Tainted Cain

What you start with

The mechanics that actually govern this character.

• The gimmick in plain language: you cannot pick up items at all. Touching a pedestal shatters the item into pickups. The only way to gain a collectible is to swipe 8 pickups into the Bag of Crafting and craft one.
• What an item shatters into depends on the ROOM, not the item pool: Secret Rooms give bone hearts, Curse Rooms give rotten hearts, Planetariums give runes, Devil Rooms give black hearts, Angel Rooms give eternal hearts. Everywhere else gives ordinary pickups. Story items (both Photos, Key Pieces, Knife Pieces, Broken Shovel, Mom's Shovel, Dad's Note, Dogma) can still be picked up normally.
• Crafting quality is the sum of the 8 components. Poop Nugget 0; Penny, Red Heart, Rotten Heart 1; Bomb, Card, Cracked Key, Key, Micro Battery, Pill 2; Nickel 3; Dice Shard, Lil Battery, Rune, Soul Heart 4; Black Heart, Bone Heart, Charged Key, Dime, Eternal Heart, Gold Heart 5; Golden Battery, Golden Bomb, Golden Key, Golden Penny, Golden Pill 7; Lucky Penny, Mega Battery 8; Giga Bomb 10.
• Order never matters. 35 or more total guarantees a quality 4 item from normal pools; Devil, Angel and Secret pool recipes subtract 5 from the total first and need 40 or more. Every recipe outside a fixed set of 19 is seeded per run. Stats: 2 red hearts, 1 key, damage x1.20, range 4.5, speed 1.30.

How to play them

• Do not craft the moment the bag fills. The bag previews what your 8 pickups will make, so cycle the contents with the swap button (R2 on PlayStation) to overwrite the slot you want, and only craft when the preview is worth it.
• Leave pickups on the floor. Room rewards and shattered pedestals are a bank; walk the floor first, decide the recipe, then swipe. Once you take 8 low-value things you have spent them.
• The bag's swipe reaches across pits and rocks, opens Spiked and Mimic Chests without damage, and buys shop pickups directly if you have the money. Use it as a tool, not just a container.
• Learn the 19 fixed recipes that exist on every seed. 8 Black Hearts = Brimstone. 8 Bone Hearts = Death Certificate. 8 Eternal Hearts = Sacred Heart. Gold Heart + Soul Heart + Red Heart + 5 Eternal Hearts = Godhead. 8 Soul Hearts = Soul Locket. 8 Pills = PHD. 1 Black Heart + 7 Pills = False PHD. 8 Cards = Deck of Cards. 8 Pennies = Portable Slot. 8 Red Hearts = Yum Heart. 8 Keys = Latch Key. 2 Golden Keys + 6 Keys = Dad's Key. 8 Bombs = Mr. Boom on 1.7.9 (Repentance+ changed it to Mr. Mega). 2 Golden Bombs + 6 Bombs, or 8 Giga Bombs = Mama Mega!. 8 Cracked Keys = Red Key. 8 Dice Shards = D Infinity. 8 Poop Nuggets = The Poop. 2 Rotten + 6 Red Hearts = Yuck Heart.
• Skip the first Devil Deal. Taking one only gives black hearts, which Curse Rooms provide more cheaply, and it costs you the Angel Room whose eternal hearts are worth more.
• Read cards and pills before binning them - a card in the bag is only worth 2 quality, but used properly it might be worth a whole floor.
• Craft duplicates deliberately: three crafts of the same low-quality item completes a transformation for free. Rotten hearts repeatedly crafting a Curse Room item gets Guppy; Rosary gives 3 soul hearts and a tears up every craft and builds Seraphim.

Items to hunt for

Strong on this character specifically, not just strong.

