Liquid Metal Tweaks | Patreon Weekly #321

Hey Patrons, in this weekly I’m going to quickly go over a change to liquid metal I just made in the beta.

This weekly also includes an audio Q&A! You can find audio timestamps at the end of this weekly.

Liquid Metal Scaling

The beta for v3.2 has been going pretty well, after some initial fixes, but one thing I noticed right away was people complaining about liquid metal. I confess I didn’t look into its value scaling too much, I expected it would overall be a nerf, but not too severe of one.

As it turns out I underestimated this. Upgrade durability scaling went from 3x to 1.5x, whereas scaling on liquid metal stayed at 2x. With exponential scaling being what it is, this has a pretty extreme impact. Here’s a little chart showing the relative cost of liquid metal per-use (Y-axis) as an item scales in upgrade level (x-axis), with v3.1 in blue, v3.2 in red:

Oops.

So yeah, I did want to nerf liquid metal but not make it almost completely useless past +2 or so. To fix this I’ve pulled the scaling down to 1.33x, which looks like this (zoomed in on the y-axis):

That’s quite a bit better, still a nerf to the frankly very generous scaling from 3.1, but that makes sense as durability on upgraded thrown weapons is significant for a lot longer past +0 now.

Audio Timestamps

This Month there were 19 questions from 10 different patrons.

• 0:24 "Looking back, across all of the updates and things you done with Shattered Pixel Dungeon, what is the one thing you were surprised that you enjoyed making the most?" - Raynuva

• 2:25 "do you think physical merch is ever a possibility?" - radiantchaos

• 4:18 "You mentioned perhaps shops could be more interesting. Did you have anything specific in mind? Shop quest to unlock more options?" - 1-800-thewolf

• 6:56 "i recapture with my pawn! this has turned out to be a bloodthirsty game, how will you continue it?" - radiantchaos

  

• 7:20 "What's your general philosophy on randomness carrying or crushing a run? Or, how do you determine the best balance between random mayhem and guard rails?" - 1-800-thewolf

• 9:28 "whats your favorite enchantment?" – radiantchaos

• 10:28 "What are your thoughts between true random distribution and psuedo-random distribution, and which do you prefer for Shattered Pixel Dungeon?" – Raynuva

  Link to my talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaojiu9syPE

• 13:14 "As a follow-up, what are your thoughts of a system of "every X attacks, the effect triggers"?" - Raynuva

• 14:32 "What are the chances of getting a more thorough warrior rework once those new armor variants eventually come out ( i know this could be a while) ? If so do you have any loose concepts on how that would work?" - Explodingpineapple64

• 15:41 "If you were a class in shattered PD, what would your class specific item be and what would it do? And to follow that up, what two subclasses would you have?" - MAXIBOB

• 17:33 "why are you buying clothes at the soup store?" - radiantchaos

• 17:58 "can you explain the logistics behind it being easier to throw a greataxe across the room than throw a shuriken 1 tile at 10 strength? (ik its for gameplay balance but it would be funny to have lore for it)" - candii.bunni

• 19:00 "Will you now consider removing the ability to throw weapons and armor you can't use due to strength, making dropping your only option" - #1 ring of force stan

• 19:16 "what are your thoughts?" - radiantchaos

• 20:05 "what are you?" - candii.bunni

• 20:25 "to be, or not to be?" - Zrp200

• 20:49 "if you were equipped with anything from your house (or apartment or whatever else you might live in), what enemies do you think you could beat in one-on-one combat?" - radiantchaos

• 21:47 "Any plans or ideas for new challenges?" - 1-800-thewolf

• 23:17 "If you don't add the "speedrun" challenge soon, could you at least add real time spent into run statistics?" - Block Vader