Keepsakes

Keepsakes are trinkets you equip at the start of a run, and they are the main lever for steering a run before it begins. Some give a flat benefit like a revive or a damage buff, but the most important thing many of them do is bias which god’s boon you are offered first, which is how you set up a build on purpose instead of hoping. You can swap your equipped Keepsake at each region transition, so a single run can use one to steer the early offers and another to power up the back half.

Earning Keepsakes with Nectar

You get a character’s Keepsake by gifting them a bottle of Nectar. Nectar is a permanent resource you find in chambers and buy from Charon, and the first bottle you give any character hands you their Keepsake in return. After that the Keepsake is yours to equip freely on any run. This is why gifting Nectar early matters: every bottle you hold is a Keepsake you have not collected yet, and a few of them are strong enough to change how survivable the early game is.

Standout picks

A handful of Keepsakes are worth chasing early:

• Lucky Tooth (from Skelly): a one-time revive worth 100 HP per run, an excellent safety net while you are still learning fights.
• Evergreen Acorn (from Eurydice in Asphodel): a few hits of invulnerability when you enter each boss fight, which buys you time to read the boss’s openers.
• God keepsakes (from the Olympians): each one biases that god’s boon to appear, the core tool for forcing a specific build.

The two survival Keepsakes above are the ones most early players lean on, because a free revive or a clean entry into a boss fight closes the gap while your Mirror is still thin.

Steering which god appears

Equip a god’s Keepsake to make that god’s boon far more likely in your first boon room. That is how you build on purpose: start with the Keepsake of the god your build needs, lock in the anchor boon, then swap at the next region transition.

Because boons only matter when they stack on one damage source, getting the right god’s boon early is most of the battle. A god Keepsake does not guarantee the exact boon you want, but it reliably gets that god to the table first, which is usually enough to commit a run in the direction you planned. Once the anchor is secured, swap to a survival or scaling Keepsake for the regions ahead rather than holding the god Keepsake past its usefulness.

Related: Boons and the Gods for what each god offers, Resources and Economy for where Nectar comes from, and the beginner build.