6-21-25
New section detailing speedrun strategy for RC >1000.

6-18-25
Added new section "PSA: lower "projectiles cap" means more dps". If you've got a high projectile cap, it may be why you kill bosses slowly.

6-15-25
Rewriting some of my guide and changing things as I've learned more stuff. Notably how to beef yourself up in the early game with weapon modifiers, and what the best weapons are.

6-11-25
Guide release. A work in progress as there were still some things I hadn't figured out.

Even after you beat A-rank, beat all the challenges including hard mode, and have everything in the soul shop, there's still more to do!

There are tiers of gear. After A there is S, SS, SSS, Max, Z, ZZ, ZZZ. And after that is where you get into infinity gear, which has infinite tiers like so: infinity +1, +2, +3, etc. The stats naturally get progressively stronger. Enjoy the game so much it sounds fun to farm this gear and see what you can do? This guide is for you!

I won't bother to explain how to unlock most things. The game has an extremely handy encyclopedia that tells you how to unlock almost everything. There are a few hidden achievements that aren't too difficult to look up. However there is a thing called anti gear which the game makes no mention of and I will tell you how to unlock that.

I also want to make it clear I don't claim to be a super professional or all-knowledgeable about the game or it's mechanics. However there are no guides like this one and so I had to figure this stuff out myself and bug people on the forums. So this guide is here to save you the trouble!

The best place to farm both soulcoins and gear is easily A-rank hard mode challenge Rooted Cubed.
As you can see this mode heavily nerfs your damage and heavily buffs the enemy's damage. The latter isn't important as when you get good you won't be getting hit and will have defenses. This means this mode is a solid test of how well you can build damage on your character, but once you get the hang of it it isn't hard to do and doesn't really rely too much on rng, not how I play it anyway.

But what makes this mode the best to farm is how rapidly you gain more soulcoins and gear on higher challenge levels. Look at the massive soulcoin jump to level 85! And it only gets higher!
What's also nice about this mode is that the higher the levels you get, the less damage nerf you receive. Makes sense right? If you lost a point every level then before long you'd be at 0 damage and it'd be impossible. Instead what keeps consistently scaling is the enemy damage but the solution is simple: don't get hit!

The tier of equipment you find is based on your equipment quality stat. You can see a breakdown of this in your stats tab while in game. Higher rank, and higher zone (meaning the further in the run you are) affect it. But there's also soulshop bonuses, and challenge bonuses as you saw in the previous screenshots. Another way to increase it is to beat the run aka loop 0 and then start a new loop.

Loops aren't explained by the game and I had to look it up. Start a regular A-rank run no challenges for easiest time, and with 500 starting corruption. Then when you reach zone 5 the manor, hit all the question marks you can. You are hoping for the mirror event. If you don't get it then restart the run and try again. With 500 or more corruption this mirror event has a new option that allows you to break the mirror. Do it, and you now have unlocked looping for all future runs in any rank and challenge. Looping makes the game much harder but increases your gained equipment quality by half the challenge equipment quality bonus. So if your challenge bonus is 20, then each loop will add another 10. It also gives a small bonus to your soulcoin gain if you beat the loop. Ultimately it's not really the most efficient to loop unless you want to have fun trying it. You get to choose new zones and pick up cards from there you couldn't before. Looping is great however when farming low rank challenges for certain gear so you can breeze through the starting zone faster than a fresh run, especially if you were lucky and got leaping boots.

Also looping doesn't seem to increase the new challenge levels unlocked when beating a challenge. So don't bother with looping, except to grab a few chests and boost your soulcoins a little, as it's more efficient to keep unlocking new levels. When you get crazy high levels like 1000+ then you can start to think about looping.

Farm B-rank Overgeared challenge until you get the Expert's Monocle, the tier doesn't matter as you will upgrade it yourself:
This is the only equipment in the game that increases your equipment quality. For a small bonus equip it before going to a chest event and after defeating a boss. It doesn't need to stay on, it just needs to be on before you trigger the gear acquisition, then you can take it off.

Also keep in mind that when a challenge offers a unique gear as a drop you are guaranteed that gear when you beat the final boss. Otherwise focus on all the chests, obviously.

