If your current items suck and you have enough strength to wear an unidentified item of different tier, do it! Maybe it’s not cursed, maybe it’s even upgraded. However, don’t be scared of cursed items – most of the curse effects aren’t that harmful. However, if you were anything like me you probably are extremely paranoid about equipping new items, maybe saving an identify scroll or remove curse scroll just in case. One of the ways to get stronger when progressing is to get gear upgrades, be it from drops or spawns or completing challenge rooms. I didn’t mention scroll of anti-magic, which I’ll talk about in another tip.

There are also the elixirs that imbue you and give you immunity to fire/toxic gas/cold which are really useful at certain bosses. Invaluable for on-diet runs and very helpful on regular runs.Īnd that’s just a few examples. This bad boy acts as a healing potion and as food with no downsides.Note: Don’t do this to wands (mage’s staff included), unless you’re running some cursed wand build. If you don’t like the curse, you can always re-curse your item. If you don’t have any OP-tier enchantments, try it out. Also, the curses you get aren’t great, but they’re not gamebreaking either. There’s also a hidden benefit of your weapon not teleporting away due to certain traps later. Curse infusions might sound really counter productive – deliberately curse your item to have it upgraded? Surprisingly, I found it to be quite good late game, where both your weapon and armor are upgraded to +6 or more – it gives you a curse, yes, but also a +2 upgrade on both armor and weapon, effectively giving you +4 extra upgrade scrolls.You can’t afford something in the current floors shop that you need? Plop this guy down and return anytime you have full inventory to offload or enough gold. You’re about to enter metropolis or demon halls, but first you want to revisit old shops and buy all scrolls/heal potions? Plop this boy down and use scrolls of passage (basically next entry) to quickly visit them all, then return.

Beacons of returning are immensely useful and save a ton of food.The surplus scrolls and potions can them be used for further alchemy or just regular usage. You usually get enough identification scrolls from shops/drops/spawns that you can have almost every potion/scroll/ring identified before entering 3rd stage. Scrolls of Divination can be used to mass-identify potions/scrolls/rings without actually using them.Here are some of the ways it can change your runs: After getting a few wins under my belt, I was still ignoring it until a few months ago, that’s when I had a realization that alchemy is vital if you want to have consistent wins. I just wouldn’t use it, thought it was completely pointless. When I started out, I ignored alchemy completely. The items background automatically shows if the item you got is an “always cursed” or “never cursed”, blue being not cursed, red being cursed and purple being “unknown”. Random drops can be cursed as well, however it’s mostly random. Cursed items usually come from gravestones, sacrificial altar and skeletal remains (if wraith spawns). When you receive a new item, depending on where you got it from the item might always be cursed or never cursed.Equipable items and wands can be cursed, meaning that they come with a harmful enchantment and that you cannot unequip them, and it’s not always obvious whether or not an item you want to equip is cursed or not.However, it is a good practice to use them sparingly, saving them up until you’re in a pinch or until you find a high-tier weapon/armor (tier 4/5 for weapon, tier 5 for armor (unless you’re mega unlucky then tier 4, which is scale armor, will do), to which you can dump enough scrolls to get to at least +6 armor and everything else on weapon. BE SURE TO GET THOSE. Potions of strength allow you to equip better equipment while also making you better with your old equipment (due to excess strength), and scrolls of upgrade directly buff your items. Each stage of a dungeon (one stage spanning 5 floors, for example sewer, prison, caves, metropolis and demon halls) always contains 3 scrolls of upgrade and 2 potions of strength.Your character might also spot the secrets around them randomly, but don’t count on it. This is vital to finding secret rooms or traps. The “examine” key can also be clicked twice to search the area around your character.Sometimes this can be very useful when learning the game, since many monsters have unique mechanics that are described in the examine menu.

The “examine” button can be used to, as the name suggests, examine things in the world, this can be monsters, items laying around, traps, hazards, etc.

Shattered pixel dungeon staff imbue