Soul Hearts

This guide will explain how to survive this game using soul hearts. It will explain how to get them, which items are needed for a soul heart build and how they should be used, in order to make your life in Mom's basement a lot easier!

Introduction

Soul hearts are awesome! <3

They are the blue heart pick ups that serve as armor for the player. You will permanently lose them when you receive damage, but once you get the right set of items they are easy to replenish. Soul hearts can be stacked beyond the 12 containers that are visible on the game screen

During a lot of runs I got the Book of Revelations (your core item for this strategy) and I have won a lot of runs using soul hearts for survivability. It is an easy strategy and you only need 2 common items to make it work. In addition, there are a lot items that have good synergy with this strategy.

The main idea is that you get an enormous amount of soul hearts during the early levels and use them to survive the final floors. It's hard to build up even more soul hearts after completing The Depths, but not impossible.

Items

Required items

To use this strategy, you need one of the following items:

Icon	Name	Description
	Book of revelations	Adds 1 soul heart when activated
	The Nail	Adds 1 soul heart when activated and lets the player break rocks by walking over them
	Crystal Ball	Drops a Tarot Card or a soul heart when activated

And you will also need:

Habit

Recharges 3 bars of the use item when the player is hit

Additional items

These items help a lot in the process of getting infinite soul hearts.

• 9 Volt - When a use item is activated, it will start with two charge bars instead of zero.
  
• The battery - In every room, one charge for the item is gained every 15 seconds, for a maximum of three charges while enemies are present and the doors are closed.
  
• The Mitre - Increases the chance of finding a soul heart after finishing a room.
  
• Guppy's Paw - When used, converts one regular heart container into three soul hearts.
  
• The Relic - Drops one soul heart every 4 rooms.
  
• Scapular - Adds 1 soul heart when the player is downed to 1/2 a regular heart.

Soul heart on pick up

These items simply give you additional soul hearts once when they are picked up.

• Squeezy
  
• The Pact
  
• The Mark
  
• Rosary
  
• Super Bandage
  
• Sacred Heart

Other ways to obtain soul hearts

• Destroying X Rocks - These are a special type of rock that look a bit darker than the regular rocks and have an X in the upper right corner. They can drop up to three soul hearts when destroyed.
  
• Mom's Pearl (Trinket) - Increases the chance of finding a soul heart after finishing a room.
  
• V The Hierophant (Tarot card) - Spawns two soul hearts when used.
  
• VIII Justice (Tarot card) - Spawns four pick ups, one of which can be a soul heart.
  
• Balls of Steel (Pill) - Gives two soul hearts.
  
• Reward for completing a room.
  
• Found in chests.
  
• Fortune telling machine - Has a reasonable chance (7% or 20% with Lucky Foot) of dropping a soul heart when used.
  
• Buying them in the shop - 5 coins or 3 coins on discount. Only worth it when you are afraid of dying early in the game or when you have a lot of spare money.
  
• Reward from a Beggar

Tactics

• Both the Book of Revelations and the Habit are commonly found in the shop.
  
• Once you have an infinite amount of soul hearts, you can easily make deals with the devil to sell your regular heart containers.
  
• The ♥♥♥♥♥ of Babylon item (find it or play as Eve) can be active in every room by lowering your regular hearts to 1/2. This can easily be done by using a blood donation machine (in a Arcade Room or by using the XIV Temperance tarot card) or by using a demon beggar.
  
• The Curse Room (the one with the spiky entrance) can be entered without losing life overall, since you will lose 1/2 a soul heart by entering and leaving the room, which triggers Habit twice and recharges your Book of Revelations!
  
• Having the Book of Revelations will increase the chance of facing a Horseman in the boss room. Overall I find them easy to defeat and they help you get the Meat Boy faster, which gives you some extra damage and protection.

Substrategies

The pill strategy

If you are a little lucky early in the game you could try gathering a lot of Balls of Steel pills. Some items that help you get these pills:

• PHD
  
• Mom's Pill Bottle (only if you can't find the book of revelations)
  
• Mom's Purse
  
• D20
  
• The book of Sin
  
• Safety Cap (Trinket)
  
• Playing on Slot Machines (or the Portable Slot item)

The tarot card strategy

You need to get really lucky to get The Hierophant tarot card more than once, but it is possible.

• Deck of Cards
  
• The book of Sin
  
• Ace of Spades (Trinket)
  
• Using Fortune Telling Machines

Pitfalls and weaknesses

This strategy works in a lot of cases, but there might be a few downsides.

• Hoarding all the items that give you soul hearts is great for survivability, but your damage might fall behind later in the game.
  
• Items that give you extra lives such as 1UP, Dead Cat and Ankh will become useless, since you only respawn with red heart containers. Once you run out of soul hearts you are pretty much dead, so don't. :)