Similarly fire is a great tool, it inflicts severe damage to creatures over several turns and you can light things on fire from a fair distance away. But because some of the terrain is flammable, if you use it at the wrong time you can light yourself on fire, it has limitations that make it more tactically interesting.
For my game I have the self imposed limitation that all items must sensibly fit into the ecosystem. Because of that, some interesting effects are going to be provided by berries.
Here are some that I have so far.
- Fire seeds: when activated start a flame at that tile.
- Bomb berries: count down 3 turns and then explode, destroying rock walls and damaging creatures. Good for changing the terrain but if you want to damage a creature you have to plan ahead.
- Mist spores: creates vision blocking mist to protect you from ranged enemies. Based on summon butterflies from Dungeon Crawl.
- Gourd: when you first use it it copies an adjacent creature. When you next use it, it releases that creature into the wild. It doesn't allow you to defeat an enemy but it does allow you to change the species in the ecosystem.
- Healing fruit: It takes the natural healing you would have for the next 50 turns and gives you it all now. If you take 2 in a row the second will not do much because the first already gave you the healing from the next 50 turns and so there is not much left for the second one.
- Frost berries: freezes a tile of terrain. Creatures skate across frozen terrain in one turn without changing direction.
Some abilities that are too useful to depend on, so the play always has the ability to dig and fill holes and also to mine away dirt walls.
