Items

The items bucket looks like a grab bag at first: two quest fetch-pieces, a scroll puzzle, a socket system, thirty-three runes and a box. It stops looking like one if you sort it by how long each thing stays in your inventory. Three of these you are meant to lose within an act. Two you will keep finding and destroying for the rest of the game. One never leaves your bag at all, and it is the reason the other two matter.

Three things you are meant to hand away

Half this bucket is about objects with no long-term use whatsoever. They exist to be spent, and the guides for them are route guides rather than item guides.

The Cairn Stones are the odd one, because the item is not the point at all. You loot the scroll, Akara translates it, and then you stand in the Stony Field and click five stones in the numeric order the scroll draws for you. Get the order right and a portal to Tristram opens with Cain in a cage on the other side. That single act of free identification is worth more than most of the loot in Act 1.

The Horadric Staff is three fetch quests wearing one name. The Cube comes out of the Dry Hills, three levels down inside the Halls of the Dead, behind a sandstone archway that is easy to walk past. The Staff of Kings is in a chest to the left of Coldworm the Burier on level 3 of the Maggot Lair. The Viper Amulet is in the basement of the temple in the Valley of Snakes. Then you drop two of the three into the third and press transmute, which is the first time the game shows you what the Cube is actually for.

The two you will never stop collecting

Gems and runes work the same way and it is worth seeing them as one system. Both drop constantly, both are worthless individually, both get consumed the moment they become useful, and both convert upwards at a fixed exchange rate.

There are seven gem types and five qualities each. Amethyst, Diamond, Emerald, Ruby, Sapphire, Topaz and Skull, running Chipped, Flawed, Normal, Flawless, Perfect. Three of any quality make one of the next, and a Gem Shrine bumps one up a step for free, which is why you save shrines for a Flawless gem and take the Perfect out of it.

What a gem does depends entirely on where you put it, and the split is clean enough to plan around. In a weapon it adds offence, in a helm or body armour it adds a stat or a utility bonus, and in a shield it adds resistance. A Perfect Ruby is +15 to +20 fire damage in a weapon, +38 maximum life in armour and 40% fire resistance in a shield. A Perfect Topaz is the magic find gem, worth 24% in armour and a helm. The number of sockets you have to play with is fixed by item type: one to six in a weapon, one to four in body armour or a shield, one to three in a helm.

Those are the same ranges the Cube’s own socketing recipes produce, which is a small but useful consistency. The recipe that sockets a weapon promises one to six, the one for body armour and shields one to four, and the one for helms one to three. If you are short a socket, you are not stuck waiting for a drop.

The rune ladder, and where the tax drops

There are 33 runes and they are a ladder rather than a set. El and Eld both need character level 11, Tir and Nef both need 13, Eth and Ith both need 15, and from Tal at 17 the requirement climbs by exactly two per rune all the way to Zod at 69. Learn that and a rune’s required level tells you its position in the list without looking anything up: a rune you can equip at 47 is Um, the twenty-second of thirty-three.

The interesting part is the exchange rate, which does not stay flat. Reading the Cube recipes in order, the cost of moving one rung up the ladder actually falls as you climb:

Three becomes two exactly at the point where the runes start being worth something, which is the opposite of what the grind feels like. It does not make high runes cheap, because every rung still doubles what sits underneath it, but it does mean the last third of the ladder is the least punishing per step. The gem cost rises to compensate, so keep Perfect and Flawless gems rather than socketing every one you find, and see rune farming for where the raw material comes from.

The one item that is a machine

The Horadric Cube is the only thing in this bucket you will still be carrying at level 90. It takes 2x2 squares of inventory and gives back 4x3 inside, so it pays for its own space, and if you ever drop it the contents move to your stash rather than the floor.

Everything else on this page routes through it. It upgrades gems and runes, adds sockets, repairs and recharges in the field, rerolls rare and magic items, turns three magic amulets into a ring and three rings into an amulet, and rolls named magic items such as the Prismatic amulet from six Perfect gems. It opens the red portal to the Secret Cow Level out of a severed leg and a stack of portal scrolls, and it assembles the keys and organs for the Pandemonium Event. It is also the only way to make a Token of Absolution and buy back a respec you have already spent.

What all those runes are actually for

Runes exist to be spelled out in a socketed item, and our runewords tier list ranks twelve of the results from S down to C. Grief, Enigma and Spirit take the top tier, Death, Beast and Lore the second, Silence, Lawbringer and Bramble the third, and Eternity, Voice of Reason and Destruction the bottom.

Line that ranking up against the rune ladder and it stops behaving like a shopping list ordered by price. Spirit is Tal, Thul, Ort and Amn, and its most expensive component is a rune you can wear at level 25. It sits in the same tier as Enigma, which wants Jah and Ber, the thirty-first and thirtieth runes on the ladder. Lore is two runes, Ort and Sol, and it lands in A. Meanwhile Destruction, which needs the same Jah and Ber that Enigma does, sits three tiers lower in C.

The practical reading is that two of the best runewords in the game are also two of the cheapest, and that spending a Jah rune is no guarantee of anything. Spirit in particular is why the tier list is worth reading before the rune farming guide rather than after it. If you are nowhere near any of this yet, the low level runewords page covers the ones you can make in Act 1, and the full runewords list has the rest.