Video Game / Under Mine

The Old Ones are never destroyed. They only lay dormant, awaiting a champion worthy of their challenge.

UnderMine is a roguelite dungeon-crawler by Thorium.

You are a peasant, as the Archmage and King constantly remind you. Your task is to find the source of tremors shaking the Undermine — a deep, defunct mine swarming with monsters and traps. They have generously outfitted you with some rags of clothing and a holey sack. They will even exchange any gold you find for better equipment — at an appropriate markup, of course.

You will almost certainly die, but the kingdom doesn't care. There's more peasants where you came from.

Gameplay is a top-down dungeon crawler reminiscent of classic Zelda (or, more directly, The Binding of Isaac). Players take control of one of a series of endlessly-generated, endlessly-dying peasants sent down into the monster-infested mines to die, scavenge gold, clean out the monsters, die, claim powerful relics, become blessed (and/or cursed!), die, and eventually, clear out the powerful bosses haunting the place. Oh, and die. A lot. Did we mention the dying? Because you'll be doing a lot of it.

Not to worry, though, as there are potent Macrogame elements in place that let you use some of your hard-earned loot to unlock newer, better items, as well as purchase permanent upgrades and abilities, ensuring that your next peasant has the potential to get marginally-farther than the last... until they inevitably die too, at least. Eventually, one of them may finally manage to make it to the source, defeat the great evil haunting the mine, and save the kingdom.

Probably.

On April 10, 2024, a sequel was announced. Trailer here.

---

This game includes the following tropes:

• Ability Mixing: Acquiring certain relics at the same time will combine them into something that typically has the effects of both at a possibly higher level plus a bonus on top. The Adventurer's Whip and Hat, for example, combine into the Golden Relic, which guarantees the effects of the previous item plus gives an instant 10k gold. This is actually a bad idea with the Masa and Mune relics, however, as the combined Masamune doesn't have the effects of the previous relics, but rather gives a chance for an instant kill against enemies. The raw 33% swing damage bonus from Masa is typically more valuable than a low chance at an instant kill.
• Achievement System: There are 95 achievements at present, ranging from unavoidable ones like defeating bosses to ones relying on chance like 5 item duplications in a row to obnoxiously difficult ones like defeating bosses with zero upgrades.
• Anti-Frustration Feature: There's an achievement for defeating bosses with no upgrades acquired, which would be unobtainable on your file if you happened to pick up any, including the one that the game strongly urges but does not force you to pick up during a cutscene. It's also lost if you pick up an upgrade that doesn't actually affect combat such as increasing shop stock, a bomb upgrade to destroy special blue blocks or even getting boots to let you walk faster out of combat! This achievement is made accessible once again in the full release of the game by choosing to take a special hex to remove all important upgrades. Not all upgrades, mind you, meaning it's apparently fine to pick up upgrades that simply make things easier but don't improve combat ability like the Glasses, which allow you to see enemy health bars.
• Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: 100 gold nuggets will buy you "cloth scraps" held together with string. But then, maybe gold isn't particularly valuable in this world. You certainly find an awful lot of it with no serious effort to the point they just seem like shiny rocks.
• The Atoner: Before heading into the final boss, Lilyth realizes her mistakes and vows to help you during the coming fight.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Many relics sound great on paper, but in actuality are either difficult to maintain or even potentially lethal. Glass Cannon, for example, doubles damage but at the cost of massively reducing maximum HP while Suneater trades in all your blessings for bonus damage, but requires you to pick up items like Hyperstone or the Queen/Emperor's Crown to compensate for the lack of range and attack speed from Cleave or Exuberance. On the difficult to maintain side of things, the Master Pickaxe allows you to deal swing damage at range with all relic and blessing improvements intact, but only so long as you're at max HP. This is made much easier by the addition of more sources of armor points in the full release, allowing the player to avoid taking damage when struck in combat. Even so, the Obsidian Knife, which doubles damage, breaks after taking so much as a single point of damage from any source and is thus all but unusable for long unless you have something like Soul Guard.
• Balance Buff:
  • Several major curses didn't make it into the normal game, including one that disabled healing for the player entirely. This one in particular was later readded as an extra challenge mode.
  • The Master Pickaxe relic was indirectly buffed by adding in five relics that can prevent you from taking damage: Soul Guard, which reduces maximum HP slightly when hit instead, three pieces of armor, and a Legendary relic. This makes it even more viable as an alternative to throw damage. It also goes nicely with the Obsidian Knife, which increases damage so long as you don't get hit.
