Perks
Perks are passive abilities that you can obtain as you descend deeper into the Mountain, augmenting you and your abilities or granting completely new abilities. There are also certain Transformations that can occur by combining certain perks together.
A set of three perks are offered on an altar near the exit of each Holy Mountain that you visit. Upon selecting one, the other two perks disappear.
Perk Rerolling
Perks can be rerolled using the 'perk reroll' structure - resembling a set of weighing scales - located at the exit of the Holy Mountain. This replaces any perks on the altar with a new draw from the pool.
The perk reroll initially costs 200 
and will double in price every time it is used (200 , 400 , 800 , and so on). Rerolling only affects perks that are currently on the altar and will not spawn new perks if a perk has already been taken. Rerolling will pull from the entire pool of perks, allowing for the possibility of collecting multiple instances of the same perk, aka perk stacking.
Rerolling will not affect the price of previously visited holy mountains: rerolling once raises the price from 200 to 400 , but the price of all previously visited holy mountains remains 200 . For example:
- Player has visited two holy mountains (A and B) without claiming a perk. Both holy mountains start at a reroll cost of 200 .
- Player then rerolls perks in B for 200 (cost in B goes up to 400 ).
- Player then goes back to A and is able to reroll for 200 (cost in A goes up to 800 , but the cost in B remains at 400 ).
Rerolling is normally limited by the fact that it is only possible for you to possess 2.15 billion (for a max of 23 rerolls). At this point your gold display shows ∞, but you will still be unable to purchase the next reroll.
Reroll Breaking
It is possible to break the reroll machine, by visiting at least 39 machines in Parallel Worlds without re-rolling most of them, and then looping back to re-visit and roll each of them once. This will roll the cost of rerolling above the breaking point of 54 trillion. Total reroll cost is at least 39*200 =7800 . Do not reroll after 6400 if you plan to do the break: total reroll cost will be 39*6400 =249600 , which can be taken from a Gold room.
Once completed, the statues will start to display only single-digits. This situation will last for another few hundred rerolls (one reported at "978"), before the machines are fixed back to an unaffordably large amount.
Breaking the reroll machine is sometimes used for extra-long runs, or to pursue various Achievement Pillars or other goals. You can keep track of which parallel world you're on by opening the 'player' file in a text editor and dividing the x coordinate by 35,840 (32,768 if in ng+). This is useful to keep track of how many of the 39 reroll machines you still need to visit.
One technique is to dig directly downwards from a reroll machine, causing it to drop out of "range" of the Holy Mountain (a little bit further than just out of view). This way, if you take a perk and the rest vanish, but while the machine is out of detection-range, then the machine will still have its price attached and can be rerolled later. This allows you to save all the reroll machines AND take a few priority perks during your first visit. It speeds up the process a lot, as any perks with a stack limit can be removed from the pool, and you can take any Extra Perk or Perk Lottery instances that you encounter on the first lap.
The reroll machine still works from around the middle of the biome and will be able to reroll any still-loaded perks from that distance. Additionally, if you happen to find a Leggy Mimic, the Leggy Mutation perk can also be rerolled if a reroll machine is close enough.
See also: Video guides by Nymphspyre and FuryForged on YouTube.
Perk Stacking
Many of the perks in Noita, including Essences, can be repeatedly stacked by means of going to Parallel Worlds or making use of the reroll altar. Unstackable perks will be removed from the perk pool when first picked. Damage immunity perks that overlap can both be picked, but stacking the immunity will have no effect (for example, Oil Blood confers the same immunity as the Fire Immunity perk).
The behaviour of stackable perks varies. Some examples of stacking behaviour are:
- For the Essences or Electricity, stacking means increasing the rate of activation of the perk.
- Lukki Mutation will grant additional length to the limbs
- Permanent Shield grants an extra layer of the shield per stack
- Stainless Armour and Perk Lottery will logarithmically get more effective
- Other perks, such as Gold is Forever, will have no stacking effect.
The full list of stacking effects is yet to be determined. While some perks have a set stack limit, all other stackable perks have a default stack limit of 128.
Normal Perks
These are perks that can be found in Holy Mountains.
Special Perks
These perks are special in that they cannot be found in Holy Mountains and must be obtained via other means. The Curse of Greed is not part of the Progress screen.
Retired Perks
These perks are no longer in the game, however most of their effects can be replicated via modding or file editing. Some of their effects, however, still exist in the form of newer/updated perks
Essences
The Essences are special perks that are not in the normal perk rotation, and instead only spawn in specific locations on the map. Seeking and handling Essences can be quite dangerous. They are also the only perks unable to be removed by the Nullifying Altar
Nullifying Altar
The Nullifying Altar is a secret room where you can remove your perks, it is also the only known way to remove perks without modding or file editing.
Perk Deck
Each seed generates its own listing of perks which varies a little in size, which determines which order the perks will appear in within each Holy Mountain, and during rerolls. Common sizes for the perk deck range from the minimum of 103 (every perk available from a Holy Mountain being present exactly once) up to around 116. The average perk deck has 108 perks in it. Maximum for perk deck length is 122 found only 15 times among all possible seeds.
When generating the initial list of perks, every possible perk in the normal list is added to the deck somewhere between once and its Pool Max value (max_in_perk_pool in the perk scripts), decided randomly. Non-stackable perks and those with stackable_is_rare set are always only added once, even if they have a different max_in_perk_pool value, giving them an effective Pool Max value of 1 also.
Then the deck is further adjusted to remove duplicate perks that occur too close together in the deck. By default the minimum distance between duplicate perks is 4, though some perks have specific distances set.
Additionally, perks that are collected will modify the list accordingly; collecting non-stackable perks will immediately remove them from the deck, and collecting a perk with a Max Stack value (stackable_maximum in the perk scripts) at least that many times will also remove it from the deck from that point on.
Trivia
- A reroll station can be brought to any location where there are perks (using Giga Black Holes or a similar method) and used to reroll perks.
- A reroll machine can be brought to the Nullifying Altar and used to reroll your perks. However, after doing so, the rerolled perks will be treated as if they're in the Holy Mountain and all other perks that have been rerolled within a certain radius will disappear after use, this can be prevented with enough Perk Lottery (this effect also extends to Special Perks, however they rarely spawn near other perks, so this would likely go unnoticed if attempted).
- A reroll machine can be brought to the ceiling of a lower Holy Mountain and used to reroll once at a (potentially) lower cost. Care must be taken to avoid dropping the machine all the way through the ceiling (or to use another method to keep active machines separate) to be able to select the desired reroll cost. Like other relocation tricks, the machine must not have been deactivated by selecting a nearby perk.
Tier lists
Sometimes people enjoy creating Tier lists. There is a complete list for all 106 normal perks in the final game at Tiermaker.com.
Lists often differ based on experience levels or intended audience (newcomers vs pros), or playstyle (speedrunners vs winstreakers vs long-runners).
Some examples from regular Twitch streamers include: Aliasbot, Daa130 (winstreak oriented), DarkViperAU, Dadwrestler, DunkOrSlam
For long runs the following image tierlist/guide exists as a guideline for what perks to pick, how many of them to pick, and the rationale behind the choices.
Search YouTube for more, plus details on their perspectives and reasoning.
See Also
History
- Dec 19 2019: Removed Mystery Eggplant perk.