Lunar Coins

What the coins buy

Lunar items are the only thing coins are for, and the list is short — 24 entries in the current item pool. What they have in common is a drawback attached to a real benefit, which is why they are a separate rarity rather than simply a strong pickup. The full list, with rarity and family, lives in the item browser.

• Effigy of Grief
• Glowing Meteorite
• Helfire Tincture
• Spinel Tonic
• Beads of Fealty
• Brittle Crown
• Corpsebloom
• Defiant Gouge
• Egocentrism
• Essence of Heresy
• Eulogy Zero
• Focused Convergence
• Gesture of the Drowned
• Hooks of Heresy
• Light Flux Pauldron
• Longstanding Solitude
• Mercurial Rachis
• Neutronium Weight
• Purity
• Shaped Glass
• Stone Flux Pauldron
• Strides of Heresy
• Transcendence
• Visions of Heresy

The rewards come in tiers

Challenge rewards are fixed amounts rather than scaling with difficulty, and there are only five amounts in use across the whole game. That makes the tier a poor guide to effort: a three-coin reward can come from reaching Stage 30, and a ten-coin reward comes from finishing the game on the hardest difficulty. The column that separates them is completion rate, not payout.

The pattern across tiers is the useful part. The most completed one-coin challenge has been finished by almost everyone who owns the game, while the most completed ten-coin challenge has been finished by roughly a quarter. Effort scales far faster than the payout does, which is the argument for farming the cheap end.

Every challenge that pays coins

Sorted by payout, then by completion rate. An entry showing a dash has a published reward but no matching completion rate in the achievement data.

Confirmed by official sources — rewards come from the community challenge table 's own Lunar Coins column; completion rates come from Valve's achievement statistics. 144 of 149 challenges joined to a completion rate.

Planning around the tier list

Because the payout does not track difficulty, the efficient plan is to sweep the cheap tiers rather than chase the large ones. Five one-coin challenges are worth five coins and are each finished by most players, whereas a single ten-coin challenge asks for a specific achievement run that many players never complete at all.

The ten-coin tier is worth a second look for a different reason: those challenges are the ones tied to finishing the game under particular conditions, so working through them produces coins and also forces you through runs you would not otherwise attempt. If the goal is coins specifically, they are the worst exchange rate in the list. If the goal is coins alongside meaningful practice, they are the best content in it.

Whichever end you work from, activating a Newt Altar is the other half of the loop — the achievements page tracks the one tied to finding eight of them, and the lunar item list is what to spend the proceeds on.

Which lunar items are worth the coins

Disputed Origin

Ranks the lunar items themselves, which is the other half of what coins are spent on

• Frames lunar items as strongly survivor-dependent: the same purchase can carry one kit and cripple another.
• Uses a utility-slot replacement as the example, where giving up the original utility skill costs some survivors far more than others.
• Works through the list as an order rather than a catalogue, so the reasoning behind each placement is visible.

Frequently asked

How do you get Lunar Coins in Risk of Rain 2?

The dependable source is challenges. 149 challenges in the game pay a set number of coins on completion, worth 547 coins in total, and the table on this page lists every one of them with its reward.

How many Lunar Coins does each challenge give?

Rewards come in tiers rather than scaling with effort: 17 challenges pay 10, 13 challenges pay 5, 83 challenges pay 3, 27 challenges pay 2, 9 challenges pay 1. That means the tier of a challenge tells you nothing about how hard it is — the completion rates on this page do.

What are Lunar Coins spent on?

Lunar items. They are bought from the Lunar Bazaar rather than found in chests, and the Bazaar is reached through a Newt Altar, which is why the two are usually discussed together.

Which challenge is the easiest way to earn Lunar Coins?

Take the highest completion rate in the tier you can reach rather than the largest reward. The most commonly finished one-coin challenge sits above 90% completion, while the most commonly finished ten-coin challenge is close to a quarter — so five one-coin challenges are a more reliable plan than chasing a single large payout.

Do Lunar Coins carry over between runs?

They are a between-runs currency rather than a pickup, which is why they are banked from challenges instead of earned inside a stage. That is also why the reward list is stable in a way that in-run loot is not.