It’s exactly neutral, 900 satiety worth of food is used to create a 900 satiety pie. However, for the first 450 turns you also get a little more health regen as a benefit.
Actually, the old logic also tried to generate a loop, but the shape often overlapped and was very chaotic. I’ve increasingly tried to tweak how chaotic-feeling Shattered’s levelgen looks to try and recapture that a bit. I wrote two blog posts about this a while ago, including a little step-through of how vanilla levelgen works: shatteredpixel.com/…/whats-coming-in-shattered-pi…shatteredpixel.com/…/whats-coming-in-shattered-pi…
This is something that I’ll likely address over time via balance patches, but the actual balance of something doesn’t always match with player expectations. It’s early so numbers are a bit rough, but so far the mossy clump has a MUCH higher success rate than the parchment scrap, likely because of all the extra seeds and dew it can generate. Rather than assuming what’s best, I prefer to get some data in and balance against that and player feedback.
I mainly picked floors 1-3 as I want trinkets to be active for most of a run, and didn’t want to put it in the prison as that area is already really bloated with gear progression.
I mainly removed magical porter because it had extremely, extremely low usage. It made more sense to push alchemize than having magical porter still exist and compete with it.
I opted to let them sit in the inventory mainly because they’re a sort of pseudo-equipment, and wanted them to sit near those items. I’m aware that inventory pressure continues to be an issue for some folks, but was hoping that making alchemize so much cheaper might help with that.
edit: also, while this certainely isn’t 1:1, trinkets will usually replace a different regular item drop in the early parts of the game.