The Hermit - Legacy Port of The Hermit from Slay the Spire 1 by AlexMdle

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NOTE: This mod currently requires the public beta branch.

Description
The Hermit is a fully playable custom character for Slay the Spire 2, ported from the beloved STS1 mod by AlexMdl. A mysterious gunslinging wanderer who fights from the shadows using precise hand positioning, crippling debuffs, and dark curse synergy. Master the art of the Dead On mechanic — cards gain powerful bonus effects when played from the middle of your hand.
About This Port
This is a port of the original The Hermit mod by AlexMdl to Slay the Spire 2. AlexMdl is aware of this port and has stated: "I generally don't mind what people do with my assets as long as it's for fun and am not against this."
Feedback and Bugs
Please use the Bugs tab for bug reports and the Posts tab for general feedback. Please be kind — this is a passion project and English is not my first language.
Installation

1. Download and install BaseLib (required dependency). Place the BaseLib mod folder in your STS2 mods directory: [Steam Library]/steamapps/common/Slay the Spire 2/mods/BaseLib/
2. Download The Hermit mod files ( HermitMod.dll,  HermitMod.pck, and  HermitMod.json).
3. Create a folder called  HermitMod inside your STS2 mods directory: [Steam Library]/steamapps/common/Slay the Spire 2/mods/HermitMod/
4. Place all three files into that folder.
5. Launch Slay the Spire 2 — The Hermit will appear on the character select screen.

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If you are encountering bugs following the recent STS2 Beta Branch update, consider switching to the 1.0.4-BetaBranchHotFix
version of the mod.
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Nexus Mods Support Ending

Thank you to everyone who has supported this, and my other mods, over the course of 2026.  All future updates to this and my other mods will be exclusively through Steam workshop and my Discord, which can be found here: https://discord.gg/7kJMtFCarU.  Thank you everyone!
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The Hermit — multiplayer fix round

Two updates focused entirely on multiplayer, prompted by a pair of excellent co-op bug reports. If you play The Hermit in multiplayer — especially lobbies with more than one Hermit — you'll want these. Both are live on the Steam Workshop now.

Combo and Smoking Barrel minded their own business

• Combo: in a lobby with two Hermits, Combo reacted to the first Dead On card played by any Hermit — so a teammate's Dead On card could return to their hand while consuming your Combo for the turn. Combo now only reacts to its owner's cards, and its per-turn budget is tracked per player.
• Smoking Barrel: had the same hidden bug — it charged up bonus damage from other players' Dead On effects, not just yours. Now matches its card text: "Whenever you activate a Dead On effect."

The 3+ player desync

• With three or more players, another player using a Dead On card could desync the lobby entirely, forcing a restart. Root cause: effects that react after a card is played were reading shared "was that Dead On?" state, and with several players' cards interleaving, different clients could see different answers — after which their simulations disagree and the game can't recover.
• Dead On results are now recorded per card at the moment it's played, so every client always agrees on whether a card triggered — regardless of how many players are acting at once.
• Combo's and Smoking Barrel's pending state now also survives mid-combat reconnects/resyncs without diverging between clients.

Requirements (unchanged)

• Slay the Spire 2 beta branch — right-click STS2 in your Steam Library → Properties → Betas → select the public beta.
• BaseLib v3.1.3+ — installed and enabled.

Multiplayer bugs like these are nearly impossible to find without real co-op groups playing and reporting — huge thanks to the two reporters. If your lobby still hits a desync with this update, please include the player count, which characters were in the lobby, and what was played just before it happened.
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The Hermit — July update roundup

A busy month! Since the v0.108 compatibility update, there have been several releases driven almost entirely by your bug reports. Everything below is already live on the Steam Workshop, and this page's file has been updated to match. Thank you to everyone who reported issues — every fix here started with a player report.

Game patch compatibility

• v0.109 support: the game's v0.109 patch (July 17) reworked its save-property system, which caused The Hermit to fail to load entirely. The mod now uses the game's new automatic registration and loads cleanly. If the mod vanished from your character select in mid-July, this was why — update and you're set.

Card fixes

• Dead or Alive: the Bounty gold is now awarded immediately when the fatal hit lands — 15 gold for a Normal enemy, 40 for an Elite, 100 for a Boss, exactly as the keyword says. Previously the payout depended on a later kill in the same combat, so killing the last enemy with it paid nothing. In multiplayer, the gold now goes to the player who played the card.
• Dead or Alive: now respects Chemical X and other X-value modifiers — the hit count previously used raw energy spent, ignoring bonus X.
• Take Cover: now matches its card text: adds a single 0-cost Defend and Upgrades it X times (X+1 when Take Cover is upgraded). It previously generated X separate copies of the Defend.
• Snipe: now actually doubles your next Dead On effect this turn, consuming one stack per doubled effect. Previously the doubling was never implemented, so the card did nothing visible.
• Take Aim: Concentration now stacks properly — if Take Aim has multiple stacks (for example via Glam), you get that many Concentration at the start of your turn instead of always one.

