Mystery Dungeon Franchise Wiki:Projects (Shiren 5 Vita Hunter Pond)

Project: Shiren 5 Vita

Proposal: Cleanup

Proposee: Jubilee

Date: February 14, 2025

Priority: Low

is a bonus dungeon available in Shiren 5. It's notable for having no items pre-placed on the ground but instead supplying monster drops much more frequently, for having only "water walls" making it more difficult to extract the contents of pots, and for the fact that certain normally rare items can be found somewhat commonly on early floors. You can't bring items, Gitan, or allies into the dungeon, nor can you request rescues, but you can take items out of the dungeon if you win or escape. The dungeon is daytime only and the goal floor is initially set to 29F until first victory, after which the goal floor becomes 50F (not 99F) and stays there permanently.

Gaining Access

Hunter Pond is available in the Dungeon Center in Nekomaneki Village. Access is not locked; you can play it as soon as you can reach the Dungeon Center.

Unique Features

• There are no items pre-placed on the ground.
  • Which is particularly jarring when you find a monster house with just monsters and traps.
  • But at least monsters that mess with items on the ground are less of a problem.
• Monsters drop items much more frequently than usual.
  • If a monster tends to drop a certain type of item normally, it still drops that type of item at least as often as it normally does and perhaps a lot more often.
  • If a monster tends to not drop items normally, it drops a random-ish item reasonably often, presumably drawn from the set of items configured to be available on that floor.
• Uses only "pond" tilesets.
  • There are no regular wall tiles or air/void tiles, just normal ground tiles + water tiles + shop tiles + the exterior boundary wall.
    • So you can always cut corners and squeeze through diagonal nooks, and the monsters occasionally do these things as well.
    • Every dungeon has an exterior boundary wall, consisting of wall you can't dig into and can't wall clip through, but it normally blends in with regular walls in most dungeons. Here, it really stands out.
  • There are no freestanding rocks or other tall obstructions.
    • Between no normal walls + no tall obstructions, it's tricky to find a good place to smash pots.
• Monster and item distributions differ from baseline, but it's hard to be very specific. Here are some examples:
  • It is possible to find otherwise extremely rare items within the first few floors.
    • Across 5 runs, and before 10F, I found 1x Parry Shield, 1x Onigiri Shield, and 1x SuperUnlucky Seed, and plenty of other uncommon stuff.
    • On another run, I found 2x Upgrade Pot before 20F.
  • There appears to be a wider variety of equipment and grasses than baseline, but a narrower variety of other categories of items.
    • But the most common items in all categories are available (e.g. Identity Scroll, Preservation Pot, Synthesis Pot, etc.).
  • There is no obvious pattern as to which items will be dropped by which monsters that don't normally drop items.
• Everything is pre-identified except bracelets.
• New items (aka items you've crafted in secret pots) do not appear in this dungeon.
• Shops tend to sell less items than normal—usually 3-4.
• There are no other Characters besides shopkeepers.
• The dungeon is daytime only.

Final Reward

Every time you beat the dungeon, you're given a Heal Bracelet. This is mildly disappointing, because you can win these fairly easily (and probably a lot faster for most players) by beating Explosion Rocks on Expert difficulty, and find them in other places as well (e.g. Merchant's Hideout). The rare items you can sometimes find within this dungeon are more valuable than the final reward item.

Farming Opportunities

It is possible to farm for certain items which are usually rare but are dropped at least occasionally by monsters on early floors in this dungeon. Parry Shield, Onigiri Shield, and SuperUnlucky Seed are hard to find normally but I found one each all before 10F across my first 5 runs, then on a later run, I found 2 Upgrade Pots by 20F in that single run. Escape Scroll, Blank Scroll, and Undo Grass all appear in this dungeon, so it is possible to both find the goodies you want and find a way to escape before the dungeon starts getting too tough. Of course, winning will also work to bring your items home but this dungeon is not trivial, so if your goal is farming and you have a copy of the item you want and a way to escape, you should consider bailing right away and being grateful for what you found. FWIW, the designers decided to limit the goal floor to a maximum of 50F rather than the usual 99F. It's hard to say how best to maximize your chance of farming, but if you're looking for a Parry Shield, Onigiri Shield, or SuperUnlucky Seed, and you haven't found one by the end of 5F, consider abandoning the run and restarting.

