Nonogram world hidden in plain sight?

Anne & I have been playing Nonogram puzzles before bed a lot lately.  I described them in a past blog post and we forgot about them for awhile.  Wow, that was five full years ago.  

Nonogram.Com has a good range of daily challenges but the puzzles don't have much variety -- just 5x5, 10x10 and 15x15 puzzles, some with spaces filled in or clues blocked at first.  There's a funny bit of confusion with having stars showing on some spaces, to gain extra points when you clear that block, but in fact the stars mess with our visual processing of the games and sometimes make us make mistakes.  "Stupid stars," is heard often.

But it turns out that Nonogram Katana has a whole Village you can build, with buildings to craft all those power ups I never noticed before.  Then more materials to open up more buildings.  I don't know when they added this, surely in the five years since I last wrote about the app or I would have noticed it by now ... now it has gotten vast and complex and the wiki is overloaded with details.

First you join the Adventurer's Guild.  Then the village (Territory) can be accessed using the map icon at top right.   There are over 30 buildings with a huge tree of items,  crafting, artifacts and more.  There is a dungeon you can build and level up,  where your PC can explore and run into a wide range of rooms and mobs even taming certain mobs to help you out.  Eventually.  I'm not nearly there yet.

The power ups can be accessed when working on a puzzle by using the "..." icon at bottom right then clicking the bag.   There are boosts that will reveal one square,  a row or column,  a 3x3 area,  5x5 area, give hints, or make corrections.  Of course, you don't get as much xp for solving the puzzle if you use power ups or hints.

It feels like you will have to solve thousands of puzzles to make much progress in the Territory or character arc.   It's strange discovering a vast unknown game world inside what looked like a simple puzzle app.

One of the challenges when trying to progress in the nonogram world is figuring out what to spend your limited resources on.   I had been casually putting points into various buildings in the last few months without really knowing what's going on.

Just now, I got the Shop.  So now I can buy and sell certain items.  That sounds like a big obvious gotta-have step.   I was working on the dungeon, the cauldron and more.   But I needed a way to get specific items for those builds.   You only get 0 to 6 items for finishing any puzzle, so needing 300 coins to start a farm is nuts.

Unless you do the daily quests for 20-30 coins each.   Oddly, there are usually two quests with the same challenge: do a 10x10 puzzle in this category and do a 10x10 from any category.

I just started my first Expedition, now that I could buy the last 8 logs I needed.  An expedition is a set of more challenges: do ten 10x10s, then some number of some other type.   I thought the first two visible challenges would be it,  but more challenges keep showing up on the list.

Nope, just the four groups of challenges.  Then there was a decent reward and hints of future challenges wrapped up in a story line about new things to unlock.

This area is very well done, and scaled to match the 100,000+ puzzles in the system.