Alongside the parts of the randomizer we’ve discussed, there are a few flags on the site that can be confusing and could do with a little extra explanation. A number of these are covered in the Duck Bootcamp, but while you’re here, let’s cover extra things you may want to know. Going through randomizer:
¶ General
¶ On, Off, and Tri-State
Many (although not all) of the flags in the randomizer can have one of three modes:
- Off: Naturally, this means the flag is not on and won’t do anything in your game.
- On: This means the flag is on. Its functionality, whatever it may be, will be active when you generate your seed.
- Tri-State: This turns your check box into a question mark. What this means is that you won’t know whether this flag is on or not; you’ll have to dive into the game to see which way that coin flipped. To activate tri-state flags simply click a flag on, then click it again for the question mark to appear.
Note that not every flag can be tri-state as some options simply don’t work with a “maybe on, maybe not” option. If you click a flag twice and it doesn’t go tri-state, that means the option isn’t available at all for that flag.
¶ Presets
This is the very first tab of the randomizer site. Presets are the easiest way to get into the randomizer. There are a few that are set up specifically to let players experience the original game as it was likely intended (Improved Vanilla), how to learn the game (Beginner), and then various types of game style meant to show facets of the randomizer (Oops, All Loose!, Shard Hunt, Floaterless).
For new players first coming to the randomizer, it is highly recommended that you start with the presets before broadening out into crafting and creating your own experience. It’s easiest to learn the randomizer via a curated style of play (like one of these presets) instead of diving in and making something without knowing how all the flags interact. The presets also provide an easy way, down the road, for a player to find a style of game they like for customization, once they’re experienced with the randomizer.
¶ Scale
¶ Starting Gold
As we’ve seen this happen before, we wanted to note here that it is best if you start the game with some starting gold. Since there is gear, and spells, and possibly items to buy, as well as the need to save at an inn before you begin your adventure, it is prudent to make sure your heroes start with a little scratch in their pockets to throw around at the shops. Even the vanilla game starts you with some cash, so it’s best to at least give yourself a little cash for the journey (even if there’s an option in the randomizer to set this at 0).
¶ Overworld and Dungeon Encounter Rates
There are three encounter rates in the game: land, sea, and dungeons. The overworld encounter rate and the dungeon encounter rates can be set in the randomizer, while the sea encounter rate is a fraction of the overworld rate. In the Vanilla game, the encounter rate came out to 10 encounters for every 256 steps, and while that doesn’t seem like a lot, it certainly feels like more when you’re in the game.
The encounter rate was also lower for dungeons than for the overworld in general, with only 8 fights for every 256 steps. Again, this is a number that would seem low until you get into a dungeon and realize how many steps you have to take, and just how many encounters you’re likely to experience.
In the randomizer, a common scale for encounters is usually 0.6x and 0.7x for the overworld and dungeons, respectively. This comes out to 6 fights for every 256 steps in both zones (and 2 fights for every 256 steps on the sea). For most players this is a manageable, but not excessive, encounter rate that still keeps the game fun.
If we go back to our analogy about the deck of cards representing encounters, think of these three types of encounters (overworld, sea, and dungeon) as the game saying certain cards, and above, will trigger an encounter. You’re always dealing from the same deck no matter what zone you’re in, but on the overworld it may be that Queens and up flag an encounter while in a dungeon (which you might have with a higher encounter rate) flags Jacks and up, and the sea says only Aces cause a fight. That is, in simple terms, how the game processes the encounter table for each area of the game.
¶ Experience, Boosts, and Bonuses
The original Final Fantasy, like most video games, was built to keep you playing for as long as possible. But, because of the limitations due to the early era of the NES and what the hardware could handle, the game increased its length not through content but through grinding. The actual meat of Final Fantasy is fairly short, an adventure that, if you didn’t have to grind, could be beaten in an hour and a half. The real length, the hours and hours of gameplay, is the time the game expects you to spend fighting enemies over and over to squeak out one more level up before heading off to the next dungeon.
