Draft:Shiren 5 Vita:Identifying Items

Introduction

Like many roguelikes, going all the way back to Rogue itself, Shiren 5 has the concept of imperfect information about items. Depending on the situation, the player will sometimes know everything, something, or virtually nothing about items they find. Being able to efficiently identify items is a key skill in Shiren 5.

Items in Shiren 5 have two levels of identification: the item's type can be identified or not, and independently, its modifiers can also be identified or not. (An item's category is always known and can even be determined at a distance via its icon. More info about category, type, instances, and modifiers can be found on the Items page.) You can often identify both the type and modifiers at once, but it's also possible to identify one without the other. It's also possible for you to determine one or both of these things about an item without causing them to be identified within the game state. This guide covers fully identifying items, both their types and their modifiers, and revealing this information within the game state.

Part one of this guide is general tips, tricks, and techniques for identifying items. Part two is a set of step-by-step guides for each category of item. The step-by-step guides are as mechanical and repeatable as possible, but don't skip directly do them, as they won't be fully understandable without knowing the techniques first.

Caveat: This guide ignores the existence of Mimic-style monsters (called N'duba in Shiren 5). Suffice it to say it's possible that an "item" may in fact be a Mimic monster. This is definitely possible for items that appear fully unidentified and for items that appear partially identified, but it may also be possible for items that appear fully identified. There is one known way that Mimics can interfere with identification, which is that they can't be mixed into runes and this could throw you off if they're pretending to be an item that normally could be mixed into a rune. It's also possible they interfere with identification in other ways that haven't yet been understood or documented.

Background Information aka Spoilers

If you want to identify items in your game, it helps enormously to spoil yourself rotten on the full extent of what items exist in the game. You can read all about all the items in Shiren 5 on the Items page. See the Categories and Checklists sections in particular. (A checklist, printed or otherwise, can be very helpful to keep track of which items you've identified in your current run.) If you don't want to be spoiled, be advised that both the Items pages and this page contain MASSIVE SPOILERS about what items exist in the game.

Techniques

Here are all the known techniques for identifying items, roughly arranged from simplest to most complex.

Check your Item Book for unexpected information: Different dungeons have different sets of pre-identified items. The two most common types of dungeons are dungeons where everything is pre-identified except for equipment (swords, shields, and bracelets), and, dungeons where virtually nothing is pre-identified. The "virtually" caveat is important, as there are some item types (but not their modifiers) that appear to be identified in every location. So if you're wondering if a given unidentified item might be X, look in your Item Book while playing the game (not at the top menu) to see if X is identified at that moment, and if so, your unidentified item in hand is not X. The set may not be the same for every location, but a common set of pre-identified items seems to be: Weeds, Escape Scroll, Tag Scroll, Gambler's Scroll, Blank Scroll, Recommendation Letter, Commendation Letter, Wet Scroll, Piece of Paper, Water Pot, and Heavenly Pot. [TODO: confirm this set in multiple dungeons.] Working theory is that these are either "non-magic" items (things that work exactly as they would in real life w/o magic such as Weeds, Tag Scroll, Water Pot, etc.) or items that the designers felt were too unfair not to be pre-identified (e.g. it would royally suck if you randomly read an Escape Scroll deep in a successful run with no way to abort out of your escape).

Use the item: Most items can be fully identified within your game state if you're willing to use them unidentified. A notable exception is bracelets. Needless to say, it isn't necessarily safe or a great idea to use an unidentified item, but it may sometimes be your best option. Sometimes, you'll try to use a consumable item such as a grass or scroll only to find it's sealed, which identifies the modifier status (you'll see a little X on the icon for "sealed") without identifying the type. Likewise, equipping an unidentified bracelet reveals its modifier status but not its type. Much more detail about identifying items by using them can be found in the category-specific step-by-step guides below.

Use an Identify Scroll: This is the simplest way to identify things and one the player will quickly learn if they don't know it already, but it's also not a very good technique, as there are more efficient ways to use Identify Scrolls if you can. If you must use an Identify Scroll, consider trying to bless it first so you will still have it after using it. Sometimes (10% of the time? 25% of the time?), reading an Identify Scroll will give you a "lucky day" outcome and identify all items in your main inventory. For this reason, it's best to pack your main inventory with anything that isn't fully identified (including items you don't own) before reading an Identify Scroll, and maybe even squeeze in one more thing to identify by targeting an unidentified item at your feet as well. As a habit, I only put identified items into Preservation Pots or other fully identified pots, so I'm always ready to take advantage of a "lucky day" Identify Scroll outcome without rearranging my inventory. Bracelets are often the hardest items to identify, with pots being second hardest, so if you must read an Identify Scroll directly, target an unidentified bracelet or pot if you can.

Use a New Item Identify Scroll: I don't use this technique myself but it could theoretically be quite useful. If you've crafted a new item scroll with Identify on it (e.g. Identify was the base scroll, or any other item-targeting scroll was the base scroll and you got lucky to add Identify onto the new item scroll), you may be able to find these new items in a dungeon that doesn't let you take items in, which could be very useful. In practice, the dungeons where you are most in need of identification help tend to be dungeons that don't allow new items, and even if they did, it would be much better to get other new items rather than a new item Identify Scroll, as it could normally only be used once. (A new item Identify Bracelet, OTOH, would be fantastic.)

Insert the item into an Identify Pot: There is no known better way to use an Identify Pot than simply to put unidentified items into it. You can do this for anything except pots, as pots can't be put into pots in Shiren 5. Given that bracelets tend to be the hardest things to fully identify, try to reserve Identify Pot spaces for bracelets. But Identify Pots aren't super rare, so if there aren't many safe grasses and scrolls left unidentified, it's not such a bad thing to put them into Identify Pots just to be sure they aren't horribly dangerous items. I will sometimes put swords and shields into Identify Pots too when it's deep in a dungeon run and most items are already identified, and I want to know if the sword/shield is worth carrying around to hopefully synthesize onto my main equipment, and I don't have the luxury of waiting to find a Strip Trap. It's usually not worth it to put talismans or staves into an Identify Pot. Talismans are trivial to identify via use, plus you know exactly how many uses you have. Staves are mostly easy to identify by use but identifying them by use won't reveal how many charges they have left. It's usually not critical to fully identify the number of charges in a staff because you can usually guess, or play conservatively (e.g., only use them in a pinch when you know they have at least one more charge, or only use them when they might be dry when you can afford for them to fail). Plus, there are other ways to identify the number of charges in a staff. So, in rough priority order, here's what to use Identify Pot spaces on: bracelets first, then grasses and scrolls, then most everything else that might need to be identified, then staves, then talismans last (or really never). (Note: it's not possible to create new item pots within the game, so there is no "Use a New Item Identify Pot" technique.)

Use an Identify Bracelet: Identify Bracelets are very rare but very helpful. If you plan to play a dungeon that lets you take items in, by all means, take in an Identify Bracelet or better yet craft your own new item bracelet with Identify on it and take that in instead. If you are in a dungeon that doesn't let you take items in, and you find an Identify Bracelet e.g. in a shop, you should strongly consider buying or stealing it, as it can radically improve your chances of winning the run. (If you're on a losing trajectory in your current run, but you have a risky shot at stealing one of these, it might be worth the risk.) In any case, if you have one of these bracelets, equip it, then pick up every other item you see to fully identify those other items. If you're carrying something unidentified, you'll need to drop it and pick it back up again. And you can do this for items you don't own in a shop, too. (Ironically, it's possible to figure out that an unidentified bracelet is Identify, and use it to identify every other item, but the bracelet itself will still not be identified in your game state.)

Use a New Item Identify Bracelet: If you do any crafting at all, you should absolutely craft at least one new item bracelet with Identify on it. Unless you're deliberately trying to make the game harder, you should always take a new item bracelet with Identify on it everywhere that lets you take items.

Use a Special Onigiri / gain Knowledgeable Status: Eating a Special Onigiri may give you "Knowledgeable" status for the remainder of the floor. I'm not aware of any other ways to gain this status. Each subsequent Special Onigiri gives you a new helpful reward that you haven't already gotten on that floor, so you can increase your chances of gaining "Knowledgeable" by saving up several Special Onigiri and eating them one at a time until you hopefully gain this state. (Gorger's Manor specializes in Special Onigiri so this is particularly applicable in that dungeon. That location page also has loads of details on how Special Onigiri work.) In any case, if you're Knowledgeable until you leave the floor, by all means drop anything unidentified and pick it back up again to fully identify it. Pick up everything you find or see in shops that you might possible want to fully identify it, too. If you've been saving a Monster House Scroll for a special occasion, this may be the right time to use it, esp. if the floor has a shop too so you can sell everything you don't need out of the looted monster house.

Use equipment resonance: Certain pairs of items "resonate" when equipped together. This gives via an audiovisual flourish when the combo first activates, and gives the player a bonus of some sort. This is not a very practical way to try to identify items, as you need the necessary equipment to check for resonances, but it can help narrow things down if you have the opportunity. Specifically, there are 6 bracelets which can be identified via resonance, though 2 of these bracelets can be identified more easily by just noticing their innate effects. The 4 remaining resonances that help identify bracelets are Nap Rattle + Alert Bracelet, Baffle Axe + Anti-Cnf. Bracelet, Violent Blade + Mojo Bracelet, and True Knife + Anti-Parry Brce.. So, if you happen to have any of these 4 swords and any unknown bracelets, you can try equipping them together to either identify the bracelet via resonance or at least rule out one possibility. (Needless to say, beware of curses on unknown equipment.) One practical trick related to this might be to deprioritize mixing these swords into your main sword to check for future bracelets. For example, an Alert Bracelet is one of the better common bracelets, so it might be worth keeping a Nap Rattle on the side until you find an Alert Bracelet, and only then mix the Nap Rattle into your main sword.

