Revision 10

Relics are the heart of the roguelite layer in Soulbound: Online. They are earned during a dungeon run, and each one warps your abilities, weapons, or stats. Stacking relics together is what produces the game's signature "100+ combinations" pitch, and the best builds are usually emergent rather than planned.

How Relics Work

As you progress through a run, you are offered relics to add to your build. Each choice branches your character in a new direction, layering onto the abilities you brought in. Because the build is assembled fresh each run, experimenting is the point: a relic you ignored last time can define your next run.

The Numbers

The studio publishes the shape of the system in figures, and they are worth knowing before you plan a run.

The bar itself fills from killing enemies and clearing objectives. When it fills you pick one of three, and stacking the picks for synergy is the whole game inside a run. Everything in that list is temporary: walk out and the lot is gone. The permanent half of the system is the upgrade you bought outside the run, which is what widened the pool those three offers were drawn from in the first place.

Early Access Relic Overhaul

For the Steam Early Access build the studio rebuilt the relic system in response to demo feedback. The earlier setup, where relics were a Phase I to VIII ladder that only nudged a single stat up one step at a time, was scrapped. In its place is a wholly new relic set spread across every dungeon ability, each one distinct rather than a flat bonus. The design goal is role-based play: relics push you toward tank, damage, crowd-control, glass-cannon, elemental, or full-support directions, and they stack into builds that reach across both your abilities and your allies.

A few of the new relics the studio has shown:

Synergy Examples

These are the synergies the studio has demonstrated. They show the general design goal: relics should change how an ability behaves, not just add a flat bonus. Finer details from the earlier browser version, such as relic rarities and categories, are not confirmed for the Steam build and are left out here until shown.

Builds Reset Each Run

Relic builds belong to the run you make them in. Your lasting power comes from your gear, life skills, and base progression in the overworld, while relics are the in-run engine that makes each dungeon dive feel different.

Relic Types

Relics come in three forms. Passive relics raise raw stats or enhance your upgraded abilities; only four passives can be active at once, so picking the right ones matters. Weapon relics modify your equipped weapon. Ability relics appear only after an ability is unlocked during the run, so an early relic offer is usually one weapon relic and two passives.

Relic Tiers

Relics use a rarity scale, shown by color: Common, Uncommon, Rare, Epic, and Legendary. The relic options you are offered are shaped by your equipped weapon and its upgrade level, your equipped abilities and their tier, and the relics you have already taken. Ability relics only become available once the ability itself unlocks during the run, which happens at relic level 3 for the first, level 5 for the second and level 10 for the third. With everything fully upgraded a run can draw on roughly eight weapon relics, twenty-four ability relics and thirty-two passives, and once fewer than three unexhausted options remain the game starts repeating what is left: two remaining options means one of them appears twice, and one remaining option fills all three slots.

Core Build Roles

Although the game is classless, builds tend to settle into four roles, with hybrids in between:

Your relic build lasts only for the run that made it. Lasting power comes from gear, life skills, and base progression, while relics and Yoku are the in-run engine.

Relic types, tiers and the passive cap describe the Early Access build and may be tuned as it develops.

Post-Launch Relic Changes

Relics have been tuned steadily since launch. A display bug that drew relic paths as one connected line was fixed so paths now stack separately with standalone relics shown beneath them, rare relics that had gone missing from selections were restored, and a handful of legendary items that could reach a 100% trigger chance and run away with a fight had their trigger rates corrected. Several individual relics were rebalanced at the same time: Duelist's Reach now grants range and cone breadth, Sweeping Form trades a little range for twice the cone breadth, Phantom Resonance on the chakram switched from ethereal to void damage, and staff relics moved off ethereal onto explosive damage.

The relic pool you draw from is also shaped by permanent ability upgrades bought outside the run, so investing in an ability widens the relic options it can offer you later. Relic buffs themselves still last exactly one dungeon run.

A later patch corrected the Pyrosphere relic tree, whose progression had started at an unreachable second phase, and lengthened Void Rift's charge stacks from eight seconds to twenty while leaving the 25% chance per cast to add a stack and the five stacks needed to open the rift unchanged. The same patch briefly made crafted legendary gear receive its legendary effect, which it had been shipping without. That lasted a week. The next patch reversed it, so crafted gear is no longer Legendary at all and a legendary effect is once again something only a dungeon drop can carry.

Recent Relic Fixes

An August 2026 patch was mostly repair work on individual relics. Cascading Power now correctly increases staff relic damage. Ethereal Duality swaps the staff to explosive damage and fires its healing orb the way its description says it should. Kusarigama's Chain Spread was repaired. Void Rift was fixed after the previous update had left it unavailable or invisible for some players. The Supporter relic now interacts correctly with support abilities, although the studio has said it still will not appear in the advanced stats display until a later fix. Magnetism was not changed mechanically; its text was renamed to experience pickup range so that it explains what the relic actually does. Skill scaling for weapons and abilities was also fixed, so higher skill levels now translate into more damage.

Empty Ability Slots Now Offer Abilities

A change on 27 August 2026 reworked what a dungeon offers a character who has not unlocked a full loadout yet. If you enter with empty ability slots, you are offered a random ability at the level each slot would normally unlock, drawn from the whole roster including abilities you have never unlocked. That turns the tutorial dungeon and the early Virelda dungeon into a place to actually try things rather than a run with dead slots, and it means a new character can reach a full loadout mid-run.

Players with every slot already filled get a normal relic selection, exactly as before. The change only intercepts the empty-slot case. There is also an opt-out for anyone running deliberately fewer abilities than the maximum, which is a real build choice at high level: a quest in Lunar City awards The Vacan-Sealer, an item that suppresses the random ability offer so your empty slots stay empty and you keep getting relics instead.

Crafted Gear And Legendary Effects

An earlier line on this page said crafted gear could no longer be Legendary at all. That was true for most of August 2026 and is no longer accurate. The crafting overhaul of 9 September 2026 made crafted gear roll from the same variant pool as dungeon drops, with crafting from Tier 3 upward weighted toward Epic and Legendary results, so a high-tier craft can land on a Legendary roll again. The difference from the reverted August change is that it is now an outcome of the same roll every drop makes rather than a guarantee attached to crafting. See Gear and Cosmetics for the full rules.

Two smaller relic changes landed in the same fortnight. The stack limit on relic reroll items rose from 20 to 100 on 3 September 2026, so a working stock of Relic Refreshers no longer eats bag space. Missing and corrupted visual effects on radial abilities such as Fortify, Ice Cube and Healing Pulse were repaired on 9 September, which restored Fortify's body glow and removed the blue squares that had been appearing in place of radial effects.