For the last month I’ve been trying to beat the game with 6 challenges enabled. Yesterday I finally did it, and I’m so happy, I even decided to (re)create Reddit account to brag about it, and then I learned the community has moved here, so I decided to brag here as well 😀

Here’s the list of challenges I decided to enable

Hostile Champions & Badder bosses — is an easy choice. Once you beat the game with every class, having bosses or monsters slightly tougher doesn’t even require adjustments to your strategy.

Faith Is My Armor and Forbidden Runes — OTOH, is an easy choice to not enable. All my successful runs so far implied heavily upgraded plate armor, and I haven’t figured, how to beat the game without that.

Pharmacophobia — would be possible without the Barren Land. But among the two, Barren Land seems easier.

Swarm Intelligence — adds a lot of action and challenge, but in a fun way.

Finally the last two: Into Darkness — that turned out much harder than I expected, but I realized, that having Eye of Newt would basically negate it, and so beating the game would become a matter of getting the right trinket. Similarly, On diet — appeared much harder, than I expected. More so, since Chalice of blood doesn’t work while the hero is starving. But I figured, that Warlock’s Soul Eater ability may make the run easier.

So my strategy was this:

1. Get the Eye of Newt
2. Beat Tengu
3. Become Warlock
4. Max out Soul Eater

Reaching Tengu was, perhaps, the hardest part of the game. There I learned two thing

1. Play it safe. Once you’ve got the right initial setup, do not risk over saving an extra healing potion
2. You have to use some upgrade scrolls early in the game. Normally, I saved all my upgrade scrolls to the later stages of the game, surviving mostly on altar rooms and other sources of cursed, but likely, upgraded, items. But Hostile Champions with Swarm Intelligence can really give you a hard time. And being killed over a saved potion while carrying a high-tier armor of thorns or a grim weapon with the right trinket in you bag was ugh…

After becoming Warlock the game becomes much easier. Just a reminder, Warlock has a chance to mark a soul by zaping a wand. If Warlock successfully marks a soul, hitting it with a physical weapon heals Warlock and can trigger other useful effects. The most important one is the Soul Eater. It gives satiety when a marked soul is killed. Additionally, on-eat effects can be triggered (meaning wands recharging and increased damage).

Wands recharging was another important point of my strategy, because sometimes it takes over a dozen of zaps to mark a soul. If you run out of charges, you run out of marked souls — and thus no healing and no food. That’s why an armor of potential is extremely important. In a heated battle my wands would basically never reach zero charges. On later stages of the game, I would return to an upper level, just to heal and feed on newly spawned enemies.

Once again: Eye of Newt is an absolute killer. Once maxed out, it helps discovering hidden rooms, avoiding dangerous enemies, intercepting the easy ones… It really played a key role in the success.

Finally, for the last stage I decided to bring the crown back to the Rat King. Ability to turn enemies into rats was extremely helpful against Evil Eyes. Guess what happens when you turn an Evil Eye hovering over a chasm into a Rat 😀 It falls down — effectively an instant kill. The most important upgrade here was the cost of charge, followed by permanent Ratmogrification. Another helpful item for dealing with Evil Eyes was a Wand of Transfusion. As soon as Evil Eye prepares to hit with its devastating deathgaze, zapping it with the Wand of Transfusion and stepping to the side from the line of attack was a certain way to dodge the attack.

Like in every other run, I made sure to have as many Scrolls of Mind Mapping as I can get for the last stage of the game (it rarely was more than 4, though, and only during this game I’ve got more thanks to the Ring of luck).

Alchemly helped a lot on all stages. Turning seeds into potions was super helpful. Whenever possible I was brewing Elixir of Might (increases max health on top of Potion of Strength). Caustic potion was helpful against Tengu or any other boss. Elixir of Honeyed Healing sometimes saves the day before you grow into Warlock.

But Alchemy was absolutely necessary for the last boss. After a couple of failed attempts to beat the final boss I learned to brew

• Elixir of Dragon’s Blood (to gain fire immunity against Fire Fist)
• Potion of Cleansing (against Rust Fist IIRC)
• Scroll of Anti-Magic (against that dark and that light fists, I forgot the names)
• Scroll of Challenge (generally helpful)

With all these in my backpack I believe I had to use only one potion of healing during the entire final boss fight. Without those items I was quickly running out of healing potions.

Of course to brew all these, I had to get energy somewhere. I rarely use Scroll of Sleep, so all of them wen’t into energy. Scrolls of Recharging are useless once you’ve got an armor of Potential. I almost never use Paralytic Potions (sometimes I brew them into the potion that gives additional armor). Just before the fight, when I know, I have my weapon, armor, rings and everything, I sacrificed all my stashed Scrolls of Identity, Scrolls of Remove Curse, etc…

PixelDungeon is an amazing game. I think, the last time I had to think so hard trying to beat a game was when I played either Baldur’s Gate or Icewind Dale. I know, it’s a whole different genre, but in terms of fun they are on the same level for me. An absolute classic!