Win and/or escape the dungeon: Winning the game or otherwise escaping the dungeon fully identifies everything in your inventory, including items in pots. (This is true for almost every dungeon, though Underground Manor doesn't allow you to take all items out on victory.) Usually you want to identify the item so you can use it to help you win the run, but this technique can be useful if there are items you need outside the dungeon, or that you need to complete your Item Book and you're afraid you won't be able to survive long enough to identify them in the dungeon. For example, Fever Pots are particularly useful outside of dungeons. If you've found a 3-space pot late in a difficult dungeon (Fever Pots always have 3 spots by default), and you've ruled out most other pots, and you have no way to identify it, you might just carry it out of the dungeon and hope it's a Fever Pot. Or, maybe you've identified all but a few very dangerous grasses, and you really want a specific grass to fill out your Item Book, but it's too dangerous to try to eat it unidentified, so you take it out with you to see what it is at home.

Do a price check at a store: Refer to the Items page for background info on how prices work in Shiren 5. You can see the buy price of every item for sale, and you can find the sell price of any item you own by starting to sell it (by itself) to the shopkeeper then aborting out, and once you know either the buy or sell price, you can calculate the other by multiplying or dividing by 35%. Also note that there are "price tiers" within each item category. That is, very few items have unique base prices within their categories, most items are in small groups or subsets of items within the category that all have the same base prices. Presumably this is by design so that you can't use a price check to 100% identify every item every time. Even so, price checks radically narrow down the possible items that a given unidentified item might be. In some cases, you can prove that a given unidentified item must be X because you've already identified every other item except X in that price tier. More commonly, you can considerably narrow down the possibilities then make an educated guess based on previous game experience. For instance, if you see an unidentified (and empty) 5-space pot for sale for 7,500 in a shop on an early floor, odds are very good it is a Synthesis Pot, not a Modder's Pot, as the latter is usually rarer and usually not found on early floors in most dungeons. Also, because the price tiers are far enough apart, you can easily use a price check to determine if an item is blessed or cursed/sealed, and if you're willing to do the math, you can even calculate how many charges are left in every staff you own (even if you can't determine precisely which type of staff it is). Note that doing a price check doesn't identify the item in your game state, but you can name the item using the Item Book name quickly, and the game keeps track of which Item Book names you've already used, which is almost as good. If you can't narrow down the list precisely, at least name the item something like "5K-1", meaning, the 1st item you've found with a buy price of 5000, to help you keep track of what you learned from the price check. (You can try to get fancier to name something to remind you of the item's price tier + modifier status + charges remaining, for example, but keep in mind that names are per type, not per instance, so any future items you find of the same type would also have that more specific name.) Given this technique, you should name *every single unidentified item*, both yours and the shopkeepers, before you leave the shop. It can be cumbersome, but doing this maximizes your chances to win the run. Here are some more specific tips related to this technique:

• If you're going to use the next technique (giving an identified Identify Scroll to the shopkeeper), obviously you don't need to bother naming anything that the shopkeeper will own when you give him the scroll.
• For swords and shields, the types are always known, so you can never name them. But you can use a price check to see if the item has a curse or seal. If so, just sell it without bothering to identify it further (unless you need it for a rune). If not, equip it once to fully identify it.
• Occasionally you can figure out what an item is from a price check (or what it's very likely to be), and rather than naming it, if it's something you don't mind consuming immediately, it's much faster to just consume it and identify it that way. (Obviously this only works for items that become identified upon consumption, such as grasses and scrolls. And, if you're not 100% certain what the item is, it can be fatal to consume it in a shop. E.g. eating a Warp Grass with an unpaid debt in a shop can be fatal, reading a Vacuum Slash Scroll will aggro the shopkeeper and likely be fatal, etc..)

• Sometimes a price check won't be enough to identify the item, but will be enough to let you know you shouldn't bother to identify it further. E.g. most bracelets with a base buy price of 2,000 aren't that great. Maybe Strength is the only one to bother with? It's a judgment call of course. But if the only 2,000 bracelet you want is Strength, you can test to see if it's a Strength Bracelet, and if not, name it something like "!Strength-1" and just sell it. There are many possible scenarios like this (e.g. sell any bracelet less then 5,000 when you've already found Monster Detector?), though of course they're all judgement calls. Even if you've decided not to identify it further, make sure to name it appropriately to help you if you see that type again.
• For bracelets in particular, you might find out that they are either cursed or sealed. In this case, they're *probably* cursed (curses seam more common than seals on equipment), and if it is cursed, it's *probably* not a great item. (Some bad bracelets such as Nonary seem to be cursed 100% of the time.) For example, let's say you've figured out that a bracelet is in the 5,000 tier but it's cursed or sealed. Odds are it's Monsterphobic or Itemphobic and cursed. Should you carry it around for a long time trying to find a way to remove the curse or seal and hope it's a better bracelet, or just sell it? Tough call. And of course if you find out it's not cursed or sealed, you should put it on briefly to identify the modifier status even if you can't identify the type right away. (But beware of putting on unknown bracelets while inside shops, as you might "blink" (warp away) with an unpaid debt, or you might explode destroying valuable merchandise. [TODO: someday try killing the shopkeeper with an Explosion Bracelet and seeing if you can safely loot his store that way.]
• There are a handful of unique prices worth memorizing. E.g. the only scroll with a base buy price of 200 is the Identify Scroll. Look through the category-specific guides below for more tips like this.
• Sometimes, items in the same price tier are "good" and "evil" twins of one another, so to speak. For example, Synthesis Pot and Modder's Pot behave almost identically and are in the same price tier, but the latter is basically a trap to lock your items away and is much harder to use safely. Lucky Pot and Unlucky Pot. Upgrade Pot and Degrade Pot. Revival Grass and Gut Grass. Undo Grass and Repeat Grass. There are other such pairs as well. Likewise, most scrolls with an item target are in the same price tier, but you wouldn't want to mix up a Plating Scroll with an Onigiri Scroll. This was presumably a deliberate game design choice to cut down on the power of price checking (because frankly, price checks are very powerful even with these "trap / evil" items). This isn't guaranteed of course, but in most dungeons, you're more likely to find the "good" twin first. (E.g. in almost every dungeon, if you find a 5-space pot that merges items on an early floor, it's extremely likely to be Synthesis not Modder's.)

Give an Identify Scroll to a shopkeeper: IMO this is the single best way to identify things in the game, and a much better use of an Identify Scroll than reading it yourself. If you give an Identify Scroll to a shopkeeper, he will fully identify all items he owns, 100% of the time. Better still, if the Identify Scroll happened to be blessed, he'll even return it to you unblessed! I recommend selling every fully unidentified item to the shopkeeper first, and maybe every partially unidentified item too. (That is, it's probably worth it to sell him both that fully unidentified pot *and* the Pinning Staff that is partially identified but you don't know how many charges it has left.) Make sure he owns everything you want identified then give him the scroll. If you plan to loot the entire floor before moving on, loot it now before using this technique, to make sure the shopkeeper owns everything unidentified you can get your hands on. It may seem like a waste, but you can identify a huge number of items all at once this way, and most of the unidentified items you were carrying around weren't really as necessary as you thought they were anyway, so you can buy back a few if you really need them. Of course, this trick is especially useful if you're skilled at stealing from shops and if it's a good floor layout conducive to theft. A few exceptions to this plan: you can identify swords and shields "enough" with just a price check, so there's no need to sell them to the shopkeeper just to fully identify them. Also if you have multiple copies of the same unidentified item, you probably only need to sell him one copy. E.g. if you have two identical pots, which have the same price check but are otherwise unidentified, you only need to sell him one for him to identify. Your other identical pot will have it's type identified but not it's modifier, however, since they had the same price check they have the same modifier status too. If the one he owns is sealed, you can safely try inserting something into your pot and, sure enough, it will reveal itself as being sealed too. Likewise with staves. You can choose to sell him only one copy first before doing the mass identification, but then you won't know how many charges are on the staves you didn't sell him. (If you really want to, you can then figure out how many charges it has left via a price check.) If you use this tricks multiple times in a single run, you'll start to run very low on unidentified types of items, and price checks will be much more likely to 100% identify remaining items.

Use traps: Some traps can help you identify items. The most common trick in this category is to leverage the Strip Trap. If you can safely do so, save equipment without equipping it until you find a Strip Trap, then try equipping everything you have that isn't identified yet. This will fully identify swords and shields and partially identify bracelets (it will show you if they are blessed, cursed, or sealed). If anything is cursed, you can use the Strip Trap to remove it. It's a good habit to never leave a Strip Trap until all your equipment is as identified as you can make it. But there are other tricks in this category too. A Trip Trap can be used to identify a Balance Staff. If you find a Trip Trap, put down all your pots for safekeeping then deliberately trigger the Trip Trap. If you have a Balance Staff (or Nagging Staff!) in your inventory, you'll figure it out. You can also use Spin Traps and Sleep Traps to test if a bracelet is Anti-Cnf. Bracelet or Alert Bracelet respectively. (Theoretically, you could also try to identify an Anti-Curse Bracelet via a Curse Trap, but this is particularly hazardous as you might end up cursing or sealing something you didn't want to, or you might get caught by a monster when all your items are on the ground.) There may be other less common tricks in this category as well. Don't forget, you can find and/or create more traps via Perception Grass, Trap Scroll, Trap Bracelet, Multiplication Trap, or by leading Mecharoid monsters around without killing them. (There are also other ways to turn traps into useful opportunities that having nothing to do with identifying items, like throwing rocks on arrow traps to generate arrows -- see the Traps page for details.)

