Chest Guide (Qualities & Mimics)

Chests are the primary source of items and guns in Enter the Gungeon. They always appear in Treasure room, and can also be found after clearing rooms, from Winchester's game, or in secret rooms. Chest color corresponds to item quality, and higher floors spawn better chests more often.

Treasure room

Treasure room chests are always locked and require a key. On each floor, one chest always contains a gun and the other always contains an item. This rule only applies to normal openings — destroying a chest bypasses this allocation.

Fuses

Entering a room with a chest has a chance (increased by Curse) of a fuse appearing next to it. If the chest isn't opened in time, it explodes and the contents are lost. Any Items or Guns that sprays liquid (except oil) can extinguish the fuse. Synergy Chest found in Treasure room always have a fuse.

Mimic

Any standard chest can be replaced by a Mimic. The chance increases with each point of Curse. Rainbow Chest, Synergy Chest, and Glitch Chest can never become a Mimic. Rat Chest is the exception: it can be a Mimic, it just never becomes one from Mimic Tooth Necklace.

How to identify a Mimic

• Shoot the chest once: if it's a Mimic it immediately reveals and attacks; if not, the chest takes no damage (explosions still destroy it)
• Watch the chest's mouth: a Mimic's mouth subtly moves as if breathing
• Owning a Dog: the dog barks when you approach a disguised Mimic
• Treasure room chests are always locked: an unlocked Brown Chest seen in a Treasure room (or in the cellar-like secret room that always holds 3 chests) is always a Mimic. Chests from room clears and elsewhere are often unlocked anyway, so this tell does not apply there
• Trusty Lockpicks never provokes a Mimic, whether the pick succeeds or fails; Drill breaks the lock and provokes it immediately

Shooting to reveal a Mimic does not consume a key. Defeating it drops the original contents plus extra loot. A Mimic's HP and damage scale with the chest's quality — a S quality Mimic is far more dangerous than a D quality one.

Holding Mimic Tooth Necklace forces all standard chests to become Mimics. Combine it with Ring of Mimic Friendship and Mimics won't attack you, letting you open every chest for free with no key and no fight.

Destroying chests

Shooting a chest destroys it for a chance at some loot, but not the full contents. Only the player's bullets can break chests — enemy bullets cannot, though enemy explosions still deal damage. Rat Chest cannot be destroyed.

• Junk — base weight 0.6; multiplied by 1.2 if holding at least one key. If Ser Junkan has not been unlocked yet, this Junk has a 20% chance to be replaced by Ser Junkan
• Half Heart— weight 0.2
• Explosion — weight 0.1
• Items or Guns at lower quality than the chest — weight 0.1; with Book of Chest Anatomy, Junk and explosions are removed from the destruction table and replaced with pickups (Key, Heart, Ammo, and so on), and the dropped quality improves as well
• Gold Junk (requires unlock) — weight 0.005; multiplied by 3 if holding Ser Junkan
• Ser Junkan (requires unlock) — weight 0.01

Drop chance = that item's weight divided by the sum of all applicable weights. Brown Chest (D quality) chests don't downgrade further, so they always drop an Items or Guns if the item/gun slot is rolled.

Standard chests

The five standard colours map to the five quality tiers. When a floor generates a chest, its colour is rolled from the table below, weighted more heavily toward high quality the deeper you go. These figures do not account for Magnificence downgrades, so what you actually receive can be lower — see What Is Magnificence?.

That is the current (Advanced Gungeons & Draguns) loot table. The Classic loot table can be switched back on from the Gameplay section of the Options menu in The Breach or on the title screen.

Its first three floors are noticeably more conservative: floor 1 is 42.5 / 35 / 15 / 5 / 2.5, floor 2 is 20 / 32.5 / 35 / 9 / 3.5, and floor 3 is 10 / 22 / 50 / 12.5 / 5.5 (listed D quality through S quality). Floors 4 and 5 are identical on both tables.