The randomizer helps to ease this in a few different ways, making the experience grind shorter and leveling much easier. The first way is via a set of double sliders for experience and boost. Base experience can be multiplied from the base 1x all the way up to 5x (although traditionally races are done somewhere in the 2x-3x range). The second slider controls how much extra, per enemy, is added into the pool. This is a flat rate, like +100, and that applies per enemy, making for some very lucrative fights (especially in the early game where light, easy to kill enemies show up in large packs – we call these “popcorn packs” because you want to snack on them quickly – and the simple, flat boost per enemy is at its most effective).
Then there’s progressive scaling, which is bonus experience earned for meeting certain requirements. This multiplier can be added for every key item found (or for meeting a certain threshold of key items gained) or for every orb, or 8 shards, unlocked in the game. These bonuses can greatly boost a grind, so if you find you may need levels to clear an area, you may want to check and clear other goals to build up your bonus and, thus, get a better grind going.
One point of clarity we feel we should add relates to bonus experience and shards. The multiplier is applied to 1 Orb or 8 Shards as it’s written (e.g., +100% per Orb or 8 Shards) but each shard gives a fraction of that bonus. You don’t need to get the full 8 shards to get the bonus; every shard collected boosts your experience a little more (so in this example, +100% for 8 shards means each shard individually would grant +12.5% bonus experience).
¶ Incentives
¶ Key Item and Loose Item Placement
When it comes to placing Key Items within a seed (whether in incentivized locations or in loose boxes), there are three ways for the randomizer to drop these items into the game:
- Guided: This can be likened to a more “traditional” experience for the flow of the game. You’ll get your transport items early, with SHIP and CANAL always being in the inner sea and likely coming before items required for the late game. Flow can vary some, but progression will feel familiar.
- Predictive: This is a less linear, more varied experience. Fetch quest items can show up earlier, and the flow of the game will feel far less traditional. SHIP and CANAL will not always be required for unlocking progression through the game, creating many new paths. You likely won’t be expected to head into late-game dungeons early, though, which still creates a “safe” experience.
- Note that Predictive is the recommended item placement setting when using new (procgen) overworlds as well as for Entrance and Floor shuffle seeds (or all of the above).
- Predictive Unsafe: This is like Predictive, but the safeties are taken off. Placement is still logical, but the game won’t care about keeping you from end-game dungeons. Logic is applied, and the game is beatable technically, but it’s up to you to follow the game’s “expected” path.
Likewise, the loose item placement can be fine tuned as well to create a number of varied experiences:
- Chaotic: This is the game throwing the items up in the air and letting the loose fall where they may. We liken this to “item confetti”, and it tends to lead to loose items showing up earlier, especially in big dungeons with lots of chests. It’s great if you want to get your loose items early, but can lead to shorter “chest digging” experiences.
- Spread: Instead of just throwing the items out wherever, and early, Spread sends the items out with a focus on even distribution. Items are spread throughout the game, with an emphasis put on equalizing across dungeons and entrances.
- Forward: Despite its name, this placement logic doesn’t put loose items in the “early, forward” position. Instead the game prioritizes sending the player out into the various nooks and crannies, always “looking forward” to the next place opened by the previous item collected. If you get a fetch item, or suddenly find a new dungeon has been opened up by something you collected, there’s a solid chance you should follow that chain to see where it leads. This is the closest to “item logic” the game has in its placement.
¶ Maps
¶ Flip Dungeons Vertically
There are actually a few ways to change up the mechanics of the dungeon floors in the randomizer, from swapping stair locations (which will swap entrance and exit stairs, where possible, or inserting new stair locations when needed) to flipping dungeon maps horizontally (which does what it says on the tin, straight up flipping dungeons along the y-axis). However, vertical flipping on dungeons isn’t exactly the same experience and this comes down to a couple of key factors.
