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  • Epiphany: Let’s take those Tainted Characters and mess them up even more;
  • Fiend Folio: An essential expansion for your BoI experience – if not for the items, enemies, or layouts, then at least for…
  • Golem: My precious… ooh, and that one’s my precious, too.

Razzle, in his 2000+ hours of playing The Binding of Isaac, has developed his own taste for the fruits of the modding community. To me, he’s pretty much an aficionado on both BoI and its many, many Workshop mods. There’s a couple big mods, however, he has yet to try. The words “Show Razzle Something Cool” flickering in my mind, I had to check them out for myself.

BoI may not have always had Workshop support, but that hasn’t stopped it from accumulating a rich modding history. If you’re playing on Steam, you owe it to yourself to take a look and find what takes your fancy:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/250900/workshop

Wanna make one of the most annoying early bosses more tolerable? Bumbario to the rescue:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2510879232&searchtext=bumbario

It might not be apparent if you’re new to BoI, but modding saved this game. Take the Antibirth expansion. Antibirth was developed at a time when Afterbirth and Afterbirth+ were putting a lot of players off for bloating the item pool, nerfing synergies, and introducing perhaps the most heinously horseshit boss the game has seen yet: Delirium. If you’re low on health, it can decide, at RANDOM, to instantly end your run by telefragging you (epilepsy warning):

https://twitter.com/pikuoriparadise/status/1774150468056351017?s=20

Let’s get one thing straight with mods, right off the bat: I love mods, and I love games that support modders. Fully-fledged expansions like Antibirth are almost always developed by affinity groups – people who’ve come together if for no other reason than because they love the game and share the goal of supporting it according to their abilities:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affinity_group

That’s beautiful.

When modding is supported, all parties benefit. Antibirth’s team basically said, “We’ll make our own expansion, with Blackjack and hookers, ” and went so hard that Edmund went, “Well, shit, can’t just not have this in my game ig:”

https://twitter.com/FixItVinh/status/810229924934062080

Something like that, anyway… When a game’s health looks precarious, mods like Antibirth are an expression of self-help (by which I mean the right of players to customise their bought games to tailor an experience to their liking).

There’s a timeline out there where Antibirth got C&D’d into disappearance1 – a massive, out-of-proportion Nintendo-style response – and I’m glad we’re not on it. See Repentance? That, my friends, is what you get when your game supports modders. Mods like Epiphany only serve to amplify that greatness and make it even better. It’s by no means an expansion the game needs, but it’s certainly one that it deserves.

It surprised me, then, when I asked Razzle if he’d tried Epiphany or Fiend Folio, to learn that he hadn’t. I honestly thought he would be all over them like a rash. Antibirth was the only thing that kept him going in the Afterbirth days; pre-Repentance Keeper was so bad, it caused him to stop playing.

When it comes to mods, quality is as important as interoperability. I remember, years ago, playing on a Minecraft server with friends with a bunch of mods installed. That allowed us to each spec into one specific mod, but I seem to remember mod interoperability being a bit… higgledy-piggledy. Having many mods installed led to multiple copies of the same ingot type, but those ingots could only be used for said mod.

Pretty much every mod I’ve installed for BoI has worked out the box without so much as a hiccup or caveat. I don’t have to be an expert on coding to know that a lot of dedication goes into compatibility. Take the External Item Descriptions mod – beyond installing it through workshop, its API can be used by mod developers to add new item descriptions dynamically (and without having to update EID every time a new mod drops on the workshop):

https://github.com/wofsauge/External-Item-Descriptions/wiki

That’s the sort of toolmaking that gets me pumped.

Even if you’re satisfied with how much content Repentance has, I think expansion mods are still worth your time. Here’s my logic: BoI is already full of bullshit, but that bullshit is never one-sided. FF introduces new room layouts, enemies, and bosses that throw you off, but at the same time, it and Epiphany combined introduce enough pickups, items (passive and active), trinkets, and ways of using them that you can bullshit your run back.

I’ve made a lot of mention to Epiphany, and perhaps not enough of FF, so let’s run through Epiphany first…

Epiphany

OK, so you know how the tainted characters are like these dark, messed up versions of their regular selves (just a glimpse into Edmund’s dark reality, sort of thing)? Let’s mess them up even more. That says both too much and too little about Epiphany’s Tarnished characters. All of them offer an even greater challenge. Not to say they’re necessarily harder to play – in BoI, challenge only means you have to think a little more about how you’re going to break the run.

