June 16, 2026
Deck of lies?
Correlated randomness in Slay the Spire 2
Players say Slay the Spire 2’s “random” luck looks weirdly rigged
TLDR: Slay the Spire 2 may be making some “random” rewards and penalties far more predictable than players thought, which could affect real runs. Commenters are split between laughing in vindication, blaming a bad design choice, and debating whether visible randomness becomes part of the game’s unwritten rules.
Slay the Spire 2 players just got handed a delicious little scandal: some of the game’s so-called random outcomes may be oddly predictable, and the comments are absolutely feasting. The big eyebrow-raisers are juicy enough for anyone to understand: one starting choice in the Underdocks makes a nasty curse called Debt show up way more often than expected, one event can never give a certain card, and potion drops swing wildly depending on where you start. For a game built on surprise, that’s the kind of discovery that makes players stare at their screen and mutter, “So I’m not crazy?”
And yes, the community has opinions. One camp is basically yelling, “Why try to fix a problem nobody had and create a bigger one?” Another is treating this like a textbook case of software karma, with one commenter name-dropping Hyrum’s law and arguing that once players can see how randomness behaves, that behavior becomes part of the game forever. Then there’s the crowd posting the most relatable reaction of all: vindication. People who felt like the game kept handing them the same cursed nonsense are now popping up like, “Thank you! I knew something was off.” The funniest side plot is players revisiting old “bad luck” stories and wondering if their supposedly unlucky runs were actually just the game’s hidden habits. In other words: the math is messy, the vibes are chaotic, and the comments are having a field day.
Key Points
- •The article says Slay the Spire 2 beta patch v0.107.0 has correlated randomness across multiple RNG systems in single-player.
- •It presents specific examples, including a roughly 54% chance of receiving Debt from Neow's Bones in Underdocks and a first-fight potion-drop chance of about 76% in Underdocks versus 4% in Overgrowth under stated assumptions.
- •The article says a similar correlated RNG issue was already known in the original Slay the Spire, where multiple RNGs were initialized to the same starting state.
- •It explains that Slay the Spire 2 seeds many separate RNGs using a base seed plus hashed labels for different subsystems and events.
- •The article attributes the remaining exploitability to C# System.Random, whose seed behavior is described as sufficiently linear that outputs from differently seeded RNGs remain correlated.