  • Bomb focused runs lost their dependence on Legendary relics with the new Spare Ordnance relic that grants a bomb for every chest opened and another relic to permanently increase bomb damage for each enemy killed with a bomb. This removes the reliance on relics like Tsar Bomba or Bag of Holding, which require you to get lucky enough to find the curse vendor and to have him give you what you want.
  • As the game hit release and just afterwards, more relics were added to increase the viability of the thrown pickaxe. It still doesn't hit as hard, but it can at least hit more enemies in any given room and has some interesting combo possibilities.
  • Two of the worst relics in the game, the Large Ember and Galoshes, had a buff to allow the former to light torches and cook food and the latter to make you invulnerable to electrified water. This makes the Large Ember functionally equivalent to the Salamander Tail. Other relics were buffed at the same time, such as allowing Mirror Shield to retain the projectile deflection of Grimhilde's Mirror, which was generally considered superior to the passive projectile defense of the combined relic.
• Bandit Mook: The Pilfers, the game's Mascot Mook, are a race of mysterious slimes that lurk in the dungeons. They'll pop up any time gold is dropped and will try to swipe it and run off, meaning the player needs to react quickly to keep their hard-earned cash. They'll even pop up in the middle of battle to snag dropped loot while the player is still focused on surviving, too.
• Body Armor as Hit Points:
  • When you start the game, the tunic, which serves as your HP, starts at 200. Subsequent upgrades give 20 HP each time, with the price going up more and more. The final total is 500 max HP and 165,350 gold needed to fully upgrade it.
  • You can acquire relics such as pieces of armor that give you a single hit of invulnerability, which uses a replenishable resource.
• Bragging Rights Reward
  • One of the most difficult achievements in the game to get, Cursebearer, requires the player to complete an Othermine run with the cursed shield relic. Every level you go down causes you to gain another major curse. If you get the wrong curse, the run can become simply impossible, forcing the player to give up and start again. However, should you manage it, the extremely powerful Paladin's Shield relic will be unlocked, which gives a ton of power-ups, including damage, attack speed, and range. But if you're good enough at the game to unlock it, then you don't really need it anymore.
  • Favor of the Queen is a special artifact that causes pilfers to reverse their normal behavior and bring you dropped gold instead of stealing it. You get to keep it until your peasant dies, at which point you have to go get another one. Sounds nice, but to get it, you have to spend 100k gold to enter the Contested Bog, defeat the boss, start a new run, spend another 100k, never hit a pilfer on the way to entering the Bog again, do special puzzle rooms, and finally meet with the pilfer queen, who will then give you the artifact. Annoyingly roundabout and also so expensive that you obviously don't even need it: If you could afford to get it, you clearly don't care about the tiny amount of gold pilfers will manage to nab from you.
• Breakable Weapons: The Obsidian Knife relic gives a double damage bonus, but breaks if you take damage yourself. If you have armor, Nullstone, or Soul Guard, you can delay or prevent this demerit.
• Cap:
  • Fortitude grants 10% damge reduction per level and caps out at 75% damage reduction from almost all sources, meaning level eight. Going beyond this is possible, but accomplishes nothing. It does stack with Hoodie's Pillow and Gordon's Tunic, however.
  • Swing speed caps out at 5x normal swing speed. Again, while you can take more Exuberance blessings beyond this point, it serves no purpose. However, using relics such as the Vorpal Blade will still let you attack faster.
• Challenge Run: After beating Seer once, you can take optional penalties to make the game harder for yourself, such as applying the Siegfried's curse mechanic from Othermine or stripping all your upgrades.
• Changing Gameplay Priorities:
  • The thrown pickaxe is very useful early on because it only does slightly less damage than the swung pickaxe but is a lot safer. However, after acquiring more upgrades and unlocking more relics, the swung pickaxe will far outpace it in damage as many of the most powerful relics in the game only affect melee damage and it just straight up gets more benefit from upgrades. It doesn't help that melee attacks can hit multiple enemies, but the thrown pickaxe generally won't unless you have certain relics, and even this has downsides such as delaying the time it takes to get your weapon back.
  • Early in the game, relics like the Sewing Kit (full gold retention on death) and Golden Popcorn (chance to double gold when it lands) are highly valuable as upgrades get expensive and you always have stuff at the shop to buy. However, after you've gotten some gold upgrades and can reach later levels safely, suddenly they decrease in value while relics like the Simple Chest to increase shop stock become more desirable in their place now that you can easily clear out the shop. Before, you wouldn't have had the money to get it anyway.
