So, you've beaten the High Dragun, you might even have beaten some, or all, of the character's pasts. Not bad, not bad at all.

But ask yourself, are you really satisfied?

Have you really plumbed the depths of the Gungeon, defeated the ultimate foes, faced the most inconceivable dangers and conquered the most punishing challenges?

No? Still have that hunger to really make the Gungeon your own? Well, good news! This is the guide for you.

In this guide I'll attempt to collate my experiences from hundreds of hours running through the Gungeon to try and give the best possible guide on higher level play. That means attempting tougher runs, with tougher characters or modifiers through tougher floors and, most of all, trying to make sure that you can be consistent and repeatedly complete the game with minimum strain and with the least possible dependence on favorable RNG.

It will take a lot of practice, careful understanding of the game mechanics, skill and fortitude, but I am confidant with the right attitude and ambition anyone can truly conquer the Gungeon and see all that this game has to offer.

So pointlessly ♥♥♥♥ those pistols and unnecessarily rack those shotguns to make that cool 'Cha-chk' sounds and lets ENTER THE GUNGEON!

Note: This Guide is a work in Progress! Not everything I want to talk about will be present here at the moment and I still need to proofread and edit it. Please be mindful of that.

Also, this guide was initially written months before Advanced Gungeons and Draguns was released, a large part of the guide may be out of date and a lot of new content will not be mentioned here as a result, I'll try and rectify this when I have the time.

This guide will be working off of the assumption that you know how to play the game in the most basic manner, and maybe have made their way through several floors or even completed the game once or twice. As such I'm sure everyone knows that Blanks eliminate Bullets and Dodge-rolling gives you invincibility frames. That kind of thing. As such I will talk mostly about the basic ways I think you should approach the game in this section rather than mechanical minutia, and in general this guide will be as in depth as possible so there will be a lot to read. I don't have anything to say about Coop mode so you'll have to find another guide for that. For now I won't talk much about items, weapons and enemies outside of specific circumstances since there are other guides that do so, as well as the wiki, and its probably better to get your own sense of these things when playing the game. That might change in the future though. I will not be holding back on spoilers, so be warned!


It's difficult to articulate what I mean exactly by mindset, but suffice to say you need to approach the game with a certain set of expectations to get the most out of it. Gungeon is quite unique, it's a bullet-hell, twin-stick shooter Roguelike with vast variety of weapons and items. However, of those elements the Bullet Hell part is probably the most important. That means it should be first and foremost approached like such a game, avoiding damage is probably the single most important part of this game if you want to do well, that means your ability to thread the needle through ever more complex bullet formations will be the main thing that determines if you stay alive. Not what gun you have, not what items you have, not how well you can aim at the enemies, simple footwork and damage avoidance is the name of the game, which can seem a bit misleading for a game ostensibly about collecting crazy weapons.

Unlike a game like Binding of Isaac it's very rare to be carried by shear power of what you pick up, no matter what the game demands a certain level of skill, especially as I have said in avoiding damage, to make consistent progress. This has sometimes given the game a reputation of being excessively difficult, but I think all anyone needs is a good deal of practice and they'll get better and more consistent at the game and see how fun it can be.

Another important aspect of mindset is making do with what you find. This is very important, as a Roguelike Gungeon will throw all kinds of weapons and items at you, and it's critical to get out of a mindset of being frustrated that you didn't find a particular weapon or whatever. Too many times have I seen people get angry that they only got Brown tier guns in floor one or what have you. The truth is that the game is actually extremely well balanced, almost every weapon or item you find has a purpose or strength that may not be obvious at first, and tier quality isn't the be all and end all. If you find a weapon you think sucks consider using it where you can and seeing if you come around to it or start to see the situations it works well in or the other weapons it synergises well with, there are tons of things I've grown to love over the course of playing that I thought sucked initially, experimentation is very important. This will be important later when we talk about chests.

Just in general try and be positive and enjoy the game, don't get frustrated by a lack of progress, as you keep at it you will and continuously get better and better. Dying is normal and to be expected, every time you do die try to examine why and what you can do in the future to avoid that specific situation if it comes up again. With some elbow grease you'll be able to overcome almost anything the game throws at you.

Evasion

Keeping the above in mind you should concentrate on practicing your ability to move around bullets. The dodge-roll is very powerful, but it has certain drawbacks, you can't stop or change direction after you commit to it, the latter half of the roll does not have invincibility frames and there is a slight cooldown period where you can't use it. That means you can often roll through one bullet straight into another some distance away and unavoidably take damage. As such a lot of the time it's better to try and do small side-stepping movements to walk around bullets rather than going for the dodge roll every time, that will give you better control over your movement even though you don't have invincibility, save the dodge roll that for thick waves you absolutely won't be able to sidestep or as a way from moving quickly and safely from a place densely packed with bullets you will have trouble dodging to a place without many. As a follow-on always try to make sure you know where you are rolling towards and not just roll willy-nilly since you need to make sure you can move out of the roll with minimum fuss.

When playing try to challenge yourself with regards to dodging to get better practice. Make an effort to finish floors without getting hit or even dodge rolling, try and earn those Master Rounds from flawlessing bosses especially floor 1 bosses. Personally I find a useful challenge is to go through the secret floor, the Oubliette (more on that later), find the old crest and try to bring it to the crypt in the Gungeon Proper. This is a demanding way to test your ability to not get hit and if you succeed you have the option of another floor to try. Speed upgrades like Shotgun Coffee can really help dodging and outrunning bullets.

Blanks should be used as little as possible and any found ought to be saved for boss battles, even then completing a boss with leftover blanks gives you the option of trying to find secret rooms.

A few weapons have the ability to destroy bullets (Blasphemy, Fightsabre, Excaliber and the Huntsman), of these I would not rely on the Huntsman or Excaliber to seriously prevent damage since they are not very reliable (they take time to apply the effect and only destroy bullets in a small area) but Fightsabre and Blasphemy are very useful in that regard. I will talk about Blasphemy in the section concerning the Bullet.

It's also worth mentioning the Bloodied Scarf, this is a very unique green chest item that removes your dodge roll and replaces it with the ability to teleport, with a small blank effect destroying bullets around the area you teleport too. The location you teleport to is determined by where your cursor is when you hold down the Roll button, or just which direction you're moving if you tap the roll button. Some people consider this item very powerful, while others think its extremely hard to use and seriously messes up the muscle memory you build up playing normally. Unfortunately I'm in the latter category, but if you do find the Scarf its worth experimenting with (especially since you can phase through locked doors or into secret rooms without using a key or blank).

Planning

Since we're talking about the prospect of making it all the way through to Bullet Hell, a certain degree of planning must be considered. You'll need to know how to maximize the effectiveness of the guns, items and pickups that the game throws at you and understand the ways you can best control the RNG to have a more stable and smooth run overall.

Typically, when you go through a floor you'll want to find as many resources as possible, especially at the start. The most basic thing to do is make sure you are thorough, scour every room in the floor before leaving and make sure nothing is unaccounted for. Usually you should not rush towards the Boss and expect everything to work out, especially if you are fairly inexperienced, any single room has the potential to drop a key or even a chest, which can really help you, and you may find useful things like extra vendors, shrines, secret rooms and NPCs. Save important things like Blanks or armor for boss encounters, because they will be much more valuable there than in some random enemy room.

There are always two chest rooms in each floor, except Bullet Hell, which has none. Of these chests one will be guaranteed to have a weapon and the other will be guaranteed to have an item, either passive or active. Knowing this will really help you plan out how to use your resources, especially at the start, if you open a chest and find a weapon you can be damn near guaranteed the other will have an item. Maybe it's a low tier chest and you don't feel as though its worth the key to open and risk getting crap like the Ruby Bracelet. On the flipside, if you have good weaponry and open a chest with an item it might not be worth opening a lower tier chest that might just have a Makarov or Plunger, especially later on when you have lots of guns and items become more valuable. These decisions are important for saving valuable keys for later, you never want to run into a Black or Red chest and not be able to find any keys to open it.

In a similar fashion, if you kill the Boss of a floor and you have not found any weapons on that floor, the Boss is absolutely guaranteed to drop a weapon and not any kind of item. Work this into your considerations as you move through the floor, it could be better to entirely ignore very low tier chests if you are a character with a good ability to kill bosses from the start like the Bullet or the Hunter to try and force the Boss to drop something better. Generally though, you'll want to be in the best possible shape you can be in before facing the boss so you can try and get those all important Master Rounds, so be careful.

Because of the quirks in the way keys drop I highly recommend finding and entering the shop as the first main objective that you have when you enter the floor, this will help in managing keys and I will return to this in the section on shops. Having at least one key on your person at any one time is a good idea. The main reason for this is because you may blunder into a chest room where the chest has a fuse, which it will blow up after a few seconds. If its a high tier chest that can be particularly galling, in fact because of this I recommend not entering a room at all if you are sure its a chest room and you don't have a key or haven't found the shop (you can often tell by looking at the edges, as well as your general position on the map, if it looks like two entrances are leading to one room and one of the entrances is blocked off with a pressure mechanism, it is definitely a chest room). In cursed runs this is even more of a concern because of the amount of extra fuses.

In the room-to-room combat it's important to organize yourself to get the best value from your weapons. Typically you'll want to save more powerful weapons for later in the game, and especially for boss battles. Make a decision on two weapons that you think are best suited for clearing through most of the floor and put them on the quick select, alternating between them. Some weapons are very ammo efficient, and some aren't, but they might have good support use, ie, the Molotov launcher will set an area on fire and you can use it once per room to make it easier to kill things while an AK-47 will do most of the actual killing. Try to get a sense of what weapons are good for room clearing, boss killing and support. The reason you'll want to mostly stick to a small number of weapons is because ammo drops are random and sometimes rare, and can only refill one weapon, so its best to have one weapon on low ammo you can fill up all the way as opposed to having tons of weapons you're switching between that are have small amounts of ammo to refill, you won't get as good mileage out of each individual ammo drop. As tempting as it is to save ammo I would say you shouldn't use your infinite ammo weapon much beyond floor 1, though that depends on the situation and weapon.

When planning in these kinds of ways it very much helps to know the small quirks about the individual pickups, which I will go into in some detail in the next section...

Pickups are generic resources that you find through the game, health and ammo and such. They frequently drop as a result of a floor drop system that is controlled by a stat called 'Coolness', we will go into more detail on that in the Hidden Stats segment. Pickups can also be found in shops, low tier chests, secret rooms and as part of the reward after killing a boss.

Before I get into pickups proper, I want to first mention this little bastard:



This is the Resourceful Rat, if you leave Guns, Items and certain pickups on the floor he will swipe them after you leave the room. If you come back quick enough and shoot at him he will run away and not take the item, but will still come back again if you leave the room again without taking it. After stealing something he will leave a mocking note behind where the item was. His purpose seems to be to force the player to make on-the-fly decisions about what to pick up and what to leave, ie if you already have an active item you won't be able to leave the item from the chest on the ground and come back for it later. However he doesn't take items still on pedestals after defeating a boss. You will grow to hate this guy!

Now, some info on the individual pickups:

• Hearts replenish empty heart containers. They are probably the most common pickup after money and are not taken by the rat if left on the ground. They come in full hearts and half hearts, and it's probably better to avoid replenishing a half empty heart container with a full heart since its a waste of half a heart. Half hearts are cheaper to buy in shops, but its more economical to buy full hearts. Jammed enemy attacks will take off a full heart, while other attacks will only do half a heart.

• Armor act as extra health on top of your usual heart containers, they also act as a blank when they are hit, so they are more useful than hearts. They also don't take extra damage from Jammed attacks. Generally armor are much rarer drops than hearts, but often turn up in secret rooms, the shop and after killing bosses. They are more expensive than hearts and are stolen by the rat if left, so you should always take them. Armor is carried over into the pasts.
  
  In the Oubliette a unique piece of armor can be found in a special room called the Old Crest that will always sit at the end of your healthbar. This is needed to get into the Abbey and I will talk about it in the secret floor section, it looks like this:
  

• Keys will let you open locked chests, locked gates and can used to Buy Flynt's merchandise (more on that later). They are fairly rare drops that are not stolen by the rat. There are some strange quirks concerning keys and shops that I will get into in the shops section. Additionally a special enemy called a Keybullet kin will drop a key when killed, and drop two keys when killed if its jammed. These enemies will disappear if left too long and look like this:
  

• Ammo crates will completely refill the ammo of the current weapon you are holding when you pick them up with the interact button. You cannot use ammo on full weapons. Ammo are common drops, and there is actually an entirely separate drop system just for ammo in addition to the usual item room drops. This can sometimes mean two ammo drops will occur in the same room. They are stolen by the rat if left.

