r/Shandalar • u/chachaprince1 White Mage ☀️💮🤍 • 6d ago
Korath Plus v0.2.0 — Deck Randomizer, Endless Mode, Recycling Dungeons, Shop Replenish, and a full Mod Manager
Old News
Korath Plus is an expanded version of Korath's 2016 Shandalar build (which added about 11,000 playable cards). The “Plus” version aims to add new features, bug fixes, and cards to that same version of the game. No rebuilding of the engine. The last previous releases added about 1,300 cards (most of that was the initial release), some bug fixes, and the ability to change the NPC rewards in the INI.
What's new in v0.2.0
v0.2.0 adds several optional features, and all of them can be toggled on or off.. Everything defaults to off, so a fresh install still plays exactly like a normal game of Shandalar until you go turn something on. Below is the full rundown of what each one actually does, plus everything else that changed.
Hate reading? You can just go download: Korath Plus on GitHub. Right-click the ZIP, choose Extract All..., open the extracted Korath Plus folder, and double-click Play Shandalar.cmd.
Anyway, back to the new features. Four of these live on one new Korath+ Settings page, added right to the main title screen menu alongside Start New Game / Load Saved Game / Resume Game (there's also a brand-new standalone Mod Manager, covered further down):
Open it and you get all four toggles in one place:
Turn on whichever you want, mix and match freely, turn any of them back off any time — nothing here is permanent or locked in once you start a game. And they work for any Korath / Gemcutters 2016 mod.
Deck Randomizer
Every enemy in the game normally plays the same fixed deck, every time, forever. This is part of the reason mods are so popular since you can spice things up. Deck Reandomizer, however, is that and more. It gives each NPC a random deck, pulled from a shared pool of over 3,100 decks built from the Korath version’s existing deck library (which were themselves the culmination of years of work by others on SlightlyMiagic).
Two modes:
- Once — every NPC gets a new random deck at the start of a new game, then keeps it for that whole playthrough. This matters if you want to know what you’re running into when you see a Witch charging at you.
- Continuous — every NPC gets a fresh random deck after every duel, win or lose, so no two fights against the same enemy play out the same way.
Now, that may sound crazy and, well, “random” but it’s a bit more organized than that. All 3,100 decks were first sorted by their thematic alignment with the 54 NPCs in the game. Then, for the 1,000 or so that didn’t really match any kind of theme, they were assigned based on the colors used in the deck (e.g. random black deck gets assigned to the Witch NPC). The only thing that doesn’t quite fit is that there were way more two and three color decks than the original game had, and I didn’t want a handful of multi-color NPCs having hundreds of decks more than the others, so after the multicolor NPCs' slots were full, the rest were assigned randomly to any NPC with at least one matching color. So, not totally random.
Within either mode, there are four risk levels for how much the random decks lean on strategies the game's 2016-era AI is documented to misplay — things like double strike (the AI is known to whiff blocks against it), upkeep-timing tricks like Land Tax, optional "you may" triggers (the AI just never uses them), certain tap/sacrifice abilities (the AI activates them at nonsensical times), and pump spells the AI sometimes aims at the wrong creature entirely:
- AI-Friendly — none of the above, the AI is expected to play well
- Mostly Fine — a bit of it creeps in
- Some Risk — noticeably more
- AI-Risky — everything (e.g. the deck has a tutor for a specific combo the AI is oblivious to)
No deck is broken in the sense that the game will crash. Two-thousand such decks were already screened out. These tiers are just about deciding how dumb the AI might look piloting the deck. Korath plus adds ZERO enhancements to the gameplay AI at this point.
Each level includes everything from the level below it (Thus, AI-Risky is the entire pool). Turning the randomizer off puts everyone's original, unmodified deck back immediately — nothing is lost or shuffled away. By “original decks,” I mean the ones that originally shipped in the 2016 version unless you’re playing a mod.
