This a thorough, exhaustive guide that details a lot of ways in which you can break Greed(ier) Mode.
If you're like me, you're impatient. You see that unfilled Greed Machine and you grimace at the thought of having to play Greed Mode, a struggle in of itself, only to then have the machine jam when giving all of your coins.

Greed Mode is a gamble, and playing it is an experience similar to finding someplace to eat in a foreign settlement. Even if you're not trying to break the game, you might have yourself a nice run, or a bad one... after another bad one, after another bad one. Eventually, you stop trying the mode all together and move on, but the thought of "I'm going to have to do this one day" eventually creeps up and forth from the dark corners of your mind. And it's terrifying.

After an afternoon of continuously breaking Greedier Mode with some friends, I was inspired to begin writing this recipe. Say no more to dreading Greed Mode! After reading this guide, you'll be sure ready to gather the best ingredients and seasonings to cook the finest gourmet, chef's kiss gamebreaks.

Any sections tagged as WIP are most likely not finished yet.

• The Main Ingredients
  
• Additional Seasonings
  
• The Dish Ruiners
  
• Putting The Dish Together
  
• Beyond The Gamebreak
  
• Quick Reference/Tier List [WIP]
  
• Conclusion

Ahh, the D20. If you know a little about game breaks, you'll find this active familiar. Like a hamburger from a fast food restaurant, you can't go wrong with it to fill your stomach.
The good old gamebreak goes like this: Restart the run until you find a D20 and preferably a battery in the same shop. Run waves until enough pennies spawn to buy it. Take just enough to buy it, then do so. Return to the room and reroll the rest of the pickups. Open any chests that appear and amass enough to buy another battery.

The problem with this gamebreak, despite being tried and tested, is its inconsistency, especially in Greedier Mode. If you don't have enough pickups, or if you run out of money to buy more batteries, it's game over for that floor. This is annoying, finnicky, and odds are you'll find yourself with little money to do the gamebreak if you do get a battery, provided you buy items to improve your stats.

It is absolutely the bare minimum needed to break the game, but the bare minimum is... bare. You'll certainly want this in your next dish, but it's not the first thing you should keep your eyes out for.

The same goes for D Infinity... with added risk. See "The Dish Ruiners" for more.


If you were thinking of gamebreaks in Greed(ier) Mode other than the D20, you were probably thinking of one of these as well. They are simple: take damage, summon money, buy heart, take more damage, rinse, repeat. A simple break, but also a slow burn, especially without some of the seasonings.
Although there may not appear to be any differences between these two items' function at first, there is one thing going against the Piggy Bank: its inability to spawn anything other than pennies.
While this may make the Swallowed Penny better, the trinket is much rarer than the Piggy Bank, only being found in urns or Shopkeepers in my experience.

Unless you're against pork, the Piggy Bank is a fine ingredient, and much more common than the elusive Swallowed Penny.

Keep an eye on your trinket slot! If you have achieved gamebreak status, odds are you might accidentally swap the trinket for another, and lose track of your precious.


If you've picked this thing up, you might shrug it off as just another heart container and move on, seeming inocuous at first. Then, you notice you sometimes drop red hearts when taking damage. What's going on?

This item is the reason why. Scaling off of your Luck stat, it has a chance to drop a full red heart for each time you take damage, which is usually only half a heart. If you are at 0 Luck, this is a 1/10 chance, with the denominator decreasing by around 0.3 for each point of Luck you have, up to a 1/2.

If you combine it with the Piggy Bank or the Swallowed Penny, it makes their slow burn even faster; and if you add some of the seasonings, even better.


Much like the Piggy Bank and Old Bandage, the Fanny Pack has a 50% chance of dropping a random pickup, between a Coin, a Heart, a Bomb or a Key.

While not as straightforward and less luck-stat based than the other ones, the Fanny Pack should be coveted all the same due to its baseline coin flip chance to spawn pickups.

Be careful! Due to its ability to spawn bombs, this can also spawn Troll Bombs.


