Draft:Shiren 5 Vita:Trap
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Traps (Japanese: ワナ) are common hazards that appears in certain dungeons. There are thirty-three variants of them in total in Shiren the Wanderer 5 and 5 Plus.
Summary
Invisibility
Traps that are pre-placed on the floor are ordinarily invisible. They become permanently visible if:
(a) you swing your sword/fists over them or
(b) you step on them while not floating, whether or not they trigger or
(c) you deliberately trigger them via the Feet menu.
Traps become temporarily visible if you eat Perception Grass, but if you then get blinded and recover from blindness, you won't be able to see traps that you didn't make permanently visible. Most new traps that you create (e.g. by triggering a Multiplication Trap, by wearing a Trap Bracelet, by reading a Monster House Scroll, etc.) are also invisible to begin with, though there is at least one exception: breaking a Black Hole Pot will create visible Pit Traps around the place where the pot broke, one trap per slot/space in the pot that was broken. New traps created by monsters, however, are visible, even if they were created in a room far away from your current location.
Whether or not a trap is visible, it will not show on your minimap with an Item Detector Bracelet until you see the trap in person, just like items normally do without remote item detection. They show up as X's rather than the usual blue dot for other items.
Unique Icons
Unlike most items, traps have unique icons rather than sharing an icon for the category. So, as long as it's visible, you can usually tell what type a trap is from far away. The lone exception to this rule is the Stairs? Trap, which has the same icon as the stairs and which can have a variety of trap effects.
Pressure Activation
The "magic effect" for each category of item is triggered differently. You trigger the primary magic effect of most Grasses by eating them, usually voluntarily. You trigger the primary effect of most Scrolls by reading them, usually voluntarily. But you trigger the primary effect of Traps by stepping on them, usually involuntarily.
No one has documented it precisely, but traps seem to have about an 85% chance of triggering any time you step on them.[Citation needed] This triggering rate can be altered, e.g. by equipping a Floating Bracelet. The triggering rate seems unaffected by whether or not the trap is visible. You can forcibly trigger a trap by standing on it and using the Feet menu, and throwing an item on top of a visible trap will always trigger it as well. Monsters trigger traps instead of Shiren while Trapper Bracelet Mode is in effect.
Placement Restrictions
Traps are never pre-placed in shops, in hallways, or on entrance tiles just inside pre-existing hallways. New traps you create that are invisible (e.g. by wearing a Trap Bracelet) also adhere to these constraints, but monsters can create visible traps anywhere. If you dig your own entrance into a room, beware that the entrance tile may contain a trap. It is not known if a new invisible trap may be created on entrance tiles adjacent to new hallways that didn't exist when the floor was created. Despite these restrictions on trap placement, there is no guarantee that there will always be a safe route to get where you want to go. In particular, you may be unable to reach some items in small monster houses without walking over one or more traps.
No items can exist on water tiles or void tiles, and traps are never pre-placed under rock outside of the Explosion Rocks minigame.
Moving Traps and Trapper Bracelet Mode
Traps ordinarily cannot be picked up or moved in any way, but there is one big exception: Trapper Bracelet Mode. In Trapper Bracelet Mode, you can see all traps, traps affect monsters not you, and you can pick up and move traps just like other items. You enter this mode if you equip a Trapper Bracelet (not a Trap!) or a Secret Pots and New Items bracelet with the Trapper effect on it, and you leave this mode when you unequip said bracelet or if it becomes sealed. Trapper Bracelet Mode is also permanently enabled in Gen's Turf and Trapper's Sandbox.
Falling Item Behavior
Two items cannot co-exist on the same tile. (This is true in all Shiren games.) So if a thrown or dropped item lands somewhere you didn't expect, the tile where the item should have landed has an invisible trap. Likewise, tiles with items on them in monster houses (and every other room) are safe from traps. However, if a thrown/dropped item should have landed on a permanently visible trap, it will first trigger the trap then land somewhere else. (Exception: the falling item can break the trap causing it to disappear, and if this happens, your thrown item will land where the trap used to be.)
