What is Isaac?
The Binding of Isaac is a top down action-bullethell-ish roguelike game created by Edmund McMillen, the game’s story revolves around Isaac and his escape from his crazy mother through the basement of their house… Of course there’s more to the story, but I’m skipping it because it is not really relevant to everything here. Let’s talk about gameplay instead!
You already know the drill with roguelikes, the player is dropped on a floor with randomly generated rooms and the objective is to reach the end of said floor, which in this case is fighting the big bad boss at the end. Collecting items, consumables, and all things in-between on the way to aid you in the journey while you fight progressively harder monsters as you descend into the unknown depths below…
Now that you have a basic understanding of the game, let me give you further details that will help you understand this page!
The game has 34 Playable Characters, each with their own gimmick or items that makes them feel different from each other. Oh yeah, about items-
There’s about 720 Items to collect in the game, which can be separated into two categories: Passive Items and Active Items!
Each item has an effect and often can synergize with other items to make your run stronger and/ or open even more possibilities!
There’s also Trinkets, which are basically a hybrid of the two categories. They have a passive effect while held but you can only have one at a time.
The game also has 7 Different Final Bosses that each lead to a different ending.
And that should be enough for you to understand what’s going on in this page!
The game is much more mechanically deep than what I explained/ showed to you. I mean, I have 2.5k hours in this game and I’m still finding new things and synergy between items! That’s Impressive in my book! But if you want to know more about it, you will have to play the game yourself!
If any of this got you interested, I definitely recommend you checking out the game! It’s a tough and unfair game, you will die a lot early on, but once you begin to master the game’s mechanics… there’s no greater feeling of using all the tools you are given during a run to completely break the game apart!!
Anyways, let’s get to the main topic of this page: 100 Runs of Isaac!
By first explaining the rules!
Runs & Rules
I'm going to present all the information you need to know using a Q & A style format! Why? Because fun!
All the questions were provided and responded to by yours truly!
Q: What exactly is this?
A: It’s pretty much what the title says, over the course of 6 months, I did 100 runs and took a screenshot at the end of each run with everything I collected! After that, I took all the items, trinkets and information and put everything into one big spreadsheet!
That I’ll soon present to you!
Q: Did you do the same thing in all runs?
A: Nope! I used a website that generates runs for Isaac to determine which character I would be playing as and what final boss I would be fighting at the end, with a chance to add an extra timed objective now and then to spice things up!
Q: Did you have any rules for this?
A: Yes! Here were they:
Holding R (restarting a run to get a better start) was not allowed;
Failure of any kind to reach the determined destination of the run WILL count as a loss;
Failing on doing timed objectives will be count as a loss;
Cheats or use of the developer console was not allowed;
Mods were allowed, but no “cheating” ones;
Q: Were the runs done in normal or hard mode?
A: Hard Mode! I find Normal Mode a little too easy, so I only played on Hard Mode.
Q: Was the greedier gamemode included?
A: Yes! Greedier is (sometimes) fun, so I decided to include it!
Q: What were the chances on the run generator for final bosses?
A: They were this:
The Lamb - 16%
??? - 16%
Mega Satan - 16%
Delirium - 10%
Greedier - 16%
Mother - 16%
The Beast - 10%
Chance for an extra timed objectives - 10%
Q: Did you ban any character?
A: I did allow myself to ban 2 characters at most from showing up in the generator!
These were Tainted Lost, for being too fragile. (100% of runs with him would be a loss, trust me, I have many hours in this game but I still suck at it!)
And Tainted Cain for being… too boring of a character. I only banned him midway through the 100 runs though, so you will still see the results!
Q: What version was this done on?
A: This was done in the latest version of Repentance, so before the Repentance + DLC!
Q: What’s the purpose of the experiment? What are you expecting to achieve with this?
A: More on that later on! :)
And that should cover all the basis for this science experiment! But if you have more specific questions about the data that's coming up next, just click below! Otherwise, let’s finally move on to the results!
Specific Questions
Q: Did you count story items?
A: Yes, they were all counted.
Q: Did you include Eternal Items (Items that appear on the Q slot)?
A: No. Just for the reason that you can’t really get rid of them and make the counting a little messy.
Q: Did you count items that disappear after being used (I.E. Knife pieces, revives and so on)?
A: No, if they weren’t in the final screenshot of the run, they weren't counted.
