A Veteran's guide to Stoneshard's Mechanics

A comprehensive guide on the mechanics of the game, detailing hidden or not clearly apparent interactions of the systems in Stoneshard.

Introduction

Hello everyone, in this guide I'll be shedding some light on some systems and mechanics present in this game.

Most of this info can be acquired by reading the in game tooltips and brainstorming a little, but some things require a little bit of testing out to get a good feel for them, so this guide is intended to save up some of your time.

Max Health Threshold (MHT)

As stated by the tooltip below, this limits the amount health you can recover while injured. But what does that truly mean?



Well, it means that as you get damaged, your maximum health will decrease in proportion to the amount of Bodypart damage you're taking, and you won't be able to recover more than the limited amount of max health until you've restored your Bodypart's health.



The proportion for each bodypart is the following:

• Head and Torso: -1% MHT per 2.5% of Bodypart Health decreased (-40% at 0 Bodypart Health)
  
• Hands and Legs: -1% MHT per 10% of Bodypart Health decreased (-10% at 0 Bodypart Health)

So, how does you recover your Max Health Threshold? As I've said before you need to restore your Bodypart's health. And how do you do it?

• Natural or artificial health restoration: If you finish your fight, sit down to rest, you'll see that once you've hit your MHT, you'll stop healing but will occasionally see your MHT increase by 1 followed by a 1 health increase to your health.
  
  Why does that happens? It's because any type of health restoration, be it from your natural restoration, items, abilities or anything else, will be converted to Bodypart Health restoration when you are at the Max Health Threshold. That will slowly restore your MHT, bringing you to full health again.
  
  
• Items: Things like healing salves, splints and the surgeon's kit will restore a flat amount of MHT once used on a damaged Bodypart. You can use these to quickly restore your MHT. The stat you should look for in these items is called Injury Treatment
  

Combat applications of the MHT

One thing you might have noticed is that, sometimes, when you take damage in Stoneshard the amount of health left after you take a hit is a little below what one would expect it to be.

After taking 51 dmg, I'm down to 67 health from my base 125 health

What is this? Well, it's the result of the effects of Injuries. Some injuries reduce your Max Health by a certain amount, and that translates to you "taking" more damage than you apparently should've had.

A minor torso injury reduces my MH by 13, bringing the effective damage up to 58

But how does -13 Max health becomes +7 damage taken? Good question, I don't know how the game calculates the damage taken well enough to give you a concrete answer. From a surface level analysis you "take" 50% of the Max health reduction as damage.

This seems to be a consideration only on Max Health reduction from Injuries and Abilities' effects.

So, you should be aware of potentially taking more damage than you were expecting if the damage you take could cause an injury on yourself. This same mechanic applies to enemies, if you can cause an injury to an enemy, they will also "take" more damage than what the log shows to you.

Additional notes: Bodypart Health and Injuries

Bodypart health is a hidden stat in the game, it's a measure of how much damage a Bodypart has to take before you start receiving Injuries. It is based on your Max Health Total (not Threshold).

Check the wiki page on Injuries & Pain[stoneshard.com] for a detailed explanation on Injuries.

So, increasing your Max Health Total will in turn increase your "resistance" to being injured.

Pain Limit

Pain limit is a mechanic that, if I recall correctly, isn't explained anywhere in game.

Simply put, Pain limit is a cap on how much pain you're allowed to have at a certain point in time. At some point you might have noticed that depending on the circunstances your Pain will rapidly decrease, that's mostly likely the work of the Pain limit.


Don't do drugs, kids. Unless you encounter a Ghast, then you'll need this


The Pain limit is capped at 25 when you're at 100% Bodypart condition and will increase as you take Bodypart damage, Injuries as well will greatly increase your Pain limit.

Given that the Pain debuffs can be quite nasty, keeping in mind the role of Pain limit can help you deal with this condition.

Fatigue

Fatigue is a measure of how tired your character is, and as per stated in its tooltip, you'll gather it from doing all sorts of activities and it'll reduce your Max Energy Threshold.

One thing you need to know is that Fatigue is inversely proportional to the amount of Max Energy you have, that is to say that, having greater Max Energy will have you gather Fatigue slower while having lower Max Energy will have you gather Fatigue faster. For that reason, you should really think about your build if you plan to use the heavier armors.

