Legendary Pasta Wand: Overview

May 22, 2026 // IOTM Overview

We’re returning to the halcyon days of January 2026, back when the powers that be dropped the legendary seal-clubbing club. This time, TPTB have unearthed the legendary pasta wand from their alternate KOL universe. In doing so, they’ve cast a spell that has put me into a real spirali. As I sit here beside my mid-sized sedani, penne in hand writing these words, I consider how my loathers.net audience will feel about this IOTM. Does it work in perfect armonie with the rest of the IOTMs in standard? Is this a clear passatelli for those with limited Mr. As? Will Gemelli ever return to the game? All this and more will be answered in this post, no capellini. Just listen to your radiatori hum and get ready to have a stelle time reading these words. Make no mistake: this IOTM is a bigoli deal. [gets hit by roughly seventeen hundred tomatoes] HA! Every tomato you throw makes my marinara stronger!

General Summary

The legendary pasta wand (or the LPW) is a 1-handed weapon that is auto-pulled at the start of each run. As with January’s LSCC, the LPW is styled with orange text and a black background, which is why I did that weird formatting above. (I am not going to do it this whole article, because that would be deeply annoying.) The wand comes with the following out-of-box bluetext:

The “Very Accurate!” enchantment adds a large bonus to hit chance. The “Summon Legendary Noodles” enchantment lets you summon 3 bundles of legendary noodles, which we will cover later. The pasta thrall benefit allows all pasta thralls to reach beyond the current 10-level limit to hit an 11th level and gain a new ability. We’ll also cover that later!

Speedrun Applicability

Let’s start out with the base enchantments. This should be pretty easy — prismatic damage is fine, probably useful to have in some shiny configurations, but +5 is slim enough it will rarely matter. The accuracy bonus is cute, but this guy is far inferior to the power of the Monodent of the Sea as an IOTM combat trivializer. Spell damage % and critical % are helpful in Grey Goo and generally useless everywhere else. Free cooks are somewhat nice; they save you one turn on cooking your once-a-run unstable fulminate craft, and can be a little useful for some minor additional turngen.

As with most equipment IOTMs, the bluetext enchantments are rarely where the power is. That leaves us with the two sources of real speedrun value in this IOTM: the legendary noodles and the fun pasta thrall nonsense.

LPW: “Jesse, It’s Time to Cook”

You can generate three bundles of legendary noodles a day. You’ll normally receive your noodles when you cast Pastamastery. If you lack that skill, you’ll get a new skill with the wand equipped (“Wave your Pasta Wand”) allowing you to still get your three-a-day. The noodles can be crafted with a bunch of new items that were added to the game on April 27th; they are pointedly associated with monsters within zones that you need to visit during ascensions. Sorted roughly by how many you fight in a normal run…

1. hot honey ant (20% from swarm of fire ants, the Arid, Extra Dry Desert)
2. haunted crudites (15% from party skelteon, Defiled Nook)
3. ratbatouille (10% ratbat, Batrat & Ratbat Burrow)
4. tomb aspic (15% from tomb asp, the Middle Chamber)
5. can of tuna (15% from sleeping Knob Goblin Guard, Outskirts of Cobb’s Knob)
6. later tots (15% from Procrastination Giant, Castle Ground Floor)
7. alien salad (20% from triffid, Spooky Forest)
8. sauced mutton (15% from drunk goat, the Goatlet)
9. spicy onigiri (15% from Demoninja, Dark Elbow of the Woods)

These are all pretty low drop rates, which is a little annoying. You need 400% to cap the triffid/fire ant drops, 566% to cap most of the others, and 900% to cap the ratbat drops. But you fight enough of these monsters in-run that you should probably be able to eke out three of these items per day; the fact that you have one of the 20% drops in the desert is very helpful, as you will generally want to fight more fire ant swarms than the other mobs there anyway due to ant agonists.

When you cook the special noodle food, you gain a food item that yields 5 adventures for 1 fullness. Each food item also features the game’s first food-forced choice adventure, where you get the opportunity to choose from five boons:

• -1 Fullness, +1 Spleen Toxicity (1/day)
• Your next 5 adventures will be combats, when possible
• You will not take damage for 5 fights
• Grant your familiar 50 XP
• Double the duration of effects from your next 3 foods

This is a really fun set of effects. The best one by a pretty large margin is the combat forcer — this effect has been hardcoded to force three straight Ninja Snowman Assassins in the Lair of the Ninja Snowmen. This makes a combat-forcer food worth the equivalent of two sneaks by fully eliminating the need to do the eXtreme Slope route for the Trapper quest at Level 8. This also is doubly helpful for 1-day runs, as you are now burning Shen Snake delay with the three turns needed to ascend Icy Peak. Very cool!