Use Synthesis Pots and Mixer monsters: You can identify some items by trying to use them in synthesis or mixer recipes. Basically, assume/hope the item is what you want it to be and try using it in a synthesis or mixer recipe. If the recipe succeeds, it will be identified in your game state, and if it fails, well, at least you've ruled out one thing the item might have been. There are a few different forms of this technique:

• Swords and shields are always identified in terms of their type, but their modifier status (blessed/cursed/sealed/none) and upgrade value are not identified by default. (To the best of my knowledge, it is impossible to find swords and shields with runes pre-placed on them.) Maybe you want a sword or shield for your base equipment, or maybe you just want it for it's rune and/or it's upgrade points, but it's not identified yet, there's no Strip Trap handy, and it's dangerous to put it on to identify it that way. In this case, it may be beneficial to just synthesize or mix it anyway. The type is known so you know if it will make a good rune or not. The upgrade points will be between -1 and +3, and empirically speaking, you're much more likely to gain or at least stay neutral than you are to lose upgrade points. (In my experience, -1 seems to come up about 5% or 10% of the time, 0 comes up about 40% of the time, and +1 to +3 comes up about 50% to 55% of the time. It may vary by dungeon.) The modifier status of the resulting item will equal the modifier status of the last item synthesized or mixed, which you can use to your advantage to eliminate the chance of getting a curse or seal on the resulting item. For example, with a Synthesis Pot, you can put in your base sword first, then 3 unknown swords, then finish with a 5th sword that is known not to have a curse or seal.
• Similar to the above, you can synthesize staves together as well. It's usually lower priority than swords/shields, but if you have the spare synthesis capacity and are tight on inventory space, why not? It's certainly better than wasting synthesis capacity. Better still, if you merge together two staves and one of them was fully identified (that is, you could see its modifier status and charges), the resulting item will also be fully identified. Huzzah! You can merge those 5 Pinning Staves, only one of which was fully identified, and the resulting staff will have a huge number of charges and be fully identified! But what about blessing and seals? Again, the resulting item will have the modifier status of the last item in the synthesis. You could risk putting in an unidentified staff in last, hoping to preserve a blessing, but IMO there's not much point in taking this risk, just put in a fully identified staff last to ensure you don't end up with a staff with a huge number of charges that is also sealed. Naturally, if you do happen to have one staff that is blessed, by all means, put that one in last.
• But the single best trick in this category is to try to use a Mixer to make a rune. This technique can be used with any Mixer recipe and any item that might be one of the recipe's ingredients, but it's particularly easy to test single-item recipes because you don't have to juggle as many items around. In terms of single-item recipes, it's particularly great to try this technique with unidentified grasses, especially on swords, because a huge portion of grasses make good runes on swords. (Beware trying this with unidentified scrolls though, because IIRC, Mixer monsters turn scrolls that don't get converted into runes into Pieces of Paper aka mush.) Throw the unknown item in first then the sword or shield, which should get rid of any seal if the unknown item had one. If the recipe succeeds, the unidentified item will be gone, transformed into a rune, and its type will be identified in your game state. (I think this also identifies the sword or shield too, though this needs confirmation.) If it fails, then you know which types the unidentified item isn't. (If a grass doesn't mix with a sword, you've ruled out about half the grasses -- and it might be one of more valuable grasses like Undo or Revival.) Certain runes are so valuable that it may be worth testing for them even if the unknown item has a very low chance of being the item you need. (For example, you could make a Refining rune if the unknown pot is an Upgrade Pot, or a Healing rune if you have a Heal Pot and the unknown item is a Heal Bracelet.) Beware that your items may in fact be Mimic-type monsters, so a recipe can fail even when you have all the right "types" of items. In other words, that grass you thought wasn't a mixer recipe ingredient and named appropriately may in fact be an ingredient after all, it's just that the copy you were testing was a Mimic monster in disguise.

Get clues from item attributes or special item behavior: Some item attributes can help you narrow down the possibilities for what an item might be, at least far enough to help you make an educated guess. Here are some examples, but more info about these techniques are in the step-by-step guides below.

• Some pots are Insert-type pots while others are Open-type pots. Look at this first to narrow down the possibilities.
• Different pots have different possible capacities by default. Some can have a capacity of 3-5 by default, some can have a capacity of 2-4 by default, and two pots have specific capacities only. (Synthesis Pots are always 5 spaces by default and Fever Pots are always 3 spaces by default.) So, an unknown pot's capacity is a clue as to what type of pot it might be.
• Different staves seem to have different ranges for charge capacity as well, but you usually can't tell how many charges a staff has until you've identified it via other means anyway (plus, many of them are easy to identify via a single use).
• Some scrolls target items and can be aborted. If you read an unidentified scroll and it asks you to select an item target, abort and think about it some more, as now it is one of a much narrower set of possible scrolls.
• Some scrolls trigger by being dropped on the ground outside shops, though you usually can't use them again unless the happened to have been blessed.
• Sometimes you may know an item is cursed (or probably cursed -- it could be sealed) without knowing what type it is, such as by using a price check at a store. Though I don't have a specific formula, some item types are vastly more likely to be cursed than others. E.g. Monsterphobic and Itemphobic bracelets seem to be more likely to be cursed than Monster Detector and Item Detector bracelets, and Nonary is either cursed all the time or it just seems like it. Knowing this can help you narrow down to make an educated guess.

Get clues from context / experience / intuition: To my knowledge, no one has yet reverse engineered the code to dump out the item distribution tables used in dungeon generation. Nor has anyone run a controlled experiment to try to determine exactly how likely a given item is to appear in a given location. (If this last sounds impossible, the original author of this webpage did precisely this experiment for Fay's Final Puzzle in Shiren 1, and it helped him understand what kinds of items he was likely to find on future attempts of FFP. Crazy, perhaps, not the most useful experiment ever run, perhaps, but impossible, no. He hasn't bothered trying this for Shiren 5 because there are a huge number of bonus dungeons that might benefit from such effort, rather than a single final challenge dungeon as in Shiren 1.) Short of reverse engineering or careful experimentation, the next best thing is intuition based on experience. For example, in most dungeons, you're vastly more likely to find cheap but helpful consumable items on early dungeon floors, so don't worry about them being Amnesia Grass or SuperUnlucky Seed. Items relevant to nighttime play, such as torches, Night-Day Scrolls, and Light Scrolls, apparently cannot appear in daytime-only dungeons. (I suspect but have not yet confirmed that Night-Day Scrolls also cannot appear in the single nighttime-only dungeon.) In most dungeons, early 5-spot pots have a very high chance to be Synthesis Pots, and failing that, most "kind" dungeons have generous helpings of Preservation Pots so even if your unknown pot wasn't a Synthesis Pot you might still be able to get your items out because it was a Preservation Pot instead. (But never place multiple items into an unknown pot in a single action! Go slow, one at a time!) If you found several copies of an item-targeting scroll early on, odds are they are Identify Scrolls, because they seem to be the most common of the item-targeting scrolls in most dungeons. Also, you might be able to specifically identify a handful of grasses if they were thrown at you by specific monsters and they happened to miss you. (If you need a reminder in these cases, you probably have the information you need in your Monster Book.) The odds of finding different items depend upon the dungeon, depth, and how it was found (pre-placed on the floor, monster drop, normal shop, elite/VIP shop, Pick-A-Choice shop, Presto Pot, etc.) and possibly on other variables as well. In addition to using intuition and experience to identify what items might be, you can also rule out what they are not. E.g. it is 100% impossible to find a stock Floating Bracelet in the Tower of Fortune. Unfortunately, it's hard to be more precise than this without a data dump or experiment. The Locations page for each dungeon has some specific tips. Hopefully others will contribute the benefit of their wisdom to this wiki with some great tips on where to find specific items and how item distribution/generation is controlled in general.

Use rescues: This is not yet confirmed to work in Shiren 5, but it worked in Shiren 1. It's also a bit borderline / sketchy, but I'm listing it here for completeness. Theoretically, you could die with unidentified items and request rescue. Then a 2nd player (or multiple other players, or you under a 2nd profile) could try to rescue you and in the process identify the items in question. Then, the 2nd player(s) could convey this information to you and rescue you. You could then revive and name the items based on the information received from your rescuer(s). The player community used a similar trick extensively in Shiren 1 to map out Rescue Passwords for Items, in effect performing community item farming via rescue passwords. Whether or not this method would interfere with your sense of personal achievement in the game, it is slow and potentially error-prone, even if you were playing both profiles yourself.

Save scumming: This is even more borderline / sketchy as it's clearly bypassing the design of the game, but one could use save scumming to backup one's save file, identify all their items potentially in destructive ways such as just consuming them, then restore to the older game state and have extra information about their unidentified items. I list this for completeness, but I don't rely on this technique for any step-by-step guides below.

Step-By-Step Guides

Each of the below guides pretends that a given unidentified item could be any possible item in the same category. This is absolutely not true. Where and how the item was generated has a huge impact on what the item might be, and how likely that possibility is. But, we don't have access to great info about these probabilities, so the step-by-step guides assume anything is possible and help you deterministically narrow down the choices. These guides assume you are familiar with all the techniques documented above. And again, these guides currently ignore the possibility that a given "item" might be a Mimic-style monster.

Swords and Shields

Refer to the Swords and Shields pages for info on items in these categories.

The techniques to fully identify swords and shields are the same.

The type of a sword/shield is always fully identified. E.g. you can always see the difference between an Ordinary Stick and a Red Blade. So the only parts to identify are the modifier and the upgrade value. (To the best of my knowledge, randomly-generated stock swords/shields (aka not new items) cannot have runes.)

By far the best techniques are the Strip Trap, Price Check, and Synthesis Pot / Mixer Monster techniques listed above. If you don't need to equip these items, wait until you find a Strip Trap then fully identify all of them. Or, wait until you find a shop and price check them, equip them to fully identify them if they aren't cursed or sealed, or sell them without identifying them if they are cursed or sealed (unless you need them for runes). Don't forget there are multiple ways to find and create more traps, the single most effective of which is to lead Mecharoid monsters around, letting them create more traps which are also visible. Alternatively, if you have extra synthesis / mixing capacity, consider using it on unidentified items.