• Blanks act like bombs in other Bullet hell games, completely clearing the current room of all bullets, including your own, and slightly pushing back enemies and damaging them. By default every time you enter a new floor you will have two blanks, but these won't stack, ie, if you leave a floor with two blanks you won't get four blanks next floor, you'll just have two. Blanks can be upgraded with Ammolets which will also increase the number granted each floor. Blanks can be used to reveal secret rooms and are not taken by rat. Blanks are carried over into the past.

• Glass Guon Stones are considered passive items by the game, but act more like pickups. When picked up they orbit the player and block and destroy any bullet that comes in contact with them. If the player takes damage, any Glass Guon Stones they have will be destroyed. They are the cheapest pickup to buy, are fairly rare drops (as common as keys) and are taken by the rat if left. The Shrine of Glass will grant the Player 3 of these items.

• Money, or casings as they are called in game, can be used to buy items from the shop and other merchants (see the shop section), as well as use some NPCs and shrines. They are most commonly created by killing enemies, who have a chance to drop some on death, but can also drop from brown chests, be room drops and boss drops. They are divided into three types, copper casings are most common and worth 1 casing. Silver are rarer and worth 5 casings. Gold are extremely rare and worth 50 casings. Gold casings never seem to drop from enemies, unlike the others, and are only found in Brown chests, room drops and boss drops. 'Knight' enemies will be guaranteed to drop casings, usually silver casings and are a valuable source of income. Such enemies include Gun Nuts, Lead Maidens, Shambling Rounds, Shelletons and Revolvenants and are usually much tougher than normal enemies. Jammed enemies also drop many more casings than normal enemies, hence why cursed runs are such a good source of income. If you take red heart damage from an enemy you will not get any casings from them, including the aforementioned Knight enemies. I have often heard it stated that if an enemy falls into a pit the money they produce is lost forever. This is Absolutely, 100% NOT TRUE! I really hate seeing this misinformation repeated, some other guides in this section say so, if you pay attention you'll see that money that falls into pits will reappear above the player and immediately enter their wallet, so don't worry about losing money by pushing enemies into pits, it's a great way to kill them. After clearing a room money will automatically go to the player, so they are not taken by the rat

• Hegemony Credits are special currency that are normally dropped three or four at a time after killing a boss. They are also ultra-rare room drops, and can be given by the Briefcase of Cash item as well as a reward from Frifle and the Grey Mauser's hunting quests in the Breach. These credits can be used to purchase item unlocks from Breach vendors like Cadence and Ox or Doug, they are also spent on opening the Tailor's shortcuts, activating the Tailor's Boss Rush mode, Daisuke's Challenge mode and the Sorceress's Blessed mode, all of which we will talk about later. They are not taken by the rat and are automatically added to player inventory if they leave them behind in a room without collecting them.

Chests will be your best source of guns and items in the game. They come in a variety of tiers with each tier being distinguished by their color. Generally speaking higher tier chests will have better items, but its very important to keep in mind that this is not a hard and fast rule, some low tier items are exceptionally good, and some high tier items kind of suck.

Most, but not all, chests need a key to open. They are commonly found in two chest rooms on each floor (except Bullet Hell) but can also rarely drop in any room as part of the item drop system. They also frequently turn up in secret rooms, can drop after killing the Shadow Magician, can be spawned by winning Winchester's game, appear in mirror rooms, are spawned by the challenge, blank and dice shrines, are spawned when the Directional Pad runs out of ammo and will show up extra chest rooms with a locked door (these chests usually aren't worth getting because they require an extra key to get to and never go up to Red or Black tier).

Here are the types of chests with notes:

• Brown Chest, Contains D tier items, typically considered the weakest items available. They are also the most common chests and only ones outside of Rainbow and Albern's chests that can contain more than one item, sometimes 3 or 4 or even more. Extra items are always pickups like money or health, it will never have more than one Passive Item, Active Item or Gun. When found outside of chest rooms they will always be unlocked, but these unlocked chests are not guaranteed to contain an item or gun and might only have pickups. It's often said that you should always ignore Brown chests, but I disagree, they can have some very good stuff (ie Regular Shotgun, Winchester Rifle, Sling, Double Vision) and the potential of extra pickups is the icing on the cake. If you open one and one of those items is a key it effectively cost nothing to open. Keep such things in mind, but if you have limited keys and higher tier chests are available do open them instead.

• Blue Chest, Contains C tier items. The next step up from brown, generally more powerful items, and less common. Unlike brown will be still be locked when found in secret rooms or room drop.

• Green Chest, next level in item quality and rarity from blue with all that entails. Contains B tier items.

• Red Chest even more powerful contents than green chests. Contains A tier items.

• Black Chest, height of item quality and rarity. Contains S tier items.

• Rainbow Chest. Ultra-rare chest that's practically an instant run winner. Will never require a key to open and when opened will spit out 8 items and guns. They will be B, A and S tier only, at rates of roughly 15% S tier, 54% A tier and 31% B tier. The chests themselves have a 0.0333% chance to spawn, so you can go tens of hours without seeing any. Any chest can be replaced with a Rainbow chest, but chests that drop as part of the floor drop system will have a slightly higher chance.

• Glitch Chest. Will rarely (0.1% chance) replace regular chests. Cannot appear after Black Powder Mine or in Secret floors. When opened will instantly teleport the player to the next floor, but the only thing they can do there is fight a glitched version of the Beholster, where you will fight two Beholsters at once! After winning this tough fight the bosses will drop a huge amount of guns (8) and pickups, and the elevator to the next floor becomes available.

• Albern's chest. A chest unique to the NPC brother Albern, more info in NPCs section.

Regular chests have a small base chance to be mimics. If you try to open a mimic it will activate and attack you, opening with a punishing jammed blast for the first three tiers. After that it will start to attack you normally, mimics are some of the few enemies that will follow you into different rooms and are quite tough. A useful part of mimics is that if you kill them they will still drop contents of the chest quality they resemble, so you don't have to spend a key on them. The Mimic Tooth Necklace item exploits this, transforming all chests into mimics and saving you keys in exchange for tough enemies. Red and Black mimics will have different behaviour compared to Brown, Blue and Green mimics, blasting out concentric rings of bullets compared to the more common variant's twin revolvers, as such they are generally much tougher, though also slower. Mimic's health rises with the quality of their chest, and they can even be jammed. Mimic are more likely to appear as the player's curse rises, their starting likelihood is 2.25% chance to replace a chest, and this rises by 2.1% with each level of curse. They will often give themselves away with subtle motions if you pay attention, additionally the Hunter's dog will bark at them. It is usually a good idea to shoot a weak weapon at any chest to get the jump on them if they are a mimic, this will also give you an achievement and unlock the Book of Chest Anatomy. If you have the Ring of Mimic Friendship then they won't attack and any mimic will just be an unlocked chest. If you don't have this item and see an unlocked brown chest in a chest room (where they are normally locked) that chest is always a mimic. Rainbow chests cannot be mimics, even with the Mimic Tooth Necklace, same with Albern's chest.

Below, all the varieties of mimic.



Chests can also have Fuses, the likelihood of which also rises with curse(by 5% per point). If left too long the fuse will blow up the chest and it's contents. They can be stopped by either opening the chest or putting out the flame of the fuse with liquid (Robot's Coolant leak is good for this).

When destroyed by weapon fire without being opened chests will often drop the Junk item. This is usually useless, but can be sold for 3 casings. Junk also gives the robot a small damage boost (5% more), will buff Ser Junkan, can be given to the Ser Junkan shrine for a piece of armor, will synergize with the Trashcannon and can be needed by the tailor when building shortcuts. As such collecting junk can be preferable than opening poor chests if the player is the robot or has Ser Junkan, or both! Junk is less likely to drop if the player holds no keys (60% likelihood on chest destruction that case, normally its 72%). If junk does not drop it can be pickups like armor, or even very low tier items and weapons. Sometimes the chest will just blow up, leaving nothing and damaging the player if they are too close, so stay back if you decide to destroy a chest.

There are a number of stats and modifiers in the game that are rather poorly conveyed to the player. Even intermediate players are sometimes unaware of the existance of stats like Coolness, so to make things clearer I will try and go into as much detail as possible for the benefit of everyone. Hopefully you'll know exactly what these hidden stats are, how they effect the game and how you can bend them to your benefit.



We touched upon this slightly in the Pickups section, coolness controls for three things, drop rates for pickups after clearing a room, the likelihood for chests to have fuses and recharge rates for active items. It doesn't effect chest quality or item quality in shops, sadly.

Coolness is very useful to increase, higher coolness means more drops, things like keys and health will be more common. It also means that active items can be used much more liberally. Each point of coolness will reduce active item cooldown by 5% (up to a max of 50%), reduce the likelihood of a chest fuse by 2.5% and increase room drops. Room drops work on a system where your chance for the next room you clear to have a drop will increase with every consecutive room that you clear that drops nothing, when something does drop the system resets back to the base chance. Coolness causes the base chance of something to drop to be higher and for the increase in that chance with every room that drops nothing to be higher too.

Curse and Coolness work in opposition to each other so you will need to 2 points of coolness to cancel out 1 point of curse when it comes to controlling chest fuses, and curse will also reduce the rate at which non-ammo items drop from the room clear system. As such higher coolness will help overcome some of the problems of high curse runs.

The player's coolness is entirely based on holding specific items and guns and a few item synergies. The item's description will often hint at whether it will increase coolness, ie Shade's Revolver says 'Anyone who uses this handgun would look pretty cool.' which is hint for the +2 coolness that this gun carries. The Cigarettes active will increase coolness every time it's activated at the cost of damaging the player while the Sixth Chamber will increase coolness with curse and remove curse's usual depression of drop rates. The Vorpal Gun will also be more likely to fire it's special bullet as coolness increases. There is no in game counter or effect to tell you how much coolness you have at any one time or whether you gained it from picking something up, but there is no way to decrease coolness beyond the effects of curse.

The Following items, guns and synergies all increase Coolness by the stated amounts:

• Old Goldie +1

• Heart of Ice +1

• Magic Sweet +1

• Cigarettes, +1 per use

• Iron Coin +2

• Orange +2

• Rad Gun +2

• Sunglasses +2

• Sixth Chamber +2 with each point of Curse

• Ballot +3

• Ice Cube +3

• Shade's Revolver +3

• Box, Ration and SAA synergy +3

Magnificence is very well hidden stat that controls the amount of high tier items you will receive over the course of a run. In short it restricts the spawning of Red and Black tier chests and items if you've already picked them up. Every time you pick up a Red or Black tier item the magnificence counter will increase by one (Note: dropping and picking up the item again does not increase magnificence again, but dropping the item will not reduce magnificence either), decreasing the likelihood for high tier items to drop from bosses, spawn in shops etc.

Chest Magnificence is also a factor, each high tier chest spawned in a normal chest room will increase Chest Magnificence and reduce the likelihood of more high tier chests spawning in the future. This also effects chests that drop as part of the room drop system and still applies even if you don't open the high tier chest in question. However if you do open the chest in question than Chest Magnificence drops by one point, so you have even more incentive to open such chests so you can you increase the chances of high quality items dropping later. Magnificence rises very rapidly and already reduces the chance of high tier items spawning by more than 95% with only two points of magnificence.

Magnificence does not effect Winchester or his rewards, and Red and Black chests can be forced to spawn regardless with the 7 leaf clover. The Red chest item Spice also subverts the usual mechanics, showing up everywhere with repeated use regardless of magnificence.

Curiously, in spite of magnificence chest quality also tends to increase as the you go through the floors, so by the time you get to the Forge chests tend to be almost exclusively Green. The Lament Configurum will increase Magnificence in spite of being a Green chest item (likely because it can provide the player a lot of higher tier items), while the Heart of Ice and generic Red Chest health upgrades like the Heart Holster will not increase Magnificence.

Like Coolness there is no way to keep track of magnificence in-game.



Curse is better communicated to the player than the above stats but still has a lot of opaqueness in terms of the ways in which it effects the game. I will only give a brief overview here since I want to go into much more detail in the sections dedicated to it and cursed runs.

Curse is gained from a wide variety of ways, primarily item and gun pickups, and its main effect is in creating 'Jammed' enemies, which look like regular enemies but are covered in a red, shadowy aura. Jammed enemies move faster, shoot faster, will do a full heart of damage unlike regular enemies and have up to three times more health. As mentioned, it also depresses the rate at which non-ammo pickups drop from room clears, in opposition to coolness and makes Mimics and fuses more likely to appear. High Curse is dangerous and will call in a powerful, invincible enemy called the Lord of the Jammed if you let it get out of control, but there are certain benefits too, chiefly the fact that enemies drop more money. Through the rest of the guide I will often mentioned cursed runs, which are runs where you start off with the highest curse you can have without calling in the Lord of the Jammed. There is a lot more to talk about in this subject, so skip to the 'Curse' and 'Cursed Runs' segments if you want more details.

As we know by now, each character has certain advantages and disadvantages relative to others, but those quirks can get further accentuated as you shift away from more regular play.

Generally speaking though, there's not a vast amount of variation between the characters, and as you go through the game their differences get more blurred as you pick up items and weapons. The Robot is an exception to this, but we'll get to him.