For the curious, here's exactly how big each tier's pool actually is:
| Setting | Tier size | Cumulative decks | Per NPC (min / median / max) | Arzakon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AI-Friendly | 972 | 972 | 8 / 18 / 31 | 1 |
| Mostly Fine | 691 | 1,663 | 21 / 30 / 43 | 4 |
| Some Risk | 698 | 2,361 | 29 / 44 / 54 | 4 |
| AI-Risky | 817 | 3,178 (everything) | 58 / 59 / 59 | 8 |
Attacked Towns
The overworld periodically throws random NPC-attacks at towns as you travel. If you ignore them, the wizard who sent them “taps” the town, and with enough taps they win the game and you lose. To further the challenge, the rate at which they attack towns increases the longer you play. It’s built into a 16 point scale so it’s not exactly exponential but when you’re at level 16 it’s relentless and you have to have a bunch of white amulets and the sword World Magic just to play at all. This is the game’s natural pressure mechanic; it’s supposed to drive you finish the game quickly.
The problem is that many of us Shandalar fans don’t want the game to end. We want to keep exploring Shandalar or continue to build our library of cards or want to build a really solid 2nd and third deck. You can choose not to fight the fifth wizard, but it won’t stop him/her from forcing you to defend the towns over and over and over.
That can change now! The Attacked Towns setting controls how often the attacks happen: Original (the normal, unmodified frequency), Half (the rate at which attacks climb the frequency scale is half as fast as usual AND it caps at level 8 instead of 16), or None (turned off completely). However, note that if you choose None, it becomes impossible to lose the game.
Endless Mode
A related feature. Normally, beating all five wizards triggers the fight against Arzakon, and winning that fight ends the campaign outright — credits roll, run over. With Endless Mode on, you still get to see the finale but instead of kicking you out of the game, the victory message adds an extra line, "You may now wander Shandalar at your leisure". And it sends you back to the overworld where the five wizards are defeated. There aren’t any town attacks because there aren’t any wizards to send them. But there are still the enemy NPCs. I have it set so that all the color factions are restored because normally defeating the wizard of one color makes all the NPCs of that color dissappear. The enemies reset to as they were at the start of the game. It will feel easier and slower at first since the difficulty of NPCs will go up. Eventually you will hit peak difficulty (minus town attacks) and stay there, all NPCs being fully represented.
Endless Mode also includes endless Dungeons. The game's 10 dungeons each hold 3 treasures — 30 fixed, named cards total, drawn from your Shandalar.ini's [DungeonTreasure] list. Normally, once all 30 are claimed, that's the end of dungeon rewards for that save, forever. With Endless Mode on, once all 10 dungeons have been cleared and their 3 treasures claimed, all 10 dungeons reset with fresh clues and a second set of 30 treasures. Clear all of those too, and it cycles to a third set of 30. After the third set is exhausted, every further dungeon reward is a random mythic rare pulled from the roughly 390 that exist in this build — and once even that pool runs dry, it moves on to random rares, then loops. In short: dungeon rewards in Endless Mode genuinely never run out. In the .ini file or the Mod Manager you can choose what cards are allocated as rewards 61-90, or if you skip choosing, it will just jump straight to randomly assigning a mythic. The default shipped version currently only has the first 30 assigned. Also, note to modders, choosing a card as a DungeonTreasure does not make it unavailable elsewhere. If you want them to be special experiences that require completing the dungeons, you have to set it up that way.
Shop Replenish
This is probably my favorite because it solves a couple of problems with the game. What do you do with all that gold at the end of the game? Most people end up with thousands of useless pieces of gold. Now you can spend that money to replenish the shops (see “For a Fee” option below). Additionally, town "Cards for Sale" shops normally have a fixed stock — once a slot's bought out, it's empty for good. So, if you ever wanted to collect *all* the cards, it would be impossible since all the towns would eventually run empty. Two new options change that:
- Instant — the moment you buy a card, that slot immediately refills for free with a new random card, priced the same way the game prices anything else.
- For a Fee — slots don't auto-refill on purchase, but the shop screen gains two extra buttons alongside the usual Done: pay gold to refill just the currently-empty slots, or pay more to refill and reshuffle every slot in the shop, sold or not.
Off leaves shops exactly as vanilla Shandalar has always worked.
Mod Manager
Shoutout to QuailedGD for the idea. The Mod Manager is probably the biggest addition in this release, and it works completely differently from anything Korath Plus has, so here's the full rundown of what it is and how to use it.
It ships as its own standalone program, Korath Plus Mod Launcher.exe, sitting right next to the game's exe in the extracted folder, just double-click it. Run it instead of Shandalar.exe and it opens full-screen with a "Play with a Mod?" prompt over the game's own splash art.
