Loot and cosmetics
Gear & Store
Six gear slots (five stat pieces and the Viral Genome) and seven rarities from Common to Prismatic. Collect boss sets and continent sets, roll unique abilities, enhance your favourites, combine duplicates, and hope for a mutation.
Gear slots
Six slots, one loadout
Your virus wears six pieces of gear: five named for real parts of a virus particle, from the Capsid helmet to the Spike Protein weapon, plus the Viral Genome, which adds skill levels instead of stats. Every slot rolls from its own set of stats, so the Spike Protein leans into damage, the Envelope into defence and the Tail Fibers into movement and stealth. Your whole lineage shares one loadout and one bag, so your gear carries over whichever virus a generation becomes, and you keep it when you die.
- Viral Genome: Like a class mod, it adds levels to skill-tree skills instead of stats, even past a skill's maximum, and can lend you skills you haven't learned.
- Fourteen stats: Each slot can roll seven or eight of them, from max HP and armour to critical hit chance and damage.
- Stacking: The same stat on several pieces adds up, then applies once.
- Growing rolls: Enhancing, item level and mutations all make a piece's stats stronger.
- Hand-named: Regular drops take names from flu or retrovirus history and biology, while boss and Pandemic Game Mode set pieces carry their set's own names.
Rarity and loot
From Common to Prismatic
Gear comes in seven rarities, from white Common to rainbow Prismatic, and higher tiers roll more stats, ability bonuses and unique abilities, with every roll stronger. Each organ caps the best tier that can drop, so pushing deeper is how you find better pieces, and the deeper and more dangerous the room, the higher a piece's item level. Cells, Killer T cells, chests, guardians, bosses and rival viruses all drop gear, and it goes straight into your bag, so you keep it even if the run ends in death.
At a glance
- Tier by tier: Rare adds class-ability bonuses, Legendary adds unique abilities and Prismatic rolls the most stats of all.
- Hard to miss: A pillar of light marks Legendary and better drops, and Epic finds play a special sound.
- Elites and rivals: Elite cells drop gear far more often, and rival viruses always leave a piece.
- Item level: Gear from deeper rooms, elites and bosses carries a higher level and stronger stats.
- Rewards: Hard and tougher challenges, Endless Game Mode sets and cities taken in Pandemic Game Mode all pay gear.
Bonuses and uniques
Gear with a signature trick
From Rare up, gear rolls bonuses to your class's abilities, and the same roll does something different for each virus, so a piece adapts to whichever virus wears it. From Legendary up, pieces also roll unique abilities: eight signature effects that change how a fight plays, from cells that burst when they die to an extra projectile on every shot. Uniques show in orange on the piece, and a lucky mutation can add one to gear of any tier.
At a glance
- Class bonuses: They boost your signature trick, your special, your ultimate or your lingering effects.
- Adapts to you: A signature bonus speeds Influenza A's shot rotation but raises the Filovirus's bleed chance.
- Enhancing: Push any piece far enough and it gains a class-ability bonus, even a Common.
- Stacking: Some uniques, like Twin Genome and Barbed Coat, add up on every piece that carries them.
- Standout: Primed Replicase starts every run with your special and your ultimate already charged.
Gear sets
Collect the full set
Outside Pandemic Game Mode, every organ boss always drops one named piece of its own five-piece set, and each set is built around one idea, from raw firepower to stealth and ambushes. Bonuses switch on as you wear more pieces of one set, and they stack, so a full set has them all. Pandemic Game Mode has sets you can't get anywhere else: infect every city on a continent and its whole set arrives at once, and infecting the entire world earns the Prismatic Pandemic Crown.
- Boss tiers: A boss piece is usually the organ's best tier or one below, and sometimes two below.
- Easy to spot: Set pieces wear an outline and dot in their set's colour, and the Loadout counts them.
- Continent sets: Each arrives as a full Legendary set, its item level rising with every continent you've infected.
- Pandemic Crown: The reward for infecting the world carries the strongest set bonuses in the game.
- Combining: Fuse a set piece with a matching spare and the result keeps the set.
Upgrading
Make your favourites stronger
Enhancing spends materials to raise a piece level by level, and every level makes everything on it stronger. Combining spends nucleotides to fuse two pieces of the same slot and tier into one piece of the next tier up, and you choose exactly what it keeps. Either one can mutate the piece, amplifying all its numbers or adding a unique ability, though every mutation a piece already carries makes the next one rarer.
At a glance
- Milestones: Partway up, enhancing adds a bonus stat at full strength, marked with an orange star.
- Ahead of the curve: Combining is the only way to get a tier above anything that drops yet.
- Your pick: Shared stats add together and nothing is rerolled, so you keep exactly what you choose.
- Keeps its level: A combined piece keeps the higher enhancement level of its parents, bonus rolls included.
- Mutations: Enhancing can stack several on one piece, but combining carries over only one.
Bag and materials
Break it down, build it up
The Gear screen opens from the main menu once you've finished a run: your loadout on the left, the bag in the middle, sorted by slot with the best first, and the piece you're inspecting on the right. Dismantle spare gear for nucleotides, the currency that combining spends, and you get back some of the materials you put into enhancing it. Three enhancement materials, each named for a real enzyme a virus depends on, come from kills, chests, bosses and rewards, and they also craft run modifiers.
At a glance
- After each run: Everything you found is laid out to compare with what you wear, then equip or dismantle.
- Bulk clean-up: Dismantle a hand-picked selection at once, or every spare piece of a tier and below.
- Full bag: New drops push out your weakest spare piece of a lower tier, never a locked one, or get dismantled themselves.
- Ribozyme Cores: Higher enhancements need them, and only Endless Game Mode drops them, though Pandemic Game Mode cities pay some.
- Badges: Icons show at a glance which pieces are worn, enhanced, mutated, part of a set or new.
The Store
Dress your virus in style
Skins change how your virus and its effects look, and nothing else, and they come only from the Store, never dropped or earned in play. Six skin slots cover your body, trail, shots, kill bursts, dash and aura, and each offers thirteen themed looks on top of the free default. Every theme has its own body design, colour palette and particle shape, so a full set reads as one look, and skins work on every virus from your next run.
- Virus skins: Your body becomes the theme's own styled core, ring of spikes and prow.
- Effects: Trails, kill bursts and auras shed the theme's particles, from tumbling rock shards to drifting snowflakes.
- Dash: Every dash leaves a themed speed streak and fading afterimages of your body.
- Theme sets: Own all six pieces of a theme and you can equip the whole set in one tap.
- Prismatic: The top theme cycles through the rainbow on every piece.
