Shrunken Head: Overview

2025-11-30 // IOTM Overview

This month, we have a very simple, workmanlike IOTM. There's nothing remotely complicated about -this- guy! Just a fun little shrunken head with good enchantments and absolutely no confusing skills that are difficult to explain. It's just that good old fashioned shrunken head you know and love. ... Wait. Wait. Reanimate your foes? I... oh no. Oh no.

General Summary

The shrunken head is an offhand. It features the following enchantments:

• Damage Reduction: 5 x L
• All Attributes +3 x L
• Regenerate 13-15 MP per adventure
• Reanimate your foes

The DR/Attribute boosts scale to your level. (Seem to be uncapped, not that those are wild enchantments to have uncapped.) As I jokingly alluded to with maximum trepidation in the introduction, the real power of the IOTM isn't in the item itself, it's in the reanimation of your foes. Having the head equipped gives you access to the skill "prepare to reanimate your foe."

If you win a fight after having cast the skill, you throw the shrunken head at your dead opponent, causing the head to slurp off the opponent's head and reanimate them as a zombie pal. (Gross.) The zombie pal is a buddy that follows you around into fights, somewhat akin to a Pasta Thrall or a Vykea companion, with passive in-fight and post-fight abilities.

The big difference is that your zombie pal has HP; specifically, 5 times the maximum HP of the monster at the start of the fight. Your zombie pal is able to absorb one hit per combat, absorbing the damage done to you in the fight; once the zombie's HP reaches zero, it is destroyed, and you are given a chance to get items from the drop table of the monster you zombified.

In addition to the get-some-items bonus, you also get abilities from the monsters in question. The abilities span from damages of any element to HP/MP regen, added meat drop %, and added item drop %.

Speedrun Applicability

This IOTM exists in one of the most frustrating spots for an IOTM to exist in: it's sort of a fiddly mess, and it's not game-changingly powerful... but it's powerful enough to really help you out if you use it correctly. Enough so that top speedrunners will likely need to take a deep sigh, rosin up our bows, and get ready to fiddle.

First, we'll take on the passive zombie benefits. Largely, most speedsters don't need the extra in-combat damage that the zombies can provide. There are often complicated multiple-round chains of actions that need to be undertaken to get the most value out of a combat -- things like "douse foe until you get the pickpocket", "do a swoop and a McHugeLarge slash and some darts and a yellow ray", throw flyers, etc. The more damage your zombie does, the fewer rounds of combat you'll have to execute all of those varied things, and the more likely you have to hold on some of your actions. Not ideal! The HP/MP regen is kind of nice for low shiny and certainly not -harmful- for high shiny, but also not particularly useful.

Enchantment-wise, the big boosters are meat drop and item drop. The way that zombie enchantments work is that each zombie gets 100 points to assign across 2-4 attributes. For attack-based skills, the # of points corresponds to the % of that attack happening in each round. For HP/MP, it seems to influence the amount of HP/MP regen you get. And for meat/items, it represents the % that your zombie is boosting your item and meat drop at the end of each fight. For monsters who happen to only generate meat/item as their two zombie enchantments, that's actually quite a nice little boon -- some monsters end up with just meat + item drop enchantments, which means you get around 40-60% boosts while that monster is your zombie companion. For instance, in unrestricted, a Witchess Rook gives you 58% meat drop and 42% HP regen; not as good as an item/meat combo, but still quite nice.

The simplest and least-painful use of the IOTM likely stops around there. Unfortunately, the zombie effects are seeded by path, which means that early in each path we'll need to solve out which are the best item/meat% type monsters for this sort of simple usage. If you can find one that's reasonably accessible, such as the beefy bodyguard bat in plain old no-frills Unrestricted, you can just grab that and try to boost your stats such that you never ever get hit, ensuring you roll the rest of the run with +26% items and +38% meat (... and some sleaze damage, which isn't ideal). But that kind of usage is at least minimally feasible, and a full-shiny user can probably keep ML low enough with all our leveling tools that they can keep a zombie bodyguard bat alive until you need to do war flyers. At that point, the auto-hit from flyers will kill your bodyguard bat and you'll want to grab something else. But, again -- in its simplest form, you can just sort of "find monsters with good item/meat splits, zombify them, accept the small boost."

