Beginner guide

Start with the weapon family

You begin with the sword and shield. The other five starting families, the greatsword, dagger, crossbow, blade and quarterstaff, open up through Moro's training nodes on the destiny tree, priced 2 to 10 sapphires each. The greatsword node costs 2, so it's usually the first alternative you can afford.

Guarding runs on MP with any weapon: a blocked hit costs 10 MP, a perfect guard (block right as the hit lands) halves that, and reaching 0 MP breaks your guard entirely. Magic spends the same pool, so a build that blocks a lot and casts a lot will starve one or the other.

Upgrades happen at anvils. Each anvil offers three picks from your current weapon's upgrade tree and works once per player; a reroll costs one die. Picking an option replaces your weapon outright, so check the weapon trees before you commit to a branch.

The bag is the build

The bag is a 6-wide grid with 24 usable slots at the start of a run, growable to 42. Charms only do anything inside this main grid. The sub bag (up to 18 slots) is dead storage: a charm or tablet parked there has no effect at all.

Many charms carry a placement condition and stay inactive in the wrong cell: top row only, bottom row only, the side columns, all 8 neighboring cells occupied, both horizontal neighbors being charms, or sitting next to a grimoire. The tooltip states the condition; the mistake to avoid is dropping a new charm wherever there's room and assuming it works. The bag planner reproduces these rules if you want to lay a build out ahead of time.

Tablets move charm levels

Every bag cell has a level, and a charm's power reads from the level of the cell it's in, up to its max level (5 for most charms). Stone tablets are what change those levels: each tablet projects a pattern (a row, a column, a diagonal, knight jumps) and adds levels, multiplies them, disables cells or lets a charm ignore its placement condition. Tablets rotate, and the pattern rotates with them. One warning: a cell pushed below level 0 turns its charm off completely, so a badly aimed penalty tablet can delete a charm from your build.

Potions, scrolls and the belt

Potions stack to 5, scrolls to 30, throwing weapons to 50, misc items to 30; charms and tablets never stack. Potions, scrolls and throwing weapons can sit in quick slots, and potions get their own belt outside the grid, so they don't have to eat bag space. A destiny quest reward later unlocks a two-slot potion belt by default.

Shop math worth knowing

Prices scale with the negotiation stat on both sides of the counter. Buying ranges from 0.66x list price (when your negotiation is 100 over the merchant's) up to 3x (when the merchant is 200 over you). Selling returns 50% of an item's value at even negotiation, from 10% at worst to 65% at best. Identifying an unknown item always costs 20% of its value. From chapter 6 on, an inventory orb can appear that sells +1 bag slot for 200 gold; buy it every time. A trade voucher, if you're carrying one, makes your next purchase free.

What actually kills you

Damage over time ignores your defenses. Burn, poison and shock tick straight through guard, parry, dash dodges and evasion, so against enemies that apply status effects the only reliable answer is not getting tagged in the first place. Burn ticks every half second, and every stack adds a full tick of damage.

Defensive stats also flatten out fast. Evasion follows a log curve: 6,200 evasion is about a 55% dodge chance and the hard cap is about 77%. Defense works the same way, roughly 31% reduction at 40 defense, 56% at 100, 80% at 200, and every hit that connects deals at least 1 damage no matter what. Stacking one defensive stat forever is a losing trade; past the knee of the curve, spend on damage or healing instead.

On offense, a critical hit deals +50% damage by default, and crit chance built past 100% converts into execution chance, which doubles the bonus. If you die with an extra life banked, you revive at 60% of max HP.

First destiny tree buys

Sapphires drop 1 per sapphire chest, plus more from breakable props and boss kills. On the destiny tree, take the Tablet node first: it costs 0 sapphires and switches on the entire tablet system. After that the cheap nodes are the strong ones: Increase HP (2), Heavy Weapon Training (2), Bond Artifact (3), Wishing Fountain (3, a free artifact at the start of every run), Expanding Pouch (4 per rank for extra bag slots) and Seed Money (6, +200 starting gold). Talent points cost 1 each at first and feed the passive tree, so they're fine filler between bigger buys.