This item gives you one blip of charge per half heart of damage if you haven't filled your charge bar.
Tainted Magdalane players love this item, and if you have any of the previous passive items + a chargable, non-regenerating active item, you'll love it too.

Each blip of damage counts as one. This means that, for example, if you have 3 charges left on your 4 charge item, you will take three half hearts of damage, as opposed to the 1 heart and a half of damage you'd thought you'd taken. You roll three times for an Old Bandage/Piggy Bank/etc. proc, a.k.a. you have three 1/10 chances of getting a full heart from your Old Bandage.


If you have acquired enough ingredients to start cooking, you'll obviously want your utensils, and our means to these ends come in the form of our active item (or another reliable way of self harming, absent the Sharp Plug).

Generally, any active item without regenerating blips can be used to self harm; however, its utility and value to the gamebreak can vary. Keep in mind what each active item does, and use them wisely!

As they come to me, I will add more details per active item to this section.

• Single/Double Charge Items: Some items, like the Wooden Nickel or the Hourglass, are excellent for our gamebreak. There will never be any variance when charging this item by using the Sharp Plug (in the case of 2 charge items, this happens if you have 9 Volt), making them a very safe tool when paired with the Plug.

Though not fundamental to the gamebreak, these seasonings can quicken and improve our gamebreak, even reducing the risk of ending the run accidentally.
While these condiments overall add to the flavour of the dish, they may not pair well with each other. Choose your condiments wisely!


If you are concerned about accidentally losing your run, these items can act as good contingencies if you fall to zero health. Some are safer than others.

• Lazarus: Lazarus has an inherent extra life that regenerates on the next floor if spent.
  
• 1up!/Inner Child: Simply revives you as your current character.
  
• Soul of Lazarus: Revives you as your current character as long as you're holding it. If you have other extra lives, this is used before them.Using it consumes the item, killing you and then reviving you.
  
• Guppy's Collar: Chance to revive you. If you have other extra lives, this is used before them. 50% chance.

• Dead Cat: 9 extra lives, but cuts your red heart containers to 1. This can cripple your gamebreak unless you can gain more red hearts (usually as a result of Breakfasting).
  
• Lazarus' Rags: Revives you as Lazarus if used. This can prevent you from obtaining the achievements you might want.

These are to be avoided in most cases. Consider them carefully and at your own peril.

• Missing Poster: Revives you as The Lost (with Holy Mantle if unlocked), preventing you from further self-harm shenanigans.
  
• Judas' Shadow: revives you as Dark Judas (not Tainted Judas!), preventing you from gaining additional Red Hearts.
  
• Ankh/Broken Ankh: Passive item and trinket respectively, they revive you as the Blue Baby, preventing you from gaining additional Red Hearts.

Among all of the effects that Pills can have, there are some that are very useful to the gamebreak.
When starting a new run, a selection of 13 random effects is picked, and other pill effects are completely unobtainable.
If you have the Lucky Foot (Cain starts with this!) or the PHD (herein referred to as 'pill engoodeners'), you are unable to get any negative effects, and negative effects that are in the pool are converted into their (mostly) respective positive effects.
You can also use the Placebo active item to repeat these effects as much as you want.

Here are some effects you should keep an eye out for:

• Bad Trip / Full Health: Refills all your red heart containers. Bad Trip becomes Full Health while you have one single health or less (other heart types count), or with the pill engoodeners.
  
• Power Pill! / Feels Like I'm walking On Sunshine!: In later stages of the gamebreak, you can use this to prevent pickups from spawning while entering/exiting a Curse Room. Further detailed in "Beyond the Gamebreak".
  
• 48 Hour Energy!: Fully charges your active, then spawns 1 Battery (2 if you're already fully charged) and 2 Small Batteries.
  
• Health Up / Health Down: The impact from taking Dead Cat is lessened if one of these is in the pool.
  
• Explosive Diarrhea: TBD?? Might be useful with Scissors (see below).
  
• Luck Up / Luck Down: Improves your Old Bandage odds.
  
