Community:Shiren 1 DS Trap Strategy

Avoiding Traps There are 3 basic ways to avoid Traps:

• See them
• Locate them
• Use equipment to be unaffected them

You can see traps temporarily by eating an Herb of Sight, wearing a Trap Armband, or eating Mecharoid family Monster Meat. But, if you change monster forms or take off the Trap Armband, you'll no longer be able to see all traps.

By "locating traps", I mean permanently adding them to your map, regardless of special vision. You can locate traps by standing 1 square away, facing them, and pressing A to swing your weapon. You can also locate traps by stepping on them. (Obviously, it is better to step on traps while wearing a Trap Armband, but either way, the trap will still be located.) Traps created by Mecharoids (or by you when you are a Mecharoid) are also located on your map. Once a trap is located on your map, it stays on your map permanently until it is destroyed or moved.

You will not be harmed by traps at all if you wear a Trap Armband or if you transform into any monster form.

Recommendations For Avoiding Traps

• Traps can't exist in hallways unless you put them there, so don't bother checking for any.
• Check for traps at entrances to new rooms. If you find one, that's a good clue you might be about to step into a Monster House. Monster house or not, it's risky to step into a new room and get hit by a trap. Depending on your map, you may be able to enter the room another way or walk diagonally because at least one of the "walls" is water.
• It's not worth the expense in time, hunger, and your personal fun to check for traps everywhere you go, with the following 2 exceptions:
  • Exception #1: if you've just seen or left something hugely valuable on the floor, spend the extra time to ensure you're not going to be hit by a trap (such as a pitfall trap) before you can pick it up.
  • Exception #2: monster houses have high trap density. The smaller the monster house, the greater the trap density. For small monster houses, search for traps on every square right away, before moving around the room. For medium size monster houses, search for traps on each square before you step on it, every time you pass through the room (or, at least use a regular pattern of how you walk through rooms so you know which squares you've already identified are free of traps). Great hall monster houses are borderline; check each square for traps if you have tons of food, otherwise don't bother.
• If you have spare inventory space, hold on to your Herbs of Sight for later floors. Later floors have more (and more painful) traps. (Plus, you might need a Herb of Sight for the little blind girl.) But if you're full up on inventory, it's generally not worth throwing away a good item to save a Herb of Sight, just use it on your current floor.
• Best time to eat a Herb of Sight is either at the beginning of a new floor or just after clearing a monster house but before walking inside. Why after clearing the monster house? If you have to eat monster meat in order to beat the monster house (or just to gain the 10 food points), you'll lose sight of all the traps.
• If you can see traps due to a Herb of Sight, consider swinging over them anyway, just to put them on your map permanently in case you lose your sharp sight.
• If you have a Trap Armband but don't want to play with it normally, it's still a good idea to put it on when you enter a new room, then step on all the traps (and not pick them up). This puts the traps on your map permanently even when you take off the Trap Armband. Great for small monster houses in particular.
• An Armband of Sight does not help with traps at all, despite the similar name to the Herb of Sight.

Identifying Stairway Traps

Some floors of dungeons will contain Stairway Traps. These look exactly like normal staircases, but will actually trigger a random trap when they are stepped on. To identify which stairs are fakes, you could always do more costly methods such as equipping a Trap Armband (traps won't affect you) or hitting something with a Staff of Postpone (they will only get transported to the real stairs). However, the simplest method to identify them, that is always available, is the following:

Stand away from the stairs, and fast-walk (hold down the B button) to move perpendicularly across the top, bottom, left, or right edge of the staircase. Shiren will automatically stop walking when he is near the stairs in question. If he stops diagonally from the staircase, then it is a real staircase. If he stops at the square directly north, south, east, or west of the stairs, then it is a fake.

Positive Uses for Traps (without a Trap Armband)

Most traps can be turned into useful projectile weapons or turned to other positive purpose when wearing a Trap Armband, but several traps can also be exploited for gain in specific circumstances even without the Trap Armband. Roughly ordered from most useful to least useful:

