is a great hall monster house populated with many Field Knaves.
  • Maybe these are the "fields" where the Field Knaves come from?
  • These floors seem to never have interior standing walls/obstructions, just open floor and small pools of water.
    • The Japanese wiki seems to imply these monster houses can have interior obstructions, but I haven't yet found any like that.
• Field Knaves can also be found more frequently than normal on many floors.
• But, the dungeon seems to only use the level 1 Field Knave itself rather than it's leveled up kin.
• Item distribution is very different than baseline.
  • Certain uncommon or rare items are more common here than usual, including Onigiri Shield, Parry Shield, Hatchet, Anti-Gaze Trge., and SuperUnlucky Seed, among others.
  • Certain rare bracelets are also more common here, and they tend to suck like Explosion Bracelet, Blink Bracelet, and Trap Bracelet.
  • Opportunities to synthesize/mix are a bit more limited than usual. Mixer monsters can be found about as often and at about the same depths as normal, but Synthesis Pots are less common than baseline.
  • Gitan bags are extremely rare. Frequently you'll find a shop on, say, 15F, and realize you still have 0 gitan.
  • New Items are not available.
• Shops seem to appear more frequently than usual, or at least more frequently than usual on 1F-3F, which is particularly maddening because you'll often have no easy way to use these early shops, not even to sell or help identify anything.
• All items except bracelets are pre-identified.
• The dungeon is daytime only.

So, you'll witness a lot of items (which might have been great and/or rare) destroyed before your eyes, and, you'll die many times with confirmed great and rare things in your inventory. Enjoy!

Final Reward

The final reward item is not yet known! [TODO: discover and document this!] The Japanese wiki says you get a "Praiseworthy Sword" for beating this dungeon, but it's unclear which item that actually is, as there is no item localized with that name in the English version of the game.

Farming Opportunities

It would be absurdly difficult to try to farm items out of this dungeon. Items are much less common than normal, they are very often weedified before you can get to them, and it's non-trivial to get any goodies you find out of the dungeon too. You might be able to tag a sword or shield and hope to get it from the Sentry should you die in the dungeon, but it's also non-trivial to save up enough cash to tag your items. There are no known items for which this is the easiest location to farm them.

Strategies

Field Knaves suck rocks. Literally. They suck them up and turn them into Weeds. And anything else on the ground they can touch, they suck those too. Basically they just all around suck. And they prioritize heading towards the nearest item on the floor that is not a Weed to weedify it. Good luck getting more than a few items out of the guaranteed great hall monster house on 4F, or indeed, any items other than Weeds at all. And to rub it in your face even more, the game frequently gives you a poor shop you can't easily use use on floors 1F-3F. You will have very limited items and equipment by the time you face 4F.

It's important to maximize the value of the great hall monster houses. Frankly, these tips aren't enough but at least they'll help. Oddly, the great hall monster houses appear to be virtually identical at any depth, including the distribution of monsters and the levels of the monsters, which means you'll struggle the most with 4F because you'll be lower level and have virtually no items to draw upon, but if you can make it to 14F and beyond, you'll have a much easier time getting more items out of each subsequent great hall monster house. In any case, these tips were written explicitly for 4F but apply to all the x4F floors as well.