  • A natural result of the game's diverse selection of Relics and effects, too. As an example, Soul Guard minimizes damage in exchange for converting it all to Max HP damage. This means food becomes worthless, and ways to continually raise Max HP become important — but items that rely on full health, like the above Master Pickaxe, become godly. Other relics such as the Cosmic Egg lose all value later in the run, while relics like the Obsidian Knife become more valuable because you're more likely to have something like Nullstone, Soul Guard, or at least one of the numerous armor granting relics.
• Chest Monster: Some chests are actually mimics in disguise and will try to kill you when you open them. Defeating them releases the normal contents of the chest. Chests that require keys or bombs to open are exempt from this, as are cursed chests. Unlike chests, however, mimics will not drop the bonus items granted by Leftovers or Spare Ordnance. Unlike normal chests, which make golden sparkles, mimics will sparkle red, making it a good idea to attack them rather than try opening them. On the plus side, this will also allow you to reach 'chests' that are otherwise meant to be inaccessible: If you can reach the mimic with a ranged attack of some sort, it will jump over to you while crossing any barriers in the way.
• Combat Parkour: The gameplay seems difficult to survive until you realize that spamming jump in combat makes it impossible for most enemies to hit you except when you land. This doesn't work as well on certain enemies such as the worms that spew spikes from the ground, as they're only vulnerable for a few seconds at a time before moving elsewhere to attack. If you jump randomly, you may not have time to reach them before they move somewhere else, and if you dodge in the wrong direction, you'll just land on the spikes.
• Cursed with Awesome:
  • Some curses have situational effects that can actually be very valuable. For example, there are curses that require you to use HP to buy items or open locked doors instead of keys. Not only does this save gold and keys, it also lets you get those items and doors opened for free if you have something like the Nullstone. In areas like the Contested Bog, where prices are sky high, this is the best way to reasonably use the shops without bankrupting yourself: Simple keys and bombs cost nearly a thousand gold apiece, let alone relics. But make sure you have that damage negation: The HP cost in that area will also be in the thousands range, meaning you will kill yourself if you buy things without thinking.
  • Some curses conflict with other curses in ways that often prove beneficial. The curse that turns almost all chests into mimics has a higher priority than the one that makes them all trapped, meaning you can still get your loot. Of course, Leftovers and Spare Ordnance still work on trapped chests but not mimics, so this is indeed situational.
• Deliberate Injury Gambit:
  • Some relics directly encourage otherwise bad decisions. The Inverter and Kurtz's Stash, for example, have the player rewarded for going out of their way to gather curses. There are also rooms that require a 'sacrifice', i.e. walk onto spikes to make treasure appear.
  • One of the rarest potions in the game, perhaps matched only by Mutagen and surpassed by Rainbow Kernels, is the Witch's Brew. What does it do? It gives you thirteen curses, including major ones. However, this is very useful when combined with Relics like the Inverter or Doom Blade, so long as you can keep them under control. Each removed curse will give a random blessing while the Doom Blade grants +4 damage for each minor curse and +8 for each major one.
• Department of Redundancy Department: The Petrified Rock. Very rocky. And much better than it sounds.
• Didn't Think This Through: Arkanos's Evil Plan is to let the peasants do the job of weakening the god Din, then swoop in to steal Din's power for himself. Problem is, Din is a god, and the peasants can't actually kill him — though they do impress him in the attempt. When Arkanos then shows up and tries to make demands of him, Din... does not react favorably.
• Difficult, but Awesome: It's hard to get the maximum usage out of some relics or items because of how demanding the conditions are to use them. The Obsidian Knife, for example, doubles your damage but will break the moment you get take any form of damage, even traps or use the Transmute stations. Absolution, meanwhile, will get rid of five curses instantly, but only if you have exactly five curses. If you have four or six curses, it won't work.
• Dishing Out Dirt: Selt, (the) Queen of Sand, occasionally traps the player in a ring of raised rocks. It's too high to walk out of, but jumping is quite another thing.
• Dual Wielding: One relic is simply another pickaxe to use at the same time as your normal one. More specifically, it lets you either have to thrown pickaxes in play at once or to continue using your melee pickaxe while waiting for your thrown pickaxe to return.
• Early Game Hell: The early parts of the game are definitely the hardest, as you have only one potion slot, no altars or upgrades, minimal shops, and little in the way of gold or thorium. You also don't know yet what relics are good, enemy attack patterns, how to dodge, or how to time your attacks. So new players might die multiple times over before even facing the first boss, but after defeating her, then proceed on through the next two or three without too much struggle. The difficulty does jump in the shimmering caverns and molten core, but resource acquisition also jumps dramatically and players have the basic beats down by this point.