Early in a run, when you don't have much to lose, it's safer to equip more items and just take the risk, and you'll likely need to equip something when you can anyway just to stay alive. Later in a run, when you have a lot to lose, it's best not to risk this, and hold out for a way to positively identify it doesn't have a curse before equipping it to fully identify it. (Strip Trap, Price Check, Synthesis Pot / Mixer Monster, giving an Identify Scroll to a shopkeeper, extra Identity Pot capacity, etc..) Another possibility is just proactively exorcise or bless it if you have spare capacity to do so, then you know it's safe to equip.

If you're stuck with a cursed sword/shield equipped, and you have unidentified scrolls you don't mind identifying by reading them, wait until you're done with the floor and about to leave and there are no monsters or NPCs around, position yourself just inside a large room (in case the scroll is Monster House), then target the cursed item with as many unidentified scrolls as you can. Exorcism, (either Fate or Earth), Plating, Sale, Onigiri, Blessing, and Fixer Scrolls will all fix your problem -- that's 7 scrolls out of 52 that will fix the problem! Not bad odds. Over and above those 7, a Curse Scroll has a 50% chance of converting a curse into a seal, and there's a chance a Darth Scroll might also work though this has not been confirmed. See Blessings, Curses, and Seals for the zillions of ways to deal with this challenge.

Bracelets

Refer to the Bracelets page for info on items in this category.

Identifying bracelets is tougher than any other category of item (with the possible exception of pots) and very important to winning your run. Bracelets can be cursed as well as sealed, and their type can't be identified by use. Worse, there's a vast difference in utility between the worst and best bracelets. Prioritize putting them into Identify Pots whenever possible. If you have an Identify Scroll and can't wait to do a mass identification at a shop, prepare for a "lucky day" outcome and target an un-identified bracelet with your Identify Scroll.

First tricky question: should you equip an unknown, possibly cursed bracelet when you have no other bracelets? Unclear. Most bracelets aren't really that helpful, but a handful are very helpful. If it's early in your run and you don't have much to lose, why not? But if you're starting to have something to lose, it's best to hold off until you can find a Strip Trap or create one via Mecharoid monster. Whenever you find a Strip Trap, equip everything unidentified before you leave the area and use the Strip Trap to remove any cursed items.

Second tricky question: if a bracelet is cursed, should you just name it something like "Cursed1" and get rid of it? Also unclear. Some bracelets (such as Nonary) seem to be cursed 100% of the time, so the fact that it's cursed changes the odds of what type it might be for the worse. (Seals aren't a clue -- don't hold a seal against a bracelet.) If it helps you see remote monsters or items (5 types do this), it's probably worth holding on to until you can fully identify it. If it doesn't, it still may be worth holding on to.

Third tricky question: if a bracelet is not cursed or sealed but you can't immediately figure out what type it is, should you wear it? Again, unclear. I tend to say "yes", but keep in mind that many locations have common, bad bracelets such as Inacc., Critical, and Trap which won't immediately be apparent.

Some bracelets that are virtually impossible to find randomly: Trapper, Night Ward, and Floating. Trapper might be possible to find in Gen's Turf or Trapper's Sandbox, but no one has yet reported finding them except as reward items. Night Ward and Floating can be obtained via wishes in Inori Cave, but the only place either of these bracelets has ever been reported to be found randomly is that Floating Bracelets can rarely be found pre-place or in shops in Rousing Paradise. Either way, your random unidentified bracelet is virtually guaranteed not to be any of these.

But let's assume your given unidentified bracelet could be anything and progressively narrow it down. Let's also assume you've already confirmed that it isn't cursed, or, you're willing to take the risk of equipping it anyway. Equip it when there are no monsters around and you can spare a few turns to do some tests, then test for these bracelets. These tests are roughly in priority order / simplicity order.

• Strength: you can see your strength go up/down by 3 when you equip/unequip it. Name it and equip it until you find something better.
• Growth: you will see the experience needed for the next level go down by 1 for each step you take. Name it and equip it until you find something better.
• Monster Detector *or* Monsterphobic: you will see remote monsters in your view and on your mini map. Keep testing: see if it causes you 10 damage every turn while there is a monster in the same room as you. If not, it's Monster Detector -- one of the best not rare bracelets in the game! If being in the same room with monsters does cause you damage, it's Monsterphobic, which is still very helpful, you just have to use it cautiously (e.g. equip it to find remote monsters, then unequip it before you get in the same room with them). Note it's impossible to tell if this is working if you're in a great hall floor or if you've read a Navigation Scroll on the current floor, so you can try again on another floor. New monsters tend to spawn every 30 turns in most dungeons, so even if you've cleared lots of monsters, odds are there are still more somewhere on the map to help you identify these bracelets.

• Item Detector *or* Itemphobic: you can see remote items in your view and on your mini map. If you've already explored the floor, you'll either have no items on the floor or they'll still be on your map, and the test will be invalid, so try it again on a new floor. As with the above pair, these can be quite helpful. Again, test further to tell the difference between Item Detector and Itemphobic -- the latter will cause you 10 damage every time you pick up an item. Itemphobic is great to use when you first start a new floor, though of course Item Detector is better (and Monster Detector is better still).
• Scout: there's no way you found this first, but if you can remotely see both monsters and items where you've never been, fantastic, name this bracelet and *definitely* use it. This is such a great bracelet it's worth blessing it when you can to help keep it safe.
• Can. Arm: shoot an arrow or worthless item at a wall, and not in a direction where it might pass through walls and hit a remote shopkeeper or other NPC. If it flies off into infinity (and if you don't have Can. Arm status already e.g. from eating a Dracon Grass), then our bracelet is Can. Arm. Take it off or use it carefully. There are definitely some good reasons to use a Can. Arm bracelet, including a little-known tip of hitting 5+ monsters in the same turn (e.g. by shooting an arrow down a hallway) to heal yourself. But I personally prefer never using this bracelet, as it's too likely I'll throw something off to infinity by mistake. Never throw a valuable item while wearing an unknown bracelet without first checking if it's Can. Arm! E.g. it can really suck to throw that full Synthesis Pot off into infinity, or to throw your main weapon at a Mixer only to have it fly away forever. (But hey, at least there's a secret trophy for throwing a Synthesis Pot while wearing this bracelet.)
• Waterwalk *or* Floating: make sure you have no scrolls, onigiri, or peaches in main inventory, then try walking on water. (Those items can be damaged or destroyed by walking on water.) Floating is virtually impossible to find, but Waterwalk can be found somewhat commonly. Get your hopes up that it might be Floating, try also walking on void or a non-dangerous trap, confirm that it doesn't work and have your hopes dashed, then name your bracelet Waterwalk. Waterwalk is extremely useful on floors with "water walls", letting you casually walk away from most other monsters, and can help in other situations as well (e.g. sometimes a river will lead to a vault, it can help you get items off of islands, and it might help you rob a store), but generally isn't one of the best bracelets. Name it then use it or sell it at your pleasure.
• Wall Clip: make sure you have over 10 HP and try walking through a wall. Again, these can be very helpful in certain ways such as helping you rob a store, but not generally one of the best bracelets. As above, name it then use it or sell it as you see fit.
• Identify: there's no way you found this first, but it's easy enough to test for it. Drop an unidentified item and pick it up again. If the other item is now identified, huzzah! This is one of the best bracelets in the game! You shouldn't necessarily keep it equipped at all times -- other bracelets such as Monster Detector can help you stay alive if you wear it regularly -- but you should definitely keep it and use it to identify basically every item you ever find. (Ironically, you can't use an Identify Bracelet to identify itself, so you'll have to settle for naming it.) This is so valuable it's worth blessing it when you can to help keep it safe.

By this point, we've named or ruled out 14 types of bracelets out of 34 possible types. If you still don't know what it is, in my opinion, it's best not to do any additional tests and not to wear it, but instead wait for a shop to price check or mass identify via shopkeeper. There are of course more tests you can run to find or rule out more types, but they are less convenient and more dangerous, and going out of your way to test for all of these things might contribute to your starvation more than to your success. But if you'd like to continue testing, here are some techniques, again in rough priority order:

• Heal: carefully watch how fast your HP regens without the bracelet on, then put it on after a big fight and watch how fast your HP regens now. If you regen much faster than normal with the bracelet on, it's Heal. Great! Don't wear it often else you'll starve, but wear it as needed in a pinch (e.g. during or after a big fight), and/or save it to make a great rune.
• Anti-Cnf.: when you find a Spin Trap and it's safe to do so, put on the bracelet and try triggering the trap.
• Alert: when you find a Sleep Trap and it's safe to do so, put on the bracelet and try triggering the trap.
• Inacc.: find an isolated monster that is far away (but no more than 10 spaces) and not particularly dangerous, equip the bracelet, and try throwing some projectiles at it. If you miss all your shots, at least ~5 times in a row, it's probably Inacc.. There's no point in throwing more than 10 projectiles, as the odds of missing 10 times in a row without it being Inacc. are extremely low. There is no great use for this bracelet, name it and sell or toss it.
• Critical: find an isolated monster that is no threat and barely does any damage, equip this bracelet, and let the monster hit you ~5 times, and no more than 10 times. If the monster never hits you critically, the bracelet isn't Critical. Again, there is no great use for this bracelet, so just name it and sell or toss it.
• Dozer *or* Blink *or* Explosion: make sure there are no monsters anywhere nearby, make sure you have no unpaid debts at any shops, then equip this bracelet and wait or walk around for 10-20 turns. If possible, do not move towards danger during this test. Dozer will cause you to spontaneously fall asleep, Blink will cause you to spontaneously warp, and Explosion will cause you to spontaneously explode. If one of these things happens, double check the message log and your feet to make sure it wasn't because of a monster or trap, and if not, name the bracelet. There's no great use for Dozer, so sell or toss it. Blink has a small chance to be handy, so maybe hang onto it or maybe sell/toss it. Explosion is an ingredient in some powerful runes, though in practice you might have to carry it around as dead weight for a long time until you can find all the other ingredients you need and also find a Mixer large enough to mix the rune recipe, so it might be better to just sell or toss it.

