Enter the Gungeon: Hidden Stats

Hidden Stats

There are a number of stats and modifiers in the game that are rather poorly conveyed to the player. Even intermediate players are sometimes unaware of the existance of stats like Coolness, so to make things clearer I will try and go into as much detail as possible for the benefit of everyone. Hopefully you’ll know exactly what these hidden stats are, how they effect the game and how you can bend them to your benefit.

Coolness

We touched upon this slightly in the Pickups section, coolness controls for three things, drop rates for pickups after clearing a room, the likelihood for chests to have fuses and recharge rates for active items. It doesn’t effect chest quality or item quality in shops, sadly.

Coolness is very useful to increase, higher coolness means more drops, things like keys and health will be more common. It also means that active items can be used much more liberally. Each point of coolness will reduce active item cooldown by 5% (up to a max of 50%), reduce the likelihood of a chest fuse by 2.5% and increase room drops. Room drops work on a system where your chance for the next room you clear to have a drop will increase with every consecutive room that you clear that drops nothing, when something does drop the system resets back to the base chance. Coolness causes the base chance of something to drop to be higher and for the increase in that chance with every room that drops nothing to be higher too.

Curse and Coolness work in opposition to each other so you will need to 2 points of coolness to cancel out 1 point of curse when it comes to controlling chest fuses, and curse will also reduce the rate at which non-ammo items drop from the room clear system. As such higher coolness will help overcome some of the problems of high curse runs.

The player’s coolness is entirely based on holding specific items and guns and a few item synergies. The item’s description will often hint at whether it will increase coolness, ie Shade’s Revolver says ‘Anyone who uses this handgun would look pretty cool.’ which is hint for the +2 coolness that this gun carries. The Cigarettes active will increase coolness every time it’s activated at the cost of damaging the player while the Sixth Chamber will increase coolness with curse and remove curse’s usual depression of drop rates. The Vorpal Gun will also be more likely to fire it’s special bullet as coolness increases. There is no in game counter or effect to tell you how much coolness you have at any one time or whether you gained it from picking something up, but there is no way to decrease coolness beyond the effects of curse.

The Following items, guns and synergies all increase Coolness by the stated amounts:

• Old Goldie +1
• Heart of Ice +1
• Magic Sweet +1
• Cigarettes, +1 per use
• Iron Coin +2
• Orange +2
• Rad Gun +2
• Sunglasses +2
• Sixth Chamber +2 with each point of Curse
• Ballot +3
• Ice Cube +3
• Shade’s Revolver +3
• Box, Ration and SAA synergy +3

Magnificence

Magnificence is very well hidden stat that controls the amount of high tier items you will receive over the course of a run. In short it restricts the spawning of Red and Black tier chests and items if you’ve already picked them up. Every time you pick up a Red or Black tier item the magnificence counter will increase by one (Note: dropping and picking up the item again does not increase magnificence again, but dropping the item will not reduce magnificence either), decreasing the likelihood for high tier items to drop from bosses, spawn in shops etc.

Chest Magnificence is also a factor, each high tier chest spawned in a normal chest room will increase Chest Magnificence and reduce the likelihood of more high tier chests spawning in the future. This also effects chests that drop as part of the room drop system and still applies even if you don’t open the high tier chest in question. However if you do open the chest in question than Chest Magnificence drops by one point, so you have even more incentive to open such chests so you can you increase the chances of high quality items dropping later. Magnificence rises very rapidly and already reduces the chance of high tier items spawning by more than 95% with only two points of magnificence.

Magnificence does not effect Winchester or his rewards, and Red and Black chests can be forced to spawn regardless with the 7 leaf clover. The Red chest item Spice also subverts the usual mechanics, showing up everywhere with repeated use regardless of magnificence.

Curiously, in spite of magnificence chest quality also tends to increase as the you go through the floors, so by the time you get to the Forge chests tend to be almost exclusively Green. The Lament Configurum will increase Magnificence in spite of being a Green chest item (likely because it can provide the player a lot of higher tier items), while the Heart of Ice and generic Red Chest health upgrades like the Heart Holster will not increase Magnificence.

Like Coolness there is no way to keep track of magnificence in-game.

Curse

Curse is better communicated to the player than the above stats but still has a lot of opaqueness in terms of the ways in which it effects the game. I will only give a brief overview here since I want to go into much more detail in the sections dedicated to it and cursed runs.

Curse is gained from a wide variety of ways, primarily item and gun pickups, and its main effect is in creating ‘Jammed’ enemies, which look like regular enemies but are covered in a red, shadowy aura. Jammed enemies move faster, shoot faster, will do a full heart of damage unlike regular enemies and have up to three times more health. As mentioned, it also depresses the rate at which non-ammo pickups drop from room clears, in opposition to coolness and makes Mimics and fuses more likely to appear. High Curse is dangerous and will call in a powerful, invincible enemy called the Lord of the Jammed if you let it get out of control, but there are certain benefits too, chiefly the fact that enemies drop more money. Through the rest of the guide I will often mentioned cursed runs, which are runs where you start off with the highest curse you can have without calling in the Lord of the Jammed. There is a lot more to talk about in this subject, so skip to the ‘Curse’ and ‘Cursed Runs’ segments if you want more details.