Hey Folks, thank for all the well-wishes last week!
I'm back home now and slowly starting up work on Shattered Pixel Dungeon again. Here's an early look at one streamlining change I'm making to the alchemy system, meant to simplify a bunch of the higher end recipes: replacing catalysts with a simple energy cost.
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The one sad thing for me about removing catalysts would be the loss of the interesting decisions forced on the player when they really want a recipe that requires a specific catalyst, but don't have any low-value items of the type required to make that catalyst.
Instead of dumping catalysts entirely, have you considered including multiple alchemy resources that stick with the player like energy? I'm thinking that energy is be unchanged, but the sacrifice of a potion or scroll is needed to get the 2nd/3rd resource.
Another thought is that I think "empty vials" and "blank scrolls" would be more intuitive than catalysts as alchemy resources, and if you created those with an alchemy pot menu action similar to 'energize,' it would be easier for new players to navigate and understand. I wish this worked with the first idea, but I don't know how you could justify empty vials not taking up space in the player's inventory.
I recall there being blank scrolls in an old pixel dungeon version, but I think you inscribed them with the stylus, and you couldn't do anything else with a blank scroll or a stylus, so separating the two seemed kinda pointless.
One of the points of removing catalysts here is to try and streamline things and overall reduce the complexity burden on higher-end alchemy. Replacing catalysts with separate resource systems wouldn't accomplish this.