Marine's sidearm
Supply Drop
Military Training

As well as the above he also has one piece of armor in addition to his starting hearts, which is unique for the default Gungeoneers.

In terms of how he plays regularly the most important aspect of the Marine is his Military Training, this passive reduces reload times and makes him more accurate, which is quite noticeable with his Sidearm which can operate from a longer range than the other default starter guns. It will also help a lot through the rest of the game, especially with slower reloading, inaccurate weapons, as a result he does well with single shot weapons like the Stinger or any shotgun weapon with a wide spread. However it can be slightly detrimental with the Cog of Battle or Rad gun, since it makes the reload window tighter.

Unfortunately, beyond Military Training the Marine is rather dull, his extra armor will not make much difference over the long haul, only providing one extra hit over the course of the game, likewise his supply drop only calls in a single ammo drop and then it expires. It may be useful to sell it if you are in need of money and don't need any extra ammo. His sidearm is quite powerful for the first couple of floors but falls off by the end of floor 2, I would not rely on it personally and I prefer not to have to use it to fight the first floor boss if possible since it makes the fight too protracted.

Overall you don't gain or lose a whole lot by using the Marine, his Military Training gives him a lot of reliability but he has no more risky or ostentatious perks compared to other characters. In cursed runs he doesn't set the world on fire, the sidearm's general lack of damage becomes most notable here since you can spend a lot of time whittling away at jammed enemies, but again his Military training helps you keep your distance and the ammo drop might be slightly handy. Military Training also remains very useful during Blessed and Challenge runs, though Supply drop is nearly worthless in Blessed Runs. His unexceptional starting weapon is not great for Boss Rush, but again Military Training can augment useful guns there too.


Budget Revolver
Sawed-Off
Molotov
Enraging Photo

Where the Marine was safe, but somewhat boring, the Convict puts massive emphasis on risk/reward, her items are designed to put her into situations where she'll be at considerable amounts of risk but also help her unstick herself from those situations. Both of her default weapons are highly inaccurate, which encourages you to get dangerously close to your foes, but the Sawed-off will do a respectable amount of burst damage, enough to instantly kill a bullet-kin in floor one if all pellets connect, while the revolver shoots extremely rapidly, to the point that its DPS is far higher than one might first assume. Her Molotov will set a large area of the floor on fire when thrown, which can deal huge amounts of damage, but also set the player on fire too if they aren't careful, and finally the Enraging photo will give them a massive damage boost if they get hit, doubling player damage for a small amount of time and instantly reloading their weapon.

The Convict is often criticized for having a benefit that only works if you get hit, and allegedly encouraging sloppy play to get the full benefit, but this is unfair. The truth is that the Enraging photo's effect becomes absolutely invaluable in the hardest parts of the game, namely the boss fights against the Lich, Old King and High Dragun. For the first two in particular Master rounds are not a concern, while simply surviving are, and the double damage on getting hit can be absolutely critical for closing out those tough fights as quickly as possible. Effectively the Convict can salvage a significant positive effect from a situation that would only be negative for any other character. This can also be really helpful in the larger, more difficult rooms in Bullet Hell or the Forge where you may get into hairy situations, the damage boost if you get hit will allow you to rapidly remove problematic enemies much faster than other characters would be able to.

Having said that, the photo won't be much benefit for the first three or four floors, its biggest use is closing out boss battles but getting hit in non-secret boss battles locks you out of getting Master Rounds, which is absolutely not worth the benefit of the extra damage. The convict shines brightest at the very end of the game instead of the start.

Her Molotov is also somewhat erratic, it can be very good at killing big groups of enemies quickly but takes a lot of damage to recharge and of course you must be careful not to be set on fire yourself. It can do tremendous amounts of damage to bosses (especially the Kill Pillars when doing their jammed attack since they sit in one place), which may encourage you to save it for them, but a lot of bosses are immune to its effects including the Bullet King, Old King, Blobulord, Gorgun, Wallmonger and High Dragun. There is the option to sell it however, especially if a better active is available.

As stated the Budget Revolver has a surprisingly high DPS, better than most other starting weapons, and as a result can be useful for longer than you might expect, all the way into floor 3, though its poor accuracy offsets this somewhat. In comparison the Sawed-off falls off as a weapon very quickly, without damage upgrades it won't be able to one-shot bullet kin past floor 1 even if all pellets connect, and as such is usually not worth getting close enough to overcome its poor range and accuracy. Its best use after floor 1 is being fed into a gun muncher or sold to a shop creep. Generally, if you don't have any weapons before floor 1's boss it's better to use the Revolver for the DPS, the shotgun forces you to get too close (though it can be useful on Gatling Gull's missile attack).

In cursed runs the convict's advantages become even more meaningful, her DPS is better for killing jammed, as is her Molotov which can inflict even greater amounts of overall damage, while the damage boost from the photo gets even more useful for taking down jammed bosses as quickly as possible (trust me, jammed phase 2 Lich is not a joke and the photo can really help there). In blessed and Challenge runs things mostly remain the same, and she does well in Boss rush since she can fall back on the photo's damage boost if things get difficult.

The Hunter

Rusty Sidearm
Crossbow
Dog

Compared to other characters the Hunter only has one starting item, her dog, as well as her crossbow and rusty sidearm. Despite this she is very flexible and versatile and her equipment makes for a powerful early game. The dog will have a small chance to find extra items when the room is cleared (he'll do a digging animation when he does so make sure you don't leave the room too early if you notice that), this is on top of the normal chances for items to drop after a room is complete so the Hunter can get a significant amount of extra resources compared to other characters over the course of the run. Indeed sometimes both the dog will find an item and an item will be dropped by the normal room clear drop system in one room. Most useful is if the dog unearths a key in an early floor, in floor one this means you can open a chest and go through the Oubliette if you so desire. The Dog can also find blanks, health, armor, money, ammo and, rarely, maps. The trickle of extra stuff remains consistently useful through the whole game.

The Dog will also bark at Mimics, which will quickly identify them for you.

As useful as the dog is, the biggest boon for the Hunter is her starting crossbow, one of the best starting weapons in the game. This is a single shot weapon that will kill a bullet kin in one hit for floors 1 and 2, from any range. It is much more useful, comparatively, than the sawed-off for the convict, which is also a limited ammo weapon, since it works at much longer ranges and is more powerful per hit, though it is single shot and has less ammo. The Crossbow is a very good weapon for use against bosses, probably the second best boss killer of the starting weapons (behind Blasphemy), due to its range and power, and with the right upgrades (ie omega or alpha bullets, Hip Holster) can remain useful through the rest of the game. Without upgrades it falls off by floor 3 since it no longer one-shots default bullet kin. Since the Crossbow is good at killing the first floor boss there is less need for the Hunter to try and find a more powerful weapon in the first floor, and as such she may be able to forgo opening chests if she finds no additional keys and instead go through the Oubliette for extra items there. The Rusty sidearm is respectable but fairly dull, its bullets are slower than other starting weapons but it does comparatively decent damage.

Unfortunately the Hunter is a bit limited in her actual gear, but what she does have is useful, especially early on, and remains worthwhile. In cursed runs the Dog's extra drops help offset the generally lower regular room clear drops (that aren't ammo) and the crossbow has enough damage to deal with early jammed enemies and jammed bosses. Additionally the dog will alert the player to mimics, which are far more numerous in Jammed runs. The Hunter's reliance on the Crossbow makes her considerably less useful in Blessed runs where her only upside is her dog. Challenge runs are mostly the same and the aforementioned usefulness of the crossbow against bosses helps her in the early stages of Boss Rush, though the Dog is of very little use there due to the low amount of rooms.

The Pilot

Rogue Special
Trusty Lockpicks
Hidden Compartment
Disarming Personality

The Pilot is probably the most RNG dependent character in the game, and his quirks and items result in a character that has a very weak start but can build up a lot of momentum as the game goes on. Generally speaking he's built around trying to get more items than the other characters would be capable of and saving up resources like money and keys for later use but has to work around poor starting armament.

First thing's first, the Rogue Special is atrocious, it is weak, slow to fire, highly inaccurate and has the worst DPS of all of the starting weapons. It's enough of a pain killing regular floor one enemies with it that I strongly recommend against facing any boss with it for the sake of your own sanity (it takes forever to kill even the floor 1 bosses with it and it doesn't even have much range so you have to be closer than is comfortable). As such, in the early game your main focus will be getting an actually good weapon, which is where the RNG starts to become apparent.

The most important item the Pilot has are his lockpicks, when used on any lock they have a fifty percent chance to either open it free of charge or break the lock and permanently prevent you from opening it, even if you have a spare key. The early game for the Pilot is thus highly dependent on lots of luck, if you don't find extra keys it may be tempting to use the lockpick on a lower quality chest and save the key, doubly so if you want to go through the Oubliette since you need both floor keys for that. If the lock breaks you'll be ♥♥♥♥ out of luck, but if it succeeds you'll get a nice boost early on of opening a chest without spending a key, which is always lovely. You can't control which chest might have that so-needed weapon however, or what that weapon it is, which is one of the major annoyances with the Pilot since opening a chest to get something like the Lowercase r or Klobbe is excruciatingly painful for him in a way other characters can't imagine. In that case you'll have to buckle down with bad weapons for a while longer, which may prevent you from getting the first floor flawless. Worse, poor use of the lockpick will probably make the chest with the weapon inaccessible which forces you to fight the boss with the Rogue Special. This generally means the Pilot will have a difficult time getting into the secret floor if his luck doesn't work out compared to other characters. Despite these first floor troubles the lockpicks are very useful, they provide an extra option if you have poor key drops that often works out for you. They can also be used on locked doors that often cordon off NPC rooms. They are particularly useful if you get a random chest drop since there often aren't enough keys for other characters to open them.

Disarming personality provides a nice price discount, which helps you save money over the long run and can make otherwise pricey items more enticing. This pays off later as you will end up with more money than other characters, to spend at available vendors, the Blacksmith in particular can carry useful but expensive items that the Pilot might be able to buy. Hidden Compartment also gives you more active item space, so unlike the other characters with active items the Pilot won't be forced to make a choice between over what item to carry if they pop an active from a chest, they can carry both the new active and the lockpick. The extra ammo is small, but useful.

Overall the Pilot simply needs to get over the initial hump at which point his greater savings and space starts to add up, usually he'll end the game with more items than other characters as a result. However he is uniquely bad in the initial stages of a cursed run, where all of his downsides are accentuated, especially his poor weaponry when fighting Jammed opponents. Additionally he gets less benefits from cursed runs compared to other characters, Disarming personality is less useful due the fact that Cursed runs give far more money than regular runs, to the point that you'll likely not even need the extra savings. Additionally the amount of mimics reduce the pressure on keys and need for the lockpicks, though on the other hand the massive amounts of chests with fuses can prompt you to lockpick them to cut your losses since they'll just blow up anyway. by comparision in blessed runs not being tied down to the Rogue Special is very advantageous, his other upsides remain useful. In boss Rush, only Hidden Compartment has any use and the Rogue Special still sucks.

The Bullet

Blasphemy
Live Ammo



The Bullet is unlocked by finding Red Caped bullet kin after defeating at least one past. If you see such a bullet kin don't hurt it and wait until it vanishes(they will not attack you), after you do this five times the Bullet will be unlocked. The Hunter's dog will bark if such Bullet kin are present in the current room, so the Hunter can be good for unlocking the Bullet.

The Bullet has by far the best defensive capabilities of any Gungeoneer, especially for more experienced players who are generally good at avoiding damage. His play style revolves around his starting Sword, Blasphemy, which is probably the very best starting weapon for any character. Blasphemy has the ability to destroy bullets with every swing, in the area where the swing would damage enemies bullets are eliminated. Additionally if you double tap the reload button all bullets nearby will be destroyed for a short period, this is more powerful than the standard sword swing for removing bullets and is a useful panic option if you feel as though you are being overwhelmed but don't want to use a blank, but it only works if you have full health.

Blasphemy will damage enemies within the sword swipe, but in addition to that so long as you have full health it will also shoot a projectile straight ahead (the sword has infinite ammo). This is important in the early game since it gives the bullet good long range capabilities, but you must ensure your health is topped off to maintain this, luckily the aforementioned defensive upsides of the sword help a lot in this regard. Additionally Armor is very useful for the bullet because you will only lose the projectile if you take red heart damage, so armor can provide some extra insurance if you get hit. If you are close enough to enemies both the sword's swipe and the projectile fired at full health will stack together, doing significant amount of extra damage to enemies. This can be somewhat risky since losing health will make the Bullet much less powerful, especially before they find another gun without full health the Bullet will only be able to fight at very close range and will be hamstrung in his defensive capabilities. Fighting bosses in particular is extremely difficult without the projectile since you'll need to be so close you'll likely get hit much more and further lose the Master Round, but with projectiles the sword is very effective at putting down early bosses. As a result getting hit early on can put the Bullet in a harsh death spiral he'll have trouble getting out of unless you can quickly replenish your health, but so long as long as you exploit your powerful defense and good offense you'll have a very good time with the Bullet, to the point that he's probably the easiest of all the characters for more experienced players.