• Enemy Summoner:
  • Several enemies will not attack you directly but instead can spawn mooks to attack you. There's a limit to how many can be out at a time, such as two Vilepots per Drude, but killing a minion will result in it being resummoned within a few seconds.
  • The first major boss, Selt, will spawn eggs at regular intervals and during her burying charge attack. The eggs are defenseless and can generally be taken out with one hit, but if left alone for more than a few seconds, they'll hatch bugs that are weak but capable of stunning the player at range.
  • Ponzu's main ability is to shed its scales and turn them into insect monsters, which is what the player fights throughout the Shimmering Caverns. It continues doing so during the actual boss fight, but only as one of its normal attacks along with ice breath, bombs, and green wave attacks to push away melee attackers.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Even though Arkanos is clearly an ass who doesn't care if the peasants live or die, he still reprimands Lilyth for disrespecting their deaths by saying they deserve some respect for the work they're doing.
• Exponential Potential: The dungeons tend to scale in difficulty in a fairly linear manner, but your own power tends to increase much faster than that. Certain relic and blessing combinations are much more than the sum of their parts and can make you basically invincible as time goes on. Or having Sylph around to at least quadruple the number of blessings you get later on.
• Fantastic Slurs: The term Pilfer is noted to actually be a slur rather than the name of the race. What they call themselves is unclear, though they don't seem to care either way.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: You, a completely irrelevant peasant, are thrown into the dungeon barely able to defeat a few rats and eventually end up powerful enough to take on godly monsters in a fiery hellhole. And, as the final boss, the god Din himself.
• Game-Breaker: Invoked. Wayland the blacksmith nods to the synergy effect and stacking power of relics, meaning that the difficulty curve is apparently intended to start high and then decrease as you break the game in two with potent combos.
• Glass Cannon: An item in the game that turns you into one. It doubles your damage, but also lowers your maximum HP all the way down to 100. This can end up either ending a run very early or cause you to become monstrously powerful if you can manage to build your HP back up with something like the Mushroom or HP blessing.
• Gone Horribly Wrong: Noori is the result of a potion experiment gone so badly it basically created a demon.
• Guide Dang It!: The bonus dungeon, Contested Bog, has special secret rooms that have to all be completed in order to open the way to the Pilfer Queen. There is no indication in the game that such an entity exists and the secret rooms in question may look completely empty. You also have to defeat the Plunder King first before you can reach her and have to avoid the impulse to smack any pilfers along the way or you lose a buff required to access the queen.
• Have a Nice Death: Time slows down, but does not stop, upon the player dying, and until you hit Continue to return to the Hub, you get to watch swarms of Pilfers appear to carry away all your dropped gold and items, one by one.
• Helpful Mook: Some enemies are pretty convenient to have around. Bobos, Bombadiers, Lurkers, and Throwbos can all break walls and rocks for you, helping you save bombs, and are easily manipulated into doing so. Tickers, Bomb Pilfers, Loaded Rats, and Engineers technically can as well, but are harder to position. However, even these will at least reveal breakable walls. Glimmerweeds are a bit of a middle case because while they can be triggered to attack as you please, they move very slowly and are hard to position in a helpful manner. Generally, you just have to hope that whatever they happen to break has a secret for you.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Toadvine constantly insults both the peasant and Bathcat, but despite this, he willingly takes a fatal attack to save the latter.
• Junk Rare:
  • Some very rare potions and relics are basically worthless or even dangerous, most notably the Witch's Brew. Don't even bother picking it up unless you're bored and want to play with the Inverter.
  • The demon Sho'guul will grant you legendary relics in exchange for accepting curses. These relics can't be acquired in any other way. However, some of them are unfortunately more dangerous than they're worth, like the Karmic Scales or Doom Blade. Some such as Tsar Bomba aren't valuable for normal gameplay, but can be situationally very useful for things like bomb runs.
• Justified Extra Lives: When your character dies, they're dead for good and you take control of another peasant who is forced to do their job.
• Killer Rabbit: Pilfers are normally annoying but harmless. Bomb Pilfers, however, drop a live bomb upon being driven off, which can seriously harm or kill an inattentive player. There also exist "Hunter Pilfers", far-more-aggressive Pilfers who will cause collision damage if they run into the player on their way to picking up gold.
• Large and in Charge: The archmage is way bigger than any other human character in the game.
• Legacy Character: When 'your' peasant dies, you take control of another one newly dropped into the Undermine. They inherit the previous peasant's gear, familiar, all thorium collected, and a fraction of whatever gold they had on them when they died. The characters all treat you as still being the same person, and not just the ones too dumb to notice like Wayland.
• Living Shadow:
  • The boss monster Noori looks like little more than a purple-edged cloud of darkness. With teeth.
