Every room explained, and how to choose your route

Your route is one of the biggest decisions you make in a run. Rooms are connected by doors, and you can only move along connected paths, so taking one room usually means giving up another.

The rooms

Fighting rooms

Battle. Fight a band of monsters. A win pays gold and offers hero picks. These rewards are how most of your team gets built, so don’t avoid them. Enemies can also wear trinkets, which they drop as loot when beaten.

Ambush. A tougher elite fight with better chances of loot and higher-level hero offers. Take these when your team is comfortably ahead. Bandit teams can steal your gold and even a trinket if you lose, so be careful with them.

Ranked Duel. Only on ranked runs. You fight another player’s saved team on floors 5 and 10, and once more after the boss.

Recruiting rooms

Shop. Buy heroes and trinkets. Hero copies are cheap, and you can pay to restock the offers. Arriving with plenty of gold can level up several heroes at once, and hero copies are usually the best thing to buy.

Tavern. Recruit one of five blessed heroes for free. It shows you which ones match your team, and deeper in the tower it can offer level 3 heroes. These are some of the best rooms in the game.

Mirror Pool. Copy one of your heroes, without its trinket. You can keep the copy as a second body or merge it to gain a level, which often turns a level 2 hero into a level 3 right away.

Upgrade rooms

Altar. Bless a hero with a stat or lift a curse. The stat choices are +1 power, +4 health, +2 armor or +3 speed. Health is a safe default when you’re not sure, and Ilse’s Altar armor is doubled.

Forge. Melt a trinket into a hero as a permanent ability. This frees up the hero’s trinket slot, so that hero can then wear a different trinket.

Sacrifice. Give an ability away. The hero who gives it up is lost, and the one who receives it also takes a curse. Use a spare hero as the giver, and choose a receiver who won’t suffer much from the curse. A curse that makes a hero start at the back, for example, hardly matters to a hero already standing there. Morrow avoids the curse altogether.

Blood Pact. Trade a life for a stat boost on your fielded team. This gets better later in a run, because the fewer fights you have left, the less a spare life is worth. Early on, it’s usually too expensive. Sable can take these for free while she has all her lives.

Other rooms

Entrance. Where each run begins. Pick your starting heroes here.

Treasure. Take one trinket from the choices shown, or take the gold instead. Taking the gold is a smart choice when a Shop is coming up and none of the trinkets suit your team.

Infinite Corridor. Pay to reroll the room ahead. Useful when you badly need a Shop or a Mirror Pool, but the price climbs with each walk.

How to choose a route

Look a few rooms ahead. Don’t just pick the best next room. Trace the paths and see where each one leads, because a Shop or Tavern may only be reachable from one side.

Get heroes first. Early on, the number of heroes on your team matters most. Prefer rooms that add to it, like Battles, Taverns and Shops with gold in hand.

Fight for your gold, then spend it. Battles pay for Shops, so try to reach a Shop after a few wins rather than with an empty purse. A Shop you can’t afford is a wasted room.

Don’t skip too many fights. Each battle gives gold and hero picks, and each pick is a chance to level up. Routes that avoid battles often arrive at the boss underpowered.

Think about your lives. If you’ve already lost a life and your team is struggling, an Ambush can wait. If you’re well ahead, it’s a good way to press your advantage.

Remember the checkpoints. On ranked runs, know that a duel is coming on floors 5 and 10, and try to have a full team by then. See the Peril and ranked guide.