Vampire Survivors Items Guide - Evolutions, Combos, Passives and Weapons Explained
The itemization system in Vampire Survivors includes a ton of different weapons, passive items, unions, evolutions, and other elements that can all be mixed and matched to create a virtually endless number of builds. These builds, in turn, exist with the objective of helping you survive much better, such as by increasing your damage potential, making you more resistant to damage, or conferring a wide variety of skills and perks.
- The Difference Between Weapons and Passive Items
- Item Unions and Evolutions
- Treasure Chests and Their Uses
- The Importance of PowerUps
If you’re a newcomer to Vampire Survivors, it’s understandable that you might have a hard time getting used to this system. In this sense, we’ve decided to write a Vampire Survivors item guide so that you can learn the ins and outs of this mechanic, as well as how to use it to your advantage during your matches.
The Difference Between Weapons and Passive Items
The two most common types of items that you’ll be finding and using in Vampire Survivors are weapons and passive items, which are also easy to confuse since they both take up space in your inventory. However, the biggest difference between these two is that, while weapons always have an active effect, in the form of the attacks they unleash periodically, passive items don’t actually do anything except boost your stats while in your possession. As such, while they both make up your inventory, you’ll almost always be leaning towards having more weapons, unless your build requires boosting specific stats via passive items.
It’s worth mentioning here that the player is limited to six weapons and passive items at any given moment. In this sense, no matter how you slice it, you’ll frequently have to combine weapons with passive items in your build. This is something you’d want to do regardless, since it’s the main method of evolving and combining items to create better weapons. In fact, evolving weapons is one of the best ways to survive in Vampire Survivors, as these combinations can be exceedingly powerful.
Speaking of which…
Item Unions and Evolutions
Weapon combos and evolutions are some of the strongest items in the game, often offering additional effects and dealing more damage, but requiring a lot of effort to actually obtain. To create one of these weapons, you first need to upgrade the base weapon to its maximum level, while also having the corresponding passive item in your inventory. Afterward, once these conditions are met, you can evolve the base weapon by picking up a treasure chest, which will grant you the evolved weapon.
Evolution weapons are quite strong and often have only one level. However, the ones that can be upgraded will usually start showing up in chests and as level-up rewards, but only AFTER you’ve filled up all other passive item slots in your inventory.
Item unions, on the other hand, are similar in concept compared to evolutions, but involve combining two weapons, rather than a weapon with a passive item. They are created in the same manner as evolutions, but with the added perk of freeing up a weapon slot since both ingredients are merged into one.
Treasure Chests and Their Uses
While this might be self-explanatory, treasure chests are one of the most valuable objects that you can find in Vampire Survivors, mostly because while they often contain just one item, you can also luck out and score up to five items or weapons in each—you can even get duplicate items within one same chest, which can help significantly to upgrade one of the weapons or passive items that you’re carrying.
Chests can be found exclusively by defeating boss enemies during gameplay. These boss enemies are often glowing with a blue shimmer, or are bigger than the rest, with a correspondingly larger HP pool. However, these enemies are not guaranteed to drop chests, as they can instead drop experience gems.
It’s worth pointing out here that chests can only contain items that are currently in your inventory. As such, they will always upgrade one or more of your items, depending on what you’re currently carrying. For instance, if you only have one weapon currently, and you get a streak of good luck with a 5-item chest, you’ll get five duplicates of the weapon you’re carrying.
Finally, chests are the only way to create evolution or union items. This is achieved whenever you have the prerequisite items in your inventory and proceed to open up a chest, which will evolve the chest and yield the resulting item. Only one item can be evolved per chest. In this sense, even if you fulfill the requirements to combine several items, you’ll simply need to find additional chests.
The Importance of PowerUps
Though not technically items, as you can’t find these in-game, PowerUps are nevertheless a pivotal aspect of your Vampire Survivors progression. These upgrades confer permanent bonuses to your stats when in-game, which in turn will make it easier to survive.
These PowerUps can be purchased from the main title screen and include upgrades to most stats in the game. And if you want to learn more about what each of these stats do, feel free to check out our Vampire Survivors beginner’s guide, where we’ve gone over this and many other topics of interest for newcomers. Nevertheless, if you’re looking to purchase some of these PowerUps, we suggest starting with Magnet, Might, and Cooldown. Later on you can invest in the others, but we believe these three give the best returns for your investment early in the game.
And with that, you basically know all the basics related to the weapons and passive items in Vampire Survivors. All that’s left now is to actually hop into matches and start unlocking more weapons and items so that you can start experimenting with different builds.