Unfortunately, the fact that zombies give you another roll at the monster's drop table is quite a big deal, and much more important than an annoying pittance of +item or +meat. The roll happens at your current drop rate at the time of the zombie's death, and does count your +item% bonuses... although, annoyingly, it does not count your familiar bonus. This also creates the real area of frustrating fiddle -- if you want to use the head for constant item drop help, you kind of want your zombie version of the monster to die quickly. But the HP is based on 5 times the HP of the monster when you first encounter it. This means that you want your ML (and thus the monster's HP) to be low when you are reanimating the target monster... but you also want your ML to be high once you have that monster zombified, because you want your opposing monsters to do as much damage as possible in an effort to eat through your zombie's HP and get the items they've stored within.

Therein lies the major fiddle: constantly re-optimizing your character's clothing, buffs, and modifiers on a few-turn by few-turn basis to try and get the most out of your zombies. It's a really huge pain in the ass! That said, there is something of a middle ground here: pick a few choice item targets, try to explicitly target those homies, and accept a lower-than-expected yield by not hyperactively optimizing to a constant churn of new zombies to play with. My guess is that most runners will take that concept and run with it, and zombification becomes more of a skill that's honed over many runs with the head rather than a tool that everyone's great at immediately.

(Oh, also. An additional level of frustrating fiddle: a fairy-type familiar's item drop % doesn't help. So when figuring out your starting drop rate, make sure you aren't including that of your familiar, or else you might get an annoying surprise when you miss the drop you thought you'd get!)

Best Zombification Targets

Having said all that, let's go over a handful of good ascension targets for the item-stealing flavor of zombification. I will rate these by zombie emojis; 🧟🧟🧟 is a very good target, 🧟🧟 is a decent-enough target, and 🧟 is a marginal but useful target. This is not comprehensive, but should cover most of the big players.

• Bowling balls from pygmy bowlers (🧟🧟🧟) are a great target; each ball you get passively represents 1 turn saved from having to dip in for more balls. It works out nicely; if you banish the orderly and refract one ball on them, then fight two bowlers with a drop + head, you'll finish up all your balls in three turns (with one being a banish-turn) and save two turns with the shrunken head. Also, another 40% drop, so very easy to cap. (Note that you can also use swoops here, though there are more items in the drop table which makes swoop -feel- worse when you miss the ball.)
• Mountain Ore from the mountain man (🧟🧟🧟) is a great target; you save one copy and one turn if you yellow ray one mountain man and use your miniature head to grab the rest. Helpfully, the ores are at a 40% drop rate, so you only need to be rolling in with 150% item to cap the +1 you need (provided you're yellow raying the 10% drop chance ore on the encountered mountain man).
• Goat Cheese from the dairy goat (🧟🧟) is a pretty good target. Probably saves a turn; next year, if you manage to swoop one cheese, naturally drop one, and use a zombified goat for your last one you can achieve full cheese in one single peridot turn. The issue there is swooping, since you only have a 2/3 chance of hitting the goat cheese from the swoop. Still, not a bad use. (Also, worth noting that if you have Mayam, this does not save a turn; you'll get 2 cheese from your two mayam resets in a 1-day and 3 cheese from Mayam in a 2-day. Even in that 1-day situation, getting 2 cheese from 1 goat doesn't really do anything of use for you, since you only need 1 cheese.)
• Evil eyes from spiny/toothy skleltons (🧟🧟) are a pretty good target, as each eye represents 3 of your 37 required evil in the Nook; that's 0.75 of a turn, comparing that to spending a turn with +400% item drop in the Nook. Pretty good, and probably worth the effort, especially as it is (reasonably) easy to hit the Nook over and over again for re-zombification, and this lets you save a few refracts for other (better) purposes.
• Stone wool from the baa-relief sheep (🧟🧟) is a pretty good target. This one doesn't save a turn, strictly, but it -does- save a clover; instead of spending a clover for baa'baa you can just use peridot to summon up a baa-relief sheep and do one swoop + one zombification to get the three wool you need. Clovers aren't worth a turn on their own, but this is so close to free that I think you probably take this pretty often and accept the clovers as a nice extra resource for things like bridge parts.
• Rusty hedge trimmers from topiaries on Twin Peak (🧟🧟) are a pretty good target. Technically speaking, they probably save you a tiny bit more than evil eyes on average (since you always have a 20-30% chance of just rolling the NC when you enter the zone to try and get a hedge trimmer). The reason they aren't in the great target category is that you need 566% item drop to guarantee the drop, and if you have -that- much item drop, you probably don't want to go through the hassle of summoning/killing your zombie. Also, frankly, it's a high enough necessary drop % that you may earnestly prefer to have +50% items on your active zombie.
• Smut orc bridge parts from the smut orcs (🧟) are... well, fine. The more I think about it, the more marginal I think it is here; assuming you are maxing your cold damage, one turn spent in the logging camp is worth 25% of the 7/7 bridge parts you get from the NC, in addition to the 1.25 or so expected bridge parts from a combat. So a normal combat is worth (effectively) 1.25 + 0.25 * 14 = 4.75 expected bridge parts, and a zombie is worth just the 1.25, making it worth about 0.25 of a turn spent in the logging camp. Again -- not bad! But not great. My guess is some bridge plans will use it just for a few extras, but I don't anticipate this being a big deal for most people.
• Soft green echo eyedrop antidotes from the airship (🧟) are... fine. There are some uses for SGEEAs in active effect management. It might help you shave off a ML effect or something. This one is exceedingly marginal, certainly not a turn in savings. You also could probably use this to try and get your amulet of extreme plot significance or mohawk wig, but (realistically) this is a far worse way to get those things versus a refracted yellow ray.

