Blood Cubic Zirconia: Overview

2025-10-31 // IOTM Overview

As I noted in the editor's note prepending the Monodent post, it's been a very busy few months for me. My daughter has entered daycare, which has brought an era of constant sickness upon my house. I have a bulging disk in my neck, which is extremely painful. My job continues to take 10-12 hours a day on a good day. As such, I've had virtually no time for KOL; I haven't even been running automated turns. But ever since this month began with the Blood Cubic Zirconia, I've wanted to make absolutely sure I write an overview for it prior to its departure from Mr. Store. I'm going to -barely- get this in under the wire, but it'll technically be out in time for readers to buy it. Spoiler alert: you're really going to want this one!

General Summary

The blood cubic zirconia (BCZ) is an accessory. As with most IOTM equipment, the enchantments aren't really why you want to buy it, but they do exist. Where L = your current player level, the enchantments are...

Serious Spooky Resistance (+3)
+ L x 3 Spooky Damage
+ L x 3 Damage to Spooky Spells
+ 20% Chance of Critical Hit
Weakens Monster on Critical Hit
+ 20% Meat from Monsters

In addition, the BCZ gives you access to 3 combat skills when worn:

BCZ: Blood Geyser 🔴 (A 30-round stun.)
BCZ: Refracted Gaze 🔵 (Replaces the monster's drop table with the drop tables of all other monsters in the current zone.)
BCZ: Sweat Bullets 🟢 (A free kill! Hooray!!!)

... as well as 6 non-combat skills:

BCZ: Blood Bath 🔴 (Gives 30 turns of a +5 x L ML effect, with +100% weapon damage & +5% combat frequency as tertiary modifiers. Caps at +75.)
BCZ: Create Blood Thinner 🔴 (Summons a potency-1 spleen item; 50 turns of +100 HP & +1000% HP.)
BCZ: Dial it up to 11 🔵 (Gives 30 turns of an effect granting +111% spell damage, +111% myst, and making all spells stagger.)
BCZ: Prepare Spinal Tapas 🔵 (Summons a potency-1 food item; 3.5 adv/fullness and 30 turns of +300% mysticality.)
BCZ: Craft a Pheromone Cocktail 🟢 (Summons a potency-1 drink; 4 adv/drunk, and the drink gives one charge of a turn-taking all-day banish.)
BCZ: Sweat Equity 🟢 (Gives 30 turns of +40% meat drop.)

Instead of an MP cost, each cast of a BCZ skill will consume substats. The scaling is pretty light up until about cast #7, at which point it starts getting quite high. To wit:

Cast #1 costs 11 substats
Cast #2 costs 23 substats
Cast #3 costs 37 substats
Cast #4 costs 110 substats
Cast #5 costs 230 substats
Cast #6 costs 370 substats
Cast #7 costs 1100 substats
Cast #8 costs 2300 substats
Cast #9 costs 3700 substats
Cast #10 costs 11000 substats

Skills marked with 🔴 cost muscle substats, 🔵 cost mysticality substats, and 🟢 cost moxie substats. Skill costs are measured separately for each skill; for example, casting BCZ: Sweat Equity 4 times doesn't increase the cost of BCZ: Sweat Bullets.

Speedrun Applicability

This is one of the best speedrunning items released in the past few years. It's a real game-changer.

In most of our recent metas, leveling has been relatively easy. Easy enough, in fact, that we have had a massive bounty of extra substats. The Model Train Set from 2022 gave so many excess substats that high-shiny runs would often get to level 14 without even trying, and (with even the slightest effort) 15 or 16 were available to the curious speedster. The Sept-Ember Censer from 2024 was a huge boon in this direction as well, with massive compounding stat gain as you stack up cold resistance. The thing with leveling, though, is that getting extra levels or extra stats has been (up to now) a pretty useless exercise. You need to hit 70 moxie and mysticality to wear the Frat Warrior Fatigues to win the war, and you need to crank your mainstat to 148 to hit level 13 and unlock the Sorceress' Tower. All stats prior to those marks are massively valuable and essential to your run, and all stats after those marks are useless.