The first issue is that, unlike with a horizontal flip (where room composition can be kept more or less the same) rooms cannot be easily flipped vertically. That’s because doors into rooms can only be along the bottom side of the room. If you flipped a room vertically, that would put the door on the top side, which doesn’t work in the first game of the series. Instead, rooms had to be reprogrammed, with their doors moved, so that access could still be granted into the rooms.
Along with that, the devs changed, removed, and added some paths to adjust the flow and feel of the vertically flipped floors. These changes can add some variety, but they do mean that even if your brain can easily adjust to the vertical flip you might still find yourself stumbling along weird passages. Make sure you get used to vertically flipped floors through practice before taking this flag for a spin in a race.
¶ Treasures
¶ Shuffle Treasures
This flag shuffles up and moves around all the treasures in the game. That’s an easy concept on its own to get, and that’s not why we’re here. The key reason we’re singling out this flag is because shuffling treasures is a fundamental part of much of the functionality of the randomizer. You must have treasures shuffled for (easily more than) half the flags in the randomizer to function properly. If you do not have treasure shuffle turned on you will likely get errors during your seed generation.
¶ Trapped Chest Formations
When choosing what can be guarding a trapped chest, it’s a good idea to be careful in your selection so as to not make a chest that might be difficult, or impossible, to clear, especially in the early game. “Allocated Formations” and “Random Formations” do not take into account the difficulty of the monsters getting dropped into the boxes, so you could end up with a chest in the Temple of Fiends, or Dwarf Cave, with Blue Ds or Gr.Medusas, fights that a level one party has no business facing. For balance, “Local Formation” or “Vanilla Spikes”, both of which pull from encounters in the current dungeon, are safer and better for use in standard play (at least if you aren’t looking for a drastic shift in difficulty).
¶ Trapped Chest Treasures
A question that has come up more than once is what, specifically, can be inside a trapped chest, especially when loose items are in play. The randomizer provides fine grained control, allowing the player to select how many chests will be trapped, but also what contents can be in those boxes. Key items, rare treasures, and shards can all be in trapped boxes, and the randomizer will ensure that these selected items have monsters guarding them when needed.
With that said, if you turn on trapped chests and set a designated number of boxes that will be trapped (via the slider), but then do not turn on any of the treasure types to go into them (key items, rare treasures, or shards) then the boxes will still be trapped, but they will only contain common treasures. This is useful if all you want are specific fights at box locations but you don’t necessarily want to have to worry about the treasures within.
¶ Shops
¶ Magic Shops: Shuffle, Location Shuffle, and Level Shuffle
In the randomizer there are three kinds of magic shop shuffling that you can experience, although two of the three make for a far more challenging experience.
- Magic Level Shuffle: This is the traditional setting used in the randomizer. It takes the spells from across the game and shuffles them between all the levels, leading to higher end magic possibly being at lower levels, and vice versa. This means you could have NUKE at level 1 and everyone likes NUKE at level 1 (except for people that don’t like fun). Level 1 shops will still be at Coneria, so level 1 magic (like that aforementioned possibility of Level 1 NUKE) will be at Coneria.
- Magic Shop Shuffle: This takes all the spell levels of the game and mixes them between all the shops. This could lead to a shop (even Coneria) having one spell from level 2, one spell from level 4, one from level 7, and one from level 8, for example. It’s possible for you to find shops early with absolutely no magic you can learn, and even if you could, you might not be able to afford it (because spell prices are maintained even if they’re shuffled into early shops. This option, to be blunt, is very messy and not for the faint of heart.
- Magic Location Shuffle: Sometimes viewed as a compromise between basic Magic Level Shuffle and the Chaos of Magic Shop Shuffle, Location shuffle takes the shops and shuffles them between levels. That could lead to a Level 2 Black and a Level 7 White shop at Coneria, a Level 1 Black and a Level 8 White shop at Pravoka, and so on. You can turn on Paired Shuffle so that shops of the same level travel together, but you still have to remember which town has which level of magic, and that can be a pain to track sometimes.
Note, also, that these flags are not mutually exclusive. You can shuffle the magic levels, and then shuffle their placements in shops, and then shuffle the shops around as well, but at a certain point you’ve shuffled everything so much the madness is just constant and unending.