The 1/day “put 1 fullness in 1 spleen” effect is somewhat neat, though less interesting than the combat forcer. It’s essentially a way to spend 1 spleen for 5-6 adventures. In most standard paths, this won’t really be a great option; due to Leprecondo producing size-3 spleen items, you’re effectively trading an in-delay copy or a freerun banish for 5-6 turns generated. But if you’re at a daycount barrier this can be pretty useful. And if you use a refracted yellow ray in the Oasis for your drum machine, you also get a free mojo filter; this is a neat way to use that extra 1 spleen you may have sitting around.

Granting your familiar 50 XP is… fine. Given how high we can generally get familiar experience in standard, it’s effectively 6-7 familiar turns freed up. So it’s not meaningless, but it also isn’t an unbelievably massive amount. (It also has the chance of being mostly useless next year, once Emberiza and the Chest Mimic rotate out of standard.) The “double the duration of effects from your next 3 foods” boon is super cool in unrestricted when you have a billion cool food effects to choose from and somewhat middling-to-bad in Standard, where we don’t really have any major food options with powerful effects to route around. The “you will not take damage” boon is fun, and I wouldn’t be shocked if there’s some weird interaction it has later, but I don’t think it’s a meaningful player in speedruns without something else to layer on top of it.

LPW: Enthralled By Our Thralls

The benefits you wring out from your three legendary noodle dishes a day make up most of the value of this IOTM. But they don’t make up all of your benefits. As you may remember, January’s LSCC also had a small benefit specifically for Seal Clubbers — it increased your Fury capacity and your ability to generate Fury. While it was cool to have a class-specific boon, the fury stuff was a pretty minor benefit in the grand scheme of things, and something that barely warranted mention in the original article.

TPTB went a great deal further with this month’s pasta wand. In addition to the legendary noodles, the pasta wand both doubles the rate of advancement of your thralls (by allowing them to get 2 experience per combat instead of 1) and allows your thralls to “go up to 11.” The new level 11 benefits range from completely useless to bonkers powerful. To that end, I am going to order the thralls from best to worst in a speedrunning context, incorporating everything the thrall does (from level 1 to level 11) and discussing how I see it used in the next few years of Standard. (Please note: whenever I use “L”, I am referring to the pasta thrall’s level.)

𝟏. VERMINCELLI

• LEVEL 1: restores MP after combat (L to 2L)
• LEVEL 5: attacks/poisons foes (L/2 to L)
• LEVEL 10: gives +30 max MP
• LEVEL 11: makes the first 3 rats you fight with the Vermincelli equipped free (!!!)

This one is pretty funny. Vermincelli used to be one of the most in-demand thralls in the game upon the initial release of the thrall system in 2013. MP restoration used to be a massive problem, and getting a free spit of MP every single combat was a pretty good boost to ascenders. This didn’t last particularly long, though; as TPTB developed standard and began to construct binding IOTMs, MP regen became easier and easier, to the point where it’s no longer a real consideration outside of specifically challenging paths.

Well, guess what! It’s back, baby. You’re going to want to bring your Vermincelli up from turn zero and slam experience into its gullet as quickly as humanly possible. There aren’t as many rats in the game as you may think, but you do encounter quite a few more of them than you might expect in run, and certainly enough that you can get your three rats on D1 and D2. The batrats & ratbats you encounter in the Bat Hole count, as do drunken rats and drunken rat kings in the Tavern. Tomb rats and tomb rat kings in the Middle Chamber also count. That ends up being anywhere from 10-15 rats per ascension, which means that running as a Pastamancer inherently saves 3 turns a day… provided you can level up your Vermincelli by the end of the day. (It is worth noting that technically it is not limited to 3 free rats per day, but the probability of turning a rat free becomes vanishingly small after 3 free rats, enough so that it isn’t really worth valuing much.)

Honestly, that’s the real rub here — getting the 350 XP you need to level up your Vermincelli on the first day of your run may actually be in question if you have a short D1. In my last Adventurer Meats World run, for example, I only ended up playing 136 turns on D1; this manifested in 77 noncombat encounters and 178 combat encounters (with many of the NCs “free” NCs like the Mobius NCs, and many of the combats free via free fights and free kills). Assuming you keep your pasta wand equipped every turn, that means I would reach 350 XP with (gulp) 3 combat encounters remaining. That’s really, really tight! There’s definitely room to spend a few more turns D1 to even out the run, especially if 3 turns saved is on the line, but it points to a bit of a fundamental crunch in getting the most out of your Vermincelli.

Still — this is a huge boost for the Pastamancer class as a whole, and enough of one that I wouldn’t be shocked if the best Standard runs of the year end up being PMs.

𝟐. SPICE GHOST

• LEVEL 1: (10+L)% item drops from monsters
• LEVEL 5: sometimes drops spices in combat (10/day)
• LEVEL 10: increases duration of entangling noodles by 1 turn
• LEVEL 11: gives +2 adventures to the first item you eat with spice ghost active

The main value of the Spice Ghost is that it’s a nice bit of passive item drop bonus. This is a nice enough benefit that it’s competitive with almost every other thrall! Spice Ghost has an extra twist, too. All of the other thralls will require 350 (or 175 combats) to get to level 11. EXCEPT for Spice Ghost! This is because of 2024 Crimbo’s pumpkin spice whorl, an item that grants you the account benefit of +3 levels to your spice ghost for the rest of KOL’s existence. This means that you unlock the Level 11 benefit at 200 XP, or just 100 combats. That’s kind of nice! It also means that the item drop bonus goes up to +23% at max Spice Ghost level, which is pretty cool. +2 turns and +10-23% item drop isn’t much, but it’s a great passive bonus and a worthy always-on thrall.

𝟑. ANGEL HAIR WISP

• LEVEL 1: (5*L)% combat initiative
• LEVEL 5: prevents enemy critical hits
• LEVEL 10: blocks enemy attacks
• LEVEL 11: +20 mysticality

The new level 11 boost for the Angel Hair Wisp is pretty mid. But as a thrall, the wisp is a solid companion that serves as (effectively) an always-on combat trivializer that happens to help in three specific areas of your run — the first round through the init test in the 8-Bit Realm, generating Modern Zombies in the Defiled Alcove, and the second round through the init test + the tower (which are effectively one area). The Angel Hair Wisp is vanishingly unlikely to save you a turn, but it is likely to make your combats a bit easier and the calculations a bit simpler when it comes to a few of the run’s awkwardly placed init tests.

𝟒. LASAGMBIE

• LEVEL 1: (20+L*2)% meat drops from monsters
• LEVEL 5: attacks foes with spooky damage
• LEVEL 10: gives you +10 damage to spooky spells
• LEVEL 11: occasionally refills your mana points (up to 10k MP, 11/day)

While meat drop is an important modifier, the actual amount you get from Lasagmbie is pretty tiny. You can generally expect that 20-40% +meat is worth a fraction of a turn on nuns, especially with how high we can boost meat drop in the Prismatic Beret meta. It’s one of those “maybe use it a few turns” sort of thralls versus one where you really should grind out the level 11 max boost. The MP regen is cute, but its unpredictability makes it a somewhat “meh” option. The Lasagmbie is one that I expect you’ll use every run — after all, you don’t lose anything by switching to it — but it isn’t really changing your life.

𝟓. PENNE DREADFUL

• LEVEL 1: your base Moxie can’t be lower than your base Mysticality
• LEVEL 5: weakens enemies by L at the start of combat
• LEVEL 10: +10 damage reduction
• LEVEL 11: +20 moxie

The nice thing about 5/6 is that you don’t even need to level these thralls up to see their main effects. The main value for Penne Dreadful is that it allows you to use sneaky outfit tricks to equip the things with higher moxie requirements than your actual moxie. This is primarily valuable from D1 to D2; due to the Sweat Bullets skill that lets you turn moxie substats into free kills, you may enter D2 with lower moxie than you need to equip the war outfit. Penne Dreadful allows you to get around those equip requirements by allowing you to equip outfits with pieces that have moxie under the required minimum, so long as your mysticality is above it. Probably wouldn’t happen every run, but I could absolutely imagine a case where this allows you to shoot off 1-2 more freekills on D1. Sweet!

𝟔. UNDEAD ELBOW MACARONI

• LEVEL 1: your base Muscle can’t be lower than your base Mysticality
• LEVEL 5: gives you +2*L weapon damage
• LEVEL 10: +10% critical hit chance
• LEVEL 11: +20 muscle

Same things I wrote about Penne Dreadful apply to the Undead Elbow Macaroni. You don’t really need to care about muscle getting annihilated via BCZ to the same extent you care about Moxie, but this is most commonly helpful if you’re a little bit short on the muscle needed for the minimum requirements of surgeon gear.

𝟕. SPAGHETTI ELEMENTAL

• LEVEL 1: gain 1 to L/3 extra stats per combat
• LEVEL 5: prevents the first attack against you
• LEVEL 10: gives +5 spell damage
• LEVEL 11: +10 spooky damage

All things considered, these are pretty lame effects. The only really interesting one is preventing the first attack; it’s nice to have an extra stagger turn sometimes. This was useful for velociraptor fights during Fall of the Dinosaurs, for example. But these are largely big nothingburgers that don’t really do anything. Still, it remains superior to…

𝟖. VAMPIEROGHI

• LEVEL 1: deals damage and heals you in-combat (1-2L, every round)
• LEVEL 5: dispels a negative effect after fights
• LEVEL 10: gives you +60 max HP
• LEVEL 11: +1 spooky res

The Vampieroghi lands in the last slot, and for a well-deserved reason — this is the only thrall that can actively cost you turns. Let me explain: the Level 5 boon (dispel a negative effect after fights) activates on the “cursed” series of effects you need in order to fight the ancient protector of the hidden apartment. If you were to equip Vampieroghi and adventure in the apartment, you either need to have tavern access (so you can get the curse between-fights via Cursed Punch) or dismiss Vampieroghi entirely in order to accumulate curses at all. This has never gotten me in a run, but it is such an annoying interaction that I generally ignore this guy entirely. (Also, frankly, none of this is particularly helpful. It’s such a paucity of HP!)

2026 In-Standard Synergies

• As aforementioned, the +50 familiar XP boon synergizes well with Chest Mimic (2024) to generate extra copies. It also synergizes with the Emberiza Aureola from the Sept-Ember Censer (2024) to generate 50-turn duration yellow rays. I don’t really think the Aureola is a major consideration in-run, but extra experience for your mimic is always a bit helpful.
• You could argue that there is (mild) anti-synergy between the pasta wand and the McHugeLarge Ski Set (2025). As previously discussed, this is a better way to tackle the quest than the eXtreme Slope route, so that piece of the ski set’s value wanes a bit. That said, in paths without consumption (like Adventurer Meats World) you still need the ski set, so… very mild anti-synergy.
• This isn’t an IOTM, but it bears mention. You may want to consider pulling the moss medal if you are aiming to level your thralls more quickly. It gives you 100 turns of an effect that gives +1 thrall experience, which ensures you can level your Vermincelli to 11 with time to spare on D1. It’s not necessarily an amazing pull, as the actual effects on the equipment are pretty “meh”, but the medal at least enters the realm of “I dunno, maybe” rather than “absolute nonsense” as a prospective pull.
• This isn’t an IOTM either, but I also want to mention it, and it’s my blog post. I do really appreciate that this IOTM has added a whole host of new pulls to softcore runs. I don’t think the legendary noodle food is so good that it’s a can’t-miss pull, but it’s powerful enough to be worth consideration. And it’s doubly effective for lower-shiny individuals who don’t have easy solves for the lobsterfrogmen at Sonofa Beach; raw-dogging LFMs can cost anywhere from 20-30 turns, so being able to pull the noodle food is a monstrously powerful pull for folks in that situation. (And could be useful when Peridot leaves standard, also!)

Overall Rating

We’d rate the legendary pasta wand a tier 3 IOTM. It’s a little hard to parse out. You save anywhere from 4-5 turns each run with one use of the combat forcer, 1 turn with the free cooks, and perhaps 1 turn per day of your other legendary noodle selections. You also get… eh… 3-4 turns of extra turngen? Not bad, and averages out to a 3-4 turn/day savings for this IOTM, which is just barely outside our definition for a tier 2 IOTM (4-7 turns saved per day). However, if you’re a pastamancer, you can add 3 whole turns to that for a 6-7 turns saved per day, well within the tier 2 boundary. Given this, I’m going to split the difference; this is a low-ish tier 2 IOTM. It’s pretty good, it’ll speed up your run, and most top runs will leverage it. It’s enough power that I can easily imagine PM becoming the class du jour over SC for the next few years. Free rats are dope! But I could also imagine another legendary item pushing the envelope such that another class leapfrogs either of them.

Article contributed by Captain Scotch