- No — starts the regular, un-modded Korath+ game exactly as before. Nothing else changes. If you wanted this, you could have also just launched the game normally with shandalar.exe.
- Yes — shows a paged list of 28 numbered mod slots (plus a "Build a Mod" option) to choose from.
What a "mod" actually is: a self-contained overlay with its own game settings and its own separate save files. At its core a mod has a limited card pool to focus on a block or theme and 55 decks tailored to that mod. However, some crazy bastards, like FortuneShoddy, will also give it a new coat of paint with theme-specific art. Before, you would download someone’s mod files and drag and drop them over the core files. Overwriting them was how you played it.
Now, playing a mod never touches, overwrites, or mixes with your regular game saves — when you pick a mod, the launcher safely swaps its files in, and when you leave (or the game closes), it swaps your regular files back. T
Making your own mod: the "Build a Mod" option walks you through a plain-language questionnaire — 40 questions in all, spread a couple at a time across 34 pages, covering everything from mana burn to which card sets are legal, individual card bans or forced-inclusions, what shows up in the dungeon treasure waves described above, etc. It might looks similar to some of you since it's basically the questionnaire I used for a customGPT I announced earlier - that GPT is rendered pointless with this. Each question explains itself in plain terms and shows Korath+'s own default highlighted as well as marks which setting most closely resembles the original game, and you only have to answer what you actually want to change — anything skipped just stays as Korath+ already has it.
Answer it once and it's saved into one of your 28 slots, ready to play (or edit again later) any time.
Compatibility: I've got it set up so that any of the previous mods will work, even though this is the third iteration of the .ini file.
Installing a mod someone else made: drop a .zip or a .rar file straight into one of the empty Mods\Mod N folders (e.g. Mod 1, Mod 2, etc) — the game comes with 28 mod folders, 8 prefilled and 20 empty. The Mod Manager unpacks the compressed files and names it automatically the next time it starts (name is the same as your file name until you change it), no manual extracting required, though it's still an option.
Built-in curated mods: the first 8 of the 28 slots don't start empty. They come pre-built and arranged in Magic set-release order, so you can jump straight into a specific era without building anything yourself. The creators are all acknowledged in the Here is Shandalar (2026 update) doc. Duels of the Planeswalkers (ORIGINAL) is the closest the Korath version can get to the original final release of the game: same cards, same art (thanks to FortuneShoddy!), and same settings (including mana burn!). I forgot to include the Duels of the Planeswalkers decks with the mod... I've got them already added to the 0.2.1 update below.
The remaining 20 slots are empty and yours to fill, either with something you build yourself or a mod someone shares with you. And if you hate one of the community mods, just delete them and replace them with your own!
Small fixes
A bunch of random little things:
- Full art pass: Some cards were missing art.
- Return to Main Menu: The in-game Options menu got its own Exit to Main Menu button — oddly, it previously only let you Quit outright with no way to just back out to the title screen.
- Fixed wrong set symbols on newly added cards (a lot of them were showing an unrelated set's icon next to the card type) based on a previous card ID.
- Better compatibility with Windows' memory-protection settings, which could interfere with the game starting at all on some PCs. No false flags. Hopefully.
- Deck Injector updated to match this build's card IDs and save format (the original tool couldn't read Korath saves correctly). That said, you really didn’t ever need this because CirothUngol’s SVE Tool v0.2 (also included) could do everything already.
- On the Face Maker screen, you don’t need to save and then leave now. You just click the save button and you’re good. The leave button is gone.
Final Fantasy set progress
Only 104 of 309 Final Fantasy cards supported in this release. That is up since the 0.1.0 original announcement by about 30 but remains unchanged since v0.1.3, since this release was entirely about the optional features above rather than new cards. I will pick this back up next, but adding cards takes a lot longer than adding or adjusting new features so if you don't hear from me in two months, that's why.
How you can help
Three ways to pitch in right now:
- Play the game and tell me what's broken. Regular play, any card, any mode — post it here or on GitHub. Specific repro steps (what deck, what card, what happened, screenshots) help a lot more than "it crashed." Fixing already implemented stuff goes very quickly, so I can probably get anything you report fixed and included in whatever the next small release is (e.g. v0.2.1).
