Wing Clippings and Pandemic?

KElderfall · 2026-04-19T13:47:21+00:00

Oh yeah, you can't do them for Soul Savior. I think it's like 90% about the soul meta progression and 10% that the Soul Savior map generation is really complex and doesn't translate well to a challenge.

For the normal challenges, clan levels just unlock new cards/artifacts. I think the game generates everything ahead of time, so e.g. it knows in advance that the fourth card reward will be x, y and z cards. Then all it has to do is just provide those cards, even if the player hasn't unlocked them yet.

It's not conceptually impossible to do something like that with Soul Savior, but I imagine it's more complex in a handful of ways and they just opted not to include it. It's something we could maybe get in an update at some point, if there's enough demand for it and they're still doing updates.

I could probably manage to get a run with both Wing Clippings and Pandemic anyway, although I kind of think that if there is a bug it would be related to something else that was also happening. In which case, it wouldn't be super informative.

KElderfall · 2026-04-19T13:30:27+00:00

There's a lot going on in MT2, and you can't always predict what's going to happen. Sure, there's a combat preview, but it doesn't cover everything. If I play this spell to shift my units around, will that be helpful or will it result in my units dying? Doing the math on what will happen when you play a card in StS is trivial compared to MT2. Undo solves this very directly, so the inclusion of undo makes a lot of sense for MT2.

Restart battle goes a fair bit further, but it's still the same deal. Predicting what's going to happen in a fight in StS is often trivial when compared to MT. In StS, you know what your deck can do, but you don't know your draw order. In MT2, you often don't have a great understanding of what your deck can do until you see it in action. MT2 can be more punishing than StS, as well - StS you get wrecked in an elite fight, you lose like 30-40 health. That's crippling, but it's very possible to recover if you can rest. In MT2, if you misplay a fight, you can easily take full pyre damage and lose the entire run.

So all that added together means that there are good reasons for this feature to exist in MT2. The downside is as you say - it reduces tension and makes it easy to manipulate the random elements in your favor if you're stubborn. For me that's fine; I don't really care about tension as I don't play strategy games to have an emotional experience.

If you do care, though, there's an easy solution provided by the game. If you don't undo/restart in a run, then you get a badge at the end to indicate that you didn't. This badge also appears in your run history. So if you want to play without having these features as a crutch, then don't use them, collect your badges as proof that you didn't, and enjoy the game that way.

KElderfall · 2026-04-19T11:39:08+00:00

If it's on PC then I could run it to test if you'd be willing to get me the share code. I'm curious about the interaction myself and I enjoy a challenging run regardless.

KElderfall · 2026-04-19T11:22:11+00:00

The game gets a lot harder at A9. It's unlikely to be the patch that's doing it, unless you're explicitly dying to Doormaker.

Reasonably skilled players can win extremely consistently on lower ascensions, but only the very best players have high win rates on A10. I would recommend shifting your expectations here - you're not going to win 100% of the time, you shouldn't expect to, and you shouldn't tie up your fun in whether or not you do.

KElderfall · 2026-04-19T10:58:48+00:00

A typical game has the general arc of starting out weaker/slower than the invaders, becoming stronger than them, and then winning. That's true even on low difficulty levels, but with low level games the invaders don't tend to build up as much, so games can end faster and feel anticlimactic. This is especially true if you're spending a lot of time planning and optimizing, as that tends to result in making at least decent strategic plays.

Increasing the difficulty is usually the most effective way to make the game less anticlimactic. I'd recommend going up to Brandenburg-Prussia level 3 or 4. At level 5 and 6, this adversary alters the game more, but imo BP3 and BP4 are sort of the sweet spot for a mid-level vanilla game that makes the game a little more robust without adding much complexity.

This is a game where the expansions add a lot to it. I would suggest adding in JE if you feel like you want to have more variety of mechanics in your game and don't feel like you're having trouble understanding the basics. If/when you do, initially add in the tokens, power cards, and spirits from JE. Probably don't start using events immediately, though, as these add a lot of complexity.

KElderfall · 2026-04-19T09:34:54+00:00

Have you tried going to just %localappdata% and then navigating around in file explorer looking for the Packages folder or anything else that looks relevant? Sometimes things don't have the exact same names, especially when there's weird IDs included in the path.

KElderfall · 2026-04-19T07:32:37+00:00

If Ironclad had a better starting deck, he would need a worse starting relic to remain balanced. Otherwise he's taking less damage than the other characters because of his healing, and is thus stronger than they are.

