The Event Decision Framework: Removal First, Gold Last
Floor 9, 61 HP, a 24-card deck that still carries four starter Defends, and Sunken Treasury offers you a little gold or a lot of gold plus a permanent curse. Plenty of players click the big chest, because a bigger number looks like more value. The settled community answer, worked out across a year of Early Access and refined through the v0.107 to v0.111 balance passes, is that the small chest wins almost every time. The reason is a ranking you can apply to nearly every event in the game.
The consensus hierarchy reads: targeted card removal or transform beats relics, relics beat Max HP, and Max HP beats gold. Gold-for-curse trades are usually bad. Each step down the ladder loses permanence. A removed Strike stops appearing in every future shuffle, forever. A relic acts in every future fight. Max HP cushions every future hit. Gold is only potential until it is converted into one of the things above it, and unconverted potential is the most common asset on death screens.
The second principle is contextual: take what the deck lacks. Removal when the deck is bloated, Max HP when the runner is fragile, relics when the engine is online but underpowered. The same event can be correct on one run and incorrect on the next, which is why this guide pairs every community default with the situations that flip it.
The third principle is defensive: read every option before clicking anything, including the exit. Slay the Spire 2 hides scripted punishments inside buttons that look like the safe default. Wongo's is the flagship example, where refusing downgrades one of your cards, but the same caution applies to every trade below. Old StS1 instincts mislead here in general: no boss relics, Afflictions instead of Curses, and events that bite on the way out.
A scope note before the details: the current build carries 66 events, and this guide covers the 15 the community treats as most impactful, with values current to the v0.111 beta branch. Act 1 is randomly Overgrowth or Underdocks, each with an exclusive event pool, so a single run sees only a slice of what follows. That slice is worth playing well: across a full run, event decisions move your deck more than any single shop visit, and unlike shops, the good options are free.
Overgrowth Events (Act 1a): Byrdonis Nest, Aroma of Chaos, Wellspring, Dense Vegetation
The Overgrowth pool arrives in your first act at the moment your deck is at its least formed, so every decision here is really a question about what you want the deck to become by the Act 2 elite wall. Four events define the act, and none of them cost gold, which is exactly why they are worth getting right.
Byrdonis Nest asks you to eat the egg for Max HP or hide it, in which case the egg joins your deck. Most guides recommend eating it, and the logic is simple: Max HP is a permanent buffer on a fragile early runner, while a card that joins your deck is a draw you must pay for in every future shuffle, and Act 1 decks have the least room for cute cards. Hide the egg only when your deck is already thin, disciplined and actively looking for more material, which in Act 1a is almost never the situation you are in.
Aroma of Chaos offers transform 1 card or upgrade 1 card. Transform if you have a dead card, otherwise upgrade, is the community line. A transform deletes a Strike you would otherwise have to pay a shop to remove and replaces it with a random card, which is removal plus a lottery ticket in one action. An upgrade is the safe floor, a guaranteed improvement to a card you chose to keep. The mistake to avoid is transforming a card you were happy with: you had a dead-draw problem and you traded away a functioning piece to solve it.
Wellspring offers the Bottle, a random potion, or Bathe, which removes 1 card but adds a temporary curse. Bathe when you are short on card-removal options is the documented pick. The trade is a curse that expires for a removal that never does, and in Act 1a, when the nearest shop may be half an act away and your gold is uncommitted, paying with a temporary debuff is cheap. Take the Bottle when your belt is empty and your deck is already clean, which is a nice problem to have on floor 4.
Dense Vegetation offers push through, losing HP to remove 1 card, or rest, which means fighting a pack of Wrigglers. Push through when healthy is the community default: HP is the most renewable resource in the run, and every starter card removed raises the quality of every future hand. Take the fight when your deck is weak, because a Wriggler pack is a normal-difficulty combat you can actually win for a card reward, while a removal does nothing for a deck that lacks damage or Block in the first place. If you do fight, note that the same creatures spawn when a Phrog Parasite dies, so you may already know how the pack behaves.
Underdocks Events (Act 1b): Abyssal Baths, Doors of Light and Dark, Sunken Treasury, Trash Heap
The Underdocks pool is the removal act. Four events, and three of them can delete cards or pay you in permanence, which makes Act 1b the best act in the game for a deck that came out of Overgrowth bloated and unpaid. Route into question marks here with confidence if your starter count is still high.
Abyssal Baths lets you decline for a 10 HP heal, or soak for +2 Max HP and 3 damage, repeatedly. The community play is to soak early and often, and the arithmetic is friendly: every soak trades 3 current HP for 2 permanent capacity, and on the Ironclad, Burning Blood heals 6 after every combat, so a single hallway fight refunds two soaks outright. Soak until current HP gets uncomfortable, then decline only if you need the heal to survive the next fight. Ten Max HP bought for 15 damage is a phenomenal rate, and it compounds with later Max HP relics like Strawberry and Pear, which the community rates S-tier for exactly this reason.
