I feel like the Arcane Stylus should be reimagined slightly. In the original PD there were many more in the game and they had a secondary function of repairing degraded armor. Stylus were later replaced by the Scroll of Enchant. In SPD, Enchant Runestones do the same thing, so the stylus is a bit redundant (not that this is a bad thing), but I wonder if there is some other way to make stylus more interesting or useful?
For instance, maybe they could be a rare item but instead of a random glyph the player gets to pick between two glyphs? And/or maybe you can use them on cursed armor to weaken a curse but not remove it? Also, it think it’s strange this magical item can’t be used for alchemy. It would be nice if they could at least be turned into alchemal energy even if there were no recipe, or turned into an arcane catalyst, or maybe you can combine two or more styluses into a Runestone of Enchant?
Just some thoughts.
Stylii are mainly around right now to help give armor a bit more variety via better access to glyphs, as weapons have more variety to begin with and so don’t need it as much from enchantments. Their functionality and drop quantity are largely the same as they were in Pixel Dungeon v1.7.1 though, most of the changes you mention are from when vanilla added degradation, which was something I chose not to port over to Shattered.
I do agree that giving stylii an alchemy recipe would be neat though. I’ve had a few ideas for it, but don’t want them to just be scrappable for easy energy.
Cool, thanks for thinking about a recipe. It would be nice if stylus could do more. With my play style I usually save them until I choose end-game armor and often it already has a glyph, or alternatively I get a great glyph on the first try and wind up selling or alchemizing all the other stylus for gold. So guess this is also about inventory management since it’s rare to not have a stylus taking up a slot.
I have mulled over the possibility of giving the player some sort of enchant or glyph option that must be used earlier on, specifically to encourage a bit more variety earlier in the game.