The best character for this at least in the early levels and gear progression is Shopkeeper. I discuss the possibility of other characters in a bit. For now Shopkeeper is the best for a variety of reasons:
1. He gains cards much faster than any other character. This means that while he is a low player level due to a significantly nerfed experience gain, he maxes out cards much faster than another character at the same point in the run.
2. We will be banishing a ton of cards and since shopkeeper has his own shop on every level up this makes it very easy to replenish your banishes. Other characters have to go to a shop and hope they get lucky.
3. Faster access to artifacts as they sometimes appear on level up.
4. Overleveling cards is extremely easy since every level up is a shop. And if you are lucky and get corrupted core then no other character can reliably +3 all cards like shopkeeper can. Some cards are immensely powerful if +3ed. As such never +2 a card you want until you have corrupted core and that card lockable in shop.

You must play Shopkeeper with level up on manual or semi-auto (they function for the same for Shopkeeper). This is because there are bugs with the game such as if you get a level up just as a stage is ending you lose that level up. Also if you get rapid level ups in a row you lose all the ones after the first if on default level up. So keep it on manual and level up when your exp bar is low.

------------------

What about other characters? Let's discuss it.

Corrupted rog:
He's got the standard experience gain. Interesting to note for the purposes of this challenge is that he is the only character with uncapped attack speed and area. However attack speed isn't as useful as you think as it's tied to fps, per the developer himself:
https://sp.zhabite.com/app/2067920/discussions/0/597403179793054761/#c597403287691461237
So this explains why when I got corrupted rog to crazy high levels of attack speed it didn't seem to have a noticeable difference in how fast I killed things. So this uncapped feature is unimportant, but it's still important to reach the typical 1000% cap.
Next is uncapped area. This is useful if you want to mess around with Jaald's Amulet evolution and have the area cover the screen and beyond. However this is only good for mob control which is irrelevant as the real hurdle of this challenge are the bosses, and a super high area makes no difference vs bosses.
So what does that leave us with? Corrupted rog annoyingly generates corruption for every card and level you get as well as artifact. This means your corruption will quickly skyrocket. The only upside to this is that with higher corruption comes higher experience gained. This means corrupted rog has the potential to be the highest level of other characters.
Why does level matter? For gear bonuses that scale based on your level. However Rooted Cubed nerfs your gear efficacy by 90%. So if you've got something that gives you 1 point every player level, Rooted Cubed nerfs that to only 0.1 per level.
What this means is that until you get infinity gear in around the +100s your player level doesn't matter much. So you might as well use shopkeeper until you can get gear that vastly outscales the 90% nerf, so that those extra 100-200 or so player levels you get more than shopkeeper actually outperforms the higher soulcard count and other benefits of shopkeeper above.

Gunslinger is similar to corrupted rog except he has higher starting experience gain and doesn't generate corruption.
However gunslinger is limited to firing a single weapon at a time. He can have other weapons, but this is pointless once you get reload upon dashing, absolute must have cards for him. This means you are constantly firing your main weapon and never switching, so what's the point in other weapons? The only point is rune of consolidation, so it's actually a good idea to get 1 level of the other 2 weapons then banish them.
Problem with gunslinger is that he's weak and fires slowly, at least until you get the +100 infinity gear then maybe he's viable. And then I think I'd rather use knight rog because a single slow firing weapon sucks. Here's footage of me giving up on the final boss in Rooted Cubed 50 or so with gunslinger railgun because I was doing no damage to him, and after taking 15 minutes to kill the previous boss. I switch to my soulcoin gear and exit anachronistic and let the boss kill me. Except the boss took pity on my plight and killed himself instead.
https://files.catbox.moe/92elkg.mp4
RIP best bro.

Summoner sucks for this mode don't use them. Pro tip: I finally beat Cooled Steel with summoner.

What makes this game so great are the variety of builds. However only one build is viable in this end game, and the developer knows it and will be buffing at least positive defense builds in version 1.1, hopefully the others too. Here are the potential sources of damage, most of which can be combined with each other:
Converting health to power
Converting negative defense to power
Converting/utilizing positive defense to power
Defense shredding
Crit (everyone can and should utilize crit)

By far the best is health to power. This is done through the card Blood Transmutation, which reduces your health and converts it to final power by a certain percentage. Now usually final anything isn't very good, but by stacking tons of health you will be giving yourself billions of power and trillions of damage (power modifies damage, and damage modifies weapon damage).

I tried a focused defense shredding build:
https://sp.zhabite.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3496839310
Took 47 minutes to beat the final boss in Rooted Cubed lvl 59. You can see how long by the number of decayed armor stacks, each one representing a second of time. By the end I had billions of defense piercing yet it still took forever.

Negative defense sucks for power, but is ironically the best for defense and protecting your character. More on that later.

