Dead Cells: Tips for Surviving 1-4 Cell Modes (Hard to Nightmare Difficulty)

So, you’ve beaten Dead Cells on 0 cell mode and you think you’re pretty good at the game. Well, if you’re looking for a challenge, Dead Cells features four other difficulty modes, from Hard to Nightmare, each with added modifiers to make the game even more challenging. If you’re having trouble clearing the game on the higher difficulties, we have some tips from experience that should help a little.

Dead Cells Tips for Surviving 1-4 Cell Difficulty

Check Wall Runes for Food

Aside from 4-cell difficulty, you should always eat all the food you find on the levels to help with healing. While you do still get health fountains during certain level breaks on 1-cell, the rest of the difficulty levels in Dead Cells completely remove them, and your only source of healing will be from your starting flasks and food you can find.

Enemies can drop food very rarely, but they’re more commonly found in secret wall runes. Check wall corners for a glowing blue rune, then strike it repeatedly to reveal a treasure. Usually it’ll be a piece of gold, but sometimes you can get food. If you’re on 4-cell difficulty, however, you’ll need to be a lot more careful with food. Nightmare difficulty introduces the malaise mechanic, which means you’ll instantly die if you take 10 hits in a row. In this mode, always make sure to keep the infection down and don’t eat infected food unless your malaise meter is low, and you really need to get your health back up.

Dead Cells Tips for Surviving 1-4 Cell Difficulty

Upgrade the Forge

This is probably one of the best tips we can give you, but we can’t overstate the importance of the Forge. Each time you defeat a boss in Dead Cells, you’ll be able to spend cells on the Forge to increase your chances of finding +, ++, and S drops in the game. Upgrading this also allows you to potentially start with upgraded weapons at the very start of the run.

Once you have enough blueprint unlocks in Dead Cells, or if you don’t have anything left to spend on the Collector, consider making a few boss runs to farm up cells to dump into the Forge.

If you don’t know about this handy little trick already, you can actually break the door past the Collector to proceed through the level without spending cells. Hoard all of them, then put them towards upgrading the Forge. It’ll help greatly in the long run.

On 1 and 2-cell difficulty, we found that it was easier to take the Promenade, Ramparts, Black Bridge route to the Concierge boss. Compared to Conjunctivius, Concierge is much more manageable, and this is a way safer route to take if you’re farming cells for the Forge.

Dead Cells Tips for Surviving 1-4 Cell Difficulty

General Gameplay Tips

Get 1% Heal Modifiers on Your Main Weapon: Because healing is so limited as the difficulty increases in Dead Cells, one of the best ways to keep your health topped up is by getting the modifier that causes you to take 100 percent more damage, but heals 1 percent of your HP with every strike you land. Of course, the trade-off is that if you do get hit, things are probably gonna be very painful for you. But in the long run, this is a great way for healing lost HP once you start getting better at dodging attacks.

Get Max Damage Reduction: In case you weren’t aware already, damage reduction in Dead Cells is capped at 75 percent, and there’s no point in stacking more equipment with damage reduction once you’re at the cap. Having said that, make sure you do cap it out for every run you do. One of my favorite builds is going for fast Brutality weapons, and grabbing both Stun and Ice Grenades. These give damage reduction bonuses, and also provide you with easy crowd control utility. Get the Fireworks Technician mutation, pump Brutality, and you’ll be able to continuously stun and freeze enemies and kill them before they even make a move. Lots of players favor Tactics builds with turrets, but your HP will be considerably lower than if you went for Brutality or Survival.

Grab Cursed Chests: Cursed chests are scary at first, but once you reach higher difficulties, they’re a great source of money and extra stat scrolls. Lifting the curse also becomes much easier when you can use your head to kill enemies safely. Just hit the R3 button to release the head and approach enemy encounters safely, and you’ll be able to lift the curse quickly. And speaking of the head, always use it in Dead Cells’ boss fights for the extra damage, it can make a real difference.

Start Going for Toxic Sewers on 3-Cell Mode: Once you get to 3-cell in Dead Cells, the Promenade becomes much more dangerous because you’ll start getting Bombardiers and Tracker enemies. On the other hand, the Toxic Sewers biome doesn’t seem to scale as drastically with the difficulty. On 3-cell, we vastly preferred going to the Toxic Sewers, Ossuary, then Black Bridge. Ancient Sewers are kind of a pain, so we generally avoided it when we could.

Don’t Get Hit: This probably just sounds like me saying “git gud,” but it’s definitely the key to your survival in high difficulty runs in Dead Cells. As you continue playing, you’ll start to learn enemy patterns and use your dodge roll more effectively. However, as mentioned previously, not getting hit doesn’t necessarily mean dodging. You can also avoid getting hit by stunning enemies before they can make a move. In short, learn enemy patterns, but also start to recognize which weapons will help you achieve that more easily. I’m a huge fan of the Ice Bow, the Ice and Stun Grenades, as well as Phaser, which lets you teleport behind an enemy. Use skills that help you avoid getting hit, and your runs will go much smoother.

Finalize Your Build Before High Peak Castle: Lastly, and I can’t stress this enough, try to make sure your build and weapon loadout are finished before entering the castle. The castle is the toughest area in the game as those enemies can wreck you pretty easily. Spend your money re-rolling your perks before entering the castle, and try to get as much synergy between your weapons as possible so you’ve got a final build for both the castle and the king.

If you have any other useful tips for surviving the higher difficulties in Dead Cells, feel free to sound off in the comments down below.