TR. Isaac is probably the easiest one to grasp, and even then, it took me a while to get used to him. Like T. Isaac, he has limited item slots to work with (four instead of eight). These can be used up by his pocket item, the Blighted Dice, and rerolled into a choice between two new ones. Compare to the other Isaacs, who pretty much have to take it or leave it.

More options, right? Yeah… sort of. When you play Tarnished characters, nothing comes free. Using the Blighted Dice will break it; you can recharge it by clearing rooms, or you can recharge it straight away by sacrificing your currently selected item slot. You’ll also notice that clearing rooms will cause your current inventory to start rotting. One by one, your items will become Blight, making them useless.

Here’s the twist: Using Blighted Dice on Blight adds an extra slot, and increases the odds of getting a higher quality item on your next use! It’s a really cool twist on resource management that keeps in line with Isaac’s identity as the ultimate flexible wild card. Your resourcefulness, if things pan out OK, will be rewarded with a maximum of 12 inventory slots.

The only other character I’ve unlocked so far is TR. Maggy, who, unlike regular Maggy’s slow, defensive play, has to keep moving and killing enemies constantly. She’s got a .75x and .9x tear and damage multiplier, but Cardiac Arrest lets her shoot a powerful piercing tear that cause enemies to shower you in disappearing half heart pickups.

Sounds a little bit like a T. Samson affair. It’s not: every time you take damage, or use Cardiac Arrest, you add 2 levels to your bleed meter. It’ll slowly begin to tick down back to zero, and as it does, you need to collect a surplus of hearts to avoid taking damage. Doing so at full health increments the bottom number on your meter. As long as it’s bigger than the number on top, you’re fine.

As a wise economist once said, however – “Debts that can’t be paid, won’t be paid” – whiffing your Cardiac Arrest and being careless about taking damage will kill you. Every time you get hit, you really do have to wonder how it’ll impact the health economy. It kind of puts me in mind of trying to P-Rank levels in Pizza Tower – you want to go fast to keep up your combo, but going fast can lead to mistakes, and it’s really easy to break your chain off of one mistake.

Characters aside, Epiphany adds a lot of interesting passive/active items, trinkets, and pickups (although most of them need to be unlocked). Essences are essentially the tarnished’s answer to Soul Stones. Internally, they’re runes, so you can use them with Blank Rune. Several new cards act as counterparts to the playing cards, Uno card, and Credit Card found in vanilla. I love when a mod adds new cards, because it makes Deck of Cards even more exciting.

The only new consumables, to my knowledge, that are unlocked from the start are dice capsules. These are similar to the Dice Shard, but only trigger one effect. There’s even a machine you can find in arcades that pay out one for every five coins:

https://tboiepiphany.wiki.gg/wiki/Beggars_and_Machines#Dice_Machine

What’s really cool is that, if you also have Fiend Folio installed, you’ll come across Dice Capsules for the dice specific to that mod as well.

Here’s the FF page for what the D12 does (for the avoidance of doubt, it’s an FF item):

https://fiendfolio.wiki.gg/wiki/Eternal_D12

They didn’t have to do this – FF already has glass dice consumables that do the same thing – but they did anyway. It’s a really nice touch. Also – maybe this goes without saying – the spriting work put into both of these mods is BEE-YOUTIFUL. I’m no artist, but you could slip these menu sprites into the co-op update and I genuinely wouldn’t notice.

Then there’s this handsome rogue and his chiselled features:

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That’s Golem. He’s from Fiend Folio. I think I’ve said enough about Epiphany for now (and left enough to return in future), so let’s move on.

Fiend Folio

This expansion oozes SOUL. It knows its source material, and what it wants to do, and accomplishes that with finesse. Basing it on an old monster collection for D&D is the perfect backdrop, grounding its identity in familiar territory, but leaving things open-ended enough that it goes its own way.

As an example: I know vanilla BoI likes a good reference, but FF’s got references out the wazoo. Some are very obvious – stop me if you’ve seen this rock before:

This fuzzy pickle seems familiar…

Do I even need to say it?

Maybe slightly more overt than the most obvious references in vanilla (e.g. How to Jump, Mine Crafter, Shoop Da Whoop!), but even so, I personally can’t find fault in it.