Positive defense is by far the worst even with the Lunar Inferno passive talent. There aren't really any ways to significantly boost your positive defense. Version 1.1 will change that with some amazing-sounding new artifacts.

Crit is a must have for every build, there's no reason not too. The Average card that puts your crit to 0 sucks. So too does the Armorless card suck. If you +3 Absolute Focus combined with Lucky Frost so you've always got at least 100% crit, it adds so much damage.

Health to power is currently the best because there's so many ways to massively boost your health which in turn boosts your final power. As I said before Blood Transmutation is a must have, can't do the build without it, and +3 it if at all possible.

A must have is Commoner's Guidebook artifact.
You should be getting 4 tainted cards every time you pick one. This means only banish the 2 defense-boosting tainted cards and the negative defense and health reducing tainted card from going negative defense (Discipline). Otherwise happily choose the other tainted cards in shop when they show up, and when you're at the point where you can only pick tainted cards, go for Durability and Vampire Blood Drop.
The easiest way to obtain this is from the question mark event where if you have less than 5 corruption you can choose to help the villagers. The reward the first time is always this artifact. If you don't get the event don't worry, it also shows up in shop so you will eventually get it.

Another must have is Queen's Blood from zone 5 the manor.
This is another item that scales amazingly. You want to +1 it, +3 if you got corrupted core by now. It adds so much extra power thanks to every wild card you own, and when you pick those health tainted cards you get 4 each time :).

A fantastic artifact is Stone Heart.
Massive boost to your health and as an added bonus a great boost to your damage too. Downside is you basically can't heal, so I hope you have or will get soon the card Blood Spirit. You'll want that anyway for Wander's Helmet artifact which lets you sell health for gold.

Otherwise +1/+3 every health boosting card you can. Exception: Castle; this surprisingly adds very little so don't bother. Flesh is also meh but better than Castle so I generally get it. The small corruption it gives is irrelevant, especially if you're using a piece of anti gear (more on that later). Also you don't want Broken Demon Horn as it gives less health than Flesh but with a bunch of negatives.
Heavy card is MVP, you always want to +3 it.

When you reach the final zone, zone 6, you will want to +1/+3 Void Energy asap.
This adds TONS of damage when you kill enemies combined with Soul Capacity (which you also want to +1/+3).

Until you get to about Rooted Cubed 130 you need Blood Transmutation to ramp up your damage for the end game. However past RC 130 Holy Crossguard is giving you trillions of power, and it only gets higher, right at the start of the game, and this is actually enough to carry you the whole game using Ballista (plus weapon modifiers). See my video in the section "Best weapons". I go through all my stats, emphasize I banished Blood Transmutation, and then kill the boss.

The thing is, without extremely high infinity gear, health to power makes barely an impact compared to Holy Crossguard accessories the higher the level you go in Rooted Cubed. And even when you are high enough that your gear isn't worthless, Holy Crossguard is more powerful still. So once you reach this point you can stop worrying about it building your damage, and focus on weapon modifiers instead. I got Leaping Boots early and was skipping most fights, as I've already got the power to win. Just need protection and some quality of life.

I'm in RC 2000+ and my Holy Crossguard is only infinity +31, which is plenty. It gets extremely tedious to level it up past that since the materials required get higher. Fortunately 1.1 will fix this with alternate ways to level your gear.

The best protection are things that nullify hits. Sage's leaf and Divine Shield. This is because in this mode you will get one shot until you get certain damage reduction cards.

Ironically and counter-intuitively negative defense offers far greater protections than positive defense. Negative defense is begun by getting the Zealot card. From there all sorts of neat and valuable cards are unlocked:

The best for protection from this is Divine Shield, that scales based off your faith aka your negative defense. Each stack of it protects you from a single hit and it only regenerates in a new stage. Combined with other defenses this is to protect you in case you make an error. Try to +3 it if you can, but it's not imperative.

The best for damage is Humility. It increases your damage to elites and boss enemies based on your faith. I assume boss enemies includes the end zone bosses. You want to +3 this if you can.

Decaying Armor is neat but doesn't do much since we aren't focusing on either negative defense or defense shredding. Banish this after getting a level. If you were to do such a build though this is a must have.

Unwavering Faith is nice if you've got corruption and want a higher faith stat and some extra purification, in which case +3 it. Otherwise you're playing without corruption.

Holy Skin makes it so you get almost no added damage taken from negative defense. This card isn't as important to overlevel, so you can take it 4/4 and it's fine. Later levels add very little.