As well as Blasphemy the Bullet also has Live ammo, which vastly increases dodge roll damage and provide immunity to contact damage, further reinforcing his defensive advantages. In floor one dodge rolling into a bullet kin will instantly kill them, but overall its too risky to use dodge rolling as an actual method for killing enemies since you have to get dangerously close. Having said that the lack of contact damage makes Live Ammo very useful against enemies that can only do contact damage, like Blobulons, Spents and Tazies, who will be only able to feebly bounce you around, when fighting these it might be better to just roll into them until they die rather than wasting ammo against them. If you find a particular item called Armor of Thorns your roll damage will be further augmented, combined with Live Ammo it gets to the point that you can kill a full health gun nut by rolling into them! Wow!

Overall the Bullet's upsides are massive, giving him unparalleled defense, so long as your health is maxed Blasphemy will remain useful all the way through to Bullet Hell, especially with damage upgrades, and with a bit of skill he'll quickly seem like the easiest character in the game to play. In cursed runs he is very, very powerful, the lack of contact damage helps even more against cursed Rubber Bullets or Blobulons, who otherwise can be very annoying but against the Bullet can't do anything. The defensive and offensive capabilities of blasphemy will be even more pronounced against enemies that have triple health and do double damage, but because getting hit can be so much worse the death spiral if you do get hit, especially early on, will also be worse, and can be unrecoverable in a cursed run. In Blessed Runs the Bullet's dependence on Blasphemy puts him at a distinct disadvantage, though Live ammo is still useful. The Bullet is probably the very best character to use in a challenge run because his advantages can nullify several difficult modifiers, especially Blobulin rancher (since they do no damage), Hammer Time, Shockwave, Pot shots and Final attack (since you can destroy the extra bullets that are created, especially with the reload). Blasphemy is also a powerful weapon to use in Boss Rush, just make sure you don't get hit.

Robot's Right Hand
Battery Bullets
Coolant Leak

In addition to the above the robot does not start with any red hearts, instead he starts with 6 pieces of armor, and, uniquely, cannot acquire any red hearts by any means at all, the only way he can get more health is through finding extra armor, though master rounds will give him one piece of armor each.

To unlock the Robot the player must find the Busted Television and bring it to the Blacksmith in floor 5. The Television can be found in the elevator shaft of floor 2 after the shortcut for that floor has been unlocked, it will occupy the active item slot and can be thrown whichever direction you are facing by pressing the active item button, it will also be dropped every time you dodge-roll and can fall pits and no longer be obtainable for the rest of the run. As a result it can be very frustrating trying to bring the TV to the blacksmith, some rooms have heavy platforming requirements which means you'll have to carefully throw it over pits. Make sure you don't forget it when you've finished clearing a room where you have had to dodge roll a lot. A flying item, such as Wax Wings or the Jetpack, can help immensely since you won't have to worry about rolling over obstacles and pits so much. Bring it to the Blacksmith and the Robot will be permanently unlocked.

Where the Bullet was probably the easiest character to use in the game the Robot is by far the hardest, he cannot make use of red hearts like all of the other characters can and must rely on armor instead. This makes him extremely brittle, armor is much rarer than hearts and as a result the robot will have a lot less health overall than other characters. As such it is absolutely imperative to make sure your dodging and evasion abilities are on point with the Robot, more so than with any other character. Because health is useless to him the following items have absolutely no effect for him and are useless as a result or have their upsides reduced:

• The Blood Brooch (heals the player after 1200 damage is dealt)

• Medkit (heals 4 hearts)

• Every health upgrade (ie Heart Locket, monster blood, Pink Guon stone, Orange)

• Meatbun (heals 1 heart, though the extra damage is still very useful)

• Ration (heals two hearts)

• Bottle (holds extra health and ammo)

• Heart Synthesizer (more heart drops)

• Magic Sweet/Riddle of Lead (extra health, but lots of other upsides)

• Ring of Chest Vampirism (chance to heal on destroying chests)

• Old Knight's Flask (can heal the player one heart twice per floor)

• Heart of Ice (extra health, but also more coolness and damage when hit)

• Gun Soul (extra health, but revive still applies)

• Yellow Chamber (two extra heart containers, but charming enemies still useful)

• Green Guon Stone (chance to heal upon taking damage)

• Antibody (chance to heal for more when you pick up health)

• Super Meat Gun (extra heart container, but still a powerful weapon)

• Blasphemy (because the robot has no hearts the projectile can never be fired)

Additionally the Peace shrine has no benefit, the Angel shrine can't be used and the Dice shrine's heal abilities are useless, though the downside where heart containers are removed will also do nothing. On the other hand, because of his reliance on armor certain items have outsized usefulness for the Robot compared to other characters, these include:

• All Gunknight armor pieces, ie Gunknight Helmet (provide one piece of extra armor per floor, stacks with other Gunknight pieces)

• Armor Synthesizer (more armor drops)

• Spice (adds hearts initially but takes them away starting fourth use, this has no effect on Robot so he can keep using it for the damage and curse)

• Nanomachines (gives two pieces of armor on pickup, gives an extra piece or armor after every fourth hit)

• Bionic Leg/Armor of Thorns (both grant an extra piece of armor on pickup)

• Old Knights Helm/Shield (both grant two pieces of armor on pickup)

• Full Metal Jacket (activates blanks when hit, effectively substituting blanks for armor, very useful with items that increase blanks like Ammolets)

• Pig (revives the player with 6 armor on death)

• Clone (restarts the entire game from floor 1 with all items you have picked up and 6 armor upon death)

• All Master Rounds (gives one piece or armor each)

Additionally the Ser Junkan shrine can be useful since it will give one piece or armor for each piece of Junk you give it, while the dice shrine has a chance to give you a lot of extra armor.

When playing the Robot it is very important to keep in mind the above qualities of each item and how they do or do not effect the Robot so you don't waste money on worthless health upgrades or so you can see how useful something like a piece of gunknight armor is for him. Because health is at such a premium for the robot any defense upgrade is useful too him, for example invincibility actives like the potion or lead skin, Dodge-roll upgrades like the Cloranthy Ring or Guon stones (the Glass Guon shrine is a good find). If it comes to it you may consider buying armor at the shop, but this is expensive and will reduce the amount of money you can spend on keys and items.

With all of these difficulties regarding the robot its tempting to ask why ever play him? Well he actually has some very powerful upsides to offset his intrinsic brittleness. First of all his default weapon is very, very good, Robot's right hand has the highest clip size and DPS of all of the starting weapons, and lets him easily handle early enemies and bosses. It remains useful through to around the fourth floor which is a major boon. Additionally he also has Battery Bullets, which raises his accuracy by 50% and causes water to get electrified if his bullets pass over it, damaging enemies standing in the water(robot is immune to electricity). Although it has no effect on flying enemies like Bookllets this can apply a lot of extra damage to enemies standing in water, and synergizes very well with the Robot's Coolant leak, an active that spreads water over an area you are facing, all of this means the Robot has probably the best ability of all of the characters to apply heavy, consistent damage in the early game without running the same risks the Convict has to. The Coolant leak can also put out fires or override poison, most usefully this lets you put out the fireplace in floor one to get access to the Oubliette grate without the water barrel (which often get accidentally destroyed), and it even lets you put out fuses attached to chests, preventing them from blowing up without using a key. Any water weapon is very useful with the Robot, especially the Mega Douser which will create huge electric pools to tear through groups of enemies.

The Robot is hard to use normally, but his upsides actually get much more pronounced in Cursed runs, to the greatest extent of all the characters. He does not take extra damage from jammed enemies who can only do one point of armor damage, his weapons and electricity can apply a lot of much needed damage to jammed enemies, his coolant can put fuses and the extra money makes it easier to buy more armor in shops. In many ways he's more powerful in a cursed run than normal. His brittleness is a poor fit for challenge runs though, where there are more ways to get hit, but his good offense is not bad in Boss Rush and Blessed Runs. Overall he is very skill dependent, but rewarding.

Understanding shops and how to get the best use out of them will be terrifically helpful over the course of the game. There will always be one shop in each floor, except for Bullet Hell which will never have a shop. Sometimes extra merchants can spawn in or out of the main shop, they often carry the best items you will be able to get from shops and are worth investigating.

Bello

Bello is the default shopkeeper who will appear on every floor between floor 1 and 4. His shop mostly carries basic resources, chiefly pickups like health, this is important to keep in mind, you usually won't find a whole lot of unique items and guns in the shop and its main use is keeping stocked up on the basics. I would recommend against buying Health, Blanks and Armor in normal runs, generally speaking it is better to save money for good items and weapons if they are available and resorting to buying health is a bit of crutch, as you get better you'll find that you won't need to buy extra stuff just to keep you alive and will be able to operate with whatever the boss or floor drops naturally.

The shop will always have at least three generic pickups on the left side, Armor, Keys, Health etc. On the right side it will have more variety, including guns and items. but it can just be more pickups too that you won't need. Finally there's often a table that will sell Blanks, Glass Guon Stones and Maps. Personally I don't think its a good idea to spend money on this stuff either, its just not worth it and you can use the money later. If you have bad luck the shop might only have the three left side pickups that you may not need, but generally speaking its worthwhile to examine the shop.

The highest priority item that should be bought in Bello's shop are keys. Keys are generally rare drops from finishing a room or killing a boss (though sometimes you get lucky) and are critical for opening chests and getting those weapons and items you need to keep moving along. The way keys in the shop work is kind of strange, if you enter a floor and do not pick up a key before reaching the shop then the shop is absolutely guaranteed to have at least one key available for sale. This touches on what I talked about earlier in the planning section, you generally want to maximize the amount of keys you get, especially early on, so you can always open chests, so if a key drops in a room before you find the shop it's generally better to find the shop first so you can buy the guaranteed key there and then go back and grab the key that dropped to get the most keys. If you do pick up a key that drops it doesn't prevent a key from spawning in the shop, but it does mean it will no longer be guaranteed to spawn, which can often catch you out and reduce the number of keys you get. However if you have a glut of keys you don't think you'll need it might be better to pick up a key drop so you can reduce the chances of it spawning in the shop and hopefully replace it with something else. Sometimes the shop will have multiple keys to buy. Generally, you will always find enough money over the course of a floor to buy at least one key from a shop, even if you come into the floor with nothing, just make sure you don't get hit, especially from 'Knight' enemies like the Gun Nut or Lead Maiden.

The shop will only sell items and weapons up to green tier quality (and also the Heart of Ice, which can be found in Red and Black chests), they will also be more expensive as tier increases, and prices increase slightly as you go from floor to floor. The Pilot has the best ability to make use of shops, due to his discount, but overall he'll also usually want to hold off on buying stuff till later.

In cursed runs shops become much more useful, the player will have a lot more money and can consider spending some on health or ammo more easily (since you will likely be going through both a lot more), as well as weapons and items earlier, just watch for curse! In Blessed runs never ever buy a gun, from any shop, it will just vanish after a while, put that money into items instead. In challenge mode using the shop is basically the same as normal.

Another option is to steal from the shop, this can bypass spending money if you don't have any or want to save it for later, but carries some risks. Stealing an item will always increase curse by 1 (in addition to any curse the item itself may have), the first time you steal from the main shop it will always succeed, but afterwards the chance to succeed will rapidly get progressively lower and if it fails you won't get the item and the Shopkeeper will eliminate all of the items in the shop and disappear for the rest of the run. However this only applies to Bello when you are trying to steal from, other ones will still work normally. As such you may want to consider trying to steal items from the floor 4 shop since if you fail you will have minimum loss (the blacksmith will still be there in floor 5), or non-Bello shops since they won't remember you if you fail. Do not steal in a cursed run, especially from Bello, I can't think of any item which is worth having the Lord of the Jammed hunt you down.

The list of items that you can use to steal can be found can be found here.[enterthegungeon.gamepedia.com]

Bello's shop often also has extra features, such as other Vendors, Gun Munchers and the Sell Creep, but we'll talk about them in the next section. The latter two will still operate if you anger Bello.

Speaking of which, do not try and attack Bello, he is invincible and will absolutely murder you, it will also prevent you from buying more items. If you shoot within his shop he will first give you a warning, if you keep at it he'll double his prices and if you still don't get the hint he'll pull a gun on you and prevent you from buying anything else, his shop will be empty in later floors. Keep that in mind when looking for secret rooms.



The Blacksmith is a unique shopkeeper found in the forge. You may remember her as the girl who you bring the parts of the bullet that can kill the past too so you can access the pasts as well as bullet hell, she'll also unlock the Robot if you bring her the TV and activate the quest to bring back Ox's arm to unlock the Clone. Generally you are saving your money for her, because she consistently has powerful but expensive items that can give you a much needed late game boost before facing the Dragun and then Bullet Hell.

