Souls are an optional feature that lots of players — including me — didn’t really understand when we first jumped into the hack-and-slash adventuring of Minecraft Dungeons. Unlike Diablo 3 or other action RPGs in the genre, you really don’t have to worry about magic or special abilities. Instead, you just have to manage your cooldowns; your potion, dodge roll, and artifacts all have cooldowns. But there are certain items that expend a different resource called souls.
Souls are collected every time you defeat an enemy. Most enemies give just 1 soul, but special larger enemies might give multiple souls once they’re defeated. Some really cool artifacts require souls to unleash instead of a cooldown — you can summon lightning from a staff, blast enemies with a laser beam of light, or blast everything with an AOE attack. If you don’t really understand what souls are for, that’s what this guide is all about.
More Minecraft Dungeons guides:
Everything You Need To Know Before You Buy | FAQ | Best Enchantments You’ll Want To Slot For Your Gear | How To Beat The Game Solo | Best Gear, Enchantments & Artifacts For Solo Players | How To Level Up & Unlock Enchantments Faster | Endgame Grinding Guide | How To Deal The Most Damage Possible | 2000+ Damage Build Guide | How To Reach All Four Secret Levels | Dungeon Locations Guide | How Endgame Power Level Works | Reaching 108 PL Guide
How Souls Work | Best Soul Builds Guide
Souls are a resource that is only required for certain artifacts like the Soul Healer, Torment Quiver, Harvester. Instead of being stuck on a cooldown like the rest of your abilities, these artifacts can be used by spending souls you’ve collected.
- How To Collect Souls: Souls are earned by defeating enemies. Regular mobs drop 1 Soul, while larger enemies and bosses may drop multiple Souls. You don’t need special weapons or items to collect souls.
You can boost the amount of souls you earn with special weapons, armor and enchantments so you’ll get extra souls for every enemy you kill — the Soul Knife and Eternal Knife naturally give you +2 Soul Gathering, tripling the amount of souls you’ll earn for each enemy you defeat.
Best Soul Builds
Souls are tricky to utilize in combat — especially against big bosses. They’re much more useful when fighting large groups of enemies where you can quickly replenish your souls.
Currently, there is no perfect Soul Build, and Souls are seen as pretty weak compared to other artifacts and weapons. But, there are still some very useful ways you fan use souls — the Souls Build gives you more speed than anything else.
- Best Souls Items:
- Soul Fists: The Soul Fists are a punching weapon that give you +2 Soul Gathering, and also increase your Crit Chance % the more souls you’ve collected. You’ll crit way more often with a high soul collection, so you don’t even need to spend your souls.
- Soul Healing: An artifact that can heal you much faster than Radiance, that you can use multiple times in a pinch — especially useful if you’ve already used your potion.
- Soul Speed: This enchantment is ridiculous when matched with any other speed-enhancement. Soul Speed is an armor enchantment that gives you a speed boost whenever you defeat a mob. It is completely broken. Try it yourself — you speed around like crazy.
- Souldancer Robe: The best robe for any Soul build. It gives you a boost, and can be found in the Creeper Woods, Highblock Halls, and Underhalls zones.
You’ll notice I don’t have a lot of attack powers on here. Many of the attack artifacts expend a lot of soul energy without doing much damage at all. They’re wasteful, and unless a patch makes soul artifacts more powerful, I don’t recommend them when you could be using Multi-Arrow and Fireworks Arrow to cripple bosses or groups of enemies.
That’s basically everything you really need to know about Soul items. There’s a lot more enchantments, artifacts, weapons and armor that use souls — unfortunately, it’s not all that great. But I highly recommend any of the items listed above; those are top-tier Minecraft Dungeons items.
