🌈kosmender’s Dead Cells Guide
💭 General Tips
📃 Note: This guide is written as relatively free-form strategy and advice based on kosmender’s experience with Dead Cells, and it’s composed of intentionally broad strokes so as to remain accurate and useful no matter what patch you’re playing on. If you’re looking for pinpoint mechanic data (e.g., how many milliseconds for the dodge-roll cooldown), you will be better served elsewhere. Think of it as a warrior’s diary.
🔴🟣🟢 1. Scrolls of Power.
💭 Information: Scrolls of Power are the basic power-up item in the Dead Cells universe, and they're a precious commodity. Each acquired scroll allows you to select one of your three stat categories (Red Brutality, Purple Tactics, or Green Survival) and increase its value by 1. Scrolls are found strewn about world areas, and are guaranteed drops inside Cursed Chests and Challenge Rifts.
You will also find scroll power-ups that feature only two out of your three stats (i.e., a choice between only Brutality and Tactics, or only Survival and Tactics, etc.).
If you find a Scroll Fragment, which looks like a tiny rock about the size of the Beheaded's Ghost Rider flame-do, know that it counts as 25% of a Scroll of Power. Collect four fragments and the effect is identical to finding a full scroll.
💡 Advice: The two most important things to remember about Scrolls of Power are: (1) pick them all up, and (2) within a given run, it's best to focus all your Scrolls of Power into a single stat color.
If a scroll doesn't include your governing stat color for the run (i.e., if you're focusing Brutality but your scroll offers the choice between Tactics and Survival), I recommend choosing the option that gives you the higher increase to HP. The game lists these HP-increase values on the stat-choice screen for your convenience. If you're a more experienced player and want to bolster the effects of a mutation you've chosen that doesn't scale with your run's governing stat color (e.g., you're running Tactics but want to pump Brutality/Survival scrolls solely into Survival to support the effects of Gastronomy, a mutation whose effects scale only with Survival), rock on.
I typically choose which color I'll be running based on (1) which stats I've pulled on my starting Amulet, (2) what appealing gear I see in the Recycling Tubes (you won't have these immediately when you start the game), or (3) whatever I'm really craving, if I happen to have strong feelings that day.
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📃NOTE: I have found that many Dead Cells players spend an enormous amount of time and energy fretting over which exact path through the world areas will best maximize their scroll count. While it's true that scroll count governs your HP, outgoing damage, and other super important factors, I find scroll-count fixation to be a grievous waste of time. Here's why: on any given patch, player HP, enemy HP, average scroll count, fragment drops, and all of that are subject to change. If you've learned the encounters, know your combat and mobility options, and just play, you'll be capable of weathering whatever you need to regardless of that specific run's RNG.
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🔪 2. Equipment choices.
💭 Information: Every piece of gear in Dead Cells scales in efficiency and power based on your stat numbers—here's how that works:
🧦 Plain gear. The vast majority of the equipment you encounter will be plain gear. Each piece of this non-legendary, non-colorless equipment has either one or two stat colors with which its efficiency can natively scale. A plain Balanced Blade scales only with Brutality. Using that blade with 7 Tactics would feel exactly the same as with 1,000,000 Tactics; the blade is reading only your Brutality value.
Plain gear that can natively scale with two different stat colors (e.g., an Infantry Bow that can scale either Brutality or Tactics) is only reading the higher of the two eligible stat colors at any given time.
Continuing with the Infantry Bow from the example above, let's say you have 5 Brutality and 7 Tactics. That bow is going to deal 7 scrolls' worth of damage (your Tactics value), and your 5 Brutality isn't factored in at all. If you were then to reshuffle your stats so you had 9 Brutality and 7 Tactics, the bow would be doing 9 scrolls' worth of damage (your Brutality value), and your 7 Tactics wouldn't factor in at all.
👠 Colorless gear. At the time of writing, this type of gear drops only as a guaranteed reward from Cursed Chests. It has no native stat-color designation; it will scale with your highest stat color at all times. If you have 24 Brutality, 3 Survival, 5 Tactics, and a colorless Crusher, it'll do 24 scrolls' worth of damage. I picked that example because a plain-gear Crusher scales only with Survival, and would be doing 3 scrolls' worth of damage in this scenario.
