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 grab a gene machine to start experimenting on how many limbs you can give your little girl or give her dragon strength. 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 your skills as you move around the world map, and is nearly mandatory, 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 buttwhip 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 additions that I know of WIP
EXPANDED RESOLUTION OPTIONS
Settings for running, running on the overworld, font sizes, character text pop-ups for attacks/ailments/evades/hexes/etc. and their duration
Toggles of enchantment strength for holding Objet of Heart
Tracking of spells, potentials, stock
Pickpocket shortcut
Museum dupe checks
Feed options for pets
Blacksmiths can change item sprites in Your Home
Item highlight list
Throw potion at self with [t]
Reload last save at death
One press skill training
Auto-drop opened chests (careful of item overflow)
Remove over-cast prompts
Party Time item gathers
Pets may heal other pets
Pets share gold when using Ensemble
Pet permadeath in Loss Mode
Enables F2 save reloads at cost of auto-saves
Bash fruit trees in one hit
Organize ranch produce in one spot
Shops can sell furniture, red books, and deeds
Deep-Sea Castle only resets items with a cooldown
Sandbagged monsters give experience
Removes naps when traveling
Harvest Moon Mode for ranches where terrible things happen to animals
Turns off the increased player XP gains post version 1.90
Turn off study days
Turn off DESTINY
Turn off Curtain Call which spawns kills you dead enemies after 10000 attacks
Turn off chain attacks doing less damage over multiple hits
Turns off the anti-sleep effects of coffee and tobacco
Summons and split monsters give XP
Stairs in Your Home won't use stamina
Sets the number of daily Pet Arena bouts
Bigger variety of Home servants to hire
Disables the stamina cost when attacking or casting
Turn off the thirst mechanic
Custom AI to teach pets spells and spacts
Makes the Act 1 boss difficult
More drinking and fighting during Party Time (use with extreme caution)
Random starts for music
Weather effects in all locations
Confirm reload with F2
Keeps home stayers in place
Turns off bump attacking by accident
Fist of the North Star Mode
Disables the cicadas
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.
Removed some things that are no longer working and I'll check for anything else that needs work.