Brown Chest

D quality, most common. Some Brown Chest contain only pickups (coins, hearts, blanks) with no Items or Guns.

Blue Chest

C quality. Has a higher chance of dropping Items compared to other chest types; Guns drops are relatively less common.

Green Chest

B quality. It carries none of the quirks the other colours have — the contents are simply a B quality Items or Guns.

Red Chest

A quality. Opening a Red Chest that contains a heart-increasing item also yields an extra key.

Black Chest

S quality, the rarest standard chest. When a floor generates several Red Chest and Black Chest chests, it raises Magnificence (rarity suppression), making later high-tier rewards more likely to be downgraded — see What Is Magnificence?.

Special chests

Synergy Chest

After rescuing Synergrace, normal chests have roughly a 5% chance to be replaced by a Synergy Chest, which always has a fuse.

Opening one reveals its color, which determines what's inside. One is guaranteed to spawn after defeating the Old King (except in Classic mode). Synergy Chest can also be purchased directly from Synergrace.

• If blue, it drops an Items or Guns that completes a synergy with something you're already carrying.
• If red, it drops a random Items or Guns. Completing a synergy is possible, but not guaranteed.

Rainbow Chest

Rainbow Chest have a 0.0333% base chance to replace a normal chest (room-clear reward chests have an additional 0.001% chance, for a combined ~0.0343%). They are never locked and provide 8 Items or Guns (~S quality 15%, ~A quality 54%, ~B quality 31%). Rainbow Chest can also disguise as Brown Chest — this variant only unlocks after breaking at least 5 ordinary Brown Chest; shooting with a liquid weapon or opening it reveals it.

Glitch Chest

A 0.1% chance variant that only appears on floors 1–3. Two conditions must be met: the player must have entered Enter the Gungeon more than 10 times, and must have defeated The Beholster at least once. Opening one instantly transports the player to a glitch version of the next floor containing only a boss room with two Glitch The Beholster.

Defeating them rewards 7 Guns or Items plus the standard boss drops and a floor full of pickups. Because the floor drops you straight into the boss room with no chests along the way, all 7 pedestals will normally hold guns as long as you have not picked up a gun on that floor before the bosses die.

Reward pedestals have a high chance of being a Pedestal Mimic, which also makes this a reliable way to run into one and unlock the Mimic Gun (see All Unlocks Guide: Characters, Guns & Items).

Rat Chest

Found exclusively in the ???. They require Rat Keys, dropped during the third Punch-Out phase of the Resourceful Rat fight (up to six per fight).

After the fight, four Rat Chests appear in random order, containing the Elimentaler, Partially-Eaten Cheese, Resourceful Sack, and Rat Boots. Collecting all four transforms the character's appearance. Rat Chests cannot be destroyed. The entrance to the lair is covered in ???.

• Lockpicking options are limited: AKEY-47 and Shelleton Key cannot open Rat Chests, but Trusty Lockpicks and Drill can
• In co-op, if the Resourceful Rat is killed while one player is dead, every Rat Chest can be opened without a Key (this does not revive the partner)
• If you already obtained any of the four Rat items before beating the Rat, opening a Rat Chest gives an A quality tier Items or Guns instead
• If any of the four Rat items are still locked, there is no way to tell in advance which chest holds the remaining one

Truth Chest

Found in a secret room with Brother Albern, with a guaranteed appearance in the Abbey (see Abbey).

Answer his question — it cannot be answered wrongly — to open it for free; it contains 1–2 random-quality pickups, Items, or Guns. Destroying it instead drops Lies. It can also be forced open with AKEY-47; either destroying it or forcing it open makes Brother Albern vanish on the spot.

Revival Chest

Co-op exclusive. When one player dies, all unopened chests in the room are replaced by Revival Chests. Opening or breaking any one of them revives the dead player; the remaining chests revert to normal. No key is required. A chest that was originally a Mimic simply revives the partner and does not fight back. Check the map first to find the lowest-quality chest to use for the revival.