Are you tired of constantly seeing bad
items... ...then proceeding to get savagely beaten
to death by totally unfair enemies? Well, as it turns out, this might not be entirely your fault! There are many unlockables which can assist you in gameplay in various ways. Some of the best items, pickups and characters are gated behind unlocks. The purpose of this video is not so much to rank these according to their power level, but rather suggest an order of unlocking
that makes your life much easier. However, keep in mind that this guide
mostly focuses on early-to-mid-game unlocks, so if you're a veteran player you might have already obtained all of these; but nonetheless, this may prove useful for new savefiles. Also, this was done on PC, and some unlock requirements might be slightly different on other platforms. Finally, it's also worth noting that you'll
probably get a lot of unlockables naturally, just by playing the game, and you might even unintentionally get something
from later on in this guide while doing one of the earlier steps. If so, good for you. With all that out of the way,
let's start off with, unsurprisingly, Azazel. Azazel's incredible base DPS and ability to fly make him an ideal candidate for unlocking nearly anything that doesn't
require a specific character. Moreover, his unlock requirement is
rather easy and often comes naturally, without much
thought put into it. You just need to
make 3 Deals with the Devil in one run. In case you're not familiar with this
mechanic, Deals with the Devil are most easily obtainable via finishing an
entire floor without taking Red Heart damage and then proceeding to do the same on the floor's boss. But, only beating the boss flawlessly is sometimes enough. Keep in mind that Soul Heart, Black Heart
and Eternal Heart damage does not reduce your chance of finding a
Devil Room and that the room can't naturally spawn
after the first boss of the run. You may check your exact Devil Room
chance by enabling Found HUD in the Options menu, and while
you're there, you should probably also make sure that
Extra HUD and Charge Bars are enabled, as more information is always nice to
have. If you're having trouble not taking Red
Heart damage, simply hold down the R key until you
restart 7 times in a row. This unlocks Half Soul Hearts, which
somewhat counter-intuitively lets you get more Soul Hearts to protect
you from Red Heart damage, because the newly unlocked Half variant
will not replace the regular variant in random drops. Next up is Eden. Eden himself is not really that powerful of a character (even though he certainly can be if you
get really lucky, since his starting stats and items are
randomized each run), but he will be necessary for further progression. His unlock method is really straightforward: Simply beat Mom's Heart,
the boss of Chapter 4, which is The Womb, Utero or Scarred Womb. Getting to Chapter 4 by normal means requires beating Mom,
the boss of Chapter 3, on a previous run. Next, Mom's Knife. This item really doesn't need much explaining,
it's simply one of the best DPS-ups in the entire game,
capable of single-handedly turning mediocre or even terrible runs into a
smooth-sailing, boss-melting experience. Now, to unlock this, you need to defeat
Satan as Isaac. But how do you get to Satan?
