A Better Lab

This mod is meant to redesign the Event "Lab" into something more interesting for the player while maintaining the core design aspects and theme of the base event.

The Event "Lab" has its options reworked. Now the event allows to player to choose from a handful of different potion lab related actions. There are also a handful of unique special interactions if the player has specific relics when entering the event.

The normal option still exists, but has been tweaked to scale with the number of potion slots the player has.

A second option has been added to brew a custom potion. The player will choose from a series of options to combine multiple potion effects into one super potion.

A third option has been added to allow the player to sacrifice HP for the relic, Chemical X. If the player already owns that relic, they will instead have the option to trade it for a new relic, Chemical Y, which will give the player many potions over time.

There are also a couple more smaller interactions that I will leave for the player to discover.

The standard event is a fairly well balanced, but simple event. The player gets a few free potions and moves on. There isn’t anything inherently wrong with this, but the event could do so much more with the theme of finding an abandoned potion laboratory. The decision making space of this event is small, and as such it can be somewhat uninteresting to find instead of a more fun event. Additionally, while potions can be useful, they are such a common reward that they often feel unexciting to receive as a reward.

With this in mind, "A Better Lab" strives to reimagine the event by creating more choices for the player. Now, the player will hopefully have some interesting decisions to think about when engaging with the event, in addition to the choices available being more exciting to begin with.

One clear goal for the event was to add more interactions with the potion related relics in the game. Potions as a mechanic are a bit more forgotten about compared to the core battle mechanics of the game, so they can feel a bit bare. Thus, having more interaction between the potion related tools that do exist would increase the potential excitement of finding this event. This started with thinking about what makes sense to do or use in a potion lab. Many different designs were imagined and rejected along the way.

To start, the base option of the event, while boring, seemed good to keep as a baseline option. Ideally, this should still be a reasonable option to choose sometimes. The one tweak here is to include synergy with the relic, Potion Belt, as well as any other tools that might increase potions slots (such as other modded characters). If the player has more potion slots, it just makes sense that they would try to bring more potions with them from a lab full of potions.

Next, the second option was the main focus of the reimagined event. Potion brewing is a classic video game mechanic, and so inevitably there had some kind of way to allow the player to do some potion making. The system settled on allows the player to choose one potion from a set of three, three times, and then create a new potion based on the combined effects of all three. In this way, the player can create one very powerful potion in a fun and engaging way. This option also has the increased decision making space of needing to decide if it is worth it to get only one very strong potion, or several weaker potions. Sometimes the player would only want a small boost, and thus having 2 more potions would be better. It also logically made sense that if you have an extra cauldron, you could brew another potion, so this became a logical point to integrate synergy with the Cauldron relic.

The next option formed from seeing the Chemical X relic and wanting to do something interesting with it. It’s a rather niche and often unused relic, so providing another way to obtain it felt like it made drafting X-cost cards a bit more reliable. Additionally, it fed into the creation of a new potion related relic that synergizies with nearly every potion related mechanic in the game. All in all, this should help both X-cost cards, and potion reliant builds feel a bit more consistent and fun. Due to the presumed low probability of finding the event, while also having Chemical X, and needing to give it up, the intent is for Chemical Y to be sufficiently powerful for having found such a specific interaction. It is limited to providing common potions to prevent it from being game breaking, but should still feel very satisfying to obtain in comparison to the ease of obtaining White Beast Statue.

Lastly, the Odd Mushroom felt like an iconic potion ingredient, so a hidden option was added to provide a large burst of potions as a reward.

All in all, there was a lot less to consider in terms of balance or fixes in comparison to past events. The only real flaw of the base event is that it’s simple and boring, and even that is only subjectively a flaw. The main goals of this reimagining was to provide fun and exciting new options with the potential or interesting choices while also providing intuitive thematic and lore based rationale for every option. Hopefully, this will make players feel more joy and high moments from finding the event.

I hope you have a good time with this mod, and I welcome any and all feedback.
Special thanks to 旅渚Lastcel for the Simplified Chinese translation!

If you enjoyed this mod, consider checking out some of my other mods:
A Better Note
A Better Sensory Stone
A Better Match
A Better Knowing Skull
A Better Forgotten Altar
A Better Third Choice