BURN IT ALL! How I made 250 tokens in ~4 hours + Got #1 on the EM leaderboard (for ver 1.24, 12/24/19)

Overview

1) DemonCrawl is very reliant on luck. This guide can’t guarantee success, only that you’ll stand a much higher chance by making sound strategic (item) choices.2) This strategy may get debuffed to oblivion soon, so this guide may not matter in a few weeks.

Proof of the Deed

Before we get into how this was done, I’ll show you the proof of the results.
250+ tokens (started from practically zero, I was still trying to upgrade crafting abilities at the time):

#1 on the leaderboard for version 1.24 of the game:

#6 since version 1.14. I do think this strategy could get to #1 in all versions of the game given a more optimal mix of items and a better player. I wasn’t perfectly lucky, nor am I particularly skilled. I just found the method:

What Mastery Should I Choose? Endless Multiverse 1?

Ultimately, you should take the mastery (link to the wiki[demoncrawl.com]) you most enjoy or the one you feel will keep you alive until you get the items that constitute the real bulk of this strategy.

The mastery that gave me a winning run, and the mastery I’d recommend to the less skilled is Knight. Before this wild success Knight was honestly the only mastery I had unlocked. It’s a great decision for those new to the game (as I was) or not very skilled at minesweeper (as I am) since you start out with 1 defense (scaling linearly) which is a huge lifesaver when you’re prone to making mistakes. By choosing Knight you’re planning to fail but you’re also choosing to give yourself a wider buffer for failure. Knight helps most in the early game… but not so much in the late game when the real threat isn’t clicking on monsters but the deadly level mods (see the conga-line of 14 mods floating in the background on the image below) which we will discuss later in this guide.

The class that I feel is likely to succeed overall (and has succeeded the most on the leaderboards historically) is Spy, though Spy can only be wielded effectively by the most skilled players or through many hours of practice. If you’re a regular person like me then you won’t have either the brain to wrap around Spy’s extremely powerful second-level Chord Glean ability (which grows in value exponentially into the late game), nor the time to invest into learning how to properly use it in a timely manner. Chord Gleaning requires the player to see a tile of value 4 or higher and choose not to discover one tile they know is clear around it until after they’ve flagged all adjacent monsters. The reward for being able to pull off this insane arcane dance (which ends in actually chording the high-valued tile) is the ability to see the numbers behind all tiles, including the flags. Doing the Spy’s dance correctly can eliminate the majority of cases where you’d be forced to make a guess, and will turn your gasps of horror when a 4-6 shows up into a wicked smile of power. If you plan on learning how to Spy, prepare for a journey. You’ll spend whole minutes looking at the 3×3 around a high-value tile trying to figure out the optimal dance. Until you can turn those minutes into fractions of a second this time spent struggling to learn the dance will outright kill your run the moment you find yourself staring into the eyes of a Melting level mod (as the Melting mod will destroy something in your inventory for every 30 seconds you spend on the level).
The classes that I feel are the biggest wildcards are the Firefly and the Witch. We will get into why in the items section.

Yes. Every strategy for Endless Multiverse, including this one, requires you to start from the beginning. If you have managed to get to a higher tier of EM before doing this strategy you’ll have to buy a reset for Endless Multiverse from the token shop for 1 token. Don’t be afraid, you’ll make a lot more than 1 token during the run.
Why do you have to start from EM1? Because when you start at higher tiers of EM everything begins tougher: You get more level mods, there are more monsters and they are deadlier. Playing EM is like running up a half-pipe. You need to start from the bottom and build momentum. You can’t start half-way up with zero momentum and expect to do anything but land on your behind.

Which Items Should I Try To Find Choose?

Items? HAH! You only need one.

This entire strategy is built on a string which is tied to all of the other goodies:
Friendly Fire.

Why?