Dead On system hardening

• Fixed Snapshot sometimes not granting its Dead On block even on unblocked damage. Dead On status is now locked in at the moment a card is played, so effects resolving during the attack — including other players' cards in multiplayer — can no longer wipe it mid-play. This hardening applies to every Dead On card.
• Concentration is no longer wasted when the card you played was already in Dead On position — it's only consumed when it actually enables the trigger.

Requirements (unchanged)

• Slay the Spire 2 beta branch — right-click STS2 in your Steam Library → Properties → Betas → select the public beta.
• BaseLib v3.1.3+ — installed and enabled.

Keep the reports coming — between game beta patches and the port's rough edges, they're genuinely the fastest way this mod gets better.
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New character mod: The Red Mage is out!

Enjoying The Hermit?  My newest character just released: The Red Mage — a Final Fantasy-inspired jack of all trades. Weave Sword, Black Magic and White Magic cards into exact-order sequences to conjure Meteor, Holy and Manafication, or train your Moogle familiar to fight alongside you with 11 combo moves.  ~60 cards, 12 relics, 8 potions, full art, sounds and spell effects.

Get it here: https://www.nexusmods.com/slaythespire2/mods/1372

Same BaseLib framework as this mod, so if The Hermit runs for you, the Red Mage will too. Kupo!

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v1.0.5 — Compatibility update for STS2 game patch v0.108 (fixes stuck attack cards)

The Hermit v1.5.1 — Game patch v0.108 compatibility update

Slay the Spire 2's v0.108 beta patch changed several of the game's internal combat APIs, which broke The Hermit in some very visible ways. If your attack cards were throwing errors and freezing combat mid-resolution — this update is the fix. Update to v1.5.1 and you're back in business.

What was broken

• Attack cards getting stuck: v0.108 changed how attacks are attributed to the card that played them. Every Hermit attack card hit this, erroring during resolution and locking up the combat.
• End-of-turn effects silently dead: the game renamed its turn-lifecycle hooks, so powers and relics that trigger at end of turn (Bruise, Snipe, Coalescence, Concentration, Horror, Overwhelming Power, Spyglass, Impending Doom) stopped firing.
• Start-of-turn effects silently dead: same story for start-of-turn triggers (Eternal, Old Locket, Clasped Locket).
• Damage-modifying powers: Big Shot, Bruise, Fleeting Time, and Maintenance Strike no longer applied their damage adjustments.

What changed under the hood

For the technically curious: all 33 attack command call sites now pass the new CardPlay context, every power/relic turn hook was migrated to the renamed v0.108 signatures, the damage-modifier overrides gained the new CardPlay parameter, and the Harmony patches were retargeted to the renamed game methods. No balance changes, no content changes — this release is purely compatibility.

Requirements (unchanged)

• Slay the Spire 2 beta branch — modding support is only available on the beta. Right-click STS2 in your Steam Library → Properties → Betas → select the public beta branch.
• BaseLib v3.1.3 or newer — the shared mod framework. Make sure it's installed and enabled.

About this mod

The Hermit is a near one-to-one port of AlexMdl's beloved STS1 character — a weary gunslinger who manipulates card positions to trigger lethal Dead On effects — published with AlexMdl's explicit permission. The only intentional gameplay differences from STS1 are small adjustments needed for STS2's multiplayer. Further development of the character beyond the STS1 baseline will be undertaken by the Downfall team.

If you run into anything that still misbehaves after updating, please report it here or on the Steam Workshop page — game patches like v0.108 can break things in subtle ways, and reports like the one that caught this bug are genuinely appreciated.
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FINAL UPDATE

Hello everyone.  Today, I am posting the final version of Legacy Port of The Hermit from Slay the Spire 1 by AlexMdle.  This update should take care of the outstanding bugs. Continued development will be taken over by lamali and his team on the Downfall Github page. 

I want to give a big thanks to this community and to the Discord community, particularly Ken, Nitablade, and lamali, for getting this project up and running and making it the best that it could possibly be.  Please be sure to check out my other mods if you like the work I've done here, and keep an eye out for new content from me coming sometime in the future.  Thanks everyone!
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New Mod: The Artist

The beta version of my new mod, The Artist, is now available for download.  Please check it out!  Mod link here.

