• Broken Hero Sword (starting item)
  
• 120 Gold
  
• Whetstone
  
• Mythril
  
• -Flex Material

If you have the guaranteed blacksmith passive on floors 3,6,9 + blacksmith upgrades weapons to +4, the requirement list is a bit simpler and more consistent. The whetstone can be replaced with another 20 gold for a blacksmith upgrade if you have these.

Choose the Broken Hero Sword as the starting weapon before starting the run. If you're going for a melee build, this is by far the best weapon to invest in and doesn't fully depend on good RNG.

Hint: Don't bother enchanting the broken hero sword or hero sword, the enchantment resets when the sword evolves.


Collect Gold as fast as possible. You need to get to 60 gold as soon as you can, so that you are ready for the blacksmith when he appears. If you see a blacksmith early on, you can go ahead and upgrade the broken hero sword to +3. When you have both the +3 sword equipped and Mythril in your inventory, the sword will be upgraded.

At boss rooms, choose Mythril as soon as you see it. This can appear as soon as early as the first boss, but usually shows up within the first two to three floors.
Some runs seem to get unlucky when trying to find the mythril. I have seen it more commonly delayed as late as floor 5 when doing ranged or mage builds while avoiding strength, but there doesn't seem to be a way to guarantee that it appears early.


Once you have both Mythril and enough gold to get your broken hero sword to +3, upgrade at a blacksmith to get a Hero Sword. The Hero Sword is decent enough to use as a weapon if your current one sucks, but we want the final version. If you have extra gold, you can go ahead and upgrade the Hero Sword further, up to +3 again.
The goal is to upgrade the weapon, so the blacksmith isn't your only option, just the most common one.


Hint: If you run into a rare or uncommon weapon and then a tavern with the Knight, picking up the free whetstone early can help later. Don't use this whetstone for these early stage weapon upgrades, unless you have an extra for a +4 upgrade later.
There seems to be a rare gold armored knight that can take the place of the whetstone knight in some taverns, which makes it impossible to get the whetstone at that tavern (I rerolled the tavern as many times as I could, but it didn't help).

Your -flex material can spawn as early as the next boss room after upgrading to the Hero Sword, and just like before, you want to grab that as soon as possible. The -flex material can be various elementals (all of the ones I've used are great), but won't spawn until you have the Hero Sword in your inventory. The different options are: Heatflex (fire and inflicts burn), Voltflex (lighting and inflicts shock), Iceflex (Ice and inflicts Chill), Toxiflex (toxic and inflicts poison) or Darkflex. Each version varies slightly, but usually fires multiple shots per swing in a wide arc.



At this point, the Hero Sword is good enough quality for the knight at the tavern to give you a whetstone. In order to upgrade to the final version of the Hero Sword, you need to get it to +4 while having the -flex material in your inventory (it doesn't appear to matter which comes first, upgrading to +4 or collecting the material). Whetstones are the easiest way to upgrade to +4 for melee weapons, and the knight gives you one for free, provided you can show him a sufficiently rare equipped weapon. I suggest grabbing the whetstone whenever you can, but there's no need to visit the tavern if you don't have a rare weapon to show the knight.

Enjoy your masterwork sword. The fully upgraded sword scales with all attributes at level A or higher (depends on the elemental you get), so even if your build went a different direction, this should be a decent upgrade from most weapons you might find otherwise.

If you have the gold, the sword can still be upgraded again at a blacksmith to +3, to +4 with another whetstone, or using the rare mythril forge on lower floors. The perk "Nature's Wrath" works well with it, for an intelligence/Hero Sword combo.

You are also able to enchant your new weapon to further increase its stats.