  • Hunter Pilfers are jet-black with dark-red eyes, and will actually attack the player over their loot if you stand in their way, rather than just try to swipe it from them.
• Macrogame: Most everything is dropped on death, but you keep a (variable based on several factors) amount of your gold, as well as a secondary resource called Thorium, which can both be spent on new items and relics (which can then be found in future runs), permanent upgrades to base stats like damage and health, supplemental gameplay powers (like a sprint while out of combat, or the ability to see enemy health bars), and upgrading the shops found in runs.
• Magikarp Power:
  • The Ursa Major relic sounds great at first, then you realize the max HP gained is only temporary. Then you realize it's actually more overpowered than you thought because the buff duration is refreshed each time you pick up more food. So if you get the right relics early on, it's very easy to snowball into having over 5000 HP by the end of the run, meaning you don't have to worry about defense anymore. It also helps that relics based on max HP do not go by percentage but rather the total amount, meaning once you get to the 5000 HP stage, you're also gaining around 200 damage from something as simple as the Knight Pendant. Furthermore, relics that work off of low HP like Aigis kick in at percentages, meaning you can have major damage mitigation for over 1000 HP if you do somehow get that low. This eventually proved too powerful and was nerfed in short order.
  • The Golden Axe scales based on how much gold you spend in the shop during the run. If you get it early, it can actually grow to be very powerful even though it starts with no bonus damage at all.
• Mook Maker: There are several enemy types that don't actually try to hurt you directly, but instead can either create enemies directly or set down traps. Drudes are one of the earliest examples as they can each have a maximum of two Vilepots at a time, which will hop at you and spit poison in an area.
• Mutually Exclusive Power Ups:
  • There are unique Swing, Throw, and Bomb relics that can only be used one at a time per slot. For example, you can't have both Guidance and Chakram at the same time for your thrown weapon, nor Golden Powder and Bishop's Bomb. However, unlike throw relics, there are actually several bombs that combine with other bombs, such as Golden Powder and Lightning Bomb combining into M.E.G.A Bomb, which can turn enemies into gold. However, at the moment, there is actually only one unique Swing relic, the Vorpal Blade.
  • There are relics that can't be effectively used together even if both are technically still working. For example, you can make use of the Doom Blade or Inverter, but not both, because one requires you to carry curses while the other only works when you remove them.
• Necessary Drawback: Some powerful relics are balanced by a bad demerit. Most of the relics from the demon vendor qualify as well as the likes of the Obsidian Knife or Birthing Pod. The former doubles all damage dealt, but breaks if you ever take any damage from any source, even transmutation or penance, though max HP damage doesn't count. The latter will give you a random second familiar that you can unrandomize, but will block you from any form of healing (except tents) until it has absorbed 500 HP. That means it's very likely to kill an inattentive or unlucky player.
• Nerf
  • The very powerful Transmutation Bomb was made into a legendary relic in the middle of development. Having access to as many transmutes as you want was kind of game breaking, so it had to at least become much harder to get. With this change, it's typically pretty rare for anyone to actually pick it up given how hard it is to even get it to show up.
  • 108 Beads used to heal 50 HP every time you prayed or underwent penance. With Sylph, Devotion, and Holy Guacamole, this would add up to 600 HP for every floor that naturally spawned an altar and 300 for anything like an altar in a bottle or a secret room that contained just one. This was dropped down to a more reasonable 35.
  • The Plunder King was nerfed in the first major patch after his release: His attack box was reduced, the number of minions was reduced, and the poison duration was lowered. Before this, he was significantly harder than any other boss in the game.
  • Ursa Major, instead of allowing for infinite HP, now caps at 400 and only lasts 100s instead of 120s.
• Nerf Arm:
  • After defeating Seer for the first time, you unlock Valeen, who can give you nasty hexes to make yourself weaker.
  • Picking up Siegfried's Shield in Othermine will give you a major curse for each level you go down, which can make things very difficult if you get unlucky. But if you manage to get to the end, you'll unlock one of the best relics in the game.
  • Sometimes at the start of a floor, you can find a special orb with a number on it. Picking it up sets your HP to one until you've entered a certain number of new rooms without dying, at which point your health recovers back to normal. If you can clear all those rooms without taking any damage, you get a reward. Fail, and you obviously die and have to start your run over. Making things more difficult is that these challenge orbs mostly seem to appear in the dungeons, which have enemies that damage you if you strike them at the wrong time, making it difficult to use certain relics such as the Phantasmal Axe.