Well, the guaranteed way to go down to Sheol and fight him is to beat It Lives, which is
a slightly harder version of Mom's Heart that permanently replaces it
after you defeat the Heart 11 times. However, if you manage to make a Devil Room spawn after a regular Mom's Heart boss fight, you will also be able to enter it and go
down to Sheol before unlocking It Lives. And now for the reason we needed Eden:
Blank Card! This incredible activated item lets you use the effects
of your held card or rune however many times you like
(provided you have enough charges). Notable combos with this item include
these cards: - Joker, for unlimited access to Devil
Deals; - The Emperor, for easily skipping any
floor and going directly to the boss; - The Sun, for a full map reveal, AoE damage in the current room and a full heal; - Two of diamonds, for
obtaining a huge amount of money and easily breaking Greed Mode; - ...and many more. Interestingly, despite this item being so ludicrously powerful,
it may show up in Treasure Rooms, Secret Rooms,
and most importantly Shops, which combined with a limited item pool early on
(especially in Shops) makes for a really substantial chance of seeing this item
if you look for it hard enough. To unlock this item, simply defeat Isaac (the boss of The Cathedral, accessible by
going up the beam of light after defeating It Lives)
while playing as Eden. This can also be accessed early,
but for this one you'll need an Angel Room, which is generally harder to
achieve, because for it to appear you must not take any Devil Deals
in the Devil Room. Next is the most powerful starting upgrade
for a character you can get: The D6! Unlocking this item will not only
add it to the Treasure Room item pool, but also make Isaac start every run with it as his activated item. And what an
activated item it is! Using The D6 in a room with passive
or activated items will reroll all of them. With proper usage, this usually leads to getting
significantly better items than what you would have otherwise had to take. In fact, this starting advantage that Isaac can unlock
is so great, that if played well, he can even outclass Azazel! As for the unlock method, well,
unfortunately for this one you will have to kill Mom's
Heart at least 10 times, because that is how you unlock ???,
a character with the usually rather nasty downside of not being able to acquire Red Hearts. Once that's taken care of, you'll once
again need to defeat Isaac, the boss of The Cathedral, but this time playing as ???. After you kill Isaac enough times (namely, 5), you will unlock The Polaroid. This item, after being unlocked, will always drop from Mom and depending on your character's build, can be extremely good at preventing
damage. Its effect is that whenever your character has Half a Red Heart or no Red Hearts
after taking damage, a shield that nullifies all damage taken appears
around you for 5 seconds. In order to maximize the benefit you can
get from this, it's often a good idea to only have
Half a Red Heart or even no Red Hearts and instead rely on a good amount of
Soul Hearts and Black Hearts. Additionally, picking up The Polaroid
allows you to enter a new floor after defeating Isaac and jumping down the
chest. The floor is called Chest. Surprising, I
know. Now that you have unlocked the Chest, the
next step is to simply defeat its boss, called ???, while playing as Isaac. This shouldn't be much of a problem
given that Isaac should be starting with The D6 by now. Doing so unlocks the D20, a cousin of The
D6 that instead of rerolling all items in
the current room, rerolls all of its pickups and chests. This can be a very powerful effect if used in a room with
a large amount of unneeded pickups, but where this activated item really
shines is Greed Mode. In case you haven't played Greed Mode yet,
it's a mode in which instead of exploring an entire floor, you fight all
of your enemies in waves in a single room, gaining coins for each
defeated wave. Normally, you would just use these coins
to purchase items from the Shop, but with a D20, if you wait until
all of the coins are spawned and don't take any of them,
you can reroll them into random other, more valuable pickups,
which can include nickels, dimes and most importantly, chests full of pickups! If you have a Lil' Battery available
in the Shop, you can open these chests to spawn more
pickups and then reroll again! This should usually create an infinite
loop of getting more and more pickups and with the infinite amount of money
you can generate this way, you can also buy an infinite amount of
items from the Shop, completely trivializing the entirety of
Greed Mode. Speaking of Greed Mode, the D20 is not
the only thing that allows you to have an easy win. To minimize the amount of attempts required to get a good run in Greed Mode,
it's a good idea to also obtain a few trinkets from the
(Something) Penny series. Let's start off with the easiest one,
Bloody Penny. All you have to do in order to unlock
this one is simply beat ???
