Endless mode: shovel question

[TowerWizard]

Can I find Smiling Mask by digging with the Shovel during endless? I am floor 350+ and am wondering if I should give up the search, because unless I find it, eventually the curses are going to be impossible to remove, since they cost more and more in the shops to remove.

Also, Peace Pipe is locked, since I did pick up Girya (and you can only have two rest site relics, apparently).

[LHGreen]

If you just grab a few Mind Blast+ cards, it won't matter, and the curses will actually help you.

[TowerWizard]

My deck contains 30 cards: 15 Limit Break, 4 Apparition, 3 Offerings, and some attacks and other crap. This way, I can often get to 500 strenght or more round 1, and then kill all enemies. I cannot remove the crap cards, since removing cards are so expensive, so I opted at making the odds of drawing Limit Break higher by having a lot of them.

So, back to the question, can I find Smiling Mask?

[LHGreen]

Originally posted by TowerWizard:

My deck contains 30 cards: 15 Limit Break, 4 Apparition, 3 Offerings, and some attacks and other crap. This way, I can often get to 500 strenght or more round 1, and then kill all enemies. I cannot remove the crap cards, since removing cards are so expensive, so I opted at making the odds of drawing Limit Break higher by having a lot of them.

So, back to the question, can I find Smiling Mask?

FOUR Apparition? Not five or three, but four? Wtf?

Anyway, yeah, your best bet is to do something like bottle a Searing Blow or get a few Mind Blasts or something like that, so that you can guarantee a kill against anything on turn 1 once the curses inevitably overtake your deck and the blights weigh you down completely. Using a Smiling Mask to remove cards is just an exercise in futility. If you're trapped in, like, a giant cistern or something, with a massive spout of water coming down from above, you can try to swim up the waterfall, or you can wait for the rising water level to carry you to a point where you can get out. But only one of those things has an actual, feasible chance of working.

But, if you insist on having it anyway, then yeah, you should be able to dig it up at some point. No reason why it would suddenly stop appearing. You could also just buy it from a shop or find it from chests or elites. When you start seeing those little metal bands, that's how you know that there are no more relics (of that rarity) to find, so unless you've started seeing those, you should still have it open as an option. If you want to get it sooner, start prioritizing elite fights, rest sites, shops, and (if you have the tiny chest relic) event rooms more. You should run into it eventually. You can also get the Peace Pipe for free removals, and bypass the problem.

[TowerWizard]

I removed one apparition.

I mean, it is just 3 added curses per restart. Just 1 per floor. With the Smiling mask or the Peace Pipe, I could easily remove more than one card per floor. I don't get how that is futile.

The Circlets have appeared for some time. No more chests, and elites have stopped giving relics. Sometimes, though, I don't get a circlet, but get one of the few relics I have not picked, like Living Branch. It is really weird, I have no idea how the logic behind the circlets are... Like you said, it should show up eventually, but it really seems hard to find...

[LHGreen]

Originally posted by TowerWizard:

I removed one apparition.

...

...

Why? Like, that seems kind of counterproductive, in general.

Originally posted by TowerWizard:

The Circlets have appeared for some time. No more chests, and elites have stopped giving relics. Sometimes, though, I don't get a circlet, but get one of the few relics I have not picked, like Living Branch. It is really weird, I have no idea how the logic behind the circlets are... Like you said, it should show up eventually, but it really seems hard to find...

Well, circlets mean that you've gotten all the relics you can for that rarity, and there's no more left. There's six types of relics you can acquire during a run (common, uncommon, rare, boss, shop, and event. The seventh type, starter, isn't something you can get during a run, strictly speaking), and each time you get a relic in that group where you already have one of each relic in that group, you get a circlet instead. Some events and things will tell you which rarity of relic you're going to get, and if you get a circlet, it means you collected all of that type, or that no more of that type of relic will drop. I don't know of any blights/modifiers that might cause that second thing to happen, but I think I remember something about certain specific relics no longer being available in endless after a certain point. I don't remember which ones, or how it actually worked, though. Only thing I remember for certain is that I read somewhere that if you trade your starting relic for a boss relic at the beginning of a run, and it's not the "upgraded" version of the starter relic, you can't get that starting relic in the run.

[TowerWizard]

With drawing like 8 cards round 1, and having gambling chip, and 30 cards with three cards that draw five more cards, it seemed that 4 apparitions was enough to almost guarantee to draw one round 1. Thats the reasoning behind that removal. Almost no fights take more than 1 round at this point, anyway.

Yeah, so the Smiling Mask must be unavailable by this point, then... I don't like "hidden" rules like that, where things change without it being stated anywhere. Thanks for the info, though!

[LHGreen]

Originally posted by TowerWizard:

Yeah, so the Smiling Mask must be unavailable by this point, then...

Not necessarily. It just means that it might be, and I'm not even remotely sure about that, and sorry but, honestly, I just don't want to check around to see what the actual mechanic is.

[Robin]

afaik you generate a string of relics at the start of a run that just loops over and over, replacing every relic you already picked with that replacement thing you get in endless, so yeah eventually if you go through enough relics you'll see smiling mask again, so I guess visit every shop, kill every elite and dig at every fireplace to speed that up is you best bet

[LHGreen]

Originally posted by Robin:

afaik you generate a string of relics at the start of a run that just loops over and over, replacing every relic you already picked with that replacement thing you get in endless, so yeah eventually if you go through enough relics you'll see smiling mask again, so I guess visit every shop, kill every elite and dig at every fireplace to speed that up is you best bet

Ah, okay. That's interesting, I wasn't aware it worked quite like that.