Moonlighter 2 Beginner Guide: First Hours, Tips & Mistakes

The loop in one paragraph

Moonlighter 2 alternates two halves. At night Will goes through a portal into one of three dimensions, clears rooms, picks run perks and fills a backpack with relics. By day he opens the Moonlighter, sets a price for each relic, and watches customers react. Gold from sales goes to the vendors of Tresna for permanent upgrades and to the Endless Vault, the cube in the square whose gold targets gate the story. The Endless Vault page lists every target.

Difficulty pick

You choose Easy, Normal or Hard at the start and can change it later in the menu. Expert (relics are lost on death, everything costs more) and Hardcore (progress is lost on death) exist for later. The difficulty guide has the details.

The tutorial, step by step

Ms. Scratch drops Will in the Kalina desert with a backpack and tells him not to come back without relics.

1. Traps. Bear traps hurt if you stand in them; roll through them. Enemies take trap damage too, so shoving them in is legal.
2. Breakables. Smash pots and crates: they drop small loot and refill gun ammo.
3. Room transitions. A glowing flower moves you to the next encounter. In real dungeons you pick one of two or three paths on Tomo’s Radar.
4. The gun. Every loadout has one. Ammo refills slowly on its own and quickly when you land melee hits. Save it for flying enemies: a shot on an enemy winding up an aerial attack drops it to the ground and stuns it briefly.
5. The backpack throw. An enemy at half health turns purple (Rupture). Hit it with the backpack to launch it into a wall, another enemy or off a ledge. Elites and bosses never rupture.
6. Your first potion. Save potions for bosses; you can upgrade their strength and count at Eris’s Witch Hut later.
7. The pendant. After the scripted escape you get the pendant, which teleports you home at any time with everything you carry. There is no penalty beyond the loot you skipped.

Your first shop day

Interact with the key device by the door to open. Each relic needs a price; customers answer with one of four reactions (Cheap, Perfect, Expensive, Overpriced). Overprice new relics on purpose and lower after a refusal, because you can always drop a price but cannot raise one after a cheap sale. Every relic’s exact numbers are on the relic price table and the calculator.

Sell cheap Commons first: they fill the perk meter that hands out shop perks. Save Rares and above for after the perks are active. Commons stay under 100 gold, Uncommons under 500, Rares under 1,000, Epics under 2,000 and Legendaries just under 3,000 at base.

What to upgrade first

Creator guides and the community 100% guide agree on the same order:

• Eris for potion count and healing. Dying costs half the quality of every relic you carry.
• Andrei for a weapon. Unlocking each weapon class costs only a few Sun Eater seeds, so try all four before committing gold to one.
• Sliver for backpack slots; every slot is more gold per run.
• Tomo for Double Chests and Deluxe relics once runs are stable.
• Shop furniture and K33P3R last. Furniture only goes on carpets; a Sun showcase early helps Rare prices.

The full list is on the Tresna vendors page.

Combat habits that keep relics alive

• Enemies cannot hit a moving target well; kiting beats trading blows. Hit two or three times, back off, repeat, for every enemy size.
• The roll has long invincibility and almost no cooldown. When in doubt, roll until you are somewhere safe.
• Kill ranged enemies and helpers before minibosses; taser and stun effects fade fast on the big target itself.
• Grab a couple of damage perks before you start worrying about loot. A dead merchant sells nothing.
• Skip trap perks (Spikes, Genie, Taser). Traps are rare, single-use and absent in boss fights.

Backpack basics

Relics interact with their neighbours. Delay rearranging until the bag is full so that as many Rare and Epic relics as possible benefit from quality effects, then use cheap Commons as sacrifices. Keep the burn, shock and petrify vocabulary from the backpack guide in mind: a wrong placement can set half a bag on fire.

Mistakes to avoid

• Fighting elites head-on while their adds are alive.
• Holding a lucky run too long with no potions left; the pendant is free.
• Selling everything at Cheap to rush perks: after a few runs Commons are worth little anyway, so only sacrifice those.
• Carrying shop relics back into a dungeon: since Patch 1 they lose all quality.
• Ignoring Eris’s riddles; each points to a hidden weapon recipe.

Sources: the TechRaptor starter guide (Nov 2025), the Gamesear “10 things I wish I knew” video (Dec 2025), the ezlilyy do’s and don’ts video (Nov 2025) and the Patch 1 notes.