Slay the Spire 2 Epochs: Full Unlock Guide and Timeline Explainer

Slay the Spire 2, unlike the original game, has the Timeline, a structured progression system built around Epochs. Slay The Spire 2 Epochs — individual objectives that each reward permanent additions to future runs. Over 50 Epochs are available in the current early access build, and completing them adds new cards, relics, potions, Ancients, alternate acts, and playable characters to the game's card pool. Unlock conditions vary across three main categories: accumulating score across runs, completing acts with specific characters, and reaching kill counts against elites or bosses. Each Epoch discovered triggers a pop-up notification and permanently expands what appears in every subsequent run.

Slay The Spire 2: Unlocking All Epochs and Everything

The fastest path through the Timeline starts with understanding that progress is global, not per-character. When you choose the character for each run deliberately — rotating across the roster rather than repeating the same hero — you knock out character-specific Epochs while also feeding the shared score pool that drives score-based unlocks simultaneously. Locking in the best relics for each character accelerates run length and kill counts, which compresses the time between Epoch discoveries. Score accumulates from floors climbed, elites killed, bosses defeated, gold collected, and new relics discovered, with bonus points for clean elite and boss kills.

Epochs do not expire and do not require successful runs to count toward score thresholds — reaching the score screen after any run, including a loss, contributes to score-based Epochs. I think the most important early investment is clearing score-based Epochs first, because they unlock the card and relic pools that make character-specific grinds — 15 elite kills, 15 boss kills, Ascension 1 clears — significantly easier to complete. Character unlock Epochs chain directly: one Ironclad run unlocks the Silent, one Silent run unlocks the Regent, one Regent run unlocks the Necrobinder, and one Necrobinder run unlocks the Defect, with none of these requiring a win.

Every Slay The Spire 2 Epoch And Its Unlocking

The table below lists every currently available Epoch in Slay the Spire 2, its unlock condition, and what it adds to future runs. Several Epochs marked as placeholders — Somewhere and Elsewhere — have unknown rewards and are likely tied to content arriving later in early access.

Score-based Epochs do not require any specific character and unlock passively across every run, making them the first priority before committing to character-specific grinds. The Underdocks alternate Act 1 unlocks through score accumulation and adds a new map variant that appears in future runs immediately. Completing the Orobas Epoch — which requires playing one run with every character — also unlocks the Orobas Ancient for Act 2, which makes it a strong target once the full roster is accessible.

Slay The Spire 2 Timeline

The Timeline lives in the main menu and displays every previously unlocked Epoch alongside blurred previews of locked ones, which reveal their unlock conditions when moused over. Progress tracks globally across all characters and all run outcomes, meaning a run that ends in Act 1 still contributes score and counts kills toward Elite and Boss Epoch thresholds. Two Epochs — Somewhere and They Return — are currently listed as placeholders with no confirmed rewards, indicating content planned for later early access updates. The Daily game mode, which posts scores to a public leaderboard, unlocks through The Daily Epoch, which requires completing one run with every character and clearing Act 3.

I see players ignore the Timeline entirely for their first ten runs and then find themselves stuck with the same starter card pool indefinitely — mousing over locked Epoch nodes after each run takes seconds and immediately shows which objective is closest to completion. Path aggressively toward elites on every run: they generate score, count toward character kill-count Epochs, and drop relics that make subsequent runs longer and higher-scoring. Rotating characters every two to three runs instead of grinding one hero to completion prevents bottlenecking on a single character's Epoch list while stalling everyone else's.