Explosion Immunity
Traps seem immune to being destroyed by explosions, volcanic eruptions, and other things that would normally destroy items on the ground.[Citation needed]
Blessings, Curses, and Seals
Traps cannot be blessed, cursed, or sealed. Shiren 5 does not have a "Broken Traps" item as some previous games did. There aren't any Characters will buy, sell, or repair traps.
Variable Longevity
Different types of traps have different chances to disappear when triggered, though the precise formula is not known. For example, if you're trying to harvest arrows from an arrow trap by throwing rocks onto the trap, you can get 1 to ~30 arrows out per trap, but the trap will eventually disappear. (Perhaps arrow traps have a 5% - 10% chance to disappear any time they are triggered?) Points Traps, on the other hand, always trigger and always disappear after a single use. And on the opposite end of the spectrum, a "Spring Device" always triggers but never disappears.
Special Modifier: "Devices" (Forcing Traps)
The in-game documentation mentions "contraptions" but doesn't fully explain what they are. That section of the documentation discusses doors and moving floors, so "contraptions" may or may not have anything to do with these "forcing traps". In any case, some traps can either behave normally like every other trap or can behave very differently than normal. For clarity, I'm referring to these "forcing traps" as "devices".
Devices appear to be identical to traps but with a special "device bit" set which changes their behavior. Devices are always visible, always trigger 100% of the time, never disappear when triggered, and override things that would normally negate the effects of the trap. For example, a "Spring Device" looks like a "Spring Trap" except it will warp the player even if they have a Steady Shield equipped. Devices trigger even if you're flying / floating over them and they are immune to Trapper Bracelet Mode. Devices are not placed randomly, but are used in specific situations in the game:
- On floors with separate rooms but no hallways, every room has a "Spring Device" (rather than a normal Spring Trap) which you can step on to warp to a random location elsewhere on the floor.
- Tiny 2x2 islands inside rooms also always have a "Spring Device" on them, so if you happen to land there randomly after a warp, you can warp out rather than starve to death.
- Pick-A-Choice shops have one "Spring Device" and one "Pit Device", both of which always trigger, so you can always warp out safely if you win and always fall to the next floor if you lose.
"Spring Devices" and "Pit Devices" are the most obvious "devices", but there could be other types of traps with the "device bit" set. Points Traps may in fact be Points Devices, as they are always visible and always trigger 100% of the time. But like normal traps and unlike other devices, Points Traps/Devices are distributed randomly around floors, not pre-placed in specific locations, and Points Traps/Devices always disappear the first time they are triggered. Likewise, Duelist Traps may in fact have the "device bit" set.
Note that Shiren 5 also has "Jumping Floors" -- tiles with arrows on them which push Shiren in the indicated direction until he lands on solid ground. These appear to be implemented as traps under the hood, traps with the "device bit" set. The evidence for this is that when you throw an item on them, the Jumping Floor shows a trap icon in the log output and the item falls somewhere else (see the example). But, as they have no non-device trap equivalents and as they don't appear in the Item Book, nothing more is said about them in this section.
Finding Traps
Odds are you will complete the Traps section of the Item Book without trying before you run out of other rare items to find. Making a trap permanently visible e.g. by triggering it accidentally registers that trap type in your Item Book. If you still can't find a certain type of trap, try going deep into dangerous dungeons, using Perception Grass to find invisible traps, then swinging your sword over them to make them permanently visible. If randomly searching for traps deep in dangerous dungeons doesn't give you the trap you want, try creating your own traps e.g. via a Karakuroid monster.