Q: Does reviving/ switching to other characters using items in game and reaching the determined end count as a win?
A: Yes. I decided to include this, otherwise revive items would all mostly be useless and that's no fun.
Q: In the Game Over screen, the trinket slot is covered by the Esc page. What did you do for that?
A: Well… That’s something I didn’t take into account during the experiment. Only when I was noting everything down, that I noticed this issue… so yeah, those trinkets weren't counted for, unless it was perfection. (This one drops on death)
Q: In The Beast fight, you can’t see your items. What did you do for that?
A: I took a screenshot before the Dogma boss fight and included the item called Dogma that you receive during the transition while I was cataloging everything!
Q: Could Boss Rush and Hush appear on the same run as an extra objective?
A: Technically yes… I think? I never got it, but it could probably happen if you are lucky enough. (or unlucky in this case)
Q: Did you include modded items?
A: No. I had mods that included modded items, but they weren’t in the final results.
Results
Time for the moment you were waiting for The Results!
In This Spreadsheet you can find everything and data I collected! ...But looking at spreadsheets is boring, so here's a visual representation!
Here’s an example for you to follow along in the big image:
And now, here's all 100 runs in one image for you to look at!
Click here to open the full image!
We can already take some cool data from this massive image:
The win rate for the whole science project was 57%! (57 wins and 43 losses)
Which is honestly low for someone like me, a person with an above average knowledge and skill in this game… until you take into account that I did this over the course of 6 months, with many multiday gaps where I didn't play the game.
The objectives with the most to the least appearance goes as follows:
Mega Satan - 20 runs
Greedier - 19 Runs
The Lamb - 18 Runs
Mother - 14 Runs
??? - 13 Runs
Delirium- 8 Runs
Hush - 4 Runs
Boss Rush - 2 Runs
Which all do line up with the rates I set. The objective with the most wins is Mega Satan with 15 victories and 5 losses, and the objective with the most defeats is Greedier with 10 losses and 9 wins.
But if we are talking %s here, well, Mega satan still rules supreme on the victory department while the losses change from Greedier to Delirium with 6 losses and 2 wins.
Extra timed objectives appeared 6 times during the experiment, Boss Rush 2 times and Hush 4 times.
Side note: One of the Boss rush extra objectives was on a run with Jacob & Esau, which was absolutely diabolical. But I won regardless!
The character that appeared the most is Tainter Isaac, with 8 runs! (3 victories 5 losses)
The character that appeared the least (Excluding Tainted Lost, who was banned for this experiment) is a five-way tie between Isaac, Magdalene, Tainted Magdalene, Tainted Azazel and Tainted Bethany! With 1 victory each, except for Isaac, who died once… some could say that this is canon…
It’s also worthy to note the period where I got The Lost 3 times in a roll… quite unlucky, but I managed to win at least 1 run!
There was only 1 “failure to reach the objective” in the entire project, one where I was supposed to go to Mother but forgot to collect the knife pieces required to reach that ending…
There were a total of 10 revives in this experiment! And by revives I mean the ones that switch your character to another one.
3 characters revived as Blue Baby, 3 as Lazarus and 4 as Dark Judas.
Even though it's not a revival, I still think it's important to note that there was one run where I finished as the Esau Jr. alternative for the character!
Now let's get to the data about the items & trinkets collected in all runs!
I’ll be separating this by DLC, so here we go!
(Btw, I didn't include trinkets on these images for my own sanity! You can see them on the spreadsheet
Some interesting stuff:
This is the biggest pool of items in the game! So this one holds about 1/3 (114 items and 62 trinkets) of everything collected in this experiment!
The item that appeared the most was Screw, but that’s a boss item so it’s expected. If you were to remove the boss items from the equation, the actual most collected item is Rotten Baby!
Trinkets are a similar case, Rebirth holds about 1/3 of all trinkets collected in the experiment, but it’s not the biggest pool of them of all DLCs… Repentance beats Rebirth by a total of 1 extra trinket…
There weren’t many golden trinkets on the experiment, only 3 of them were collected and 2 of them were Rebirth trinkets!
17 passive items, 57 active items and 28 trinkets didn’t appear in the final results.
More interesting stuff:
This is the smallest DLC in the game, with a total of 71 items and 15 trinkets collected during the experiment.
The item with the most appearances is Mr. Dolly, but again, this is a boss item. if we exclude boss items, the item with most appearances is Deep Pockets! (Cambion Conception doesn't count because Lilith starts with that.)
9 passive items, 14 active items and 19 trinkets didn’t appear in the final results.
Even more interesting stuff:
Ranking third in terms of size, this one had a total of 73 items and 28 trinkets collected!
Again, the item with most appearances is a tie between boss items (Dad’s Lost Coin and Midnight Snack), removing this pool items, the item with most appearances is Broken Modem.
6 passive items, 21 active items and 20 trinkets didn’t appear in the final results.
The last interesting stuff:
Ranking 2nd, this also holds 1/3 of everything (110 items and 51 trinkets) collected in the experiment.
You know the drill, the top items are all boss items, but if you remove them, the actual top one is Birthright! (Not counting glitched items.)
Despite having the biggest pool of trinkets of all DLCs (1 more than Rebirth), Repentance still fell short of beating Rebirth in total collected. Still, this one had the 1 golden trinket!
14 passive items, 28 active items and 30 trinkets didn’t appear in the final results.
For those familiar with the game, you might have noticed I excluded story items from the images. That’s because they are items you need to collect for progression, so they would dominate in their list... so that's why I put them in a separate image!
(They weren't excluded from the total amounts though!)
And with that done, we have reached the end of the results segment!
Now time for some fun things that happened during the 100 runs!
Fun Facts
A couple of fun things happened during this experiment that I wanted to take note of!
For example-
If you noticed, all the runs with Tainted Isaac ended in either death or me switching characters with a revive. That’s because Tainted Isaac SUCKS, so I took all the opportunities to switch characters that I could find! For better and… for worse…
I also had a funny interaction with Astral Projection and The Forgotten! For those who don’t know, when you take a hit, this item will make your soul leave your body and slow time down for a brief moment so you can fire back at your attackers. Here’s the thing though, if your character takes lethal damage, the item effect will still trigger but when you return to your body, you will die. This allows for some cool plays like, picking a heart with your soul form to prevent death and such.
The interaction I had was funny because it was a softlock!
I triggered the effect of Astral Projection after taking lethal damage with The Forgotten and switched to The Soul thinking I would get a chance to survive… I did survive but… since The Soul is chained to the skeleton, I couldn’t go to the next room anymore. I was softlocked, so I lost that run.
On a funnier and luckier note, I managed to find a golden horse pill in one of the runs! This is the second time I ever seen a golden horse pill in all my hours of playing this game. (Golden modifier is rare in pills and the Horse modifier is also quite rare. According to the internet, the odds of finding a Golden Horse Pill is about 1/2500 per pill!)
If you look at the list of items, you will notice that I tend to prefer devil deals over angels. That’s because I personally find it more fun taking a lot of risks in this game and living on the edge, using all my health as a resource… which might have led to the high death rate…
And now, near the end of this page, I have the funnest fact of them all to share!
Throughout the page I went on and on about this being an experiment and all… so, what’s the conclusion of this experiment? What did I prove by doing all this? What was the purpose of everything?
The answer to these questions is: None, nothing and there was no purpose!
Because the experiment was biased from the start! From me banning 2 characters, not recording all items & trinkets that appeared throughout a run and my biases while playing. All these factors made this experiment flawed & unreliable from the start!
Plus, what would even be there to prove if you made an experiment like this with completely neutral data? Boss items would still dominate the list anyway!
With that out of the way, let's go over the things I used to make this!
Resources
In case you want to see the results in their purest form or want to do this yourself, here’s the things I created that helped me greatly in sorting everything!
All the 100 runs in a block of text and the screenshots!
The website used to generate a run with a random character and random objective!
Here’s the empty spreadsheet for you to do the same!
It would be cool and such a time saver if there was a mod that counted every instance of an item and/ or trinket that appeared during a run and noted down on a text file… unfortunately, I was not able to find such mod or am smart enough to make said mod… so everything had to be done manually. It’s a lot of time to do something that is essentially useless… So why did I do it?
There were two reasons why I embarked on this journey.
The first one was:
I wanted an excuse to talk about one of my favorite games of all time, while also doing something unique and a bit insane that no one has done before! (Well, maybe someone has done this before. I don’t know, I haven’t checked but you know what I mean!)
And the second reason is:
For fun!
I spent hours and hours doing all this, but I had a lot of fun doing so!
I’m quite proud of how everything ended up as well, despite the not ideal win rate for someone with the amount of hours I have.