Less a rogue-like and more a bizarre and wonderfully demented sandbox, Elona doesn't necessarily have to be played as a dungeon crawler. If you don't fancy dungeon delving, you can always make a pianist who goes from bar to bar earning his wage and avoiding getting gibbed by critics who power throws giant boulders. Perhaps you'll want to get a ranch and a farm and spend your time playing Harvest Moon (the good one), or visit a geneticist who can add extra parts to you or your little girl for a permanent price. Compared to other roguelikes, Elona is almost casual: Death is never permanent should you make it an option and there's always a way to bounce back.
Some features at a glance:
- An actual plotline and sidequests!
- Random events while in a dungeon/town or just by traveling.
- Randomly generated sidequests via notice boards in every town.
- Randomly generated dungeons.
- Player housing and structures such as museums, shops, farms, etc.
- New Game + Mode: a marriage and lineage system where you and your spouse can have a child and pass on that genetic data to the next character you create.
- Companions can join your party by inviting, hiring, buying them as slaves, or just subduing them. Your party size is based on your charisma.
- Material collection/crafting.
- All towns and NPCs are fair game, if you can take them on. There's even a sidequest that involves nuking an entire village.
- Custom portraits and tiles.
- Original soundtrack. Custom music can be added.
- Gamepad support.
Elona+ is what happened when a team of modders took the original Elona's source code and began to add to it extensively, adding several new mechanical systems, an entire continent's worth of new dungeons and plotlines, and even more ways to break and abuse the game systems.
This version of the base game is currently in active development, with releases every couple of weeks; unfortunately, this does not include work on a translation, so a lot of the new content can be rather piecemeal and hard to understand if you don't have the wiki open next to it. The vast majority of the game still retains its translation from the original release, though, and the sheer amount of additions that Elona+ brings to the table mean it's now regarded as the de facto official version. There is very little reason to play Elona base-game with the sheer amount of fixes Elona+ brought in!
Elona+ additions:
- Quicksave and Quickload buttons!
- New continents with more plot to follow.
- An entirely new God, based around commerce and generating platinum coins.
- Special feats based on base class.
- New special actions based on skill levels.
- Retooled experience curve: experience and skill gain has been increased across the board.
- New and retooled skills: Traveling will now increase all the skills of the receiver who is given the stockpiled experience, while Swimming will increase your speed when wet.
- A reworked crafting and alchemy system that makes most crafting skills more useful and adds an alchemy pot with several high-end recipes.
- Shopkeepers can now upgrade items without a scroll, while healers can uncurse items for a small fee to save poor newbies getting stuck in cursed hell.
- Pet Evolution: feed your pet 'heart' items to evolve them into new forms and up their stats and skills.
- Rare monsters that may join your party when you kill them.
- The ability to equip pistols as a melee weapon and pistolwhip people.
- The ability to equip melee weapons as thrown weapons and lob swords at people.
- A limit break meter, culminating in special skills that do largely heinous amounts of damage.
- Hugs!
- A whole host of ways to modify pet AI, from commanding them all to attack or return to fine-tuning their chances of melee or ranged attacks, their distance from you, and their special move usage.
Custom+GX toggle options
EXPANDED RESOLUTION OPTIONS
THE STORY OF THE GAME that was deleted by translators
Settings for text pop-ups/font/duration
Guards teleport you to the questor
Items are placed on your person after accepting delivery quests
Finishing quests move you to the questor
Mouselook and more...
