Lilith

What you start with

The mechanics that actually govern this character.

• 1 red heart container and 2 black hearts. She is permanently blindfolded and never fires tears herself; the Incubus fires in her place, and in Repentance it deals 100% of her damage stat against 75% for every other character.
• Starts with Box of Friends (unlisted on the select screen, 3-room charge in Repentance, 10 coins in shops), Incubus and Cambion Conception.
• Her innate Incubus cannot be rerolled and does not count as a collected item or toward the Conjoined transformation. A second Incubus found on a pedestal does stack.
• Cambion Conception grants a permanent demonic familiar after 15 hits, again at 30, then at 60 and 90. Dull Razor, Blood Donation Machines and Devil Beggars all count as hits.

How to play them

• Box of Friends duplicates every familiar for the current room only. Fire it as you enter a boss room, not in a room you have already cleared.
• The Incubus trails behind her with a delay, so aim by moving into position first and then firing, rather than turning and shooting in one motion.
• Every familiar you pick up is another Box of Friends multiplier, so familiars are worth more to her than raw stat ups are.
• Batteries are her scaling: 9 Volt, The Battery, Car Battery and 4.5 Volt all convert directly into more Incubi per fight, which makes shops and coins unusually valuable.
• Never permanently trade Box of Friends away. If you want a second active, use a Schoolbag.
• Tear modifiers still apply through the Incubus, so a single strong tear item is multiplied across every copy. Polyphemus and Godhead scale better on her than on anyone else.

Items to hunt for

Strong on this character specifically, not just strong.

• BFFS!: Incubus tears deal 2x her damage as Lilith, against 1.5x for other characters, and it buffs every duplicated familiar too.
• Forgotten Lullaby trinket: doubles the Incubus fire rate, making it fire and charge faster than a normal character would.
• Car Battery: Box of Friends adds two copies of each familiar instead of one.
• Godhead: the Incubus copies her tear modifiers including the homing aura, and in Repentance that aura deals a flat 2 damage 30 times per second regardless of her damage stat, so it is multiplied across every Incubus.
• Birthright: all shooting familiars stop trailing behind her and instead group toward the direction she is firing, which fixes her aiming problem outright.
• Hypercoagulation: take deliberate self-damage and collect the half red hearts, which feeds Cambion Conception into free permanent familiars.
• Charged Baby: it can charge Box of Friends mid-room, and Box of Friends copies Charged Baby, creating a self-sustaining charge loop.

Traps to refuse

Picks that are neutral or good elsewhere and bad here.

• Genuinely dead on her in Repentance: Dead Tooth (no effect), Large Zit (does not fire while blindfolded and the Incubus fires no creep shots) and Evil Eye (the Incubus cannot fire eyes).
• Do NOT trust the old pre-Repentance dead list. Dead Eye, Epiphora, Technology 2, Tractor Beam, Mom's Eye and Loki's Horns are all marked as ineffective only before Repentance; on 1.7.9 the Incubus fires Technology 2 lasers, gains Epiphora fire rate without the accuracy penalty, and works with Dead Eye.
• Maw of the Void: she gets the stat boosts but the damaging ring is never created unless she also holds The Ludovico Technique.
• Two control traps: King Baby repositions her familiars and makes aiming the Incubus much harder, and Cursed Eye on 1.7.9 makes the Incubus charge while still teleporting Lilith when she is hit (the no-teleport version is Repentance+ only).
• Losing Box of Friends to a D4, a Dice Room or a swap. It is the single mechanic the character is built around.

Cheese and techniques

Verified against 1.7.9 on console — anything patched, PC-only or Repentance+ only is called out rather than listed.

• Active items recharge per wave in Boss Rush and in Greed mode, so Box of Friends can be used every wave and the familiar count compounds through the whole fight.
• Room-long effects last the entire Beast fight, so one Box of Friends use before Ultra Famine keeps the duplicates through all four Ultra Harbingers and The Beast. Each Harbinger killed also grants 2 active charges.
• Cambion Conception can spawn a second Incubus, and familiars it spawns do not affect item pools, so you can still buy an Incubus pedestal afterwards for a third.
• Box of Friends plus Lil Dumpy stacks extra Holy Mantle-style blocks, and repeating it makes her close to untouchable for a room.
• Box of Friends does not copy blue flies or blue spiders and only copies some orbitals in Repentance, so shooting familiars (Incubus, Twisted Pair, Lil Brimstone, Robo-Baby 2.0) are worth far more to her than fly-spawners.

Getting the marks

• Boss Rush and both Greed marks are her standout runs, because per-wave recharging lets her hold a very large familiar count for the entire fight.
• If she dies holding Ankh, Lazarus' Rags or Judas' Shadow she loses the blindfold and her innate Incubus, and every mark from that point counts for ???, Lazarus or Judas instead.
• One container plus two black hearts makes Devil deals cheap in soul-heart terms but leaves almost no margin on Mother and The Beast, where every hit is a full heart.