Common Mitigations
Here are some tips about avoiding all types of traps:
- Depending on the situation and your tolerance for risk, you can attack over every tile to reveal any trap. So long as more traps are not created, you can be certain that tiles free of traps will remain free of traps. But if you do this too much, you'll starve. The best balance might be as follows. For tiny monster houses, swing over every tile that doesn't have a visible item on it and that isn't an entrance/exit tile as soon as you can, to reveal all the traps in that room. For larger monster houses, swing over every tile you need to step on to pick up all the items you want to pick up, preferably in some sort of pattern so you can remember which tiles you've checked and which you haven't. (One possible pattern is to always move diagonally, thus ensuring you never step on half the tiles in the room. Another possible pattern is to make sure the outside edges are clear, only stepping internally to avoid traps around the edges.) For every other room, it's probably not worth the loss of fullness to check for traps this way. OTOH, if you've hit one Multiplication Trap, you might want to be more careful than normal. And because it's a particularly horrible time to get hit by traps such as Pit, Explosion, and Floor Warp, if a monster knocks off a super valuable item of yours to the floor, make sure to check for traps as you move to retrieve it.
- Eat a Perception Grass. If you care, make sure to swing over traps to reveal them permanently in case you get blinded. As you probably won't have many of these grasses, consider saving them for deeper floors or monster houses.
- Read a Trap Deletion Scroll. Especially useful on new floors before you start exploring, and on floors with monster houses. But keep in mind that destroying all traps means destroying traps you could turn to your advantage too. This does not destroy "devices" such as Jumping Floors and Points Switches.
- Shoot a Trap Deletion Staff. This is particularly useful when you want to clear a safe route across a monster house, or if there is no way to reach items on the floor without stepping on bad traps.
- Equip a Trapper Bracelet. This enables Trapper Bracelet Mode, which will ensure that you never trigger a trap accidentally, but (a) that mode can be annoying and (b) monsters will occasionally trigger traps when you don't want them to, destroying items.
- Equip a Floating Bracelet. The ultimate in trap protection! This item ensures you'll never trigger a trap unwillingly, and, it lets you cross water (without getting wet) and cross air/void tiles to boot. It's amazing. It's also exceedingly rare. It can be found in some difficult bonus dungeons such as Rousing Paradise, but it's probably easier to find one by wishing for it in Inori Cave. When you get one, consider crafting it into a new item so you can buy a new copy whenever you need one; see Crafting for details.
There are also many ways to mitigate individual types of traps -- see the Reference Chart below.
Turning Traps to Your Advantage
As with virtually every gameplay element in every Shiren game, "good" and "bad" are highly subjective and context is critical. There are usually ways to turn "bad" things to positive advantage, and traps are no different. See the chart below for more ideas, but here are a few particularly useful tricks:
- Deliberately trigger a Strip Trap to remove cursed items. If/when you find a Strip Trap, it's a great idea to try on all your unidentified equipment before moving on, to see if anything is cursed/sealed while you have access to the Strip Trap.
- Throw stones or other items onto the various arrow-type traps to harvest arrows. Build up a supply of ~3 giant piles of arrows if you can do so without starving to have a better chance of winning the run.
- Break a Black Hole Pot in a shop to create Pit Traps inside the shop. Sell the shopkeeper everything you own then steal everything back that you want and exit to the next floor in safety.
Given that traps can be useful, it can therefore also be useful to create traps, especially traps that are visible by default, e.g. by leading a Karakuroid monster around in circles in a large otherwise empty room.
The above tips work great without Trapper Bracelet Mode, but with that mode, there are vastly more possibilities for turning traps to your advantage. Here are just a few ideas:
- Carry Spring Traps or Pit Traps with you, so you can always escape a bad situation. (Dropping a trap doesn't cost a turn, so you can drop it at your feet and trigger it in a single turn.)
- Collect Pit Traps so you can always steal from shopkeepers without ever taking a risk.
- Carry a Time Switch Trap with you to be able to switch time even if you don't have a light source.
References
These excellent external references may have better and more complete information that has not yet been replicated to this wiki: