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Interesting Coin: Overview

August 31, 2026 // IOTM Overview

For August’s IOTM, the powers that be ended up taking inspiration from the wonders of numismatics. If you have never heard of that word before, well. Congratulations! You’ve led a great life. It’s the history of currency, and it’s the most boring thing you’ll ever hear about. The only reason I know about it is that during the COVID work-from-home period, my employer used to have us all do show-and-tell during our weekly team meetings. One of my old coworkers chose to use his slot to talk about numismatics for 30 minutes. I’ll never forget it — these were perhaps the worst 15 minutes of my life. If anyone ever wants to tell you about numismatics, you should ask them to just give you some money instead and let you study the currency from home. And then you should make a wise financial decision and put that currency in a high-interest savings account to celebrate the oddity that is the August 2026 IOTM: the Interesting Coin.

General Summary

The interesting coin is a combat item. It is also a currency, and also quest item. Upon ascending into a new run, you are sent four interesting coins. You gain more coins each day; if you have zero coins, you gain 1 coin at rollover. If you have anywhere from 1 to 20 coins, you will get 3 coins each rollover. After that, you will gain 20% interest on your coins, rounded down to the nearest whole coin. (So, for instance: at 22 coins, you gain 4. At 100 coins, you gain 20. At 500 coins, you gain 100. And so on and so forth.)

As a combat item, you can use the coin once per day to free-kill a monster. You can do this once per day; happily, this use does not actually use up the coin. So you are free to spend that coin, if you so desire.

As a currency, you can spend your coins on a large number of different options. Realistically, for the purposes of speed-running, there are three items you’ll be spending your coins on in-run.

There are also a handful of other small items that are technically affordable in a 2-day run, although they are extremely unlikely to be purchased by most speedrunners.

You also can (technically) purchase the solvent (removes all negative effects, 3 đŸȘ™), Roth IPA (a 5 adv/drunk size-1 booze, 4 đŸȘ™), soybean futures (1000 meat in a weird way, 7 đŸȘ™), and underdraft protection (+20 sleaze damage pants, 7 đŸȘ™). Please don’t, though.

Speedrun Applicability, but fake (aka non-spleeners)

As usual, let’s handle the easy stuff first. The singular free-kill per day is nice. It’s not a super high quality free-kill, given the item/meat destruction, but it’s a blisteringly simple way to save a single turn each day.

Unlike many IOTMs, you do have a decent amount of choice with how you spend your currency. There are some pretty obvious uses that will likely be the main uses for speedsters in the next few standard sets, but there’s enough flexibility that one or two path boards will probably be swung by a creative application of the lesser choices. To wit, here are a few possible uses of the road-less-traveled options in the coin shop.

Speedrun Applicability, but for real (aka The Spleeners)


 OK, done with the easy stuff. The spleeners are where the coin’s power really lies, and by far the most useful piece of this IOTM. The worst of the spleeners (toxic asset, the spooky jelly lookalike) is still pretty dang good; 1 spleen for a forced drop that doesn’t impact your Everything Looks Yellow timer is pretty good. In the event that TPTB do not reprint an ELY-powered yellow ray source, this will quite easily take the place as the 2nd best spleener; the first 3-4 yellow rays in a run are extremely valuable and important, especially in the age of refraction.

While we still have ELY yellow rays, though, the liquid asset is the true 2nd best spleener. And you know what, it’s pretty great. Monster replacers are an interesting tool. In theory, they are worse than a free-run banish; if you don’t want the monster you have encountered, it’s not necessarily a given that you want any old random other monster in the zone, especially since the replacer doesn’t actually burn delay. I actually wrote a bit about monster replacers in the long-ago analysis of the August Scepter’s waffles; that commentary still holds for the liquid asset. To add a bit more modern IOTM color, replacers synergize well with a lot of different IOTM-based combat actions. Three specific ones of note:

One other fun fact — the way that the Boss Bat works is different than virtually every other boss in the game. Instead of just forcing himself into the picture as a superlikely adventure, the Boss Bat is added as a mob in the zone somewhere from turns 4-6 in the zone. You aren’t allowed to banish the guards, but you -can- use replacers in the zone. This is -not- as good as a waffle; waffles will just refuse your replace if there aren’t any other monsters in the zone. But using one at 5 turns spent in the Boss Bat’s Chamber is a decent use of a late-run liquid asset, if you roll a bodyguard on turn 5.

