Relics are where an Emberward run stops being about damage numbers and starts being about what your maze can do that it could not do before. Talents are the permanent layer underneath them. This page covers both: how the relic pools are organised, which picks earn their slot, and how talents should be spent.
How relics are organised
Relics are sorted by damage identity. Every element has its own pool, and there is a general pool that any run can draw from:
| Pool | Examples from the 1.0 relic list |
|---|---|
| Fire | Flamekeeper's Guard, Ember Guardian, Lava Bucket, Frostfire |
| Ice | Flash Freeze Device, Permafrost Gem, Black Ice Shard, Ice Storm |
| Electric | Lightning Conductor, Energy Storage System, Balanced Circuit |
| Poison | Volatile Poison, Resonant Poison, Amplify Poison, Frost Venom |
| Arcane | Focus Prism, Mystic Gauntlet, Prophet's Crystal Ball, Elemental Blueprint |
| Economy and tempo | Wealth Vault, Golden Roulette, Microtransactions, Time Saving Device, Craftsman's Luck Charm |
| Structural | Aggressive Construction, Explosive Demolition, Vengeance Statue, Voodoo Doll |
| Tower-specific | Scrap Master's Note, Scrap Master's Wrench, Scrap Master's Boots |
| Scaling | Tome of Endless, Academy Certificate, Adventurers Legacy, Debugging Encyclopedia, Giant Lizard Fang |
The point of the table is the last two rows. A relic that names a tower family or names endless mode is worth more than its rarity suggests, because it multiplies something you have already committed to instead of adding a new thing to manage.
The Scrap Master set, as a worked example
The three Scrap Master relics are the clearest case of tower-specific design in the game:
- Scrap Master's Note raises a Scrap Tower's ammo by 50%, from 30 shots to 45.
- Scrap Master's Wrench changes what happens when a Scrap Tower is destroyed — which matters, because a Scrap Tower that runs out of ammo is destroyed by default.
- Scrap Master's Boots completes the set.
Taking one is a small buff. Taking all three turns a disposable tempo tower into a plan. That pattern — relics combining with a tower family rather than with a stat — is what the strongest builds are built on.
Element pacts and the altar
Heroic difficulty adds the altar: you can make a pact with an element, and the Oathkeeper achievement asks you to hold pacts with every element at the same time and still finish the run. That tells you the intended ceiling of relic play — pacts are powerful enough that holding all of them at once is an achievement in itself, and the risk is presumably proportionate.
Talent priority
Talents are permanent, bought with EXP, and they do not reset between runs. The order that pays off in the 1.0 build:
- Economy first. Flame generation and starting resources compound across every later wave of every later run.
- Maze tools second. Anything that makes blocks cheaper, more flexible or easier to place is buying you the core mechanic.
- One element's damage third. Commit to Fire or Poison early; spreading points across three elements gives you three mediocre halves.
- Relic access fourth. Relic slots and relic quality are where mid-run power spikes come from.
- Character synergy last. Synergy talents only pay off once you have settled on a main character — see the characters guide.
There is one exception to "economy first": if you are chasing Mad Genius (a Heroic Void Depths clear without using any talents), the talent tree is not a progression path for that run at all — budget a separate attempt for it.
Talents versus endless mode
Endless runs invert the normal order. In a normal region run you are spending toward a finish line; in endless mode there is no finish line, so economy talents stop being "investment" and become survival. The relics that matter shift too: Tome of Endless is named for the mode, and any relic that scales rather than adding a flat amount is worth more than its usual tier once waves stop ending.