Doors of Light and Dark is the classic fork: the Door of Light upgrades 2 random cards, the Door of Dark removes 1 card of your choosing. Usually the Door of Dark, because targeted removal beats random upgrades. The word doing the work is targeted: you delete the worst card in the deck, on purpose, while the Light door improves two cards chosen by a dice roll, which may be two cards you were about to remove anyway. Flip to Light only when your deck holds no genuinely bad cards, a condition that usually describes late Act 2, not Act 1b.
Sunken Treasury is the event that opened this guide: a small chest with a little gold, or a large chest with a lot of gold plus a permanent curse. Take the small chest. The large chest's extra gold is most likely spent removing the curse it just installed, and if you never get around to that, you carry a dead draw for the rest of the run. The community consensus on gold-for-curse trades is that they are usually bad, and this event is the standard exhibit.
Trash Heap offers dig deep, losing HP for a unique relic from the legacy pool, or rummage, for gold plus a unique card. Dig deep when healthy, because a unique legacy relic cannot be bought in any shop and can redefine a run the way a good Ancient blessing does. Rummage when you are poor and the gold has a named target, like your first removal or a planned purchase at the next shop. Note that both options pay in uniques, so this event is never a true skip in the way Sunken Treasury's big chest is a trap.
Wongo's: The Shop Event Where Refusing Is a Punishment
Wongo's appears in Act 2, The Hive, wearing the costume of a merchant. It offers four options: buy a random common relic, buy a specific rare relic, buy a ticket that pays out several random relics after a few fights, or refuse. The refuse option is the trap, because refusing downgrades 1 card. There is no free exit. In most events, walking away is the safe default that costs nothing; at Wongo's, walking away actively damages your deck, and the damage is not cosmetic: a downgrade can strip the upgrade you campfired into Demon Form two floors ago, or leave an already weak card worse than a starter.
Choosing among the three purchases is a liquidity question. The specific rare relic is the information play: you see exactly what you are paying for before you pay, and a rare relic that matches your build, a Brimstone for a Strength Ironclad, an Ice Cream for an energy-hungry Defect, is worth a premium. The ticket is the value play: several random relics for one payment outscale any single item, but the payout arrives only after a few fights, and Act 2 is the act of the 200-HP Infested Prism and the Entomancer's growing board, so there is a real chance you face your hardest elite wall before the relics land. The random common relic is the budget option when the rare on display does not fit your build and the ticket price exceeds your purse.
The community line is buy the ticket or the rare relic when rich, and never refuse. If your gold is thin, the random common relic at whatever price you can afford still beats a forced downgrade, which is the floor of this event: Wongo's converts gold into relics at worse-than-shop rates and punishes poverty, so the real preparation happens before you enter, on the path that built your purse.
The deeper lesson generalizes across the whole event system. Treat every exit button in this game as a potential cost until proven otherwise. The mistake the game's own materials flag is playing like it is still StS1, and event design is one of the places the sequel punishes old instincts hardest. Before you click leave anywhere, ask one question: what does leaving pay?
Amalgamator: Two Free Removals and an Ultimate Card
The Amalgamator in Act 2 offers to remove 2 Defends and grant an Ultimate Defend, or remove 2 Strikes and grant an Ultimate Strike. The community verdict is almost always take it, and the reason is that the event is two free starter removals plus a superior replacement, which is precisely the service shops charge gold for, delivered at zero cost in the act where your deck should already be committing to its final shape.
Choosing the side is a deck-composition question: consolidate whichever starter you have the most of and need the least. A deck full of early-picked attacks, a Strength build hoarding Whirlwind and Inflame, still needs its Defends to survive the Knowledge Demon's damage race, so it should consolidate Strikes into the Ultimate Strike and keep its defensive floor intact. A block-heavy list, an Exhaust Block engine heading toward Barricade and Body Slam, gets more from consolidating its Defends, because that archetype ends up generating Block from cards it actually wants to draw. Count your starters before you click: the correct side is the one where losing two copies hurts least, not the side with the shinier replacement card.
When would you decline? The honest answer is almost never. Even a five-card combo deck benefits from compressing two starters into one better card, and the Ultimate versions are strictly superior to what they replace. The only defensible pass is a deck so committed to thinness that adding any card at all breaks a deliberate ratio, and that deck barely exists outside dedicated deck-thinning runs. Treat Amalgamator as one of the best nodes you can path into in Act 2, sitting comfortably alongside an elite kill in expected value but without the HP cost.