Her shop will always have 6 items, a combination of guns, items and pickups. There will always be three pickups on the left side and three guns and items on the right side of her room, some of which will go up to Red and Black tier, so there is a reliability to her that Bello does not have, which is why she is such a useful vendor in comparison. From my experience, she seems to have a somewhat limited inventory, but what she does have is often very useful, in particular she has a lot of bullet and damage upgrades (ie +1 Bullets, Alpha Bullets, Rocket-Powered Bullets) which are a real help, as well as a selection of guns. There's not much more to say about her, generally by the time you get to her you won't need pickups like keys but you might need health, and since she is the last vendor before Bullet Hell you lose nothing by spending all of your remaining money on her if you can. Still, make sure you search the floor for other vendors to see if they have something better first. You'll of course be able to buy even more stuff in Cursed runs, but again there's no point buying guns from her in Blessed runs and Challenge runs will basically remain the same.

Unlike Bello the Blacksmith does not seem to care if you fire at her, though she will notice if you steal with similar results.

In addition to Bello and the Blacksmith there are a variety of other vendors present in the game. They all have unique item pools that follow a certain theme, and can carry some of the most useful items in the game. They will typically be your best sources of particular Black tier items and weapons. Generally they do not sell pickups, with a few exceptions. None of these vendors will react with anything other than harsh words if you shoot at them or in their shops, but if they catch you stealing they'll stop you buying anything else!

Professor Goopton

Professor Goopton is everyone's favorite, funny, Futurama-speaking octopus alien thing. He mostly sells gloop or biological related weapons and items, often laying down lots of liquid upon use. Look here[enterthegungeon.gamepedia.com] to see what he has on offer. He isn't the most powerful vendor, but he sometimes has good stuff and he sells at a small discount, his best items in my view are the Compressed Air tank, Membrane, Strafe gun, Duct tape(by far the best source for this) and Gundromeda Strain. The robot can also get the Mega Douser from him. He also operates a shop in the Breach to unlock items for hegemony credits.



This short sighted but helpful old bullet kin mostly deals with blanks and blank related items, as well as other ways of destroying bullets. In some situations what he sells can be by far the most useful stuff to have, but the difficulty is that they need to work in combination to get the full effect. As a result you may need to buy multiple extremely expensive items to get the full effect, an example is the Owl/Gold Ammolet combo, this is insanely powerful and causes the owl to basically kill everything in the room (and even adjacent rooms!) at random intervals every now and again. But both items are very expensive to buy. As a result cursed runs can really help you get the money you need if you encounter this guy, as can simply stealing. Even without the possibility of such combos he is a very useful vendor, ammolets are just generally useful, his full inventory can be found here [enterthegungeon.gamepedia.com]and in my view some of the best Items he carries are the Relodestone, Gold Ammolet, Owl, Elder Blank, Table Tech Blanks, Full Metal Jacket and Chaos Ammolet. He also sometimes sells regular blanks and armor, and his items remain very useful through almost any kind of run, especially cursed runs.




Flynt, he's a lock, Flynt-lock, geddit? Ha! (it took me way too long before I noticed that joke, urgh). Flynt sells key and chest related items, but uniquely he doesn't sell them for money, instead you have to pay for them with keys. The player pays 1, 2 or 3 keys per item depending on its quality, but they can also steal them if possible and save on the keys. This is an interesting mechanic, it effectively gives you an option to bypass the unknowningness of opening a chest and instead spend some keys on exactly what you can see before you. His biggest potential use is in buying one of the items that nullifies most of the locks in the game, namely the Shelleton Key, AKEY-47 and Mimic Tooth Necklace, they quickly pay for the cost of the keys spent. Like Old Red some of the stuff he sells can synergise very well with each other, for example the Ring of Chest Vampirism and Mimic Tooth Necklace or Ring of Chest Friendship and AKEY-47. If you find him early and can afford the right items it can pay off hugely over the long haul, AKEY-47 and the Shelleton Key are practically run-winners that mean every chest can be opened and you'll never have to buy another key, saving a huge amount of money for powerful items instead. Some of his most useful items are locked (lol) out by curse in Cursed runs though, and in Blessed mode the AKEY won't last long. Again, challenge mode doesn't change things much. His inventory is here [enterthegungeon.gamepedia.com]and in my view the best items he sells are AKEY-47, the Shelleton Key, the Bracket Key and the Mimic Tooth Necklace.

Cursula

Cursula sells items that might best be descibed as, er, 'Happy' but at a heavy cost. Every item she sells comes with 2.5 points of additional curse, and she also sells a lot of regularly cursed items like Casey which can add up very rapidly. However, she also sells her items at a steep discount which makes them all the more enticing. Be careful when buying from Cursula, while cheap, if you go too far you might end up with more curse than is manageable, and maybe even call in the Lord of the Jammed. Still, she has some good stuff, though I think her inventory is overall the weakest of the shopkeepers, but her 50% discount can help a lot. She sells a lot of normally cursed items, items that cause charm (IE Charmed bow) and health upgrades, and also blanks (with all that curse it's a comically bad idea to buy blanks from her). Interestingly, it is always better to steal an item from her than to buy it, not only do you get it for free, but the curse you gain from stealing (1 point) is actually a lot lower than the 2.5 points of curse you get from simply buying it from her! Overall there aren't great items or synergies with her, except maybe for Cursed Bullets which increase your attack with your curse, and 6th Chamber which increases your coolness with curse. In Cursed runs you should never, ever buy from her, none of her stuff is worth the Lord of the Jammed running after you, and there isn't much to say about Blessed and challenge runs outside of the usual. Her inventory is here [enterthegungeon.gamepedia.com]and I would say her best things are the Shotgun Full of Love, Cursed Bullets, Sixth Chamber, Bracket Key and Wax Wings.

Trorc

The Trorc is a very straightforward merchant, but very good. He mostly sells military hardware that's, fittingly, simple but very effective. Some of the most powerful weapons in the game are available from him, as are some useful offensive upgrades. He is the only merchant listed on this page who does not show up in either the Black Market or in the regular shop, but he also sells item unlocks in the Breach for Hegemony credits. His inventory is mostly non-cursed, and expensive, so he's a major help in Cursed runs, but because so much of the stuff he sells are weapons he's much more limited in a Blessed run. As always challenge mode is mostly the same. His inventory is here[enterthegungeon.gamepedia.com], and the best items he sells, in my opinion, are the M16, RC Rocket, Com4nd0, Double Vision, Full Metal Jacket, Mourning Star and A.W.P.

The Sell Creep has a roughly one in four chance of showing up in any regular shop, and is the only way to sell items in the game. He will give a little under half the buying price of any item given to him, so he will pay a lot more for higher quality items than lower. For Junk he will always only give three shells, which may be enough to allow you to buy something else. He is useful for offloading poor weapons and items if you need the money for other things, I recommend that the Convict sell her Sawed-off if you need the money (and possibly her molotov) and that the marine sell his supply drop. The robot can also drop off useless health related items like Heart Lockets for more money. if you have an active item and no more available slots for another, it is often a good idea to go to the shop and see if the Creep is there before opening chests or fighting a boss. If he is you can use him to sell whichever active item you don't want if you find another and at least get some money back from it. This requires you to be quick since you need to teleport to and from the boss room/chest room and the shop before the Rat steals one of the items. Remember you can also drop passive items by opening up your map and choosing which one to drop. Selling cursed items to the Creep is also a good way to control you curse levels and get something back. Remember he will not take certain items, for whatever reason, including the Trusty Lockpicks and Bloodied Scarf.



Quite different from the other Merchants, Winchester will instead take money for a chance to play his shooting gallery game, and win-a-chest... er. In this game you must hit four creepy looking targets that resemble his face in a play area over a pit. The gun you're given is dead accurate with a laser sight, and it's bullets can bounce several times, but you only get four bullets and each bullet is destroyed when it hits a target so your aim must be very good. Some targets will require you to bounce the bullets around obstacles in order to reach them. There are three types of blocks that line the stage, blue block will just cause your bullets to bounce normally, green blocks will be destroyed when hit once and can open the way for other shots and red blocks will immediately destroy any bullets that hit it. If you hit at least one target with allotted bullets you will be given an unlocked, non-mimic (even if you have the mimic tooth necklace) chest, and the chest's quality will be determined by how many targets you hit, 1 target will give a brown or blue chest, 2 will offer a blue or green, 3 will be green or red and all 4 will create a red or black chest. If you get good at it Winchester's game can be the most reliable source of Red and Black chests in the game.

normally you can't walk out into the play area, or you'll take fall damage and spawn back where you start, and you can't use other weapons than what Winchester gave you or you'll immediately fail. But bullet upgrades and flight items can be used to cheese the game, for example the Hip Holster and Scattershot upgrades will double and triple the amounts of bullets per shot, vastly increasing the chance that you'll hit something, while Bouncy and Angry Bullets will cause them to bounce much more to similar effect. Finally Wax Wings and the Jetpack can let you fly close to the targets and trivialize the challenge, Winchester won't care and will still pay out regardless. Discounts apply to Winchester's game, but like other shops it gets more expensive to play as you get further, it costs roughly 30 shells at the start and in my opinion is always worth playing, especially as you get better since the money you spend on it is very good value for at least a green chest, not to mention red and black.

Acing (hitting all four targets) Winchester's game three times will unlock the extremely powerful Seven Leaf Clover, which forces all chests to be Red and Black tier.

The Black Market

Rarely (probably once every 10 runs) you will encounter this funny looking demon's face in non-secret floors between floor 2 and 5. This leads to the Black Market, but you cannot enter the Maw without either 100 shells or at least 1 point of curse. If you enter without these requirements the Maw will damage and eject you, but if you do have them you will teleported to the BM outside the main map. Here Professor Goopton, Old Red, Cursula and Flynt will be all selling their wares in the main room, while Winchester will have a game room in a neighboring area. All of the merchants, except for Flynt but including Winchester, will be selling their goods at half-price, so this is a tremendous opportunity to grab some of the more powerful items, or even steal them. You can teleport back to the Market at any time while still in the floor.

If you shoot the Face with a water weapon like the Siren it will be destroyed and you won't be able to go the Market, but it will leave behind a high tier Gun or item.

Resourceful Rat

The rat probably doesn't really count as a shopkeeper, but what the heck. In a small amount of atonement for stealing all the stuff you leave on the floor the Rat will appear at the start of floors 3, 4, and 5 at the start of the run if you use the elevators to theses floors. Here he will offer the player free weapons,1 in floor 3, 2 in floor 4 and 3 in floor 5. They are typically Blue tier chest guns for floor 3 and Green tier for the other two floors that will give the player a little leg up since they otherwise only have their starting equipment. Interestingly you can steal some of the guns from the rat with the usual effects, and every time you complete the floor and its boss the guns available at the start of the shortcut will change.

An assortment of non-shop related NPCs populate the game world that can be very helpful, lets see what they have to offer here.

Gunsling King and Manservantes

This duo of an arrogant, classist and likely inbred revolver-rolling-royal and his stalwart, long-suffering servant will offer you bets to complete a room with certain restrictions, these are:

• Finish a room without dodge-rolling.

• Finish a room without taking damage.

• Finish a room using only the provided weapon (either the Klobbe, Derringer, Peashooter, Nail Gun or Casey).

To activate their challenge you will need to pay the king a small amount of money, roughly 15-20 casings, and if you win the challenge you will get both the money and a random item back. If you see the Gunsling king (he is denoted by a crown icon on the map) I highly recommend taking up his challenge, the dodge-roll and weapon restriction challenges are typically quite easy and you shouldn't have much difficulty in winning the room damage challenge in most rooms in the game. If you are having trouble, make sure you're using your best weapons, active items and blanks, its far more worth it to win the challenge than worry about wasting those items.

The Gunsling king does not appear to draw from any particular item pool for his prizes, which means anything goes. At times I've gotten the most powerful items in the whole game from him, including Gunther, so it really is worth it.

In cursed runs they can sometimes cause trouble, not only because the rooms are intrinsically tougher, but also because they put the item you win directly in your inventory so if it has curse you won't be able to refuse it. You can drop the item and return to a lower level of curse, but the Lord of the Jammed will definitely spawn regardless and you can only lose him by going down to the next floor. In challenge and blessed runs the King operates pretty much the same, but the no damage challenge can be a lot more difficult with certain Challenge run modifiers.