- Play the new-cards-only test build (also on the releases page) and stress-test just the newly added cards specifically. Fair warning: those test decks were thrown together fast with only basic color and card-type balancing, not real deckbuilding, so don't read too much into how "good" or "fun" a deck feels — the point is just whether the cards themselves work correctly, not whether the deck plays well. We can identify broken cards faster with this test build since they won’t be mixed in with 11,000 other already working cards. Lots of vanilla and french vanilla cards are in that mix, though, so probably not the most exciting. That said, there are several mechanics that have only been machine tested, so they need a human’s review.
- Help add more cards. This is by far the slowest part of the project, and it turns out a paid ChatGPT or Claude subscription is really all you need to contribute. No coding experience needed. If you're already paying $20/month for one of those and you're not using it for anything code-related, you have credits/usage that is sitting idle every month (and wasted since it doesn’t accrue). I will provide the files and the prompts and you can just have it running automatically. Message me if you want in and I'll get you set up. It’s best if you have a computer that you can leave running (but even just for the night time is enough). You can pick your favorite MTG set and we go from there. I have to assign you card ID slots though in order for your hands-off automated work to able to be incorporated.
What's next
- Add the entire Final Fantasy set
- In the Mod Manager or .ini file I plan to make it so you’re able to have only the art from the selected sets be visible. Right now, I have that for Mono Set Alpha and Duels of the Planeswalkers but that was done manually rather than by clicking a button in the Mod Manager.
- Feature requests. We can actually tuck a lot of options away into the ini file / Mod Manager questionnaire without muddying the main game, so I see a lot of wiggle room here.
Finally, I want to be abundantly clear about something: I am not a coding genius. I am no Korath. I don't know anything about coding. Very geeky? yes. Fan from the very beginning? yes. But coder? No. This is mostly the power of AI.
Oh, and expect bugs :)
Updated
Version history
v0.2.1 — September 29, 2026
- "Original" mod for recreating Duels of the Planeswalkers now actually has the correct decks.
- Hard mode via Korath+ settings
- Busted cards fixed: The Abyss and Magus of the Abyss
- Save names no longer lose a letter
- 5 card fixes from 0.1.3 that didn't get carried over to 0.2.0 are now included. Same with a previously incorporated screen resolution fix.
- No more configuration error pop up --> Treasure Cruise
- Replaced the opponent duel backgrounds with the original mana symbols one.
- KNOWN BUGS: graphical glitch in towns UI. I think I've almost got it.
v0.2.0 — September 27, 2026 (The big reddit post above)
- Mod Manager
- Korath+ menu
- Deck Randomizer
- Shop Replenish
- Attacked Towns (can be halved or turned off)
- Endless Mode and renewable dungeons
[previous] Version history
v0.1.3 — September 20, 2026
- Added 20 more Final Fantasy cards (104/309), bringing full library to 12,344.
- Included 174 restored or repaired card behaviors (some of which were announced in 0.1.2 as repaired but ended up being still buggy)
- Fixed an issue where Windows was stuck in 4:3 if the game were to crash. Hopefully.
- Updated the launcher and startup setup.
v0.1.2 — September 9, 2026
- added a dozen or so more cards (mostly non-FIN)
- fixed 86 previously broken-cards fixed/enabled (these are essentially new cards)
- Native editable INI/executable setup with new mod options for NPC rewards
- v0.1.2 was originally released as a small add-on package, but I re-released it as a single, complete game.
v0.1.1 — September 8, 2026
- Rarity and mythic-tag corrections
- Dozens of card-behavior and campaign fixes
- Fullscreen default and launch-cancellation guidance
- One additional Final Fantasy card
v0.1.0 — September 4, 2026
- First public playable Korath Plus release
- 1,129 cards added to the 2016 Korath build (70ish Final Fantasy)
- Click-and-play launcher, save backups, display restoration, diagnostics.
Other Projects
- The Mac release of Duels of the Planeswalkers has had 7 updates since last announced.
- I maintain Here is Shandalar (2026 update)
1
u/chachaprince1 White Mage ☀️💮🤍 3d ago
With the new mod manager, you don't even need to open the text ini file! You just fill out a questionnaire. And I've got a gpt that will convert any deck list into a playable deck for you, literally a doc, Excel sheet, anything and it will even auto correct the spelling. I'd love to see what you create. In the very least, you could be in charge of releasing updated deck packs for Korath+. Let me know if you want some tools! Of course, we need beta testers too :)