Equipment inRogue Genesiais an important but underexplained mechanic. Its easy to think most of a character’s power comes from the soul cards you collect during a run or the upgrades found in the soul shop. The random equipment you find in chests can be easily forgotten in the mix or checked only at the start of a run.

Making the most of the equipment system becomes more important as you approach the higher level worlds and challenges. Some runs will disable your other upgrades, or require you to squeeze the most out of all the systems at once. Here’s how equipment works and the best ways to use it.

Multiple items in Rogue genesia have their effects disabled by level requirements.

How Equipment Levels Work

All gear you find will have asoul level below the stats it provides.This differs from the character level andchecks for all sources of soul cardsincluding stage rewards, level ups, and shops. Positive benefits on an item increase the soul level while negative enchantments lower the soul level. If an item’s level is above your characters, its benefits won’t activate and will be shown in red on the equipment screen.

On top of setting your equipment at the start of a run, you’re also able tochange gear at any time from the pause menu. Any stat boosts from items you don’t meet the level requirement for are highlighted in red.

A player in rogue genesia loots an assortment of armour pieces and crafting materials.

This system means that you’re encouraged to use different equipment at the start and end of a run. You can start a run with equipment that gives large flat boosts alongside modifiers to keep them active at level one. Once you’ve made some progress you’ll want to swap to a second set of equipment that either complements a specific playstyle or has all-around high modifiers.

How To Learn New Enchantments

Whenever you recycle an item you learn how to apply its enchantments to future equipment of the same type. Since the enchantments are specific to the item type you’ll need to recycle a large pool of gear to make the best possible equipment.

The easiest way to find multiple of the same equipment piece is in Rog mode challenges, after applying a corruption modifier to the start of the run. The challenge mode will ensure that only the named item will appear in chests, while the corruption levels grant an increase in the level and rarity of the gear.

A loadout of level zero items in Rogue Genesia, focused on power and gold gain.

Many challenge mode items also have starting modifiers that you can’t craft yourself.

This gives multiple stat multipliers and has no level requirement.

A legendary glove is crafted in rogue genesia that multiplies the wearers attack speed and power.

Nobleslayer’s Gloves

Snuffhead’s Favourite

Thismultiplies damage versus elites and bossesand can be swapped out when not in an elite or boss level.

Knight Pendant

Dual Wielding

The pendant lets youstart the game with a specific weapon. You can equip several to have a ready-made set for evolution.

Element Stones

Stones

Each stone modifies thedrop rates for its own elementand gives a useful stat modifier with no level requirement.

Expert’s Monocle

Overgeared

Thisraises the quality of all equipment you findbut needs to you complete a challenge relying largely on equipped gear for power.

How To Craft Starting Gear

The items you want equipped at the start of a run are those that give large static boosts and have penalties bringing them as close to level zero as possible.

For positive modifiers, there are a few areas that all characters want to perform well at from level one.

A player in rogue genesia uses a bunch of area modifiers to increase the size of a singularity.

How To Craft High Level Gear

High-level items are expensive to make. You’ll need to use lots of materials and soul coins to upgrade them, especially if you don’t have an existing high-level item to use as a base.

You’ll often be neglecting the negative modifiers on any gear you intend to wear past level 100, but there are still a few you might take a look at:

For positive benefits, you’ve got a wider range of useful options than were present at the start of a run.

How To Use Loadouts

The game lets you save several loadouts and swap between them on the fly. The simple use for this is to set up two loadouts with the low and high-level gear we crafted already but you also interact more deeply with the system in you want to push the game’s limitations.

Application

Purification/Corruption

Lots of purification cards only appear when you have a certain amount of corruption. If you want to use a Light Soul for crafting the Sun Sword, Arcanic Lance or Sola’s Lanceyou need to bump your corruption over 50.

Drop Rates

The various elemental stonesincrease the drop rate of tagged cards. This is especially true when trying different avatars: TheRogue has a reduced chance of looting fire cardsbut you can offset this with a stone and still gain their bonuses to wind elemental cards.

You might also want toincrease the drop rate of void cards until you have an upgraded void spiritand then you want to avoid further drops of that type.

Starting Gear

You can start the first level withtwo Knight’s Pendants equipped to gain their starting weapons, plus a Trainer’s Glove to begin with your weapon upgraded. Once you’re actually in a game you can swap these out for other gear.

Stat Requirements

Some cards will only appear if you meet certain stat requirements that are harmful in the long term. TheEvasion card only drops to players with negative defence, but is useful on tank builds.

Weapon Groups

You canmake different loadouts for weapon groupsbased on their tags, such as area weapons, critical weapons, or weapons with high knockback.

Challenge Modes

Some challenge modes make use of equipment in new ways. A good example is theStoned challenge, which starts the player at level 95but with no cards.