The Staff of Oscilion

To play as intended, use simplistic commands like ">Head North", ">Examine item" or ">Attack Enemy". You can also command all party members by writing something like ">User attacks Enemy 1. Celia casts SMITE on Enemy 2." The AI tends to make party members use skills a lot, so manually controlling them can help in reducing SP waste! Who knows if there's a way to recover it once inside the dungeon?

You will learn new skills when finding new weapons, but feel free to write up some for your character too! For balancing, I'd suggest around 2-3 SP cost based on each point of damage.

Using detailed instructions like "I pick up the sword" or "'Let's go that way!' I say, pointing to the left door." can produce more detailed replies but also risk making the AI confused as to where you are in the dungeon, and therefore might be breaking it. If you are doing a first playthrough, I recommend you stick with simple inputs.

Tested on Claude 3 Sonnet (both normal and 3.5) and GPT4o-Latest. Works better on Sonnet. Using low temp is recommended so the AI doesn't randomly change important flags.

This card uses scoped regexes to hide old information from the AI, making the message history smaller. For me an optimized run takes ~230 messages and ~16k tokens, but for first-time run I'd assume it would be at least 300 messages long. Since all the important information is stored in tags that get added to every message, having a smaller context window will most likely still be fine.

Known Issues The output flickers and changes shape as the AI outputs tags: This is an unfortunate side effect that I don't think can be fixed with how SillyTavern handles tag hiding. If you can see the tags, remember to disable the "Showt in responses" option.

0hp characters taking a final turn before dying: This happens rarely, and the only solution to this I can see is to make a CoT going through each character's turn which while fixing the issue is impractical and makes generation time much longer only to fix a rare issue.

Characters act as if it's their first time in the room even though they've been there before: This is an issue the optimizations I've used in order to keep the context as small as possible. Since it's never written down in the context which exact room you're in, the AI only gets told that you enter a room with some specific features, not that you are back in a room that you were in before (even if you are in a room with the exact same features that that room had).

Unused files Here's a catbox folder of some unused files (warning, spoilers): https://catbox.moe/c/g66kyr The portraits were going to be used for a Party UI I worked on for a while. There was also a dynamic map that would fill out as you explored the dungeon and show off your current location. I scrapped both of these ideas as they both took up too much space and bloated output times. The markdown UI is simpler and easier for the AI to understand and write. Making a dynamic map through the markdown UI is far trickier, relies on the AI using a lot of logic and my experiments with it on a far smaller map than the final one gave me middling results.