• Birthright: doubles the pickups every shattered pedestal produces, roughly doubling how many items you can make per floor. His best possible pick, and in Greed Mode buying the same on-sale item repeatedly with it gives near-infinite consumables.
• Death Certificate: uniquely, he CAN pick up items normally inside the Death Certificate rooms without shattering them, which makes it the strongest single item for him in the game.
• Abyss, Void or a Black Rune: lets you get immediate value out of pedestals by absorbing them instead of shattering them.
• Moving Box: put a pedestal item in the box, carry it into a Secret Room or Angel Room, and drop it there to force the pickup type you want. Four-room recharge.
• Sworn Protector: blocking enemy shots generates eternal hearts, the hardest quality-5 component to farm and the gateway to Angel pool crafts. Mitre, Black Lipstick, Mom's Pearl, Bible Tract and False PHD all bias drops toward soul, black and eternal hearts as well.
• Raw pickup volume items: Everything Jar, Sack Head, Broken Modem, Contract From Below, Glitter Bombs and any Sack familiar. The Safety Scissors trinket turns Bomb Bums and Bombgaggers into infinite pickup farms with no troll bomb risk.
• Scapular plus Piggy Bank, Fanny Pack or Old Bandage: leave and re-enter a room to re-trigger Scapular's soul heart at half health, which is effectively infinite quality-4 components.

Traps to refuse

Picks that are neutral or good elsewhere and bad here.

• The D6, Eternal D6, Spindown Dice, More Options, There's Options and Glitched Crown are all dead items for him - pedestal manipulation is meaningless when pedestals shatter. Chaos is equally useless, since pickups are decided by the room, not the pool.
• Magneto pulls pickups onto you so you cannot swipe selectively, and range ups (especially Tiny Planet) push the swipe hitbox far away from you. Both actively break precise crafting.
• Humbleing Bundle, BOGO Bombs and the Equality! trinket: doubled pickups add 2 of a component when a recipe wanted 1.
• Little Baggy and Starter Deck stop cards or pills spawning, deleting two whole component types; Magic Skin converts hearts into a broken heart container for very little return.
• Bum Friend, Dark Bum, Key Bum and Bumbo steal components off the floor. Dark Bum is the one exception if you have written off red hearts and want black heart volume.

Cheese and techniques

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

• R Key chaining is the big one and it is version-sensitive. On 1.7.9, defeating The Beast or Mega Satan ENDS the run before you can use an R Key, so bank every other completion mark first and kill those last. The guaranteed Gateway to the Void after Mega Satan is a Repentance+ change you do not have. Done correctly you can still take every non-Greed completion mark in one run by crafting R Key four times.
• Mama Mega! forces open the Boss Rush door and the ??? passage regardless of the timer, and golden bombs are relatively easy for him to farm, so it is his reliable route to the timed marks on an otherwise slow run.
• Portable Slot's 8-penny recipe is fixed on every seed. It converts spare coins into a burst of mixed pickups in one room, which is the cleanest way to manufacture components you are short of.
• Because recipes outside the fixed 19 are seeded, the practical console workflow is to read the seed off the pause screen and put it into a community Bag of Crafting calculator in a browser. There is no in-game recipe list, and with no mods or Repentogon on console there is no way to surface one.
• Clicker turns him into another tainted character while keeping what he crafted, so crafting Holy Mantle, Dead Cat and Gnawed Leaf and then clicking into Tainted Lost makes an otherwise brutal mark set manageable. Also: D1 plus Car Battery plus a Battery pickup gives infinite batteries, and Jera plus Clear Rune clones pickups sustainably.

Getting the marks

• 7 secrets, not 14. No unlock for Mom's Heart, none for normal Greed Mode, and no Hard-mode-sheet co-op baby.
• His 7: any one of Isaac / ??? / Satan / The Lamb gives the Gilded Key trinket; either Boss Rush OR Hush gives Soul of Cain; Mega Satan gives Gold Pill; Ultra Greedier gives X - Wheel of Fortune?; Delirium gives Bag of Crafting for other characters; Mother gives Lucky Sack; The Beast gives Blue Key.
• Unlock as many pickup TYPES as you can before grinding him. Bone hearts in particular are quality 5 and gate most high-tier recipes, and a lot of good crafts are simply unreachable without them.
• Soul of Cain cannot be used to reach the Home closet on his own unlock path (his unlock excludes it), so a Red Key or Cracked Key is the route if you ever need it. Sacred Orb also reshuffles recipes, so do not take it after you have noted this run's good ones.