The Lost Adventurer

Probably the most useful NPC to encounter in the game, this suspiciously familiar looking hero will ask you map out the entire floor for him and return. Effectively you just have to play the game as you always play (and like I said you should always be completing every room on a floor to maximize money and drops) and he'll give you an item for it. You don't need to fight the boss for the map to be considered complete, he will still give you the reward from looking at all the other rooms. If you have a map before actually searching the whole floor, either from a floor map, the effect of the Cartographer's Ring or from the Gungeon Blueprint he will give you your reward for that too. Secret rooms are not a consideration. Like the Gunsling King he seems to reward you from the entire game inventory, and similarly I've gotten ludicrously powerful items from him (including the Clone), however also like the King he will put the item right into your inventory which can be problematic in cursed runs if its cursed. The Adventurer is often locked behind a door, or parts of the map you need to explore like the shop can be locked, in my view you should always use a key to get to him or finish the map since the reward is effectively the cost of opening any chest but has the chance of being a black or red chest item. Don't shoot at him before talking to him to him or he won't offer his quest.


This pair of questionably accredited physicians will fully heal the player for all heart damage incurred one time in the floor you meet them. In earlier floors, especially as you improve and get hit less, they won't be terribly useful, but as you get further and health becomes more of an issue they can be quite a relief to find. They are especially useful for the Bullet, if he has taken significant damage it can be a hopeless task trying to get back to full so you can use your sword again, but Patches and Mendy will immediately sort him out. Conversely, they are pretty useless for the robot, though they do give him a piece of junk (tiny damage upgrade), a piece of armor or the Bottle active item. It's probably better to go through the whole floor before using them if you aren't in a desperate situation, since they will heal you up for any extra damage at the very end and you'll get the most out of them. They are also exceptionally useful in cursed runs since you will likely take much more damage their, and will also help survivability in Challenge runs in particular as well as Blessed runs to a lesser extent.



Brother Albern is the first NPC that will only appear in secret rooms, and the most common one to find in them too. He will always be present in one secret room in the Abbey of the True Gun secret floor, most commonly coming off of a chest room, but can rarely show up in other secret rooms in other floors. When approached he will ask the player various nonsensical questions and state that he will only open the chest for the right or truthful answer. Despite that, there are no wrong answers to anything he asks and he will always open the chest no matter what you say. The contents of the chest vary dramatically, it can contain anything from health, to blanks, guns, armor, money and items, sometimes there will be multiple items in the chest and they can be surprisingly high level (ie, yesterday I found a sniper rifle and an armor synthesizer) other times there will be nothing but half a heart. Despite this its generally worth seeking him out if you are in Abbey, no matter what kind of run, it's only the cost of one blank after all. If you shoot the chest and destroy it an item called 'Lies' will be left behind that's basically identical to junk.

Old Man

Again the Old Man only turns up in secret rooms, and is extremely rare (though I've noticed he seems more common in the Oubliette in Secret rooms attached to rooms with enemies). Very useful, he will give you a random item in the same manner as the Gunsling King and Lost Adventurer with no strings attached at all, unless you are playing in coop. Usual problems apply during cursed runs since he puts the item in your inventory.

The last secret room only NPCs, these witches are similarly rare as the Old Man and will take any gun you give them, dunk it in their pot, and give back a different gun with the same or higher quality and extra curse. As you might imagine you ought to steer clear of these ladies during a cursed run, it's likely just not worth it. Otherwise they can help you trade out weapons that aren't very useful for something that might be better.

Shrines are scattered around the Gungeon and tend to have specific benefits associated with them along with some sort of cost if you interact with them. Individual shrines can dramatically change in usefulness depending on how you are playing the game, i.e. what character you are or what game mode you are in. Like NPCs they sometimes show up in secret rooms or behind locked doors, but unlike them they have no reaction if you shoot them. You can tell if a room is going to be a shrine room if there is a green light beside the path leading towards it. Most shrines can only be used once, but there are a number of exceptions that I will specifically mention. I will list the individual shrines, their effects and some gameplay notes in alphabetical order:

Ammo Shrine

The Ammo Shrine will completely refill the ammo in all of your guns to max in exchange for slapping you with a 3.5 increase in curse (refer to the curse section for more information on that little present). This shrine varies dramatically in usefulness overall, obviously you want to wait until you have your weapons at the lowest amount of ammo possible before using it, as such if you find one but still have plenty of ammo left you might want to run through the rest of the floor before using it, though maybe use it before the boss to put you into a good ammo position with your best weapons. RNG around ammo drops can make it either comparatively useless or an absolute lifesaver, but overall as you get better at the game and are better able to manage your ammo economy it will probably be less useful than it seemed at the start. The curse is a major consideration, if you have zero or a small amount of curse to start with it probably won't be much of an issue, you may even enjoy getting some tougher enemies and a bit more money, but if you have a lot of curse built up beforehand it can make things very difficult. If you find it on either a Cursed or Blessed run it's and absolute no go, in cursed runs it will absolutely send you over the edge to get chased down by Lord of the Jammed which is simply not worth the ammo, while in Blessed runs the ammo refill is meangingless since your weapon will just change anyway, effectively increasing your curse for no upside.

Angel Shrine

The Angel Shrine will permanently reduce your health by one full heart and increase your curse by 1.5 in exchange for a flat 25% increase in your damage using any weapon. Personally I find this trade-off extremely tempting, damage increases are very valuable in this game and this is a good source for that, it's also worth keeping in mind that it's in line with other items that significantly increase damage since they usually also have some kind of downside or similar catch associated with them (ie Heavy Bullets decrease bullet speed, Eyepatch makes you much less accurate, Gilded bullets requires you to not spend money to get the most out of them etc). Still the hit to health is quite harsh, but if you can consistently get Master Rounds in the first three or so chambers then it should be worth it overall, otherwise you should probably leave it. Compared to other shrines the curse is fairly negligible unless you're already packed to the gills with curse, though again this shrine won't be an option during cursed runs if you don't want the Lord of the Jammed tagging along to keep you company.

Unfortunately, because he has no hearts the Robot cannot avail of this shrine at all, if he interacts with it there won't be any option to do anything.

Blank Shrine

Unlike the other shrines you don't directly interact with this shrine to get it's effect. The shrine has a 9 in 10 chance to drop a chest if you fire off a blank in the same room as the shrine, it's also reusable, though each blank fired after the first chest reduces the chance for another chest to spawn by 45% until there is only a 1 in 4 chance for a chest to drop, the chests can also be mimics so be wary! If you find this chest on a floor it's the best incentive to hold onto the your blanks as much as possible, even in boss fights (though don't get so fixated you get hit and lose the Master Round). If I find this shrine I prefer to blast off all of my spare blanks here rather than look for secret rooms with them since it's overall more reliable, most of the chests will be unlocked brown chests and if you have some keys to spare blue and green chests can still be good. I've never seen a Red or Black chest drop from this shrine though that could just be a lack of luck on my part. In cursed runs keep in mind the amount of extra mimics you'll probably get from this process.

Challenge Shrine

The challenge shrine will throw you against three waves of tough enemies after interacting with it and drop an unlocked chest after you've defeated them all. The chest will always be better than brown but can be a mimic. The waves are usually the hardest that you'll find on a floor, for example there is at least one that will have two Lead Maidens which is otherwise unheard of. Still, as you get better at the game you shouldn't have much difficulty killing the enemies, you might even get more money out of it than otherwise(especially with high curse, though of course the fight will be harder). Even if you do get hit a couple of times I think it's worth it in almost any situation to use this shrine so that you can get that chest, unless perhaps you are literally one hit away from death.

Cleansing Shrine

One of the rarer shrines in my experience, I don't believe these spawn at all if you have no curse and even with lots of curse you don't see them very much. In exchange for a payment of 5 casings per level of curse you have this shrine will reset your overall curse back down to zero. Unfortunately it's an all or nothing prospect, you can't decide to just reduce your curse by 1 or 2 and pay less, you have to reduce it down to zero and pay the most amount possible to get rid of the most curse possible which can be a problem if you only want to reduce it a little or don't have enough money to pay for the full treatment. This is one of the only two ways to decrease curse in the whole game without dropping a cursed item (the other being the next shrine incidentally) so it can be useful if you find it to prevent your curse from getting out of control, if you find it on a cursed run you can reset things back to normal and avail of curse-increasing options like buying or stealing certain items while also getting the extra money from the run up till that point. I usually avoid this shrine since I like lots of curse unless I'm lucky enough to find it while I know there is a valuable item on the floor that will require me to take on curse, like the Skeleton Key, while I'm in the middle of a curse run. For newer players using the shrine if you've let your curse get a bit too high can provide a very nice breather and decrease the difficulty a lot. Look at the section on curse to find out a bit more about that.

The Cleansing Shrine is also the only thing in the game that will directly inform you of your level of curse, based on what the description says before activating it, this breaks down as follows:

• 0-2 Curse: The spectres don't disturb you.
  
  
• 3-4 Curse: You are touched by Darkness.
  
  
• 5-6 Curse: You are Wreathed in Darkness.
  
  
• 7-9 Curse: Tarry not. they come for you.
  
  
• 10+ Curse: No one can help you.

As the last point suggests the shrine also will not work at all if you are at ten or above curse, watch out!

Dice Shrine

Probably the most complicated shrine of them all, this shrine will give the player a random benefit along with a random downside if you use it. The Benefits are as follow:

• Cleansed: Removes a random amount of curse
  
• Bolstered: give the player 1 or 2 permanent health upgrades
  
• Gift: Spawns a chest (can be a mimic)
  
• Renewed: restores a random amount of missing heath
  
• Paid: Receive between 20 to 99 casings
  
• Hasted: Movement Speed increased
  
• Shielded: Receive 1 to 3 pieces of armor
  
• Blanked: Receive 1 to 10 blanks
  
• Reloaded: Ammo capacity increased to 125% or all ammo refilled on all guns

The Negative effects are as follow:

• Limited: Reduces Ammo capacity on all guns by 30%
  
• Cursed: Increases curse by 5
  
• Unsteady: Increases reload time
  
• Disarmed: Steals the weapon you are currently holding
  
• Robbed: Steals 25-100% of the casings you have
  
• Pained: Damages the player for 1 to 2 hearts worth of damage
  
• De-Blanked: Steals a random number of blanks
  
• Enfeebled: Permanently removes one heart worth of health
  
• Priceless: No negative downside is applied

As you can see using this shrine is like pulling a slot machine for one positive and negative effect, unless you manage to get the Priceless modifier. Using this shrine is entirely up to the player and their willingness to trust in the RNG and take some risks for some gains, but I will say that it's easy for you to lose out harshly by using the shrine, some of the benefits can be of little use (Cleansed and Renewed will be of little to no use if you have little or no curse gained or health lost respectively, while if you manage to get Limited, Robbed or Unsteady it can seriously set you back and hobble you for the rest of the run). In particular I recommend against using it in cursed runs if only because getting the Cursed modifier can be completely fatal. Still, if you do decide to use it and the dice rolls in your favour it can be very useful, and it's worth keeping in mind that you can take certain approaches to tilt the odds to your advantage. Before using the shrine, If you've spent all of your money, used all of your blanks (looking for secret rooms or fighting bosses for example), know there is at least 2 hearts worth of health lying around somewhere on the floor and hold out a low value weapon like the Lowercase R then that will go a long way towards mitigating a large number of the downsides, and hey, you might even get Priceless. If you play as the robot them the health related negatives won't effect him, though neither will the health related positives. Sometimes the effects will just cancel each other out and nothing really happen, ie you get both Bolstered and Enfeebled to end up with the same amount of max health as before.

A final note about this shrine is that there is a vanishingly small chance, 0.1% that using the shrine will instead cause it too explode, reduce your heart containers to just 1 but also increase your damage 4 times! I usually give this shrine a miss if I see it but if you feel like you want a bit more spice in your gungeoning career, then take the gamble with this and make things more interesting.


The Glass Shrine will grant the player 3 of the Glass Guon Stone items with no downside, refer to the Pickups section for more on them. Interestingly this is one of the only shrines that has absolutely no cost associated with using it, so be sure to use this whenever you see it for the small benefit it provides.


Found in the first room of the first floor, if you've defeated the past of the player character interacting with this shrine will set your curse to 9, see the section on Cursed Runs for more info.

Junk Shrine

A statue to the legendary Ser Junkan, this shrine will take junk that you have in your inventory and replace them with pieces of armor. Can be particularly useful for the robot and give him a good supply of armor, it's worth keeping in mind that the 5% damage increase the robot gains for holding each piece of junk is not lost when you give them up to this shrine. You can use the shrine muliple times to get rid of multiple junk in your inventory. If notice this shrine on a floor and find some low quality chests and limited keys you might want to consider destroying the chests for junk and dropping them off at the shrine to get a bit more value for the junk, though if you have ser junkan (the passive item) dropping off junk at this shrine will make him less powerful which isn't worth doing.


The Peace Shrine will take whatever gun you are holding out when you interact with it and in exchange heal you for a full heart's worth of damage and can be repeated. This is actually a pretty good deal if you're badly injured since you can offer it poor quality guns like the Convicts' shotgun you likely will never use past the first few floors, otherwise they're probably best sold or thrown into a gun Muncher. Of course it won't do anything if you are at full health and taking weapons away will make you weaker if you have the passive item Unity, just to keep in mind.