• Puberty: 3 Puberty pills give you the Adult transformation, granting you an additional Red Heart.
  
• Gulp!: Eat your currently held trinket, turning it into a permanent passive (much like a regular item).
  
• Vurp!: Regurgitate a new copy of the last used pill.

Although not as fundamental as the main ingredients, these passive items make your dish better nevertheless.


Normally, being a clown is a humiliating, colourfully crappy job. And colourful crap is exactly what this item gives us.

Each time you take damage, you have a 5% chance of making a rainbow poop appear. When breaking this poop, you regain all your red health.
This item works best when your method of self harm does not revolve around a static spot (i.e. the Curse Room spikes or a blue fire), and thus pairs really well with the Sharp Plug. Simply spawn some poop wherever, and break it when you're down to a heart or less.


A simple one, and one you might be familiar with. Habit gives you a blip of charge when you take damage. This allows you to passively charge your active item while self harming without use of the Sharp Plug.

Both of these items give you complete immunity to blasts. No more taking damage from Troll Bombs that spawn from the chaos.

In the case of Pyromaniac, its healing ability pairs well with the Sharp Plug and Curse of the Tower (alternatively, another means of infinite explosives, such as Golden Bombs or Explosive Tears), allowing you infinite uses of your active item, provided you have enough base red health to charge it.

Be careful! You should avoid these items if you do not have any other means of self damage.


Very good alternative ways of self harm, or infinite charges (in the case of Pyromaniac + Sharp Plug). They also open those bomb chests, and unstuck those pesky sticky nickels.

Be careful! Dr. Fetus and Epic Fetus synergise with your other bomb items, which can result in game crashes. See: The Dish Ruiners.


No more pesky troll bombs! Keeps the chaos a little more tidy, and also adds more pickups for your D20 shenanigans. Pairs really well with Curse of the Tower, since the Troll Bombs it spawns turn into regular bombs, essentially granting an endless stream of bombs.


With this item, each damage you take has a chance to Gulp one of your trinkets, turning them into passive effects, much like the Gulp! Pill, and freeing up your trinket slot. A good chef will always taste test while cooking.


Leave suggestions in the comments for more items! I hit the section limit-

A chef must be careful with the ingredients they add. He mightn't know how to make this ingredient work, either because he doesn't understand it, or because it does not go well with the dish.

To continue this drab chef analogy, here is a list of ingredients you should avoid adding. Understand them, and do so at your own risk... or play it safe, have some restraint, and don't.


All of these are terrible. Just terrible. They will re-roll every single one of your passive items, and you won't have your gamebreak combo anymore. They don't care about anything else. They just want to see you burn.

Avoid them if you can.

With the D Infinity, you're more likely than not using it for either the D6 or the D20. Since this thing uses every dice, be very careful when transforming your Infinity! D4 and D6 are close to each other, and so are D20 and D100. Without being careless, and with a healthy amount of paranoia, you shouldn't have to worry.


While not very harmful items on their own, they can create trapdoors that will take you to the next floor. If you are in the middle of shuffling pickups with the D20, they will ruin your day.
However, they can be used to create crawlspaces. This can allow you to create another "safe room" (see: Beyond the Gamebreak).


Even if you won't be firing your tears much, these items can cause your tears to turn into explosions. While these can be exploited to do self harm (Ipecac from Fruit Cake), they should nevertheless be avoided if you don't have a reliable means of self damage (eg. Sharp Plug).


Both of these items give you extra pocket item slots. While this may seem useful at first, either item locks you into their respective type. Unless you have both of them at once, you'll only be able to acquire either pills or cards/runes.


A risky one, Void has the potential to derail your run more quickly. It is good as a four charge item, but you should be mindful of the active items you are absorbing, as they can have unintended results when thrown all together into the bowl of void soup.


This item is the only way you can obtain multiple checkmarks on separate characters on a single run. Because of that, and its random nature, it should be used carefully, as it can turn you into The Keeper or The Lost, if either are unlocked; results which will cripple or halt the gamebreak respectively.
Only use it when looping with the R Key, or when donating to the Greed Machine to zero the chance of jamming.