Well. Not anymore! Now, extra stats can be flexibly used to enact major turnsavings. This is, honestly, huge. We were hitting major leveling marks without even (really) putting much effort into it. Given the general uselessness of excess stats, for the past few years, leveling has mostly been approached as a task where you greatly minimize your resources spent on it. You use whatever the most efficient source is, get to the exact mark you need, and spend the rest of the run with no effort spent on leveling or stat accumulation. The BCZ lets us derive real value from minor leveling tools, which empowers things like the Monodent of the Sea, which seemed relatively low-value prior to BCZ's release.

To start, I'm going to break down the skills. It isn't going to be super complicated, honestly; there are two killer combat skills, three killer non-combat skills, and some more mild-to-moderate use skills that have niche applications but will not require large investment.

BCZ: the Game-Changing Skills

Sweat Bullets (🟢) is the best skill, and also the most obvious one -- it's just a straight-up freekill! It will always save at least 1 turn, and could (feasibly) save a tiny bit more by using it to extend limited buffs. (For example, let's say you've stacked up enough item drop to make it to +600% and can force A-Boo Clues from A-Boo Peak ghosts. If you have 10 turns of it and needed those 10 turns to do other item drop activities, like a long Spookyraven Basement or Filthworms or grabbing your airship goodies or any number of high item drop tasks, using freekills to add 1-2 extra combats at that item drop level will guarantee 2 A-Boo clues, rather than having to roll for clues, which can sometimes cause you to spend extra turns farming for the clues.) It's an obviously powerful skill. You want to cast this as much as possible.

Refracted Gaze (🔵) is the second best skill, and a way more powerful tool than it may look on first glance. As a reminder, it removes the monster's core drop table and replaces it with the drop tables of all other monsters in the zone. So, for example: if you used it on the party skeleton in the Defiled Nook, you would create a monster with the combined drop tables of both the spiny sklelton and the toothy sklelton, which makes it a 2 evil eyes monster. This pairs well with a banish on the party skeleton, clearing the zone of bummer monsters and ensuring you get an evil eye on every turn you adventure there. Refracted Gaze is a much stronger skill than it might seem at first glance, allowing you to do fun things like:

Get 3/3 bridge parts from a single combat in the Smut Orc Logging Camp (with 900% item drop or a yellow ray)
Get both the mohawk wig and the amulet of extreme plot significance in a single yellow ray (... along with, like, 1k meat of goodies)
Roughly seven hundred billion items from a war hippy (including a Green Smoke Bomb from a non GROP, if you do a yellow ray)
Get 4 A-Boo Clues from a single ghost at A-Boo peak (or 5, if you use monodent to talk to Some Fish)
Ensure you get the harem girl outfit no matter what monster you encounter in Cobb's Knob Harem
Get every sonar-in-a-biscuit you need in a single fight (not useful yet, if you have bat wings, but will be nice once they're gone, or if you don't have it)
Get 3 rusty hedge trimmers from a non-beast fight in Twin Peak
Get the reassembled blackbird on your first turn in the Black Forest
Get both your book of matches and a writ of habeas corpus in a single fight in the Hidden Apartment, by using it on a Shaman

... and more! That's a lot of cool stuff, and those are just a few things off the top of my head. Now, all this said, it's important to remember that there are a few anti-synergies and restrictions with Refracted Gaze. To wit:

In order for Refracted Gaze to work, you need to be adventuring in an actual zone, and you need to have run through the zone's monster selection process. This means that monsters encountered via Peridot, the Crepe Paper Parachute Cape, and Mimic Eggs / Pocket Wishes are not going to do what you want.
Fundamentally, Refracted Gaze destroys the drops of the monster you have actually encountered. So there are some situations where using it does nothing, or worse than nothing... like using it on one of the Evil Eye dropping skeletons in the Nook, or using it on a filthworm. (This synergizes very well with the Monodent's Talk to Some Fish skill, as noted in the A-Boo Clue example above; you can basically always destroy those drops. Remember, though -- if you need to kill that monster for zone progress, like Blech House progression or Black Market searches, don't delete the monster with your Monodent.)
While I've mentioned Monodent's Talk to Some Fish skill a bunch while describing Refracted Gaze, it's important to note that you cannot use Refracted Gaze on the monsters you get from CLEESH. This is because you cannot refract bosses, and the newt/salamander/frog monsters are considered bosses in the game. Very tough bosses that are hard to kill. Real "big man on campus" energy from those dudes.