In Blessed runs you can exploit this shrine by feeding it guns endlessly until your health is maxxed out, the constantly changing gun seems to be considered unlimited for this purpose!


Fans of Vlambeer are sure to appreciate this guy, alas, no airhorns or gangster rap! Y.V. will fittingly cause your guns to randomly shoot extra bullets as you fire by offering casings at this shrine, the more casings you offer the higher the chance extra bullets will be shot out. The amount of extra bullets that will be shot is also random. This can massively increase your damage output overall as random shots will vomit it out a slew of extra projectiles to ruin an enemies day, however as you use the shrine each additional use to increase projectiles will raise the cost of the shrine by 10 casings (the first use will be 10 casings so the second one will be 20 casings and so on), so the shrine quickly becomes extremely expensive. Because of this it's exceptionally useful to find this near the end of a cursed run when you can blow hundreds of extra casings for Y.V's ability to murder everything around you, or have the Briefcase of cash item or be good when using the Loot Bag item. If a shot does not activate the effect then the likelihood of the next shot to activate it will increase, by 3.7% each time (on top of the base activation chance based on the amount you've used the shrine). The amount of extra bullets will be 2 to 4 times that of a single bullet and cost no additional ammo.

Powerful weapons with little ammo get the most out of this, seeing a Stinger or BSG fart out a slew of projectiles for way more destruction than usual is a thing of beauty. I would recommend you get at least a few uses out of this shrine whenever you find it.

Secret rooms are hidden in most floors of the Gungeon, usually one per floor but sometimes there can be more. They are a useful source of extra resources and can hold some useful and unexpected secrets.

To find a secret room, you need to shoot walls with a weapon that does not have infinite ammo, this will reveal a crack that gets bigger the more you shot it. In addition to this enemy bullets can also reveal the crack. When revealed you can use a blank to blast down the wall closing off the secret room, it will make a bell sound when you do, alternatively you can use an explosive such as, say, an RPG missile to blast down the wall and save the blank. Getting hit while wearing armor will sometimes reveal secret rooms, but it can be hard to notice in the heat of battle. This happens a lot for the Robot in particular and you should have a quick double-check after finishing a battle where you lost armor to see if a room was revealed. An example of such a crack can be seen below:










Typically, secret rooms lead away from the Gungeon, into open areas not surrounded by other rooms. As such it's best to look for them in the Gungeon's extremities, especially in chest rooms, the elevator room after the boss room, the Shop and extra vendor rooms or gun muncher rooms. If you want to be quick it might be a good idea to shoot the walls of the chest rooms and elevator room and if its not there blowing your blanks off in the Shop (since shooting in the shop will anger the shop-keep) and/or a random room around the edges of the gungeon. They do also spawn off of such random enemy rooms, and in my experience it feels like those Secret Rooms have rarer stuff in them, its usually worthwhile to scan the walls of a room you've had an intense fight to see if the bullets of you or the enemy have revealed a crack in the wall. As stated above the Abbey often has an easy to find secret room containing Brother Albern, usually off of a chest room.

It's good to find secret rooms early, like most things that give extra resources that has a bigger impact at the start of the game, especially with regards to keys. As you get better at fighting first floor bosses you may want to consider avoiding the use of blanks there and saving them for secret room searches after killing them. A map will always reveal secret rooms, as will the Gungeon Blueprint and the Brick of cash (which will have an easily noticeable snitch brick standing beside the room entrance), but generally the map is too expensive to be worth buying just to find secret rooms (though this can change in cursed runs).

Secret rooms have an extremely wide variety of possible layouts. The most common ones typically have a small number of pickups like health, armor or keys. Extra chest rooms are also common, and can provide an alternative if the floor's chests are otherwise underwhelming. A lot of chest rooms can spawn with the chest surrounded by a pit, this can be dangerous if the chest is a mimic, especially in cursed runs, since when the mimic dies the contents often fall into the pit and are unobtainable, so be careful not to push the mimic off of the platform when fighting it.

Much rarer rooms can contain NPCs, as well as the secret room only NPCs listed above (Albern, Witches, Old Man) this can include the merchants listed in the second part on shops, Winchester and the lost adventurer. Shrines can also rarely be found as can evil gun munchers. Finally some rooms have specific combinations, such as a large room with three chest mimics, or a room with a skeleton, a note, a key and a brown, a blue and a green chest.

In Bullet Hell there will always only be one, very difficult to find secret room, and it will always contain an evil Gun Muncher.

One last little thing, in some shrine rooms you'll see a path lead straight into a wall, this is a dead giveaway of a secret room at the end of the path.

I guess secret rooms weren't enough, so there are also entire secret floors too! Secret floors can extend your run and give you the opportunity to find even more items than normal, but they also have high costs to entry and can be much more difficult than other floors. The two floors are the Oubliette and Abbey of the True Gun.

The Oubliette

This grotesque, fetid sewer seems to be where the gungeon's detritous ends up, including malformed gundead and lot of disgusting blobs. It can be entered through the first floor by finding a room with the fireplace, putting out the fire (either by shoving a nearby water barrel into the barrel, shooting a water weapon at the fire or prompting a blobulon type enemy to move too close to it), pressing a button behind the fire that lowers a wall to a special secret room somewhere in the floor, finding said secret room and unlocking the grate to the Oubliette by using two keys on it. When you fall down the resulting hole you will be instantly transported to the Oubliette, and when you are finished and take the elevator at the end of the floor you'll go to the Gungeon Proper like normal.

As such if you want to go down to the Oubliette you'll need to save two keys to get there. As we have already talked about there you can always find at least two keys on floor 1 to get down there, but doing so may entail not opening some chests. The Pilot can try and lockpick the grate locks, but if he fails there's no way down. Regardless the Oubliette will have two chest rooms, a shop and a boss that drops an item just like any other floor, in addition to any other secrets or pickups that present themselves, so in my view its worth it to go down and in the long run you'll get more stuff by doing so. The floor is big step up in difficulty, especially since its so early in the game, so you'll need good experience if you want to do well, many of the enemies are very tough and dangerous for that point in the game, especially Poopulons, Spogres and Veteran Shotgun kin. One of the big gimmicks of the floor is that there is a lot of poison around and enemies that either create poison or are immune to it. I would say it's roughly as difficult as floor 3, the Powder Mines. There are also some surprisingly tough rooms that require good platforming skills.

Luckily the Boss (there is only boss, no variation between three like in other floors) is fairly easy, the Blobulord. You don't have to worry so much about getting hit by him, since there is no Master Round for the Oubliette, but he will still drop an item.

In Cursed runs the Oubliette becomes much, much harder, I would say the only floors that cause me more trouble are the Forge and Bullet Hell. Considering it's so early in the game you have little health and good weaponry to work with, but as well as that some the enemies, particularly the Poopulon and Spogre, can be far more problematic when jammed thanks to their ability to fill the screen with bullets and withstand much more damage. As well as that though, as curse goes higher in the Oubliette in particular a lot of the regular bullet kin enemies get replaced by the deadly Veteran Bullet kin, who can also be jammed and will endeavor to make life much more difficult with their predictive shots. In challenge mode the Oubliette is best avoided, an already difficult floor is made worse, while in blessed runs it might be alright depending on what weapons you end up with.

Of course one last thing about the Oubliette is a little room than houses an item called the Old Crest. You can pick it up, but what can you do with it? Well...


In comparison to the Oubliette the Abbey seems clean, well maintained and filled with historical artifacts. It also has giant pools of what look like blood, insane gun cultists and Skeletons rising out of their tombs, oh well, close enough.

To gain entrance to the Abbey you'll need to carry that crest you found in the Oubliette all the way through the Gungeon proper into a special crypt with tombs for important looking bullets and an alter to place the crest upon at the end of the room. When you do this the closest tomb will shift and reveal a staircase down to the Abbey. This is harder than I've made it sound, because to get the crest to the alter you need to make sure you take absolutely no damage between picking up the crest and placing it on the alter, or else it will break and the Abbey will be inaccessible. As such its best to leave the crest until you have cleared the Oubliette and killed Blobulord, so that you have the smallest chance of getting hit. When going through the Gungeon Proper it's best to double down on what strategies work best for avoiding damage, use your best weapons, pop off Blanks if necessary, use active items liberally. The crypt room usually comes off of Chest rooms or shops, so make sure you find them first and don't get waylaid looking for the boss, the longer it takes to find the crypt the higher the chance will be that you get hit and lose the crest. The crest room in the Oubliette is often locked behind a gate, so consider whether or not you want to spend a key to go down to the Abbey.

The Abbey has a high difficulty wall, mostly courtesy of it's Boss, so you'll need a lot of experience. If you do go through it and succeed it can really help you out with more items and weapons over the long run, but that boss... we'll get back to him. The Abbey is quite similar to floor 4 in its enemies, lots of Bookllets, Skullets, Spents, Gunjurers and Bloodbulons as well as more unique Cardinals and Gun Cultists. Uniquely a lot of the enemies will be jammed, regardless of the level of curse you have. Despite this I would say that the regular rooms in the Abbey are easier than Oubliette, if mostly because the player will have better weaponry and items by this point. The Abbey has a couple of quirks, there is always a secret room with Brother Albern who will give you some more stuff, and secret rooms seem more common in general here too, I've found three secret rooms in one run in the Abbey before. Like the Oubliette it operates like a normal floor with a shop, two chests, and a boss drop, which can beef up your inventory nicely.

The Boss is by far the biggest concern. The Old King has the third highest health of all of the game's bosses, only lower than the Dragun and Lich. Effectively it's an endgame worthy boss halfway through the game. At this point you still won't be as well armed as you would be going up against the Dragun or Lich, which adds to the difficulty. In addition he is one of only two bosses (the other being the Kill Pillars) which has a jammed attack without having to be jammed himself. His attack are modeled after the Floor 1 boss the Bullet king, but are far tougher and more complex. Suffice to say the Old king is very hard, and if you don't feel that you have a good enough weapon to face him before going down to the Abbey you may want to give it a miss. If you do beat him Floor 3 will seem like a very nice respite afterwards. Do keep in mind the Robot won't take more damage from his jammed attacks.

Compared to the Oubliette the Abbey doesn't get especially more difficult in cursed runs, especially since bullet kin aren't replaced with their Veteran counterparts. A number of the enemies are already cursed regardless as has been stated, so it can be fairly similar. A difficult part can be simply getting the crest to the crypt due to the tougher enemies. The biggest problem is the possibility that the Old King will be cursed, and not many people want to have to face down this monstrosity:











Jesus, I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy.

For Challenge runs it will probably be very hard to get into the Abbey, especially due the extra sources of potential damage, and it's usually just not worth the grief.

Bullet Hell is the final and hardest floor in the game, the way through to the true final boss and real ending, and just generally a culmination of all the horrors the Gungeon has to throw at you.

To gain entrance to Bullet hell all of the four default Gungeoneer's pasts must be defeated. After you do so, in the special area that contains the gun that can kill the past there will be a distorted looking tear in the floor just before the Staircase that leads to the Chest containing the gun. If you walk into this hole a giant skeletal hand will grab the player and pull them down to Bullet Hell.

Bullet Hell is crushingly difficult. With a couple of exceptions every previous enemy encountered in the earlier floors can appear, usually in very difficult combinations. Each individual room is usually very large and has multiple waves of numerous enemies, in addition to having large rooms Bullet Hell also has a lot of them, as a result it is by far the longest floor, and can often take up to half an hour to clear everything. There are lots of dead ends and complex pathing which makes it very difficult to get to the Boss room quickly, generally speaking you want to spend as little time as possible fighting in the enemy rooms and need to beeline towards the Boss chamber since you will mostly only be losing health and ammo if you spend too long fighting. Sometimes you'll get lucky and find the Lich in short order, which gives you the best chance to kill him while you still have relatively high resources.

The main reason you don't want to spend much time searching room to room, in addition to the difficulty, is because Bullet Hell does not have the usual useful stuff that other floors do. There are no chests rooms, no shops of any kind, no NPCs, no shrines, no extra chest rooms, and only one secret room that will always hold the same thing, an Evil Muncher. All you'll find are seemingly endless grueling rooms filled with enemies.

