Grayfruit's Guide to Breaking The Binding of Isaac

hi everyone today i'm bringing you another guide video because this is something i get asked about a lot and i'd love to help people achieve the dream of making the binding of isaac completely broken like i do i'll be sticking to the rebirth edition with all the dlc up to afterbirth plus seeing as the original flash game version of isaac is a lot harder and has a lot less resources to get stuff really broken like afterbirth plus has this game is both complicated and gross so sadly if you're a complete newcomer to isaac this guide might not be very helpful at getting you familiar with the more basic mechanics or lowering your gag reflex respectively i'd suggest playing a few rounds of the game yourself just to get a feel for it or if you're not looking to spend money unless you're sure you'll like it maybe watch a playthrough and check the incredibly detailed and useful isaac wiki for more info if there's anything that confuses you i've actually done an informal non-scripted beginner's tutorial stream where i try my best to explain and demonstrate a lot of the major mechanics if that sounds useful as well i've linked that alongside all other resources mentioned in the description this game also has an unlock system so without mods you'll have to unlock a lot of the items i'm describing in this video i am eventually going to talk about mods but for this first part i'm just going to talk about the game in its unaltered form if you're already a game breaking pro and just want to see the mods i use feel free to skip to this part of the video the main strategy to keep in mind when you're going for game breaks is to hold on to useful items until they're at their maximum potential usefulness index or makui for short this part of the video is just going to be listing specific items and situations to take advantage of but the main idea is to keep your eyes peeled for those things and save them until you can get a really good combination steam sale is the bread and butter game break item it reduces the cost of anything in shops by half of its original or sale price making everything completely free of charge for the rest of your run if you manage to get your hands on two of them you can accomplish this either by duplicating one with an item like diplopia or the crooked penny or you could just get two steam sales naturally which is possible and marginally more likely than other items seeing as the steam sale is in both the treasure room and shop item pools as well as being a rare-ish drop from blowing up shopkeepers or fighting greed greed mode is easier for game breaks of this nature as it starts you out with the restock by default and also gives more opportunities to bomb shopkeepers i find that i get steam sail on the last floor of greed mode frustratingly often so the rerun ability is a godsend for those situations a lot of people don't even know about the rerun feature because you have to unlock it by doing three victory laps in a row if you find yourself with two steam sales but no restock in normal or hard mode just find your nearest shop and pray that it has a re-roll machine buy every item in the shop pay the re-roll toll to spawn them all back in as different items then rinse and repeat until you hopefully get restock which is also in the shop item pool before you run out of coins and bombs and no getting three steam sales does not make it so you get paid to buy items glitter bombs are usually a slightly forgettable upgrade giving you the occasional random drop out of the explosion of one of your own bombs however if you get this item alongside something that gives infinite bombs like the fetus items number two a gold bomb or even kamikaze you can get theoretically infinite pickups with a little patience this kind of game break has a tendency to turn into what i like to call a complete [ __ ] and thus it's a little hard to keep track of what cards and pills and such are wear some items are especially useful in this clusterfucked state or cfs for short such as the bum friend series of products to keep pickups clean and tidy if there are enemies in the room the gb bug can be good in a cluster as it has a chance to reroll pickups into pedestal items and when the floor is covered in items that makes this chance much more likely greed mode obviously is best for this generally a cfs is much messier and more tedious than some other kinds of game breaks but it's fun in its own right you could even theoretically do this with doctors or own if you had some sort of infinite battery resource speaking of which the blank card is one of my favorite items in the game what it does is mimic the effect of whatever card or rune you're holding at the cost of losing spacebar charge but not consuming the card like that action normally would this can lead to outright broken combinations with cards like the two of diamonds or the euro rune blank card plus two of diamonds is a little easier in greed mode because all you need is a shop roll with a battery in it that is as long as you keep a few coins to buy a battery with and double your money at all times yara on the other hand is useful basically no matter where you are if you get yara in the blank card find a room that has a battery in it duplicate it using the blank card go get another four bars of charge either from