While FF doesn’t introduce any new alternate paths, it goes above and beyond to enrich every single floor and special room with new layouts, obstacles, enemies, and bosses. Here, these coloured blocks require a key to destroy, but you’re only given one. It’s a choice between a guaranteed item, or risking the crane game.

Sometimes the entire floor’s scenery will change. These rooms in the Caves floors look like they’ve been inhabited before – cave paintings and fossils decorate the floor and walls, and the vignette dimming your surroundings enhances the atmosphere:

Speaking of rocks – look, this post is getting a bit long, and every time I go looking for more to say, I end up playing into the wee small hours. This game’s a brainworm like that. Can we just get back to Golem for a second? Fiend and T. Fiend can wait.

Local Golem Found to Be a Cinnabar Rock, Too Pure For This Basement

If you want to show someone how hard FF goes, you should show them Golem. His whole gimmick is collecting rock trinkets to grant passive buffs. These rocks are in their own pool exclusive to him, so you won’t find your usual trinkets playing as him (with some stony outliers). He takes his time to get started, I’ll grant you that, but when all those passive buffs start coming together, the result feels satisfying.

Apollyon and his Tainted counterpart are also rocks. They also take forever to get started. But I don’t get that same satisfaction from Void’s stat increases – even its main gimmick only comes into play when you get a run that has a lot of powerful active items. T. Apollyon? Thanks, but I prefer to drink lead paint. He’s bone-dry.

Golem pulverises that little almond-shaped part of my brain that likes to collect things. Maybe that’s to be expected – I am, after all, a T. Cain Enjoyer:

https://brologue.net/2024/03/04/tainted-cains-amazing-commodities

But T. Cain has yet to monopolise the trinket economy. That area’s been hardened to capture by Golem and his comrades down in the Subway. You can access it through the trapdoors found in shops, treasure rooms, boss rooms, and the first room of every floor. Here’s the ones you want to get familiar with:

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https://fiendfolio.wiki.gg/wiki/Golem#Common_Subway_Traders

All the info you need on what Golem’s rocks do is out there – IsaacGuru is pretty much PlatinumGod but with certain mods added:

https://isaacguru.com/mod/fiendfolio

Here’s a quick rundown, anyways:

  • All rocks give some passive buff – stat increases, tear effects, on-hit effects, familiars, etc.;
  • Fossils have an additional unique effect when crushed by the Bismuth Golem – take the Bomb Sack Fossil, for instance:
  • Geodes gain additional bonus effects when you have 2 in your trinket slots. When smelted, however, their effects receive a 0.67x multiplier and won’t count towards the effect bonus:

While geodes look rare and shiny, they’re no harder to find than rocks and fossils. The quality of each is analogous to that of passive and active items, going from Common, to Rare, to Fiendish. The three rocks labelled Extremely Rare are your two starter rocks, and A Bit of Trollite (replaces room rewards with troll bombs); Minichibisidian is the only rock in the even rarer Self-Insert category (randomly transforms enemies into Bonies).

Getting stronger as Golem is all about saving your soul hearts. Bosses drop a rock on defeat, so you’re always guaranteed 1 per floor, at worst. While you ideally want to hold onto geodes for their bonus effects, at some point you’ll be in a surplus of rocks that you have to let them go. The only rock that you absolutely should smelt ASAP is the Placebeode. Doing so allows you to hold only one geode trinket and still get the bonus.

With all that smelting, crushing, and grinding going on, maybe you’ve forgotten that Golem can still access Devil and Angel deals. Smelting’s a double-edged sword in that respect: gain small passive buffs, but make it riskier to go for the game’s most stacked item pools.

I love this character, and I hope if you give FF a shot, you’ll love him, too. If Golem’s not a testament to how much love gets poured into BoI through its mods – you don’t just whip up 180+ item sprites overnight – then I don’t know what to tell you. My thanks goes to everyone who contributed to these mods – you are powerful, and I appreciate you:

https://tboiepiphany.wiki.gg/wiki/Developers
https://fiendfolio.wiki.gg/wiki/Developers

  1. I’m not talking about fan games here – if you’re a Smash player, you are very well aware of Nintendo’s attitude to mods. Whether it’s Project M, Project+, or HewDraw Remix, organising a bracket feels like trying to hold a speakeasy without getting caught. ↩︎
  2. Source: https://fiendfolio.wiki.gg/wiki/File:GolemThumbsUp.png ↩︎
  3. Source: https://fiendfolio.wiki.gg/wiki/File:Golem_Common_Traders.png ↩︎