Forbidden Caves

Forbidden Caves status has been set to Added

Congratulations! Your dungeon has been added to Trove! 

It can be found in the Forbidden Spires biome!

Forbidden Caves status has been set to Rewarded

Forbidden Caves status has been set to Accepted

Forbidden Caves status has been set to Approved

V3 looks great! 

Looks like everything is now in order.
I love the new tunnel, torches, and it's always nice to see some more natural-looking dungeons. ^^

I know it can be hard getting everything just right and working properly in a 3star, but you stuck through it to the end,
good work and happy to approve!

Forbidden Caves status has been set to Needs Review

Forbidden Caves status has been set to Active

Hi there!

Improvements on v2 are looking really good, well done! Overall you have a very solid design, nice layout and a good theme going on there :)

Some more thoughts that might be helpful:

Technical - please fix!

A lot of mob spawns are positioned on the walls/elevated bits of ground from where they would not be able to reach the player.
This one for example would be forever stuck up there as npcs can not jump 2 blocks down. And having only 1 block (to the wall) to stand on, this npc would appear to be quite broken if anything big spawns there.
Each and every npc spawn can generate a mob with affixes, so please make sure that every spawn location can move around and can reach the player.

Art - please consider spending some more time to make this dungeon really beautiful

1) There are quite some rooms that use natural blocks - this is a good thing!
Unfortunately, natural blocks can generate good patterns or completely plain areas, so in big rooms this is not such a good thing.

Adding some extra architectural elements could help with such cases.

I understand the theme is the 'cave', so it needs to stay natural, but i believe there is some room to make it a 'decorated cave' before it stops being a cave. You have absolutely nailed the combination of Natural+structures in the forbidden_caves_forbiddenspires_bossroom_04_01 and 02 .

Something like this for example could work too - enlarged spires banners hanging from the ceiling - could partially hide the plain walls but does not turn the area into a built room:

Same applies to corridors, some of them are quite plain, like first cave_01 part for example, while others are decorated really good with those plug-in pathways.

2) Art nitpick here! To add some more visual consistency throughout the dungeon it could also be good to have some unifying elements.

You did a very nice trick with the x_bossroom_03 blueprints that block an opposite entrance. It could be nice to do the same with jade rooms and have some 'tori gates'  in the corridors preceding the room.

The red carpet road feels a bit out of place if it is connecting one natural cave to another. May be some red flooring in the caves/rooms could help the dungeon to appear more consistent? 

3) This is might apply better to new designs as it might require quite a lot of re-designing, but just to have it written down: 

The current set up seems to always use same rooms for 1st encounter (yellow+blue, yellow+purple) and the other set of room plugs for the 2nd. With this, its is possible to make the cave rooms slowly turn more into man-made as it progresses down to the big boss.
Could be a good way to achieve consistency + variety.
There is a good amount of positive sides to the current setup too, so please dont feel like you have to redo the whole thing >_<

Im going to change the status of this one to Active for now, hoping for that one last push to make this dungeon truly awesome :)
Dont forget to set it back to Needs Review once you upload the changes.
To recap - please fix the npc spawns! Art polish welcomed, but optional.

Forbidden Caves status has been set to Needs Review

Forbidden Caves status has been set to Active

I love the way this dungeon blends with the Forbidden Spires biome and it being a 3 star too!

A few suggestions/edits

Gameplay
-There are a few sections where the player falls pretty far down and would be hard for newer players to climb back up. Maybe you could add some sort of rocks, pillars, bounce blocks, or make the terrain slanted to make it a bit more climbable. 

Example slant

-Some hallways are pretty long and take a bit of time to walk through so adding some directional jump pads could speed things up

-A few rooms could have more variation to them,
A lot of the rooms are all pretty similar in terms of gameplay since they are all on flat ground with a few trap swaps.
Raising or lowering ground to a few could add some movement variety. 
A few ideas would be adding a pond or river into one of the terrain rooms, raising parts of the floor in some of the jade-themed room, adding some thicker pillars or walls structures that players could hide behind or jump on top of.

Entrance blueprint

-The entrance blueprint needs to have more ground below the top layer. biomes are not perfectly flat so when it spawns there will be open spaces that players can get into. Should be good if you add at least 5 blocks to compensate for varied spawns.

Detail
I love the  detail in the jade rooms, but a few of the halls feel empty/plain 

-Maybe adding some pillars, arches, fences or decorating the ceiling could make it more interesting.

-Last thing would be that while the terra-themed rooms blend really well together with the tunnels the jade ones feel like they cut into the environment with no introduction, 
adding a gateway or some sort of transition could help it feel more natural.

Back To active for now, can't wait to see the variations you come up with ^^

Forbidden Caves status has been set to Needs Review