As you can see, experiments in this 2nd batch are harder to pull off at will and safely, and for not very much return. You probably shouldn't run this 2nd batch of tests, as you may starve if you did, and even if you did, you're only up to 22 types of bracelets named or ruled out out of 34 possible types. There are of course ways to test for even more types of bracelets, but you start needing even more rare circumstances to try them, and the effects start getting very difficult to detect, so the ROI just goes down even further. Odds are very good you'll find some other way to identify the bracelet before you could test for all types.

So at this point in the guide, I'll assume you've only ruled out the 1st 14 bracelets from the 1st set of tests, and you've now found a shop, and you're willing to do price checks but are unable or unwilling to do mass identification by giving an identified Identify Scroll to the shopkeeper. Here's what we can learn from price checks.

Base buy price (sell price)	2,000 (700)	3,000 (1,050)	5,000 (1,750)	10,000 (3,500)	30,000 (10,500)	50,000 (17,500)
Bracelets we haven't ruled out yet	Inacc. Bunch	Cleansing Anti-Cnf. Alert Anti-Crs. Staunch Mojo Critical Trap Monster Summoner Dozer	Heal Alleyway Blink Explosion Nonary	Anti-Parry Time Stop		VIP
Bracelets we have ruled out already	Can. Arm Strength		Monster Detector Item Detector Waterwalk Wall Clip Monsterphobic Itemphobic	Growth Floating	Identify Scout Trapper Night Ward

IMO (and other experts may disagree), if your goal is to try to maximize your chances to win the run, the green bracelets are the best ones to try to identify and use. Most of the red ones are useful, but they're not as useful as the green ones or they're just very rare, so pragmatically speaking, you want to hunt for the green ones. Even among the green ones, some are only useful temporarily (e.g. Growth) until you can find a better green one (e.g. Scout).

Are there any in the bottom row that you haven't ruled out yet? Rule them out now per the tests mentioned above, but beware testing bracelets in a shop! I once absent-mindedly thought I'd test an unpurchased bracelet to see if it was Wall Clip -- and it was, and I was branded a thief unexpectedly and couldn't survive.

OK, you've ruled out everything in the bottom row already. What's left in the top row? If the base buy price is 2,000, 10,000, or 50,000, you don't really need it to win, so could just name it with the price and stop trying to fully identify it. (If it's 50K, of course, you could name it with the correct type, not just its price.) As tempting as it might be to get Anti-Parry, Time Stop, and/or VIP, if you've already got one or more green bracelets, is it really worth the inventory space and cost (or risk to steal) to get them? OTOH, if the base buy price is 3K or 5K, there are two green bracelets worth trying to identify. It's hard to test for Alert and Heal on demand especially while you're in a shop and you may not even own the bracelet in question. As always, if you don't have any better information, name it with the price like "3K-1" or "5K-1" (meaning, the 1st bracelet you've named at those price tiers) so you have that information for all future copies you ever find. Never use the same name for different item types in the same run; the game lets you do this but it's very hard to tell them apart later.

OK, time for the fourth tricky question. The shopkeeper is selling a bracelet for 3K or 5K and it might be Alert or Heal respectively. Should you buy it, or risk stealing it? Unclear, and it really depends on the particulars of your situation. Odds are against it being the Alert or Heal, unless you've already identified most of the other bracelets at the 3K and 5K tiers. If you can do a mass identification via shopkeeper, this is a good time to consider it, especially if you have plenty of other unidentified things you'd like to sell and identify at the same time. Or, if you're rich, they aren't that expensive, so you could just buy them and try to find opportunities to test for them (e.g. find a Sleep Trap), preferably on the same floor so you could sell it back to the shopkeeper if it's not the type you want (after re-naming it something more precise like "!Alert-1"). OTOH, if you already have a great bracelet or two such as Monster Detector -- perhaps the single most useful bracelet at helping you win the run which is also not that difficult to find -- maybe don't bother trying to get an Alert Bracelet. I'd still rather have it even with a Monster Detector (e.g. to wear during great hall monster houses), but it's less critical when you have other excellent bracelets to use. Heal on the other hand is one ingredient for the super helpful Healing rune recipe, so it's definitely worth trying to ID it even if you have Monster Detector.

Beyond this, if you still can't figure out what it is, do mass identification at the shop or identify it the old fashioned way via Identify Pot or Identify Scroll.

Grasses and Scrolls

Refer to the Grasses and Scrolls pages for info on items in these categories.

The techniques to fully identify grasses and scrolls are similar and related enough that it's best to cover them in one section.

Grasses and Scrolls are (normally) single use items. They become identified in your game state when you eat or read them respectively. (One notable exception: eating an Amnesia Grass will make you forget everything you've identified so far on this run and re-randomize the placeholder descriptions for every item type. But it's rare enough in every location that it shouldn't make you hesitant to consume grasses, at least not early in your run when you don't have much to lose and the odds are very low that you've found an Amnesia Grass.)

Given you can identify them by eating/reading them and thus mostly wasting the first copy of that type, should you do so? The short answer is "yes, in the early part of your run and when you need to free up inventory space".

Many times, you'll find yourself tight on inventory and need to make painful choices about what to keep and what to consume immediately or toss. This tends to happen by 5F-10F on dungeons that have a reasonable number of items per floor. This early on, you likely don't have much to lose yet, and, in most dungeons, you can't find anything really dangerous that early in the run anyway, so taking some risks isn't a bad idea. If you happen to have an Identify Pot, it's probably best *not* to use spaces for unidentified grasses or scrolls yet -- more on this later. And if you happen to have an Identify Scroll, don't waste it by targeting an unidentified grass or scroll. (If you really want to read the Identify Scroll now, target something harder to identify like a bracelet or pot, and by all means keep your unidentified grasses and scrolls in main inventory and hope for a "lucky day" outcome.) Consuming/wasting a few items to identify them is a good option at this point.

So, which should you choose? Prioritize reading scrolls before eating grasses for a few reasons:

• Scrolls can be blessed so you can sometimes get a 2nd use out of them after you know what they are.
• Reading some scrolls requires you to target an item, which can be aborted and is a big clue as to what it is.
• Some grasses are so powerful (e.g. Revival, Undo) that it's a shame to waste them, and some are so bad (e.g. Amnesia, Imabikiso, and SuperUnlucky) that it's dangerous to eat them at all.
• Many grasses can make good runes, especially on swords, which can really help the viability of your run, and if an unknown grass does turn into a rune, it becomes identified in your game state.

The safest way to read unidentified scrolls is to clear out monsters from the floor (as much as you can), then stand just inside a room that isn't a shop, next to a hallway that leads to another room with the exit stairs. Clearing the floor of monsters helps if the unidentified scroll happens to be Attraction or Gathering. Standing near an exit helps if it happens to be Monster House. (If it is Monster House and you start to get overwhelmed, in a pinch, you can retreat to the stairs and exit the floor.) If it's Grounded or Muzzled, just change floors to clear the bad status. If the scroll asks you to target an item, defer wasting it for a bit as you can hopefully put it to better use, and hopefully you can free up enough inventory by wasting untargeted scrolls.

If you still need to free up inventory, it's hard to say which is best to waste next (targeted scrolls vs. grasses), but let's go with targeted scrolls. These will either be Identify or an item enhancing/destroying scroll with a base buy price of 500. It's a real shame to waste an Identify Scroll, but if wasting an unidentified targeted scroll is your best option, at least prepare for a "lucky day" identification outcome. Depending on what targeted scrolls you've already identified, you will need to adjust your target accordingly, but if you haven't identified any yet, a good target is a sword or shield with no modifiers or upgrade points that isn't your primary equipment. This way, you may be able to capture the value of a helpful scroll (e.g. Plating, Fate, Earth) by adding that value to a temporary item then mixing it with your main equipment later, and if the scroll destroys the targeted sword/shield (e.g. Sale, Onigiri), there was no real loss. If by chance you have a cursed bracelet equipped and don't mind destroying it, target it with all the unidentified targeted scrolls you can get your hands on.

If you still need to compress inventory further, start eating unidentified grasses. Make sure you have room in your stomach (so you don't waste the food value of the grass), make sure you've mostly cleared out the floor and are as far away from monsters and NPCs as possible (in case it's Sleepy, Confusion, Blinding, Rage, etc.), and stand in an exterior room facing outward (so you don't aggro a faraway shopkeeper or other NPC if it's Dragon).

Don't flush out your entire inventory of unidentified grasses unless you truly need the space, because you can also identify many grasses without wasting them by trying to mix them into runes. Check the Monsters section of the Location page for your current dungeon and search for "Mixer" to see on what floor you can next encounter Mixer monsters. 18 grasses out of 34 can be used to make good runes, and none turn into bad runes! Making a rune is usually the single best use for a grass (at least until you have enough copies of that rune), and it identifies the type too, so it's a good idea to try mixing all unidentified grasses into runes whenever you have access to Mixers. If they don't mix, consider naming them appropriately (e.g. "!Mix-1"). If you have plenty of opportunity to mix runes, try mixing grasses on shields first, as you are usually tighter on rune space on your sword, and only if it doesn't mix on a shield then try mixing it on a sword. If you don't have plenty of opportunity to mix runes, just try mixing directly on swords, but beware of hitting your rune limit. (If you max out on runes on your main equipment, consider spreading additional runes around so you only have 1-2 on any given piece of extra equipment. This takes up more inventory space, but it lets you mix in runes 1-2 at a time onto your primary equipment as it gains rune space. If you instead max out runes on your main equipment and also max out runes on a secondary piece of equipment, you probably won't be able to mix them without losing runes until your primary equipment reaches level 8, when most equipment gains infinite rune capacity.)

