Version 1.10 released! "Super Hard" mode is go.

While a lot of the attention for game randomizers lately has been for the purpose of speedrunners having a new challenge they can compete against each other in for a couple hours, randomizers' roots are more closely shared with "Hard Mode" style ROM hacks.  Since its release, The Lunarian Shuffle has made a lot of quality of life changes that favor a quick and reliable completion of the game, with good play allowing you to complete the game faster, rather than good play being required to complete the game at all.

Version 1.10 introduces "Super Hard" mode, which makes the game far more difficult in many different ways.  This is not for the faint of heart, and I do not suggest trying to complete a Super Hard seed in a single sitting.  The details of Super Hard mode are as follows:

• The game will give you equipment regardless of whether your party has members who can use it.
• Every chest and plot award for items has a 1 as its "minimum goodness."  Items you find will still be appropriate to the current section of the game, but even the most out-of-the-way chests could contain a Cure2 or some simple ammo.
• The "cures just one status effect" items are back in the game, wasting a lot of your item drops.
• Half of all learned spells have their spell learning levels rolled between +0 and +39 levels instead of the usual Hard Mode +0 to +6.
• Tellah fails to learn 1/3 of the spells he is supposed to learn at the top of Mt. Ordeals.
• Tellah's replacement joins the party at level 10 instead of level 20.
• Whereas in Hard Mode, shops will sell between 1 and their original maximum number of types of items, in Super Hard Mode, the most items a shop can roll are between 1 and 4.
• Gold chests contain less GP.
• The "Maximum Experience Sharing" option is disabled.

In total, these changes make the game take me between 2 and 2.5 times longer than it usually does to complete.  I suspect there will be some seeds that are absolutely brutal.  In particular, players had been noting that TLS solo character challenges weren't actually that hard because relevant equipment was so readily available when no equipment for other characters were being produced; no such luck in Super Hard mode.


Another feature addition is that more items have descriptions in the Item menu.  The code to make this work is borrowed from B0ardface, who is responsible for the recent Free Enterprise project, though the actual descriptions are my own.

Also, as a quality of life improvement, the program will now remember what base ROM you used last time you loaded one successfully, and will automatically load it when you start the program again.  This makes generating new seeds that much less of a hassle, especially if you keep your source and destination ROMs in different locations.

As always, get the new version from the Google Drive folder here:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B9k5jnZ_x-ijRG5BTE1objljbzQ?resourcekey=0-0RFE3TC3A3VnxLH4vaqIdA&usp=sharing