• Unequip Trap: allows you to remove even cursed equipment. When you find an Unequip Trap, equip every item you've never equipped yet to check for curses, and use the trap if you find one.
• Summons Trap: summons ~4 monsters in front of you. Step on this trap facing away from your line of retreat, then retreat to where you can fight the new monsters one at a time. Good way to get extra experience and possibly extra items, though risky if the local monsters are too tough for you.
• Spring Trap: can get you out of trouble in a hurry. For example, if you're surrounded in a monster house but can see a Spring Trap, trip it to get to safety. Also, if you're done exploring the floor but a long way from the stairs, jump on a Spring Trap and you'll probably save yourself a lot of walking. It is possible to spring into a vault randomly if you're very lucky. (However, this is not recommended unless you have plenty of food to burn. It's far faster and more reliable to tunnel into a vault if you can.) If you get stuck in a vault or on an island, there is always a Spring Trap you can use to escape. There also exists a rare, special type of indoor floor with no corridors, just a collection of disconnected rooms; each room has a Spring Trap which you can use to travel randomly between rooms. (Here again, tunneling is more reliable.)
• Pitfall Trap: moves you down one floor. Most of the time, this means forward one floor, but sometimes this means backward one floor instead. Either way, you can use this to leave the floor early if you're in trouble. Or, if down is forward in your area (it usually is), you can use this trap instead of a staircase if the staircase is too far away, or, to avoid having to figure out which staircase is the real one. Breaking a Bottomless Jar creates pitfall traps; breaking one in a shop is thus a very safe way to steal. A pitfall trap on Table Mountain floor 22 is extraordinarily useful (and extraordinarily easy to create); read Stream Village Shopping Spree for details. If there is no floor below yours -- such as immediately after arriving at Table Mountain itself, or if you're on the same floor as a Wanderer you're rescuing -- Shiren will crawl back out of the Pitfall Trap, suffering no damage and remaining on the same floor.
• Alarm Trap: waking the denizens of a monster house while you're on the far side of the floor is one way to make the monster house safer; all the monster disperse and you can fight them over time. This works especially well if you have an Armband of Sight so you can see where the formerly sleeping monsters go. But this technique carries risk: some monsters (e.g. Ark Dragon, Hell Dragon) can deal large amounts of damage at remote distances, even through solid rock, so waking a room full of these on the other side of the map could prove fatal.

• Curse Trap: there are a handful of items you might want to curse. The special effects of an item are disabled if the item is cursed. So, any item with a negative special effect could potentially be improved by cursing it. In rare circumstances, it can be valuable to have curses on normal items, even though they don't have negative special effects. Example: Gaze family monsters can't make you take off cursed items, and Fragile equipment won't lose durability if cursed. Finally, aspiring Borg Mamel trainers can use curse traps to create some Borg Mamel food (though in practice, I find it's easier to locate a Curse family monster than a Curse Trap).

1. Example #1: a cursed Armor Ward provides excellent armor value and doesn't make you hungry.
2. Example #2: if you accidentally put items into a Venting Jar, cursing it will allow you to break the Jar and reclaim the items. This does not work with cursed Unbreakable Jars.

• Landmine Trap: Will instantly defeat most monsters (including the Tainted Queen) that are caught in the surrounding blast radius when Shiren triggers the trap. Shiren will also take damage equal to half their current HP (which can be reduced to a quarter with a Shield with a blast Rune equipped.) Will destroy any walls or Items surrounding the trap. Shiren may be vulnerable to monsters that were not defeated by the explosion. At 1HP, Shiren can be defeated by a Landmine Trap. Dying to a Landmine Trap is an Adventure Log entry so it might be a good idea to do this when the player is not holding valuable Items.
• Big Landmine Trap: Will instantly defeat most Monsters (including the Tainted Queen) that are caught in the surrounding blast Radius when Shiren triggers the trap. Without a Shield with a blast Seal, Shiren will be left at 1HP by the explosion, and with one, Shiren will take damage equal to half their current HP. Will destroy any walls or Items surrounding the trap. Shiren may be vulnerable to monsters that were not defeated by the explosion. Triggering Big Landmine Trap will always leave Shiren at 1HP, therefore one cannot kill Shiren.
• Hunger Trap: a hunger trap could be useful in a very rare, specific circumstance. SPOILER. In some locations, if you're hungry and try to eat your last riceball, an old man will appear and beg you for your food. If you give it to him, you get a Happiness Herb (which seems to be the only way to acquire them), and if you deny him the food, he'll ambush you later with a troop of Polygon Spins [fact check?]. Among other locations, this works in the Old Mine. Take 1 riceball in, starve yourself via hunger traps, and try to eat the food. When the old man appears, give him the food for the Happiness Herb, then return to Mountaintop Town to eat. [Fact check: I've had the old man beg for my last riceball even though I wasn't very hungry. What controls this? Is there a hunger requirement at all, or does it just need to be your last riceball?]
• Knockback Trap / Log Trap: in rare circumstances, you may be able to leverage these traps to reach spots you otherwise couldn't (or at least to reach them faster). Example: you could cross a river with one of these traps nearby. One of Fay's Puzzles also points out that these traps will throw you 10 spaces if you don't first hit a wall or monster. If the floor layout was just right, you could use a log trap to land on a 4-square island and collect the items.
• Multiply Trap: if you need a particular trap and can't find it, this may help you create one.

