basic knowledge
Endgame

Running Delirium — Fog, Shards, and Simulacrum

Basic KnowledgePublishedUpdated

Delirium was restructured heavily in 0.5. Go in expecting the old “kill monsters to fill a reward bar” model and the encounter won’t make sense. This page covers how to run the mechanic; spending what drops out of it is covered in Liquid Emotions.

The progress bar is not a reward meter

Breaking a mirror spreads the fog and puts a progress bar on screen. That bar is not a reward meter — it shows how deep into the fog you are and how long until it clears. The start is the mirror; the end is the map boss. The old “kill monsters to fill a reward bar” model is gone.

  • Follow the direction the fog is moving and it always leads to the map boss.
  • Hitting certain depths spawns coloured mirror shards; walking into them triggers extra encounters. Sources disagree on what each colour means — only “red leads to the Loathsome Mire” is agreed on, so treat other colour claims with suspicion.
  • Map bosses are always 100% Delirious, and they’re the only source of Potent emotions. If you’re farming emotions, you have to push to the boss.
  • Staying out of the fog too long ends the encounter. The commonly cited window is 4 seconds, though that figure isn’t restated in the 0.5 official notes.

Delirium monsters got considerably weaker across 0.5.2 and 0.5.3 — unique toughness halved, and damage bonuses for normal, magic, and rare monsters reduced. If you wrote Delirium off as too tanky in an earlier patch, it plays differently now.

Farming emotions efficiently

  1. Run the maps around The Withered Willow (south-west of your Atlas start). They all contain Delirium and award Delirium Atlas points.
  2. Take the Atlas notable “I know your childhood fears…” — 25% increased Liquid Emotions dropped by monsters, and a 20% chance for them to be Ancient. Effectively mandatory if you want Ancient emotions.
  3. Instil up to three emotions on a Waystone. Duplicates stack.
  4. If you’re building toward a Simulacrum, put Liquid Despair on the Waystone (30% increased Splinter stack size).
  5. Use three Delirium Tablets together to reach pre-0.5.3 fog scaling. 0.5.3 halved base fog scaling but made multiple tablets scale it multiplicatively.

Trial of Madness and Simulacrum

Completing Delirium mirrors can spawn Grand Mirrors on a nearby Atlas map, which duplicate that map’s boss. Kill both bosses and you unlock the Trial of Madness. That spreads a fog bank from a map of your choice; every map inside starts at 10% Delirious, and killing rare monsters and map bosses raises Deliriousness across the whole bank. At 100% the Simulacrum unlocks, and you can keep pushing to 200%.

Simulacrum itself changed in 0.5:

  • It is a 7-wave encounter. Not 15.
  • Entry works differently. There’s no Realmgate activation — you combine 300 Simulacrum Splinters into a Simulacrum and apply it to an endgame area that is at least 100% Delirious. A fog bank reaching 100% also spawns one (since 0.5.3 that happens at 100%, not when the fog is first spread).
  • Since 0.5.3 the inside starts at 100% Delirious and scales to 200%.
  • 0.5.3 added shard choices between waves, letting you trade danger for reward.
  • Completing one grants a key to the Delirium pinnacle boss. Sources spell that boss’s name differently, so it isn’t stated here.

Omniphobia and Kosis still exist, but in 0.5 they show up largely as shard-triggered encounters inside maps rather than fixed wave bosses. No reliable source documents their exact wave placement now, so don’t plan around a specific wave.