BCZ: the Pretty Dope Skills

In the current standard set, we're pretty short on sources for major Monster Level. This isn't great, because (realistically) you want to hit >200 ML for the Tavern quest, and you'd like to stack as much ML as humanly possible for your swarm of ghuol whelps. But BCZ is here to save the day, with the Blood Bath (🔴) skill giving you 30 turns of 5 x Level ML. One important caveat -- it does come with +5% combat frequency, which will mean that you don't necessarily want it to always be on. After all, you're trying to hit NCs for a large portion of your run. But this should effectively serve as a 50-75 ML boost that you can put on whenever you actually want it, making it as good or better than wishing for Polonoia. It also helps majorly amp up your statgain, which helps you cast things more often. It's really great!

Then we get to the food and booze. Both are pretty good!

The drink (the Pheromone Cocktail (🟢)) has mildly stronger turngen and a mildly stronger effect, as all-day banishes are generally pretty valuable. It's worth pointing out that with this drink, we now have a LOT of all-day banishes on offer, with things like Monkey Slap, Spring Kick, Lightning Bolt, and Batter Up all existing simultaneously in the 2025 standard set. But it's still nice to have, and (helpfully) this is one that you get a charge of just for drinking the drink, which means you don't have to pay attention to always having something equipped and prepped (which you do for the other three).
The food (the Spinal Tapas (🔵 )) is pretty bleh turngen for a food, but a truly wild effect. Like... +300% mysticality is SO MUCH, dude. SO MUCH! Unless you are absolutely cutting it razor close on turngen, that's a major enough stat boost that it'll almost certainly worth eating a few times a run. One obvious beneficial zone is Blech House, as this is powerful enough to let you faceroll your blech progress. The other is somewhat context dependent. If you AREN'T a mysticality class, this will let you trivialize the tower test in half your runs. If you ARE a mysticality class, this will be a monstrously huge boost to your scaling fights (i.e., Some Fish), which will help you accelerate your stat accumulation for more refracted gaze and sweat bullets casts. All of this is dope as hell!!!

BCZ: the "OK, Fine, They're Decent" skills

Short blurbs here.

Dial it up to 11 (🔵) is a nice buff. It's basically a third of the buff you get from your tapas above, with some extra spell damage and the super interesting "spell stagger" concept. This will help for trivializing combat and for towerkilling the wall of bones, especially after CCSC & the guide to burning leaves rotates out of standard.
Blood Geyser (🔴) is a nice combat survival skill. A 30-round stun is... uh, a really long time. Might be useful if you've cranked your ML up a bit too high and find yourself on dangerously low HP early in a fight. Not really turnsaving, but may be a nice boon every once in a while.
Sweat Equity (🟢) is a +40% meat drop buff. Worth, like... a quarter of a turn on Nuns? Probably less, honestly, given the bonkers high meat drop we're getting in a post prismatic beret world. Still, it's nice that you can use it for both nuns and wall of meat.
I'll be honest, I don't really think there's any in-run use for Create Blood Thinner (🔴). Using spleen on that necessarily locks you out of one of your fun Leprecondo items, so I doubt there's any world where you'd ever use it. Very funny effect, though.

BCZ: A Cost Analysis on the Stats

Now that we've broken IOTM's skills, let's try to make a few general assessments of how the basic substat costs correspond to the in-run leveling picture.

As previously noted, to access the war outfit, you need to have 70 moxie and 70 mysticality. This corresponds to 4,900 substats.
To ascend the sorceress tower, you need to be level 13, which corresponds to 21,904 total substats. (We can just call it 22,000.)

In KOL, statgain is distributed such that substats are granted in a 50%-25%-25% ratio (or 2:1:1, if that's easier to read) with half going to your mainstat and the other half being distributed among your two offstats; that is, if you gain 100 substats from one fight, you'll get 50 mainstat and 25 to each offstat. There's some variance applied, so it isn't always a straight 2:1:1, but over a large enough sample size it reduces to that ratio. Thus, most players end up with something very close to a 22,000 / 11,000 / 11,000 stat mix at level 13. That means that later in a run, you will have (at minimum) about 6000 substats to play with in your offstats while maintaining your 70 base for the war outfit.