  • After defeating the final boss, a new familiar unlocks that causes almost entirely negative effects towards the player, such as healing enemies, poking spider eggs to release more enemies, and annoying Bobos, an enemy in the first dungeon that only attacks the player after being attacked first. It also cannot be used alongside other familiars.
• New Game Plus: Sort of. Defeating all five bosses allows the player to lift a stone that revives them all slightly stronger than before.
• Nice Girl: Bathcat is the most pleasant character in the game and the only one who treats the Peasants with any modicum of respect. She even allows the Peasant to keep a portion of the mine's gold as a reward for saving the world from Arkanos.
• Non-Indicative Name: At least one of the supposed Ancients was created by one of the Hub NPCs, meaning it probably isn't any older than the peasant slaying it.
• Noodle Implements: Some relics are of... questionable design. Behold, the mighty Lunchbox, allowing the wielder to carry food along with them. And yet, strange as they are, some of these weird relics are also really useful. The petrified rock, for example, massively increases the rate at which you find items from blowing up rocks. If you have it when you find one of the rooms that's filled to the brim with rocks, you can easily find dozens of bombs, keys, talismans, and even a few potions. If you've got a Popcorn potion or two? You can go from zero keys/bombs to the cap of 99.
• No Party Like a Donner Party: It's strongly implied that Kurtz and his fellow adventurers resorted to cannibalism after getting trapped in the dungeons. When he escapes, you acquire the powerful Hungry Ghost relic recipe.
• No-Sell:
  • Certain niche relics don't have much use in just moving around, gathering treasure, or killing bosses, but they do allow you to negate certain hazards or completely shut down certain enemies. Wayland's Boots, for example, are pretty useless except that they make you immune to the spikes of one of the more annoying recurring enemies. Galoshes remove the mild risk posed by oil slimes by stopping them from slowing you down. Grimhilde's Mirror allows you to reflect ranged attacks instead of having to dodge them, allowing you to deal damage and spend more time on the ground fighting rather than dodging.
  • The Doll blocks the next few curses from hitting you. Ara applies a single-use curse block each time you pray at an altar. For the latter, this buff is removed the next time you pray, as you use it to block the minor curse praying gets you, but can also be used elsewhere to block a major curse from cursed chest/lanterns before heading back to pray again.
• Not Completely Useless:
  • The Galoshes, which are probably the single worst relic in the game, can be combined with the Lava Walkers to create the Helios Boots. This allows the player to run slightly faster, leave flaming patches and oil all over the ground to interfere with enemies while also giving invulnerability to fire and increasing speed. But it's still faster to just stab them and fire is typically more annoying than dangerous so long as you don't keep burning yourself.
  • Some of the bomb-based relics look pretty useless at a glance, which may cause the player to overlook them. However, once a number have been unlocked, you can get combinations like having an immunity to friendly bombs, increased bomb damage per kill, increased damage per number of bombs, and then stuff like having temporary bonus bombs or regaining bombs after killing an enemy. Then, you get a unique bomb relic and have effects like massive range or healing every kill. This makes a bomb-based run a perfectly viable strategy if you can get the right relics, even letting you oneshot bosses like Mortar.
  • Wet Blanket is a fairly situational item which is typically better off transmuted unless you're a careless player, but it's very helpful against Seer, as it's very difficult to avoid all the fire damage in that room.
• Not the Intended Use: Many players note that they use the Cursed Altar Room not to store a relic for a later run or to create the Masamune, but rather to simply drop a horrible relic like Seer's Blood so that it doesn't take the place of something more useful.
• Obviously Evil: Lilyth, who appears to be a horned demon found in a prison talking about her dark god, is about as obviously evil as you get. But she does pull a Heel–Face Turn.
• Obvious Rule Patch: The bonus area, Contested Bog, is absolutely filled with enemies that cannot be effectively fought in melee, at least without very high levels of Cleave. Melee typically has more support relics and better damage scaling, so as players get more familiar with enemy attack patterns and the game in general, they often use throws less and less often. But in the bog, there are enemies that become invulnerable when you get anywhere near melee range, enemies that cause a short-ranged explosion of spikes when struck, enemies that leave long-lasting poison trails in their paths, and so on to force the player to at fight at range at least a little. The boss of the area also hits like a truck, but notably near exclusively attacks by simply jumping at you, making it much safer to hit him from afar and give yourself more time to dodge.
• One Stat to Rule Them All: In higher summoning levels, the most important stat is damage reduction, meaning you need to stack up Fortitude whenever you can as well as make sure to grab the two relics that halve elemental and physical damage respectively.