Once you have Friendly Fire every stranger will shoot a flare in a random direction each turn. This flare will wrap around the level until it contacts an obstacle. When it hits most obstacles (undiscovered tiles or other strangers) it will destroy them and set the tile on fire. It will not destroy most items, though. This is important because:

1. When a flare kills a hidden monster the tile becomes clear and discovered without any interaction or threat by you. This means every turn you are discovering additional tiles for free, growing with the number of strangers on the board.
2. When a flare kills a stranger they have a chance to drop a subset of items tied to that type of stranger. Since the flare wraps around the board, given enough turns every stranger will eventually shoot themselves in the back of the head and kill themselves. Most strangers drop items which make their type spawn much more often, meaning more strangers throwing flares, meaning more items being dropped, meaning point #1 skyrockets really, really quickly.
3. You are going to have a ton of items in 3 or 4 maps. Lucky for you the nomad stranger (who, yes, throws flares and drops a bindle that makes yet more nomads spawn) will not only buy and sell items, allowing you to treat every level like a giant item shop, but also a bag that makes item shop inventories infinite and a ring that allows you to sell items to item shops. These allow you to quickly grow and prune your inventory into whatever shape you wish.
4. Plants (strangers who throw flares and drop an item which makes yet more plants spawn) also give up a thing that allows you to choose to feed them the last object in your inventory instead of feeding randomly. This lets you prune your inventory in a pinch once your bag becomes full (which it will be full constantly.)

Recall that Firefly and Witch were the masteries I had tagged as wildcards. While this strategy will allow you to quickly build up a huge reportoire of items, you’ll need to find a method for regenerating life points as you’ll be reaching into fires a lot to pick up those valuable objects. The Firefly mastery renders this point moot: Everything makes fire and you are immune to fire. A level 2 Witch who can prune their inventory into having a Holy Pendant (an item which renders you immune to omens) treats each omen in their inventory as protection against level mods. Finding any way to avoid the Melting level mod is going to be extremely important in the late game. I’ll explain the run-killers in their own section.

My inventory during the run would shift a bit as I ran into level mods (or made stupid mistakes) that costed me valuable items. I also started to ween myself off of magic items and build up a sack of passives after mods started to seal my inventory. With that in mind I can recommend these as solid choices:

1. Reiterating: Friendly Fire and the items which spring directly from killing strangers with Friendly Fire are mandatory. You must have Merchant Ring, Mucilage and Bindle for the strategy to work.
2. Aspect of the Bear / Crystal Veins / Anything that gives you life. Unless you chose Firefly as your Mastery, you need to have some way to regenerate life because you will be reaching into fire a whole lot. Even as a Firefly, it’s still very important to have something like this on hand.
3. Holy Pendant. Pick this up the moment it cycles in, and keep it even after your inventory is filled with zero omens in sight. Most omens kill runs. Friends don’t let friends play with omens without a Holy Pendant.
4. Purifier. I didn’t even know this item existed until after my record run (yes, I’m that new to the game). I also wrote this guide before discovering Purifier, so some of the other recommended items in this section take a backseat to finding the Purifier. Had I known this was a possibility, I would have continued pruning my inventory and repeating levels until I found it. If you can get a Purifier and avoid getting your inventory sealed, you eliminate the late game difficulty curve.
5. Godmonger. By pruning you get to choose which items go into your inventory. With Godmonger you get to choose multiple legendary items.
6. Punching Bag + Shop Key, or Angel of Stone + Chaos Portal + Opal of Mana. With these combos you can replay levels infinitely, which means that you aren’t forced to play a level with item-removing mods or item-sealing mods until you’ve found something to negate their effects, i.e. Purifier above.
7. Silver Bullet. Not vital to the run but insanely fun. You will be making dozens of projectiles every turn. Just one silver bullet from the center of the map will mark an enormous chunk of the level. Some levels you’ll beat in less than ten turns because so many monsters are getting flagged for you by silver bullets.
8. Book of Combat. Not vital but it’ll let you farm tokens at a steady pace if that’s what you’re after. Literally every enemy in the entire level is destined to die by fire using this strategy, and the coins they drop do not burn away.
9. Rainbow Lens and Handbell. Not vital, and since they are active-use magic items they won’t survive the late-game once your inventory starts getting sealed by an onslaught of mods. The Rainbow Lens is pretty much guaranteed to flag a quarter of the level in one click because the entire floor is on fire. Handbell is nice in the early game because it allows you to force strangers to spawn in problem areas. Flare sprinklers on demand.
10. Viking Helmet. “Fortify by 2 every time a stranger dies.” Do you want armor?
11. Fake Moustache? It’s not tied to the Friendly Fire strategy at all, really. It’s nice to have a backup plan in case some weird combination of the stars aligning prevents you from spawning strangers. I love this item because it is a whole strategy in itself, capable of beating entire levels alone all for the price of a single inventory slot. Truth be told I haven’t unlocked any of the other legendary items in the token shop because I don’t want to dilute the chances of getting this bad boy.
12. Bellows. Optional. It spreads fire faster and in a world where no strangers spawn, gives you a way to start the pyromania. Like the Fake Moustache, it gives you a backup strategy in case something prevents you from spawning strangers. In my entire run I was never unable to spawn strangers, but considered picking these up at one point to stretch many of the items in my inventory into that regime in case the problem arose.

