Wandsmith

Wandsmith is a game about building and using wands to fight through castles full of enemies. You start with a couple of random wands, a couple of random components and a random perk. Enemies drop their wands when they die, letting you take one, move components onto your current wand or replace it with the dropped wand. At the end of each level, you fight a boss with greater size and strength than the other enemies, and a staff. Defeating the boss grants a perk and access to the next level, where enemies have more health and wands with better stats and components appear.

Build your wands

A wand’s projectile depends on its material, hilt and components:

• Wand material: determines projectile type, number of component slots, mana pool and recharge rate.
• Hilt: determines status effect, colour and base projectile stats.
• Components: modify projectiles, affecting cast delay, damage, mana consumption, size and more.

Reducing cast delay can make a wand fire rapidly, while adding damage can produce a powerful blast. Rapid casting requires enough mana, and a powerful blast can cause more recoil than expected.

There are 36 base wands, each with a different combination of projectile type, mana pool and component slots. Five identical tiered components can be combined into one component of the next tier. Tiered modifiers offer progressively better bonuses at higher tiers, but also add a negative effect. Unique modifiers have a strong effect and usually a significant drawback; which ones suit you depends on your run and playstyle.

Spells and effects

The game has four projectile types and three status effects:

• Orb: a standard, single-shot projectile.
• Scattershot: fires many smaller orbs in a wide spread.
• Laser: a melee attack attached to your wand.
• Shield: creates a protective barrier in front of your wand.
• Fire: deals damage over time.
• Condensed Health: makes you take more damage and causes you to drop a health pickup on death.
• Condensed Mana: makes spells cost more mana and causes you to drop a mana pickup on death.

Manage your mana

A wand’s remaining mana affects its spells. Casting with 50% mana left consumes slightly more mana than casting at 100%. If there is not enough mana, projectiles have greatly reduced stats, including size and speed, so you need to balance your loadout for the enemies you face.

Use a staff

Staffs contain multiple wands that fire in sequence when you cast. A staff’s mana pool equals the combined maximum mana of its equipped wands, but staffs do not regenerate mana; you need to find mana to refill them. They let you cast a variety of spells in quick succession, including different projectile types and status effects.