Also, one final note -- the zombified monster's drop table can drop conditional items (like evil eyes) but cannot drop no-pickpocket items (like A-Boo clues, tomb ratchets, and barrels of gunpowder). Technically, this would mean you -should- be able to get ratchets, since they are only no-pickpocket on base tomb rats and are pickpocket-able on tomb rat kings... but you also cannot cast zombification on bosses, like the tomb rat king or the smut orc pervert. Plan accordingly!

2025 In-Standard Synergies

• The shrunken head has decent synergy with the Monodent of the Sea (2025). Surprisingly so, in fact. Being able to use the monodent to create arbitrarily large scaling monsters that you can fight with ML should help ascenders who want to try and get monsters to beat up their shrunken head to get into the items within. Also, because your fight changes, you can technically get two hits on your zombie in one combat; let the first monster hit you, then let the fish hit you. Nice!
• Similarly, the Blood Cubic Zirconia (2025) has a small bit of synergy by making monsters more angry at you with the big old 5 x Level buff to your monster level.
• The Peridot of Peril (2025) has synergy by allowing you to summon up specific monsters, which lets you target a specific monster's inherent effects for the shrunken head buff. Same goes for Chest Mimic (2024), although I very much doubt you're ever mimic-summoning a monster solely for shrunken head buffs.
• CyberRealm has a somewhat interesting synergy with the shrunken head. The monsters in the realm do %HP damage, and hit very hard. So you can (reasonably often) use a CyberRealm fight to kill a zombie you want dead.

Overall Rating

The shrunken head is a tier 3 IOTM. It's a pretty frustrating little tool, and there's a pretty high range of outcomes for usage. If you look at this and (healthily) decide that you aren't going to stab yourself in the face, this guy is probably not going to do more than 1-2 turns of value over a whole run. If you put maximal effort into it, you will irreparably destroy your psyche, but in exchange may be able to eke out something like 3 turns from the cyrpt, 2 turns from the mountain, 2 turns from bowlers, 1 turn from smut orcs, and 1 turn from a trimmer. That's 9 turns over a whole run, which would be a T1 for a 1-day run and T2 for a 2-day run. Realistically, though? I don't think even the nuttiest speedsters are going to manifest that combined value, because it's just too much of a pain in the ass to inspire monsters to kill your stupid zombies. So I'll make a fairway assumption that most users are going to see 4-5 turns of value over a whole run and slot it into tier 3. What a goddamn hassle, though. Yeesh.

Wanted to also add a big old warning to this post. All of this assumes that the shrunken head doesn't actually make you lose a turn. And there's one very obvious annoying place that it can get you. If the shrunken head is set to a mode that damages your enemy, you cannot towerkill the Wall of Bones. And that sucks! So, uh. Probably try to ensure you have no accompanying zombies when you get to the sorceress tower. Maybe. Yeah.