The best for keeping you safe, even more than the previous section, is Sage's Leaf artifact. How it works is that as soon as anything hits you it activates nullifying that damage and making you invincible for 4 seconds. This then gives you plenty of time to enter anachronistic (where you are also invincible) and let the cooldown of Sage's Leaf go by. In anachronistic your buffs and cooldowns go by in real time. Using this you are invincible against everything. If you do get hit while it's on cooldown it takes first from Protective Field (below). When that runs out it then takes from Divine Shield, and when that runs out damage goes to your other protections. But other protections won't really do anything.

Anachronistic is the best at keeping you alive by far, which is why Anachronistic Hourglass is a must have passive talent. You can literally stand in front of bosses in complete safety for like a minute, and is a must vs the final boss. Exception: Vampire Queen. She can still hurt you in anachronistic, I assume because she can use it too. Fortunately she's easy to dodge.

Thorn passive talent gives you 0.5 seconds of invulnerability every time you take damage. It's not much but it can save you from getting multihit very quickly and give you a split second to react. There is a one shot protection mechanic, but I'm not sure how it works. You take a fatal single shot blow but don't die, unless you get hit again.

Protective Field active talent is a must have.
It absorbs a ton of damage for you and will save you. That and nearly all active talents are useless so you might as well use this.

Luna's Cross will get you killed because 0.25 second invulnerability is useless, whereas Sage's Leaf protects you for a massive 4 seconds if you messed up and got hit, giving you plenty of time to escape or enter anachronistic. Keep in mind they banish each other so wait for Sage's Leaf. Also, the game doesn't tell you this but the dev confirms, that corruption reduces how long Sage's Leaf is active.

Blade Skin is a great card.
it scales with our final power and that is exactly what we are stacking. At least +1 it, but +3 doesn't add much so don't worry about it. When you have insane amounts of final power thanks to Holy Crossguard that makes this card very valuable.

Another good card is Evasion.
This card can't normally be overleveled. Once you grab it it won't show up anymore. However if you are lucky and it shows up as a lockable card, buy it from random cards then overlevel it. This is the only way, and it means it only uses 1 bar instead of 2. But overleveling it isn't a must, so grab it when you see it.

And of course you want the resurrection artifacts when you find them. They do little if you're getting chain damaged because there's no period of invulnerability when you resurrect, but still nice to have.

This is from my own experience only.
1. Any hit you receive activates Sage's Leaf which nullifies that hit's damage and makes you invincible for 4 seconds.
2. If hit while Sage's Leaf is on cooldown it drains the talent charge of Protective Field active talent.
3. If hit when the above two aren't active it removes a stack of Divine Shield.
4. If hit with no Divine Shield then it goes to the various damage reduction methods and this is when you start actually taking health damage.

Besides the ones I mentioned previously here's a few others. Most artifacts are pretty obvious which to get and which to reroll. Ones like Beef Statue, Saint's Shinbone, and Saint's Pelvis are obviously useless for every build and should always be rerolled. However if you see them in the shop and have the spare currency, buy them so they won't appear in the pool anymore particularly from chests. Similar with the 3 Gilgamesh cards.

Pork Statue is useless.

Chicken Statue is nice when you want health bonus.

Unstable Core sucks. Your dash recharges insanely slowly and the damage bonus is currently bugged and doesn't work.
https://files.catbox.moe/9p1j6m.mp4
Even if it did work, I still don't think it's worth it for this challenge as you need anachronistic in order to survive.

Stone Heart get every time. Huge boost to health and good boost to damage. Blood Spirit card invalidates its negatives.

Wander's Helmet is fantastic if found early as it ensures you never run out of money. Blood Spirit card is a must have in conjunction.

We will be banishing a lot of cards so Town Hall Registry is great.

Old Coin is nice if found in the middle of the run when you should be rich or if you've already got Wander's Helmet. Otherwise being broke isn't fun, as I'm pretty sure it also nerfs the gold gain on Shopkeeper level up.

I could see Molten Core being good if you want to play low health with no regen or Blood Spirit, using Wander's Helmet to keep your health low. However with Commoner's Guidebook you will have health regen.

Leaping boots are great. If found early I start skipping some stages in the third zone, and fifth zone onwards I'm beelining the boss as I should be fully powered up.

Coward's Sapphire is nice to speed stages along and will let you get more kills if you're fast, although if killing enemies is hard then your build probably can't deal with the boss.

Mythril compass is nice to make stages faster.

