Shattered Pixel Dungeon in 2026 | Patreon Weekly #344

Hey Patrons! In this weekly I’m sharing my rough plans for 2026 a little early! These points will show up the usual public blog in about a week. I’ve also just released v3.3.2! It’s just a small patch with some fixes and a fair bit of internal work on the new tester area.

Here are the major pieces of content I'm considering for Shattered Pixel Dungeon in 2026, sorted roughly based on the order of priority. Just like with previous years it's unlikely that I'll manage all of this in 2026, and new things may also pop up and shift priorities around a bit.

• City Quest: It’s taken longer than I would like (though I did expect it would), but my most immediate plan for 2026 is to implement and release a new quest for the city. This will include some incremental improvements to the tester area in v3.3 patches, and then a major update a bit later with the quest itself!

• New Items & Misc.: The recent item additions in v3.3.0 have made me realize that I've gone quite a long while without adding new items to the game in a bunch of categories. I don't expect any one update will focus on these new items entirely, but I would like to put a bit of an emphasis on adding a few new items to the game over the course of the year.

• Hero-centric Lore: Now that all six of the game's heroes are released, there's finally opportunity to start fleshing out the game's characters and greater lore a bit! This lore could include baskstories in hero select, journals written by the heroes from their perspectives, or documents that describe interactions and conversations between the heroes.

• Better Armor Variety: I'm quite happy with the changes I made to thrown weapons in v3.2, despite them not being in my initial 2025 plans. It's gotten me thinking about doing an overhaul to expand armors as a class of item. It would be really nice to have more variety of armor, even if adding more types doesn't actually change up gameplay too much.

• More Subclasses & Talents: While I don't currently have plans for more heroes, I do think there's room to expand the current six further. In particular I have some ideas for a 3rd subclass for each hero to better take advantage of Shattered's increased equipment and class diversity. I've also got some ideas for possibly more base class talents in tier 1 to 3.

Also, while I’m not going to be putting it down as a 2026 goal (given that progress isn’t really determined by me directly) I do want to try and make a lot of progress on better in-game art this coming year as well. I’m going to give a bit more of a detailed public explanation on why this has taken so long in the blog post.

And here are other major pieces of content I'd like to add to Shattered that I'm definitely not going to have time for in 2026. Think of these as possible longer term ideas or 'stretch goals'. The higher an item is on this list the more clearly defined my idea is for it, and the more likely I am to do it in future years.

• Halls Quest: While I don't want to make the game overly long, a bit more gameplay at the tail end of the game is sorely needed to give players a bit more time with finished builds and time to make use of armor abilities. I have a few ideas for interesting quests that could test an endgame character.

• Endless Mode: Some form of endless mode is a very common request. This partly ties in to the last region of the game being the shortest, but also there's just a desire for players to see how far they can get with strong character builds. I have a few loose ideas for how endless might work, but want to focus on other things like new quests first.

• 3rd Caves Quest and Better Shops: In previous posts like this I've talked about both a 3rd caves quest variant and also expansions to the game's shops. Neither of those ideas are gone, but I have de-prioritized them in favour of other content. In particular I still think new more specialized shops could work very well if executed properly.

• More Dungeon Variety: In earlier years I've talked about alternate dungeon paths, but I've been reconsidering that. This is partly due to time commitment, and partly because some alt path ideas have now been used elsewhere, like quest sub-floors. I still think new environments, enemies, etc. are a good idea, but as new elements within the existing regions.

• Something New?: Lastly, you might have noticed that the lists on these posts have been slowly shrinking over the years. Eventually everything here will be cleared, and it'll be time for something new! This is still a ways off though, and I have no current plans for what form this may take, it could be more ideas for Shattered, or something else entirely.