Unless you’re looking for a challenge, Magic Level Shuffle is likely the only setting you’re going to really care about.
¶ Spell Name Obfuscation
If you want a challenge for your brain, and to have to think more while casting magic, then you can try and use Spell Name Obfuscation. As the flag name says, this option changes the names of spells to confuse you and keep the magic unpredictable. It can do this in one of two ways:
- MixedUp: In this form, all the names for spells are shuffled among all the spells, from both White and Black magic together. There is no concern for spell level numbers, so you could have a spell with no “upgrade” form, like TMPR, and discover it as ICE2 in a shop. There is also no consistency in the naming of the spells, such that just because one FIRE spell might be called HARM that doesn’t mean all FIRE spells will become HARM spells. The shuffling is entirely chaotic.
- Madness: This one is even worse, giving every spell a random combination of letters and numbers with absolutely no rhyme or reason to their assignments. It’s pure gibberish, start to finish, and completely unpredictable.
Obviously this flag was made simply to confound and confuse players while they’re going through the game. With that said, Shop Info is still available for any of these spells, meaning you can press Select on a spell to see what its function could be. It will require you memorizing which spells are named what, but there is at least some method to the madness if you so chose to go that route.
¶ Party
¶ Standard Party and Recruit Selections
A point of confusion that has come up relates to the layout of the randomizer site. The randomizer tab for Party has two sections where you can make selections for the party. There’s the wide, top area that shows all the unpromoted and promoted classes, as well as forced and none checkboxes, and it lets you define the possible composition of your entire party:
And then there’s the section a little further down on the tab for selecting possible characters the player can recruit:
The two sections do look similar, but they are functionally two different portions of the randomizer. The top section is all about making your original class while the bottom section is just for characters you can find later in the game. Each can be set independently and will not affect each other. That means that, for instance, you can set the top area to not have any thieves available, but then put thieves in the recruitment pool, letting your seed possibly have the five-fingered runners available to you but only by playing through the game.
Make sure, when setting your party options, you use the right table for the proper area and don’t get your wires crossed about which side goes where.
¶ Gear & Items
¶ New Consumables
And finally, for this section of discussion, we turn to the Gear & Items tab for a whole host of new items that can be found, and purchased, in the randomizer. These items, called “New Consumables”, bring a host of concepts from later games in the franchise back into (the randomized version of) the original game. These items are:
- FCURE: A full cure, aka CUR4.
- PHNIX: The classic phoenix down, a common revive item in the franchise.
- SMOKE: Smoke bombs, which automatically let the party run from battle when used.
- BLAST: Casts FIR3 in battle.
- RFRSH: Casts HEL3 in battle.
- FLARE: Casts NUKE in battle (goes by the FLARE name for the spell used in later games).
- BLACK: Casts BANE in battle (although it does so with lower accuracy making it even less likely to hit an enemy than the already low-accuracy BANE spell).
- GUARD: Casts FOG2 in battle.
- QUICK: Casts FAST in battle (not to be confused with the QUICK spell in later games, which allowed a character to take two actions on their turn, or QUIK in FFR’s Spellcrafter, which is a caster-targeted version of FAST).
- HIGH: A higher cure, which restores 160 HP.
- WIZRD: Casts CONF in battle, with the same functionality as the Wizard Staff.
- CLOAK: Casts RUSE in battle, with the same functionality as the Defense.
Note, though, that there is one more set of consumables that you can stumble across, but to do so you need to turn on Deep Dungeon. This mode includes items for replenishing your spell charges. There’s ETHER, which restores charges for spell levels 1 and 2, DRY, which restores charges for levels 1 through 4, and X-ETH, which restores charges at all levels. These are very useful items to have in this game mode since finding inns to restore charges can be difficult. These items replace TENT, CABIN, and HOUSE in the game since you won’t be able to use those anyway (as there’s no “outside” in the dungeon where you can use them).