Collection Book increases your damage by 1% for each unique soulcard you have (not levels in the soulcard). Remember that damage comes after power and is influenced by final power stat. So it's very easy to get over 100% damage increase with this artifact. A solid strategy is to take 1 level in every card that doesn't harm your build to benefit this artifact, then banish the card to benefit Town Hall Registry.

Glass Sword is amazing when you are at RC 130 and higher. You no longer need to use health to power, so the double damage is more than worth the health loss.

Portal Shard should theoretically let your projectiles hit a boss multiple times. But I can't see my projectiles so I don't know if it's working. I grab it anyway. Interestingly it benefits enemies, namely the zone 1 boss.

Until you are able to start farming high level infinity gear, your gear isn't super important. But since this is a health to power build, prioritize those effects that add base health and max health multiplier per level. With the 90% nerf it doesn't add much, but it's still something.

There's an extremely valuable misc gear slot that allows you to start with a specific weapon. Here's where to farm them:
It only has weapons for the standard rog archetype, so no gunslinger or summoner weaps. You will just have to farm over and over. I've done it for hours and still don't quite have all the weapons. Use the 2 slots to start with 2 weapons of your choice for the evolutions you want. what's great is that after you load the first map you can then switch off them and keep your weapons. This is why loadouts are so handy.

Next you will want 2 of these:
At first glance it might seem insignificant, but remember that at higher challenge levels of Rooted Cubed you're getting hundreds of millions of bonus soulcoins. combined with a ZZZ tier of this item giving 1.50 final power per each of those, means you've got hundreds of millions of power right at the start of the game! And you will only get stronger as you progress in levels. This makes the early game a piece of cake.

Unfortunately the 2 misc slots don't have items that boost your health, so the above item is the MVP for those slots. It will eventually get outperformed by Blood Transmutation health stacking, but there's nothing better to put there until...

When you beat the final boss you want to quickly switch to your soulcoin boosting gear loadout. The 90% equipment efficacy nerf doesn't apply to soulcoin modifiers! This consists of two rings and helmet. The rings you need the mythical primary modifier of increased enemy count so you've got 2 positive slots to put the highest two tiers of soulcoin gain. You want these 3 items to be max tier and they will give you an insane amount of coins.
--------------------------------------
You should be using anti gear with minus corruption per player level (see that section) and playing with some starting corruption, and Holy Crossguard. The rest of your gear doesn't matter, but you can throw some health boosting and attack speed boosting stats per player level.

Anti gear is something not even hinted about in game and is unintuitively obtained. I'm not sure how the mechanics work, something about doing a challenge with the lowest possible equipment quality boost and getting lucky that the drop system gives a tier lower than F aka anti gear. Here is the Reddit thread where a guy gives a fantastic guide and video:
https://www.reddit.com/r/RogueGenesia/comments/1l15eyy/guide_how_to_get_antigear/
I'm copying the text here in case something happens to the thread:
How to get Anti-gear.
-Seed 591667136 [copy and paste]
-Refund all 3 quality gains from the Soul Shop (tiers C, B, A. Search for the word quality.)
-Refund all Soul-Coin shop bonuses. (tiers F, E, D, A, S.)
-Don't wear gear that increases gear quality, nor soul-coin gain.
-0 corruption on the slider.
-Quick game off.
-F-tier Single Armed challenge.
-Leveling set to Manual.
-Set gear auto-dismantle ON. You don't want to be gaining a bunch of junk gear.
-First chest on the right to get boot, jump to chests, quit.

---------------------

Anti gear is unique in that most stats are reversed. Positives become negatives, and negatives become positives. Anti gear is also leveled purely through coins and needs no materials.

Unfortunately the only use I can see for this is to have gear with no requirements that reduce your corruption per player level. Great for Blood Handed challenge, but only has a small impact on Blood Bath challenge. This effect is found on 3 equipment slots: helmet, leggings, and boots. So grind until you get at least those. Preferably every item just cause. I got every item except light armor and I don't see anything useful it would bring so I can't be bothered to keep grinding it.

So since gear doesn't matter much in this challenge until super high levels, you can have one of these anti gear pieces on for the corruption reduction so when you get Flesh or maybe some other card you get no corruption and the card pool doesn't get more items you don't want.

---------------------

Another strategy is when you get high challenge levels so that Holy Crossguard is giving insane starting power, is to start the run with some corruption. The Holy Crossguards means you've got the power to counter this starting corruption with ease. And this starting corruption gives significantly more gear quality than normal thanks to the challenge level. Then you wear those 3 corruption reducing items that look like this:
So that even nerfed by 90% that's still 2.7 corruption reduction per level from the combined 3 pieces at this tier. Combined with purification efforts and +3ing Light spirit means by the time you reach the final boss the corruption is doing very little for it. And once it spawns you can switch off this anti gear back to your health boosting gear because the boss has already spawned so it can't benefit from changes in corruption.