doing rooms or getting another battery and bada bang bada boom the game's bada broke from here you can clone any pickup as well as pills cards sacks and chests as long as we're on the sack in the chest allow me to briefly explain how cloning these things works since chests and sacks have random goodies in them you might think that if you clone one it'd create a new randomized pack of goodies in the new cloned one but actually the contents will always be exactly the same so for instance if you clone a chest that contains a penny a bomb in the tower card both chests will contain exactly those things the one exception to this is if you clone a chest that has a pedestal item in it in which case each clone chest will contain a new pedestal item if you're trying to specifically get pedestal items from chests i'd advise just going to the area of the chest in order to make the chance of that happening 100 rather than deal with the chances of it not happening elsewhere but yes this trick can be used to get infinite pedestal items this card can also reap amazing benefits when combined with the tarot cloth or the car battery as both of those items individually double the blank card the iv bag is another seemingly innocuous item that can get you infinite money and thus also theoretically infinite anything with a little patience normally this item is infinitely usable with no battery charge giving you one to three coins in exchange for taking one half of a heart of health certain item combinations can allow you to get infinite coins though such as isaac's heart which makes isaac's actual body invincible turning iv bag into an item that just infinitely gives you coins at no cost to yourself you can also get broken stuff with the iv bag in certain trinkets items that grant two trinket slots and the recent feature of smelting and gulping trinkets help a lot with this bloody penny which has a 50 50 chance of dropping a half heart whenever you collect a coin is great for this since it makes a recursive cycle of damaging self to get coins picking up coins coins making hearts and picking up hearts in order to start over again and once you have enough coins and hearts it'll start making a profit fast then you can make this cycle more and more efficient with items like piggy bank humbling bundle fanny pack and maggie's bow or trinkets like the swallowed penny counterfeit penny and mom's locket i won't go through all those items specific effects but essentially it just makes it so the whole process yields both more hearts and more coins in fact sometimes the iv bag isn't even needed at all if you have these trinkets and items so you can just do it with an environmental hazard or some other self-harm item if you're struggling to find iv bag i'd suggest using blood donation machines a lot if you have hearts to spare it's worth donating them because i mean just on one hand it's a good cause and on the other it's a good chance that you'll either get the blood bag which heals you five red hearts as well as adding a heart container or the iv bag which is what you're looking for habit is an item that isn't so much a game breaker on its own but it can help you get to a game break situation faster it gives one room worth of charge every time you take damage thus if you had a sun card in the blank card as well as at least three heart containers and at least part of that aforementioned cocktail of self-harm strat items you could go in and out of a curse room over and over again to spawn infinite coins and use the battery charge you're getting from being hurt to heal yourself there are a ton of spacebar items that become a lot better and have more potential for brokenness when you have habit on just in general especially ones that give you health like the yum heart the book of revelations or the satanic bible game breaking with the d20 is pretty simple and easiest to do in greed mode i find because it's easy to come upon a room filled with pickups in there this item re-rolls all pickups on screen including potentially turning single items like a coin or bomb or a key into chests and sacks thus if you have enough pickups on screen requiring more luck the less pickups there are you can use this process to get infinite random pickups step one use the d20 on a room full of pickups step two open all chests and sacks that you see but try not to pick up anything else step 3 get charged for the d20 somehow step 4 rinse and repeat steps 1-3 until you have so much of everything that you don't know what to do with yourself pyromaniac is a lot more conspicuous in its brokenness every time you get hit by an explosion rather than damaging you it heals you a full red heart this is of course already broken with items that grant infinite explosives like kamikaze number two doctor fetus epic fetus and ipac as well as just generally making the game much easier as explosions are everywhere and the game even counts stompy leggy attacks as explosions for some reason this can also turn atrocious inconvenient items like curse of the tower or broken shovel into amazing healing items infinite regenerating health isn't the most convenient resource to milk for all it's worth but between things like blood donation and sacrifice rooms there's usually enough to work with both diplopia and the crooked penny are pretty crazy as they both have the capability to