Part 45: Encountering

Side Course 4: Encountering

Alright, what's the next mechanic to talk about? Uh... encounters and how they're determined? Well that's a small one, sure. It's a pretty simple system, as you walk around the labyrinth, you fill up the encounter orb, going from blue to green to yellow to red and then you get an encounter! Of course, there's a bit more to it, so let's go over the first step.



This is a simple text representation of B14F, letting you easily make out the shapes of the islands. Each number is a tile on the floor and how much it advances the ORB. Dashes are walls, or indeed, the edges of the map, while dots are tiles that don't increase the orb, such as boss areas, or stairs, treasure chests, impassable areas that aren't walls, etc. So, every tile we walk on on this floor will increase the rate in some way, but it's all by different amounts. So tiles where all the Killclaws lurk have increased rates, as well as the island with the Muckdile. Even little things, such as going around the top left island results in drastically different numbers. Of course, the only way to see this for yourself is to see how the colours change in the orb, but that's not particularly useful, since if you walk through enough high numbers quickly enough, you can skip over colours, such as going from blue to red.



With your encounter, what next? Well, depending on the tile you enter the encounter depends on what you'll encounter. The game has hundreds of different groupings and this floor has 5: 5F, 60, 61, 62 and 63. These are put into chunks that correspond to how you're progressing through the floor, so a wide open floor with lots of different directions isn't a great example, but you can see on other floors you'll have one encounter table by the stairs, the next one further into the floor, then another by the shortcut, then another before the next stairs. For this floor, you can see you'll find the same group in different places, such as 63, which is Muckdile island, by the gathering point and up by the optional area to get the Violet Key.



Each tile grouping has a few different encounters you can encounter. Encounter. I might as well show off all steps of the process, since you can see that different groupings can have the chance of producing the same encounter, so it doesn't always change depending where you are on the floor, such as groups 5F and 62 having the same 30% chance of encounter 70. All groups have 3 different encounters, though the chances always change.



And finally, what each of the encounters lead to. Might seem familiar from the update, but it also shows the limitations of what you'll encounter, so you'll never face a Cutcrab and a Vampbat at the same time. But with 3 encounters per table, depending on where you encounter something, you could face anything at all, meaning you might never be safe. Such as just before the stairs to B15F, group 61, which could be encounters 73, 74 or 75, a chance of fighting Woodbats, Redclaws, Moriyanas or Cutcrabs, nearly every enemy on the floor.