Things I’ve learned along the way.
Acid and shadow skulls always have an orb-ish thing in their rooms. Destroy this and they can’t replenish their magic; they will cease their attacks and simply go back and forth from the orb.
Trap chutes descend all deposited items to floor 1. Letting you pick them back up the next time you die. If you’re feeling overwhelmed or if you just don’t want a challenge, deposit all your items (including equipped items) and kill yourself by running into enemies or traps. You’ll respawn with most of your levels, skills and attributes intact and all your gear waiting for you in the starter chest.
Maneuver your enemies between you and spikes and use your sack (F) to hit them into the spikes. They will die instantly.
Spikes can hurt you, too. This is not as evident in the first biome as in the second one, due to the spikes protuding farther on those particular spiketraps. Don’t walk into them.
Explosive barrels can be ignited by hitting them. Useful for clearing out enemies. Or killing yourself. 🙂
Molemen have a heavy attack that can’t be parried. With good timing you can always avoid it by hitting him with your sack (F). This is much easier than running backwards.
While other bugs (non-roasted) are bad, this one is good and will replenish your health:
It is generally found on food shelves and dining tables. Brown ones are also positive, can be found on floors.
There are 4 kinds of orbs you can find sitting on pedestals, they all give you something:
White/grey-ish: Invincibility for a long period. Good for clearing rooms.
Red: Full health. Save it for when you really need it or grab it when you leave a floor.
Transparent with something that looks kinda like a brain inside: full wand charge.
Purple: Experience.
Watch out for pressure plates while running around levels:
You can use this to your advantage if you let enemies run on it in the right direction, or if you hit it while they’re running at you from the other direction.
Platforming tends to have the same patterns, more or less. Learn them and you’ll have an easier time.
There is no trap in the game that can’t be avoided. Alternating spikes always look the worst, but can be jumped over to safety.
When you enter a new floor, the game saves and if you close the game (or it crashes) you’ll start from that point, with everything you had at that time.
You may also save from savepoints that exist somewhere on each floor. Again, these are only useful if you close the game or crash. If you die you will return to floor 1. That is, unless you accidentally alt+f4 before respawning.
Help! My floor generation is fricked and I can’t reach my exit (or the silver key)!
First make sure that you’re not missing anything look for switches, use a map reveal if you have it. Switches can spawn in weird places sometimes (mid-air, inside objects).
Kill every enemy. Sometimes the key spawns on the map and sometimes it’s dropped by enemies.
You’ve run through the level over and over, looked in every corner, under every barrel, inside each goblin nostril? OK. If the floor truly is cursed and there’s no way forward:
Right click the game in your library and go to manage->properties->betas tab->select the beta in the dropdown menu and accept. The next time you load your broken floor it should have been regenerated.
Beware: As far as I know, this is a one-time deal. Once you load a savegame in the beta it can no longer be loaded in the main branch due to version mismatch. This also means that you have to stay on the beta branch for as long as you’re playing this save, of course.
I’m stuck in a room. There are bars on the door.
You’re in a challenge room, and those bars are supposed to retract once all enemies are dead. See if you can spot an enemy halfway inside of a wall or the ground. If you can’t find one, go have a snack and come back – the bars retract on their own at some point to avoid you getting stuck.
I got a crappy wand that only hits enemies if I’m super close… and it just boops them a bit.
That’s a kinetic wand. You can right click with it while looking at things like explosive barrels and you’ll lift them. While something is lifted you can fling said object at a high velocity at enemies.
Note that only flinging uses up a charge, not picking up objects. This means it can be used often to move stuff that’s in your way, avoid traps, make ladders to spots you shouldn’t really be able to reach, and more.
When do I get a merchant/crafting station?
You get nothing on floor 1. On floor 2 you get a merchant, and a crafting station on floor 3. They keep alternating like this, showing up in a predictable pattern.
What do I do with this copper key?
It’s used to open cells/boxes with treasure inside. Rarely you’ll get more than there are locks on the floor, in this case it’s up to you whether to keep it.
What’s this potion thing? It says +dexterity, or +intelligence, or +dexterity. Is it temporary?
It’s a permanent effect. Drink it and rejoice.
I’m not including things like lifesteal, as their usefulness is obvious and you’ll see them for yourself long before you see any of these (rare) skills.
Deflection is amazing. At the first level it lets you deflect any projectile. Casters go from being a big threat to being a mere nuisance if you’re not fighting something else while they’re shooting at you. Eventually it becomes a good way of hitting back projectiles at the enemy.
Sack smack is an essential move, and this skill simply makes it even better.
Crafting can get you some really powerful weapons, with way more skills on them than anything you’ll find on corpses.
The ability to add more pieces, and thus more attributes and skills, is essential for making great weapons.
A free item at every shop? Can’t really say no to that. In addition, levels beyond the first reduce shop prices.
My reasons for this one are exactly the same as for Artisan. Crafting is nice and for you to take advantage of that, you need crafting materials.
The chances for each corpse to drop anything is fairly low, but you can stack the skill and (hopefully) you should be killing a lot of enemies. Just remember to press E on their corpses. It even works on slimes!