• Percent Damage Attack: The Karmic Scale turns enemy attacks into such. However much health you had before, you're reduced to five bars that each deplete with a single attack and are refilled with a single source of healing. This makes fires and multi hit enemies like gargoyles extremely dangerous while also making items like Troll Sweat incredibly powerful.
• Permanently Missable Content:
  • There's an achievement for skipping bosses by going through certain events or special battles, but these are only actually available during your first run because the events no longer trigger after that. If you simply defeat each boss before heading onward, you're locked out of these achievements permanently. This issue was fixed in the full game release.
  • One achievement is only available during the tutorial and involves taking a bomb the game gives you while explaining mechanics, heading back to the entrance, and using it to destroy a wall with a hidden entrance in it. The game hasn't actually told you that hidden rooms exist at this point, nor that there is anything special about this wall. It's only once you've gotten inside that you learn about this feature of the game. If you've already completed the tutorial floor? Too bad, you can never return to that version of Goldmine 1. Fortunately, once you know about this achievement, it's very easy to simply start a new file, blow up the wall, and grab the 'treasure' inside, which isn't anything valuable, useful, or unique.
  • Unexpectedly averted at one point. When you first unlock Lilyth, she drops three blessing recipes you can pick up and they'll immediately be added to altars from then on. You don't actually have to do so, however, and may not want to given that there's a limit to how many blessings can show up on an altar at one point. So you could choose to pick up none, one, or two if you don't like one of them, but the blessing can actually show up as a normal recipe when proceeding through the game, at which point it will once again be automatically added into the altar.
• Power at a Price:
  • The very powerful blessings are the only way to continue increasing your power after acquiring all the upgrades and then picking up the relics that you want. Unfortunately, for every blessing you get at an altar, you also receive a minor curse.
  • The demon Sho'guul offers some very powerful relics such as the Nullstone and Mushroom, but getting them requires the player to take on several curses both minor and major, which can be crippling.
  • Many relics have tradeoffs that can make the player hesitate to pick them up.
    • Duplicator, for example, causes two relics to spawn instead of just one, but once you pick one up, the other is destroyed. If one room contains, say, Holy Guacamole and Inverter, you may have a difficult choice on your hands.
    • The new Soul Guard relic seems to work by drastically decreasing damage taken, but the damage taken is removed from your maximum HP for the run.
    • Suneater has some of the highest potential damage of any relic in the game, but this comes at the cost of removing all current blessings and preventing you from acquiring any more. In exchange, you gain a potent 8 damage for each blessing lost or that you would have gained, meaning you can get literally thousands or even tens of thousands of damage from this relic depending on when you acquire it. While the downsides of most lost blessings can easily be compensated for, this doesn't work too well for either HP or damage mitigation: There are only a few relics that boost maximum HP and you probably won't get the best one (Mushroom) on a file with Suneater, while there are only two relics that reduce damage taken and they don't work as well as stacking Fortitude, which is considered essential on higher difficult levels.
  • One rare potion removes all curses on the player, which can be amazingly powerful if you've accidentally or intentionally loaded up on them, especially with a relic like Inverter to turn curses into blessings. However, it also has the unfortunate side effect of taking you down to 1 HP and removing all your keys and bombs.
• Power Up Letdown:
  • There are many relics available from the start, more than can be unlocked over time and also secondary effects like blessings. However, many of these actually kind of suck and may even be more dangerous to the player than the enemy, meaning they're better off ignored or transformed into something else if possible. As the game continues, you may realize that unlocking a certain relic or blessing was actually a bad idea because it makes it harder to find something more valuable. The large ember, for example, only does a tiny amount of passive damage around the player when you really want to be killing things in only one or two hits, and the glaive makes your thrown pickaxe slightly larger, but won't actually hit harder or strike more enemies.
  • On the other side of things, Masamune is a very difficult relic to create, but arguably isn't even worth the effort since it only applies a chance for an instant kill rather than the huge 33% damage increase effects that came from the relics making it.
• Resurrective Immortality: The Ancients, some of whom aren't actually ancient at all, have their existence tied to summoning stones. As soon as they are all defeated, once someone lifts the summoning stone, they all come back to life. It's unclear what purpose they serve, but apparently they are meant to be regularly defeated and revived.
• Robbing the Dead: The Pilfers will usually stick to trying to snag dropped bits of gold out from under you, but when you (inevitably) die, they'll happily line up to strip your corpse of everything of value, save for what your canary can carry out.
