Slay the Spire 2 Daily Climb Guide: How to Unlock, Modifiers, and Leaderboard Tips

What Is the Daily Climb?

Daily Climb is Slay the Spire 2’s competitive challenge mode. Every 24 hours, the game generates a new run with a fixed character, a set Ascension level, and three modifiers. The seed is identical for every player worldwide. Same map. Same card rewards. Same relic drops. Same event outcomes.

That shared seed is what makes it competitive. You and every other player are navigating the exact same decisions, so the leaderboard reflects pure skill and strategy rather than luck. It’s my favorite way to play after a standard run starts feeling routine.

How to Unlock Daily Climb

You can’t jump into Daily Climb right away. The game locks it behind two requirements:

1. Play a run with all five characters. You need to start at least one run with Ironclad, Silent, Regent, Necrobinder, and Defect. These don’t need to be wins. Just starting and playing counts.
2. Win a run by completing Act 3. Beat the final boss with any character.

Here’s the catch that trips people up: order matters. If you beat Act 3 before trying every character, Daily Climb stays locked. You’ll need to play with the remaining characters and then win another run before it unlocks. So save yourself time and play one run with each character first, then go for your first victory.

If you haven’t unlocked all five characters yet, check out our beginner’s guide for the unlock chain.

How Modifiers Work

Each Daily Climb applies three modifiers that fundamentally change how you approach the run. You can’t swap them out or ignore them. Some modifiers hand you an advantage. Others make the run harder. Most days, it’s a mix.

Learning to read the modifier set and adapt before your first card pick is what separates average Daily Climb players from strong ones.

Deck-Altering Modifiers

Draft replaces your starting deck entirely. You go through a series of three-card draft picks and build a 10-card deck before the run begins. This is one of the strongest modifiers you can get. Pick aggressively for synergy since you control every single card in your opening hand.

Sealed Deck gives you a pool of 30 cards and lets you choose 10 to build your starting deck. It’s similar to Draft but offers more flexibility. Look for energy-efficient combos and cards that scale well into Act 2 and 3.

Diverse opens the card pool to include cards from every character, not just the one you’re playing. Combined with Draft, this creates wild cross-class synergy runs.

Map and Combat Modifiers

Flight removes all pathing restrictions on the map. You can jump to any node regardless of connections. This is huge. Route to elites early for relics, then hit rest sites when your HP gets low. Don’t waste Flight on safe linear paths.

Big Game Hunter floods the Spire with extra elite encounters that drop better rewards. More elites means more relics, but also more HP spent fighting them. Pair this with strong early-game cards.

Lethality cranks up damage across the board. Fights hit harder and end faster. Glass cannon strategies work well here because enemies don’t live long enough to punish low Block.

Difficulty Modifiers

Night Terrors makes resting at campfires cost max HP instead of restoring it. Every rest site becomes a painful trade between upgrading cards and keeping your health pool. You’re on a clock.

Terminal reduces your max HP at the end of each combat. Your health bar shrinks as the run goes on, capping at 1 HP minimum. Combined with Night Terrors, this turns runs into a race against your own body.

The modifier pool rotates regularly, and Mega Crit has added new ones through early access patches. I won’t list every modifier here since the list keeps growing, but the ones above show up most often and have the biggest impact on your strategy.

The Scoring System

Daily Climb uses a different scoring system than standard runs. Your final score is a packed integer that the leaderboard sorts in descending order. It encodes multiple factors into a single number, prioritized in this order:

1. Victory — Did you win? A losing run can never outrank a winning one, no matter how far you got.
2. Floors visited and badges earned — More floors cleared and more badges collected push your score higher.
3. Speed — Faster completion time beats slower completion time at every comparison tier.

That last one matters more than most players realize. If two people win with the same number of badges and floors, the faster player wins. Speed isn’t a tiebreaker. It’s baked into the score at every level.

Badges

Badges are achievements earned during a run. Some are multi-tiered (Bronze, Silver, Gold) based on thresholds you cross. Others are single-tier for specific accomplishments. Earning more badges directly improves your leaderboard position, so learn which badges exist and plan your run to collect them.

Leaderboard Strategy

Competing on the Daily Climb leaderboard requires a different mindset than just trying to win. Here’s how I approach it.

Win First, Optimize Second

A victory always outranks a loss. Don’t sacrifice a stable winning run for a risky speed play. Secure the win, then figure out where you can trim time and grab extra badges on future attempts.

Play Fast, Think Faster

Speed is a real scoring factor. That means long deliberation on every card pick costs you leaderboard position. Know the card pool well enough that most decisions take seconds, not minutes. If you’re still learning, play a few normal runs with each character until their cards feel automatic.

Route Aggressively When Modifiers Allow

Flight and Big Game Hunter days are your chance to stack relics early. Hit three elites in Act 1, grab the relics, and snowball through the rest of the run. Passive relics that generate value every combat are worth the HP trade.

On days without routing modifiers, stick to a balanced path. Two elites per act is a good baseline. Don’t force a third if your deck can’t handle it.

Read the Modifier Combo Before You Start

Spend 30 seconds thinking about how the three modifiers interact before you make any choices. Draft + Diverse? Build a cross-class combo deck. Night Terrors + Terminal? You need a fast deck that ends fights in 2-3 turns because your HP ceiling is collapsing. Flight + Big Game Hunter? Go relic hunting.

The best Daily Climb players don’t react to modifiers mid-run. They plan around them from turn zero.

Keep Your Deck Lean

This applies to every mode, but it’s extra important in Daily Climb when you start with Draft or Sealed Deck. You begin with a tight 10-card deck. Every card you add dilutes your draws. Remove aggressively at shops and events. A 12-card deck that draws its win condition every other turn beats a 20-card deck that sometimes gets there. For deeper deck-building strategy, see our Ascension Guide since the same thinning principles apply.

Tips for Consistent High Scores

Practice with Custom Mode. You can enable any modifiers in Custom Mode and practice with them before they show up in a Daily Climb. Familiarize yourself with modifier interactions so you aren’t adapting on the fly during a scored run.

Watch the top leaderboard replays. After each daily resets, the previous day’s top scores are visible. Study their routing decisions, card picks, and pacing. You’ll learn tricks you wouldn’t discover on your own.

Don’t skip the Daily Climb on bad modifier days. Even combinations that feel punishing teach you something. The players who climb the leaderboard consistently are the ones who have experience with every modifier combo, not just the easy ones.

Track your times. If your winning runs take 45 minutes and the top scores finish in 25, the gap isn’t card knowledge. It’s decision speed. Practice snap decisions in normal runs to build that muscle.

Daily Climb turns Slay the Spire 2 from a solo puzzle into a daily competition. The shared seed removes variance, the modifiers keep it unpredictable, and the leaderboard gives you a reason to optimize beyond just winning. Once you unlock it, I think you’ll find it hard to skip a day.