Watch out for items that simply kill you, immediately or inevitably. If you do plan on using them, make sure you have an extra life.



Even if you remove all the other methods of self harm, you will still have your trusty Curse Room to continue the vice. Having Flight or the Orphan Socks prevents you from taking damage by entering, meaning you have to go in and out of the Curse Room to continue.
The Flat File removes spikes entirely, so be sure to avoid it entirely if you are carrying Marbles.


Sometimes, your dish is so good that it breaks reality.
And we don't want that. We want to keep cooking. While the following items may not be bad, and even desirable in most cases, they can crash the game, especially when amassed with other passives.
Even if the game does crash, your progress will not be lost, only reset to the first moment of the floor. If you suspect an imminent crash, pause, exit and rejoin to save your progress.


Items like The Parasite, Multidimensional Baby (pictured above) and Cricket's Body cause your tears to split or duplicate. Within the game's core is a certain object limit that cannot be reached, lest the game crashes. Since each tear counts as an object, and these items multiply tears exponentially or not, at best the game will slow down, and at worst it will crash.


Much like before, these can also summon many objects by sheer accumulation of tear effects. While these are tamer in this regard than those in the previous section, they should still be considered as a potential vector for crashes.


These bombs fire a ring of 10 tears when exploding, taking your passive items as effects. With bombs being a method of self harm, these should be avoided if you've taken items which may incur game crashes.

The good old technique of holding the R Key until good item still applies in this; however, now knowing that more items can achieve gamebreak, you can actually play the video game a little bit more and have fun!

You're still going to want to R-Key until you find a desireable item; not only in the shop, but also in the silver treasure room (or Gold, if you're lucky and find a free key in the Shop). So, here's your guide:

1. Look inside the Shop.
   
2. Is Fanny Pack/Sharp Plug/Old Bandage there?
   
3. Is D20 there?
   
4. Look inside the Silver Treasure Room.
   
5. Is Old Bandage there?
   
6. If the answer to 2 is Yes, proceed to play and buy the item. Gamebreak is likely.
   
7. If the answer to 2 is No, but 3/5 is Yes, proceed to play or R Key. Gamebreak is a little less likely. Trust your instincts.
   
8. If there are urns/special shopkeepers (the ones with Coins in their eye sockets) there and you can bomb/break them, do so. This might get you the Swallowed Penny.
   
9. If the answer to all is No, reroll and check again (if available), then R Key.

You can also bomb a Restock Machine in the shop if available. If you do this, make sure to pause and resume repeatedly! Restock Machines can reroll items twice or thrice, and you might miss out on one of the good items. Pausing repeatedly after bombing it allows you to exit the game if you find one of the good items, cancelling any posterior rerolls if they would've happened.

One you've acquired the good items, and if you have some spare health, proceed to do self damage. With the money that you might get, buy a heart, rinse and repeat. However, you might want to hold off on doing so until you have a good combination, as you can exhaust your coins before profiting.
Unless you have Percs! or The Wafer, do not use floor spikes, as they deal a full heart of damage.

If you have the Sharp Plug + Old Bandage combo, you can use your Active in the main room to spawn pickups from your other on-harm items. Since the Old Bandage can facilitate recursivity, do so until good capital has been amassed.

If you've exhausted your health, and have little money, buy Health and move to the next floor.

WIP: This section contains details on how to extend your run, loop, etc. The presentation is being worked on, but the core information is here.

So, you have broken the game and can kill enemies just by looking at them funny. What's next?
Perhaps you want to keep a collection of trinkets to then swallow with Marbles? Sucks to have PICA, but, more power to you!

By holding the Drop key (R2/RT on PSX/Xbox, CTRL on keyboard), you can drop your trinkets and pocket items in the current room. Through this (and with another technique...), you can create a "warehouse" room, stocked with all of the useful items and trinkets that you don't want to lose, which you can then duplicate if you find Diplopia or the Crooked Penny (!!!).