as Samson. Oh, and if by some miraculous chain of events you haven't naturally
unlocked Samson yet, to get him you simply need to complete
two floors in a row without taking damage. Once that's taken care of, Bloody Penny
may appear as one of the trinkets available to buy from the Shop and if it does you should definitely pick it up, as its effect makes any coins
you pick up have a 50% chance of additionally dropping a Half Red Heart,
greatly boosting your survivability (and cheese potential). Next on the list is Counterfeit Penny. This one gives you
a 50% chance to add an additional coin to your total whenever you pick up any of the coin
types. Unfortunately, depending on how you've
been playing the game up until this point, unlocking this trinket may prove quite grindy. The unlock method doesn't involve
killing a boss or anything like that, instead you have to... Play the Shell Game 100 times. The best way to farm this is to gather a
lot of money on an easy run and then look for Arcades. Play the Shell Game until he offers you Skatole. This is the only payout that, if
successful, would make the game disappear, so if you
see it, walk out of the room and his rewards
will be reset. Additionally, it's important to note that
the exact variant of the coins, bombs, hearts or keys that you will
obtain is random and you may sometimes not get the base
variant which is shown under the shell. This really comes into play if the
possible payout is a bomb - he may spawn Troll Bombs and kill
himself with the explosion! If he does spawn them, you should try
your best to move them away with your character's tears or body. And onto the perhaps most game-breaking of the trio, Swallowed Penny. It makes you spawn a coin
of a random type whenever you take damage, which combined with
pretty much any other way to increase money gained or decrease prices
(or effects triggered upon taking damage) leads to an extremely easy way of
breaking Greed Mode. If it's so good, then why wait until now
with unlocking it, you may ask? Well, just like many other
awesome unlocks, it's gated behind a part of the game
that I haven't talked about yet - Challenges. Accessed from the main menu,
they are a list of unlockable (yes, that's part of the reason why I waited so long to mention them, you don't have most of them available at
the start of the game) challenge runs that start you off with
specific items and rules. Some of these can be done much earlier
and some are even available by default, but they may prove especially
frustrating if you attempt them before getting a solid grasp of regular
gameplay. So, depending on your experience and
skill level, it may or may not be worthwhile to do this
earlier on in the timeline. Also, keep in mind, some challenges have
pretty terrible rewards that will definitely not make the game any easier
for you, so I would recommend checking the Wiki
(link in the description) before trying to complete a challenge
that is not on this list. Unless you enjoy the added difficulty, of
course. (Weirdo.) In order to unlock Swallowed Penny, you will need to complete Challenge #15:
Slow Roll. This one is pretty straightforward, you have huge powerful tears, but your
tear delay makes you shoot extremely slowly. Be somewhat careful about where you decide to shoot and you shouldn't have
much trouble beating Mom and finishing this challenge, even with the restriction that Treasure Rooms don't appear. Next on the list of challenge rewards is the rune Jera. Runes are a lot like cards. They are single-use consumables granting various effects. This one in particular spawns a copy of
every pickup and chest in the current room. I don't think it requires much explaining to see the game-breaking potential behind this, especially if you have access to
multiple of these, although do keep in mind that you CAN'T copy a Jera rune using a Jera rune. Also, despite our previously unlocked
activated item Blank Card having the description "Card mimic", it actually works on runes as well, making Blank Card + Jera an extremely easy way to generate insane amounts of items. To unlock it, complete challenge #2:
High Brow. You start off with Number One and a bunch of poop-themed items (very funny, Edmund) and once again you need to defeat Mom. Not too hard, really, but use your activated item, Flush!, if you find yourself in a difficult room. The next rune, Algiz, grants you a shield similar to the one that The Polaroid may provide, but this one lasts for a whopping 30
seconds! That's usually way more than enough time
to kill any boss that you would otherwise be having trouble with. To unlock this one you'll have to complete challenge #8:
Cat Got Your Tongue. Hopefully it's already available for you,
but in case it's not, you'll have to become Guppy to unlock it.