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The Hermit — Big Update (Bug Fixes + STS2 Beta Compatibility)

Hey everyone! 
This is a chunky update. Two big things going on:

⚠️ FIRST: Delete HermitFix

If you have HermitFix installed (the experimental sidecar mod), delete it now. All of HermitFix's fixes are now baked directly into HermitMod itself, and running them side-by-side will cause patch collisions. Just remove the 
mods/HermitFix/ folder before launching.

What happened

The April 23 STS2 beta update changed a chunk of the modding API — specifically how the game tracks combat state, how powers receive turn/play events, and how the energy and damage commands are called. The Hermit's compiled DLL was built against the old API, which meant that under the new beta build:

• The game would softlock the moment you played certain cards (Magnum Opus, Flourish, Strike, Feint — basically anything that triggers an attack hook). Card stuck mid-screen, no rewards screen on enemy death, only a force-quit fixed it
• Memento sometimes didn't appear in your opening hand
• Lots of console errors, occasional disconnects in multiplayer

We rebuilt the entire mod against the new API. Everything should now work cleanly on the beta branch. (And it still works on main — the new API is what's coming to main soon anyway.)

What's fixed

Since we were doing a full pass, we rolled in every bug fix that used to live in HermitFix, plus a bunch of new ones reported since.
Card behavior bugs:

• Body Armor — always grants block now, even if you have no card to discard
• Malice — always deals damage now, even if no card to exhaust
• Dead Or Alive — X scaling actually works (was off by one because the base cost was set wrong)
• Take Cover — upgrade actually does something now (was a no-op; now gives you one extra Defend per play)
• Itchy Trigger — won't waste its cost-reduction on cards that are already 0-cost
• Dissolve — Barricade lasts 3 turns instead of forever, and now shows a countdown number on the icon
• Bounty — actually grants gold when you kill enemies (BountyPower was a totally empty buff before)
• Determination — won't misfire on weird debuff edge cases
• Snipe — actually does something now (it was an empty buff). Apply Snipe → all your Dead On cards trigger that turn
• Combo — no longer crashes the game when you hover over it

Called Shot, fully reworked:

• No longer glows yellow when sitting in the middle (it's not a Dead On card; that was misleading)
• Now glows red when its rider is live — i.e., when the previous card you played was a Dead On that triggered
• Bonus draw only fires if the immediately preceding card was a triggered Dead On (was previously firing off any Dead On played that turn, which made it way too easy)

Relic timing fixes (these were a fun pair of bugs):

• Dented Plate — actually gives you the bonus energy at low HP now. It was firing before the turn's energy refill, so the +1 was getting overwritten immediately. Card draw worked because draws aren't reset on turn start.
• Spyglass — same exact bug, same fix. Concentration → next-turn bonus energy now sticks.

Multiplayer state divergence fixes:
These are the gnarly ones. Some Hermit cards were causing hard "state divergence" disconnects in multiplayer because of subtle RNG and state-evaluation issues:

• From Beyond — was using the wrong RNG channel (the one shared with random card generation effects) for picking targets. With multiple enemies, two clients could pull a different sequence and target different creatures. Switched to the dedicated combat-targets RNG.
• Gambit — was using  OrderBy(random) to shuffle attack cards from discard. That's a classic non-deterministic shuffle in .NET — the random selector gets called multiple times during sort, in a number that depends on input order, so two synced clients pulled different sequences and selected different cards. Replaced with a deterministic Fisher-Yates shuffle.
• Itchy Trigger — same wrong-RNG-channel issue as From Beyond, but for the Dead On hand-card pick. Fixed.
• Grudge — its damage multiplier was evaluated per-hit during the AoE, against live curse pile state. If anything changed pile contents between hits (a power exhausting a curse, an enemy dying mid-attack), the count read different on different clients. Now baked once at play time.

What's NOT fixed yet

• The icon error in the multiplayer top panel for The Hermit — that's a missing asset file in the .pck, on the to-do list for the next update.
• Some scene-file warnings that show up in the console — cosmetic, doesn't affect gameplay, also on the list.

Install

Same as before:

1. Delete  mods/HermitFix/ if you have it
2. Drop the new  HermitMod folder into your  mods/
3. Make sure you've got  BaseLib v3.0.9 or later

Thanks

Massive thanks to everyone who reported bugs in the comments and on the Discord. The multiplayer divergence reports especially were super helpful — those bugs are nearly invisible in single player, and pinpointing them ("happens with multiple enemies", "happens after Concentrated", "non-Hermit characters appearing state divergence") was a huge time-saver. Keep the reports coming.
Have fun, gunslingers.