duplicate pedestal items diplopia duplicates every item and pickup in the room once and then disappears whereas crooked penny which move which whereas crooked penny which works for multiple uses has a 50 50 chance that's unaffected by your luck stat to either duplicate everything in the room or delete everything in the room giving you one penny in return so diplopia is consistent but only has one use while crooked penny is a risk that you can take over and over again these two items are usually how you get two steam sales or two incubi or quad quad shot from two mutant spiders diplopia is not affected by the car battery unfortunately but crooked penny is and the way it works is complicated so i'm just gonna put it up on the screen not much else to say about these items except they're great [Music] pills are an unlikely source of game breakiness but with the placebo you can actually exploit a few of them quite hard the best one to get with placebo is 48 hour energy with an exclamation mark because using it charges your item while also dropping one or two batteries meaning you can use it to get infinite batteries once you have a ton of batteries if you get your hands on any other number of useful pills you can have essentially unlimited uses of any of them including the ones that boost your stats permanently my personal favorite thing to do with placebo is become infinitely small with one makes you smaller or fill up the entire screen with what makes you larger [Music] now these next few items are pertinent to game breaking but they're more on the category of items you'd want to avoid or treat with care rather than look for d4 d100 and missingno are all pretty volatile items as they all have to do with re-rolling every item on your character although the details vary mass re-roll items like this can lead to broken builds and item combinations but it's also just as likely that you'll get all your best items re-rolled into trash mass re-rolling when you already have a large amount of items has the unfortunate side effect of what we call breakfasting now i'm no programmer and i've never felt super clear on the details of this but i'm going to do a brief tangent here in order to explain breakfasting because it comes up a lot in my videos and it's a little esoteric to understand at first so the binding of isaac uses the system we call item pools for determining what items appear during a play through the term pool here really just means a list of items that can be spawned in specific rooms or situations for example the treasure room pool is as you may expect the list of items that the game will give you in a treasure room whereas the devil room pool is only items you'll get as devil deals there's different sets of pools depending on if you're in normal mode or greed mode and there are more pools than what you'd think the wiki has a full list of them when an item gets spawned by the game it flags that item and removes it from that item pool thus items that exist in multiple pools and most items are in at least two can show up multiple times in a run although this happening naturally is rare when an item pool has flagged every item in that pool every subsequent item that shows up will be breakfast i'm pretty sure this is an intentional move to prevent the most extreme game break situations as breakfast is an item that doesn't change your appearance in any way and its effect giving you a single heart container is something that would never become broken in ways the game couldn't handle we call this effect where every item starts coming up breakfast breakfasting if you use the d4 d100 a bunch of times or go down a bunch of floors with missingno you can actually breakfast the items that are already on your character by flagging those items in such mass amounts you can cut huge chunks out of item pools and drain them all quite quickly leaving you with a weirdly specific set of items every time and nothing else i don't know why these items survive the breakfasting process but i have a suspicion it has something to do with those items being linked to transformations which you'll get all of if you completely breakfast the whole game little baggie and starter deck have sort of a yin yang thing going on the little baggie gives you a pill and an extra pill slot as well as removing all cards from the game turning them into pills the starter deck does the opposite giving you a card in an extra card slot and turning all remaining pills into cards so if you have a game break that centers around a very useful card or rune avoid the little baggie if it's a pill you're exploiting instead avoid the starter deck undefined teleports you away from useful resources and can on occasion essentially force you to go to the next floor via the error room best to be avoided unless you're into the adventurous lifestyle now i'm going to talk about mods so if you either don't have afterbirth plus or do and just want to limit your game breaking potential out of some idea that the game will like you less if you break it more hop off at the next stop i have two mod packs linked in the description one that's useful for game breaking that i'll go into detail on in just a moment and a silly one that i'll give a brief explanation on after skip to this part if you just want the silly one this one's a tiny bit technical but essentially it's a tool you