• Monster distribution will likely be:
  • Some Field Knaves, usually 1-5 of them. They will always be L1 Field Knaves, not their leveled up kin.
  • Many blue (L1) Mamels.
  • On 14F, the floor can have blue (L1) Zalokleft monsters.
  • On 24F, the floor can have green (L2) Zalokleft monsters.
• The best way to deal with the Mamels is probably to completely ignore them, walking around them and not letting them slow you down to save the items.
  • Yes, the Mamels in the great hall monster houses are blue and lower level than the green Pit Mamels you probably already saw on 1F-3F.
  • They tend to hit you for 1 HP at a time, so even if there are several of them around you, it may still be best to completely ignore them until the items you want are safe.
  • This is esp. true if you managed to equip any shield by this point.
• If there are any Zalokleft monsters, they are your friends and you should avoid coming into contact with them until all the Field Knaves are dead.
  • They will head to the nearest item and take it and warp away and hide in a corner, which means, they are effectively saving an item for you to collect later. Yay!
  • Yes, this does mean you're getting one less item out of them, but you'll have way too many other problems to deal with due to the Field Knaves anyway, and it would be a shame if you let them take one of your few items rather than safeguarding an item on the floor.
  • Though it does suck extra hard to finally get around to killing a Zalokleft in a remote corner only to find it saved a Weeds.
• Field Knaves seem to behave like this, from highest to lowest priority:
  • If you are in a straight line with a Field Knave and within 10 tiles, including if you're adjacent to them, they might throw a Weeds at you which might hit you for 2 damage or might drop at your feet. They choose to throw at most 25% of the time, probably less.
  • If you're adjacent to them, they'll attack you.
  • If they're standing on top of an item that is not Weeds, they'll turn it into Weeds. This takes a turn, they can't do it unless they start the turn on the item.
  • If there is any item on the ground in the same room that is not Weeds, they will head towards the nearest one.
    • They'll always move diagonally unless the nearest item is in a straight line horizontally or vertically or unless partially blocked by the terrain.
    • I have no idea how they break ties when there are multiple items that are the same distance away.
  • The remaining behavioral priorities in this list are normal monster behavior.
  • If you're in the same room, they'll head towards you.
  • Else, they'll choose an exit and head towards it.
    • After first entering a room, they'll at least move one space into the room before choosing a new exit to head towards.
    • Monsters seem to occasionally change their minds as to which exit they plan to use, though it's not clear when or why.
  • Else, they'll head in a random direction and keep moving that way until they hit a wall (I think).
• More important information about Field Knaves:
  • You can't tell which way a Field Knave will move by which way he's facing. Monsters face towards you, even if they plan to move in another direction, or at least that's true for Field Knaves.
  • Throwing Weeds at Field Knaves heals them.
  • Throwing any other type of grass at them has its normal effect.
  • I've only ever seen level 1 Field Knaves in this dungeon, even at deeper depths, so maybe the higher level forms are never spawned.
• Here are some *possible* ways to deal with the Field Knaves.
  • DON'T MOVE! As soon as you enter the great hall monster house, look around using your joystick and make sure you know where ALL the Field Knaves are and ALL the items are, and look for shiny floor tiles while you're at it. Try to figure out which items you have a decent chance of saving and that you most want to try to save.
    • Stones, arrows, food, peaches, and talismans, while always useful, are not super critical (unless you're starving).
    • None of the grasses pre-placed on the ground will be weeds, but they also don't seem to be super useful either, at least not on 4F. The best grasses I've ever found are Revival Herb (rare), Invincible Grass (fairly common), and Swift Grass (uncommon). After a few turns, it can be hard to determine if they've been turned into weeds already or not, though if you pay close attention you'll see that none of the Field Knaves move towards the already weedified items.
    • The swords and shields can be quite nice, including some that are hard to find in other dungeons. Even if you doubt they will have runes you want to try to add to your main equipment, they may have upgrades, and upgrades are extremely hard to come by in this dungeon. So, swords and shields may be the best items to try to save.
    • The pots can be quite helpful. Possibilities include Preservation, Synthesis, Identity, Exorcism, Blessing, etc..
    • The bracelets I've found haven't been super helpful. Explosion, Blink, and Trap are about as likely as Strength, Anti-Cnf., and Staunch.
    • The staves can be very useful -- more on this below.
  • If you move immediately adjacent to a Field Knave, it will stop moving towards the item it was planning to destroy and indeed will not even destroy the item it is standing on and it will attack you instead. Giving the Field Knave a free hit may be preferable to letting it destroy an item.
  • It's usually best to be lined up with a Field Knave, because he might slow down to toss a weed at you, and because you have the possibility of hitting him with a staff bolt, talisman, or other projectile. Don't count on him slowing down to throw weeds of course, but, if you're both moving towards an item and he's a few tiles ahead of you, there's at least a chance that he will stop a few times to throw Weeds at you, allowing you to move adjacent to him thus forcing him to attack you rather than continuing to race to the item. But if you plan to use a staff bolt or throw something at the Field Knave, make sure to do so before a Mamel or other monster breaks your line of sight.
  • You can manipulate Field Knaves by dropping or throwing items, giving them a new target to weedify that is closer to them than any other item. It is hard to use this tactic well but doing so is probably critical to maximizing the value of the floor and thus maximizing your chances to win the run. Keep in mind that an item thrown over open ground or water will travel 10 tiles then fall, except rocks which travel 3 tiles. Using arrows as a lure to delay or divert Field Knaves to other locations is probably the best way to use them, as a single arrow shot in the right place could divert many Field Knaves for many turns, whereas hitting a Field Knave with an arrow probably won't kill him in one shot, and even if you miss, the arrow will be weedified instantly delaying the Field Knave for at most 1 turn.