Finally, let’s cover the actual best-in-class spleen item from this IOTM: the INTANGIBLE ASSET.

Leveling in KOL is often somewhat hard, and often somewhat annoying. As the speedrunning community re-learned for the Thrifty challenge path, there are a lot of substats you need to get all the way to the sorceress tower. There are major routing benefits to getting these stats as early as humanly possible, allowing you to combine quests that need similar resources and use one resource for multiple tasks. The last four “eras” of KOL standard sets have had their own specific solutions for leveling. I have invented names for them, because I want to.

With this IOTM, I can officially welcome our readers to the EMBEZZLEMENT era.

Each time you consume an intangible asset, your next fight will convert all dropped meat into substat gain — 50% to your mainstat, 25% to your offstats. For most fights, this isn’t a particularly useful or interesting boon. But for certain monsters, this actually represents a bonkers amount of statgain. One particularly obvious target for this is the Knob Goblin Embezzler, the Lucky! adventure in Cobb’s Knob Treasury. The KGE has 1000 base meat drop; this means that if you have 0% added meat drop and 0% additional mainstat per fight, you’d get 500 mainstat per fight. But we can do a hell of a lot better than that. Using only IOTMs that will be available in next year’s standard


Add it all up, and this gets you an easy 455% pre-familiar-bonus. Using an evergreen Hobo Monkey at a buffed familiar weight of 35 pounds, that adds another 150% on top. This gets you to a grand total of 605%, but there’s a few other sources you may consider. For some hassle, you can get +100% from the Cooler Yeti buff, +100% from spelling “VIEW” with your Heartstone, and 40-50% from finding a meaty Shrunken Head zombie; add those in, and you’re suddenly at 855% meat drop without using a single rare Prismatic Beret buff.

One fight with an embezzler at 605% meat drop will give you an average of 3000 mainstat per combat, and 855% gets you up to 4250 mainstat. But we can do better than that, too! The stats you gain from intangible asset fights are impacted by any percentage boosts to mainstat per combat. So, atop that, we can add +10% mainstat substats from your moonsign and +25% mainstat substats from the Laughing Stock. That translates the previous totals from 3000-4250 to 4050-5700.

Suffice to say: that’s sick! Level 11 requires 10,816 total substats, and level 12 requires 15,625. Even at this very low end, three turns of embezzler leveling gets you about halfway to level 12, and the high end gets you to level 12 and a bit of the way to 13. This ignores all IOTMs from 2024, too; next year’s standard set will be able to achieve this and more, depending on other meat drop items that are added to the standard set as time goes on.

Now, there’s a cost to this. Unlike the Censer, you are spending turns to do this leveling — 2-3 turns, to be exact. This also costs 2-3 clovers! But a precious few turns and some clovers to solve essentially all of your leveling needs is a trade-off that makes sense essentially every time. You best start believing in embezzler stories, sonnie: you’re in one.

2026 In-Standard Synergies

Normally, this is a whole unique section. But I’m pretty sure I covered every reasonable synergy in the applicability section this time. So, uh
 go read that again, I guess! (Basically, it synergizes with anything that gives additional meat drop percent and anything that resets on combat switch.)

Overall Rating

We’d rate the Interesting Coin a tier 1 IOTM. Eagle-eyed readers might recall that I rated the Sept-Ember Censer tier 1 as well. It’s a very good IOTM. The weird thing about leveling IOTMs is that the overarching turn savings you get from them are extremely daycount-driven. You save a ton of turns on D1; being able to level without any real effort is worth 10-20 turns over a full run, on the low end for full shiny folks and the high end for low shiny folks. But there are severe diminishing returns; after all, you only need to level to 13, and anything beyond that is questionably useful. Still — the drop forcer and the monster replacer are both quite valuable little tools for your D2, which helps hold up the value a bit. I still think this is short of the lofty heights you get from a Sword of S-Words or a Blood Cubic Zirconia, but it’s a critically important IOTM for the next two years, and I highly recommend grabbing one.

Really getting this in right under the wire here. I wanted to add an extra section analyzing the aftercore implications of this IOTM, but I decided it was better to get this article out before the IOTM leaves the store than wait for me to finish an extra section. Maybe I’ll make a follow-up post covering the aftercore uses of various other IOTMs as well. We’ll see!

Article contributed by Captain Scotch