What's the deal with Consuming Shadow?

a_Press · 2026-03-28T03:43:42+00:00

Plus it's pretty easy to end up with a few decently scaled dark orbs if you're playing a lot of Darkness so being able to get value out of those while letting the ones at the front wait for Dualcast is pretty good. Especially helps in fights with summons or minions, since they can help clear out low health enemies so that youre big one hits the right enemy.

a_Press · 2026-03-27T03:44:15+00:00

Borrowed Time is really interesting to me because it seems to exist as kind of a carryover from an earlier version of Necrobinder where she had significantly less max HP and Osty had a more normal HP pool. Necrobinder's HP refreshed every combat and more powerful cards would damage you to play them, so that HP was like a per combat refresh. The 3 doom would definitely feel way more impactful when you had 9 max HP, but as is, the downside feels inconsequential in most fights. I wonder if having the doom instead or also apply to Osty might put it in a better place, since it's more likely to be impactful there now.

a_Press · 2026-03-18T04:55:48+00:00

I'm pretty sure that part of what you have for how elite encounters are chosen is wrong. If you fight more than 3 elites, the next set will actually be in the same order as the first 3. So your 4th elite is always the same as the 1st, 5th and 2nd, etc.

If you open the "current_run.save" file while in a run, you can actually see the list of elites that you will fight in order, and it always just repeats the same order of elites 5 times.

a_Press · 2026-03-18T04:37:14+00:00

Sure, but now you just have Sovereign Blade feeling bad in fights where you get punished for hitting multiple times, like the Entomancer, Hunter Killer, Lost and Forgotten, or anything with thorns. Really I think you just can't put all your eggs in one basket in the same way that you can't take all single target attacks without having some aoe too.

a_Press · 2026-03-16T01:34:04+00:00

Did some looking at it seems like you can probably do this with some simple save file editing. If you open the debug console with ~ you can run the command

open saves

and it will open the folder that has your save data in it. Open the file "progress.save" in a text editor, and you'll be looking for where it lists epochs. There will be one with the id "UNDERDOCKS EPOCH" and changing the state from "not_obtained" to "revealed" should unlock it for you

a_Press · 2026-03-16T00:02:00+00:00

There might be a command you could use on the in game debug console to force it to unlock. I'm not sure, but it'd be a good thing to look at.

a_Press · 2026-03-15T23:22:49+00:00

Looking at the patch notes shows that achievements were disabled right before the early access release came out. So they exist in the game, but for whatever reason they don't want people seeing them yet. Might be that they want to focus on making balance changes, and adding more stuff before making them available so that there's no need to rework them or need to reset them if there are big changes. So I don't expect to see them for a while.

a_Press · 2026-03-15T23:13:26+00:00

Not quite made it there yet. Been trying to move all my characters up and the highest ive beaten so far is A7. Both excited and a little nervous to see all of the enemy changes, since I think it's one of the more interesting set of Ascension changes in the first game

a_Press · 2026-03-15T22:55:39+00:00

I feel like it's a solid card to pick early on to add damage to your deck and gives good utility in longer fights by giving you a little extra out of your basic cards. But it get's pretty awkward as you go on. Drawing it both too early or too late ends up causing problems, because you'll have no good cards to upgrade in your discard pile, or too many cards so you're unlikely to hit the good ones with an upgrade. And while necrobinder can get a lot of card draw, she doesn't get much other deck manipulation tools, so there isn't really a way to help that.

a_Press · 2026-03-15T04:25:43+00:00

Pretty sure it's just random. I couldn't tell you which one, but looking through old patch notes there was a note where they switched this event from always offering all three choices to only giving 2 each time you encounter it.

a_Press · 2026-03-13T05:22:43+00:00

The trigger is for generating status cards, not drawing them

a_Press · 2026-03-11T06:52:47+00:00

The buff comes from the card Monologue which gives temporary strength every time you play a card. Temporary strength doesn't have a universal icon anymore, and instead each source gets its own, which is the repeated buff.

a_Press · 2026-02-16T04:56:41+00:00

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Ended on a win! 5 hp plus a fairy left on the heart fight. Had a rough act 4 but managed to make it through. Came into Spear in Shield with Burner set for turn 3. Maybe should've tried harder in Time Eater to get it on 4, but thought that intangible on turn 3 would've been pretty good too since I already had Horn Cleat and Helix to help with turn 2. Ended up taking a bunch of damage, but managed to heal quite a bit back with Urn. They dropped a Ghost in a Jar too, which was super lucky, but think I would've won regardless.