🏆 Legendary (yellow) gear. This gear is found (1) behind reward doors for flawless boss fights (one guaranteed legendary piece), (2) in a special treasure room guarded by an enormous guardian in the Fractured Shrines, and, most commonly, (3) spawning randomly atop special pedestals in world areas. Fun fact: there are special item affixes that can appear only on legendary gear. My favorite is "100% extra damage" – there's no downside to that. (Plain gear can roll an affix that offers the same increase of outgoing damage, but also includes 100% extra incoming damage.) Not all legendary-exclusive affixes can be rolled on all legendary gear—I highly recommend experimenting with re-rolling your legendaries to see what you can discover.
At the time of writing, legendary gear scales with the combined value of your two highest stats (e.g., with 6 Brutality, 3 Tactics, and 10 Survival, a legendary Blood Sword would deal 16 scrolls' worth of damage, adding your Survival and Brutality values together). For a very long time before that, it worked just like colorless gear, scaling with only your highest stat value. Regardless of how they tweak things in future patches, it feels almost certain that legendary gear will always scale with your highest stat color in some way—that's always been its thing.
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📃 NOTE: There is no intrinsic difference between the three stat colors outside of their relationship to power scaling. Think of "scroll" as the currency unit of the Dead Cells power spectrum. The color of the scroll is simply an identifier that dictates how it interacts with your equipment and mutation choices. A legendary Blood Sword scaling with 33 Tactics will perform identically to that same sword scaling with 33 Brutality or Survival.
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💡 Advice: I highly recommend splitting your time across the three loadout families; they're each beautiful in their own way, and all three are completely viable for completing all the content in the game. This theme is going to come up more than once in this guide: Every time you explore a new facet of Dead Cells and the options it gives you, that will elevate your personal level of gameplay in a holistic sense. Learning to flip and flop your way through a shieldless Tactics glass-cannon run teaches you nuances about player movement and enemy behavior that will serve you on your chunky, clunky, Survival sword-and-board adventures, and vice versa. Finding the edges helps your subconscious triangulate the core.
The most important qualities of a piece of equipment in Dead Cells are: (1) whether it scales with your governing stat color for the current run, and (2) whether you enjoy it. With a few teensy exceptions, all Dead Cells equipment is viable in all Dead Cells encounters, which means an enormous component of your personal experience with the game is going to grow around your idiosyncratic preferences and selections. That's part of what makes the game great—I've met a slew of talented Dead Cells players, and we all enjoy the gear pool differently.
I very strongly recommend you experiment with equipment yourself before coming to any final conclusions about it. The best gear for your run is going to be whatever you're most comfortable with and can wield efficiently.
🥥 3. Difficulty tiers.
💭 Information: Dead Cells has six difficulties. Each time you defeat the Hand of the King (found after High Peak Castle) for the first time on a new difficulty tier, you will receive an item called a Boss Stem Cell. Boss Cells can be placed into the alchemy tube in the starting area just beneath all the canisters showcasing gear that you've unlocked. (Interact with the tube as you would a treasure chest, then press left or right to adjust the number of Boss Cells in it.) As shorthand, I refer to the difficulties as: 0BC (normal mode), 1BC (hard), 2BC (very hard), 3BC (expert), 4BC (nightmare), and 5BC (hell).
As you increase your difficulty, the game unleashes new threats, including but not limited to: new enemies, fewer health-flask refills, new boss behavior, and greatly increased damage from enemies. There is also special content that is progress-gated behind the 5BC difficulty that I won't detail here for spoiler-avoidance reasons.
Increasing difficulty also increases the number of cells (the blue ones, the currency used to unlock gear from blueprints, not Boss Cells this time) you acquire on a run. There are two reasons for this increase. Enemy density increases alongside difficulty, and more enemies means more chances for cells to drop. There are also discrete modifiers attached to some difficulty tiers that apply a multiplier to number of cells dropped from enemies. Essentially, an enemy who would've dropped a single cell on a lower tier will drop two at a higher tier.