  • I have never managed to use this technique well, but it might be possible to play a positional game. E.g. position yourself at a place where items are closely grouped on the ground, or even drop one or more items yourself. This might draw the Field Knaves to your location or otherwise prevent them from destroying the more important items. If the alternative is moving towards and saving only 1 item, vs. trying a positional play to lure all the Field Knaves to you then saving lots of items after you defeat the Field Knaves, it might be worth a shot.
  • If there are items "behind you" with no Field Knaves nearby, consider leaving them for later. Instead, consider racing to the middle to save items that are in more jeopardy first. But keep an eye on where all the Field Knaves are and make sure they're not able to slip past you and destroy the stuff you were hoping to pick up later, and of course, beware of new Field Knaves spawning "behind you" as well.
  • Staves can be extremely useful if used properly.
    • If you have a Swap Staff or Pinning Staff, play very slowly and consider your options. Maybe you can save a few items in one part of the map then swap or pin all the way across the room and save some more items. You can pin to a monster or the exterior wall to jump closer to where you want to be. (I have never seen interior obstructions on these floors, just water patches, though the Japanese wiki implies that interior obstructions can appear.) If you have nothing better to try, you can "hail mary" by pinning to leap on top of water causing you to warp to a random location; between having zero chance of saving an item and using the water warp trick, the water warp trick may be worth the Pinning Staff charge.
    • If you can manage to paralyze a Field Knave as he is standing on top of an item, many Field Knaves may eventually gather round and try fecklessly to get the covered item. This can allow you to gather all the more remote items in relative safety before returning to clear the pack of Field Knaves and get the covered item.
    • Other staves offer similar opportunities (e.g. Knockback a Field Knave just before he weedifies an item, Clone a Field Knave just as he's about to weedify an item and stop him as well as other Field Knaves who are adjacent to the one you cloned, etc. etc.).
  • In real life, the shortest distance to a location is a straight line, but that's not true in grid-based, turn-based games like Chess or Shiren. E.g., if there's an item that is 10 tiles directly to your east, you can reach that item equally quickly by moving straight east, or by moving diagonally NE or SE for 5 tiles first.
    • Using this trick, it is sometimes possible to move closer to multiple items at the same time, even though the items are far apart from one another. In other words, chose a path that moves you closer to as many items as possible until you have to choose between them. In effect, you can delay choosing which item you will get next to see where the next Field Knave spawns.
    • Another way you can use this trick is to move diagonally "away" from an item while a Field Knave moves "more directly" towards the item, and you can position yourself to fire a staff bolt shot at the Field Knave before he can destroy the item. There are sometimes situations where, if you follow the same path as a Field Knave, you will lose the item it is trying to destroy, but if you move at a 90 degree angle to the Field Knave, you can hit him with a staff bolt shot before he destroys the item. [TODO: This is pretty abstract. It might help to draw a picture. OTOH, this is difficult even for casual chess players to use well, maybe it's just not that critical to mention here.]
  • Some room-wide or floor-wide scrolls can be particularly effective, if you're lucky enough to find them:
    • You can find a Collection Scroll, and it's a great way to save the contents of the entire floor. I have not yet seen or tried an Attraction Scroll or Gathering Scroll.
    • A Vacuum Slash Scroll will kill all the Field Knaves, but you'll still need to hurry to collect all the items before more Field Knaves spawn.
    • Other room-wide scrolls aren't super effective. E.g. a Slumber Scroll can only work if you need to delay a single Field Knave for a few turns until you can get adjacent to him. In other cases, you'll simply end up hasting the other Field Knaves you weren't able to reach in time.
  • If you find yourself surrounded by Field Knaves, e.g. after everything has been weedified already, you can usually retreat near or through pockets of water to engage them one at a time. You can survive swapping into the middle of a group of Field Knaves (e.g. near the last remaining item), but it helps to have both a sword and shield equipped before considering this.
• BTW, you are in a monster house, so there are traps, but they are so sparse and time is so short to save items on the floor that it's probably best to not even think about them. Even if you have a Perception Grass, it might not be worth the 1 turn it would take to eat it.
• It's worth the time to scan the entire floor (using the joystick, not walking there) to look for sparkly ground.
  • It seems like you find about one sparkly ground per every 2 great hall monster houses.
  • The best time to look is after killing all the initial Field Knaves but before going around to collect remaining items, so you can optimize your route.
  • Remember, digging up sparkly ground can reveal another monster, so make sure you're not near death when you try digging it up.
  • I believe you need at least 8 strength to dig up a "normal drop" from sparkly ground, and you need at least 9 strength to dig up a "better drop" from sparkly ground.
    • If you can't dig it up and you're below maximum strength, this is a good time to eat a Peach or Antidote Grass or use a Heal Pot charge to restore your strength and try digging it up again.
    • If you're at maximum strength and still can't dig it up, it's likely a "better drop". Try on any unknown bracelets to see if they are Strength Bracelets and try digging up the item again.
    • It's probably best to eat any Strength Grasses whenever you're at maximum strength, rather than trying to save them to find a way to bless them, as having a max strength of at least 9 should be enough to dig up any sparkly item.
• I usually go around and collect all the Weeds left at the end. They pay for themselves in terms of food value, and maybe give you slightly more food than it cost you to go pick them up. But also, as I'm doing this, I occasionally fight other monsters and get drops from them. So, it's effectively food neutral or maybe slightly food positive, and slightly item positive as well.
• If you didn't manage to get enough good stuff by the end of 4F, it might be better to just give up now and restart.