Bullet Hell will push your resource management to the absolute limit, considering the extreme length of the floor and number of tough enemies you won't be able to count on extra resources or new guns from the shop or chests. All you will have (unless you get a few lucky chest drops) will be what you started Bullet Hell with. The only thing you can count on are room clear drops that might give you some much needed Ammo or health, but this is erratic and you'll need to carefully conserve what ammo you have as well as desperately trying to avoid getting hit. Keep in mind my advice from the planning section, all of your previous careful actions to minimize RNG and get the best value in previous floors was to prepare you for the slog through Bullet Hell. Use your best weapons, you should have been saving them and keeping them topped off for this occasion, now you can let rip, especially with more ammo-efficient stuff. Killing enemies quickly with your good stuff is important since it means you'll be less likely to get hit overall, so being fast and clearly rooms quickly is very useful. Do no get bogged down plinking away with lousy starting or Brown chest items, all it will do is draw out the run and increase the likelihood that you get hit. Balance ammo drops carefully around your needs, remember you need to kill the boss (we'll get to him), so your very best boss killing weapons need to be topped off even though you shouldn't use them in Room-to-room fighting. Its mostly for bullet hell you'll want to collect as many master rounds and general health upgrades as possible, earlier flawlesses will start to pay off as they give you better margin for error since you can't rely on health drops or the shop as much as earlier. Keys are almost entirely useless here, ideally you should have spent them all by the previous floor, likewise with money, hence why you ought to buy as many things as possible from the Blacksmith. The resources needed to kill the Dragun and clear the Forge, themselves no mean feat, can really eat into what you have available for Bullet Hell, keep that in mind and be sure not to leave anything behind before you go down.

The Lich is True final boss, the Gungeon Master and bane of your life. He is by far the hardest boss in the game and will take the most to kill, much more so than the Dragun. He has three distinct phases, each with very unique attacks and visuals, personally I think Phase 2 is the hardest because of a particular attack of alternating bullet rows that is very hard to dodge. Unload everything you have left on him, you have nothing left to lose at this point, and save blanks and active item uses for this fight. He'll push your dodging abilities to the limit, but keep at him and he'll eventually break. Defeating him will Unlock the Riddle of Lead and Gungeon Blueprint and end the game, blasting him with the Bullet that can kill the past and vanquishing his evil.

Conquering Bullet Hell is basically the final goal of this game that occurs only after killing the initial Final Boss of the Dragun and the pasts, but its not quite the limit of what you can do in the game. In the next sections I will start to talk about alternate game modes that can make everything, especially Bullet Hell, that much harder.

Gaze too long into the Abyss, and the Abyss shall gaze back at you

We've touched upon curse a bit in the Hidden stats section, and throughout this guide I've mentioned cursed runs in various contexts. I will go into extensive detail on both here and in the next section.

Curse

The following will cause you to gain curse:

• Holding the following items and guns. The Big Boy, Knife Shield, Bracket Key, Huntsman, Unicorn Horn, Blood Brooch, Shellegun, Lament Configurum, Cursed Bullets and Shelleton Key all provide +1 curse (any items spawned by the Lament Configurum will also have an additional +1 curse). The Elder Blank, Sixth Chamber, Yellow Chamber, Badge (only after talking to dead police officers), Casey and Fightsabre will provide +2 curse. Excaliber will provide 2.5 curse. Dropping any of these items will remove their curse from the player

• Using the Angel (+1.5 curse), Ammo (+3.5), Dice (+5 if you get cursed effect) and Hero (always sets curse to 9, even if you already have a some curse) shrines.

• Breaking a Mirror (refer to miscellaneous objects section) by shooting it or (preferably) unlocking the chest that it reflects. Either increases curse by +3.5.

• Giving a gun to the Witches (refer to NPC section). +2 curse.

• Stealing from any shop. +1 curse for each steal.

• Buying anything from Cursula. +2.5 curse on top of any curse the item already has.

• Standing too close to a Cursed Pot for too long. +1 curse, and can repeat.

• Using Spice. Increases curse by +0.5 on the first use and +1 for every subsequent use.

• Transforming into the Cormorant after finding all Gunknight pieces. +3 curse.

This effect denotes that you have gained curse via one of the stated means.

Apart from dropping cursed items the only way to remove curse is to pay money to the Cleansing shrine(though they don't work when you have curse of 10 or more) or luck out and get cleansed from a Dice shrine. If you find them Cleansing Shrines are your best way to keep track of curse in the game refer to the shrines section to see how it measures curse.

The effects of curse are varied, I will list what I think are all of them now:

• Enemies can be 'Jammed'. Jammed enemies will have a shadowy, reddish aura. They will do double damage, destroying a full heart worth of damage, compared to normal (although a few enemies already have jammed attacks that won't be buffed like the Spectral Gun Nut). Jammed enemies will also triple health, move and attack faster and will deal contact damage if they didn't previously (ie, Rubber Kin). 'Knight' enemies like the Gun Nut seem to receive less of a health boost compared to regular enemies like Shotgun Kin, only having about twice as much health. Jammed enemies also tend to drop much more money.

• Chests are more likely to either have a fuse or be a mimic, sometimes both. Refer to the Chests segment to learn more

• The Chance to receive a drop when a room is cleared is reduced. Except for ammo, for which the chance increases with curse.

• The Black Market (see Shops part 3) can be entered with no problems with at least 1 point of curse.

• Certain enemy types will become more common in certain floors based on curse, especially Veteran Bullet kin in the Oubliette and Bullet Hell who will replace other types of Bullet Kin.

• If curse is at least 7, then Bosses also have a chance to be jammed, like enemies, with similar buffs (though jammed bosses only have about 20% more health).

• If curse goes above 9 a special enemy called the Lord of the Jammed, left, will appear. This guy will follow you from room to room and floor to floor and cannot be killed or incapacitated at all. He will periodically fire bullets at the player which makes things much more difficult, acquiring him will usually ruin runs so you should never go above 9 curse. He will also cause shopkeepers to vanish and destroy their wares, meaning shops can't be used for the rest of the run. The Lord himself cannot be jammed, will not deal contact damage or block your movements, and if you reduce your curse back to at least 9 he will disappear in the next floor, but not in the current floor where he'll still follow you around and make your life miserable.

The above effects get ever heightened as you get more curse. At 1 point of curse you will have a 1% chance for enemies to be jammed, room drops will have -1% chance to appear, ammo will be 5% more likely show up and mimics and fuses will be 2.10% and 5% more likely to appear respectively. At 10 points of curse fully 50% of enemies and bosses will be jammed, Chests will have 23.25% and 50% chance to be mimics and fused respectively, room drops will be 10% less likely and Ammo be 50% more likely. As such you can see that careful control over your curse is important if you don't want to get overwhelmed. Keep of track of what items you have or actions you've done that contribute to your curse and try to tally roughly what your level might be based on the figures stated here. If you keep curse under about 5 points then it won't significantly impact the game and you can reap it for its upsides.

For less skilled players I would recommend you keep a lid on curse at the start of the run, but as you get further you can loosen up based on how powerful you've gotten, if you have an extremely powerful loadout you can more easily overcome curse and exploit its, primarily monetary, upsides later into the game. This can be good practice for preparing for a genuine cursed run. Of course, now we need to find out more about said genuine cursed runs...

Throughout the guide I've made a lot of references to Cursed runs, so lets grapple with this madness head-on. At the start of the game, in the very first room there is a statue called the Hero's Shrine, left, that I'm sure you've noticed. If you are playing a character whose past you've already killed then you can interact with the Shrine (use the 'pray' option) so that it will automatically set your curse to 9. You must do so before you leave floor 1, and if you do then that is what I have been calling a cursed run. 9 curse is the highest level you can have without calling in the Lord of the Jammed so it is important to avoid any means of increasing curse if you want to keep things stable. 10 curse also massively increases the amount of Jammed enemies and bosses so I think its very important to avoid it.

Cursed runs provide a significant extra challenge for players who have completed Bullet Hell and want something more. In many ways it also lets you cut loose, especially in the amount of extra money and ammo you get which means you can buy almost everything, usually you'll find at least 100 casings per floor, and use weapons more liberally. However, the lower drops mean less health in general is available, combined with the harsh jammed attacks you'll need to make sure your dodging skills are absolutely impeccable. The extra money lets you overcome this a bit since you can buy more health and armor, and I would recommend buying any armor available as the robot since armor is generally hard to come by.

Almost every room you encounter will have at least one jammed enemy, they have a roughly 1 in 4 chance of spawning at this level of curse. Because they have so much extra health it tends to take a lot longer to complete a cursed run than a regular run. For a lot of people this may just make the entire endeavor tedious so keep that in mind if you already find the game a bit slow. Of course, the first few floors (Especially the Oubliette) can be very harsh, especially if you're playing as an initially weak character like the Pilot, and health upgrades are even more sought after than they were previously. Personally, I think if you lose out on the first master round its probably not worth bothering to try and finish the run, you might as well just restart and try again. Luckily, despite their appearance, cursed bosses are typically more bark than bite, you'll want that flawless either way so whether or not they hit you for half a heart or a full heart makes little difference, they also only have a little more health and speed so if you're good at flawlessing regular bosses jammed bosses won't be much different. The exception to this are bosses that create a lot adds, primarily the Beholster and Treadnaught. I believe adds created by jammed bosses are guaranteed to be jammed themselves so they can be a serious hindrance and add a huge amount of extra health in the encounter, as well as that the Beholster also shoots twice as many rockets out if he's cursed and its hard to tell if he's cursed from his appearance before he attacks. The hardest bosses of the Old King, Dragun, and Lich will of course be more difficult when jammed but shouldn't prompt any changes in strategy compared to normal runs.

There's a lot of tips that can help when fighting in regular rooms during cursed runs. First of all clear out any non-jammed enemies in the room before targeting the jammed ones. It takes a long time to kill jammed enemies so its better to make sure you aren't being fired upon from multiple angles so you can then concentrate on bringing down the jammed enemies. Weapons and items that freeze, stun, charm and transmogrify (ie Snakemaker, Witch pistol or other magic weapons that transforms enemies into chickens) are very useful. Freezing mean you can slow down and stun jammed enemies that would otherwise cause you trouble for quite a while, keeping them out of the fight while you clear out weaker enemies (they also take lots of damage when unfrozen). Stun works similar to freeze, its a bit less useful since it doesn't slow enemies and do extra damage when they leave the effect, but nonetheless takes them out of the fight for a while. Some weapons that stun include the Barrel and Anvillain. Charm lets you turn enemies against each other, this is far more useful in cursed runs than otherwise because jammed enemies will also do double damage to other enemies, including other jammed enemies, and will be able to withstand a lot more enemy fire, while even non-jammed enemies targeting their jammed comrades will be a much needed source of extra damage that's also not targeting you. Finally transmogrify helps since it can immediately turn a jammed enemy into a chicken, effectively killing them far faster than otherwise and ignoring most of their health. Extra bullets for transmogrifying weapons from items like Scattershot and Helix bullets can increase the chance that your shots will transform, but be careful, the chickens themselves that are created can be jammed and do contact damage. Poison and fire can help, but overall aren't as useful since they aren't as good at actually killing jammed enemies than regular enemies (any extra damage will help though, no matter the source). Explosives can be dangerous since they'll sometimes fling enemies right at the player for a full heart of contact damage. A very good way to quickly kill grounded jammed enemies is to push them into pits where they die instantly, use a weapon with strong knockback like the T-shirt cannon for this.

Certain passives are exceptionally useful in cursed runs. Most obvious is Silver Bullets, which more than doubles damage against jammed enemies, effectively rendering most of their extra health moot. It also synergises with the Crossbow to do even more damage so its good to find as the Hunter and does more damage to bosses. Gilded Bullets also has outsized usefulness, because you find a lot more money in cursed runs you will get a much higher damage boost from its effects. By the time you get to Bullet Hell the damage boost in a cursed run from Gilded Bullets can be astronomical, one of the highest damage boosts in the game. However, you may want to spend that money on stuff in shops, so be careful how you balance what you do with the money. Just generally anything that boosts damage is highly sought after, but don't pick up anything already cursed in these runs no matter how powerful.

Keep a wide eye open for mimics and fuses and remember what I said concerning them upguide. Make sure you take full advantage of things like tables, exploding barrels and pits to defend yourself and kill enemies, anything that can give you even a little bit of an edge will always help in cursed runs. If you can't hack it a cleansing shrine will let you bring things down to normal, but remember they do not work at 10 curse or higher. Do everything right and eventually you'll even be able to crush a jammed Lich and become a god to the Gundead.

Of course, if you're really crazy you could try combining cursed runs with other modifiers like Blessed Runs and Challenge runs. Speaking of which...

To activate Challenge mode you will first need to free Daisuke (left) from the Gungeon. Like other NPCs you find he will intially be trapped behind a special locked door, usually in the Gungeon Proper (floor 2). A tough enemy like a Lead Maiden or a boss or miniboss will drop a special golden key which will let you open his cell, after which he'll appear in the Breach as a permanent fixture. He will be located in the room on the top-right of the Breach near the entrance of the gungeon, talk to him to be given the option of activating Challenge mode.

Activating Challenge mode will cost you 6 Hegemony Credits the first time, but after you've tried it at least 30 times then the cost will drop down to only 1 Hegemony Credit. Challenge mode will automatically activate various unique, random modifiers in every room you have to fight something in, including Bosses. These modifiers will mix up the gameplay to make things overall much more difficult, the bosses in floors 4 and 5 will always have specific, unique modifiers.

The modifiers are as follow, in alphabetical order:

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(TBA)