💡 Advice: When you unlock a new difficulty … first, congratulations, future-to-me past-you! … you've got two basic options: crank up the difficulty to the highest level you've unlocked and do trial by fire (i.e., jump right into 2BC the second you beat 1BC), or stick around on a tier you're comfortable with to train, farm, and learn for a while before diving into the new challenge. Personally, I prefer to jump right in. It's painful, but it's fun. I think both methods are admirable and viable, just a matter of preference.
🛵 4. Traversal runes.
💭 Information: There are four metroidvania-style traversal upgrades to acquire in Dead Cells that allow players to move in new ways, access new areas, and perform new skills. (There are also a small handful of other runes, but they're not germane to this section.) Until you've collected all your traversal upgrades on a given save, there will be territory in the game you simply cannot reach.
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📃 NOTE: You will only be able to unlock one rune on a given run because of the runes' placement and the logistics involved.
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(a) Vine-Growing Rune. Found in the Promenade of the Condemned, the Vine Rune allows the player to transform small green blobs on the floor into helpful vine ladders.
How to get it: on a fresh save file, your only exit from the Prisoner's Quarters (starting world area) leads to the Promenade. Go there and fight everything you see (except the spikes). Eventually, you'll tangle with a special elite enemy who will drop this rune upon dying.
(b) Sarcophagus Teleportation Rune. Found in Toxic Sewers, the Teleportation Rune allows players to teleport from one weird little sarcophagus to another. (Those pink statues that sound like 'tricity when you rub 'em.)
How to get it: once you've acquired the Vine Rune, begin a fresh run and clear the Prisoner's Quarters. By using your Vine Rune on one of the aforementioned green floor blobs, you'll have access to an alternate exit that leads to Toxic Sewers. Go there. In the sewers, kill everything until you find an odd little arena with an elite enemy. Dispatch the elite and your reward will be the Teleportation Rune.
(c) Ram Rune. Found in the Ossuary, the Ram Rune is more groundbreaking than the Rube Goldberg machine that makes Elon Musk breakfast each morning. For real though, this rune allows you to smash through breakable parts of the ground, sending damage-dealing rubble tumbling toward unfortunate baddies below. These breakable bits are labeled with a little insignia that will glow brighter as you get closer to it.
How to get it: once you've got your Teleportation Rune, begin a fresh run and navigate through the Prisoner's Quarters. Choose the Promenade exit. On the far right side of the Promenade map, there is a teleportation sarcophagus that you can now use to teleport to the Ossuary entrance. Once you're there, it's similar to acquiring the previous runes. Find a special elite in an arena, kill it, and gather your runic reward.
(d) Spider Rune. Found in the Slumbering Sanctuary, the Spider Rune is the coolest. It allows players to climb up walls Ninja Gaiden style, and it completely changes the combat landscape of the game.
How to get it: once you've got your Ram Rune, begin a fresh run and navigate through Prisoner's Quarters, taking the Toxic Sewers exit. When you're done there, take the Ancient Sewers exit. Proceed to fight Conjunctivius. As you exit the boss arena, you'll be able to use the Ram Rune to break the floor, revealing the entrance to Slumbering Sanctuary. Go there. You guessed it: find a special elite in an arena, kill it, and receive your Spider Rune.
💡 Advice: All the traversal runes are cool, and you'll need them to gain full access to all the alternate pathing available to you in Dead Cells. But above all else, the reason I recommend that new players unlock these abilities as quickly as possible is because Spider Rune changes everything. Instead of being a mild-mannered Paul Blart who's forced to enter combat spheres in the expected way (e.g., up a specific ladder with poor lateral visibility), you're Batman, Spider-Man, and Neo all wrapped into one. You can surprise enemies, stop yourself from getting stunned by the impact of a long freefall by sticking to a wall for a moment, and so on. It's the best.
💀 5. Combat.
💭 Information: Combat in Dead Cells is a gorgeous symphony of visceral delights, and a hallmark of the "tough but fair" guiding principle at the core of all my favorite roguelikes. Here are some subtle nuances I've noticed in my years playing the game that might not be readily apparent to newer players:
The vast majority of non-airborne enemies who aren't already aware of your presence remain unaware of you until your feet touch the ground on their elevation level. You can capitalize on this once you feel out different enemy behaviors. Thesis: you're almost always at least a little safer when you're off the ground.