Strategies

This dungeons seems designed to make it difficult to get items out of pots, or maybe even designed to help the player appreciate how a Trip Trap can be turned to their advantage. Not only are there no normal walls and no tall obstructions to throw pots against, but bracelets are not pre-identified and Can. Arm Bracelet is a bracelet you might find commonly in this dungeon. Because of this, pots other than Preservation Pot almost serve as traps for your items. Don't insert items into other types of pots until you're sure you can get them out again, or unless you can afford to have them locked away for a long time. Some tips for dealing with this:

• Seals on Preservation Pots can really hurt. Take extra care to make sure your Preservation Pots don't get sealed, or that you can recover from a seal (e.g. Exorcism Scroll). E.g., use projectiles against Cursister monsters where feasible, and don't put multiple important items into a single Preservation Pot so they can't all be sealed away with a single seal.
• You'll likely find a Synthesis Pot and things you'd like to synthesize together early on in your run, but don't begin synthesizing until you're sure you've found a place to get your items back.
• Monsters can consistently be used to break pots and recover items on floors without walls. This method, however, requires you to be wary of special monster behaviours. Firebirds will destroy the pot and all of its contents, Kappas will throw it back at you (which may actually make it easier to pick up the items, as long as taking damage is no big deal), Zaloklefts will steal an item and take off.

Note that, like any thrown item, the pot has a chance to miss its target and land on the ground, intact.

• Throwing pots long distance onto the ground never causes them to break.
• Extraction Scrolls and Blank Scrolls (upon which you might write Extraction) are still too valuable to waste on a pot you don't mind breaking.
• So your best bet is to look for a place near the exterior boundary wall.
  • Though it's rare, the game will sometimes generate a room directly adjacent to the boundary wall. More commonly, you'll find a passageway or room that has only 1-2 intervening water tiles between solid ground and the boundary wall, and this is close enough to be useful.
  • If you're not 100% certain you're close enough, confirm your distance by moving the right thumbstick to display the grid. There must be no more than 2 "water walls" between the boundary wall and open floor.
  • Also, make sure there are enough open floor tiles without traps on them in range of where you plan to break the pot. Swing your sword/fists over every tile where you want items to land, to confirm there are no traps there first.
  • Note that when smashing a pot against a wall, the pot breaks directly above the last open space it traveled over to get to the wall, not over the wall tile itself. All the items that fall out of the pot fall starting from that location. Falling items can actually land on any of 25 different tiles in a square centered around where they tried to fall. The specific tile chosen is in a deterministic pattern, with closer tiles being chosen over more remote tiles, with ties being broken in counter-clockwise order starting at 6 o'clock. E.g., if the item can't land directly where it wanted to land, it will next try landing one tile to the south. Items cannot exist on top of other items, including visible and invisible traps, nor can they exist on water tiles, so you need to make sure there is at least one open tile space free of traps within a distance of 2 from the tile where you plan to smash the pot. If none of the 25 tiles in range are suitable landing sites, the falling item will be lost.
• It is also possible to find a Fort. Staff deeper in this dungeon, which can be used to create walls to break pots against.
  • You can also use a Fort. Staff on a water tile then break it to turn it into an open floor tile. (This is one great way to retrieve items on those pesky 2x2 islands inside some rooms.) This trick might be especially useful in thus dungeon, given that water tiles are everwhere, and you might want to "dig" a new passageway to another room. Consider saving your Fort. Staff charges to dual-purpose them for both "digging" a tunnel and breaking a pot.
• If you can't find another method and you really need to break a pot, you can theoretically use a Trip Trap, if you can find one.
  • The basic technique is to drop everything except your main equipment and any pots you want to break, leaving enough room for the contents to spill out nearby, then repeatedly trip the trap until the pot breaks. It's faster and more reliable to forcibly trip the trap via the Feet menu rather than walking off and on the trap multiple times. Dropping your other inventory items makes it more likely that the pot you want to break is the item that will drop.
  • Obviously, make sure you're not carrying a Balance Staff when you try this, nor will it work if you have Cautious status e.g. if you've used a Perceptive Pot on this floor.
  • It's definitely not worth scouring the floor trying to find a hidden Trip Trap; even if you eventually found one this way and didn't suffer unduly from other traps, your run would likely end in starvation. If the current floor doesn't have a good exterior wall to use for breaking pots, the next floor or the one after that probably will.
  • If you have a spare Perception Grass, it might be worth it to use it to try to find a Trip Trap, especially on a fresh floor you haven't explored yet.
  • Likewise, you could leverage a Karakuroid family monster to create a Trip Trap for you. This is a great way to make traps, as they are always visible; other methods to create traps such as Trap Bracelets and Muliplication Traps aren't as useful.
  • If you find a Trip Trap randomly, consider taking the opportunity to do all your Synthesizing, Exorcising, Identifying, or whatever else you want to do with non-Preservation Pots.
• Never wear an unknown bracelet that might be a Can. Arm Bracelet when you're trying to smash a pot. It would be a real shame to have planned so carefully to smash your pot only to have it fly off into oblivion.
• Make good use of Mixer monsters rather than using Synthesis Pots, as you don't need to find special places to smash open monsters.