You can do that by simply collecting (you don't have to be actively holding them in the case of activated items) any 3 items from this pool on the
same run: Guppy's Head, Guppy's Paw, Guppy's Collar,
Guppy's Hair Ball, Guppy's Tail and Dead Cat. The most reliable way to achieve this is to visit as many Devil Rooms as possible and also open as many Red Chests and Golden Chests as possible, as all 3 of these sources have a decent chance of containing one of the required items. Onto the actual challenge itself:
Cat Got Your Tongue is one of the more annoying challenges as it starts you off Blindfolded, meaning that you cannot fire tears at all! Your only ways of dealing damage at the
start of the run will be Guppy's Hair Ball, Guppy's Head and possibly some bombs. Treasure Rooms don't appear in this one
either, so unless you really enjoy torturing yourself with learning how to
properly use Guppy's Hair Ball as an offensive item (yuck), you will usually have to rely on getting lucky with items available from Shops, boss drops and Devil Rooms. You're mostly looking for familiars, orbitals and defensive items, possibly
some bombs as well. Thankfully, the goal is just Mom, so after
enough attempts you'll surely get it. After that, it's time to unlock another
rune - Perthro. It rerolls all pedestal items in the
current room, which is the same effect as The D6. And to unlock this one you'll need to beat challenge #6:
Solar System, available after defeating Mom's Heart 3 times. Yup, another Blindfolded challenge. Let's get these over with sooner rather than later. In this one, you get flight and a few
orbitals to protect you from shots and deal damage, as well as the Beelzebub transformation, which turns most types of enemy flies
into friendly blue flies. Keep in mind that the flies orbiting
closest to your character (the ones from halo of flies) will not
deal any damage to most enemies; the only exceptions being some fly type foes
and those should already automatically turn into blue flies The goal is Mom's Heart or It Lives, making this challenge probably take longer per run than the previous ones, but unlike in Cat Got Your Tongue, in
this one you actually have a decently easy to control source of reliable damage, so overall, with good control this challenge shouldn't be that bad. Alright, so now that you're done with those Blindfolded challenges, (for now) let's move on to unlocking Ansuz. This rune reveals the whole map, including the Secret Room and (unlike XXI - The World) also the Super Secret Room! To unlock it you'll need to beat challenge #5:
The Tank. The prerequisite for this one is
once again trivial, you just need to have seven or more Red Heart Containers at
one time. This challenge gives you a ton of
survivability while making your character really slow; and while this can get pretty annoying, it's really not all that difficult considering you just need to kill Mom to be done with it. Next up, the rune of Dagaz.
This one removes all curses from the current floor, except Curse of the Labyrinth since that one irreversibly turns the floor into an XL floor, and grants a single Soul Heart. This rune is particularly useful after unlocking Everything Is Terrible, which is your "reward" for defeating Mom's Heart 5 times and makes curses appear more often (among other things). Unlocking this one requires beating challenge #4:
Darkness Falls. This one has 2 prerequisites, but yet again both should already be
done by now. Firstly, unlock Eve by not picking up any
Hearts for 2 floors in a row; and secondly unlock It Lives
by defeating Mom's Heart 11 times. Once that is done, the challenge itself gives you a decent amount of starting damage and the incredibly powerful (if used correctly, this may require some practice) Sacrificial Dagger. This one is a bit longer,
requiring you to beat Satan, but if you get some good Devil Deals
it really shouldn't be too bad. That's it when it comes to the runes
that we really want to unlock, the other runes, while sometimes useful,
in general tend to dilute your rune pool, (looking at you, Berkano) so I wouldn't
recommend doing their associated challenges until much later. Without further ado, the next unlock is Chaos Card! This consumable,
once activated, proceeds to travel in a straight line, instantly destroying everything in its path (yes, INCLUDING bosses). This is honestly probably the most
powerful standalone consumable item in the entire game if used correctly,
but making good use of it can be quite tricky and unintuitive, so I made a detailed guide on its usage and related topics (link in the description and at the end of this video). Although, do keep in mind that said guide doesn't feature my smooth, soothing voice as I didn't have a decent-ish mic yet. Anyway, for this one you'll need to do challenge #9:
Demo Man, available after defeating Mom's Heart 9 times. The challenge should honestly not be much of an issue if you use remote detonator at the right time after every shot,
as you will have both a lot of damage and infinite explosives at your disposal.
The goal is to defeat Mom's Heart or It Lives. Another great item to unlock via
challenges is Death's Touch. It gives you a nice damage-up and increases tear size, but most importantly it grants piercing
tears, which is a phenomenal thing to have
against groups of enemies and multi-segment bosses.