Starvation is a real problem in this dungeon. It is important to maximize the utility of Mixer monsters, but it's also important not to linger too long on any given floor hoping more Mixers will spawn. Check the chart of monsters found at each depth, as there may well be Mixers on the next floor too, and you may find Mixers faster by changing floors rather than waiting for more monsters to spawn on the current floor. Needless to say, if you can synthesize the CR Diet rune onto your shield, or use a Diet Shield directly, this is very helpful. Alternatively, maybe it's better to prioritize saving some of the food available on the floor of great hall monster houses, 4F in particular, rather than (e.g.) trying to save a shield when you already have a good shield.

Though controversial, it should be pointed out that "save scumming" as it is sometimes called might be particular useful in this dungeon. For example, one could save scum to maximize the loot gained from every great hall monster house, which would greatly enhance the viability of the run. The original author of this wiki page chooses not to do this himself, enjoying the challenge of trying to beat the dungeons as designed, but takes no position on whether this is "cheating" or good or bad for anyone else to do. (It's a game, there is no leaderboard, you're only really competing against yourself, so do what makes you happy.) FWIW, the original author of this wiki page (who is no slouch at Shiren) has attempted this dungeon 30-50 times already and never gotten further than 30F.

Expert Badges

[TODO: confirm there are no expert badges 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/%a4%a2%a4%e9%a4%b7%a4%ce%bf%b9 (Japanese wiki page for this location)

Open Questions

• What is the final reward item?
• Are there any expert badges?
• Try gleaning great tips from the Japanese wiki and merging them in here.