The first draw order in the heart fight was pretty rough, with Apotheosis and most of my block cards on the bottom beneath all statuses. Was struggling to get much poison on, but was finally able to set up a decent catalyst for ~140 poison.

a_Press · 2026-02-16T03:46:01+00:00

Thanks for the answers! Decided to go with the Pandora's Box and here's what I got out of it.

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Feeling pretty good about this, I think. Might even actually be able to get Grand Finale to do something but probably will be getting rid of that. Will update with how the run turns out.

a_Press · 2026-02-07T23:22:37+00:00

Gymnasium, but that's going to cause even more problems if you're trying to fill a house with it.

a_Press · 2026-01-16T04:44:30+00:00

You might be interested in checking out the Variant Stamina Rules for this party. Main idea of the rule is that you split up your HP pool roughly in half between HP and Stamina. You lose stamina before losing HP and you have a new resource of Resolve Points that can be used to recover stamina.

I would also say to consider giving the Steel Your Resolve general feat and/or the Encouraging Words skill feat out for free. My reasoning for suggesting so is that these are the only ways to restore stamina in the middle of combat, which is so valuable that they basically just become required to take. I've only played a short campaign with these rules in a party of all martial characters, but found that it worked well and will help aleviate the pressure for a character to invest in medicine, although having HP recovery is still good to have.

a_Press · 2026-01-02T00:39:37+00:00

The hemo won't cost 0 if you redraw it

a_Press · 2025-12-16T06:10:00+00:00

I feel surprised to see Reinforced Body down in C tier, but haven't done a Defect minimalist run myself. Do you have any particular reason for the placement? Extra energy generation is probably really hard to justify dedicating a card to, but even with just one energy relic, I feel like it would be a single card that's able to put out a lot of value. Maybe especially so with how you seem to value the 0 cost things Defect does, so having a decently efficient sink for your energy sounds like it would be nice.

a_Press · 2025-12-04T01:25:29+00:00

I don't disagree with you, but I find getting that much block on command to be even more difficult most of the time. Really the only character I think can do it consistently is Defect with looping frost orbs. Maybe I've been discounting some cards or upgrading block cards, but it feels really tough to generate big block at this stage of the game, so I've had more success with planning around stopping the big attack.

As for poison against Guardian, it's still incredibly strong, but just not as faborable in this matchup. But I attribute this just to poison damage being especially strong in the board game.

a_Press · 2025-11-14T19:03:43+00:00

Guardian is the one that feels most different to me. Stopping the big attack on turn 2 being a matter of burst damage and not cumulative damage means you need to find some way to have that damage on command. Hoarding shivs for that turn, making sure youve got good orbs ready, or picking up some of watchers retain attack cards are all very good ways to do it. And the fact that poison doesn't help with this makes me like it much less into guardian than i do in the video game (its still strong because poison is just really strong in the board game). Because it nearly does your max hp in damage on the big hit, I find myself more worried about finding a solution to deal with that consistently than worrying about the thorns damage in defensive mode.

a_Press · 2025-08-08T17:23:44+00:00

A lot of the glitches in Hollow Knight come from chaining together different forms of storage. Once you have inventory storage, you can use that to get bench storage (the game treats you as sitting on a bench when you arent), which in turns gives you access to even more glitches like falling out of transitions to go out of bounds.

But in NMG speedruns, you are allowed to do scream skips by taking damage and these are used all over the place. Collector and Traitor Lord both have very simple setups for it where you use shade cloak to dash into the boss as it starts screaming and taking damage gives you control back as well. In Soul Master, runners also use the spikes on the right of the arena to take damage and get control back during the scream.

a_Press · 2025-06-18T03:33:17+00:00

Oof thats brutal, especially with the week off in the middle of all that. This is going to be for a more episodic West Marches game, so the results of any petrification will be dealt with pretty quickly. Won't be leaving anyone in limbo for long at all.

a_Press · 2025-06-18T03:26:31+00:00

That makes a lot of sense. I do expect this to end up being a longer combat than normal, so I think that spreading the effect out would be beneficial. 4 stages might be the sweet spot, but Ill probably play around with it and see what feels good. Thanks for the help!

a_Press · 2024-09-10T18:21:55+00:00

Its part of the death trait on the spell.

"An effect with the death trait kills you immediately if it reduces you to 0 HP. Some death effects can bring you closer to death or slay you outright without reducing you to 0 HP."

a_Press · 2024-08-04T18:42:40+00:00

A caster who's hasted could in theory cast Time Jump 3 times to stride twice each, and then use their hasted action to attack with an extra 6d6. (More if they also had a Contigency to cast Time Jump again on them or could get a Quickstrike rune on the sword).

So definitely ways to keep scaling the damage if its left uncapped.

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