(It's not a good idea to try this same trick with scrolls. While it would work to identify a scroll that does make a rune, very few scrolls make runes, and if it's a scroll that doesn't make a rune, IIRC the Mixer will destroy the scroll, turning it into a Piece of Paper aka mush.)

If you've tried turning a grass into a rune and it didn't work, that's a huge clue as to what type of grass it might be. Now it's starting to be much more likely to be very powerful or very dangerous. If you still need to free up inventory space, it's not *too* risky to just consume the grass if you found it on an early floor. Most dungeons aren't evil enough to put the truly dangerous items on early floors, but a handful might.

Using the above tricks, you can sometimes knock out a bunch of nasty things early on, when they're not very damaging, like Bankruptcy, Attraction, Gathering, Muzzled, and Grounded Scrolls (to name a few) and like SuperUnlucky Seed (which drops you back to level 1 but isn't so painful if you were only level 5 when you ate it). But of course, as your run progresses, and you're starting to have a lot to lose, and you've already identified many of the safer items, it gets more and more risky to identify grasses and scrolls by using them. So for the rest of this section, we'll assume that you have a grass or scroll that is too risky to identify by consuming it. (Exception: if you're starving to death, eating an unknown grass late in the run is better than dying.)

Now it's best to wait to find a shop and price check all your unidentified grasses and scrolls (and other items). Price checks are fantastic clues, considerably narrowing down the possibilities, sometimes even to a single item. See the techniques section above for details on how to maximize price checks, and see the prices of all items in the category on the category info page. Also, here are some base buy prices (sell prices) worth remembering:

• Grasses
  • 10 (3): This will be Weeds, but it should always be pre-identified for you anyway. Don't necessarily just toss or eat it for food value though because it can make a good rune.
  • 200 (70): This will be Heal. Makes a good rune, or can be used to heal, or can be used to raise max HP by 3.
  • 1,000 (350): This will either be Revival or Gut. Revival Grass is super helpful for winning your run, and Gut Grass is Revival Grass's evil twin that doesn't work. It's important to not eat these outright until you can tell which one it is. Revival Grass is more common but don't count on it being that in a particularly nasty dungeon. Prioritize fully identifying this within your game state, even if that means selling it to a shopkeeper and buying it back again at a loss after mass identification. If it's Gut Grass, eat it or sell it quickly. (I don't know what happens if you collapse with both Gut Grass and Revival Grass in your inventory, but it might prevent you from reviving.) If it's Revival Grass, prioritize blessing it ASAP, both to prevent it from being sealed or turned into an onigiri, and also so that it will protect you twice. If it loses the blessing, bless it again! If it's not blessed, it's safer to keep it in a Preservation Pot though don't put all your most valuable things in a single pot of course. If it is blessed, it may be safer to keep it in main inventory rather than to keep it in an unblessed Preservation Pot.
  • 1,500 (525): This will either be Undo or Repeat. Identical handling to Revival/Gut as mentioned above.
  • 5,000 (1,750): This will either be Angel or SuperUnlucky. Angel Grass tends to be the more common of the two though that's not guaranteed in particularly dangerous or evil dungeons. It's rarely a good idea to consume an Angel Grass, not because the effect isn't good, but because you usually don't need to gain 3 levels, and the rune effect is far better. (Of course, if you already have that rune on both your sword and shield, eating subsequent Angel Grasses is a fine use for them.) Oddly, there is actually a good reason to consume a SuperUnlucky Seed in some situations, e.g. if your level is so high that your HP regeneration is dangerously low, but we won't go into the details of this possibility here as it has nothing to do with identifying items. Likely the best way to use both of these grasses is to turn them into runes, so it's not critical you tell which is which, just avoid consuming them and mix them into runes when you can.
• Scrolls
  • 200 (70): This will be Identify. Yay! If you've found one of these, you'll still need to identify it in your game state before you can give it to the shopkeeper for mass identification. Scour the floor and your inventory to try to find another one, so you can identify one by reading it (preparing for a "lucky day" outcome so you may not need to sell a ton of your items to the shopkeeper just to identify them), and if the first one don't give you a "lucky day", go ahead and use the 2nd one to mass identify items with the shopkeeper if so desired. If the scroll happens to have a buy price of 220 / sell price of 77, congratulations, it's a blessed Identify Scroll and you can read it once then still give it to the shopkeeper. Or if you happen to have a way to bless it, great, bless it then read it to identify it, then give it to the shopkeeper if so desired.
  • 500 (175): This will be an item-targeting scroll of some kind. (The only other item-targeting scroll is Identify at 200.)
  • 5,000 (1,750): This will be Blank, but it should always be pre-identified for you anyway.
  • 10,000 (3,500): This will be Extinction. It might be worth buying or stealing this. If you try to steal it and the theft goes awry, you can throw it at a shopkeeper (and hope it hits). This will wipe out all shopkeepers on the floor; don't worry, it doesn't kill you and it doesn't mean you won't find shopkeepers later in the dungeon. But do hurry off the floor anyway as more shopkeepers will continue to spawn. If you don't need it against the shopkeepers, save it for a particularly nasty family of monsters. Dragons are a great choice, as the last few floors of many dungeons are filled with the highest level dragons which can roast you from long distance.

Practically speaking, price checking everything and naming them with the clues from prices can be a PITA. You may or may not want to bother, depending on how hard you want to try to win your current run. It's common to get mostly-benign and mostly not-super-helpful grasses and scrolls early on, so you can certainly play faster and almost as successfully by just consuming them.

Needless to say, if you've found a shop and you have the opportunity to give the shopkeeper an identified Identify Scroll, you should strongly consider selling everything unknown you have to the shopkeeper and doing a mass identification. The most thorough way to maximize your chances of winning the run are to do price checks first and only decide whether or not to do a mass identification afterwards, as you may get enough info from the price checks so have to sell fewer items to the shopkeeper, or just pass on the mass identification because you don't have enough unidentified items left and want to wait for the next shop. Practically speaking, it's much faster to just skip the price check, sell everything unidentified, and do the mass identification right away. Yes, this gives up some advantage, but it's a much faster way to play, and odds are you won't want every item anyway, and if you're good at theft, you may be able to steal back everything you want anyway (after first selling everything else you own to the shopkeeper for extra money and stealing those items back too).

For completeness sake, here are some additional techniques that can be used to identify grasses and scrolls, though I don't recommend using them:

• Naming items then throwing them at monsters: You could name a grass something like "Test1" and throw it at a monster to see what it does. Many grasses have unique magical effects when you hit a monster with them, so you may be able to tell what it was without risking eating it yourself. But this doesn't identify the type in your game state, so you'd have to keep notes outside the game (screenshots are one convenient way to do so) so you can name it correctly the next time you find that type. Throwing unidentified scrolls at monsters has a very low chance of helping you figure out what scroll it was, as most will just do 2 HP of damage. One bizarre and extremely rare exception: if you throw a Squid Sushi Scroll at a Squid monster, you'll turn it into food.
• Seeing if scrolls stick to the ground: It is possible to drop scrolls on the ground (not in shops or boss battles) to see if they stick to the ground. (Sticking to the ground means the icon changes to an open scroll when you walk away; if it happens to have been blessed, you can still pick it up once and it will just lose the blessing but be usable one more time.) There are 3 scrolls that stick to the ground: Light, Sanctuary, and Oil. (Any others?) If your scroll didn't stick to the ground, you've ruled out those types. If it does stick to the ground, this still doesn't identify the type in your game state, so do more tests. If a monster can't walk over it, it's Sanctuary. If a monster gains "Tottering" status when walking over it, it's Oil. Else it's Light. (Note that you can't find a Light Scroll unless you're in a dungeon that can experience night.) If you plan to do this test, drop the scroll just inside the entrance to a room, to guarantee that monsters will eventually try to walk over it. But note that, if you're planning to do this test, you'll be mostly wasting these 3 scrolls anyway and without identifying them in your game state, so it might have been better to have just read them.

Later, you'll find more copies of grasses and scrolls for which you know the type but don't know the modifier. When you know the type, it's usually not worth it to try to figure out if it's blessed or sealed (it can't be cursed) proactively. Just be careful to use it when you need it but when it wouldn't kill you if it failed due to being sealed. OTOH if it's a particularly valuable type such as Revival or Undo, by all means, proactively put it into a Blessing Pot to ensure it's blessed, or into an Exorcism Pot to ensure it's at least not sealed. When you get to a shop, price check all grasses and scrolls for which you don't know the modifier, selling those that are sealed and that you don't care to unseal, or again, do a mass identification with the shopkeeper just to reveal the seal/blessing in your game state so you don't have to keep track of it yourself. Later in the game, esp. after a few successful theft attempts, money won't be much of an object anyway, so it's worth spending some gitans to reveal the modifier state in your game, or the shop might be extremely safe and easy to rob.

Pots

Refer to the Pots page for info on items in this category.

Pots are difficult to identify, 2nd possibly only to bracelets. You can't put them into an Identify Pot either making it just that much harder.

First, check if your pot is an insert-type pot or an open-type pot, and consider where you found it. If it was in an easier dungeon and/or on an earlier floor, it's less likely to be one of the rarer pots. This is obviously a bit of a judgment call but it can help you narrow down the likely possibilities more quickly. Here's a chart breaking down these two dimensions:

	Insert-type Pots	Open-type Pots
Not Rare These can be found in most places, though they're not all equally likely.	Preservation Ordinary Synthesis Sale Presto Identify Exorcism Blessing Curse Black Hole Fever Sticky Hide Unbreakable 4-2-8 Zen Dodger Perceptive Reflection Modder's Floramorph	Heal Hilarious Zalokleft Klein Monster Water *
Rare It's very unlikely or impossible to find these anywhere in easier dungeons. It's unlikely to find these on early floors in any dungeon.	Upgrade Degrade Lucky Unlucky Grilling	Shrine Maid Heavenly

EDITOR BOOKMARK -- CONTINUE EDITING BELOW THIS POINT

Another visible clue about what a pot might be is the number of spaces it has. No one has yet documented the full set of spaces each type of pot can have by default, but here are some things that are known. (If you have more info about how many spots each type of pot can have by default, please add it, as that would be super helpful to know!)