Enemy-attack collision boxes can and will extend beyond the edge of a platform. If it looks like a Slasher can reach you with his sword, he probably can, whether or not you're sharing the platform with him.
This is more about platforming and traversal, but it's incredibly important in combat situations: dropping down from one elevation to another with a ground pound can be weird if you're attempting it directly over the top of a ladder, vine, or other climby mechanism. You might find yourself thinking you pressed all the right buttons in the right way, yet you just never dropped through the floor. You're not bonkers; it happens. It's weird and just something to know.
Some enemies (lookin' at you, Slashers) can be interrupted mid-combo—by breach due to massive damage taken, because they get frozen, or because they get otherwise stunned—and snap immediately back to where they left off once they recover from the interruption. It's perfectly normal behavior, but it can be a shock, especially if you expected the target to have died before their recovery.
💡 Advice: We've already covered scrolls and stats, but it bears repeating in a combat context: collect every Scroll of Power you find, and focus only one stat color within a given run. The HP pools and damage output for enemies, bosses, and the player are all tuned with the expectation that you're allocating scrolls this way. To deviate is to create a challenge run for yourself, which is awesome, so long as that's what you're aiming to do.
🌈 Now, some overarching best practices for Dead Cells combat:
(a) Know your encounter. Every enemy in the game can kill the player on any difficulty, and the baddies become deadlier than the sum of their parts when working together. It's vital that you use everything at your disposal to understand who and what you're fighting. If you consistently run exuberantly into encounters without clocking the placement and details of the opposition, your gameplay is unlikely to improve over time.
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📃 NOTE: when watching high-level Dead Cells endgame play, it can appear like we're just blasting through world areas without following this first bit of advice; that's an illusion. What you're seeing is these same principles I'm suggesting being put into play, just sped up and with added complexity. Once you've truly seared the game's smaller patterns into your mind, it allows you to run the ground-floor stuff on auto-pilot and use your executive attention faculties to scan for the big-picture threats. More on this later.
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(b) Know your fallback points. I highly recommend fully clearing world areas of all enemies while cell currency is still meaningful to your save file (i.e., you still have unlocks to pay for), and until you've mastered all the enemy types. An added benefit to full clearing is that it allows you to fall back to safe territory if you find yourself overwhelmed. Imagine: you've got a Kamikaze Bat (exploding airborne green dudes) tailing you, a Bombardier tosses some bombs that compel you to run away to avoid them, and an errant toss of your Infantry Grenade has now landed on a very surly, very elite Lacerator whom you didn't intend to aggro.
In the split second while the "Oh shit! You've aggroed an elite enemy!" audio cue plays, you won't know which elite ability the Lacerator has. The Kamikaze Bat will have locked on and begun its fuse if you haven't kept kiting it. Those Bombardier bombs might still be to your left depending on how fast all of this has happened. What would I do? Fall back, split the enemies up if possible, and stall for skill cooldowns.
If you've cleared all the enemies up to that point, left is your friend. Yes, some enemies will follow you. That's fine. A well-timed retreat into free-of-enemies territory will, at the very least, give your skills time to recharge and force the enemies to choose how to pursue, sometimes resulting in them splitting up.
(c) Use elevation to your advantage. I think of Dead Cells combat as occurring on a series of lateral shelves. Most enemies don't know the player exists until you're sharing an elevation level with them. Use this to your advantage. Even once you've aggroed "chasing" enemies (i.e., ones that will pursue you even before 5BC teleportation) like Runners, elevation is one of the strongest tools you have to confuse and manipulate them. Enemies that teleport need a moment to get their bearings when they arrive at their target destination.
Know this: each time you ascend or descend onto an unexplored shelf, you've entered a combat arena. (There won't always be enemies there, but I'd consider that an empty arena, as it might later be the place you choose to bring enemies.)
(d) Be behind the danger. One of the best combat habits you can bake into your gameplay is to begin encounters by ground-pounding just behind the enemy you're about to fight. If you're fighting a group, waiting until they're clumped together is ideal. This will usually give the enemy a brief stun, creating time for the player to slather on some damage before the enemy can react. Bonus points if your amulet has the "applies burn on ground pound" affix.