At higher gear tiers you will be able to completely remove all corruption with this anti gear and so get a free boost to gear quality find.

The best weapon and the one you can't do without is Ballista.

There's something about Ballista that causes it it to slowly ramp up damage against enemies and bosses. Here it is against some enemies with it as the only weapon:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXmqE_OfKNI
This was Rooted Cubed 139 Loop 1 (so after beating zone 6).
Note how Ballista is sadly terrible at crowd control, but something unknown about it makes it ramp up damage. This makes it the best boss killer.
Here is me killing the zone 6 boss in Rooted Cubed 151, again with Ballista as my only weapon:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0dtIjXy47M
I go through all the stat tabs for you at the beginning so you can see what I did.

As another example, here's me beating the final boss Rooted Cubed 67, but I didn't know it was Ballista doing the boss killing.
https://files.catbox.moe/spf8yx.mp4

--------------------

For crowd control I recommend Explosive Bow. You can also use Artificer's Katan as a third weapon, but it's not necessary. I would banish all other weapons for performance reasons as they can lag the game even when disabled.

Weapon evolutions are always +1 or +3ed. Never overlevel an unevolved weapon, obviously no point. All this is from the perspective of boss killers, because if it can kill the boss it can kill mobs.

I'm more than happy to accept input! Testing weapons in this mode can be tricky.

----------------------

I will continue to test and play around and update this section as I test the weapons, always having at least Ballista and Explosive Bow and then seeing how other weapons compare to it.

Silph's Blade sucks and always performed worse than Artificer's Katana. I shop tricked and got them both a couple times to test.

Interdimensional Rose is purely defensive, but not terribly helpful if you follow my previous defense section. So I always skip it now.

Singularity Gland is useless, plain and simple. Looks cool though.

Jaald's Amulet is a fun weapon and fine for crowd control in the early game, though it still falls behind Ballista and Explosive Bow.

Fuma Shuriken never performed well for me, even against crowds.

Arcanist's Staff is terrible, and the bonus damage to magic tagged weapons is negligible.

Staff of Storms was awful.

Sola's Lance did nothing.

Sun Sword sucked.

Angelic Prism was great in the first 2 zones, started to slow in zone 3, then couldn't kill anything with it in zone 4. Zone 5 and beyond it lags the game even when disabled.

As I said before Protective talent is really the only choice as your active talent. Remember to activate it, and it absorbs damage and will save you often. Remember that you must activate it every time you resume a run. Don't get yourself killed because you forgot.

1. Anachronistic Hourglass is a must have, greatly increasing how long you can be in anachronistic mode.

2. Thorn. Half a second of invulnerability when you get hit isn't much but it can help.

3. Soul Expansion is great and gives so many free levels. If you're patient you can enter anachronistic and let it run its full 120 seconds. I never bother and it's not needed.

4. Multishot is nice, giving a projectile every 20 levels. It's not much for Shopkeeper who is low level but I don't know anything better.

5. Shaman staff slightly buffs magic tagged weapons like Explosive Bow.

6. Weapon Specialist is highly recommended because you need weapon modifiers asap after you've evolved your weapons. This passive talent slightly reduces drop rate for weapons, and greatly increases it for weapon modifiers. Weapon modifiers makes the game a breeze, see the section "RC greater than 130: soulcards" for an example of it in action and what you can expect. It also lets you put weapon modifiers on a third weapon which is great if you're using a third weapon (not necessary though). And finally Blood Spirit card is highly valuable to keep your health maxed if you get Wanderer's Helmet artifact, and it's real hard to find otherwise.

Other people's thoughts on the best passive talents are welcome!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTHUZSHPMDA
Rooted Cubed 652 loop 0.
Watch as I face the final boss first with a projectile cap of 400, with 2 weapons each having over 60 projectiles per shot and shooting very fast. I'm doing barely any damage to the boss.
Then I restart the fight and drop the projectile cap to the minimum, 50. See how I very quickly take off the first quarter of health.
The developer confirms that a lower projectile cap does indeed cap the number of actual projectiles you can fire, and the missing projectiles you would fire instead have their damage transferred to the other projectiles.
https://sp.zhabite.com/app/2067920/discussions/0/597403944640107511/#c597403944640124531
I'm not sure exactly how this means more dps, but as you can see it does. If however you're playing with weapons with low projectiles like Gunslinger in general and especially with Railgun, I doubt this would make a difference.
All my other videos, and indeed 99% of my gameplay, have been with the 50 projectile cap.