Each point of a monster's base stats equates to 0.25 stat gain per point, while each point of monster level equates to 0.33 stat gain. Remember the 2:1:1 distribution; this means that if that monster has a base monster level of 100 (like, say, the burly sidekick), the monster will have 0.25 * 100 for 25 base substats, distributed as 12 mainstat and 6 to both offstats. And if you roll up with ~100 ML per fight, you get 0.33 * 100 for 33 extra substats, distributed such that you get 16 mainstat and 8 for both offstats per fight, summing to a total of 28 mainstat and 12 offstat per fight. The base monster level of the monsters you acquire in-run will vary widely; for instance, Cobb's Knob's outskirts goblins have base ML of 1-2, while war monsters have a base ML of 170-210. Scaling monsters you fight will be considerably stronger than any normal monsters you fight in-run, especially with the massive % boosts you get from this IOTM; you can trivially hit 300 base monster level on scaling monsters. Given the +411% myst boost from this IOTM, you can trivially hit double or triple that if you have a mysticality mainstat.

Given that, let's return to the cast costs and look at the number of turns it takes to get from 0 substats to that amount. We'll assume that you have 50 ML (10 from puffin, 10 from dreschers, 20 from ur-kels, and 10 from your monster control device) and three levels of base monster level -- 100 (for your average fight in a run), 300 (for your non-myst scaling fights), and 600 (for your myst-mainstat scaling fights). That equates to about 10 substats per average fight, 23 substats per scaling fight, and 42 substats per myst scaling fights. That gets you the following turns-to-cast:

Cast #1 costs 11 substats; 2 average fights, 1 scaling fight, 1 myst scaling fight
Cast #2 costs 23 substats; 3 average fights, 2 scaling fights, 1 myst scaling fight
Cast #3 costs 37 substats; 4 average fights, 2 scaling fights, 1 myst scaling fight
Cast #4 costs 110 substats; 11 average fights, 5 scaling fights, 3 myst scaling fights
Cast #5 costs 230 substats; 23 average fights, 11 scaling fights, 6 myst scaling fights
Cast #6 costs 370 substats; 36 average fights, 17 scaling fights, 9 myst scaling fights
Cast #7 costs 1100 substats; 107 average fights, 49 scaling fights, 27 myst scaling fights
Cast #8 costs 2300 substats; 222 average fights, 101 scaling fights, 56 myst scaling fights
Cast #9 costs 3700 substats; 357 average fights, 162 scaling fights, 89 myst scaling fights
Cast #10 costs 11000 substats; 1061 average fights, 481 scaling fights, 265 myst scaling fights

That's for offstats; for mainstat, you'll need half as many turns as were listed there (albeit after reaching 22,000 base substats). So, that's a nice start. But what of our flat stats? In addition to the stats you'll get from general combats, you can expect the following flat chunks of stats from every run:

You get anywhere from 4000-5000 mainstat and 2000-2500 offstat from each Mmm-Brr Mouthwash
You get 1500 to all stats from using an enchanted bean with the Spring Shoes at level 12. (Or, 2000 to all stats at level 14. 👀)
You get 200 to all stats from the Strange Leaflet quest

That's a lot of stats!!! So. What does it all mean, folks?

Cumulatively, the first 3 casts of any skill are a pittance; just 11 + 23 + 37 = 71 stats. Easy; you get those without even trying. So the first three casts are (effectively) free. The second 3 casts of a given skill cost 710 stats; this is a bit more, but not much more. That should be pretty easily available and reasonably easy to generate, so if the skill is worth using, you can do that without much fuss. Casts 7, 8, and 9 are where you start having to actually work for them. But you don't necessarily need to work -that- hard. After all: at full shiny, you will do about 300 "normal" combats in a run, and snag 50 or so scaling combats. If you get 3 Mmm-brr Mouthwashes, this all combines to give us:

15,200 mainstat and 8,450 offstat from your flat stat sources (Mmm-brr, bean, leaflet)
6,000 mainstat and 3,000 offstat from your "average" combats
13,800 mainstatand 6,900 (nice) offstat from your scaling fights

If you add this all up and compare it to the amount you actually -need- in the run (IE, level 13 and war outfit access; frankly, it's nice to keep your stats to 70 anyway, as any lower and you start to have some mild trouble with tower tests). This gives you an overage of roughly 12,000 excess stats in both your mainstat and your offstats in a 1-day. (And in a 2-day, you unlock 1-2 more Mmm-Brr mouthwashes, and double your free fight total, which is super helpful.)