Additionally, it can appear in not only Treasure Rooms but also Devil Rooms,
just like Mom's Knife, which improves the comparatively small Devil Room item pool quite noticeably. The challenge that unlocks this one is #17:
Waka Waka. It starts you off with the absolutely horrible combo of Anti-Gravity + Strange Attractor. This makes it so that your tears only
start moving after you stop holding the fire button and enemies (among other things) are attracted to these stationary tears. To counteract this, I highly recommend just spamming the fire buttons, treating this as kind of a really bad Chocolate Milk run. It's really annoying, but thankfully you only have to beat Mom. And the last essential item that you
should undoubtedly be unlocking is... Epic Fetus! Just like the name implies,
it's similar to Dr. Fetus in that it replaces your tears with explosives,
but WAY stronger and with much easier aiming, because instead of bombs, you fire missiles from the sky! If you're playing with a mouse and keyboard on PC, for this item I highly recommend turning on Mouse Control in the options.ini file found in
Documents\My Games\Binding of Isaac Afterbirth+ as that will allow you to deliver death to your enemies with unparalleled precision. The unlock method for this item
is not the easiest or quickest, but well worth it for the eventual payoff.
You have to beat challenge #19:
The Family Man, but before you can do that, you'll have to unlock the challenge itself. In order to do so, you'll need to acquire
both Key Pieces from the Angels in one run. They will only drop them if you've unlocked the Key Pieces via beating the Chest or Dark Room on a previous run. There are many ways to
summon these Angels, but we'll focus on the 2 most reliable
ones: - Firstly, you can destroy the Angel Statue
in an Angel Room to spawn a single Angel. This can be done via a bomb or similar rock-destroying effects. The problem with this method is that the Angel Room will never appear under normal conditions if you have taken a Deal with the Devil in the current run and the Devil Room will always be the
first one to spawn, so you'll need to "resist the temptation" of taking good Devil Deals if you want to make use of this method.
- Secondly, you may make enough sacrifices in a Sacrifice Room. Each time you step on the spikes in a Sacrifice Room, you will take damage, but you may get a positive effect, such as chests, pickups or being teleported to the Angel Room. However, there are a few guaranteed outcomes depending on how many times
you've made a sacrifice in that room and the most important ones for this
purpose are the 9th and 11th sacrifices' rewards: A battle with Uriel, the first Angel; and with Gabriel, the second Angel. This means that if you have enough health or means of replenishing your health, you may acquire both key pieces from the same room. The two problems with this method are
that: a) You may not always have enough health
to make all the necessary sacrifices, although this shouldn't be too bad
considering you may get hearts as rewards; and b) Sacrifice Rooms are not guaranteed to spawn on every floor. Overall though, I would say this is my preferred method, as you don't have to give up the various upgrades available from Devil Deals. Alright, assuming you took care of the Key Pieces, onto the challenge itself. This is another one of the dreaded Blindfolded challenges, although in this one you can kind of
shoot, but only thanks to your starting
familiars. It goes without saying that acquiring
more familiars or orbitals would increase your damage output nicely,
especially since you start with BFFS!, which improves the effectiveness of your
familiars, but it's worth noting that vanilla damage-ups are actually not worthless at all! In fact, obtaining an item such as Polyphemus or Ipecac would greatly increase the damage of your flies generated by Rotten Baby,
since their damage is twice your tear damage. Make sure to use Dad's Key if you're low
on keys and hopefully, with enough attempts, you can finally defeat Isaac, and unlock the pure awesomeness of Epic Fetus! And that's it! That's all the essential
unlockables in The Binding of Isaac Afterbirth+, at least in my opinion. Yes, there are other powerful items that you may want to unlock, but I believe that equipped with these
unlocks, as well as the knowledge that you hopefully acquired along the way, you should have a good head start on any
further endeavors in Isaac and oh boy is there a good amount of
those to choose from! This marks my first video with a full
voiceover, so please do let me know what you think about this format and whether you would like to see more via the comments below. Thanks for watching! This has been Meatnyan, signing off.
given the fact that i have unlocked most of the characters of the game(and almost defeated lamb once, but i still died at the 2nd phase), it's a nice video