Custom Seeds! | Patreon Weekly #150

Hey Patrons!

Firstly, here are the results from Patreon Poll #28:
Curse Improvements:                    54%
Harder Ascension Route:             54%
Item Rework / Addition:                42%
Interface Shops:                               38%
Further Alchemy Streamlining: 23%
The final result of this poll was notably different than the public numbers would indicate. A harder ascension route in particular was a lot more popular among silver patrons than it was among gold+. Based on these results, I’m going to try to work on 2-4 curse improvements and some slightly more basic ascension improvements for v1.3.0.

Also, next week’s weekly will have an audio Q&A segment! Feel free to ask questions either here or on the Patreon discord.

There’s also a new Shattered Secrets this week, covering some potential new rewards from the blacksmith.

In this weekly, I’m going to share the progress I’ve made toward custom seeded runs in v1.3.0!

Entering Custom Seeds

The way seeds work is fairly straightforward. When the game generates the dungeon, a lot of purely random calculations are involved, but if they’re given a numerical ‘seed’, then these calculations always give the same result. So, if a particular seed gets plugged into the game before the dungeon is generated then the game will always generate the same dungeon!

Currently the game generates a random seed for each dungeon, but in v1.3.0 I’m going to add a little button when starting a new game that lets the player enter their own custom seed! Games with custom seeds with have the depth indicator changed to green and won’t be eligible for badges or the rankings screen. I’m also adding the game’s seed to the hero info, runs in progress, and rankings windows for all runs, even regular ones.

Each seed is expressed to the player as nine uppercase english letters, with optional dashes in between for readability. This makes it easy to share and copy seeds (three groups of three letters, each letter looks unique), but still allows for a total of about 5.5 trillion different combinations.

The game also lets the user enter whatever they want into the textbox (e.g a number, name, or place), and then quietly converts it to the uppercase letter format. Numbers are translated quite literally. For example, 0 becomes AAA-AAA-AAA, 1 becomes AAA-AAA-AAB, and 26 becomes AAA-AAA-ABA. Other text is ‘hashed’ to produce a number that is then translated to a seed. As an example, ‘Shattered Pixel Dungeon’ becomes KHR-LYL-DZJ.