How I (Finally) Got Dead God

It feels like it took me forever, but I managed to get this finished. I finally got Dead God on one of my save files in The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth. It will probably be a while before I do something like this again, but I figured I might as well turn this into a big thing and talk about how I got the achievement. First off, I completed every challenge after they unlocked as there weren’t any that were a detriment to unlock. I also beat every completion mark on hard mode with every character including the tainted ones to unlock Death Certificate. Now as it turns out that was the only item I needed to see in order to complete my collection page. The reason was simple. I decided to leave a certain character for last to make sure I could guarantee seeing most of the items during my repeated playthroughs. As you may have guessed if you have read my blog posts this past month or so, that character is Tainted Eden. Since his gimmick switches his items so frequently I got every last item available by the time I unlocked Death Certificate. So, it should be easy to find right? Not really. The item pool for the secret room is a lot bigger than I realized and so finding it while getting lucky was very unlikely. So I came up with three strategies to increase my chances. Option one was to start with a character who has a rerolling item to try and exhaust the secret room pool. Option two was to snag Chaos to force it to appear in other pools so I could potentially reroll it. Option three was to potentially get Spindown Dice to find the item since it give the most control over any rerolling item. Guess which option it ended up being. Or you could just keep on reading. That works as well.

So to increase my odds, I obviously wanted to start with someone who could reroll items from the beginning as that would give me the best chance of doing these strategies in a somewhat consistent manner. So naturally I went with Isaac, and man was my luck terrible with him. While his reroll item is great, the problem is that it is not easy to gain charges for it without the right items, so there would be multiple times I would just be short of rerolling secret room items and my luck was also just really bad. So in my frustration I took a gamble and switched to playing as the Lost. The only real advantage his reroll item has is it has less charge time. There are certain risks such as items potentially disappearing half the time, but hey who doesn’t like to gamble every now and then. Unfortunately, I couldn’t do much about dying a bunch. I can’t even blame it on the character either. It was just a skill issue. Eventually though I got a decent run of items and made it to the Dark Room and I had Guppy’s Tail which increased the amount of items I found by a lot. So I explored until I found the Secret Room since this was my last chance to reroll for an item. I got lucky. A chest spawned that I could reroll for an item. I had to take the risk each time to see if it would disappear. It managed to successfully reroll the item after three attempts. On that last attempt I decided to grab the item since I felt like it might be worth it. The item was Spindown Dice. I was able to use it to reroll into the D6, Isaac’s reroll item from Mr. Mega. Since I had Schoolbag, I was able to use both at once which was nice. After that I explored the floor and found some cool items but nothing to help with finding Death Certificate. The only thing that was sort of useful was that I use Spindown Dice on Fruity Plum to get 4.5 Volt. So now defeating enemies helped with charging my dice. Unfortunately things weren’t looking great. I had exhausted every room and nothing to show for it. There was a sliver of hope however at turning this around.

Another item I got on this floor was the item Forget Me Now, which would allow me to restart the floor and potentially get another chance. The problem is that to use it, I would need to leave behind either Spindown Dice or the D6. It could possibly be very useful for secret rooms, but I wouldn’t be able to get anywhere unless I could guarantee an item in the secret room. Conversely, if I didn’t get lucky with what spawned as items, Spindown Dice could only do so much for me. Eventually I decided on Spindown Dice since that took away some of the randomness and if I was lucky I could always get another D6 from it. So I used the item to restart the floor and with Spindown Dice. I opened the first chest in the Dark Room to see what deals were up for grabs and it was Purgatory. Immediately my brain paused. To be sure, I went and looked up the collection page to be sure. I was right. Death Certificate was five spots away from Purgatory on the page meaning if I could use Spindown Dice five times, I could turn it into Death Certificate and complete the file once and for all. I had a limited amount of rooms, so I just had to hope I could gather enough charges using 4.5 Volt, but in the end after defeating the Lamb for the second time that run, I managed to get the last charge I needed and picked up Death Certificate completing the Collection Page. I used the item to get Sacred Heart just cause I wanted it and thanks to Dad’s Key showing up this run I was able to eviscerate Meta Satan and Delirium and finish the run. So in the end it was sort of a combination of strategies one and three that got me the item, plus a lot of luck as well. It was hard, but at least I have the save file to prove it. See you next time!