One planning note connects this event to the wider run. If you know Amalgamator is in the Act 2 pool, you can shop more aggressively in Act 1, removing on the side your deck is weakest on, because the event offers a second round of consolidation for free later. Runners who treat every removal source as part of one budget, shops, events, transforms, consistently end Act 2 with cleaner decks than runners who buy removals reactively whenever a shop appears.
Self-Help Book and The Future of Potions?: The Free-Upside Pair
Two events in the current pool can appear in any act and cost effectively nothing. They are also the two easiest events to waste, because no-cost options still have an aim component, and aiming them lazily is like upgrading a Strike you plan to remove next floor.
Self-Help Book lets you study the blood tome to empower an Attack, Skill or Power in your deck. Always take it, pure upside, aimed at your core card. The aiming rule matters more than the taking rule. Empower the piece your engine runs through: Demon Form in a Strength list, Catalyst in Poison, Corruption at the heart of Exhaust Block, Prophesize in a Regent draw engine. Empowering a starter or a filler common converts a free event into a marginal stat point that will be irrelevant by Act 3. Because the event can appear in any act, a late-run sighting is the best sighting, empowering a card that is already upgraded and already central to the plan.
The Future of Potions? converts one of your potions into a card reward based on its rarity. Free value whenever you have a spare potion, says the community line, and the entire skill is knowing which potion is spare. The redundant third defensive potion in a full belt is spare. An off-archetype potion, a Vulnerable Potion in a Poison deck that deals no attack damage, is spare. A Fairy in a Bottle you are explicitly holding as elite insurance is not spare, and converting it trades a run-saving trigger for a card draw. This event is also the pressure valve for the three-slot belt: sighting it while holding a belt of duplicates is one of the cleanest pieces of value the event system ever hands you.
A scheduling habit ties the pair together. Both events scale with what you already have: Self-Help Book with your best card, The Future of Potions? with your worst potion. Neither is worth pathing for, but both reward the discipline of keeping a defined core card and an honest rank order of your belt, which is the same discipline the potion usage guide builds around. Players who can name their deck's best card in one second get more out of free events than players who hesitate, because hesitation at a free event is a symptom of a deck without a center.
The Foul Potion Chain: Potion Courier into The Merchant???
The most elaborate scripted sequence in the event pool spans two acts. Potion Courier, appearing in Act 2 or Act 3, offers one choice: pick up the Foul Potion. The community answer is always take it and hold it, because the potion is a key, not a drink, and the door it opens pays better than any shop in the game.
The lock is The Merchant???, a later event where a suspicious merchant is revealed as a fake, and your options narrow to throwing the Foul Potion at them, which triggers a hidden boss fight. The payout for winning is enormous: 300 gold, all the knock-off relics the fake was selling, and the exclusive Merchant's Rug relic, which is needed for 100 percent completion and cannot be obtained anywhere else. No shop, elite or chest in the game pays anything close, and for completionist runs the Rug alone justifies the whole detour.
Price the chain honestly before you commit. From pickup to throw, the Foul Potion occupies a belt slot, potentially across an entire act, and a full three-slot belt that refuses good pickups because it is holding a key has paid a real cost. The fight itself is a boss-strength check, so the throw is best made at high HP with a deck that is online; the fight being player-initiated through the throw means you control the timing, which is the difference between this hidden boss and a forced elite. One hard restriction: the event does not appear in co-op, so co-op runners can ignore the entire chain and keep their belt slot.
Two practical notes complete the picture. If you take the Courier potion in Act 2, plan your belt around it, spending or converting one of your other two slots so the key never locks you out of pickups. And if you reach Act 3 with the Foul Potion still in hand and low HP, remember that holding it a few more floors while you heal at a rest site is free: the Merchant event does not expire because you played well in between, and the difference between throwing it at 80 HP versus 25 HP is frequently the difference between a payday and a death screen.
Battleworn Dummy: The Only Skill-Check Event
Battleworn Dummy in Act 3, Glory, is the one event in the pool that checks your deck's performance rather than trading resources. You pick a difficulty tier, then must kill the dummy within 3 turns for a scaled reward. Fail, and you get nothing: no partial payout, no consolation prize, just a wasted event node and whatever resources you burned trying.
The community default, conservatively pick a tier you can reliably kill, is expected-value reasoning in one sentence. A reward you clear nine runs out of ten beats a larger reward you clear four times out of ten, because failure pays exactly zero and Act 3 is the least forgiving act in the game to be weakened in. The honest measurement is your deck's three-turn damage ceiling against a training dummy, which fights back far less than a real enemy but does not die on its own either.
Know your archetype's ceiling before you pick. Claw zero-cost is described as the fastest kill archetype in the game and can look at the top tier honestly. A Sly Discard list resolving five or more cards a turn has a genuine three-turn burst window. A Frost turtle Defect, a Poison Silent before Catalyst comes online, or a slow Doom Necrobinder stacking toward a percentage execute has a low three-turn ceiling and should take a low tier and accept a modest payout. The event rewards the same self-knowledge the elite pathing guide teaches: fight what you can actually kill, not what you wish you could.