Might be too late to reconsider your choices in life


Another important thing to keep in mind is that the amount of Fatigue generated when you use a Skill or Spell is proportional to the energy cost of that ability. So reducing your ability's cost will also help you lower your Fatigue gain.

In conclusion, if you don't want to have to worry about Fatigue, maintaining Vigor up and building around maintaining a good amount of Max Energy would be ideal.

Additional Note: Magic and Fatigue

Compared to other skills, spells have higher energy costs on average while also having tons of ways to decrease the cooldown of your spells, meaning that you'll be using them more often. This in turn translates into a faster rate of fatigue gain even though both skills and spells have the same proportion of Fatigue Gain (2% of the Total Energy cost of the ability)

Dodge

Dodge offers damage reduction and relative immunity to certain effects if sucessful, it enables a light armored playstyle that can be quite fun, but it has its complexities, like any other system in this game.

Tooltip in game


At some point you might be in the situation where you might ask

I have 100% Dodge due to my gear and abilities, but enemies sometimes still deal full damage to me, why does that happen?

Well, if you take a look into the Accuracy and Dodge tooltips you'll find the following excerpts

My image editing skills surprise me sometimes


So you have to pay attention to if the enemy attacking you has high accuracy, is using an ability that gives themselves a lot of accuracy, is using an ability that reduces your dodge, if the attack is ranged in nature (Arrow, Bolts or Magical projectiles like Jolt), as well as if the attack is classified as AoE (Area of Effect) as these bypass dodge completely. All of those can cause your character to take full damage from an attack.

On the topic of Accuracy reducing Dodge chance you might ask

What if my gear and abilities give me more than 100% Dodge chance, how does it work?

In this case, the game will consider 100% as your dodge chance, anything thing above that isn't considered for combat (but is considered for Buff and Debuff calculations, more on that later).

Finally, you might've noticed this part

• Dodge chance below 0% increases the Accuracy of enemy attacks

Knowing this is very important when you get hit by abilities or receive effects that reduce your dodge, as well as when using heavier armors, all of those will make you more likely to be hit by an enemy.

Fumbles and Dodge

As stated in the Dodge tooltip, dodging will turn a fumbled attack into a miss. Knowing this is an important part of making any dodge related build. Such builds shouldn't rely only on increasing their Dodge chance, but also should try to have a way to reduce enemies' Accuracy and Fumble chances, as that will help keep you even more safe .

Buffs and Debuffs

Buffs and debuffs are quite a prevalent concept in games so you should be aware that they are any temporary (or even sometimes permanent) increase and decrease to your attributes.

Both buffs and debuffs are applied directly to your character and affect it immediately, even if it doesn't immediately shows on the attributes page (edge case of abilities that don't spend a turn).

I slept very well last night


Often people ask if eating something twice would just extend the duration of a buff or if their effects would stack and the answer to that is that all buff and debuff's effects overlap,

Eating two of these will give +1% unholy resistance twice!

Attribute Caps

Something that's necessary to know is that almost every attribute is capped at some value, so you can't increase or decrease it further than the cap. The actual cap varies from attribute to attribute but a good rule of thumb is 75% or 80% for defensive attibutes, like resistances. Offensive attributes vary a lot in regards to their cap, so I recommend searching for it on the wiki.

One key interaction that you need to be aware of is that the cap is only important at the moment the game queries the value of an attribute. What does this mean?

This means that if you have a few buffs that increase a stat past a cap, let's say you used Cauterize with 3 bleeds and gained +90% Bleed Resistance for 240 turns, got hit later with Onrush now reducing your Bleed res by 15%, you would still have 75% Bleed res even though you might have expected to have 65%, given that you were capped at 80%.

This is a very important concept, overstacking an attribute can help deal with debuffs that affect that attribute.

The -Fumble chance here is useful even if you're already at 0% fumble

Status Effects: Daze, Bleed and more

In this section we will consider Status Effects as Daze, Stun, Stagger, Immobilization, Knockback and Bleeding. All of those are effects that can be caused by the inherent properties of weapons, by the stats given to you by weapons, or by abilities that specificly mention them.

