Blacksmith upgrade: Wakizashi gains a third use per turn

About this game

Developer: Terry Cavanagh · Publisher: Terry Cavanagh · Platform: PC (Steam) · Art style: Comic & cartoon · Screen type: Tech / Research

More Dicey Dungeons screens in the Gallery

What to study

Between fights, Dicey Dungeons' progression is as legible as its combat. The blacksmith screen puts the equipment card and its upgraded self side by side with an arrow, and the upgrade is deliberately boring on paper, Wakizashi+ keeps the same MAX 4 slot and the same damage line, and simply works three times a turn instead of two, because the screen's job is to make that one changed number impossible to miss. Underneath, the backpack explains where equipment lives when it is not on the board: a small area grid where the Pirate Hookshot takes a double-height tile and every other item takes one cell, so carrying capacity is a packing problem you can see. Even the footer is doing interface work, carrying health, gold, level progress and the floor's skull count into a screen that could easily have hidden them. Frame at about 0:22.5 in the Reunion Trailer (Steam; manual extraction from the 2 fps probe pass over the window 22–24.5s; the same screen a second later, upgrading the Pirate Hookshot's NEEDS 4 slot to EVEN, is held as an alternate).

Patterns

How the screen is arranged.

upgrade-grid split-comparison

Components

Parts on screen.

Tabs Banner Grid List Pips Slots Dice

Screen inventory

• the upgrade is shown as a before-and-after pair with an arrow between them: WAKIZASHI (hatched MAX 4 slot, 'Do [dice] damage (2 uses this turn)') becomes WAKIZASHI+ under a ribbon banner, same slot, same effect, exactly one number changed to '(3 uses this turn)'; the whole value of the upgrade is that single visible diff
• below the pair, the backpack is a space grid, not a list: the selected WAKIZASHI tile in cream, a tall green PIRATE HOOKSHOT tile spanning both rows, and LOCKPICK, LEATHER ARMOR and ANCIENT SLINGSHOT tiles filling the rest, equipment occupies physical area, and the two-row Hookshot shows items come in different footprints
• the screen is staged as a blacksmith's counter: a goblin smith with a hammer behind an anvil at left, a sword laid across the counter, with UPGRADE and BACKPACK buttons under the grid, the two verbs of the screen are buttons, not tabs
• the footer never lets the run state go: THIEF at 32/32, 3 gold, dice x3, 'LEVEL 3, Level up in [star] 3', an EXIT button, and Floor 3 told as a row of skull pips, three of them lit

Top 3 colors

#4e6281 34%#3a4962 24%#848487 17%

Top three palette colors by share. The remaining colors make up the rest.

Source and credit

© Terry Cavanagh, Dicey Dungeons screenshot: Steam trailers (Reunion Trailer / Launch Trailer), Terry Cavanagh, shown for design study and commentary. PlayCraft is an unofficial fan project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Terry Cavanagh.

Source tier 2 (publisher-released) · screenshot: Steam store page · Steam page

Source details

Fetched 2026-10-25. verified 2026-10-25: manual extraction manual-upgrade-wakizashi-22.png @ ~22.5s in the Reunion trailer, MD5 c60dd93c84f681fd172563378234e776, from the verified-clean curl-shim download (25,718,508 B, MD5 9c9c91c68a8f3892b16aae9d1cd6a233; full decode to null exit 0, zero error lines, decode-steam-861540-Reunion-Trailer.mp4.err), inspected visually at full resolution (1920x1080 native); the WAKIZASHI -> WAKIZASHI+ pair ('(2 uses this turn)' -> '(3 uses this turn)', MAX 4 slots), the backpack grid (WAKIZASHI / PIRATE HOOKSHOT / LOCKPICK / LEATHER ARMOR / ANCIENT SLINGSHOT), UPGRADE / BACKPACK / EXIT buttons and the THIEF 32/32, LEVEL 3, Floor 3 footer all legible; no trailer text or marketing overlay in frame

no published policy found (checked 2026-10-25); fair-use study use, takedown honored within 48h

Rights holders: see Copyright & takedown.