Anyway. Point is: you have a LOT of stats to play with, probably more than you realize!

BCZ: Synthesizing the Analysis

"Wow. You've written a lot of stuff, Captain Scotch. How the hell do you use this IOTM, again?"

Well. It's pretty simple. If you assume you have 12,000 substats available per stat, you just need to assign those to the available skills. So let's get back to our 🔴🔵🟢 coding, and list the skills by tiers to fill this in. We start with 12,000 of each stat.

First, you distribute to the best skills:

You want as many Refracted Gaze (🔵) charges as possible. Getting nine charges takes roughly 8,000 total substats, leaving you 4,000 🔵
You want as many Sweat Bullet (🟢) charges as possible. Getting nine charges takes roughly 8,000 total substats, leaving you 4,000 🟢

Then, you distribute to the next-best skills:

You likely want 4-6 casts of Blood Bath (🔴); ML is important! Getting six charges takes 800 total substats, leaving you with ~11,200 🔴
You likely want 3 Spinal Tapas (🔵). Getting three takes 71 total substats, leaving you 3,929 🔵
You likely want 4-6 Pheromone Cocktail (🟢). Getting six takes 800 total substats, leaving you with 3,200 🟢

Then, you distribute to the last few:

You likely want 2-3 casts of Dial it up to 11 (🔵). Getting three takes 71 total substats, leaving you 3,858 🔵
You likely want 1-2 casts of Sweat Equity (🟢). That's basically costless.
You likely want 4-6 casts of Blood Geyser (🔴). Getting six charges takes 800 total substats, leaving you with 10,400 🔴

So. If you get nine charges of daily freekills and gazes, six charges of your ML effect, six toggling non-freekill banishes, 90 turns of +50-75 ML, meat drop, some extra mysticality, and some combat trivializers, you've spent <2000 muscle substats, 8,200 myst substats, and 8,800 moxie substats. As we've now gone over -- that's a lot of substats, but it isn't so many substats that it's impossible to imagine. Most speedsters in the top board positions are going to be able to pull it off relatively costlessly... assuming you can manage your ML properly, fight enough scaling baddies, and get max leverage out of your Mmm-Brr mouthwash.

2025 In-Standard Synergies

In the prior sections, I mentioned a few specific synergies already, like the obvious connection with the Sept-Ember Censer (2024). Two others bear slightly more mention.

The Monodent of the Sea (2025) pairs quite well with the BCZ as well; the extra substats from fighting your 13+ Some Fish a run are actually quite meaningful when it comes to generating the stats needed to summon everything up. Not only that, Some Fish helps boost the power of 4-5 important Refracted Gaze targets per run, which is actually dope as hell. The extra stats help with boosting your scaling monsters a bit as well. There's a ton of synergy here!
The 2002 Mr. Store Catalog (2023) synergizes quite nicely with Refracting Gaze. The rad skateboard's "McTwist" skill will double the new mega-large drop table, which means you can do fun things like 6/6 bridge parts in a single combat. That's basically a DIY smut orc pervert! (Gross.)

Overall Rating

The blood cubic zirconia is a tier 0 IOTM -- that's the best tier there is! In a normal speedrun, you save 8-9 turns a day in flat savings from freekills. You can get about 8-9 turns a day or more saved from clever usage of refracting gaze, as well. The ML effect helps in multiple areas of the run, likely saving you 1-2 turns per run. And you also get some bonkers buffs that could feasibly save turns, like +411% mysticality, all the spooky damage you need to ace the tower test, an extra 60% meat drop for nuns, and a huge boost of spell damage for advancing Blech House. And then on top of that you get a few turn-taking all-day banishes (AKA, the main benefit from Monodent of the Sea). This thing has it all, and you REALLY REALLY want it. I promise!

Article contributed by Captain Scotch