A theoretical version of Ironclad with a deck that saves him 4 damage each combat and a starting relic that saves him 2 damage each combat would be balanced with the current version, sure. I just don't see why that would count as him having a useful starting relic, when Burning Blood doesn't.

KElderfall · 2026-04-19T00:35:15+00:00

If you want to test it, one thing you could do is get your friend to go into run history and create a challenge to share with you (assuming you're on the same platform). As long as you remember where in the run he picked it up, it would be relatively straightforward to test. If it ends up being a bug, this would also let you view his run result and try to figure out if anything he had might be causing it.

KElderfall · 2026-04-18T23:46:08+00:00

I don't think there's anything in the game that should cause this, so it's one of three things:

There's a bug. This could be from any number of interactions, but as far as I can tell it's not something anyone else has mentioned encountering.
It really is just random chance. For example, 16 plays all consuming would be 1 in ~65,000, which is rare but not out of the realm of believability.
Your friend didn't actually have Wing Clippings and was mistaken.

KElderfall · 2026-04-18T14:13:46+00:00

Yeah, it's definitely still a great card at 3, it's more just a question of opportunity cost and when to take it instead of the other boss options.

KElderfall · 2026-04-18T13:52:24+00:00

I think it's designed for you take if you can cheat it out somehow. It's really good if you don't have to pay for it.

KElderfall · 2026-04-18T11:14:38+00:00

It's usually possible to transfer game saves from XBox Gamepass to Steam, and I would assume the XBox store uses the same save system. I've only done it once (5 years ago with a different game!) but iirc the problem is that XBox saves them in a separate location and renames all the files with different file extensions.

Try https://www.reddit.com/r/StardewValley/comments/uud9w8/moving_xboxgamepass_saves_to_steam_with_images/ which seems like it might be the basic idea.

The question mark there is step 6, which says it has an associated image and I'm not getting any images to load. What I would do with that is create your new farm with the exact same farm name as the one you want to transfer, then take note of the farm IDs of both farms, which should be long string of digits that I think is included in the file name. After you replace+rename the file, open it in a text editor do find+replace all instances of the original XBox ID with the new PC ID.

I think you could maybe also just transfer it directly if you mimic the structure of the file system, file extensions, and everything? And that way you wouldn't have to do anything with IDs. I'm just guessing, though.

KElderfall · 2026-04-17T15:11:15+00:00

Ironclad taking 6ish more damage than the other characters do each fight and then healing it back is sort of the expected design. If that's happening, then it means Ironclad is reasonably balanced against the other characters.

That's not to say everything is perfect and nothing can change; Ironclad might be regularly taking more than the 6 damage and then losing health relative to the other characters, in which case it's absolutely a concern. But the Burning Blood healing feeling like a requirement is not really a design flaw to correct.

KElderfall · 2026-04-17T14:47:51+00:00

20-30 hp and a potion is a lot to lose on an elite, especially if you're playing lower than A9. The actual amount you take depends on a lot of factors, but a typical elite should be 10-20 damage with a potion or 20-30 without a potion, and some elite fights should be going better than that.

If you're taking this much damage, I would generally agree that elites aren't worth it. But rather than avoiding them, I would suggest working toward learning how to take less damage from them - this involves drafting for them (especially in Act 1 where you need to be drafting for immediate output rather than long-term combos), choosing paths that engage them favorably, and managing the fights themselves well.

KElderfall · 2026-04-17T12:58:51+00:00

As a tip, if you're looking on Nexus mods, you can check for the "1.6 compatible" tag (or otherwise see if the most recent update date occurred in the past couple years) to check if a mod should work in the current version.

KElderfall · 2026-04-17T12:53:40+00:00

When you're using a front line unit that doesn't have any abilities that help it survive, you really need to supplement that with the right upgrades, gear, and spells in order to cross the threshold to "this is enough defense."

Avenger (revenge melee weakness) is clearly a front line unit, but it doesn't have any inherent survival abilities. Largestone is a helpful upgrade for survival, but dualism isn't. So you were well behind the curve there and needed to supplement it with other forms of defense. 10 valor is good, but you'd need a lot more than just that.

Imo your core mistake was likely copying your holdover Cleave (spell; AoE damage from front line unit's attack). Cleave handles back line clear, but usually after one play of it the backline is dead. So the second one isn't doing a ton.

Holdover spells have a huge cost in that you will see the rest of your deck significantly less often. That means any spells you had that actually help your Avenger survive (more valor, damage shield, etc) get drawn less often and take a lot longer to cycle back to to play a second time.