can use to use other mods and really start to mess around with the game in specific ways in the form of an extra menu screen this mod pack also includes the custom starting items mod which allows you to use the mod config menu to set which item specific character start runs with use the isaac wiki or platinumgod.co.uk to find specific item values rather than just scrolling through each item one by one as it gets quite tedious this is perhaps the easiest way to get the game to break as you can give yourself items like the blank card or godhead slash brimstone right at the start there's tons of ways to get creative here with broken item combinations as you can give yourself three items in a trinket right off the bat curses are blatantly random increases in difficulty and they put restrictions on being able to see what the hell you're doing so this mod removes them if you think curses are great and shouldn't have been removed i'd suggest just arbitrarily handicapping yourself in some other way flip a coin at the beginning of each floor and if it lands on heads you have to do the floor with one hand or balancing a book on your head or whatever a lot of the tedium of some game breaks is having to see certain animations or do certain actions over and over and over again so several mods in this collection are dedicated to reducing that tedious waiting time beggars as well as machines that accept coins except for the normal slot machine and the three shell beggar have much faster animations now and giant book has been removed altogether giant hook is the name given to brief animations that play when using certain items and doing other things like adding two halves of eternal hearts to make a heart container or when triggering effects that only occur when you take damage this mod completely removes these small cutscenes and can make certain specific situations a lot faster in the long run this one's exactly what it says on the tin hold select during game play and select the room you want to go to and bam tedious walk time saved you'll still take damage if you teleport into or out of a curse room and it does occasionally restrict your ability to teleport if you're in a room that you're not supposed to be able to leave otherwise such as the mom boss fight room this one's also exactly what it sounds like remember og isaac where you could get fat lasers when you got a lot of damage upgrades this brings that feature back allowing for some pretty wacky op item combos this seems like a very small thing but trust me once you get a good item fest game break going you'll want all the free space you can get in unmodded isaac you can also just walk out of and back into a room to get rid of empty pedestals but this mod just saves you the time [Music] heart containers coins bonds and keys effectively no longer have a cap i say effectively because they do technically have a cap it's just that once you've reached that cap you already have more than enough coins or bombs or keys than you could ever use in your brief human lifespan i've had concerning things happen before with the one that works on heart containers specifically where i get so many hearts that for some reason it carries over between runs and it lags the game significantly but i found that using the dead cat item drained all the laggy extraneous containers i explained it before but long story short breakfasting is a measure built into the game to prevent some of the more ridiculous game break situations from happening it limits the items that spawn until all that's left is breakfast a boring item that does nothing exciting this mod removes that feature not always perfectly but well enough that i still include it this mod makes mass reroll items much more viable such as missingno the d4 and the d100 [Music] the universal dice is the only mod item i'm including here as it's quite useful but not completely busted this dice re-rolls things into other iterations of things from the same category for example it re-rolls pedestal items into different pedestal items coins and other coins trinkets into other trinkets cards and other cars pills keys bombs hearts chests better putting etc in there just in case i forgot something it's quite useful and it doubles your chances of even getting a d6 level of quality item by merely existing the silly mod pack i've assembled is frankly quite a mess i'm not even sure the game will run with all the mods enabled so i'd suggest you go into the mod menu in isaac's main menu and go down the list disabling ones you don't want this mod pack includes both random goofy changes and a bunch of jojo reference mods as all were highly requested i realize basically nobody will want all of these mods which is why the feature of disabling them in-game is very useful here i encourage you all to customize your wacky isaac experience to your personal preferences and with that i think i've shared all the most pertinent game breaking info i have i'm sure there's a couple details i got wrong or a couple things i neglected to mention so be sure to chip in with your advice in the comments other than that good luck and happy breaking

Channel: grayfruit

Views: 282,697

Rating: 4.9755754 out of 5

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Id: TJtOzw5ojJE

Length: 17min 45sec (1065 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 24 2020