Equipment

Dead Cells provides players with Gear in the form of:
 * Weapons, which have limited but different movesets.
 * Skills, which cause a variety of effects but must cool down between uses.
 * And Amulets, passive items which grant powerful offensive or defensive benefits. They can also grant points to Brutality, Tactics or Survival.

Gear items are not automatically collected — they must be picked up with the Interact key/button. Unwanted gear can usually be converted into gold if the Recycle upgrade has been unlocked.

Most Gear appears with one or more Affixes, which add effects or situational benefits. Only non-starter, Level 1 Gear, and unique talismans lack affixes.

If you're looking for a missing item, but you have everything listed below, you might be missing the Merchandise Category upgrade from the Graveyard.

Gear Level
Gear Level is the roman numeral next to an item's name and is the base Gear Power of the item. Each biome has a base Gear Level value, which is the minimum level an item can be on any given biome. A table can be found below with each biome's base Gear Level.

The Gear Level of an item will increase based on the number of active Boss Stem Cells.

Additionally, the Gear Level of an item will also be affected by where it was found in the biome.

* Amulets are unaffected by the difficulty bonus on 3BSC+.

Gear Quality
The player can spend cells at The Blacksmith's Legendary Forge to permanently upgrade all the Gear Quality attribute of all weapons and skills across runs.

Gear Quality is the term used to refer to the "upgrade level" of an item. It is displayed as a +, ++, S, or L after the roman numerals (referred to as the Gear Level). Gear Quality gives the item the following attributes:


 * Gear Quality of + adds +2 to Gear Power.
 * Gear Quality of ++ adds +4 to Gear Power.
 * Gear Quality of S adds +6 to Gear Power.
 * Gear Quality of L adds +6 to Gear Power.
 * Makes the item colorless.
 * Decreases cost of re-rolling affixes.
 * Forces at least one starred affix.
 * Allows equipping the same item twice.

Gear Power
Gear Power is the term used to refer to the "outputted level" of an item. This is a hidden value that represents the actual power of the item after taking into account its Gear Level and Gear Quality. Gear Power is calculated by taking the Gear Level of the item and adding the bonus from the Gear Quality. As an example a Heavy Crossbow IV++ has a Gear Level of 4 (as indicated by the roman numerals) and the Gear Quality of ++ adds a bonus +4 to Gear Power, resulting in a Gear Power of 8. This means the item will have a +129% damage bonus, and three affix slots.

Gear Power influences the number of affix slots on the item, and the overall damage boost it receives. A table detailing the effects of Gear Power on Weapons/Shields can be found below:

Gear Power follows a pattern:
 * The first boost adds +4% damage and an affix slot.
 * The second boost adds +29% damage.
 * The third boost adds +29% damage.
 * Every sixth boost adds +30% damage instead.
 * The cycle then repeats.

It should be noted that an item may have more affix slots than affixes available for that item. In that case, the item will just have empty slots that do not show up.

Gear Variants
Two variants of weapons and skills can be encountered: Colorless items and Legendary items.

Colorless Items
Colorless items, which are found in Cursed Chests, scale according to your highest stat. In addition, they are dynamically scrolled. This means that if your highest stat at the time is Brutality, the colorless item is Brutality. If later on your highest stat is Tactics, your item will now scale with Tactics. For example, a Colorless Torch, which is a pure Brutality item, scales with Survival if you have higher Survival than Brutality. Colorless items are marked with a white color, rather than the colors of the base item's scaling stats.

Legendary Items
Legendaries are powerful variants of items, appearing as a random drop from enemies (1% and 6% for common mobs and Elites, respectively), and as rewards after beating a boss without getting hit, or from Legendary Altars.

Legendary altars have a base 2% chance of spawning per biome, increasing by 15% for each biome where an altar did not spawn, meaning that most successful runs can expect to run into at least one of them. These altars grant 66% damage reduction to nearby enemies (indicated by a shield icon above the enemy's head), and the item can only be retrieved from the shrine when all enemies with this icon have been defeated. Alternatively, moving enemies, if they get far enough away from the altar and provided that no other enemies get close to the altar, allows to retrieve the item on it.

Legendary items cannot be upgraded, but they have powerful advantages over normal items:
 * Colorless — scales with your highest stat
 * A specific affix (predetermined for each base item) with a 15% chance to be applied after all other affixes, ignoring the usual affix generation rules
 * Cheap re-rolling cost
 * Possibility to equip alongside non-legendary gear of the same type

Legendary items are marked with a gold color, rather than the colors of the base item's scaling stats.

The item pool for Legendary items is not limited to unlocked items, but heavily skewed towards them. It therefore is possible, but not likely, to get any Legendary item other than the Symmetrical Lance on a fresh save. On saves with all items unlocked, the chances of a given item appearing seems to be equal.

Weapons
The player can only carry 2 weapons at a time. Picking up a third displays a menu that compares all three weapons, and asks the player if they want to discard a carried weapon for the new one.

Crossbows and the Scythe Claws are 2 handed weapons that take up both slots. When equipped, they allow you to store a weapon within the backpack. This weapon cannot be used while you have a two-handed weapon, but if you switch to a one-handed weapon you can use the weapon that was stored.

Skills
Skills are secondary abilities that can be used in combat. The player does not normally start with skills without the Recycling Tubes upgrade and must find them throughout the run.

The player has two skill slots. Upon picking up a third skill, a menu which compares all three appears, allowing the player to choose which of the three skills to discard.

Skills cannot trigger Rally nor cooldown reduction mutations.

Skills are roughly split into three types: traps and turrets, grenades, and miscellaneous powers.

Amulets
You may only equip one amulet at a time, but their effects are powerful... "A fine object, adroitly hidden under your clothes to make less work for the artists." Amulets come in Ruby, Topaz, Sapphire, Golden, and Moonstone. They are most frequently acquired by defeating Elite enemies or by opening Timed or Perfect Doors. Amulets can also be found within Challenge Rift chests, on corpses, or by rummaging through loot in lore rooms. Amulets carry one or more affixes, grant damage reduction, and can give the player more Stats.

As amulets are leveled items, the gear levels of Biomes affect the quantity and quality of the Affixes on the amulets found, as well as the number of Stats and the % of damage reduction they grant.

As of the Update of Plenty, the player will always start with an amulet on a pedestal in the passage from the jar room on 1 BSC and higher, with its tier increasing based on difficulty.

Prisoner's Collar
"'Nothing worth mentioning, except maybe a vague whiff of dead rat...'" The player starts every run with the Prisoner's Collar equipped. It gives no benefits of any kind.