• Preservation always has 3-5 spots by default.
• Synthesis always has 5 spots by default.
• Fever always has 3 spots by default.

By all means, use price checks to narrow down the choices if you have access to a shop. Some relevant tips:

• Only Water and Heavenly have a base buy price of 2,000, and Heavenly is extremely rare. But, Water is very frequently pre-identified for you, even in dungeons for which most items are not pre-identified. (Why? My guess is that a Water pot is basically a real pot, not a magical pot, so like Weeds, it's always pre-identified.) So, if you find an unknown pot with a base price of 2,000, definitely check your Item Book to see if Water is already pre-identified, and if so, you've got yourself a rare Heavenly Pot.
• Only Synthesis and Modder's have a base buy price of 6,000, and Synthesis is vastly more common in most locations, esp. on early floors. Double check your Item Book to see if either type has been named or identified already. If not, it's still mostly (but not entirely) safe to treat it as if it's a Synthesis Pot, esp. if you don't have much to lose yet on your current run. Name it Synthesis, synthesize all your great equipment together, try to break it against a wall, and if it doesn't break, rename it to be Modder's (or just quit your run :^) ). (And if you threw it off into the distance because you didn't realize you had Cannon Arm e.g. via wearing an unknown bracelet, at least you get a funky trophy/achievement.)
• All of the not-rare Open-type pots have the same base buy price of 3,500, so, you can't learn anything from just a price check. (Possibility: maybe Heal is more likely to have 5 spots, and Hilarious are more likely to have 3 spots??)
• All of the rare Insert-type pots have a base buy price of 10,000, so you can't learn anything from just a price check. (Possibility: maybe Grilling is the only one that is likely to have more than 3 spots??)
• All 4 of the pots that produce scents (Zen, Dodger, Perceptive, Reflective) have the same base buy price of 2,500. You can't tell which is which via price alone, but at least you know that inserting an item will destroy the item and produce a scent.

Should you jump to trying to ID pots by use, or hold off? Difficult question. I prefer holding off until I'm tight on inventory and I'm forced to either ID something or abandon something. Then I usually choose ID'ing grasses or scrolls by using them first. I prefer to mass ID pots and other items at a shop if I can.

But it's not horrible to ID pots by use. Here's my technique. I'll start with Open-type pots because that's very straightforward. Using an Open-style pot once is enough to ID it in your game state. Ideally, treat unknown Open-type pots as Zalokleft until you know it's not Zalokleft. Wait until you find a shop, put the best non-pot item you'd like to steal near a shop exit, leave the shop and face the item (horizontally or vertically, not diagonally) while in a hallway. Make sure you're in a place where there is at most 2 hallways spaces adjacent to you. Have some emergency gear on you if possible (e.g. Warp Grass, Confusion Scroll, etc.). Then open the pot once. If it's Zalokleft, congratulations, you just figured that out and ID'd it within your game state, and, stole a great item to boot. Heal, Hilarious, and Klein are mostly innocuous -- the worst thing is that you just wasted a charge. Monster is the most dangerous one, but since you're in a good location, there are at most 2 monsters adjacent to you, so you can either fight them or use your emergency supplies if needed. If you don't want to wait until you find a shop, at least find a place where there are at most 2 hallway spots around you, and preferably only 1. Then put an item down in front of you that is not something you need, just something you're holding on to to sell (in case the pot is Zalokleft), and open the pot once to ID it.

ID'ing Insert-type pots by use is significantly more challenging. Clear the area of monsters and make sure nothing you care about is on the ground around you, including shopkeepers/NPCs. (If it's Fever, you don't want it destroying anything valuable around you.) Choose a non-pot item to sacrifice for the test. It should definitely be something you don't care about, but, something that can be either sealed or blessed (so, don't use an arrow or stone). Should the test item be ID'd or not ID'd? I recommend an ID'd item, as it's good to ID everything you can and this test item might be destroyed before being ID'd. Ideally, I choose a sealed, ID'd onigiri if possible. But for purposes of this document, I'll assume you've chosen an ID'd grass that is neither blessed nor sealed. Insert this 1 item into the pot. (Never insert multiple items into an unknown pot at the same time, of course.)

From this 1 test, you can immediately ID these types of pots. Most of these are self-evident so I won't bother spelling out all of them, but only some of these will ID the pot in your game state, so you may have to name the pot.

• Preservation (you'll have the option to take it out again)
• Sale
• Presto (theoretically, it might be possible for the item to be changed into the same item, throwing off the test, but the odds of this happening are so low I'll pretend they are zero)
• Blessing
• Curse
• Black Hole (the item will be gone and the pot shrunk without producing a scent)
• Sticky (you'll have to go around and fight some monsters to break it and get your item back)
• Hide
• Zen
• Dodger
• Perceptive
• Reflection
• Floramorph

That's about half of the possible pots with a single test item -- not bad.The best thing to do at this point is to probably wait to find a shop to price check or mass ID items, but if you prefer continuing to test the pot, here's what I might do next.

There are only 4 more common types of pots at this point: Ordinary, Synthesis, Identify, Exorcism. If it wasn't 5 spots to begin with, it's not Synthesis, so skip this paragraph. If it was 5 spots to begin with, frankly, it very well might be Synthesis, but it's still too risky to try testing this with great equipment. Again, wait for a price check, or plan to put in a pair of items that could synthesize that you don't really care about. Maybe use this opportunity to hopefully get rid of a curse or seal on a piece of equipment that makes a great rune, or maybe don't risk it on equipment and instead try to merge a pair of not-super-valuable staves. Either way, if at all possible, choose an item that is either sealed or unID'd or preferably both as your next item to insert. If it gets unsealed or ID'd, you know it's Exorcism or Identify and can bail out of assuming it's Synthesis. If neither, it's still probably Synthesis but could be Ordinary (or a less common pot). Put in your next item and see if it synthesizes.If the items synthesize, odds are very high that it's Synthesis not Modder's. Name it Synthesize now, use the last 2 spaces to synthesize right away if possible, and try to break it. If it doesn't break, rename it Modder's, cry, and/or quit your run. (But hey! You didn't try synthesizing your best stuff, right? So you'll probably be fine, and can just sell the Modder's, as it's very unlikely you'll find an Extraction Scroll in good time to use it.) If you've put in 3 items to your 5-spot pot and still can't ID what it is, it might be Ordinary or something less common. At this point, you really ought to wait to price check (which is now more complicated due to having contents) or mass ID via shopkeeper.

If it's not a 5-spot pot, we're down to 3 common types of pots, though there are still many more uncommon/rare pots it might be. If possible, choose something that is both sealed and un-ID'd as your next item to insert. If it unseals it's Exorcism, if it ID's it's Identify, else stop there and don't risk inserting any more items, just wait for a mass ID at a shop or other means to ID it. (You weren't standing near any important items or NPCs on the ground, right? So it didn't just blow up because it was a Fever Pot and you didn't just destroy great stuff, right?)

By this point, you should have ruled out everything in test 1 above as well as Synthesis, Identify, Exorcism, Fever (because it would have blown up by now or because it wasn't 3 spots to begin with), and Modder's, The only remaining choices now are Ordinary, Unbreakable, and 4-2-8 (all of which are not rare), as well as Upgrade, Degrade, Lucky, Unlucky, and Grilling (all of which are rare). 8 choices left. If you can at all wait until you find a shop, you should do so, as you'll easily be able to tell the difference between the 3 not rare and the 5 rare with a price check. Because it's pretty important to make this distinction now, I'll assume you will do so. You'll have to do a bit more math because the pots have contents, or maybe you can just tell them apart by estimating, because there are only 3 price tiers possible at this point:

• Base buy price of 600: Ordinary, 4-2-8
• Base buy price of 1,000: Unbreakable
• Base buy price of 10,000: Upgrade, Degrade, Lucky, Unlucky, Grilling

If it has a base buy price of 1,000, name it Unbreakable, test it by throwing it against a wall and seeing that it doesn't break, and you're done.

4-2-8 is almost like the evil twin of Ordinary. Ordinary can be pretty useful, e.g. to carry around synthesis/mixer ingredients until you're ready to use them, or to carry around expensive items you just want to sell. It's terrible to put items in 4-2-8 as you can't get them back without a rare Extraction Scroll, and it's a great projectile weapon too (though dangerous in that it can destroy items or harm NPCs). How do you tell them apart? I'm not aware of any way to do so via usage. You must ID them via one of the many techniques at the top of this document, my recommendation being mass ID via shopkeeper. Alternatively, you can name it something like "428Test", throw it at an innocuous wall, and see if it explodes. You won't be able to rename it to the correct type until you find another, though, so take notes or save a screenshot to help you remember.

By this point you're down to only the 5 most valuable and rarest pots. Again, great time to ID these via other means like mass ID via shopkeeper, esp. if you need these items in your Item Book. But there are some additional tests you can try to do if you really, really can't or don't want to ID them in some other way.

• Upgrade: If you happened to have put an ID'd sword, shield, or staff into this pot, or are willing to do so now, you'll notice it gain upgrade value / charges as you change floors. Another great possibility is to name this pot Upgrade and try mixing it onto a piece of equipment. If it mixes, and you now see the Refining rune, great, you know it was an Upgrade Pot, and the Refining rune is pretty awesome so you're done.
• Degrade: If you happened to have put an ID'd sword, shield, or staff into this pot, or are willing to do so now, you'll notice it lose upgrade value / charges as you change floors. I'm not aware of any rune you can make with this pot (though it might be worth testing again), but it's safe to break it and get your stuff out if you don't want it to degrade further. It's also safe to use remaining spots in this pot to store things that can't degrade. Or just sell it for a ton of money.
• Lucky: If you carry this around for several floors, you should spontaneously see an item in your main inventory gain a blessing, or maybe one of your pots grew when you weren't looking (not confirmed). Great! You have a Lucky Pot.
• Unlucky: If you carry this around for several floors, you should spontaneously see an item in your main inventory gain a curse or seal, or maybe a pot shrank when you weren't looking (not confirmed). Great! You have an Unlucky Pot.
• Grilling: If you have a non-grilled onigiri that you don't mind grilling, try putting it into this pot and see if it becomes a Grilled Onigiri. But this type of pot is super rare, esp. outside of Onigiri Hollow, so odds are you just trapped an onigiri in some other super valuable pot.

