Any actual tips for tainted cain?

[Piresphant]

Tainted cain is one of the few characters I have left to complete. I can't have fun with him. Do you guys have any actual tips (not the calculator or the mod)? Tips like you have for jacob and esau (you can pick up 2 items in treasure room on alt paths). I can only find guides before the patch

[kone]

With Tainted Cain it helps being aware of the quality of your bag.

A bag full of red hearts, pennies, bombs and keys will give you a range of poor items. However this means that you could shuffle around basic contents and find which recipes are worth repeating. Items like familiars for Conjoined, health-ups and items that give more resources like Old Bandage and Piggy Bank. Spend the first few floors getting to know the 'trash' recipes.

The key to getting the good items, like quality 2-4 range items is to use better consumables. Pickups like special hearts, better coins, golden pickups, lucky pennies and charged keys will near guarantee you quality 2 items like Fruit Cake, Tech 2 and syringes. Keep filling the bag with more of this and you'll get better and better items.

How to find these items? The trick is to separate 'trash' with the good stuff for later. Find out the best of the 'trash' experimenting with recipes en masse and leave soul hearts and nickels for later quality crafting. Mix the good with the bad and you'll get an average of mediocre. Less items that appeal to you, less items overall.

To actually 'get' them, you can destroy bad active items over and over in the secret room to guarantee you bone hearts among chances of better components. An example of a strategy is destroying Portable Slot that has a fixed recipe of 8 pennies. I personally like to think of active items as resource storage as this character.

Lastly, be frugal and smart. Taking soul hearts limits your item quality yet making sure you get that angel deal nets you eternal hearts you can craft with. Also, when needed you can on-demand get keys, hearts and bombs if you replace an active item. The shop can be quite worthless because money is oftentimes already trash waiting to be turned into gold.

[Piresphant]

Originally posted by kitten exterminator:

With Tainted Cain it helps being aware of the quality of your bag.

A bag full of red hearts, pennies, bombs and keys will give you a range of poor items. However this means that you could shuffle around basic contents and find which recipes are worth repeating. Items like familiars for Conjoined, health-ups and items that give more resources like Old Bandage and Piggy Bank. Spend the first few floors getting to know the 'trash' recipes.

The key to getting the good items, like quality 2-4 range items is to use better consumables. Pickups like special hearts, better coins, golden pickups, lucky pennies and charged keys will near guarantee you quality 2 items like Fruit Cake, Tech 2 and syringes. Keep filling the bag with more of this and you'll get better and better items.

How to find these items? The trick is to separate 'trash' with the good stuff for later. Find out the best of the 'trash' experimenting with recipes en masse and leave soul hearts and nickels for later quality crafting. Mix the good with the bad and you'll get an average of mediocre. Less items that appeal to you, less items overall.

To actually 'get' them, you can destroy bad active items over and over in the secret room to guarantee you bone hearts among chances of better components. An example of a strategy is destroying Portable Slot that has a fixed recipe of 8 pennies. I personally like to think of active items as resource storage as this character.

Lastly, be frugal and smart. Taking soul hearts limits your item quality yet making sure you get that angel deal nets you eternal hearts you can craft with. Also, when needed you can on-demand get keys, hearts and bombs if you replace an active item. The shop can be quite worthless because money is oftentimes already trash waiting to be turned into gold.

Thank you for the tips and for taking your time. Do you have any tips on how to get on time for boss rush and hush? It seems that with all the crafting, there is a lot of time "wasted"

[kone]

Originally posted by Piresphant:

Thank you for the tips and for taking your time. Do you have any tips on how to get on time for boss rush and hush? It seems that with all the crafting, there is a lot of time "wasted"

Boss Rush and Hush are rough. The best case scenario is getting lucky with finding Almond Milk, Sacrificial Dagger, Tech 2, Lachryphagy or Fruit Cake early enough to have a foundation. Red/Blue Candle and Glass Cannon are also great actives to come across to speed things up. The character doesn't get damage much at all so those are the best he gets within a reasonable amount of time - and with basic components to boot.

There's also well, forcing them open with Mama Mega but I doubt anyone has the patience to manipulate items long enough to get two gold bombs for each craft. It's far easier to get 8 bone hearts for perspective.

[ジョーンズ._]

very funny