While gold can be obtained by simply slaughtering incoming monsters, Lunar Coins are far rarer. Since they’re almost entirely random, you can’t really farm them, per se. You can increase your chances by playing with high-DPS characters such as the Mercenary and the Huntress, but there’s no one way to reliably farm Lunar Coins outside of destroying every enemy in your path.
Once you get on, though, you may wonder what on earth you’re meant to do with it. The good news is that unlike most items in Risk of Rain 2, these coins are collected across any runs you do.
This means dying doesn’t deplete them. You can collect them slowly over the course of many runs with different characters. Read on to find out just what they are actually for and what you can spend them on.
Use Lunar Coins at Newt Altars
This is probably the first thing you will use a Lunar Coin on. These little shrines are hidden around levels and are usually tucked away at the end of tricky jumps.
There doesn’t seem to be one in every level, but Newt Altars are more common than other shrines — and even the coins themselves.
Spending one Lunar Coin here gets you a Blue Orb. This becomes a Blue Portal upon clearing the teleporter boss.
Going through this portal places you in a realm with a shop. Here you can trade items for rarer ones and spend Lunar Coins on items. Perhaps most importantly, this is where you can unlock the Artificer.
Artificer
The Artificers cost a rather hefty 10 Lunar Coins to unlock. They can only be bought by the person who paid the coin to the Newt Altar.
This means you really need 11 Lunar Coins in order to gain access to this character.
There is a chance that a portal will open randomly, but it is incredibly slim. This should be the first thing you do with your coins if you want to unlock this character.
Use Lunar Coins at Lunar Bud Shrines
The Lunar Bud is exactly what it sounds like. It is a small flower bud that can be found in Risk of Rain 2’s levels. Lunar Buds aren’t typically hidden like the Newt Shrines, so you may well stumble across one without realizing it.
For the cost of 1 Lunar Coin, you can get one Lunar item. These items tend to be things that give you an incredible boost. However, they also have drawbacks to balance things out.
There is an in-game challenge for having several Lunar items on you in a run, so this is probably worth grinding out at some point. Plus, many of the items are really powerful.
The best one I have found so far gives you money every time you land a hit, but each time you are hit, you lose money. This often leads to some absurd bank balances.
Use Lunar Coins at the Shrine of Order
Of all the uses for Lunar Coins, this may well be the strangest. These peculiar statues look like pieces of funky geometric art. They can be found randomly. Though, these seem to be the rarest of the Lunar shrines.
These statues change your items up in unusual ways. While there may be some rhyme or reason to it, as it stands, it is hard to say. They take all of your items and change them into just two items instead, but a lot of them.
For example, upon using one around 40 minutes into a run (by accident, RIP that run), my loadout suddenly changed to having 39 Firework bundles. This meant that all of my attack power was gone, but opening a chest led to a 30-second barrage of fireworks hunting down my enemies.
Was it worth it? No. But it was funny. It is hard to say exactly why you would want to do this, but if you are having a boring run then maybe it is worth it(?).
List of Lunar Items
Here’s a list of the Lunar Items you can get, along with what they do.
Shaped Glass: This item increases your base damage by 100% but reduces your health by 50%. Brittle Crown: You gain a 30% chance to gain 3 gold with each hit. You either lose 3 gold, or a percentage of your gold equal to the percentage of your maximum health lost when you are hit. Transcendence: You get 1 maximum health, but the rest of your health becomes a regenerating shield. Corpsebloom: Your healing is doubled, but it is applied at 10% per second instead of all at once. Gesture of the Drowned: Your equipment cooldown is reduced by 50% but is activated whenever it can be automatically.
That’s all there is to know about Lunar Coins in Risk of Rain 2 for the moment.
There isn’t any way of guaranteeing that they drop, so it’s just a matter of grinding out enemies. This is definitely best done as part of your runs in general, or with friends who are happy to let you collect the rare currency.
Just keep at it and you’ll have more coins than you know what to do with. For more on this excellent roguelike, be sure to head over to our Risk of Rain 2 guides hub.
