Bestiary Guide: Stats, Event Encounters, and Animation Viewer (v0.108.0 update)

The Bestiary is a new screen inside the Compendium menu, added in beta v0.105.0 on May 7, 2026. It lists monsters and bosses that you have encountered in your runs and lets you view their full animation sets in a dedicated viewer.

Mega Crit explicitly described the first version as "an outline of what it will end up being." Since then, the Bestiary has picked up extra entries, bug fixes, event combat encounters, and a v0.108.0 stats section. It is still not a complete mechanical database, but it is no longer just a gallery.

Open the Compendium from the main menu and look for the Bestiary entry alongside the existing Cards and Relics catalogs. You do not need to be in a run; the Bestiary is part of the meta-menu, not the in-run UI.

The catalog only shows monsters you have actually faced. So your Bestiary fills out naturally as you play — fight new monsters on different acts and characters and they will populate the list.

When you have a monster selected in the Bestiary, pressing the number keys 1 through 8 cycles through the monster's different animation states — idle, attack windups, hit reactions, death, and so on. Mega Crit flagged this as a "pro tip" in the patch notes.

This is genuinely useful even before data fields ship. Watching a monster's windup animation in isolation makes it much easier to recognize the same tell mid-fight under pressure.

The most-requested deep data — exact HP bands, move pool, intent rotations, and drop tables — is still not fully exposed. The new stats section is useful, but do not treat the Bestiary as a replacement for a mechanics wiki yet.

There is still room for better browsing. The list shows what you have seen and now includes more encounter coverage, but players who want heavy filtering, sorting, search, and act-by-act grouping are still waiting on a more mature data layer.

Slay the Spire 1 famously never shipped a Bestiary. The community filled the gap with a Steam Workshop mod and the Spire Logger family of external tools, but those came with the cost of leaving the game. Building it into the sequel — even at "outline" quality — is a milestone, because it locks in a place where the data layer can later live without players needing third-party overlays.

For now, the most practical use is as a learning tool: encounter a confusing new enemy in a run, then look up its animations in the Bestiary afterward to build memory of its tells. That alone shortens the "what was that move?" gap for new players, even before the numerical data arrives.

v0.106.0 (May 21, 2026) expanded the Bestiary with three new entries: Kaiser Crab arms, Decimillipede, and Parafright. Mega Crit also fixed a bug where Waterfall Giant was not respawning in the Bestiary after defeat — so if you cleared one before the patch and the entry stayed missing, it should now be populated correctly.

Two indirect quality-of-life wins worth noting: Aeonglass's first-move intent icon was corrected (previously showed a buff icon instead of the debuff it actually applies), and the Kaiser Crab Rocket Claw charge SFX no longer loops. Bestiary's role as a tell-memorization tool gets cleaner every patch that fixes these visual / audio inconsistencies.

Beta v0.108.0 turns the Bestiary into a more useful run-history and learning tool. It adds a stats section, event combat encounters, hides duplicate animations for some monsters, and slightly adjusts the selection arrow in the monster list.

The same patch also fixes several Bestiary-specific problems: fresh save / reload treasure-room softlocks, incorrect monster discovery counts, Kaiser Crab title overlap, repeated Knowledge Demon animation stops, missing Tunneler animations, Tunneler animations while burrowed, and Kin Priest Soul Beam impact SFX in the Bestiary.