Ordinarily, a run in Vampire Survivors has a hard cut-off point at the 15- or 30-minute mark, when Red Death shows up to cancel your Christmas. Unlike the lesser Reapers like the Drowner, Trickster, or Maddener, the Red Death instantly teleports into melee range once it spawns and drops your character with a one-hit KO. With that in mind, you’ll want to know how to beat this boss.
How to Kill the Red Death in Vampire Survivors
When it spawns, a typical Red Death boss has a health pool equal to 655,350 HP multiplied by your character’s current level. It cannot be knocked back by any attack (i.e. Garlic) and a single melee attack from the Red Death inflicts 65,535 damage before armor/resistances. Red Deaths are immune to the Rosary’s explosion effect, but can be frozen with effects like the Clock Lancet or Jail of Crystal.
If you can survive a single Red Death, a new Reaper spawns every minute afterward. This comes hand in hand with several stages’ specific hazards, such as Gallo Tower’s sudden lightning storm.
The Hard (Easy) Way to Beat Red Death
The most effective way to beat Red Death is with the Crimson Shroud and Infinite Corridor weapons.
The Crimson Shroud is the evolved form of the Laurel, which requires the Metaglio Left and Metaglio Right accessories at max rank. With the Shroud equipped, the damage you receive from any single hit is capped at 10, and any enemy that touches your character is hit with a powerful explosion.
That retaliatory strike can be powered up by your Armor and any effects that increase your Might or Curse stats and is capable of damaging enemies that are ordinarily immune to damage, like the Stalker in the Bone Zone.
When struck, the Red Death takes 1% of its current max HP in direct damage from the Crimson Shroud.
Screenshot by GameSkinny
The Infinite Corridor is the evolved version of the Clock Lancet, which requires the Gold and Silver Ring accessories at max rank. It periodically sweeps the area around your character with a clockwise beam that freezes any enemy it hits. When that beam completes a full rotation, every enemy that’s still on screen loses half its current HP.
While the Corridor can’t actually kill anything by itself, it does benefit from the Out of Bounds Arcana, so any enemy that gets frozen also explodes.
Depending on your character and the rest of your build, you may be able to score a Red Death kill with the Shroud or the Corridor. With both at once, it’s virtually guaranteed; the Death can barely scratch you, takes 1% of its health in damage any time it tries, and is getting its overall health cut in half every so often.
It does take a little bit of work to pull this off, but it’s less time-consuming than some Early Access strategies, like the “heaven and hell” run with Toastie.
How to Kill Death for Beginners
Neither the Shroud nor the Corridor are on the drop tables for “shortcut” evolutions, such as Gains Boros’ character passive or the Super Candybox II Turbo. The only way to get them is the hard way.
The first step is to run the challenge stage Moongolow. On your first run through this map, you can reach and fight a special, surreal boss near its end. Defeat it to reach the Holy Forbidden, where you’ll find the Yellow Sign relic.
With the Yellow Sign in your inventory, you can now find and collect 4 new relics on most maps.
- The Gold Ring and Metaglio Right both increase your Curse by 5% per level.
- The Silver Ring increases your Area and Duration by 5% per level.
- The Metaglio Left grants 0.1 Recovery and 5% max HP per level. All four relics have a maximum level of 9.
Screenshot by GameSkinny
These four relics are generally found to the extreme north, south, east, and west of your starting position on the map.
If you get close enough to each relic, it spawns a Masked Guardian miniboss, which is fast and hits like a freight train but has no special tricks. A dead Guardian drops a Golden Egg, which permanently increases one of your current character’s stats by a small amount.
With those relics unlocked, you’ve technically got everything you need to take on the Red Death, but the execution can get tricky. Both the Laurel and Clock Lancet are weak choices early on, but you have to take them to evolve them into the Shroud and Corridor. That, in turn, limits you to a maximum of 4 slots to do all your early DPS with.
Further, you have to spend a lot of travel time in any stage to pick up the four relics to evolve the Laurel and Lancet. This isn’t bad on linear maps like the Inlaid Library but can be difficult in more complicated layouts, such as the Dairy Plant or Mt. Moonspell.
In every case, however, you can bypass that by taking the Mad Groove Arcana. This is unlocked by surviving to 31:00 in the Mad Forest, which can be done via the aforementioned high-level Laurel trick.
With Mad Groove, every interactive object on a map is attracted to your current position every two minutes, including the 4 hidden Yellow Sign relics. The only drawback, aside from losing an Arcana slot, is that you need to be careful about your positioning to avoid running into a relic that you might not want to take yet. There’s nothing that spoils your run quite like an unplanned Guardian crawling up your nose.
From this point, you have to pull off a peculiar balancing act. For maximum firepower, you’ll want to grab 6 passive relics before you pick up the 4 from the Yellow Sign.
Further, you’ll need to have enough damage output to protect yourself before you start burning upgrades on the Laurel, Lancet, and Yellow Sign relics, especially since you’ll end the run with at least 90% Curse. In practice, you generally won’t see the Shroud or Corridor before the 18-minute mark, if not much later, and around Level 90.
Screenshot by GameSkinny
You also have to carefully manage the number of treasure chests in the current stage (above), as those are the potential spawn points for evolved weapons. I’ve lost Red Death runs because I simply ran out of minibosses to kill before the 30-minute mark.
Fortunately, the contents of treasure chests in Vampire Survivors are determined when you open them, rather than when they spawn, so you can let them stack up over time and only grab a chest when you know there’ll be an evolved weapon in it.
This is complicated, but it’s not as hard as it may sound. If you focus on decent weapons for early crowd control, pick a map with a 30-minute timer and a forgiving enemy pattern (Inlaid Library), and carefully manage your upgrades. You should go into the Red Death fight with the two weapons that were designed to kill it. The Death boss won’t be able to deal significant damage to you and will lose half its remaining health at regular intervals.
Upon the Red Death’s demise, you’ll receive up to 4 Golden Eggs. If multiple Deaths have spawned, killing one also kills the others. Unfortunately, your run will end seconds afterward, due to the appearance of the invincible, untouchable White Hand. You can only punch death out so many times, I suppose.
As an additional reward, you’ll also unlock the hidden character Mask of the Red Death, an Edgar Allan Poe shout-out who starts with the Death Spiral and the single highest base movement speed in the game.
That’s how you beat Red Death. For more Vampire Survivors tips, check out our dedicated VS guides hub.
Featured image by GameSkinny.