That Worked! I Am A Golden God! What Could Possibly End Me Now? (Also, where are my 250 Tokens in 4 hours?)

So you have the perfect inventory. Everything you desire is sitting in your bag. You have 10 revives, 100 life and 10,000 defense.
But then, all of a sudden, your backpack is gone and you are in the middle of EM50 where every monster does 99,999 damage and you have no way to protect yourself.

What I’m trying to get at here is that what will inevitably kill your run is anything that randomly destroys items in your inventory. There’s three four separate level mods which do this kind of thing and a boss:

• The one that killed me was the Melting mod. Every 30 seconds an item is removed from your inventory. You might just get unlucky and the mod takes everything that protected you and, in your rush to complete on time, clicked a monster. Boom. You’re dead.
• The Apocalypse mod spawns strangers that might hurt you, give you an omen or steal from you unless you bribe them. You absolutely must find the ones that steal your items and bribe them before the level ends.
• I got lucky and didn’t see it during my run, but there’s a rare mod known as Pagan which straight up just deletes 10 items when the level starts. I hope you have a way to reduce level mods or dice in an inventory slot which isn’t sealed because otherwise this will just straight up bodyslam you into a grave.
• The Burglar boss steals your items every time he picks up a Heart of Darkness. You also just have to be lucky and hope you have the Transcendence item in your inventory. Transcendence will turn Hearts of Darkness into souls which you can pick up, depriving it of the nefarious sustenance it needs to power the depraved machinations of your demise.
• As pointed out by LootZ in the discussion page for DemonCrawl, if you’re doing the Friendly Fire strategy you should also watch out for the Vengeful mod, which will cause enemies to attack you when they die.

Yeah. So since I could prune my inventory due to the Friendly Fire strategy I had gotten to EM4’s boss from EM1 with little effort, but the number of level mods were getting to be over the top:

I had noticed that the level had the Currency mod from the beginning of the tier. Using the Sapling and Mucilage items from the Friendly Fire strategy I kept feeding my bottom 2-4 inventory slots each level to plants until I could fill it with Miracle Seeds (also dropped by plants in the level), and between each level I would DROP A LOAD OF MY MIRACLE SEED ONTO MY BOSS (sorry, it’s not often you get to say something like that in any context), vastly widening the boss level. I also chose to do every statue level I ran into, increasing drop rarity. Since this was late into an Endless Multiverse run meteorites were dropping. I also picked up every meteorite I ran into, further increasing coin rarity (but adding even more level mods). With all of the mods I had stacked up, I was limping into the boss’ level with almost my entire inventory sealed but it didn’t matter: There were so few enemies and so many coins, and all of them were tokens.

Addendum: How To Do The Spy’s Chord-Glean Dance (& How to Chord/Double-Chord In General)

In the comments of this guide Armaros11 asked for an explainer on how to do the spy’s insane arcane chord-glean dance.
Because knowledge of chording is required I also explained the powerful double-chord which everyone, not just the Spy, is capable of doing.
Here’s a link to a separate guide, made specifically for these functions.

Thanks for Reading. Good Luck Out There, Friend.

Remember that winning isn’t the most important thing in life. It’s making a massive amount of money. I’ve had countless numbers of [insert preferred sex here] proposition me after I struck it big on tokens in my minesweeper roguelite. In a completely unrelated vein please Like, Comment and Subscribe. Don’t forget to hit that bell button. My Youtube Steam career depends upon it :^)

In all seriousness, do be kind and, if you find a better strategy, pay it forward. To help someone else win is better than winning ourselves as we’d all rather live in a world of camaraderie than a world of cutthroats. We can’t do that if we aren’t willing to also reach out into the dark and hoist others up on high.

If you can think of any way to improve this guide, please write in the comments below.