Starvation is a real danger in this dungeon. Here are some ways to deal with it:

• Needless to say, be careful with your food. Don't eat it needlessly early, do keep it in Preservation Pots, etc..
• There are no pre-placed items, not even in monster houses, and shops don't have much for sale either, so you're probably better off diving as soon as you find the stairs.
• If you can wait, don't eat grasses when you're full on food, to avoid wasting their small food value.
• There's a good chance you can find a Diet Shield and Mixer monster relatively early in your run. Use them to make sure you have the CR Diet rune on your shield.
• If you don't have anything particularly valuable in your inventory, consider letting a Nigiri Morph convert a few of your items into onigiri for you. (The level 1 "Baby Nigiri" is green in color and found on very early floors. It can't turn your items into onigiri. But the level 2 "Nigiri Morph" is red and found on 23F - 25F, and it can turn your items into onigiri.)
• Kumonigiri monsters are also in this dungeon and have a high chance to drop onigiri. (These are the brownish panda creatures.) Consider lingering on a level where they appear and harvesting some more food while you can. It's not clear if lingering on a floor that can spawn Kumonigiri will result in more food or less. Having a Monster Summoner bracelet might make this plan more likely to succeed.

As always in dungeons where you can't take items in, make good use of Mixer monsters. They're available before 10F and can do everything a Synthesis Pot can do and more, provided they have enough stomach capacity, and they don't have the problem of needing a wall to smash them against. See Runes for more info.

Take advantage of the fact that all normal walls are "water walls":

• Don't forget that you can cut corners. If you're used to running down hallways then taking 90 degree turns, try to stop doing that, or at least be aware that monsters following you will get in a free hit when you take the 90 degree turn. Oddly, the monsters don't seem to take advantage of this when running away from you; they also go into the junction square then take a 90 degree turn, giving you a chance to get a free hit on them.
• You'll occasionally find a diagonal nook that you can now squeeze through. Monsters can't do this normally, but they can do it if they're pursuing you. Working theory is that if you are immediately adjacent to them and you use the diagonal nook trick to retreat from them, they will pursue you through the diagonal nook. But, if they aren't immediately adjacent to you when you use the diagonal nook, you might be able to get away that way.
• Pinning Staves are somewhat common in this dungeon and are effectively turned into Warp Grasses in this dungeon. Wave them offscreen. The bullet will hit the exterior boundary wall, even extremely far away, you'll be warped virtually every time onto a water tile, then re-warped to a random location in the dungeon. Warping to a random location is certainly better than being surrounded by monsters, but it's a very unreliable way to commit theft. Hat tip to user Mycotoxin on gamefaqs.com for suggesting this trick.
• Don't just walk into a monster house to wake all the monsters. You probably can't just retreat down the "water hallway" and attack the monsters one at a time as they file out, because likely some of them can fly or walk on water, and even monsters that you're "sure" can't fly or waterwalk may do so anyway because they may actually be Crow Tengu monsters in disguise. Instead, you can use projectiles to fire over the water and wake monsters one at a time and kill them more safely that way.

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/%a5%cf%a5%f3%a5%bf%a1%bc%a4%ce%c3%d3 (Japanese wiki page for this dungeon)

Open Questions

• What's the complete list of rare items you can find here?

Solution

Solution comments:

Solution provided by: Jubilee

Project finished on: