Passive Skill Trees Mod: A Comprehensive Guide [RGON]

It's a big mod! It's not my mod, I'm just an enthusiast.

It adds a few (six?) layers of progression to the game behind your standard fare of unlocks. Defeating enemies grants you exp. You accumulate levels and spend skill points to empower yourself across future runs, but eventually you’ll be applying handicaps to yourself for exp multipliers and other layers of meta-progression.

At its basest, there is a global skill tree and a character-specific skill tree. Every character has a unique tree and character level, and its boons apply only to that character. Global, obviously, applies to everyone. Successfully completing floors and runs also awards you Respec points, which you can use to de-allocated nodes to get the skill points back if you'd like to sink them elsewhere.

When you’re in your final quarter of the game, you’re gonna have a global level above a thousand, a host of run-defining ancient starcursed jewels, an uber expedition incurring major stat penalties, a choose-your-own-misery star tree from jewels you’ve looted, magic and unique weapons (and your subsequent combination of the two) to give yourself an edge, and a bazaar to select additional starting items with at a modicum of new currency. Let’s get started.

You can get the mod from the steam workshop here:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3305869734

And if you need Repentogon, you can find that one here:

https://github.com/TeamREPENTOGON/REPENTOGON/releases

Current guide version: 0.91

Changelog:

2 Jul/0.912: Thoughts for Colossal Mallet and Volatile Arbalest.

18 Jun/0.91: Added a how-to for copying PST save data from one save file to another.

10 Jun/0.9: Added trees for remaining characters. Some Ancient Astral Weapons and Ancient Starjewels are still missing descriptions- time for the next save file...

26 Apr/0.8.5: Added trees for Lost, Tainted Lost, Blue Baby. Add thoughts on Embered Azurite, Sanguinis.

1 Apr/ 0.8.4: Added thoughts for Soul Watcher, Blazing Carnelian, Arachnite Ancient Jewels, Tainted Azazel. Moved changelog, added a few bugs.

30 Mar/ 0.8.3 Added thoughts for Crystallized Anamnesis Ancient Jewel. Don't use Unusually Small Starstone with Tazazel or you'll cry.

23 March/ 0.8.2 Added thoughts for Tainted Forgotten, Unusually Small Starstone. Slight clarification at the opening of the Expeditions chapter.

15 March/ 0.8.1: Added thoughts for Glittering Starstone and Phantasm Prism Ancient Jewels. Added Ancient Stardust exploit.

21 March/ 0.82: Added thoughts for Unusually Small Starstone and Tainted Forgotten. Added minor bugs section [7.3].

This is the basic skill tree, all EXP gained contributes to global skill points to allocate here. It takes approximately, I don’t know, 400 skill points to fill out? Surplus skill points will be used across the sidereal trees later, but we’ll get to that.

Square nodes are minor nodes, nodes with square indents are notable nodes – usually like minor nodes, but stronger. Octagonal nodes are keystone nodes that have significant effects.

Let’s talk about what I consider to be important early nodes:

* The XP Gain nodes are great. More XP means more levels. Grab up to the two XP gain notables as soon as you can. The fires/poops/secrets/whatever are okayish too if you’re starting a new character, but not really meaningful. I don’t see much point past the the Flawless XP nodes.
* Dynamic Tree mode is a gimmie. Allocate it. No good reason not to and you need this for other features.
* Spec up to the Relearning keystone in the respec points branch if you win regularly. It’s not likely you’ll need as many respec points as you’ll generate, but you won’t have to think about it after this.
* The upper Mapping Chance branch leads to Eldritch Mapping, which ensures you never get Curse of the Lost (or Amnesia pill effect) ever again at the cost of a slight nerf in stats for the floor. You’ll always have your minimap! Essential. Grab the rest of Mapping Chance while you’re at it.
* Lucky Pennies to the left of Mapping Chance don’t have a corresponding notable, but do add a pretty good amount of Lucky Pennies to your runs. Grab these nodes.
* Whenever you get to them, the Grab Bags notables are good.
* Trinket Smelting Chance on the right side of the tree is quite useful especially early on before you’ve unlocked Gulp! or Smelter.
* Curse Room Spikes Removal on the right side of the tree is really good. It doesn’t always apply correctly if the curse room is connected to the spawn room- make sure you leave the spawn room and re-enter to see if the effect took.

Good midgame nodes:

* Boss Challenge Room Unlock can feed you a couple extra attribute-boosting items over the course of a run. Gives you good reason to find Telepills or The Hermit or what have you
* Natural Curse Cleanse takes a lot of the headache out of floor curses, which you’re likely to see more often once you get to playing with Starcursed jewels. You want this.
* Sacrifice Room Red Hearts can help you milk sac rooms. Really great for characters like Maggie.
* Spiked Chest Replacement also just takes the headache out of your lootboxes, if it procs you’ll see the spikes retract when you get close enough to trigger them.
* Special Sacks on the left side is a nice way to get black sacks before unlocking them, and the extra chance to get them (and subsequently extra chances to get black hearts) gives you more opportunities to protect your red hearts and preserve deal chance.
Anecdote for unlocks via other characters- I haven’t tried this.
* Pill Floor Luck and Pill Card Luck: I don’t think it actually removes the luck gained when you change floors, so you can ramp your stats up if you gobble down each one you see.

It’s all up for you to decide, but the rest is yours to play with! Remember that you can spend respec points to redistribute those skill points if you’re hankering for a change.

Final notes: The ‘First Item Tears/Speed/Luck/whatever’ notables apply the stat boost for each unique item you pick up. So if you pick up 20 items in a run, then First Item Speed has added .2 speed to your character; that’s a non-negligible boost over a run!
* Planetarium Chance means you can get planetariums without skipping treasure rooms.
* Champion Chest Limit and the Champion Chest mods are really great once you’re using Starcursed jewels, since you can make champions appear much more frequently and thereby generate a fair bit more pickups.

Keystone nodes: Going anti-clockwise:
Relearning – No longer gain respec points when completing floors. Gain 10 + 2x(floors completed) when winning a run. If you win regularly, take this. If you’re looking at collecting all secrets, take this, because you’re probably winning regularly. No need to worry about the other respec nodes once you have this keystone. 5/5.
Eldritch Mapping - Remove Curse of the Lost whenever you get it (natural curse, Amnesia, etc), up to 3x per floor. -4% stats for the floor whenever it procs. And +10% chance to get a curse on the next floor. I love my minimap, so this one’s my favorite. 4/5
Generosity In Steps - Donation machine jams after 10 coins. Buying anything unjams it. Invalidates the 30 nodes you took to get there, and it tends to be you want to dump a bunch of coins into the dono machine all at once. 2/5
Spider Mod! – Start the game with Spider Mod. Spider mod familiar doesn’t appear. Spider mod item is removed from item pool. Wanna see HP bars and damage numbers? Spider Mod. Debugging your Astral Arsenal? Spider Mod. 3/5
Hell’s Favor: - +15% damage for the next floor when entering Devil Room. -15% damage for the next floor when entering Angel Room. If you have a favorite item pool or like playing sacrifice rooms, sure. 3/5
Heaven’s Favor - +15% tears for the next floor when entering Angel Room. -15% tears for the next floor when entering Devil Room. A slightly harder sell – a tear rate multiplier is nice and all, but Mega Satan runs are probably going to want to dip into a devil room to pawn off surplus heart containers, and you’re gonna get penalized for a floor for that. 2/5

Unclick – Clicker can no longer show up. It’s one more active item removed from the pool, so probably worth having if you wanna splash the skill points. 4/5
Cosmic Realignment – We’ll get back to that.
Beast-hunter’s Rush – Triple the time bonus given from passive tree nodes. -3 seconds to Boss Rush timer when you get it. You can get 75 extra seconds from the board, so making it to Mom without taking a single hit keeps the boss rush door open ‘til 23:45. Hypothetically, if you’re not taking 50 hits in the run, this is a straight bonus. It does making predicting the boss rush door timer a little harder though. 5/5

Star Tree – Allocate it. This is core gameplay.
Dynamic Tree Mode – Allocate it. This is core gameplay.

COSMIC REALIGNMENT:
You can play your favorite character and gain unlocks for the UNLOCKED character you select on the allocated Cosmic Realignment node. If you really want Jacob & Esau’s items and prefer to be ANYONE else, you can elect to take a penalty to redirect your unlocks to that character. There are caveats:

* If you want 100% completion, ie all secrets, you’re still gonna have to play the character. You get blue icons on the completion note for realigned unlocks.
* The penalties get pretty steep for harder characters, as I’ll document below.
* You have to path through -0.96 Luck to get here. A minor penalty, but one you're going to want to respec out of while you're not realigning.
* If you forget to remove your Cosmic Alignment, you're not going to get unlocks for any other character while it's set. Watch out you don't throw a really good Tainted Lost run because you forgot to remove your alignment to Jacob & Esau, or whatever.

Playing Secrets Randomizer? (an unrelated mod, but another one of my favorites)
* Characters are unlocked for Cosmic Realigment according to their NATURAL unlock condition, not the shuffled unlock. That means, for example, if you have completed 2 levels without taking damage but still have Samson locked because that netted you, I dunno, Hagalaz, you can still realign to Samson even though you can’t play him. This is a good way to get out of a pickle where you’ve done all challenges and all unlocked character marks, but have run out of characters to play.

PENALTIES:

Listed are the penalties for realigning to the character below. Some penalties have additional cutout conditions if you're playing Keeper, these are indicated in the corresponding descriptions.

Isaac: -.1 to all stats.
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Magdalene: Starting speed is always 0.85.
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Cain: -0.5 Luck
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Judas: -10% damage
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Blue Baby: First 2 non (soul heart) pickups you collect per floor vanish. Make sure the first things you’re picking up are pennies or something; this is only likely to be an issue if you’re starved for red hearts or leaning hard into pickup scarcity.
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Eve: -8% all stats if you have 1 red heart or less.
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Samson: -0.15 damage every time you’re hit, up to -0.9. Resets every room.
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Azazel: -20% range
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Lazarus: Items that grant extra lives (Dead Cat, 1up Guppy’s Collar, etc) no longer show up.
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Eden: -0.1 to a random stat when entering a floor past Basement 1.
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The Lost: You can’t have more than 2 red/coin hearts. Non-red hearts vanish on pickup. If Lost has Holy Mantle unlocked, start with Wafer. Means you’re stuck playing red hearts with a total buffer of 4 hits. Probably don’t play this as Tainted Judas.
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Lilith: Baby familiar items have a 75% chance to be rerolled when spawned. -8% to all stats when you don’t have a baby familiar. Incubus is removed from the loot pool.
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Keeper: 50% for coins to vanish when collected. 25% chance to take ½ heart damage when a coin vanishes (1/8 coins will hurt you half a heart, approx.) If you picked up (didn’t vanish) less than 5 coins in the previous floor, halve your coin count.
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Apollyon: -0.04 to a random stat (except speed) when picking up a passive item.
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Forgotten: Convert starting hearts to bone hearts. When entering a new floor, convert a bone heart to a soul heart. (Keeper: -4% all stats per active blue fly when you enter a room, persisting until that room is cleared.)
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Bethany: Soul and Black hearts are halved when collected. -0.02 Luck when picking one up. (Keeper: -0.01 Luck permanently when a blue fly spawns, capping at -2 luck)
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Jacob & Esau: -25% damage and tears. -50% exp. Halve these penalties when collecting a new item, up to 8x.

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TAINTED CHARACTER PENALTIES:

You can do Cosmic Alignment to a character's tainted counterpart once you've rescued them from the Red Closet in Home. These penalties are generally steeper.

Isaac: No items in the first treasure room you enter. -4% all stats per item obtained after the 8th, capping at -40%.
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Maggie: If you enter a room with monsters and have more than 2 red hearts, take ½ heart damage. Coins, keys, bombs, and chests have a 15% chance to be converted to half hearts. NOTE: Half heart damage taken does not go to red hearts first. You can have as many soul and black hearts as you want so long as you don’t have more than 2 red hearts, but the moment you do, those black/soul hearts are gonna start getting munched.
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Cain: Start with Bag of Crafting if it’s unlocked. -2 luck while you don’t have Bag of Crafting on you. 100% chance to get Curse of the Blind. Crafting an item with Bag of Crafting reduces this chance by 10% per item.
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Judas: Starting health is set to 2 black hearts. All soul hearts are black hearts. Take 1 heart of damage when picking up a black heart. +0.4 damage for the room when you pick up a black heart. (Keeper: 50% chance for coins to give 0.2 damage for the room instead of healing, up to +1 damage). Effectively you turn soul and black hearts into damage instead of protection. You’re gonna want to get more heart containers.
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Blue: TBD
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Eve: -33% Tears
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Samson: TBD
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Azazel: -40% damage to enemies far away from you, based on Range. IE take a flat damage penalty past a certain threshold, and that threshold is further away as your Range stat grows. Unsure yet how far that is.
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Lazarus: You have two health bars and you cycle between them when you clear a room. 1st has your character’s starting health, 2nd has two soul hearts. Health ups only affect currently active health bar.
(Keeper: 33% to spawn a blue fly when collecting a coin instead of healing you, cannot heal while you have blue flies).
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Eden: Start with -0.15 to all stats. -0 to -25% to a random stat when hit. Also, shuffle total stat reduction across all stats.
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Lost: TBD
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Lilith: TBD
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Keeper: Convert dropped hearts, bombs, keys, and chests into coins. Start with Restock. When entering a new floor, if you have fewer than 15 coins, lose a heart container. Otherwise, halve your coin count.
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Apollyon: Gain a locust familiar when picking up a new item, up to 10. Lose a locust on entering a new floor. -4% damage, tears, luck per active locust. -8% to all stats if you have no locust.
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Forgotten: Convert a starting heart to a bone heart. Cannot have more than 1 soul/black/bone heart. Bosses drop a soul or bone heart on death. -15% range, shotspeed, luck if you don’t have a soul heart. -15% damage, tears, speed if you don’t have a bone heart. (Keeper: First coin in a room can’t heal you. -8% to all stats if you haven’t picked up a coin. Resets each room.)
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Bethany: Passive items collected become Lemegeton wisps. Lemegeton wisps take 70% less damage. Fully heal wisps when moving to a new floor. Permanent -4% all stats when a wisp dies, up to -20%.
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Jacob: TBD.

Every character has their own skill tree. Some are better than others. At level 60, each one gains two Core Crimson Nodes, Universal Crimson Nodes, and Divergent Crimson Nodes. Hypothetically, it’s supposed to cost Crimson Cores from Arcane Astrolabe Expeditions, but they only cost a skill point, so put them to use.

* What about modded characters?
It’s up to modmakers to make their own character trees for the mod, and from what I’ve seen there’s not many. That being said, modded characters do also gain exp and levels as you play them, even if they don’t have trees- this means you can convert character skill points into global skill points from them on the sidereal tree if you need a sudden infusion. More on this later. You’re going to have to make your own judgments about modded characters’ trees, since I don’t have them and don’t know what to tell you.

You CAN use your modded character to earn unlocks for standard characters via Cosmic Realignment, and you CAN convert their character skill points into Global skill points from the Sidereal tree (more on that later), so there’s reason enough to use them.

I’m rating the features and general power of each character tree below:

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Isaac: 4/5

Isaac has a really robust tree- most of it is in stat multipliers and acquiring lots of pickups. Intermittent Conception up top gives you a free birthright effect for one out of every three items, and that gives you a fair bit of extra leverage to craft a mean build. Chest Re-closing is a superb way to stack up those pickups, which goes great with Isaac’s other stat boosts associated with Pickup Boons and Boon of the Ordinary. And you get stat boosts for previous wins, and the always-helpful Mapping Chance nodes.

Once you’re deep into the Astral Forge and Expeditions, Isaac also becomes invaluable for stocking up on equipment, since the Chest Re-Closing nodes can apply to Sidereal Caches too. More on that later, just keep it in the back of your mind.

In short, Isaac’s tree makes him a stat-scaling machine with a grand abundance of keys, bombs, and coins. Good stuff.

Recommended Core Crimson Nodes: Chest Re-closing

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Magdalene: 3/5

Maggy is, unsurprisingly, all about getting and spending hearts. There’s a few ways to empower Yum Heart here, and Heartblessed chests can generate more hearts for you if you’re somehow lacking. The blood donation notes on the bottom of the tree are really good, but I didn’t find donation machines all too often even with the extra chance to spawn one in the first room. A simple, if uninteresting tree, it’ll feed you everything you need to play those sacrifice rooms and keep your run alive.

Recommended Core Crimson Nodes: Blood Donation Machine Spawn

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Cain: 5/5

Like Isaac, Cain’s runs get powerful on account of an abundance of pickups. In this case, it’s mostly nickels, good pills, and free uses at slot machines and such. The Thievery keystone lets you nab shop items for free (and scaling up to a 60% chance is VERY generous), and Wealthsmith makes keys redundant. This tree is straight bangers across the board.

Recommended Core Crimson Nodes: Free Machine Use

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Judas 2/5

The triangular cluster of nodes up top to recharge Book of Belial against bosses makes for a nice way to scale damage in longer battles, and the Black Heart Conversion in the left side are nice. The tree gives you options to transform into Dark Judas (with his whopping 2x damage multiplier) for a room at the cost of all of your red heart containers, or to start with Judas’ Shadow and take a 1.5x multiplier instead. I’m just not into it. Huge damage is nice and all, but I find it doesn’t keep up with boss armor.

Recommended Core Crimson Nodes: Black Heart Conversion

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Eve 5/5

Finally, Dead Bird is the best item in the game. Dead Bird Shield becomes a partial Holy Mantle, sometimes blocking damage when waking the bird, and Carrion Avian nets you permanent damage ups if you let Dead Bird kill bosses. Dark Protection on the left side of the tree will save your run the first time you hit the ♥♥♥♥♥ of Babylon state, and Phantomcrows on the right side gives you free Dead Birds while one is awake and working. Allocating Dead Bird Shield on your crimson nodes bumps the chance of not taking damage up to 60% (!!) which you can use to play curse rooms, sacrifice rooms, demon beggars, the works. If you have the Sacrifice Room Hearts nodes allocated on the global tree, you can play sac rooms better than Maggie can.

Eve’s good.

Recommended Core Crimson Nodes: Dead Bird Shield

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Samson 4/5

Samson has a lot of great scaling here. Hearty lets you start with a whopping four hearts (great for ramping up early devil deals), Hasted rewards you with Tears before you've stacked damage bonuses from taking hits, and Rage Buildup lets you stack a LOT of base damage between hits. Boss Luck means you're going to have a very high luck stat if you're playing well. There's no real negatives in this tree, making Samson plenty viable for early forays into storyline objectives in competition with Azazel.

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Azazel 3/5

Tree’s largely about helping Devil Beggars and collecting black hearts. Bloodcharge up top gives you more range but a slower charge speed; a trade I don’t really find worth making with as many range up items as are in the pools. You can squeeze an extra 14% chance to convert dropped hearts into black hearts via crimson node, which makes meeting the Goat’s Head criterion on the left side rather easy. It’s a safe tree for an already powerful character, which makes it great for the sorts of players that are still learning on Azazel. For more experienced players, there’s not a lot here on offer.

Recommended Core Crimson Nodes: Black Heart Conversion

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Lazarus 4/5

Upper part of the tree gives you free Birthright, and the top keystone gives you free Damocles for every other floor. You’re on the character that can most readily accept Damocles going ‘oops’ on you, and only have to bear the threat of it for half of the game. Your odds of survival are very, VERY, good, and if/when you die, Soulful Awakening gives you an extra soul heart as insurance. The Plan C nodes aren’t likely to proc and not nearly as powerful as doubling your quantity of pedestal items; the Suicide King node is a little gravy on top but unlikely to be worth surrendering all your hearts to utilize past floor 1.

Recommended Core Crimson Nodes: They’re not good. Damage?

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Eden 2/5

Eden’s tree lets you get an extra item at start, Chaos in the first treasure room, and a gulped Modeling Clay for one more ‘could be anything’ item. Spaghettification is a minor boost when you get hit but really, you don’t want to be getting hit. Chaotic Epiphany and the broken syringe nodes give you other minor bonuses, but besides the potentiation of random pedestal items and a couple extra innates, this tree isn’t that interesting.

Recommended Core Crimson Nodes: Eden’s Blessing Spawn for a free Tears Up somewhere along the line.

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Lilith 4/5

Lots at play here- big buffs to Box of Friends, free procs of Monster Manual on room clears, plenty of extra Familiars to be had. Familiar Kill Soul Hearts is free HP. Middle row keystones Demon Army and Heavy Friends are a little situational; Heavy is good for non-Incubus babies but slows you down considerably. Demon Army gives you an extra Incubus (double the firepower!) but you can't find baby familiars like Brother Bobby or Rotten Baby. Pretty sure you can still proc 'em with the Monster Manual nodes. Up to you if better chances of rolling stat ups offsets being able to find and double familiars dealing 3.5 damage.

One caveat - Box of Friends with Demon Army will give you three, not four, Incubi.

Recommended Core Crimson Nodes: Familiar Kill Soul Heart

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Blue Baby 4/5

Blue gets a lot of credit for creativity- Bean Diet makes every use of The Poop drop a giga-fart with the effect of a random Bean item, giving him room clear for early floors, and Poop On Card/Pill Usage means more bean-g for your buck. Blue Gambit can help frontload you four extra blue hearts (and identify Balls Of Steel pills), and Brown Blessing will rather frequently generate pedestal items for you to stack towards Oh Crap or reroll into something more useful. Desperate players can trade luck for more Soul Hearts with Slipping Essence but be careful of pickups scarcity.

Recommended Core Crimson Node: The Poop All Stats or Poop Item Luck

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The Lost 4/5

It's not an interesting tree, but you like second chances, right? Sacred Aegis lets your Holy Mantle regenerate within a room after seven seconds in exchange for a modest stat loss while you remain in that room. If you tend to beef it in Mega Satan's second phase, or are biting your nails over Delirium, well, hello.

Heartseeker Phantasm gives you stat ups as you collect soul and black hearts, and converts red hearts into soul hearts. The rest of the tree lets you stack tears with Soul Hearts (you hit this cap quickly) and damage with Black Hearts. It's nice to be able to utilize dropped pickups while accommodating for Lost's somewhat disappointing stat package.

Core Crimson Node: Black Heart Conversion

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Keeper 1/5

Keeper’s Blessing on the right allows you to heal for an extra coin heart per coin, four times per room. This effectively doubles your healing effect, and also boosts Wooden Nickel. Huge if you’re struggling with Keeper, but this is one of the driest, least interesting trees in the set. Fighting Greed on the first floor? Yawn. Steam Sale, but you hemorrhage coins on hit? Nah. The fly nodes are all right.

Recommended Core Crimson Nodes: Coin Shield or Blue Fly Damage. Dunno what to say if you need Coin Shield after Keeper’s Blessing, I’d be a little surprised if you made it to character level 60 before beating whomever starts you with Wooden Nickel.

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Apollyon 3/5

You can stack some stats up by not absorbing active items on the top half of the tree, and some joy eating Locust trinkets via Void on the bottom half. Apollyon’s Blessing lets you avoid Curse of the Blind entirely, thereby making sure you know exactly what you Succ or keep. It’s a great tree for Apollyon, but not run-breaking.

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Forgotten 4/5

There’s a lot to play with here, you’re going to need well over 100 character skill points to fill it out. Right side details bone mode, left side for spirit mode. Both are excellent. Bone heart conversion on the right side helps you make up for sequential mistakes. Osteomancy lets you borrow a bone item for free every floor, and the Treasure Room Bone Item small and notable nodes feed you what are generally good items, which scale up the Melee Damage Per Bone Item nodes. The tree is also laden with nodes that give you minions and Polished Bone gulped trinkets, and fodder is good if your glut of mods installed don’t draw the game to a crawl (on the bright side, boneys from polished bones are quite aggressive). On the left, The Soul essentially gets a free Blessed Penny and bonus Soul Hearts, and the Spiritful nodes (you only get to allocate one) just give you more innate effects from items predominantly sourced from the angel and devil rooms. I’m partial to Spirit Reaper, since the effect is powerful and doesn’t require any coordination between bone and soul forms. Inner flare is great, Soulful is not. You either have too many soul hearts, or none because you swapped The Soul to steal a devil deal.

Recommended Core Crimson Nodes: Honestly, you got options here. Bone Heart Conversion will save your ass. I’m not sure the Birthright node works, but if it does it’s a fair choice. Polished Bone, Bone Item, Soul Heart on Room Clear, whatever you need.

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Bethany 4/5

Wisps die too fast? Will o the Wisp keystone: what if they didn’t? This whole tree is stacked, rounding out Beth’s weaknesses. Soul Heart Tears means you’re gaining stats with every soul heart. Soul Trickle rewards you with soul hearts if you’re at full health. Chaotic Wisps is fun. You get more stats per orbiting wisp per floor, which means more stats. Wisp Destroyed Luck scales your luck up quickly. I don’t take the Metronome keystone, but everything else is free real estate. Beth scales really well and gets to play hardball with her considerably more durable wisps. It’s a great tree.

Recommended Core Crimson Nodes: Wisp Orbital Boon

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Jacob & Esau: 4/5

JnE antagonists ready to decry the character as 'Jacob & Hitbox,' this tree is for you. Jacob Heart on Kill and Esau Soul Heart on Kill will feed you additional health with extreme regularity. Heart Link is incredible, doubling your heart container gain rate and making devil deals competitive for the character with Angel Deals (since you can take two pedestal items from Angels if you space it right). It's also just nice to be able to use all those hearts Jacob generates for both brothers and the stat reduction for heart differentiation is negligible with an ounce of forethought. Coordination is free damage stats and Red Stew Boon frequently appears on next floors, aiding clear times and safety.

Choices? and Keep Them At Bay also exist, I guess. Choices? might pay off if you don't like to take alt routes. The Slow/Paralysis nodes may have considerable effect if you're taking an astral weapon like Viper Stinger or Devil's Tongue.

On that note, re: Astral Weapons. Weapons that grant you an item (Oceanic Might and Aquarius) grant the item only to Jacob. Stat bonuses from weapons (+base damage) apply to BOTH brothers at full value, and proc effects like Viper Stinger can come from either brother. You can clear the game no problem if you've got a Starblessed Astral weapon with two flat +base damage modifiers.

Isaac: 2/5

It's a bad tree with good tradeoffs. Vacuophobia on the right is the clear winner- innate birthright makes Isaac a powerhouse if you can make it through the initial 24% stat reduction. Like okay, TIsaac is a powerhouse to begin with, but the scaling potential here is incredible. The rest of the tree is not super good- Sinstral and Dextral Runemaster empower the runes you find, and Fractured Remains hypothetically helps you find the rune shards to make more of them, but it didn't seem to happen often enough to justify carrying the shards over more useful pocket items like, say, Dice Shard. Consuming Void exists, but the stat bonus halves per room cleared.

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Magdalene: 3/5

It’s a good tree with bad tradeoffs. Temporary Heart Time makes Maggie much cozier to play and the creep nodes (including Lingering Malice keystone) are very powerful (with potential synergy with one or two Ancient Astral Weapons). Other small and notable nodes are great, like Half Heart Pickup Conversion, but keystones like Tainted Health (and its hefty speed malus) or Bloodful’s room-start stat debuff leave you better suited to filling out safer stats elsewhere. Don’t even bother with Temporary Heart Luck.

Recommended Core Crimson Nodes: Temporary Heart Time

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Cain: 4/5

TCain is a contentious character, and one that I had to begrudgingly admit I enjoyed, yet never want to pick up again. Dropped Special Pickups on the right is a beautiful way to craft better items while the rest of the tree guides you towards more pickups. Opportunist and Magic Bag are both free benefits. You can allocate TWO Grand Ingredient keystones; the listed stat effects only take effect while said item is the first in the bag unless it says otherwise. I’d recommend Bombs for the 10% increased damage with golden bombs and Hearts/Keys depending. Charged Key doubles your active item charged rate, Hearts will help you protect your deal chance if you really care. I didn’t bother with Ransacking at the bottom, since I don’t want to be bopping bad guys with the bag.

Don’t forget you can shuffle the contents of your bag around by tapping the Switch/Drop Items button.

Recommended Core Crimson Nodes: Dropped Special Pickups

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Judas 1/5

Sigh. I don’t want to attack enemies with How To Jump. I don’t want speed capped at 1.2 for Dark Arts. Boss Culling is hardly worth the effort. It’s a tree with a lot of downsides. Make do with what you can and try not to let Dark Arts’ cooldown go too high with your allocations.

Recommended Core Crimson Nodes: Dark Arts Cooldown.

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Eve 5/5

She’s done it again, can you believe it. This tree is also stacked! Congealed Blood gives you a smelted Lil’ Clot at 30% of your damage (you will have enough damage), ensuring you’ve got a buddy every room. Resilient Blood, like Beth’s keystone, makes your minions considerably more durable. You get a free Eternal Heart to play with every floor via Blessed Blood, Bloodwrath gives you a fat damage boost for losing life (ie summoning a clot, which you’re doing all the time), and Mystic Vampirism gives you even more health to play with and the ability to turn Clots into something more useful than red hearts. Eve is STRONG. Give her an Ancient Astral Weapon with a %chance to inflict FOO on hit like Viper Stinger and you’ll clear the game with ease.

Recommended Core Crimson Nodes: Blood Clot Damage

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Samson 4/5

Do you like having options? Samson’s tree lets you lean into being Berserk all the time, or Berserk less often but in exchange for tear rate. Spawn temporary hearts on kill so you can save your run when you’re berserking with zero life. Or have Libra. The Suplex nodes are silly and contrived, but otherwise you’ve got lots of options for pounding faces in.

Recommended Core Crimson Nodes: Honestly, depends on if you want more berserk duration or not.

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Azazel: 2/5

Extra gravy for sneezy baby, but the sauce is pretty thin. Brimsoul on the left gives you Brimstone (with a damage penalty) over your thin beam if you have exactly two black hearts, adding nice leverage for the first couple floors, but it's a fickle thing to maintain. Curseborne top center is the shining keystone here in that it pre-curses enemies in a room- no need to sneeze to start popping. The tears penalty here really hurts until you get a Tears Up effect, though; I was eating hits in Basement because my beam wasn't charged as anticipated. The other two are less useful- Gilded Regrowth tends to give you flight for a room after you've cleared it (yay loot) and Dark Bestowal awards pops with occasional temporary Devil items. This can include stuff like Marked! (ugh) or Goat Head (yippee) but you get only one item to play with and can't accrue towards the next while you have it.

Recommended Core Crimsone Node: Hemoptysis Slow Chance is the largest by numbers, but none of them are particularly impressive.

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Lazarus: 4/5

Huge QoL. Flip Special Room Charge = chance to recharge Flip if you oopsed into a Deal room without it at full. Entanglement eases out stat discrepancies and saves your run if you ♥♥♥♥ it up. Flip Boss Hit Recocery means you can swap forms regualrly enough on hairy boss fights. Ephemeral Bond lets you play with items across versions of yourself, and Great Overlap doubles your Flip charge rate if you don't get hit. Spiritus is cool if you're not accident prone.

Lotta stat bonuses, lotta equalizing, lotta adding to Flip. Good stuff.

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Eden: 4/5

There’s a lot to unpack. Item Reroll Avoidance minor and notable nodes isn’t for avoiding a shuffle on a singular hit- rather, it locks all of your items in a la Birthright when it triggers. This is quite unintuitive and means you might not be able to damage yourself out of a bad set of items. You’ll have to path through it if you want the soulstone nodes or Normalized Vitality.

Speaking of, Normalized Vitality is pretty great if you roll into a bad health pool or want to play devil deals. If you have more than 5 red hearts and/or 4 soul heats, you’re probably going to get by without one or two, so the penalty isn’t a lot to miss. Plus it’ll remove broken hearts, which gives you extra leeway on expedition runs. It’s a fantastic choice if you’re willing to path through Item Reroll Avoidance.

Chaos Take The World makes the devil deal perks of Normalized Vitality a little less palatable, since they no longer contribute to the devil item pool, but then you can roll into (or out of) items from special pools like devil items. This ALSO causes friction with Item Reroll Avoidance, since you’re likely to roll out of, and then get locked out, any particular special pool. Still, shops and libraries become pretty sweet places to bulk up on items. The Dead Sea Scrolls proc is ALSO a little bugged and doesn’t actually require 2 charges on an active item.

Serendipitous Soul lets you lock in your build with Birthright if you can clear 12 rooms without getting hit, which you’re more likely to be able to do if you’ve got a good build. The active item conditionality (-25% chance to lose birthright when using an active item) can be negated with the cluster of nodes, so the only real penalty is that your active item slot is locked down until you consume it.

Blessed Crucifix helps here, since you get one free ‘oops’ per floor and one blocked hit if you’d get killed. It’s a freebie and helps offset the general unpredictability, and with Normalized Vitality, you get a pretty good buffer between you and the Today I Died screen.

The rest of the tree is pretty ‘whatever.’ Higher Quality Reroll Chance just generally brings your quality of items up and is an easy recommendation.

Lilith: 4/5

Right side? Baby Bender. Top right? More babies. Conjoined plus Baby Bender equals strong. More baby = more success! Left side: Cord Damage for free bleeds. Skip Charging Behemoth. Coordinated Demons / Pulse Damage feeds you Black Hearts. The goal then is to use or spend those two black hearts before they get buried under other soul hearts. To nobody’s surprise, T.Lilith is very powerful, but her other keystones aren’t much to look at unless you’re playing into whipping enemies, which I find a hard sell when you can make so much space with homing Gello. Chimeric Amalgam sounds nice, but will eat your non-baby (and modded) familiars and won’t give you a Lil’ Delirium back for them. Take it for the nodes behind it, not because Lil’ Delirium is any good.

Recommended Core Crimson Nodes: Cord Damage, or Black Heart on Pulse Kill

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Blue Baby: 5/5

Blue does everything better with this tree. More poops, larger poops, better quality poops, chance to reuse Held poops. Alacritous Purpose and Ascetic Soul are phenomenal keystones increasing survivability and offense. Special Poop Find feeds into Rainbow Poops which can be made to drop Soul Hearts, a detail I missed the first go around. You can take the Bob's Rotten Head keystone for a more reliable bomb that only costs two active charges. So many of Blue's shortcomings are fixed here, so have fun flinging poo.

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The Lost: 3/5

You still like second chances, right? Deferred Aegis can replace your Holy Mantle if you're choosy about when you use your Holy Card, potentially allowing you an extra hit per floor like an innate Wooden Cross. If you're being practical and stacking on Champion chance, you're almost guaranteed to get extra Holy Cards with the Champion Holy Card Drop nodes. The narrower item pool gives you a couple choice outcomes with the Spin-Down keystone, where the negligible speed loss could let you spin an early Toothpicks into Brimstone or something equally run-defining. Helping Hands lets you stack all of those extra Holy Cards. Huge.

The remainder of this tree isn't so great. Glass Spectre trades shield for speed as a damage multiplier ( i was never short for damage), the Quality # Upgrade nodes aren't going to help define a run, and I don't trust myself not to slam myself into dangerous things with all of the variable speed bonus nodes.

If you've managed a few uber expeditions and allocated those Obol Sharing nodes, well, surprise- Tainted Lost doesn't get any obols from that. If you were hoping to get ahead early with the TImeless Bazaar, well, tough titties. Earn your victory.

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Keeper: 4/5

Keeper enthusiasts, rejoice! This tree is straight money. Stack on the Vanishing Coins timer to generally increase your wealth pool. Marques of Flies in the top-left wildly empowers your fly army at negligible penalty, and Fortunate Spender bottom-left lets you stack on the Luck for doing what you’re gonna be doing with TKeepsie anyways. Strange Coupon MIGHT butt heads with Fortunate Spender, but starting with Coupon and refilling it via batteries/charged keys easily outweighs the reduced charge rate. Gilded monsters seem a little half-baked to me, and curse rooms seem like a death wish to me (dunno why you’d want the top row), but there’s otherwise plenty here to help Keeper do Keeper things.

Recommended Core Crimson Nodes: Vanishing Coins Timer

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Apollyon: 3/5

An absolute ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of damage. Stronger locusts, locusts that shoot tears, pre-gulped Extension Cord to arc between you and locusts. Get the locust tears, locust lost contact tears (that name isn’t quite right, they’re not shielded tears), locust tear damage, the extension cord arc, Close Keeper, and Carrion Locusts. I don’t really see the Locust Kill Pickup Drops, Kill Tear Boost, or Kill Luck as being worth the effort, and Great Devourer seems silly to me when you can double the damage of one locust by having two locusts instead of scaling one singular locust. Get a nice Astral Weapon like Twisted Oakstring and you’ll clear rooms like mad.

Recommended Core Crimson Nodes: Locust Tear Chance

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Forgotten: 5/5

Tforgor's tree fixes most of the gripes a player might have with the character, and quite frankly, has no bad skill points. Want to start with Recall? There's a keystone for that. Auto-turret bone projectiles while carrying The Body? Sure. Add to it that it'll shoot bones back towards you that home in on enemies, helping clear the way between yourself and yourself - AND the nodes behind it give them the change to slow or paralyze enemies. Flawless Clear Polished Bone is back from base Forgotten's tree to help hunt down enemies, giving you stellar room clear speeds.

Remember that the player's location is centered from The Body and not The Soul when choosing Astral Weapons and enchantments, so look for effects against close enemies.

Recommended Core Crimson Nodes: Not enough choice here to matter.

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Bethany: 4/5

There’s a lot of sauce here. Immediately, Resilient Flickers keystone makes your Lemegeton wisps nearly indestructible- for better or worse. You can effectively run at enemies and sawblade them to death with your wisps, and all those Wisp Kill Soul Heart nodes will help keep your life up if you’re low. That said, if you end up with something unsavory like Cursed Eye, you’re gonna have an absolute ♥♥♥♥♥ of a time trying to get it removed, and that’s not fun. On the bright side, Otherside Seeker lets you play around with red rooms if you’re so interested, Blood Harvest up top gives you extensive access to active item charges (ie lemegeton), and there’s a couple other fun ones like Coalescing Homing Tear and Destroyed Item Wisp to play around with. Skinny of it is, more blood charges, nearly indestructible wisps, more red rooms, more soul hearts if you’re low. Don’t bother with the blue key or luck on kill nodes, or red heart room damage.

Recommended Core Crimson Nodes: Honestly, up to you. Good choices all around, minus the ‘don’t bothers’ above.

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Jacob: 5/5

Immediate caveat, vanilla TJacob makes me cry. I can't stand getting charged at from offscreen, or trying to figure out both where I am, and where Esau is going to be, and I'm horribly, awfully prone to hugging my dearly departed brother. I've got a big fat case of skill issue.

Imagine my relief to discover that there's a keystone that turns you into spirit state permanently, gives you holy mantle, AND stops Esau from hurting you entirely. You can essentially retool Jacob into The Lost, but with the added company of your vengeful spirit brother-turned-companion-again. Reaper Wraiths on the right side of the tree does all this, AND gives you one free Eternal Heart at the start of the floor to guarantee you the buffer blocker promised by the prior Eternal Heart Drop Conversion nodes. Soul and Black hearts become tear rate and damage, respectively, since they no longer do you any good.

There's other nodes that boost your stats when Esau is nearby, and a Keystone (Spiritual Covenant) to have him haunt the last enemy you've shot (while you're in spirit mode) if you want to think even less about slinging him at bosses. Wrathful Chains on the left side is pure upsides, with the only trick that you might have to press the Pocket Item key a few times to sling Esau if there's a bound monster closer to you than he is.

If you like Jacob, there's LOTS of beef built into this tree. If you don't like Jacob, you can play him like The Lost and get on with your life, and that's beautiful. Great tree.

Recommended Core Crimson Nodes: Anima Sola Cooldown. You've got options here.

You can allocate starcursed jewels into sockets here to increase your starpower, which in turn a) earns you more exp and b) gives you better chances of receiving Mighty starcursed jewels, which have higher starpower, more severe penalties, and maybe a third mod on the jewel.

There’s also Ancient Starcursed Jewels, which feature run modifiers that increase your EXP returns for that run. You also get rewards for defeating superbosses, ie the Beast and Delirium, while they’re equipped. This reward is largely not worth it, but can be a fun goal to do. You can still drop ancient starcursed jewels once you’ve found all 38 unique jewels, but they’ll be Faded and only give you additional starpower while equipped, without adding any additional difficulty. This is a good thing to have.

Generally speaking, it’s dangerous to stack up any one specific mod- enemy damage resistance, or stat downs, these can all have real and unpleasant impacts while you play. If you spread the negatives around, it’s more likely you’ll just negate some of the benefits you’ve made in the global skill tree while reaping large exp multipliers. The suggestions I make are according to my own playstyles; you’re welcome to make do with whatever jewels you’ve found, or experiment with which maluses you’d consider tolerable.

Pressing respec on a jewel will destroy it. There’s an option in Dead Sea Scrolls or Mod Config Menu to disable the dropping of starcursed jewels when you’re full in that particular category, in case you’re just tired of seeing them or done looking for mightier jewels.

The numbers I list here for mods are approximate ranges, it’s possible the numbers given could be a little lower or higher on jewels you find.

Azure jewels:

These modify non-boss monsters, add extra damage when you get hit, and may convert normal monsters into champion monsters. There’s a lot of good reasons to want to fight champion monsters (more pickups, more obols, etc), so use this part of the tree to your advantage.

Keeper caveats: The mods that give %chance to receive an additional ½ heart of damage WILL take additional Coin Heart HP- you can get one-tapped as Tainted Keeper if that mod triggers on a hit, and that sucks bad. Remove jewels with this mod while clearing Keeper/Tkeeper marks.

I consider these to be relatively good mods:

* Normal monsters have a 15-50% chance to become champions when entering a room.
* Boss monsters have a 10-25% chance to deal an additional ½ heart damage when hitting.
* Monsters have a 10-30% chance to slow you on hit for 2 seconds.
* Monsters have a 10-20% chance to reduce your damage by 20% for 3 seconds.
* Non-boss monsters have a 5-15% chance of being duplicated when entering a room.

The temporary debuffs are freebies, and not at all punishing if/when you do get hit. More enemies means more exp, and once you’ve ramped past the point where enemies are non-issues, they’re just free. Champions, as mentioned before, drop pickups and obols when killed. They don’t get all that much more difficult (mind the tear novas, but). I consider it more likely to take hits from non-boss monsters than from bosses, so I’m more inclined to risk the extra damage from bosses.

I consider these to be bad mods:

Monsters have an 8-20% chance to release 4-8 tears on death
Non-boss monsters spawn 1-4 static hovering tear(s) on death that last for 3-8 seconds.
Champion monsters have a 10-25% chance to deal an additional ½ heart of damage when hitting
Normal non-champion monsters have 8-25% chance to deal an additional ½ damage when hitting
Monsters have a 10-20% chance to remove ½ soul/black hearts when hitting
When you get hit by a monster, the next 1-3 hits in the room will deal an additional ½ heart damage


Static tears and tears on death are more ways to gaffe HP on a room. Static tears especially, you effectively close off your escape paths if you get cornered and try to murder your way through a problem. Personally, I find hits to come several at a time, so I’m not super inclined to credit additional damage on subsequent hits. Honestly, though, it’s up to you if you’re willing to risk the additional damage when hit, or how. It’s easy enough to spread the risk around while allocating good mods, just don’t risk the tears on death.

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Crimson jewels:

Crimson jewels allocate beef to enemies and bosses. HP ups, damage reduction, shot blocking. There’s a lot of nasty mods in here, so be gentle about what you put into your runs.

I consider these to be good mods:

* Boss monsters have 8-30% increased HP
* Monsters receive 8-30% less damage from explosions
* Monsters receive 8-30% less damage from lasers
* Every 10-4 seconds in a room, status effects are cleansed from monsters
* Champion monsters heal 15% of nearby non-champion monsters’ HP every 10-4 seconds
* Monsters have a 3-10% chance to block damage

Now, I say ‘good,’ but allocate sparingly. Effects cleansing is problematic for astral weapons that apply status effects, but is otherwise a freebie.. Healing 15% HP isn’t bad in isolation, but when it’s 60% champions in a room, they can remedy a lot of damage. You may lean harder into explosion resistance or laser resistance, but you’ll have to remember which one you’ve tanked. There’s considerably fewer laser effects than explosive effects, and things like Brimstone qualify as laser. You’ll also want to remember that deeper expedition levels come with increased magnitudes of implicit buffs for monsters and bosses, so you’re really going to want to be gentle about how much extra protection you shunt onto enemies. Aim for high times and low block chance.

I think these are bad mods:

* Monsters have 8-30% damage reduction
* Boss monsters have an additional 30-200 HP
* Normal monsters have an additional 5-30 HP
* Monsters have one-shot protection
* Monsters receive no damage for 1-3 seconds every 10 seconds

You don’t really want to be fighting Dingle on Basement 1 with 4 damage while it has an extra 200 hp, 70% increased health, and 35% damage reduction. You’re gonna be there all day. One-shot protection means it’ll always take at least two hits to kill something, which can be damning if you don’t have any extra effects. Extra HP on normal monsters applies to thinks like flies and spiders too, making the early game quite nightmarish.

Just, be careful here, really. Much like in Path of Exile or other action RPGs, survival depends on layers of defense. You’re building those layers onto the enemies and you need to spread that out in ways that don’t stonewall you.

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Viridian jewels:

Item scarcity, stat penalties, curses, costs. These jewels penalize you, what you have, what you’ll spend and what you’ll find.

I think these are good mods:

* 5-15% heart pickup scarcity
* 5-15% coin, key, and bomb pickup scarcity
* -0.01-0.15 speed
* 5-25% additional chance to receive a random curse when entering a floor
* 10-30% chance to spawn an additional troll bomb at the center of the room on clear

For clarity- pickup scarcity means any given pickup has that% chance to just disappear when it would spawn.

With champions spitting out pickups everywhere, and the chance to generate sacks when grabbing pickups, I find I have an overabundance of bombs and keys past floor 2. Hearts are also pretty easy to surrender, though mind that this includes soul, black, and bone hearts too. Speed is easy to compensate for, particularly with the speed-on-first-item-pickup mod from the global skill tree. A few curses can be ignored entirely, while curse of the lost gets wiped by eldritch mapping, and the rest grant bonus stats from the global tree. And c’mon, one single troll bomb in the center of the room on clear? Easy.

I think these are bad mods:


* -0.4-1.5 luck
* Shop items cost 1-5 more coins. Affects pickups.
* Shop items cost 5-15 more coins. Doesn’t affect pickups
* Whenever you lose or spend coins, 10-30% chance to lose an additional 2-5 coins
-* 0.25-0.5 damage
-* 5-20% chance to find the devil/angel room
* When starting a run, remove 1-6 random items of quality 4 from all item pools

Honestly, you could absolutely tank shop item costs if you’re brazen or don’t like the shop item pool, or aren’t playing greed mode. Lose Or Spend Coins can do real damage to your wallet on beggars, donation machines, Torn Pocket, and the likes. It’s tempting to take the Q4 item removals, but expeditions themselves remove a pretty hefty portion of the pool and they’re fun items. I like having fun. You could probably take one of any of these mods on one singular jewel and cushion out okay.

Ancient starcursed jewels significantly modify your run in exchange for a pretty solid xp multiplier. You can have two of them equipped. Most of them offer additional benefits (a negligible quantity of global skill points and respec points) for taking said starcursed jewel through the Delirium and Beast fights, and most of them halve their xp bonus for Basement 1. It’s a to-do list for glory, another fat chunk of XP for faster growth, and just another chance to shake up your runs. Mix and match two to curate your own challenge run!

Once you’ve found all 38 ancient starcursed jewels, any more found will drop as Faded Starpieces, which do nothing but grant 30-60 starmight. It’s a nice pip in starmight to have two of these socketed.
The structure is as follows:

Name

Conditions

+%00 xp gain while equipped
Halved on first floor? Y
Boss goals? Y

Thoughts go here.

Recommended Character: If there is one.

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Phantasm Prism

When killing a non-boss living enemy, 20% chance to summon a random undead enemy with a similar base HP up to 12 times per room.
This affect does not apply to living enemies spawned after entering the room.
Whenever you get hit by an undead enemy, increase this chance by 4%, up to 50%

+%70 xp gain while equipped
Halved on first floor? N
Boss goals? Y

It adds more chaff to get in your way, and can produce monsters that are considerably out-of-depth (fire-breathing demon things from Gehenna in Basement 1, for example). That said, more stuff to kill means more EXP to bag, and more time spent per room. Curiously, the bouncing spikeball obstacles in Corpse can be converted into room-bosses.

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Tellurian Splinter

Start with Terra
-1.5 damage and -50% speed
Gain +1% speed when destroying bomb rocks, up to 35%
Halve your current speed buff when entering a new floor.
Rocks in rooms have a 20% of being replaced with bomb rocks

+%55 xp gain while equipped
Halved on first floor? Y
Boss goals? Y

Born to rock. Shoot rocks, blow up rocks. Blow up walls. You take a slight damage penalty (which Terra itself partially amends) and a pretty hefty speed penalty, but breaking bomb rocks and picking up Wooden Spoon or The Belt pretty well fixes this. This modifier is pretty easy to manage and lets you play with one of the better planetarium items. Lots of utility available just from this starcursed jewel, have fun.

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Twisted Emperor’s Heirloom

Starting from the second floor, spawn a Reverse Emperor card in the first room.
Entering the next floor without defeating the Reverse Emperor boss grants -12% to all stats, up to -48%.
Reverse Emperor boss item rewards are replaced with locked chests before the Womb.
After Womb, Reverse Emperor awards nothing.

+%70 xp gain while equipped
Halved on first floor? Y
Boss goals? Y

If you can manage bosses, you can manage this jewel. You get no additional power scaling by fighting all these extra bosses, but it’s a respectable exp multiplier and another chance for Astral Weapons and Sidereal Caches if you’ve angled into that.

Protip: Don't pick up Little Baggy or your Emperor? card will get turned into a pill each floor and you'll have no way of dodging the stat penalty. This will ruin your run.


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Glittering Starstone

Start with Soy Milk and Head of the Keeper
-50% damage, +1% damage per coin you have.
Your max coin count is now 50
Purchasing an item increases this cap by half of that item’s price for the current floor.
Shop purchases cost twice as much.

+%40 xp gain while equipped
Halved on first floor? N
Boss goals? Y

You get to run Soy Milk in exchange for a slow first floor and a hefty cap on your coin count. Astral Weapons with damage benefits when picking up coins play strongly here, and it should be pretty obvious why spawning coins mid-combat may appeal to characters like Keeper. As long as you don't spend all your coins going into the Hush fight, there's not much trick or penalty. Couple notes, though:
1) Great for Beggars and Donation Machines.
2) The coin cap applies even with items that increase your limit. Deep Pockets doesn't help here.
3) The coin cap benefit is half the cost of the LAST item you bought, not half the SUM for the floor. Buy the soul heart, THEN the item if you're inclined.
4) Cap resets per floor, coins over cap are removed. Sucks.

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Unusually Small Starstone

Start with Pluto.
-30% damage and -0.7 tears
When entering a room, split all monsters in two if possible

+%50 xp gain while equipped
Halved on first floor? N
Boss goals? Y

More exp and double enemies, more champions and more pickups. You and all baddies are small, and sometimes bosses get doubled too. Go wild with on-kill effects, don't use on TForgotten because it's really hard to pick up your skeleton. Characters with slow fire rates or charge attacks (Azazels) also suffer badly from the -0.7 tears, so choose your character wisely.

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Circadian Destructor

Every 48 seconds, trigger The Tower’s effect if you’re in a room with monsters
Whenever The Tower’s effect is triggered, monsters become immune to explosions for 4 seconds.

+%70 xp gain while equipped
Halved on first floor? Y
Boss goals? Y

TBD

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Baubleseeker

All pedestal items are replaced with a random trinket. Shop trinkets cost 3 more coins than usual.
10% chance for Treasure Room to contain Mom’s Box if you don’t have it, protected from trinket replacement.
Smelt trinkets on pickup.
+1% all stats per smelted trinket, up to 15%

+%75 xp gain while equipped
Halved on first floor? Y
Boss goals? Y

This one’s a delight for Apollyon and their locust trinket character passives. It’s a Pica Run, without being limited to the Pica Run challenge. Honestly, it’s pretty fun, but may not play nicely with other ancient starcursed jewels. Modded trinkets tend to be pretty darned strong, so have fun.

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Saturnian Liminite

Start with Saturnus and Spear of Destiny
Cannot shoot tears, and base damage is set to 0.25
If you don’t have flight, grants flight and -15% speed.
Every 4 seconds in a room with monsters, reset Saturnus’ ring of tears

+%75 xp gain while equipped
Halved on first floor? N
Boss goals? Y

TBD

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Iridescent Purity

Each passive item you pick up has a 15% chance to be removed when entering the next floor.
Chance increases by 15% individually for each item picked up in the current floor.

+%80 xp gain while equipped
Halved on first floor? Y
Boss goals? Y

It’s worth trying if you’ve got strong scaling and a strong astral weapon. TBD tbh.

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Crystallized Anamnesis

Start with Purity
-50% effectiveness of Purity aura stat ups.
Collective pedestal items are stored in each Purity aura based on their source item pool
Items that aren’t in current Purity aura’s item pool are removed.
Collecting an item switches Purity to the corresponding aura
Collecting a Devil item grants a random Angel item, and vice versa
While Purity is inactive, disable all items.
Once lost, Purity’s aura is restored after 7 seconds as a random color.

+%75 xp gain while equipped
Halved on first floor? Y
Boss goals? Y

It seems to have a Chaos-like effect, where pedestal items seem to come from random pools (The Wafer from a Boss Challenge room, for example). 'Course, you're gonna forget which color you're on, and which items you have, and that you're not getting the half heart damage via Wafer on the three other colors, and you're gonna skill issue into some ground creep, and then, like the clumsy T.Eden player you are, continue to whoops into new and exciting problems because you don't know what you don't have when you have it. Best played like T.Eden; where more pedestals mean more success and that means chocolate milk Mom's Knife for one out of every four hits against you in Delirium.Worth trying once, then hopefully never again.

Chronicler Stone

Every floor, a certain number of rooms must be explored.
When entering the next floor, if you’ve explored less than the ordained amount, -4% to all stats per unexplored room, to a total of -50%
Grabbing book items for the first time halves your current debuff effect

+%60 xp gain while equipped
Halved on first floor? Y
Boss goals? Y
This can’t be used in Greed Mode.

This one requires you to full-clear your maps, or as close as you can get to it. Secret, Super Secret, devil/angel rooms, side route entrances. There’s a counter that tells you how many rooms you need to visit, and occasionally you just can’t get to the requisite number and have to take some penalty, but if you’re playing thoroughly anyways, it’s just an exp increase. A good run with this jewel can help you get to level 60 for Expeditions in one go.

Recommended Character: Tainted Bethany (smelted Crystal Key makes extra rooms)

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Cause Converter

While this jewel is equipped and in Seeking status, defeating a boss will convert it to your cause.
Unequip the jewel to stop converting further bosses.
Starting a run with a coverted boss switches the jewel to Converted status, revealing its modifiers.
Certain bosses are excluded from conversion, and successful conversions are shown with a text indicator in-game.
Can be equipped mid-run to start/continue converting bosses.

+%N/A xp gain while equipped
Halved on first floor? N/A
Boss goals? N/A

TBD

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Nightmare Projector

When first entering a room with monsters, trigger Reverse High Priestess.
Once first triggered, triggers again every 2 minutes

+%70 xp gain while equipped
Halved on first floor? N
Boss goals? Y

TBD

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jewel_Challenger’s Starpiece

No description available!

+%60 xp gain while equipped
Halved on first floor? Y
Boss goals? Y
Can’t be used in Greed Mode.

This jewel does something, but is missing text. TBD

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Sanguinis

Start with an additional broken heart.
When entering a floor, gain a broken heart if you have fewer than 4
Taking damage has a 40% chance of granting a broken heart, once per floor. Halve this chance during The Ascent.
Defeating the floor boss without taking damage removes a broken heart.

+%75 xp gain while equipped
Halved on first floor? Y
Boss goals? Y

You can get hit about as often as you can with Tainted Lost, making this a dangerous and risky starjewel. I wouldn't recommend it under most circumstances.

'Course, if you don't have hearts, you can't get broken hearts. It's literally free EXP for The Lost(s).

--

Shiftstone

Speed everything up while on the left side of the room.
Slow everything down while on the right side of the room

+%60 xp gain while equipped
Halved on first floor? N
Boss goals? Y

TBD

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Glowing Glass Piece

When entering a previously cleared room, trigger D7. Can only happen once per room.
Respawned monsters gain 5 + 5% hp. These values increase by 2 each floor.
Respawned monsters grant no XP.
When entering a floor, -6% to all stats if the above hasn’t triggered 3 or more times in the previous floor, up to -30%.


+%50 xp gain while equipped
Halved on first floor? Y
Boss goals? Y
Can’t be used in Greed mode.

TBD

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Primordial Kaleidoscope

Start with Playdough Cookie and Fruit Cake
Start with smelted Rainbow Worm
-3 Luck
Deal half damage to enemies not affected by status effects.
Hitting a boss reduces its status effect cooldown by -.5 seconds

+%50 xp gain while equipped
Halved on first floor? Y
Boss goals? Y

TBD

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Blazing Carnelian
Orange fireplaces are replaced by red fireplaces.
Blue fireplaces are replaced by purple fireplaces
Rocks have a 15% chance to be replaced by a red fireplace when first entering a room.
Hot bombs and Pyromaniac can’t show up.

+%40 xp gain while equipped
Halved on first floor? Y
Boss goals? Y
Can’t be used in Greed mode.

Great time, if you like getting shot in the ass! This one sucks bad and will feed you chip damage to no benefit, which makes getting into the Devil/Angel room harder. Bethany's wisps may help you absorb strays, or try a character that can't gain red hearts so you don't fumble your deal change. Maybe don't use T.Eve since you're gonna lose clots. The exp bonus is hardly worth the effort.

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Embered Azurite

Item pedestals swap between red pool and blue pool item.
-8% all stats per difference between total blue items and total red items, up to -64%

+%20 xp gain while equipped
Halved on first floor? Y
Boss goals? Y

The EXP multiplier here is negligible, but you gain access to two very narrow item pools- expect a lot of Angel Items like Holy Mantle and Salvation in the Blue pool, along with Planetarium and Zodiac items. Red pool has winners like Sacred Heart, Abaddon, Lord of the Pit, Eye of the Occult, and so on. Every pedestal item shunts items into one of these two pools, and they cycle like with Isaac's Birthright. Any character capable of generating extra pedestal items (Blue Baby's Brown Blessing) will help you pad out your item list even further.

Rock Bottom's in the blue pool, so you can stop worrying about your slant if you find it.

There's no visual indicator which way your color imbalance is, so the hardest part of this jewel is remembering if you need to take more red or blue items.

Cursed Starpiece

Starting from the second floor, all treasure rooms contain a reversed Stars card instead of item pedestals.
Starting from the second floor, -12% all stats for the current floor while you haven’t used Reverse Stars. Apply -6% instead of the floor doesn’t have a treasure room
Reversed Stars has a 100% chance to remove an additional item. If used in a treasure room, reduce this chance to 35%

+%70 xp gain while equipped
Halved on first floor? Y
Boss goals? Y

TBD

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Cat’s Eye Prism

Start with 2 smelted Kid’s Drawings and Guppy’s Eye
-50% damage
Monsters take 90% reduced damage from sources other than blue flies

+%60 xp gain while equipped
Halved on first floor? N
Boss goals? Y

Pretty palatable for any character that regularly deals in blue flies (Keepers, for example). You get the Guppy transformation from the get-go, which includes flight, and flight is a big boon on just about any run. Not as bad as it sounds, but not as fun as it sounds either. Choose your character wisely.

Recommended Character: Keeper, Tainted Keeper, anyone with Blue Fly nodes

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Soul Watcher

When you enter a room with monsters, a random monster becomes a Soul Eater
Non-boss Soul Eater monsters have 20% increased HP
Soul Eater monsters gain 4HP, 4% HP, and 25% when a nearby monster dies, up to 20 times
Bosses are Soul Eaters and spawn an attack fly every 10 seconds

+%70 xp gain while equipped
Halved on first floor? N
Boss goals? Y
Can’t be used in Greed Mode

Not as menacing as it sounds for an established character. This Path of Exile throwback beefs one singular enemy in the room with more HP. Mega Satan may take forever to chew through, but for the rest of the time, one singular super-Fatty or Pooter isn't going to change your game. I couldn't easily identify the Soul Eater in a room, except that it was typically the last enemy alive.

Be wary of combining it with other starjewels that add extra monsters like Arachnite (below) or Unusually Small Starpiece.

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Arachnite

Killing an enemy has a 40% chance to spawn 1-5 swarm spiders, up to 12 times per room.
Chance increases by 8% per floor, up to 90%
Bursting Sack cannot show up.

+%65 xp gain while equipped
Halved on first floor? N
Boss goals? Y

You want a beam weapon, or Jacob's Ladder (or similar, check the timeless bazaar on your fully kitted character if you're stuck), or an Astral Weapon with splash damage, because there's gonna be a lot of Little Guys around and that's remarkably dangerous if you're just throwing ordinary tears. Definitely a starjewel to configure around, but perfectly manageable if you do.

Recommended character: T.Azazel. Hemoptysis curse pops and beams clear spiders neatly.

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Glace

Start with Uranus and smelted Ice Cube.
-50% speed and tears. Destroying a frozen enemy reduces this by 0.5%. Resets every floor.

+%60 xp gain while equipped
Halved on first floor? N
Boss goals? Y

TBD

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Gaze Averter

Start with Tiny Planet and My Reflection
-2 damage and -10 range
Deal 75% less damage to enemies located in the side of the room you’re currently facing

+%60 xp gain while equipped
Halved on first floor? Y
Boss goals? Y

TBD

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Opalescent Purity

When you collect a pedestal item, remove all other items on the floor, including those spawned by effects.

+%100 xp gain while equipped
Halved on first floor? Y
Boss goals? Y

TBD

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Mightstone

Start with Champion’s Belt
+50% chance for monsters to become champions
Champions have +15% increased HP
When killing a champion, buff all other champion monsters in the room, increasing their HP by 10%, speed by 5% and size up, up to 5 times per room.

+60% xp gain while equipped
Halved on first floor? N
Boss goals? Y

TBD

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Crimson Warpstone

Replace treasure room, shop, and angel room items with Cracked Keys
Picked up Cracked Keys stack
35% base chance to drop a Cracked Key when clearing a room, increasing every floor
-15% chance to get a Cracked Key for the room when you get hit
-30% to all stats. Entering a red room reduces this debuff by 2.5%. Resets every floor.
Entering the ultra-secret room halves the current debuff.

+%50 xp gain while equipped
Halved on first floor? Y
Boss goals? Y
Can’t be used in Greed Mode

TBD

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Labyrinth Stone

Guarantee Curse of the Labyrinth when possible, along with other natural curses.

+%45 xp gain while equipped
Halved on first floor? N
Boss goals? N
Can’t be used in greed mode.

Like big floors? Use this jewel. Mind, you get half as many shops and angel/devil rooms. Up to you if that’s worth the exp boost, or simply enjoy the experience at no other real penalty.

Cursed Auric Shard

Start with Card Reading
When clearing a room, 90% chance to trigger Teleport 2.0’s effect
Teleport effect doesn’t trigger in certain rooms, like devil/angel, boss, or curse rooms.
After defeating the floor boss, minimum speed becomes 1.6 and the teleport effect stops triggering.

+%55 xp gain while equipped
Halved on first floor? N
Boss goals? Y
Can’t be used in Greed Mode.

TBD

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Martian Ultimatum

Start with Mars.
Every 4 to 8 seconds, while in a room with monsters, spawn a pattern of static tears around you. After 2 seconds, tears fire towards your direction, dealing contact damage
-0.05 speed when hit, up to -.25 Resets every room.

+%80 xp gain while equipped
Halved on first floor? Y
Boss goals? Y

TBD

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Nullstone

The enemy with the highest HP in the room that you kill gets nullified.
When entering the boss room, spawn the first enemy nullified.
When the nullified enemy dies, spawn the next one in the sequence.

+%45 xp gain while equipped
Halved on first floor? Y
Boss goals? Y
Can’t be used in Greed mode.

TBD

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Luminescent Die

When entering the floor’s boss room, spawn Reversed Wheel of Fortune card
Entering the next floor without using Reversed Wheel of Fortune grants -10% to all stats, up to -40%
Active debuff is halved when using Reversed Wheel of Fortune card

+%50 xp gain while equipped
Halved on first floor? Y
Boss goals? Y
Can’t be used in Greed Mode

This one’s fun. You MIGHT reroll all of your items. You might have to redo the floor. You might just shuffle all the pickups in the room. It’s kind of a freebie for confident players, and the opportunity to redo a floor gets you scaling that much harder if you can keep something worth using. Throw the dice!

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Teprucord Tenicen Eljwe
(corrupted ancient jewel)

Start with TMTRAINER and MissingNo.
Trigger Dataminer whenever you enter a room.

+%66 xp gain while equipped
Halved on first floor? Y
Boss goals? N

DELETE THIS

Rep+ players may delight in Dataminer spawning corrupted items every room. It’s carnage.

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Astral Insignia

Guarantee a Planetarium every 2 floors from the second one.
When grabbing a Planetarium item, replace the old Planetarium item if you have one
-2% to all stats when first entering a normal room, up to -60%
Debuff stops applying during the Ascent
Entering a Planetarium halves this debuff.

+%55 xp gain while equipped
Halved on first floor? Y
Boss goals? Y
Can’t be used in Greed mode

TBD

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Mistlestone

Treasure room and Planetarium items are replaced with Mystery Gift
Mystery gift can only be used in boss, angel, or devil rooms
8% chance for Krampus to appear after clearing the boss room per used mystery gift.
+25% chance to find an angel/devil room
-5% chance to find the angel/devil room whenever you get hit

+%50 xp gain while equipped
Halved on first floor? N
Boss goals? Y

TBD

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Umbra

Guarantees Curse of Darkness if possible
Black Candle can no longer show up
While Curse of Darkness is active, -2% all stats when first entering a room, up to -20%
16% chance to spawn Night Light when clearing a room, once per floor.
Remove Night Light when entering a new floor

+%70 xp gain while equipped
Halved on first floor? Y
Boss goals? Y
Can’t be used in Greed Mode

TBD

Arcane Astrolabe:

You can access the Arcane Astrolabe from the string of nodes to the upper-left of the Star Tree, or by pressing Tab to open the Quick-Select Menu.

This is where you run Expeditions, which are a sequence of objectives you complete across runs. An Expedition Run requires a character at or above level 60, and a certain amount of Starmight from jewels socketed in the Star Tree. The amount of starmight required increases as your depth increases. You unlock other parts of the Passive Skill Trees mod after completing Depth 10 and 15.

While Expeditions may be progressed on any qualifying character, the Arcane Obols you receive on Expedition are per-character.

There’s boons and curses you acquire for runs under that specific expeditions, which persist across runs until you complete the expedition, turn off expedition mode, or reset the expedition. Keep an eye on which boons and curses you’ve picked up, as they may be beneficial or harmful for particular marks you’re trying to complete with characters – a boon that lets you paralyze enemies will be an asset, while a curse that takes -5400 minutes from the boss rush door won’t let you get that mark. Rewards here are nominal at best, the real objective is to complete tiers 10 and 15 to unlock more stuff. Hypothetically you can acquire starblessed prisms in tier 15+ expeditions, but I haven’t seen ‘em.

You can also get boons, which give minor bonuses during your runs while on expedition, and boon upgrade points, which can improve your boons within the Effects tab of your expedition. I don’t really go out of my way to collect either; I’m more preferential to which goals are easier to complete within a run.

Expeditions have Depth- You need to complete an expedition at the highest tier available in order to choose the next Depth. Remember to tab through and select the next Depth when you've completed your Expedition.

Good curses and bad curses:

Good curses (or less bad curses)

* Curse of Urgency (-5400 minutes to boss rush and hush doors)
* Curse of Shrouding (expedition node rewards and curses are no longer known – you plot the whole route while you can see the nodes anyways, this does basically nothing)
* Curse of Ancient Stars (you need an ancient starcursed jewel equipped – faded starpieces count!)
* Curse of the Heartbroken (start with an additional broken heart)
* Curse of the Boonless (you can no longer gain boons)
* Curse of Fading Keys (spend an extra key when you use a key)


Bad curses:

* Curse of Precariousness (remove 3 items from the shop room)
* Curse of Tear Deprivation (-44% tears)
* Curse of Unexpected Taxation (-2 coins every time you enter a room with monsters)
* Curse of Vanishing Wealth (on entering a floor, lose 20 coins)
* Curse of Inverse Fortune (300% of positive luck is applied as a stats down percentage, up to -30%)


Meh:

* Curse of Ephemeral Pieces (Non-vanishing pickups now disappear after 8 seconds)
* Curse of Punishment (take ½ heart every 8 rooms cleared; this cannot kill you)
* Curse of Power Demand (35% chance to lose an active item charge on room clear, 70% if you got hit, batteries are rarer)
* Curse of Diminishing Power (-30-50% bomb and laser damage)


There’s more curses out there for you to discover; call this another TBD block if you’d like.

The rewards per-node, besides the Boons, are negligible- the amount of obols or exp you gain is insignificant. It's largely unnecessary to plot your Expedition based on Obol or exp rewards.

Perhaps most importantly, consider your choice of node based on how long it’ll take to complete. Collecting 100 obols is something you can do within 1 floor. Blowing up 8 tinted rocks might take you a few runs. Donating to the shop/greed machines may encourage you to play greed mode, or may have you blowing up the donation machine on other runs simply so you don’t overflow the damn thing. Your goal is to complete expedition Depth 15 so you can unlock every corner of the sidereal tree and launch uber expeditions, so manage your time well.

Once you complete Expedition Level 15, you can partake in Uber Expeditions, which award you a Deep Space Skill Point every other node. You can spend these in the top-left side of the Star Tree.

The objective in an uber expedition node is always the same: Beat a final boss. Every node will also have some conditions that add Entropy, like ‘taking damage from a champion monster’ or ‘lose or swap your trinket’ or ‘every pedestal item collected past the 12th one’

Entropy is a pretty bad thing to have. Per the node on the board:
Every 40 entropy increases implicit expedition modifier magnitudes, up to 8 times.
Every 60 entropy: Add a random Expedition Curse, up to 5 times (the red nodes you’ve been pathing through up to this point).
Every 75 entropy: Add a Deep-Space Distortion, up to 3 times. Adds significant challenge to the run. I don’t know what distortions are out there, but you can bet you don’t want them.
At 100 entropy: Reduce maximum attempts by 1.

You also only get 4 or 5 attempts for the run; you don’t want to go idly resetting your runs for a good start during uber expeditions.

Fortunately, players with skill issues may path through expedition nodes with a human figure on them, which instead have conditions that grant Order when completed, like ‘Clear the boss rush without taking damage more than 3 times: +40 order’ or ‘open any 5 chests without taking damage in between, +15 order (0/3). If you gain Entropy and possess Order, your Order is consumed instead and your entropy does not go up.

Why run ‘em?

- Deep space skill points can be spent for +%xp, and Obol Sharing nodes. Obol Sharing lets your collected obols benefit the other 33 characters, and Cosmic Altruism is going to amplify how many obols they receive. You’re not going to notice the -25% obols dropped penalty since you’re getting them all from champions.
- Astral weapons drop at tier 4 for uber levels 1-4, and tier 5 for 5+. If you focus on collecting magic Gauntlets, you can make some truly frightening astral weapons by imprinting their magic modifiers.
-Access to the Obscure Bazaar lets you spend inordinate amounts of obols on Starblessed Prisms, Crimson Starcores, and Character Skill Points. Ignore the skill points. A starblessed prism is 8,000 obols and a crimson starcore is 6,666 obols. The starblessed prism lets you imprint a second magic modifier onto your ancient astral weapons, and let me assure you, an astral weapon with +3.6 base damage has a huge impact on how your run starts.

There’s a few other keystone nodes out in deep space, like:
* Eldritch Exchange, which doubles your Entropy gain, but gives you +2 expedition attempts and no longer takes attempts at 100+ entropy.
* Bring the Chaos, which rewards you with more obols, ancient weapons, and potentially a crimson starcore if you stack on stupid quantities of entropy
* Entropic Tradeoff, which starts you with 40 entropy but locks you to +20 entropy per run (+40 with eldritch exchange), and
* Bring the Order, which starts you with 50 order, protects you from losing attempts above 30 order, and gives you a chance to avoid receiving entropy, at the cost of -0.03 luck per order possessed.

Ambitious players may lean into Bring the Chaos for greater rewards, but I don’t find it worth the risk, since you can produce so many ancient astral weapons with a full tree on Isaac as it is and crimson starcores aren’t implemented properly.

Sidereal Tree:

You get Obols while on Expeditions. Obols are spent to path around the Sidereal tree, and are spent alongside global skill points for non-pathing nodes. You’ll need a lot of them. We’ll talk about each region/feature on the sidereal tree in segments, but the most important points are probably this:

You’ll get most of your Obols from defeating Champions and bosses. Ergo, you want starcursed jewels that produce more champions and bosses with multiple ‘units’ per. Lil Gurdies, Teratoma, The long pacman-snake things.

Once you unlock Uber Expeditions and subsequently start getting Deep Space Skill Points, you want the nodes that allocate Obols to other characters when you collect them. Repentance has 34 characters, and shunting even 7 of 10 obols to every other character gives you a total of 238 obols per 10 collected, when the sharing activates.

There’s a couple keystone nodes you’ll want to look out for on the paths to most of the Sidereal tree’s main features:

* Global Skill Point Exchange: Allows you to cash out obols for global skill points. The cost increases per skill point purchased, up to a cap of 220 obols per. The cost is also per-character, so you get to scale up to that final 220 cost on each one. This is the meat & potatoes of your global skill point creation once you’ve filled out the global skill tree. Once you’ve allocated the Obol Sharing nodes on the Deep Space portion of the Star Tree, you’re going to have plenty of global skill points to play with.

* Character SP Conversion: Allows you to turn Character skill points into Global skill points. Once you’ve allocated every node on a character’s personal skill tree, you can splash the surplus here for more GSP. This is a one-way conversion; there’s no getting those character skill points back, so don’t go crazy if you’re still allocating character passives.

Additionally, if you have any modded characters installed, they probably don’t have their own personal skill tree which means you can convert all of their personal skill points into global skill points for reallocation elsewhere. Handy if you’re trying to get enough global points to kit out Isaac or Azazel for sidereal caches or whatever.

* Obol Exchange: You can convert one global skill point for 10 obols. This isn’t worth it, and never will be. Avoid.

* Sidereal Actualization: You’ve just unlocked Tainted Lazarus and want to use your maxed out Astral Weapon at level 1 to get a running start with the character, right? Doesn’t work. Forget it. This node’s bugged and doesn’t do anything. You still need to reach level 60 and have an active Expedition in order to utilize your Sidereal Tree. Sorry.

Timeless Bazaar:

You can choose an item from the bazaar for a negligible amount of Obols to be added inherently to your next run. Players leery about the tooltip about spending global skill points don’t need to be, those are only spent when you force a stock refresh (it's one global skill point to refresh) and a) you don’t often need to and b) don’t have to worry about global skill points once you’ve filled the board and start collecting obols for every character (or just filled one character's board and are converting obols/character skill points into global points). It’s not super useful without investing more global skill points into the sidereal tree, but could help you with particularly fussy marks if you’re stuck.

Once you do, though, you usually get one or two Q3 items to pick from, an occasional devil/angel deal item, and the ability to lock an item without claiming it for subsequent rerolls. Getting an item offering flight from floor 1 is remarkably powerful, to say the least- find what covers your character’s weaknesses.

It takes approximately 146 global skill points to fully allocate the Timeless Bazaar, and approximately 12,800 Arcane Obols. Remember that you can respec any of the Bazaar nodes to get those global skill points back if you’re in a pickle, but those obols are gone for good.

This one's over on the rightmost side of the Sidereal tree.

Gain points towards triggering an effect by allocating one (or two or three) Septentrions from the top row to utilize the one allocated Meridion from the bottom row. Unlike the other systems in the Sidereal Tree, this one doesn’t consume much for skill points or arcane obols, so you can jump in pretty quickly.

Standout choices for Meridions include:
Monstrous Meridion for familiars from Monster Manual, optionally scaling familiar count damage bonuses on your astral weapon
Gilded Meridion to spawn many pennies off defeated enemies
Sidereal Meridion for more sidereal caches
Snake-Eye Meridion to let anyone be Isaac with his D6
Glacial Meridion to put a status effect on everything and buy yourself space in a room

Once you’ve completed expedition depth 15, you can spend crimson starcores from uber expeditions or the Obscure Bazaar to allow you to allocate said two or three Septentrions total.

- What about Crimson Convergence?

That’s over by the Sidereal Artifact, but the tooltip is busted. I don’t know what any of the buffs here do. TBD.

The big one. Every weapon type has an innate effect, and every weapon can have a magic mod or two. Magic mod values get higher as Tier goes up. You can dismantle weapons for resources, and you get more resources out of higher-tier items. Hypothetically unique/legendary/whatever weapons get/have higher tier mods per Tier, but this doesn’t seem to exist.

Equipped weapons give stats, damage multipliers, or activate effects. Isaac doesn’t actually swing a longsword around or anything.

Tier 1: expedition 1-10
Tier 2: Expedition 11-20
Tier 3: 21-30?
Tier 4: uber expedition 1-4
Tier 5: uber 5+

Deconstructing a weapon gives you some resources, which you can use to improve your weapons. They go approximately like this:

* Mundane Essence: Used for Honing, to improve the implicit (class) properties of that weapon. You get most of it from deconstructing Normal, Gray, Unenchanted, Non-Unique/Ancient weapons. It takes 1640 Mundane Essence to fully Hone a weapon.
* Sparkling Essence: Used to modify Magic modifiers. Get 'em by breaking down Magic, Blue, Enchanted weapons.
* Ancient Essence: Used to improve the unique modifiers on Ancient weapons and when copying Magic modifiers onto them. Gained by deconstructing Ancient weapons. Some weapons need a lot more of this than others.
* Sparkling Stardust, Ancient Stardust: Gained when killing Bosses and Final Bosses respectively. Ancient Stardust especially is a BIG bottleneck, so plan carefully.

(There's a little bit of cheese out there to gain more Ancient Stardust beyond the Sidereal nodes; multi-segment final boss enemies like The Lamb and Mother will give a stardust per 'thing' destroyed (Mother's arms, Lamb's torso and head, etc). Killing Lamb or Blue Baby while in The Void will also give Ancient Stardust. If you get some way to 'destroy' the Lamb Body object entirely, it will trigger to give you an Ancient Stardust without actually destroying the sprite, allowing you to milk it for additional stardust. Bit of an exploit, but your options to do so are pretty narrow).

I’m going to summarize the implicit effect for each weapon, then narrate through my opinions on each Ancient (unique, legendary, whatever) weapon currently available for that class of weapon.

You can naturally roll up to two modifiers on Magic weapons, and one on Ancient weapons. You can get a Starblessed Prism to allow you to put a second modifier on Ancient weapons, and Ancients usually come with some pretty gamechanging modifiers on them, so by and large you’re prolly gonna be using one of them in your runs.

Ancient Weapons:

Ratings are
Earlygame
Endgame
Utility

Thoughts.

LONGSWORDS:

10-26% increased damage to enemies within 1.5 tiles of you. That’s Forgotten Bone range. It’s not much for range, but is a pretty solid damage boost without any other conditions.

Grey Wind
7-12% chance on hit to slash enemies within 2 tiles of the target hit, dealing 120-160% of the hit’s damage. 2 second cooldown. If the slash targets 3 or fewer enemies, deals 50% more damage, inflicts Bleeding for 3 seconds, and increases cooldown to 5 seconds.
-0.6 base damage.

Earlygame: 0/5
Endgame: 0/5
Utility: 0/5

TBD

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Glowing Sunblade
Start with innate Sol.
-16%-8% damage and tears. Remove this penalty for the floor when you enter the boss room. Gain 0.05-0.1 speed for the floor when you enter the treasure room.

Earlygame: 2/5
Endgame: 3/5
Utility: 4/5

If you’re in a hurry, Sunblade’s a good choice. Good for Azazel, Boss Rushing, or digging up Forgotten. Remember, Sol procs The Sun whenever you kill a boss, so characters with fat red health bars can play sacrifice rooms or donation machines to great effect if they can just kill the floor boss first. If you need extra muscle to get character marks, I wouldn’t really recommend it with so many better options.

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Glowing Moonblade
Start with innate Luna.
-18(?)-10% damage and tears. Remove this reduction when entering a secret room.
Entering 2 secret rooms grant .06-0.12 speed for the current floor, once per floor.

Earlygame: 3/5
Endgame: 2/5
Utility: 4/5

Another utility weapon. Remember that Luna adds a secret room to the floor, which means another chance for a gamebreaking Secret Room Item. Consider this one for characters that can’t keep red hearts, as your odds of finding soul hearts in the secret room (and replenishment of soul hearts via the moonbeam) are pretty good. Remember that secret rooms are commonly off the starting room, and make sure you get into one ASAP to peel off that debuff.

--

Redbeak
If half or more of your total red heart containers are empty:
+12-20% damage dealt
+6-15% chance for hits to bleed enemies for 4 seconds
4-8% chance for enemies to drop a half heart on kill, which vanishes after 2 seconds.

Earlygame: 0/5
Endgame: 0/5
Utility: 0/5

TBD

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Divine Interceptor
When hitting an enemy within 2 tiles, fire a spread of sword projectiles towards it.
At upgrade level 3: sword projectiles pierce.
At upgrade level 6: Sword projectiles are homing.
5 second cooldown.

Earlygame: 1/5
Endgame: 1/5
Utility: 1/5

Cool in theory, but it doesn’t work. Upgrading this weapon doesn’t make the sword projectiles pierce or home. You’re better off just equipping a whip.


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Maxwell’s Thermic Engine

0.5% damage for 3 seconds when hitting an enemy, stacking to 6-12%
While the buff is maxed:
12-22% chance for hits to cause burning or slow for 3 seconds
15% chance for burning enemies to explode, dealing 30 damage to nearby enemies
15% chance for slowed enemies to freeze on death.

Earlygame: 0/5
Endgame: 0/5
Utility: 0/5

TBD

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ESTOCS:

Consecutive hits against enemies within 2 tiles of you grant a 3-8% tears bonus, up to 20-30%. Hitting an enemy beyond 2 tiles resets this bonus. That’s a pretty big tears bonus just for staying roughly in something’s face. Ancient weapons in this category benefit from or add to a high tier rate.

Arcing Needle
Every 0.5 seconds spent firing, 2-6% chance to gain Jacob’s Ladder innately for 2.5-4 seconds. Chance goes up in 1% increments as you keep firing, and resets when you stop.
Finding Jacob’s Ladder naturally grants +15% tears.

Earlygame: 0/5
Endgame: 0/5
Utility: 0/5

TBD

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Auric Persecutor
Half your coin count acts as a tear multiplier, up to 20-40%
7-15% damage for the current floor when picking up a nickel or dime, up to 21-40%

Earlygame: 1/5
Endgame: 4/5
Utility: 1/5

Hooooo, scaling! Estocs give you tears up. This one makes your coins a tears multiplier. Finding a nickel or better gets you a fat damage bonus. $$$ has nothing on this. Also really good with the magic enchantment that gives permanent damage when picking up a nickel/dime, since you’re trying to do that anyways.

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DAGGERS

3-8% chance to for hits to deal 40-65% more damage. Double the chance for targets within 1.5 tiles. Crit-sticks. I’m not sure it’s worth standing in coughing range of most enemies for that damage boost, but I was willing to talk up the longswords. The Ancient weapon selection in this category is rather gimmicky.


The Scrambler
3% chance on hit to confuse enemies for 4 seconds. Triple chance against targets within 1.5 tiles.
Increase this chance by 1% per new floor.
Deal 25-40% more damage against confused enemies.
Hitting confused enemies has a 50-20% chance to remove confusion.

Earlygame: 0/5
Endgame: 0/5
Utility: 0/5

TBD

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Adrift Blade
25-35% chance on hit to deal between 40-60% and 200-280% of the original damage.

Earlygame: 0/5
Endgame: 0/5
Utility: 0/5

TBD

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Ivory Vampire
Red Hearts can be picked up regardless of health.
Every half red heart collected grants 2-4% speed, tears, and damage for 4-5 seconds. Stacks up to 8 times.
Buff timer pauses while in a room with no enemy.

Earlygame: 0/5
Endgame: 0/5
Utility: 0/5

TBD

QUICKBLADES

+0.1-0.24 tears for 1-2 seconds when hitting an enemy, which stacks to 2-4. Double the duration against targets within 1.5 tiles. Each stack has its own duration. Yes, you can ramp up to +4 tears per second with quickblades, and they’re frighteningly effective at it. More effective than the multiplier on estocs, I reckon.

Nimble Twins
+5-12% tears.
When hitting an enemy, additionally fire a slow-moving red tear and a quick blue tear towards them. These tears deal 25-50% of your damage.
Gain 3% damage for 2 seconds when hitting enemies with the red tear, stacking up to 15-21%
Gain 3% tears for 2 seconds when hitting enemies with the blue tear, stacking up to 15-21%


Earlygame: 5/5
Endgame: 5/5
Utility: 3/5

It’s a nice piece simply on account of the implicit and the straight tears bonus. The red and blue tear also help to build up the quickblade implicit bonus, and the stat boosts keep as long as you’re adding to them. I think there’s a 0.5 second cooldown on the additional tears, but the skinny of it is that you’re gonna rocket past 6 tears per second by Basement 2. It’s a sweet piece of gear.

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Quicksilver
Press the Drop button to Parry. Parry blocks 1 incoming hit if timed right.
Has a 1.5-0.8 second cooldown. You can only parry monster hits.
A successful parry grants 8-12% tears and speed for 3 seconds, and makes your next hit deal double damage.

Earlygame: 0/5
Endgame: 0/5
Utility: 0/5

TBD


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Crimson Altruist
2-6% damage when using a blood donation machine, up to 100%
0.2-0.4 tears every 16-9 blood donation machine uses
Halve the active bonuses when entering a new floor

Earlygame: 0/5
Endgame: 0/5
Utility: 0/5

TBD

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SPEARS

+14-25% damage against enemies between 1.5 and 2.5 tiles of you
-15-7% damage against enemies closer than 1.5 tiles of you

Spears have a sweet spot, and one you’re likely to play to when rocking something mean like Viper Stinger. There’s no ramping here, so just keep them away from you and you’ll be happy with the results.

Viper Stinger
9-15% chance to paralyze enemies on hit for 2 seconds.
Double the chance and duration against poisoned enemies.
Killing a paralyzed enemy releases a toxic cloud, poisoning for 4 seconds and dealing 80-150% of your damage to nearby enemies.

Earlygame: 4/5
Endgame: 5/5
Utility: 4/5

Secretly, this thing’s straight busted. The paralysis applies to bosses too, and will proc often if you’re doing lots of hits (they don’t have to be tears!). Enemies explode quite neatly into damaging poison and can chain across the room. Put this on T.Eve or so. Also, there’s no cooldown on any of those features, so you can pretty much chain-paralyze a boss and trivialize it. It’s so, so good.

Caveat: Every upgrade takes 1 Ancient Stardust and 1 Ancient Essence, and each one increases the paralysis chance by .1%, meaning you need to deconstruct dozens upon dozens of ancient weapons and slay a hundred final bosses to max it out. You’ll want to make sure you’ve got your enchantments right BEFORE you start pumping all your materials into it.

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Gravitas
When hitting enemies beyond 2 tiles, 7-12% chance to additionally fire 3 homing tears dealing 30-50% of your damage. 0.5 second cooldown.
When the homing tears hit, 3% chance to gain Spoon Bender for the current room.
-12-6% tears while you have Spoon Bender

Earlygame: 1/5
Endgame: 2/5
Utility: 1/5

You’ve got several really low odds stacked against you for a for-the-room spoon bender effect. You’re likely only to see it in a room after everything’s slain, or maybe during long boss fights like with Delirium. It’s not good. Take anything else for more impact.

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Beastbane
12-28% damage dealt to bosses.
Defeating a boss grants you a permanent 4-6% damage, once every 2 floors.

Earlygame: 2/5
Endgame: 3/5
Utility: 1/5

TBD. But, like, it’s damage. Not complicated.

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Boreal Frostspear
7-10% chance on hit to slow enemies for 3 seconds.
When you hit a slowed enemy beyond 3-1.5 tiles of you, 1% chance to freeze that enemy. Hitting the same enemy increases the chance to freeze them.

Earlygame: 0/5
Endgame: 0/5
Utility: 0/5

TBD

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TRIDENTS

Consecutive hits against enemies beyond 1.5 tiles of you grants 0.3-1% damage and tears, up to 8-12%. Resets when you hit an enemy within 1.5 tiles of you.

Inverse Estoc ramping, but with both tears and damage. Keep your distance. No sweet spot to fiddle with here.


Oceanic Might
Start with innate Aquarius
Player creep deals 30-50% more damage to enemies.
Hitting enemies standing on creep created by you has a 10% chance to trigger a water explosion, dealing 25 damage to nearby enemies. 2.5 second cooldown.
Explosion chance becomes 40% against flying enemies.

Earlygame: 5/5
Endgame: 3/5
Utility: 2/5

But I’m a creep, I’m a weirdoooo~ It’s pretty good with zero drawbacks except to your framerate if your other mods munch it with creep on the screen. Good choice for other creepers like Laz and T.Maggie. Gets a high earlygame mark for letting you kite spiders and other dumb chasing enemies around. Endgame potential is pretty strong if you can bag some homing, but mostly it’s up to you if you want to play with creep or not.

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Lost Coral Trident
Start with innate Neptunus.
-25-12% damage

Earlygame: 3/5
Endgame: 3/5
Utility: 1/5

I’m pretty sure this is still a nice damage up if you’re timing your shots to utilize the extra burst fire rate against bosses. TBD however.


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Verdant Green
6-9% chance on hit to create a poison cloud.
This chance receives a flat increase from your tears stat, up to 5%
Poison clouds periodically poison enemies within it for 4 seconds. Poisoned enemies instead take 25-40% of your damage.

Earlygame: 0/5
Endgame: 0/5
Utility: 0/5

TBD

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Consecrator
Gain 9-15% damage when entering a devil room, up to 30-40%
Gain 9-15% tears when entering an angel room, up to 30-40%
Active buff gets halved when clearing a boss room.
5-10% chance for angel/devil room to spawn.

Earlygame: 0/5
Endgame: 0/5
Utility: 0/5

TBD

SCYTHES

Hitting an enemy triggers a circular slash at the hit location, dealing 70-120% of the hit’s damage. Effect has a 2.5-0.75 second cooldown.

Wham! It’s a splash attack that also strikes the target. Hits in approximately a 3x3 tile square centered on your victim. This adds both area and burst damage, helping you clear chaff and tough enemies. A fantastic implicit, despite any sort of stat scaling.

Tale Ender
+60-120% damage dealt to enemies with full health.
75-100% chance to instantly kill the first non-boss enemy you hit in each room.
Halve this chance when the effect triggers, reset it on entering a new floor.

Earlygame: 3/5
Endgame: 2/5
Utility: 1/5

Dealing effectively double damage on the first hit is kind of nice if you hit hard, but the instakill effect is only for the first enemy you hit in the room, and just that one enemy. Kind of useless lategame unless you’re in the Dark Room against the anti-Fatties, I guess.

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Crimson Reaper
When hitting a full-health enemy, apply bleed for 4-6 seconds.
Double this duration against bosses.
Bleeding enemies below 20-50% damage take increased damage based on their missing HP below 20-50%.

Earlygame: 0/5
Endgame: 0/5
Utility: 0/5

TBD

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Mobripper
Circular slash from implicit modifier now deals 250-350% of the hit’s damage instead.
If the slash kills an enemy or hits a boss, fear all enemies hit for 3 seconds.
-25-15% damage.

Earlygame: 5/5
Endgame: 4/5
Utility: 3/5
With a little honing, this slash effect is on a .75 second cooldown, strikes approximately a 3x3 tile area, deals several times your hit’s damage, and fears anything that survives. It bites, it chunks, it drives survivors away and buys you space. It eats small enemies for breakfast, and once you’ve got some damage items stacked in, will continue to clear rooms through to the final chapters. The damage penalty is negligible compared to just how much you gain from the circular slash. A fantastic weapon and one I’ll readily recommend maxing out as soon as you get one.

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AXES

6-15% chance to cause bleeding for 3 seconds when hitting enemies
+10-16% damage with hits against bleeding enemies

I can’t say I find the odds for bleeding to be particularly helpful for normal enemies, as it takes about as many hits to apply bleed as it does to kill something. Bleeding damage may be helpful versus more mobile bosses, and a damage bonus that doesn’t depend on how close or far away I am is a welcome change. Still, it’s not much.

Starsteel Broadaxe
+2% tears for the current room when hitting bleeding enemies, up to 20-33%.
Hitting a boss reduces their status effect cooldown by 0.5 seconds.

Earlygame: 0/5
Endgame: 0/5
Utility: 0/5

TBD

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Ancient Runic Chopper
+3-5% permanent damage whenever you use a full rune, up to 24-36%
12-18% tears for 10 seconds whenever you use a rune or rune shard.

Earlygame: 0/5
Endgame: 0/5
Utility: 0/5

TBD

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Circuit Splitter
Hitting a bleeding enemy creates a laser ring that follows them, damaging nearby enemies for 15-25% of your damage per tick, capped at 5.
Laser rings last 2-3 seconds and can linger in place if the enemy dies.
Up to 3 laser rings can exist simultaneously.

Earlygame: 3/5
Endgame: 2/5
Utility: 2/5

It’s all right, I guess. You need to hit bleeding enemies to trigger it, which means you’re not going to trigger often against smaller enemies, which the laser ring works most effectively against. I don’t think the host of the laser ring takes damage from it, either. That, and it’s prone to nerfing via Crimson Starcursed Jewels if you’re knocking laser damage down. It’s largely outclassed by Mobripper, which has the benefit of also hurting the trigger subject.

Still, it’ll help clear up trash enemies. It’s all right.

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GREATAXES

Every 5-3 hits against each enemy causes it to bleed for 4 seconds
+12-22% damage for 2 seconds after hitting a bleeding enemy
-8-4% tears

In my opinion, much better than smaller axes. Regular bleeds and predictable stat boosting for other effects (flies) in exchange for a negligible tears down. Rip and tear until it’s done.

Berserker’s Wrath
Trigger Berserk! When first entering a room with monsters, once per floor.
Entering a boss room causes it to stop.
+3-5 seconds to Berserk!’s duration.

Earlygame: 4/5
Endgame: 2/5
Utility: 3/5

Wanna bonk stuff and clear the first couple floors like it’s nothing? You want this axe. Lacks staying power, but the implicit effects give a nominal damage bonus against boss targets. It’s fun for a lark, but it won’t carry you.

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Frozen Terror
When hitting bleeding enemies, 15-25% chance to slow them for 3 seconds.
When hitting slowed enemies within 1.5-2.5 tiles of you, perform a circular slash that can freeze slowed enemies. 1.5 second cooldown.
Slash deals 80-160% of your damage.

Earlygame: 2/5
Endgame: 3/5
Utility: 3/5

You probably want to hear me stop harping on about Mobripper, huh. Frozen Terror has a little bit of area clear, it’s got slow on hit, it’s got bleeding, it’s got a damage boost from the implicit. It’s a good utility weapon for anyone with a fair fire rate. Don’t expect miracles out of the circular slash, or for the slow to matter against bad guys that take more than four hits. Still, it’s a respectable choice.

SHORTBOWS

+0.07-0.12 shot speed
35-85% of your shot speed above 1 becomes a tears multiplier, up to +80%

Now, I’m not sure how you get your shot speed up past 2.00, but if you can manage it, that’s a really, really big tears multiplier. Reach for crossbows if you like this in damage flavor.

Storm’s Advance
Start with innate 120 Volt.
Every 10-6 hits against enemies, launch a fan of electrified tears towards the last target hit.
These tears deal 40-100% of your damage.
2 second cooldown.

Earlygame: 4/5
Endgame: 3/5
Utility: 3/5

Pairs neatly with the shotspeed/tear rate implicit, and 120 volt will save you from an embarrassing hit or two. Adds a little oomph against bosses. It’s a good choice for just about anyone.

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Quill Rain
Start with innate Soy Milk.
-40-10% damage to enemies within 2.5-1.5 tiles of you.

Earlygame: 0/5
Endgame: 0/5
Utility: 0/5

TBD. Very Path of Exile of you.

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BOWS

+0.04-0.08 shot speed
Hits against enemies deal additional damage the further away they are from you, up to 15-25%.

I do not know how far one has to be to max out this damage multiplier, but I’d guess one is more likely to miss the target than effectively utilize the damage bonus at range. I’m not particularly fond of this implicit, but there’s a few choice ancient weapons in here.

Gilded Seeker
Start with innate Head of the Keeper’s+1% damage when collecting any coin while there are monsters in the room, up to 25-40%
Halve this bonus when clearing a room.

Earlygame: 3/5
Endgame: 2/5
Utility: 4/5

This would be so much better on a shortbow, but alas. The main draw here is Head of the Keeper to generate extra coins, and an easy choice to make for Greed Mode. The damage bonus might be nominally useful for longer boss fights, but there’s no meaningful way of keeping a reasonable bonus to the damage stat. You’re in it for Head of the Keeper, and that’s it really.

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Twisted Oakstring
When hitting an enemy beyond 2.5-1.5 tiles of you, create an additional homing, spectral, fearing tear at their position.
This tear deals 80-140% of the hit’s damage.
0.5 second cooldown.

Earlygame: 4/5
Endgame: 4/5
Utility: 2/5

The secret here is that the additional tear is just as likely to hit the monster that spawned it, thereby giving you a nice extra kapow at pretty simple ranges. If it doesn’t, that tear is gonna go find something else to deal some extra damage with, and is probably going to play on the implicit effect quite nicely. Another good all-rounder, it excels on characters that manage to get damage downfield regularly (T.Apollyon, for example.)

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Brute’s Onslaught
When using an active item, for each charge used, boost the next 5 hits’ damage by 20-40%.
10-16% tears for 5 seconds after using an active item.

Earlygame: 0/5
Endgame: 0/5
Utility: 0/5

TBD

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Divine Messenger
When hitting an enemy beyond 3 tiles from you for the first time in a room, create a holy Aura at their position.
Holy Aura lasts for the rest of the room, slowly moves towards you, and grant +1 damage, +0.4 tears, and 12-18% damage and tears while in it.

Earlygame: 2/5
Endgame: 2/5
Utility: 2/5

You hear holy aura and think Hallowed Ground Holy Poop. Nope. Flat damage and tears is pretty nifty, but you’re probably going to clear a normal room before the holy aura gets to you, and you’re not gonna want to stay still long enough to utilize it in a boss room. There’s no damage negation like its better, dookier counterpart, either, so all you’re looking at is a slow, situational damage and tears boost that tries really hard to be useful to you, and doesn’t really succeed. I’m not impressed.

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CROSSBOWS

-0.15-0.05 Tears
+0.08-0.5 shot speed
Total shot speed becomes a damage multiplier, up to 25%.

If I’m reading this correctly, you max out the damage multiplier from the implicit shot speed bonus alone, so all you’re competing with is the non-issue -0.05 tears and maybe Dead Onion.

Volatile Arbalest
7-10% chance to create a small explosion when hitting enemies beyond 2.5 tiles of you.
Deals 250-400% of your damage.
1 second cooldown.

Earlygame: 2/5
Endgame: 2/5
Utility: 1/5

The explosion doesn't destroy tiles (i don't think), the proc rate is small and painful especially on a low tear rate, and the range on the explosion is sad. Mobripper has a larger area, no range limitation, and procs every time it's off cooldown. Precise Seeker is more consistent, if you're itching for a crossbow in particular.

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Avelyn
Every 4-2.5 total seconds spent firing, shoot 3 tears towards a nearby enemy, each dealing 40-75% of your damage.

Earlygame: 2/5
Endgame: 1/5
Utility: 1/5

It sounds like a perky boost to your damage, but unfortunately it doesn’t work as described; it still requires consecutive firing and not total time spent firing. Switching firing direction will wipe out the built-up time, as will stopping firing. Pick anything else, really. Like a whip, the implicit does this but better.

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Precise Seeker
Every second, mark a random enemy, prioritizing bosses.
Every 5-2.5 seconds, fire a quick piercing spectral tear towards the marked enemy.
Fired tear deals 200-400% of your damage, up to 60.

Earlygame: 4/5
Endgame: 3/5
Utility: 3/5

Much, much better compared to Avelyn, this is a set-and-forget weapon that will wipe out enemies at random while you fight. No need to think about aiming, or economizing damage, it’ll just shoot for you and probably unmake some stupid pooter on the other side of the room while you’re mogging gapers. If you’ve got PST enabled for challenges, you’ll also be pleased to note that it will continue shooting at things even when Isaac is blindfolded. Great choice for characters with high damage scaling (Judas).

GAUNTLETS

Can have an additional magic modifier. Magic modifiers are stronger. Transmutation costs are halved.

Gauntlets are crafting food. Magic modifiers roll stronger on gauntlets and those higher values translate directly onto ancient weapons when you imprint them, meaning you can get some frightening powerful damage multipliers on your favorite toys. I’d recommend taking the nodes biasing towards gauntlet drops when you’re farming tier V items on Isaac (or whomever).

Magefist
Can imprint up to 3 modifiers on this weapon.
Imprinting cost if halved.
0.2-1.5% all stats per modifiers on this weapon.

Earlygame: nan/5
Endgame: nan/5
Utility: 4/5

This one’s hard to rank, because gauntlets are all about magic modifiers and you have to make a good weapon out of this yourself. You COULD craft this into an item that adds +6 flat damage while equipped. You COULD craft this to deal excruciating damage to a bleeding enemy. You COULD add 90% damage after firing consecutively for 3 seconds. How you go with this is up to you. What it turns into, additionally, is somewhat down to luck, since imprinting magic modifiers is a roll of the dice anyways. This one’s for the crafting enthusiasts. The only benefit this offers as an ancient astral weapon is the potential +4.5% to all stats when you’ve got 3 modifiers on the weapon, or 4 with a starblessed prism. 4 magic modifiers is nothing to sneeze at, of course, but that’s going to take some doing to get right.

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Ironhand
Rolls 3 random weapon implicits.
Cannot imprint magic modifiers onto this weapon.
+0.2-1% all stats for every 10 honing on this weapon.

Earlygame: nan/5
Endgame: nan/5
Utility: nan/5

Lacking the same crafting oomph of Magefist, this one’s all roll of the dice. If you like the tear rate boosts of the quickblade and estoc and want to see the greataxe bleed on it, you might look for that Ironhand. Axe/Greataxe/Whip combination to force bleeds? Ironhand. Great mace /Scythe/Whip for maximum procs? Sure. This one’s for gamblers and no-frills armamentarians. It’s probably going to lack the raw damage that a selection of good magic mods can offer.