One property of those effects is their interaction with Dodges and Fumbles, if you note on the Fumble chance tooltip it mentions it preventing those effects from being applied on a fumbled (or dodged) attack.

You better reduce your fumble chance


This is an important thing to have in mind when making a build, reducing your fumble chance is essential if you rely heavily on applying these types of effects. It's also critical when fighting enemies that can apply them, increasing their fumble chance is a great way of denying them of these effects.

Applying Status Effects

One thing you might be wondering is how are the chances to apply those effects calculated?

It's very simple, it's CHANCE - RESISTANCE, that is to say, if you have 20% Daze chance and the enemy has 10% Control Resistance, you would have a 10% chance of applying Daze to that enemy.

Another thing you might be wondering is what about negative resistance? How does that work?

It's the same as explained before, and because of that, negative resistance increases the chance of applying a Status effect, that is to say, if you have 10% Stagger Chance and the enemy has -5% Move Resistance, you have 15% chance of staggering the enemy.

The last question regarding this interaction would be what if I have 0% Bleed chance and my enemy has -10% bleed resistance? Will they have a chance of bleeding when I attack them?

The short answer is no. The long answer would be that you need at least some amount of a status effect chance to benefit from negative resistance.

You should keep these above 0, but not really

Additional Note: Walls

You might have been in this situation before, you're fighting an enemy and they use the ability Mighty Kick against you, they succeed in hitting and now you're dazed. You check the description of the ability and nowhere it says it should Daze you, what happened?

Well, it's simple, you got knocked back into a wall, when that happens you take a fixed amount of damage (15% of the health of the Furniture/Enemy you've got knocked back into, or 15% of your Max health if what you've hit doesn't have health) as well as getting Dazed.

Knowing this is essential when fighting enemies that can knockback you, you should never fight them with your back against the wall. You can also use this in your favor, if you have a way to knockback enemies, lining them up with a wall will potentially give you the ability to deal extra damage as well as to daze them.

Additional Note: Injuries and Bleeding

Whenever an Injured Bodypart is hit by an attack, that body part has a small chance of bleeding even if the attack doesn't have a chance of causing Bleed. This chance is very small though and if you have a good amount of bleed resistance it should completely prevent you from bleeding in those cases.

Additionally, a Severe Chest Injury has a chance of bleeding every turn.

Enemy Armor Durability

Enemy Armor Durability, differently from your armor's durability, is a multiplier to the protection stat for that enemy. That means that an enemy that has 10 base protection, but currently sits at 50% armor durability, will have only 5 effective protection.

Bring your tin can opener when fighting these guys

Is there a way to know how much damage to the enemy's AD I will do with one attack? Not really, Enemy's AD "health pool" is hidden, there's no way to see it and you can only try to estimate it when attacking. One thing we know though, is that Enemy AD is dependent on their protection stat, meaning that enemies with more protection will take more damage to have their armor destroyed.

Armor Damage and Enemy AD

Armor Damage is a multiplier to your base damage when calculating the effective damage to the enemy's AD. More armor damage means that the enemy's AD will deplete faster.

Armor Penetration and Enemy AD

Armor Pen is how much of the enemy's Protection stat you ignore. Having 20% Armor Pen means that you'll ignore 2 Protection of an enemy that has 10 base Protection.
How does this interact with Enemy AD? Armor Pen considers the effective Protection after Armor Durability is accounted for. So, as an example, an enemy with 10 base Protection, at 50% Armor Durability, while receiving an attack with 20% Armor Pen will have an effective (10 * 0.5 * (1 - 0.2)) = 4 protection.

Armor Pen does nothing while the enemy is at 0% Armor Durability.

Conclusion

This is about it for now. If you want to ask about anything related to the game you can do so in the comments and I'll try to respond, it might also make me remember of something that I need to add to this guide.

If this helped you, don't forget to give the guide a thumbs up.

[Sir Gura]

Ahti, counter chance is just the chance to attack back, they have no effect on the attack that triggered them

[HardWorkingLoner]

Counter chance - if you counter, do YOU get hit or not? Meaning does it work like parry (negate damage and do counterattack) or as thorns (take damage and attack back) ?

[Ashrak]

Amazing Guide! Thank Yout!