(e) Sip your health flask safely. Unless you've got Emergency Triage mutation speeding up how quickly you sip, I'd recommend not trying to heal mid-combat. The approximate time it takes to sip your flask unassisted is: forever. Better to finish the fight and heal in the calm than die with your flask out for the paparazzi to see.
(f) Damage over time is always good. Poison, bleed, fire, shock … they're all incredibly useful components of Dead Cells combat. An enemy with a status effect is one who is dying whether the player is still present or not. One word of caution: some enemies, usually bosses, will experience weird alterations to their timing if they're really stacked with DOTs. Fortunately, if that's happening, it also usually means said enemy is going to die soon.
(g) Be Patient. Dead Cells has a brilliant paradox at its core: it's fast as hell but the best way to learn to dance within that chaos is to take your time. Focus on the fundamentals. Learn to consistently earn your kill-streak rewards (you can go to Options > Gameplay > Display Number of Enemies Killed Without Being Hit to add a streak counter to your in-game HUD). Getting those kill streaks will elevate your gameplay and instill the habits that you'll need as you venture into the higher difficulties.
(h) Ignore the speed/timed doors at first. Once you've mastered kill-streak reward doors, you'll be able to get the speed-reward doors if you want to. I say that as someone who began as a relatively slow, methodical player. Now, I can and have completed 5BC runs with the Cursed Sword (i.e., endgame no-hit runs) while unlocking all kill and time doors. That vast improvement fruit came from a garden seeded with patience, not adrenaline.
🤸♀️ 6. Bosses.
💭 Information: Bosses in Dead Cells are largely awesome. It's likely that you'll find they (especially Hand of the King) become the sticking point for progression as you work your way through the difficulties. Boss HP and player damage ebbs and flows across patches, but for the most part, Dead Cells boss fights run pretty long compared to other roguelikes I've played. That means if you want to consistently and soundly defeat them with a variety of equipment and build styles, you're going to need to really learn the encounters.
💡 Advice: Pay attention to move sets, telegraphs, and subtle nuances (e.g., "oh snap, he won't do X attack as long as I'm airborne). For me, this part of the process is largely subconscious. This is true for me across all roguelikes: I like to see the encounter several times with different builds, and that starts the marinating process that will result in eventual muscle memory. Once I've gotten a given encounter to the point where I'm very unlikely to die, then I start using my conscious attention to sort out the last bit of detail necessary for proper mastery. For example, noticing that a move telegraph begins a split second before I thought it did (which gives me more time), or unearthing weird edge-case behaviors specific to certain gear interactions.
While I'm still scared of a boss, I'm always going to take Emergency Triage (the fast-flask-sip mutation that drops from killing the Time Keeper boss the 5th or 6th time; can't remember).
🥀 7. Cause of death.
💡 Advice: Pay attention to what kills you. If it's the same thing time after time, the best path forward is usually one of these three options:
(1) Approach the situation with the same strategy, and try to make it work with more practice. If you don't see improvement after a series of deliberate attempts with this method, I suggest trying one of the other two listed below.
(2) Approach the situation with an entirely different strategy. If you've been trying and failing with face-to-face melee combat, try some ranged play. If you've been relying on similar gear and one loadout color, try a different one. Here's the important part: whether or not your experiments culminate in victory, the details you learned from the experience will elevate your future gameplay.
(3) Avoid the situation entirely. This obviously won't work if the challenge you're struggling against is the Hand of the King or some other unavoidable encounter. (Side-note: my Hand of the King boss guide might prove instructive if he's your current sticking point.)
But if your recurring cause of death has been something like "Corpulent Zombies always surprise me in the Forgotten Sepulcher" … path your runs so that you never have to fight them.
Of course, I highly recommend you eventually learn all the enemies, world areas, and bosses, because they're 99% awesome, and you'll be a better overall player for having experienced them all. This avoidance advice is meant to help those who want to progress, are still learning the game, and find themselves frustratingly hard-stuck.
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Good luck and happy hunting.
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- kosmender 🌈