They add so much damage and are very worth it.

Get all the weapon modifiers you can and +1 them.
Go to Behemoth Graveyard for Gigantification card. It increases the weapon's damage based on its projectile size. Because of this we won't get anything that reduces it, including Split; the small loss in projectiles is worth it I think, as we get plenty of projectiles elsewhere. And since we no longer need Blood Transmutation, banish Heavy.

Thermodynamic boosts damage based on projectile speed, so grab all those too. Conundrum: Quick increases speed but reduces size. Size is harder to boost, and by banishing Quick we can still get high numbers for both so that's what I do.

Accelerator increases projectile speed every time it hits an enemy, but initial speed is 70%. I have no idea how that is calculated compared to your projectile speed number. Also no idea if it can get increases from hitting the same enemy multiple times, like through the Portal artifact. Well I get it and it seems to work out ok.

Rune of Consolidation goes on Ballista of course.

Fire Spirit and Thunder Spirit are always slightly behind Ballista in terms of damage at the end screen, so make sure you +1/+3 them.

The rest of the weapon modifiers are straight forward. I banish Rune of Necromancy though as it doesn't do anything for us as we kill so quickly.

Here's what your gameplay should roughly look like by the time you get to the zone 2 boss in RC 295, thanks to getting all the weapon modifiers to +1. Later levels of RC you will kill the bosses even faster.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XC_s4zin2hE

In no particular order:
Rune of Consolidation (Ballista)
Weapon Aura
Gigantification (Behemoth Graveyard)
Blood Spirit (keeps you topped up, don't bother overleveling)
Fractal (nice to overlevel, but is difficult to so don't worry about it)
Thermodynamic
Thunder Spirit
Rune of Luck
Divine Smite
Concentration
Rune of Alacrity
Rune of Heaviness
Fire Spirit
Ice spirit (only need for Lucky Frost, useless otherwise, banish after the first level)
Accelerator (Not sure how beneficial this is, probably lowest priority)

Once your run has started focus on building your weapons and evolving them. Don't forget crit and working towards Divine Smite. Always go Dawn Forest so you can get at least one level in Clover for Lucky Frost. Vine also in Dawn Forest is nice because it trivializes the 4th zone boss because it causes his hands to get permanently stuck.

Go Behemoth Graveyard for Dense Blood. Don't bother with any of the other unique cards in this area. Ember Dune's best offer is Ankh which halves damage from projectiles, but you would take so much damage this doesn't matter.

Banish things that boost defense piercing/shredding, except we want Penetration so our projectiles can go through more enemies. Banish things that boost your power, as what they offer does not benefit the final power we are getting from Blood Transmutation. Banish defense boosting cards. Feel free to get slippery Skin though, damage mitigation is nice although not really necessary. Banish cards that boost projectile size. Projectile duration is fine, though banish Subsonic. We want projectile speed for Thermodynamic so Hypersonic is a great card to +3.

Banish all talent cards except Capacity and Soul Capacity. They work great with Void Energy for a massive damage boost in the final zone.

Keep all tainted cards but banish (although buy them [excluding Discipline] if they popup in the shop before you can banish them) the following:
Primordial's Shard
Worm's Plate
Stone Skin
Discipline
Rust

Dash and Dash cooldown are nice. Spike Boots are great. Banish Frenzy and Marathon unless you really want them. Oil is amazing if you can +3. At Oil level 4 you can exit anachronistic from the final boss, Sage's Leaf will protect you, and have all your dashes restored in a couple seconds then reenter anachronist and laugh at the boss.

Exp boosting cards are nice, especially if you can +3 them.

You want to +3 the projectile boosting cards. Massive hit to attack speed though, so be sure to get those cards as well, of which the cards that increase attack speed at the cost of defense or power are fantastic. Banish the cards that reduce projectiles.

At this point in farming, Holy Crossguard adds so much power that no other method can hope to contribute. Thus we don't care about anything that produces power and only that which boosts damage. Remember that damage is calculated from power and has it's own modifiers, namely from artifacts.

Our main focus will be weapon evolutions and getting them to +1, then weapon modifiers, then defense, then quality of life. Get what you can when you can, but prioritize in that order.