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Metamorphic Claw
Mimics the effect of a non-Gauntlet Ancient Weapon. Effect changes every floor.
Ancient upgrade level applied to chosen effect- 0-8

Earlygame: nan/5
Endgame: nan/5
Utility: nan/5

It’s RNG mode without any of the saucy implicits that accompany any of the other weapons. Kind of a stupid choice, but it’s yours to make. Choose it for fun, not for any strategic reason.

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GREAT MACES
Hitting an enemy within 2.5 tiles causes a shockwave, paralyzing nearby enemies for 1.5-2 seconds.
Already paralyzed enemies hit receive 200-250 of your damage, capped at 50.
7-5.5 second cooldown.

Could probably save your bacon if something gets in your face too quick and you need to buy some space. Paralysis on the implicit is fun, but plenty of other weapons do it better.


Mighty Purifier
Paralyze undead enemies for 1.5-2.5 seconds when first hitting them.
15-22% chance to block hits from undead enemies
+25-35% damage dealt to undead enemies.

Earlygame: 0/5
Endgame: 0/5
Utility: 0/5

TBD

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Chaotic Tumult
The implicit shockwave now triggers a random status effect on hit for twice as long, instead of paralysis.
When hitting an enemy affected by a status effect, 15% chance to spread the effect to a random enemy within 3-4 tiles of the hit.
+1% damage for the current room when killing enemies affected by status effects, up to 8-15%

Earlygame: 3/5
Endgame: 3/5
Utility: 2/5

It’s neat. The effect spread doesn’t require the shockwave, so you can maybe spread a Scorpio or Mom’s Eyeliner effect to other enemies you hit. Don’t count on the damage bonus meaning anything except as maybe a little pip bonus against Hush.

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Firestarter
12-18% chance to inflict Burning for 5 seconds on hit.
Chance is tripled for explosion hits
Killing a burning enemy has a 35% chance to cause an explosion dealing 220-300% of your damage, capped at 50.
Getting hit by a burning enemy grants you +15% speed for 3 seconds.

Earlygame: 0/5
Endgame: 0/5
Utility: 0/5

TBD

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Colossal Maul
Double the implicit shockwave’s damage.
+30-40% implicit shockwave size.
Implicit shockwave’s damage can affect enemies regardless of paralysis status.
+3-2 seconds to implicit shockwave cooldown.
-12-5% speed and tears while the shockwave is on cooldown.

Earlygame: 4/5
Endgame: 3/5
Utility: 3/5

Whump! Bigger slam, satisfying screen distortion, a fat lump of damage, and paralysis to boot. The struggle here is that the cooldown is so long that it may not be ready by the time you've cleared one room and moved on to the next, which takes a little bit of the oomph out of that first blood you're counting on. Still, with a little good timing, you can pop the most aggressive parts of a room with one tap and work yourself out of a positioning pickle. This one's fun.

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Tolling Bell

Start with innate Leo
When certain sounds play, gain a buff:
Explosion sounds: 7-12% speed for 3 seconds.
Broken rock sound: 10-18% damage for 4 seconds.
Boss door closing: 10-20% tears for 7 seconds.

Earlygame: 0/5
Endgame: 0/5
Utility: 0/5

TBD

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WHIPS

When hitting an enemy, shoot a stream of 5 tears towards them. Hitting enemies with these tears grants either +0.3-1.2% tears or speed, up to 8-15%. for 2-5 seconds. 2 second cooldown.

Eat this, Avelynn. The stat ups not particularly impressive and fall off too quickly for any useful ramping. It’s a very satisfying weapon to use though, the stream of tears tickles my brain right in ways that simple stat bonuses don’t. I like whips.


Snakebite
Implicit instead fires 3 tears that poison on hit.
These deal 250-400% damage to already-poisoned enemies.

Earlygame: 4/5
Endgame: 3/5
Utility: 2/5

The poison duration is virtually nothing, unfortunately. That being said, it provides ample burst damage to a single target and scales neatly with any enchantments to deal extra damage to poisoned enemies. I’m rather fond.

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Devil’s Tongue
Implicit tears petrify enemies for 0.8-1.6 seconds on hit.
Already petrified enemies are inflicted with burning for 3 seconds on hit.
Implicit cooldown is raised to 3 seconds.
+12-18% damage against burning enemies

Earlygame: 4/5
Endgame: 4/5
Utility: 4/5

Another excellent choice, the petrification is more predictable than Viper Stinger, if less constant because of the implicit cooldown increase. Makes enemies burn and lets you do more damage to burning enemies, giving you good opportunity to single out nasty targets in a room. It’s a great choice for any character for laying on the hurt a little thicker.

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Azurebinder
Implicit tears gain Lost Contact and Tiny Planet’s effects.
Implicit tears fly for longer.
+1-3% damage for the current room per blocked tear, up to 8-15%

Earlygame: 1/5
Endgame: 1/5
Utility: 1/5

No, no, no, no. These tears do not stay airborne long enough to be meaningfully useful and curve around Isaac in a way that makes blocking any kind of projectile before they fall entirely improbable. This is a bad item. Don’t use it. Go get the stupid longsword that doesn’t scale properly. Go get Gravitas. Go grab literally anything else, please.

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Sacred Scourge
After killing an undead enemy, for 5-9 seconds:
implicit fires an additional 2 tears
Implicit tears fly for longer.
Halve implicit cooldown.

Earlygame: 3/5
Endgame: 2/5
Utility: 1/5

Despite the rating numbers, this one’s kind of fun. Whip away after blowing up a Boney or whatever. I won’t say it’s all-purpose Good or anything, but when the effect activates, you’ll feel it, and you’ll go to town on whatever’s still alive in the room, and that’s fun. This is a fun weapon.

My friend, Isaac is your answer. Barebones Isaac and his character skill tree have everything we want. Let’s walk through some setup.

- Fill out Isaac’s character skill tree. Core Crimson Nodes: Chest Re-closing
Universal Crimson Nodes: Champion Chest Limit
Divergent Crimson Nodes – whatever you want really. I like Eden’s Blessing Spawn.

Sidereal tree: Every single Sidereal Cache node. You can skip the Starcursed Jewel nodes if you’d like, you probably have enough of those.

You also want every Sidereal Cache Astral Weapon node, ever Boss Astral Weapon Drop Rate node, all Magic Astral Weapons, all Ancient Astral Weapons. For my purposes, I also allocate all of the Astral Weapon Drops: Gauntlets nodes so I get better magic weapons since I’m not targeting a specific Ancient Astral Weapon. You’re gonna need a hundred some global skill points for this, and like twenty thousand obols.

You probably also want the nodes that award extra ancient stardust on defeating final bosses. This will be a bottleneck.

If you’ve got a couple crimson starcores, unlock the second and third septentrions for Isaac. Distribute them as you see fit, but ‘kill an enemy,’ ‘kill an enemy with a status effect,’ and ‘kill a champion monster’ are safe bets. Allocate the Sidereal meridion so you spawn an extra five caches per floor.

Queue up your highest level expedition or uber expedition if you’re angling for magic gauntlet items. Again, tier 5 uber expedition gives tier 5 astral weapons.

Now we just play. Find bosses and kill them. Complete challenge rooms. Open sidereal caches, and wait a couple seconds to see if they re-close so you can open them again. There’s a pretty decent chance that opening a sidereal cache will produce another sidereal cache courtesy of all those nodes you allocated.

- Side routes? Not necessarily useful. Consider it if you have the Runs Continue Past Mother mod installed, as Mother will give +4 ancient stardust (2x arms, 1x head, 1x blobsphere) for defeating her. You may also get a buttload extra stardust if you initiate the phase change while she’s got maggot ball tennis happening.

-Church or sheol? Grab the negative and go to hell. Satan is a total of 6 bosses, Isaac is 1. In the dark room, The Lamb is 2 final bosses, and Blue Baby is 1. You just get more resources going downwards.

-Normal or hard? Slightly difficult choice, Champion monster pickup drop rate is 100% on normal, and 20% on hard, so you’re probably going to get more chests to convert into sidereal caches on normal difficulty. That said, you’re more likely to get harder rooms including minibosses (which will produce astral weapons) on hard mode. It’s up to you, really.

That’s the gist of it. Good hunting.

Oh, is there. I've got an exploit for you.

Go fight Mother, but remain in her first phase. One of her attacks, which you'll probably rarely see (since you'll phase change her too quickly), is where she lifts up and summons a bunch of wretched Isaac-Gaper-things from the bottom of the screen.

For whatever reason, these all qualify as final bosses despite being basically nothing. Each one will give Ancient Stardust. This minion phase alone is worth probably 30 Ancient Stardust, and more if you've allocated points into the top left portion of the Sidereal Tree for that character.

The maggots from Maggotball Tennis in the first phase also qualify as final bosses for the same effect, so holding out for this attack may also be a good idea, if somewhat dangerous.

This is clearly not intended behavior, but if you're playing around with each of the unique astral weapons, or writing a guide about them all, it's a great way to get ahead.

Alternatively:

- If you find a modded item or effect that can 'delete' or instakill enemies ('Tony' from the Warp Zone mod), you can strike The Lamb's body repeatedly to trigger a final boss kill and be awarded massive EXP and Ancient Stardust. Would not recommend for the casual player.

* The Expedition condition "Defeat The Beast or Delirium without taking damage more than once" condition completes as soon as you defeat the first Horseman, assuming you didn't get hit more than once. You don't need to defeat the Beast for this challenge, so do the Ascent if you're trying to close out your expedition.
* Astral weapons and Arcane Obols left in boss rooms will become Cracked Keys on the Ascent, since they count internally as trinkets. Handy way to make sure you can unlock your tainted characters.
* Destorying the stalactites/stalagmites during the Beast sequence awards no EXP. If the Beast destroys stalactites for you, however, you do get EXP. It's 70-100 exp a pop, so largely unremarkable compared to each of the bosses you've already faced.
* Mentioned elsewhere, Sidereal Actualization doesn't do anything.
* Mentioned elsewhere, Divine Interceptor doesn't gain effects with upgrade level.
* Tainted Lazarus' Ephemeral Bond node may share quest items like the Key Pieces between superpositions. Ephemeral Bond is slightly less useful than it should be as a result.

This one's not too bad, actually.

Right-click Binding of Isaac in your Steam Library, move over Manage, then click Browse Local Files. If you're on Steam Deck, you can do this from Desktop Mode.

Open the 'data' folder,

then open the 'passive skill trees' folder. You'll see save1.dat, save2.dat, and save3.dat - each is the PST data for the corresponding savefiles. Left file is save1, right is save3, middle save2, etc. If you don't see the .dat file extension, that's okay, it's still there.

Right-click rename the file for the savefile you want to copy TO, and name it something else like savebackupjustincase, or whatever, really. Right-click 'Copy' the file you want to copy FROM, and then 'Paste' it. If it asks if you want to overwrite or make a copy, Make A Copy. Right-click Rename your duplicated file to 'save2.dat' (or just save2 if you don't see the .dat extension) or whatever number savefile you're replacing. Powee, your PST data is copied over. If something's gone super pear-shaped, you can rename your 'savebackupjustincase' file back as it was.

You can check that it worked by referring to Isaac's level when you choose New Run on your savefile. If Isaac looks good, everything else will be good too.

NOTE:

If you've done Cosmic Realignment on your donor savefile, those blue completion marks WILL copy over onto the new file! If you're gonna wipe those, you'll need to get in there with your favorite text editor and carefully pare out that progress. Zero Cosmic Realignment process looks approximately like this in the .dat file:

"cosmicRCompletions":{"0":[]},

(and mind your comma at the end). The curly brackets segment is going to look considerably different with completions in there, so you're going to have to eyeball how much to cut out by referencing just where the next quoted variable starts.

MAKE BACKUPS BEFORE YOU START EDITING YOUR SAVEDATA!

I've been writing this over the last couple months as a means of putting off formal univeristy assignments putting some data, opinions, and guidance on the record. Currently I'm calling this version 0.9 of the guide, as it has a whole bunch of TBD tags that I have yet to fill.

* Why so many TBD tags?

Haven't played 'em yet. There's a lot of content in here, and I'm opining as I unlock/try it. I've hit Dead God with my save file, but even still I haven't tried every Ancient Astral weapon or Ancient Starjewel. Bear with me.

I want to get the guide published to put to print what I have already, anyways. LibreOffice says it's in excess of 17,000 words and that's a lot to hide away in my documents folder. Not a lot of good a guide does in there!

* What's a Dead God savefile total out to?

Global level 1926. 25,000 Mundane Essence, 15200 Sparkling Essence. Arcane Astrolabe Depth 22 (I got lazy here and turned my focus to completion marks instead of depth), Uber Expedition Depth 6. Modded characters gaining Arcane Obols from Cosmic Altruism sharing and not by playing have 124,000 Arcane Obols. I'm sitting on 676 free Skill Points, and averaged out at 946 Starmight. I think I only got 2 or 3 Crimson Starcores and couldn't really spend them with Crimson Convergence since there's no tooltips.

* Why are you so incorrect about my opinion on XYZ?

You're welcome to call me out if you disagree with my opinions about Judas' skill tree, or what have you. This document isn't set in stone, and despite a few hundred hours' experience, I haven't given every corner as much scrutiny as it deserves.

* Does this mod work on Repentance+?

To my knowledge, yes, if you've got Repentagon set up for it.

* But I'm still on base Repentance! How do I get Repentogon?

You can find the final base Repentance release on Github here:

https://github.com/TeamREPENTOGON/REPENTOGON/releases/tag/1.0.12e

* What's with Sidereal Actualization / Divine Interceptor / FOO?

There's bugs, and it's been a little while since the mod's been updated. A more responsible version of me would have documented all the bugs I've found so far. They're pretty few and far between. Let's pen in a TBD for a 'current bugs' section.

* No images in the guide?

Text is easier to search than images. Also, I've been playing the mod on steam deck, and extracting screenshots for the guide would be a huge pain in the neck. Ctrl + F to Find whatever text you're looking for.

* Did you use AI?

Absolutely not, and I never will. By writing this guide, I'm putting niche details on the record, in the public, in perpetuity. I must encourage you to take your passions and put them to word, so that one, three, five, ten years from now someone will find your work, your joy, and take it on as their own. 'Sides, if nobody's written it up, there's nothing for LLMs to scrape and regurgitate, and I'm pretty darned sure nobody's written this guide before. If you feed this one to a bot, I'll feed you to a woodchipper.

* Why's it broken out into chapters the way it is?

Steam guides have a pretty narrow character limit. I'm 99% certain I'm going to need to shuffle some chapters around as I start filling in details for empty characters/weapons/starcursed jewels.

* You've got a typo here/ inconsistent capitalization there!

Yeah, it need a polish pass. Call me out on it and I'll see about patching it up next time I'm adding descriptions for the todo blocks.

* How do I unsocket a jewel?

Press the respec button. R key, on keyboard, LT + bottom face (A) button on Deck/Controller.

* Bad guys got unkillable!

Check you didn't overdo it on your Crimson starcursed jewels.

That's it for now! Have a good grind, stay sane.