• Schizophrenic Difficulty: You're going to die a few times on your first clear of the Undermine. The bosses grow slowly in difficulty until you reach the hardest boss, Seer, who is difficult to even hit safely, has wide ranging attacks, and inflicts burns to keep hurting the player. Once he's beaten, though, suddenly the game is much easier while you stack up new relics, familiars, blessings, and upgrades. Eventually, however, the game gets loopy with difficulty and the first boss will become likely the most difficult because you won't have the exponentially powerful bonuses you'll have later on when you get to Selt.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: The kingdom sealed all its monsters into a vast mine, locking the door behind them. As you defeat each major boss, you receive a token that is added to a massive door, indicating there's likely more than one seal to be dealt with.
• Simple, yet Awesome
  • One of the best relics in the game has no big fancy effects, nor does it improve damage. Nope. All the Mushroom does is increase your maximum HP by one per enemy killed while healing an equal amount at the same time, an effect carried by another very powerful relic, Hungry Ghost. Given that an average floor has dozens of enemies, this means if it's acquired early, then it can easily result in the player having thousands of HP.
  • Spare Ordnance, a completely ordinary common relic, has no direct combat use. All it does is let you find a bomb inside every chest you open, even trapped chests. Given that it's not at all weird to find several chests per level, this means you also get several free bombs per level on top of whatever treasure was already there. It also means that it is always worth using a bomb to reach or open any chest you see, as you will at least break even. Even locked chests will allow you to at least break even on number of total items gained. Further, the bomb inside the chest can actually be a bomb bag, meaning three bombs instead of just one. With this in mind, acquiring it early allows you to never really have to worry about whether you should use a bomb or not.
• Skippable Boss: At the moment, every boss apart from the Rock Mimic and Seer can be skipped, at least temporarily. Selt can be skipped by defeating Bathcat and Toadvine instead, Mortar by receiving a staggering number of major curses, Noori by surviving an early attack from Ponzu, and Ponzu himself by simply paying to enter the current final dungeon. The Rock Mimic, however, has to be defeated to progress in the game and there is no way to skip past Seer. This isn't necessarily easier, however: The Scaled Invasion is actually a harder fight than Noori and the curses gained from skipping Mortar are likely to put an end to your run quite quickly. And you'll still have to do them eventually.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: Heavily on the side of Cynicism, to the point of Black Comedy: the kingdom's gold mines have been stopped by a horde of monsters, but the greedy King is too cheap to hire actual heroes, so he sends his own overworked peasants down to die in droves until the problem is fixed. His archmage, Arkanos, oversees the task, and makes no secrets of the fact that he sees the tide of peasants as expendible and essentially-equivalent to dirt and is secretly using the situation to further his plan to steal the power of a god for himself. The peasants are outfitted with less-than-bare minimum, getting a rusty pickaxe and some scraps of cloth to start with, but can "lease" marginally-better gear from the Kingdom at increasibly-exorbitant prices. The cutesy Mascot Mook Pilfers will swipe every valuable the moment you're not looking, will happily rob your corpse blind the moment you die, the "nicest" ones are merely greedy shopkeepers, and they make for some pretty nasty loan sharks if you happen to abuse the credit mechanic. The NPCs range from a cruel alchemist to a shameless con artist, and absolutely, positively no one cares when (not if) you die. Hell, most of them fail to even notice!
• Tactical Suicide Boss: Noori can become invulnerable by putting out the torches in the boss room. Unless you have something like the Salamander Tail or Seer's Blood, you can't relight them yourself, meaning Noori can only be defeated by using its own flaming curse attacks to relight the torches.
• Taking the Bullet: During the final battle, Toadvine sacrifices himself to save Bathcat from Din's attack.
• Treacherous Quest Giver: Turns out that Arkanos has been manipulating the Peasants the entire time in order to claim Din's power for himself. Unfortunately for him, Din has no intention of relinquishing his power, and ends up using Arkanos' body as a host after the Peasant weakens him.
• Useless Useful Spell:
  • Some relics and blessings seem powerful at first glance but later turn out to be basically pointless. For relics, the Galoshes make you immune to the slowing effect and jump preventing effects of oil, but also make you very likely to set yourself on fire.
  • As far as blessings go, the struggle to earn gold early on makes Craftsmanship and Loyalty seem useful, but only until you realize that basic upgrades can get you up to 95% gold retention and the Sewing Kit relic automatically puts you at 100%. Thrown pickaxe upgrades like Mighty Hurl and Gust are also problematic in that throwing farther makes it take longer to get your pickaxe back while a bigger pickaxe means your weapon can't get through narrow tunnels and is unlikely to even hit more enemies anyway.
• We Have Reserves: The kingdom's modus operandi (and yours, eventually) is to herd peasants into the Undermine until one somehow succeeds in stopping the tremors. The Archmage can barely distinguish one peasant from the next, and tells you so.

---