UI tweaks
Show enchant toggle for Objet of Heart
Spell tracking
Skill potential tracking
Filter skill by potential
Show spell stock in tracker
Highlight/filter items
Re-parse Itemlist.txt
Reports museum dupes
Draw stamina bar
Full-size items in inventory
Draw items left and right to reduce overlap
Convenience
Filter items to easily feed pets
Item sprite customization to house blacksmiths
Display Pickpocket shortcut
Gathers items after Party Time quests
Share gold when using Ensemble
One press bash all fruit from trees
One spot Ranch produce
Shops will now sell furniture, books, deeds
Dunk potion on self using [t]
Running on world map
Skip skill training confirmation
Auto-drop opened boxes
Remove over-cast damage confirmation
Shortcut finished quest dialog
Sort spells by type
Returns zombies to DD-Cemetery Key
PAGE 2
Leash temporary allies
Auto dig walls
AI
Improves Act 1 boss' AI
Increased drunk fights at Party Time
Keeps home stayers on the spot
Pets heal other pets with healing rain
Necromancy minions hunt for enemies
Disable summon shadow steps
Allies act independently
Gameplay
Disable autosaves and allow manual save/reloads and turns off rare-loot trigger
Always on rare-loot trigger
Confirm reload text
Reload last save after death
Disable Harvest Moon mode for ranches
Disable chain attack nerf
Disable thirst mechanic
Prevents pissing from fear
Disable stamina loss from attacking
Same for using stairs in Your Home
Revert cooking changes of creating additional product at high levels
Revert boss out-of-sight free healing mechanic
Revert post 2.08 elemental changes
Revert post 2.22 ranged ammo nerf
PAGE2
Disable mob begging for life mechanic
Turn on sandbag training
Increase Dojo EXP gain
Revert post 1.90 weapon skill exp
Disable study days
Disable DESTINY
Revert post 2.13 combat exp
Revert post 2.17 skill exp growth rate
Revert post 2.31 4x XP bonus for low level skills
PAGE3
Disable Curtain Call
Disable skill SP nerfs
Disable multi-attack-critical nerfs
Disable sleep prevention
Disable naps while traveling
Disable Deep-Sea Castle persistence
Allows returning baby versions of pet turn-in quests
Disable Abnormal mode inventory limit
Extra Gameplay
Increased daily Pet Arena attempts
Increased variety of home servants
Increase mob density in nefia
Custom map nefia
Changed job quests and rewards
Disables random custom npcs
Summoning crystals to summon custom npcs
Spawn evolved enemies
Replace socks with kits for Urcaguary Quest
Custom maps in Moongate/Runes have loot
Enable unused text adventure
Allow trading card games to the death
Spells activate weapon enchants
Weaker artifact fusion for blacksmiths
Challenge
Permanent etherwind
Doubling taxes
Speedrun nuking the beggar cave
Pet permadeath
Split monsters split constantly
Etherwind-enhanced ambush spawns
Miscellaneous
Random start for music
Display weather effects
Prevent bump attack
Fist of the North Star melee
Disable cicada noises
Faster fishing animation
CGX spell animations
Display day/night cycles
Draw maps when using map item
Melee weapon swing animation
Load animated tachi-E
Draw Tachi-E on main screen
Draw items with translucency effect
Draw Tag-Team with X-offset
Getting Started
At its core, Elona involves running around a continent building up your skills and stats, slowly gaining in power and cash until you can reach better ways to improve your power and income. Early on, this mostly involves doing things that will give you platinum coins - chiefly town errands and dungeons - and then spending those coins on buying new skills or improving a skill's potential, a percentage value that indicates how efficient your training in a skill is.
There are tutorial NPCs who give you items as you complete each task and finish their tutorial and a tutorial building outside your cave that gives you items when you finish doing their quizzes, based on your level. Once you're done with the tutorial NPCs in your cave, you should leave and proceed to the nearest town, where you can choose a pet to accompany you on your starting adventures. You should probably choose the little girl, because while it might sound pretty iffy, she's the only one out of them with opposable thumbs, the ability to wear armor, and the ability to kick your ass right out of the box.
Links:
[*]Elona+ official wiki (Japanese)
[*]Elona English Wiki
FAQ - Game Tips / Beginner's Guide / Character Creation - First Continent Map - Elona+ Changelog
[*]4chan's Elona Tips pastebin links.
[*]Elona Discord channel: https://discord.com/channels/2083916097 ... 8589353984
[/list]Unlocking debug races:
Open config.txt. Find the line extraRace and change "0" to "1". Start the game and you'll have access to a ton of races, including the deeply broken (and kind of dull) Catgod.