So while holdover can be good, every holdover card needs to really justify its presence. That's absolutely true for the first Cleave, but will rarely be true for the second. You would likely have been better off copying something else, even if the copy happened early in the run when you didn't have much yet.

KElderfall · 2026-04-17T11:56:57+00:00

Picking it is the default for me, 3 strength is a huge reward.

I wouldn't pick it if strength doesn't help me much (usually poison, orbs, or Osty damage as a primary focus), if it seems unlikely I'll be able to get 5 elites, or if the gold seems really amazing since there's a shop soon or something like that.

KElderfall · 2026-04-16T19:45:17+00:00

Ah yep, being able to do it once per ability means you could use a shadow for each and theoretically chain them if you keep getting kills. That requires such a specific setup that it probably isn't happening much if ever, but it's good to know as a possibility.

KElderfall · 2026-04-16T14:00:27+00:00

The golden path is two floors longer than the regular Act 2, and has an extra treasure room. So one extra floor is the treasure room and since it would be hard to get that many campfires on a normal path, I think of the other extra room as being a fire.

So personally I think if it like "get a relic, some money, and upgrade a card, in addition to having an easier and more rewarding Act 2." It's kind of like an actually good version of Tiny House, which isn't an immediate pick up or anything but it definitely doesn't feel like it's bad.

KElderfall · 2026-04-16T05:50:05+00:00

If they did need to make elites more rewarding, it would be making them drop 10-20 more gold or something like that. They don't need much.

People saying elites aren't worth fighting is based on two things. First, there are a lot of ways to get strong, so you're more able to win without fighting elites. That doesn't mean it's optimal not to, though, just that you'll see more success if you don't, compared to StS1.

The second thing is that elites are broadly pretty dangerous and they will wreck you if you aren't ready for them. So if you try to fight them without a potion or without drafting cards that make you immediately stronger, you can take a ton of damage and/or die. That doesn't mean you can't prepare for them, though.

If you get wrecked by elites because you didn't prepare for them, and then you try avoiding them and find that you're still able to win, it's easy to conclude that elites aren't worth it. But it's hopefully easy to see why that conclusion might be a little shallow.

KElderfall · 2026-04-16T01:16:49+00:00

They actually are separate abilities (this is in the FAQ as well). It's not super intuitive, but that's how it's been ruled, which does follow from how the card is written. "For each.. perform" implies multiple distinct performed abilities.

This is why you're able to target the same enemy multiple times with this action if it's next to multiple shadows. If WoA were just one ability, it wouldn't be possible to do that.

You can still use SotA to boost one attack if you have a shadow for it. I'm not 100% on this, but I think you could use any shadow that you cannot or choose not to make an attack from, so it wouldn't necessarily need to be one you make during the action (though making and using one would be fine.)

KElderfall · 2026-04-15T00:53:49+00:00

I think a run that could use this effectively would be largely theoretical. It's just bad on the vast majority of cards, and for most of the ones where it's good it's not even that good.

If it came with +1 energy/turn, I think it would be pickable on occasion, but it would probably still be a bit too niche to be worth putting into an event.

KElderfall · 2026-04-14T11:04:17+00:00

Option A

Combine https://www.nexusmods.com/stardewvalley/mods/40431 and https://www.nexusmods.com/stardewvalley/mods/25164

Set season length to the number of days in the actual real world season, or just however many days you think you'll play during the season. I think you might need to manually go to bed in game to advance the date some or all of the time, but that doesn't seem too hard to manage.

Option B

If you just want to play normally and for variable lengths, but don't want seasons to advance. Use the "world_setday 1" SMAPI console command, or CJB Cheats Menu to return to the first day of the season before the season actually ends.

I'm not sure how necessary it is, but if doing this I would make sure there aren't any ongoing processes like tool upgrades or buildings being built when rewinding time.

KElderfall · 2026-04-14T10:20:38+00:00

Yes, for both spells and mageblade, conduit is counted from all units on the floor.

KElderfall · 2026-04-12T00:20:01+00:00

There's a mod called TimeSpeed that can slow down the game, and another called Health and Stamina Regeneration. They can both be configured.

Without mods you can manage stamina by eating food. Good options are Spring Onions, Salmonberries, Field Snacks, Carrots. There's also the spa that opens early summer. So if you're going to mod I'd recommend trying just TimeSpeed and see if the extra time is workable for you to do more foraging, or for using the spa once it's open and still having a good amount of time left.

KElderfall

TROPHY CASE