And after that? Well, why stop at one Ultra Greed kill? Why not two? Maybe three? A little more couldn't hurt... right?
With Butter, a D6, and a dream, you can create an R Key from nothing! Here's how:

1. Continue gamebreak until you find Butter.
   
2. Buy an Active from the shop, preferably the crappy or harmless ones (the Beans, the Remotes, Black hole, etc.) Keep the active item's effect in mind!
   
3. DO NOT DO THIS WITH DIPLOPIA. That active is centric to further gamebreak shenanigans.
   
4. While holding Butter, use the active in the floor's Super Secret. The active item will drop into a pedestal. This technique will herein be referred to as "to butter".
   
5. Proceed until you have enough actives amassed there.
   
6. Reroll them.

Not only do you have the opportunity of getting the good items (and getting rid of the bad items) from the Secret Room pool, you can also find the R Key! So once you've found it, be sure to keep it around somewhere else. Simply butter a crappy active and swap the R Key for it.

If you have gotten your hands on Diplopia, butter an active item in another clean room, which will become your Diplopia Room. (You can have your R key here, too.)

Here's the tricky part: in this Diplopia room, you have the opportunity to make a ludicrous amount of copies of any active item you want, by getting either two or three ? Cards or a Wild Card (unlocked from Tainted Eden's Mega ♥♥♥♥♥). The procedure is as follows:

1. Butter or swap Diplopia for the item you want.
   
2. (Optional, but risky!) If you have the Crooked Penny and don't want to lose Diplopia, use/Butter it in this room.
   
3. While holding Diplopia, use the ? Card. If you have a Wild Card, use Diplopia first, then the Wild Card.
   
4. Repeat until you have as many items as you want/need.

You should have more than enough R Keys here for an eternal evening of Greed Mode shenanigans! Or... just a few loops, if you have Schoolbag, some ?/Wild Cards, and the Clicker.
Say you don't want to lose all of these items, and you want to keep the run going for eternity...

Enter the man, the myth, the magnificent...


TODO: Add a funny gif here.

Unlocked by using Pandora's Box (Defeat The Lamb as Lazarus) in the Dark Room, this bad boy can fit so many items in it. Up to 10 doodads of any variety can be stored here; this means, you could hold 6 R Keys, 2 Diplopia, 2 ? Cards, or any other broken combination that comes to you.

Not only that, but it can also be used to keep your warehouses tidy! By using the Box where there's too much stuff, you can move the stuff elsewhere and keep a room clean, without having to Butter the active items, or carrying the trinkets one by one (or two by two if you have the Belly Button/Mom's Purse).

With Schoolbag, the trick to looping infinitely is to:

1. Unpack your stuff.
   
2. Take the R Key in the other slot (if you're using Clicker for further checkmarks, use it for that).
   
3. Pack your stuff back in the box.
   
4. Use the R Key.
   
5. Rinse and repeat until you've scummed all of Greed(ier) Mode.

If you ever run out of R Keys, and assuming you have a Diplopia in your inventory, you can look for one of the two broken card combos and keep duplicating!
If you are using the Clicker to get more completion marks, check that the character you're swapped into doesn't have the mark (Pause Menu).

WIP: This section will detail everything above in less detail, for quick reference.

I didn't like Greed(ier) Mode. Odds are, you didn't like it either before reading this guide. But after discovering all of these tips and tricks, it started to grow on me. I learned how to break this mode, to get all I want. It's magnificent, but also...

It gets boring.

Have a little temperance and restraint. Don't get too greedy with your gamebreaks, lest you crash the game, or worse: find yourself bored of your gamebreak. Take a break from the game, try to play it normally... and get frustrated, and return to gamebreaking again. Or, just play Hard Mode. Or do something else.

I hope you have found this guide useful, if not too long and wordy. For you ADHD folks (lighthearted), I'm working on a briefer guide in one of the above sections, so you don't have to consult the whole thing every time.

The comments are open for feedback! Please don't be mean.