Note that you can also exploit traps to help you identify armbands. Put on the armband you want to test and trip the trap you want to test it against. Don't do this if you can't stand being wounded by that trap type, but this technique can help you ID an armband in a pinch. See Identifying Items for more information.

Positive Uses for Traps (with a Trap Armband)

Note: becoming a Mecharoid is functionally equivalent to wearing a Trap Armband with the following two exceptions:

• DS: You cannot interact with items at all while you are in monster form, including Mecharoid monster form. This restriction includes both items and traps, both in your inventory and on the ground.
• You can use your special Mecharoid ability to create random traps on open room floor squares. You will not be able to select the traps you make nor place them in corridors.
• As a Mecharoid, Shiren will Move at Double Speed.

But other than those differences, Trap Armband play is the same as Mecharoid play. For readability, I've written this section as if you're using the Trap Armband, which is more common, but the tips will mostly apply either way. Using a Trap Armband well is actually quite difficult. It's like mastering a different game entirely.

You will only get 1 experience point for killing a monster (no matter how tough he was) while wearing a Trap Armband, unless you recently affected that monster with a trap. Here's how the system works:

A monster's "trap counter" starts at 0. When he is affected by a trap, the trap counter goes up by 1. If the monster moves and is not affected by a trap on his next turn, the trap counter drops by 1 until it gets back to the minimum of 0. If the monster moves and is affected by another trap, the trap counter increases. You can also increase the monster's trap counter by making sure he doesn't move (e.g. that he swings at you instead) and throwing another trap at him. (Does anyone know the maximum value of a trap counter?) When a monster dies, if his trap counter was 0, you get 1 EXP, otherwise you get his normal EXP value multiplied by the trap counter. So, if you can wound him twice and kill him before his trap counter evaporates, you get double experience!

A very useful item during Trap Armband play is the Scroll of Chains. This tiles the room you are standing in with a weird "chain" floor. When a monster moves over a chain floor, their trap counter does not decrease. Thus, you can rack up more experience for each kill. Save these for great hall monster houses or larger rooms.

Another useful item is the Super Trap Scroll. Normally, flying/floating monsters are invulnerable to traps even when you wear a Trap Armband. But after reading Super Trap, all monsters are vulnerable to traps until you leave the floor.

Every floor contains many traps, sometimes a ton of traps. This means that, using a Trap Armband, you have access to a large array of extra weapons. And if you intentionally trip every Multiply Trap you find, you'll get gobs and gobs of options. The downside is that traps don't stack in inventory and very few traps will both kill a monster outright and give you experience for it.

Honestly, killing monsters with traps and getting experience for it is a royal pain. You basically have to layout a line of traps and lure monsters over them. For monsters with low experience, it's better to just take 1 EXP for killing them. Of course, you can always switch out your Trap Armband and receive normal experience for a kill, and that's usually much better.

Some specific traps, however, can let you rack up a ton of experience all on their own. Putting down a Knockback Trap pointing directly into a wall will cause the enemy to be bounced repeatedly against the rocks, taking 5 points of damage each time and increasing the Trap Counter to boot. This can easily get you up to 5x to 7x before the trap vanishes, letting you smack the weakened monster to death for a massive experience boost compared to the monster's normal value.

Although Traps don't normally appear on Hallway spaces (except in Great Hall Mazes), you are allowed to lay down traps in halls when wearing the Trap Armband. This is just one way that the game changes completely when wearing the Armband -- you can take a long hallway near the periphery of the level, lay down a series of traps, and just wait in the middle for monsters to converge on your position with significant multipliers in effect, then bump them off. You can keep walking up and down the line of deathtraps replacing any that vanish, and keep the process going as long as necessary, barred only by the The Winds of Kron and the Growls of the Stomach.

Monster houses can be particularly tricky. If they have a landmine trap in them, you can say goodbye to the items on the floor. Best to switch out the Trap Armband in that case, and instead lure monsters to a sequence of traps waiting in the hallway or the next room.

Traps in your inventory will transform into broken traps when entering a town or village. Broken traps aren't useful for much but Fay the Researcher in Canyon Hamlet will "recycle" your broken traps and give you a useful item in exchange. See Broken Trap Recycling for more.