Bomb Baton

Bomb Baton is a relic that adds extra Bomb pegs to the initial pegboard when a run begins. Its effect increases the count of regular bomb pegs on the board by a fixed amount, placing additional bomb pegs into random peg positions and replacing whatever peg was there.

The relic's core effect is expressed in game data as granting +{[ADDITIONAL_BOMBS]} bomb_regular to the starting peg layout. When the relic spawns these extra bombs, each new bomb replaces a randomly chosen peg on the board; the replacement can be any peg type that occupied that slot. This means Bomb Baton can both increase bomb density and remove potentially useful pegs (for example, low-value pegs or other special pegs) in exchange for guaranteed explosive pegs.

Practical interactions and strategy:

• Bomb Baton always applies to the initial peg placement, so its benefit is realized immediately on the first shot.
• When paired with relics or effects that also add bombs, order of operations matters: Bomb Baton triggers before Bombulet-style effects that double or add bombs after, so combinations can multiply bomb counts. For example, with Bombulet the effective bomb total becomes (b + 3) × 2 where b is the original number of bombs on the board.
• The random replacement behavior can be used tactically: replacing low-value pegs with bombs increases explosion potential and score opportunities, but it can also remove beneficial special pegs. Expect variance in value each run.
• Bomb Baton is most valuable on board layouts and builds that make good use of high bomb counts (items that trigger on bomb explosions or synergy with blast-focused damage). It is less useful when preserving specific special pegs is critical to a strategy.

Design notes:

• The added bombs are the game's regular bomb peg type (bomb_regular) and are counted explicitly in the pegboard initialization.
• Because the extra bombs are inserted by replacing existing pegs at random, precise placement cannot be controlled and should be accounted for when planning synergies.