As discussed previously, negative defense thanks to Zealot is the best way to go. Read that section. I make sure to overlevel Lunatic for the massive boost in faith (negative defense) which boosts Divine Shield and Humility.

These are things like dash charges, exp bonuses (including Wisdom of the Forgotten), crit for Divine Smite, and health boosts.

Collection Book artifact increases our damage by 1% for each unique soulcard we own. Therefore I always get at least 1 level in each soulcard that doesn't harm my build, then banish it (which benefits Town Hall Registry artifact). Banish everything after a single level if it doesn't directly aid your build, including health cards (I +1 Queen's Blood though because it's so amazing). You get plenty of health from the tainted cards after you max Cardio. I always banish defense cards without ever taking them as they interfere with our negative defense. This allows you to get to the build-defining cards faster, and only Shopkeeper can pull this off since he can replenish banish so often.

Continuing on from "RC >130: soulcards"...

Always go to Dawn Forest to get Clover to synergize it into Lucky Frost. Vine is also nice because it trivializes the fourth boss (his hands get permanently stuck on it).

I avoid Zealot for the time being so as to not dilute the card pool. I'm focusing on levelling my weapons and then levelling the evolutions. Soon after that you start getting weapon modifiers and need to focus on them.

Next is Behemoth Graveyard to get Gigantification, and Wisdom of the Forgotten (+1 it if you can, and preferably after you got Cursed Book and Bookworm since they get banished).

Starting zone 3 you should be in solid shape with Ballista and Explosive Bow +1, and all weapon modifiers +1. You can continue levelling up and handling all that. It's at this point I start avoiding battle missions if I've gotten Leaping Boots, and I hardline it to the end game. Each new zone I handle the new cards it introduces and get what I want. Continue going for the most chests you can, looking for the needed artifacts of Sage's Leaf, Collection Book, and Glass Sword. Corrupted Core is great but you probably won't get it in loop 0, and can easily win without it.

After beating the final boss I loop and do a couple zones grabbing more chests. I usually quit by the third zone or before.

Speedrun strats. Similar to the previous section, but with some changes.

Once you get to RC 1000 and beyond Holy Crossguard is literally all the damage you need, plus the weapon modifiers. I banish every card that doesn't directly benefit my build. My build focuses on weapons, weapon modifiers, projectile size, projectile speed (unless it reduces projectile size), crit (Divine Smite and Lucky Frost), negative defense (Divine Shield and Humility), attack speed (+1 the two Epic cards), and dash (mainly Oil). No need for the slight damage boost from Collection Book artifact or any other damage boosts except from weapon modifiers. Would rather banish the cards I don't want as it's faster.

Still always +1 weapon evolutions and modifiers. Near the end game when overlevel shows up in the shop I +2 my weapons. I actually DON'T want Corrupted Core, because it dilutes the card pool and slows you down. I need over 1500 card levels so I can equip my soulcoin rings by the endgame, so I need a lot of tainted cards. The higher the tier of gear the higher the card level requirement, and misc slot items don't have powerful enough negatives like helmet does.

Ideally I +1 Wisdom of the Forgotten, +2 it if I get the overlevel before I exit zone 2.

I almost always +1 projectile increases (banish Split) although Clumsy and Compromise aren't imperative and aren't worth wasting the rerolls. +1ing Overloaded is top priority. And +1 projectile speed increases especially Hypersonic (banish Quick). So wait for them to eventually show up in the shop.

If I get Leaping Boots early, I'm doing the early bosses from zone 2 onwards.

When banish replenishment shows up in your level up shop, use some rerolls to banish everything you can and drain your uses, then buy the replenishment. I can have my soulcards be nothing but tainted before I face the zone 3 boss. Then it's an easy speedrun unless Leaping Boots still elude you.

You want Fighter's Ruby artifact to remove time requirements, because you can kill them so fast at this point, and Mythril Compass to reduce the requirements.

https://sp.zhabite.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3505261001

------------------

When you're at RC 2000+, Holy Crossguard is giving so much damage you can pretty much use whatever weapon you want.

You should have looping unlocked. If not, ctrl+F "looping" and read how.

You get more exp if you select loop rather than "next stage" aka end the game (this option given after beating the final boss). So you might as well select loop, pick a map, and see if there are any chests nearby. You also should've acquired leaping boots by now, so why not? Remember that looping gives half the equipment quality of the challenge level, so it's a nice way to get some extra tiers of items.

When you're finished, start a stage, switch to your soulcoin gear, and end the game as this also gives a slight boost to soulcoins.