Tips and Strategies - Vampire Survivors Guide - IGN (2024)

In Vampire Survivors you'll be tasked with surviving seemingly endless waves of monstrous enemies. Though Vampire Survivors may seem like a simple survival action title, you'll likely find it difficult to outlast the horde for the 30 grueling minutes needed to complete a stage, especially if you're a newbie.

In this Vampire Survivors guide, you'll find various Tips and Strategies that will enable you to plan more effectively and help you understand the nuanced gameplay mechanics so you can successfully endure the unending flood of enemies.

Read our Tips and Strategies guide below or click on one of the following links to learn more about a specific section:

• Don't Play Defensively
• Learn Your Enemies
• Spend Those Coins!
• Strategically Use Floor Items
• Unlock Evolved Weapons
• Enter Every Run With A Goal
• Account For Randomazzo

Don't Play Defensively

In playing a survival game you may find yourself innately playing defensively and avoiding incoming enemies. But in Vampire Survivors this approach will ultimately leave you vulnerable and underpowered when the horde increases in numbers and in strength.

Rather than trying to survive by fleeing the monsters, you should instead aim to strategically take them out. Eliminating as many enemies as possible will allow you to rack up XP-gems and secure Chests that will enable you to improve your stats and weaponry. An aggressive philosophy should also be implemented when you're Leveling Up as pictured above, and when you're using coins to PowerUp in between runs.

For instance, while selecting upgrades or powering up your stats you'll have the option to augment various defensive attributes such as Armor, MaxHealth, or MoveSpeed. While these items aren't necessarily ineffective, their benefits pale in comparison to the strength of raw damage per second (DPS).

Instead of choosing or improving defensive items, we suggest that you select and upgrade weapons with high damage outputs such as the Shadow Pinion and King Bible. Your high DPS output will put you in a far better position to fight back the horde as your defensive attributes will ultimately fail to negate incoming damage if you don't have the damage output to slay the more fearsome late-game enemies.

Learn Your Enemies

Vampire Survivors features a plethora of enemy types, some of which have stronger variants that stretch from a slight HP-boost to a boss-like upgrade. Learning the behaviors of your enemies as well as having a rough understanding of their Health is crucial so you can effectively exploit weak enemies and mine stronger enemies for Chests.

Weak enemies such as base-level bats and blue ghosts can be targeted to thin the horde and rack up XP-gems to enable rapid upgrades. Weaker enemies should also be identified when you find yourself in trouble as they can easily be killed to carve a path to a safer area or to reach valuable items such as Floor Chicken.

Stronger enemies should be identified as they obviously pose more of a threat and require significantly more damage to defeat. But if you find yourself with space to roam you can hunt them down so they don't become a bigger threat in the depths of an indistinguishable horde and so you can collect the Chests and high-tier Gems they drop upon death.

Spend Those Coins!

As you progress in a run you'll find yourself collecting coins from the floor and you'll receive high coin totals when you open Chests. When you're defeated, these coins will follow you to the lobby and you'll even gain a 500 coin bonus if you manage to outlast the horde for 30 minutes to complete a stage. These coins can be used to PowerUp 18 different attributes that'll make you better equipped for your next run.

You may be hesitant to use your hard-earned coins on PowerUps but Vampire Survivors offers a refund system that returns your coins in full. You can refund and reshuffle your PowerUps as much or as little as you'd like and with no downside to your spending, you might as well splurge until you can no longer afford any other upgrades.

If you'd like to learn the best order to purchase upgrades take a look at our PowerUp Order guide that further explains the PowerUp marketplace.

Note that while PowerUps can be refunded in full, spending coins on Character unlocks is final and cannot be refunded.

Strategically Use Floor Items

In addition to XP-gems and Coins, you'll eventually come across a few Special Items that spawn as floor loot. These items are immensely powerful and offer abilities such as a flamethrower, the ability to freeze time, and a magnet that attracts all XP-gems in the area.

With the game-changing strength of these rare items, you may feel the urge to collect them as soon as possible but try to avoid using these items until the ideal moment. For instance, if a flamethrower Special Item spawns and the enemy horde is relatively tame and unthreatening, you should wait to collect it until you're surrounded by enough enemies to maximize the Item's output.

Special Items can be an invaluable get-out-of-jail-free card that can help salvage even the most scuffed of runs but while you should use them strategically, you also shouldn't wait too long to collect them as it's easy to lose track of Special Items when you're being hunted by thousands of ghouls.

Special Items won't disappear unless you're using the Pentagram weapon that destroys all enemies and has the chance to wipe all items and gems on screen.

Unlock Evolved Weapons

Vampire Survivors offers a bunch of randomized Weapons during your runs, most of which you'll uncover as you naturally progress through the game. But the most powerful Weapons, Evolved Weapons, are a bit trickier to unlock.

Evolved Weapons offer high-damage, high area of effect attacks that decimate the monstrous horde while providing special effects and incentives.

Evolved Weapons can be created by upgrading specific Weapons to Level 8, selecting a compatible Item, and defeating a high-tiered enemy that drops a Chest at least 10-minutes into your run. All Evolved Weapons and the necessary combinations to unlock them are discussed in detail in our Evolved Weapons and Combinations guide, but for the time being let's look at an example.

To unlock the Evolved Weapon, Death Spiral, you'll need to:

• Upgrade the Axe to at least Level 8
• Select the Candelabrador from a Level Up or collect it from Floor Loot
• Defeat a boss-level enemy at least 10-minutes into your run

You can unlock several Evolved Weapons per run and doing so will quickly make you a force to be reckoned with no matter the enemies at hand.

Boss-level enemies can be identified by their significantly larger size compared to their base-level variants or by their brightly colored outlines.

Enter Every Run With A Goal

When you begin a run you should have a general goal in mind so you can choose the best PowerUps, Arcanas, and Weapons to achieve that goal. While you'll naturally enter most runs with the goal of securing a stage completion, other times you may be more interested in unlocking a Character or completing a specific Achievement.

For instance, you may enter a run with the goal of unlocking Arcana card, VII - Iron Blue Will which tasks you with reaching Level 99 with Gennaro. With that goal in mind, you can fund the Crown PowerUp to increase the value of XP-gems and when in-game, you can select items like the Attractorb to rack up XP with ease. These choices may result in a low damage output but they'll help you make rapid progress toward the objective you've outlined and enable you to reach Level 99 even if the horde ultimately consumes you before the clock hits 30-minutes.

Account For Randomazzo

If you choose to play with Arcanas active, remember that you begin every run by selecting a single Arcana modifier. Assuming you live long enough in your run, you'll eventually have the opportunity to select two additional Arcanas from a randomized pool.

Because of this format, you should always select your preferred Arcana first so you don't have to rely on luck and hope that your favorite Arcana lands in one of the four-card selection pools. Secondly, though it may seem obvious, you should always analyze your inventory and goals before selecting your second and third Arcanas. As you'll note in the image above, you can see your Items and Weapons as well as your stats on the left side of the Randomazzo screen. Taking your inventory and stats into consideration will enable you to select Arcanas that buff your current Weapons and Items or Arcanas that can boost any stats in dire need of improvement.