Potions, Keys, and Hazards | Patreon Weekly #279

Hey Patrons, in this weekly I’ve got an explanation of a fix I have planned for v2.5.4.

Potions, Keys, and Hazards

Despite v2.5 being out for almost a month now, there’s still a couple more things to do before I move on to v3.0 dev. I’m not looking to make any more balance changes, but there are a few other miscellaneous tweaks and bugfixes to make.

One of the more notable fixes I’ve got planned is a final end to cases where a solution potion for a hazard room is locked inside a laboratory room, and the key for that room is inside the hazard room. I’ve been unsure about fixing this for a little while, but a recent uptick in reports has changed my mind.

This can happen only in very specific cases, as I already fixed most cases of this when I made these sorts of potion hazard rooms spawn at most once per floor a while ago. Specifically, it happens due to this ordering:

• Any sort of locked special room is generated, adding a key to the item spawn list.

• Any hazard room is generated, adding a potion to the item spawn, it chooses to use the previously generated key as its reward item.

• A laboratory room is spawned, it adds another key to the spawn and chooses the previously added potion as one of its reward items.

• The player then finds the key generated by step 3 first (likely on the floor somewhere), and uses it to open the locked special room from step 1. The key for the laboratory room is now inside of the hazard room from step 2, but that hazard room’s solution potion is in the laboratory room.

This exposes some greater quibbles with how the game adds items into level generation to begin with, as you can see it’s very order-dependant, but for now I want a quick fix with minimal disruption to levelgen. I’ve decided to simply change laboratory rooms to only look for potions of strength in the item spawning list, and otherwise freshly generate a potion every time.