If you tried to use your pot and found it sealed, pots are valuable enough that it's probably worth carrying around until you can unseal it or at least price check it if you can manage the space. Unlike a curse, a seal doesn't tell you anything about the probability that the underlying item is "good" or "bad".

Needless to say, if you've named a pot that you don't have in your Item Book yet, prioritize fully ID'ing it. There are many techniques at the top of this document. Since they can't be put into pots, my favorite methods are mass ID via shopkeeper, or escape the dungeon (completing your Item Book is more helpful than any one particular run IMO), or in a pinch use an Identify Scroll on it after preparing for a hopeful "lucky day" outcome.

Staves

Refer to the Staves page to see all the different items in this category.

Most staves are trivial to identify via use, so it's best to try this first before resorting to more expensive methods.Do this as early as you can, to identify items as early as possible before you need them in a pinch. Find an isolated monster many spaces away, a monster you can beat trivially even if it levels up or is otherwise enhanced, a monster that is not maximum level, make sure you have at least 26 HP and preferably at least 51 HP, and wave your staff at it one time only. If the staff is sealed, the seal will reveal itself and you'll have to try again later or try with another technique -- more on this below. But usually it's not sealed and it will hit the monster. I won't bother writing all the details as most of these are very self-explanatory, but you can positively identify all of these staves in a single shot:

• Swap
• Knockback
• Pinning
• Transient (important detail: the log will say that the monster warped *and was paralyzed*)
• Seal
• Clone
• Paralysis
• Slow
• Swift
• Glorious (the monster will level up and lose all status ailments)
• Mage (the monster will either be warped away *and not paralyzed*, confused, or put to sleep -- none of which can happen from other staves)
• Electric (the monster will take 25 electric damage, or 50 if the staff is blessed)
• Trap Del. (the monster will take 2 damage, or 4 if the staff is blessed)
• Boring (the monster will take 10 damage, or 20 if the staff is blessed)
• Fort.
• Drama
• Sacrifice (you'll get hit from the side with a log)
• Shocking (you'll get hit with 25 electric damage, or 50 if the staff is blessed)

Congratulations! You've just immediately identified 18 out of 24 possible types with a single shot! [TODO: revisit this section when you're certain you have a complete list of possible Mage Staff effects, as there may be some disambiguation required between the Mage Staff and other staves.] But you're not done there. Try letting the monster hit you once. If it takes an identical amount of damage that you took, the staff was Empathy. (The monster will take some damage from a Counter Shield or Retribution rune, but not the same amount that you took.) Try hitting the monster once. If you take an identical amount of damage the monster just took, the staff was Sharing. (Be careful not to kill yourself while trying to kill a monster hit with a Sharing staff! Be safe, heal up if needed! And save that Sharing Staff to make a great rune.) You've now positively identified 20 different types from a single monster encounter. You'll know what it is but it's not ID'd in your game state, so name it.

OK, if you've made it this far, there are still 4 different types the staff could be: Unlucky, Balance, Ordinary, or Nagging. Next time you find a Trip Trap, clear the area, put down all your breakables (pots), and deliberately trigger the trip trap. This will reveal the identity of both Balance and Nagging staves, though again, you'll have to name them, they won't be ID'd in your game state.

You're down to just 2 possibilities: Unlucky and Ordinary. Find a level 2 monster and again zap it with a bolt. If it's an Unlucky Staff, the monster will level down, and if not, by process of elimination, you have an Ordinary Staff. Again, name it, because it won't be ID'd in your game state yet.

After a single test against an early monster and getting it down to just 4 types, you may be more likely to find a shop before you can complete the other tests. Of the 4 that you can't identify from a single monster encounter, the Unlucky has a base buy price of 1800, while the rest have a base buy price of 900, so you can easily identify the Unlucky Staff that way. If you've already found a Trip Trap to test for Balance/Nagging, your unidentified staff is Ordinary if it's at the 900 tier.

OK, you know the type and you've named it, but it's still not ID'd in your game state so you don't know the number of charges. In practice, this isn't really a problem. All staves have 4-7 charges by default, so you know you have at least 4 shots total (unless it was eaten/pecked at by a monster, which drains it). Just be conservative and don't use if when you need it to have another charge and it might not. (I think different staves have different ranges of charges actually, but have never tried to map out the amount. If someone were to map it out, you might be able to tell that (e.g.) it's always safe to use staff type X up to 5 charges.) If you really want to fully ID it to see the number of charges, a mass identification at a shopkeeper is your best bet, though you can of course use many of the other ID methods documented above. A mass ID via shopkeeper may be a great idea even if you don't really need to know the specific number of charges if you're rich or if it's a trivial theft opportunity or if you don't really need the staff anyway (e.g. it only has at most 1-2 charges left). If you have at least one ID'd staff of the same type, you can merge them together via Synthesis and the resulting staff will have all the charges and be identified. Don't risk putting an unidentified staff in last if it could be sealed as then the resulting staff would be sealed, but do put in a blessed staff last to have a blessing on the merged staff. Merging a set of staves where none of them are identified is probably a good idea, but you'll likely lose track of how many charges it has if you don't take good notes, esp. if you find another copy.

If you don't have this staff type in your Item Book yet, it's more important to prioritize identifying it. Again, mass ID via shopkeeper is your best bet, but if you have no other things that are harder to ID left such as bracelets and pots, might as well use an Identify Pot space or possibly an Identify Scroll on it.

I recommend keeping your staves that aren't fully ID'd in your main inventory, in case you get a "lucky day" outcome from reading an Identify Scroll, or in case you hit a Trip Trap and one of them happens to be Balance or Nagging.

If you know it's sealed but don't know it's type, how important is it to ID it? It depends. I wouldn't call any staff critical to a successful run, but a few such as Pinning and Cloning can make big differences. Personally, I carry them around until I can do a mass ID at a shop if I have space, or I occasionally use them as fodder to help ID pots and hope the pot is Identify, Exorcism, or Blessing.

Talismans

Refer to the Talismans page to see all the different items in this category.

Talismans are trivial to identify via use, so its virtually never important to try to identify them any other way. Note that talismans can't have modifiers (can't be blessed, cursed, or sealed), so it's just a question of identifying their type. Find an isolated monster several spaces away (but within 10 spaces so you can reach them with a thrown talisman), a monster that you could beat trivially even it levels up or is otherwise enhanced, and throw a talisman at them. Do this as early as you can, to identify items as early as possible before you need them in a pinch. Since talismans never appear as single items, so you can always name one of them that didn't hit the monster with what you learned, though maybe you'll have to retrieve a missed talisman to name it.

Using a talisman lets you know its type, but won't identify it in your game state. This is completely not a problem, but if it bugs you, you can eventually sell 1 of your talismans (or the entire stack if they're not really useful) to a shopkeeper when you plan to give that shopkeeper an Identify Scroll. If you haven't completed your talismans in your Item Book yet and this is a type of talisman you're not familiar with, spoil yourself with the Talismans page, name it appropriately, then up the priority of fully identifying it within your game. Still the best way to do so is to sell 1 to a shopkeeper when you plan to give the shopkeeper an Identify Scroll and mass identify lots of things. Short of that, put 1 (not the whole stack) into an Identify Pot, keep them in main inventory when you read an Identify Scroll on something more important like a bracelet and hope for a "lucky day" outcome, or just win the run / escape the dungeon to identify your "mystery" talisman.

The only gotcha that might trip you up when identifying a talisman by use is that a Sleep Talisman gives the monster Asleep status, while a Slumber Talisman gives the monster Sound Asleep status. There are other minor name differences as well (e.g. a Fear Talisman gives Afraid Status), but they're easy to figure out.

If you keep missing the monster with your talisman, are you wearing an unidentified bracelet which happens to be an Inaccurate Bracelet? After 3-5 misses in a row, that's strong enough evidence in my book to name the bracelet and unequip it.

Torches, Onigiri, Peaches, Arrows, Stones, Traps, and Others

For all items in these categories, the item type is always known and they cannot be cursed. So the only possible unknown information is whether or not it is sealed. Talismans, Arrows, Stones, and probably Traps as well cannot be sealed either, so there is 100% nothing that can be unknown about them. For the rest of these items, practically speaking, it's not important to determine if they are sealed in advance, so it's best to just try to use them when you need to use them and if they're sealed the seal will be revealed in your game state at that time. Needless to say, do not try to use an item that could possibly be sealed when it is 100% critical that it not be sealed. E.g. maybe don't wait until you're starving and at 1 HP before trying to eat that Onigiri that might be sealed -- go ahead and try to eat it earlier than that. If you have the opportunity to reveal the seal early (e.g. Price Check, Identity Bracelet, Knowledgeable status), by all means use it, but in practice, it's not worth spending anything of value to determine if these items are sealed in advance.

It's rarely important to try to remove seals from these items, but see Blessings, Curses, and Seals for ways to deal with them. (Most of those techniques are focused on curses, though; an Exorcism Pot or Exorcism Scroll is usually your best bet if you really need to recover access to these items. Blessing Pots and Blessing Scrolls tend to be too valuable to use on items in these categories.)

(Open questions: As a peach ripens/rots, will that remove the seal because it's now a different item? Does a sealed Onigiri become an unsealed Grilled Onigiri when you take explosion/fire damage?)