One timing note: because the reward scales with tier and the event sits in Act 3, a strong deck that has already assembled answers for the Act 3 boss pool can take the highest tier with a straight face, since the dummy cannot punish greed the way a Mecha Knight can. But if the run is thin, treat every tier above your reliable ceiling as a coin flip priced at zero, and remember that the gold this event pays has to compete with simply arriving at the boss healthier. Scaled rewards scale both ways; the dummy's tiers are the last place in the run where overconfidence is still on sale.
Event Pools, Alternate Acts and Pathing Toward Question Marks
Act 1 rolls randomly between Overgrowth and Underdocks, and the two variants carry completely different enemy, event and boss pools. The first thing to do on floor 1 is identify which act you got, because it changes the value of every path decision: Underdocks is dense with removal events, which favors greedy early paths for decks that need thinning, while Overgrowth's pool, Byrdonis Nest, Aroma of Chaos, Wellspring and Dense Vegetation, leans on Max HP and single-card services.
The distribution of the fifteen events in this guide: four in Overgrowth, four in Underdocks, Amalgamator and Wongo's in Act 2 The Hive, Battleworn Dummy in Act 3 Glory, Self-Help Book and The Future of Potions? in all acts, and the Potion Courier to Merchant chain across Act 2 and Act 3. Since Act 1 is a coin flip and the all-act events are rare sightings, a full run touches perhaps six to eight of the fifteen, which is exactly why each decision deserves to be made well when it appears.
The pathing implications are concrete. Events are the highest-value non-elite node because several of them replicate shop services without charging gold, and a removal event on your path is functionally free money. Factor event density into branch choices, the map routing guide's own advice, and remember that since v0.101, floor 6 no longer spawns elites, so early question-mark nodes are cheaper to reach than they were at launch. The classic Act 1 shape is combats first for gold and cards, then a shop or event cluster, then elites once you have answers in the deck. Rest sites fold into the same ledger: an upgrade often outvalues healing, and every point of HP you save through good event decisions is HP you can spend on an upgrade instead of a nap.
One caution to finish: event pools are also where the game hides its worst trades, the Sunken Treasury large chest, the Wongo's refuse, and the Affliction-priced options scattered elsewhere in the full 66-event pool. Afflictions, the StS2 replacement for Curses, latch onto your existing cards and cannot be removed at shops at all, so any event that pays in Afflictions is a hard avoid for most decks. Path toward question marks with intent, but read each one like a contract, because the signature line is usually in the smallest print.
The Cheat Sheet: All Fifteen Events in One Paragraph Each
Abyssal Baths: soak repeatedly early, decline only for the emergency 10 HP heal. Amalgamator: take it, consolidating whichever starter you have most of and need least. Doors of Light and Dark: take the Door of Dark for targeted removal unless your deck has no bad cards left. Dense Vegetation: push through when healthy, fight the Wrigglers when the deck is weak.
Byrdonis Nest: eat the egg for Max HP. Aroma of Chaos: transform a dead card, otherwise upgrade. Wellspring: bathe for removal when shops are far away, bottle when your belt is empty and your deck is clean. Sunken Treasury: small chest, every time, because the large chest's curse outlives its gold. Self-Help Book: always, aimed at your engine's core card.
The Future of Potions?: convert genuinely spare potions, never the Fairy. Potion Courier: always take the Foul Potion and hold it. The Merchant???: throw when strong; the payout is 300 gold, the knock-off relics and the exclusive Merchant's Rug. Wongo's: buy the ticket or the rare relic when rich, and never refuse, because refusal downgrades a card. Battleworn Dummy: pick a tier you kill nine times out of ten. Trash Heap: dig deep when healthy, rummage when broke with a named target for the gold.
The mistakes that actually cost runs, in rough order of frequency: taking the large chest at Sunken Treasury out of greed; refusing at Wongo's out of caution; empowering a filler card with Self-Help Book; hiding the Byrdonis egg on a thin deck; over-tiering the Battleworn Dummy; and converting or discarding a held Fairy in a belt emergency. Notice that four of the six are versions of the same error, taking the option that looks bigger or safer instead of the option that is permanent.
The framework from the top of this guide, removal and transform over relics over Max HP over gold, answers most of these before you even read the flavor text. Your deck's current shape answers the rest. When both agree, click fast. When they disagree, trust the deck: the ranking is the average case, and your run is not the average case. And when an event you have never seen before appears, default to the cheapest exit that costs nothing permanent. Novelty in this game is usually priced in HP, curses or Afflictions, and the house rarely sets those odds in your favor.