More damage is great, but this is down here because it’s not something worth stacking before things like scrap collector or artisan. You have to be able to make a good weapon before you concern yourself with making it even better.
Yet another way to gain crafting materials. Haven’t had much luck with getting any good materials with this… but anything is better than just hoping for enemies to drop ’em.
To sell something to a merchant, simply right click it in YOUR inventory (right).
You can sell this cuddly moleperson pretty much anything but keys. Weapons tend to be the most valuable. If you feel you need cash, you might consider cleaning up all loot on the entire floor and bringing it to the merchant.
He has no coin or inventory limit and will buy any amount of items you bring him.
When you’re at a shop the first thing you should do is look at every non-grey item. It doesn’t matter if it’s a wand and you don’t want a wand, nor does it matter if it’s a helmet and you already have an amazing red helmet.
You’re looking at the skills, and only the skills. Since you can permalearn any skill you CURRENTLY have from equipped items, it’s a perfectly valid strategy to buy a crappy item because it has a good skill on it. If the skill is good enough you might even consider taking a blade/axehead/macehead/hilt/whatever just to make a weapon to equip and permalearn the skill.
In the room you will find several interactable objects that all do the same thing: bring you to the crafting interface.
In addition, there will be a box of crafting materials (usually two, and usually crappy ones).
To start crafting a weapon, you’ll need at least two things:
1: a blade, axehead, or macehead.
2: a hilt (if blade), or shaft (if axe/mace).
The blade or head determines the damage and, obviously, the type of weapon. They also generally have more skills and stats than other parts. This is by far the most important part of your weapon.
The hilt/shaft is, as stated, required but it has no impact on the damage of the weapon. The other parts that can be added (gems and misc) follow the same pattern, but they’re not required to make a weapon – they just add whatever skill or stat is stated on their tooltip to the final product.
Now, eventually you will outgrow your trusty, and undoubtedly beautiful, artwork of a weapon.
So what do you do? Throw it away? Sell it? NO!
The next time you get to a crafting station, right click on the weapon in your inventory while you have the crafting screen open.
You’ll be prompted to disassemble the weapon: do it. You now have ALL your original crafting materials back.
Just get a new head/blade of the appropriate level and it’ll serve you well again. Credits to NolanSyKinsley for this.
You’ll know it when you see it: it’s an altar. Always in a weirdly shaped room of some kind.
This beauty lets you trade items of any non-grey quality for a random item of one quality lower (somewhat regularly the same quality as well).
Simply stand next to it, or on it, and drag items out of your inventory. To separate an item from a stack use shift and click.
If you give it a grey item you’ll be punished (HP damage).
You can sacrifice not just weapons and armor, but things like fire bombs as well.
Rarely you’ll get a potion back (+str, dex or int).
If you give it a cursed weapon you’ll receive a blessed weapon:
I usually give this thing any greens and above that I don’t want on a floor. The only reason not to do so is if you’re desperate for money. This is by far the best way of keeping your health potion and wand potion stocks refilled, in addition to getting other neat stuff.
If you’re leaving a crafting floor, why not fill your remaining inventory with greens and above just incase you get a sac altar? If you don’t, at least you can sell them at the shop!
Killstreaks are extremely potent on lower floors after you’ve descended. Run through rooms and one shot everything you can! Plan your route if you can, the timer gets quicker the higher the streak gets.
This fella gives you quests. You can only have 1 at any given time, and it fails if you die but persists when you ascend floors.
Quests can be worth your time. They usually give you 5 attribute points, money or a random item. Some basically auto-complete on lower levels whilst others require you to go out of your way to complete them.
Oil is stinky and slows you down. However, you can harvest the power of oil by igniting it with a weapon with fiery strikes! Stand close to the oil and aim at it while swinging. Make sure not to stay on top of it.
Fire deals a lot of damage (much like acid) and can be effectively used to deal with a lot of enemies.
This is a treasure slime. If you see it, kill it. It drops a bunch of random items. Look at it like a walking chest with the same moveset as the blue slime.
The spider boss seems scary, but it can fairly easily be killed with (probably) any weapon.
If you want to kill it without cheesing: Hit it in the face until it starts to telegraph and then run to the right or left, while continuing to hit it.
When it walks away from you it will spawn eggs, usually behind you.
Destroy them asap and avoid the poison they leave behind.
Run to the boss as soon as it comes back to the center while avoiding the web it shoots at you.
Repeat the process as many times as needed.
Cheesy:
Stay as far away from the boss as you can until it spawns eggs.
Destroy as many as you can and kill any remaining spiders that may have hatched.
Position yourself so that the acid left behind by the eggs are between you and the boss and dodge incoming webs.
The boss will walk into the acid and suffer from its effects. Try to keep it inside of the acid.
Repeat as many times as needed.
Ava (orc lady with two swords)
Hit her when you feel that it’s safe to do so, but focus on parrying.
Over time her swords will fly away and onto the floor. When she loses both she’ll go to pick them up.
Use your sack (F) to hit her into spikes when she’s chasing her weapons.
You know the deal, repeat. That’s it.
Platform dude in Ava’s room. Not sure what his name is so I’m going to call him Bob
Hit the supports for the platform a ton of times. Bob doesn’t defy gravity.
