Mycopunk Ouroboros Guide: Rooms, Scrap and Cleansing
Ouroboros is a room-by-room roguelike run. Contraband Scrap only comes from scrapping upgrades inside the run, Contraband Gats are the per-room reward, and Gats buy Cleanse, which pulls a chosen upgrade into your permanent pool. Upgrade rotation level gates still apply inside the mode.
Ouroboros is Mycopunk's roguelike mode, added during Early Access alongside the Ice Floes, and it exists for one reason: target farming. The main game gives you random upgrades from missions. Ouroboros gives you a room-by-room run where the rewards are specific enough to build toward, and a currency that lets you pull a chosen upgrade out of the run and into your permanent collection.
How a run works
You enter a sequence of rooms. Each room gives you Contraband Gats on completion, and the run gets harder as you go. Upgrades you find inside the run are temporary — they live in the run, not in your save — unless you pay to cleanse them out.
The mode has a minimum level requirement since 1.0, so a fresh account cannot use it as a shortcut. That is deliberate: Ouroboros assumes you understand the hex grid and the element system before you walk in.
The two currencies
Contraband Scrap is the run currency. It only comes from scrapping upgrades you find inside the run, and it resets when the run ends. That single rule defines the mode: you are constantly choosing between keeping an upgrade and melting it into resources for something better.
Contraband Gats is the meta currency. You earn some after completing each room, and they persist. Gats are spent on Cleanse, which is how a run upgrade becomes permanent.
| Rarity | Cleanse cost in Contraband Gats |
|---|---|
| Standard | 10 |
| Rare | 35 |
| Epic | 55 |
| Exotic | 180 |
| Oddity | 280 |
The Cleanse option sits in the middle section of the Gear page. That cost table is why Exotic and Oddity upgrades are worth planning around rather than impulse-buying: one Oddity cleanse is worth ten Standard ones.
Level gates still apply
This is the part that catches people out. Ouroboros is a roguelike, but it is not a separate progression system. The upgrade rotation tiers still unlock against your player level, which is derived from the total level of your employees rather than the level of any one employee.
Practical consequence: if you cannot rotate Epic upgrades in the main game, you will not rotate them in Ouroboros either. The mode gives you a different route to the same loot pool, not a bypass around the level requirements.
Farming patterns that work
Target one weapon. Set your focus on the weapon whose grid you are actually building. Focus increases that weapon's upgrade drop rate, which matters much more inside a constrained run than in open missions.
Bank, do not gamble. Scrap the upgrades that do not serve the build. Scrap is the only way to buy the rolls you want later in the run, and hoarding mediocre upgrades starves you of options.
Leave when the run stops paying. Once you have the upgrade you wanted and enough Gats to cleanse it, ending the run is the correct play. The mode rewards exits as much as it rewards depth.
Use it for the Holder achievement. Discovering every upgrade in the game is a long-tail achievement, and Ouroboros is the most controlled environment for seeing new ones, because it feeds you upgrades at a much higher rate than mission rewards.
What Ouroboros is not
It is not a faster way to level employees. Employee XP comes from missions, objectives and side content — the 1.0 patch explicitly added employee XP from side objectives, Incursion rooms and Paid Time Off objectives to the end-of-mission screen, which is where the levelling happens.
It is also not a shortcut past the pattern infusion system. Upgrades you cleanse out still carry whatever pattern they had inside the run, and the 1.0 infusion rules apply to them exactly as they do to anything else. A big Exotic cleansed out of Ouroboros is a big Exotic in your inventory, and it will cost you stats if you shrink it.
Is it worth playing
Yes, with a caveat. If you are still learning the grid, Ouroboros is confusing: too many upgrade choices before you understand what a good shape looks like. If you already know which three upgrades you want for a build, Ouroboros is the only reliable way to get them.
The developers describe the game as a roguelike internally and pushed back on "roguelite" in their own roadmap post, which tells you how seriously they take the mode. Treat it as the endgame activity it is: run it when you have a target, not when you want to relax.
Achievements tied to the mode
Two are directly connected: reaching floor 10 in Incursion is a facility run rather than an Ouroboros room, but both are the same "push deeper" instinct, and The Holder of All Things — discover every upgrade — is realistically an Ouroboros project. Both sat at 0.0% when this page was checked, which is the clearest possible signal that they are long-term goals rather than launch-week content.
Last checked 2026-10-21 against the Roadmap to 1.0 post, the 1.0 patch notes and a Steam Community guide documenting the Ouroboros cleanse costs.
