The Neowsletter - May 2026

Hey, Slayers! Demi the CM here with this month's Neowsletter!

Dev Update

We wanted to start off with an update from last month's roadmap, especially for those who only play StS2's main branch. The first big update is that we have moved from a weekly to a bi-weekly cadence for the beta patches. Though we stuck with the weekly cadence during StS1's Early Access period, it was a hard pace to keep up and--this time around--hasn't been giving enough time as we'd like for our now much bigger base of beta branch testers to absorb the changes. This also means that main branch updates will be a bit more infrequent by extension, but hopefully this gives players on both branches more time to provide feedback on the updates.

In terms of our progress on the list of promised features, we've now added the Bestiary to the Compendium on the beta branch! It currently acts as a full list of enemies in the game along with their move animations, though it will eventually include more detailed information about them as well.

Otherwise our recent beta patches have mostly been focused on stability and performance along with some balance changes, the most notable of which was the removal of The Doormaker. The long and short of the reasoning behind this is that, while this boss provided some interesting micro-decision-making situations in his fight, he was a bit more complex than what we want. He's now been replaced on the beta branch with a new boss, Aeonglass, so if you're a Doormaker lover: appreciate him on the main branch while you still can! In honor of his legacy, we wanted to share a little peek at what his earliest iteration looked like...

Lovely early dev art courtesy of one of our programmers, Jose.

For those still waiting for Steam Workshop support and Twitch integrations, rest assured that they are still coming in the near future--apologies that they've taken a bit longer to implement than we initially estimated! The multi-fronted mission to make StS2 as good as it can be continues.

Spire Stats

And now it's time for a look behind the curtain at some Slay the Spire 2 metrics! At the time of writing this, the community has reached a whopping 240,000,000 runs, 60.5 million of which have been wins vs 179.5 million losses. That's a win-rate of 25% overall, which is much better than it sounds. Broken down by Ascension, the average win-rate on A0 is 16%, compared to 9% in StS1. At the highest, A10, the win-rate is about 17%, compared to a very small 3% at A20 in StS1.

In the last issue we broke down the different choices players made in a few select events. This time we wanted to quickly show off the popularity of each character, i.e. what percentage of the total runs each character accounts for...

As you can see right away, the community has been playing the characters almost the same amount, with the stats leaning just a bit in favor of the first couple of characters that are available to players: Ironclad and Silent. We're glad to see all our children getting roughly equal amounts of love!

On the topic of stats...

We also wanted to take the opportunity to highlight a couple of community projects that collect their own stats and provide data, tools, guides, etc. for players: Spiracle and Spire Codex. Be sure to check them out!!

Devour the Tower

The first big community-led StS2 tournament, Devour the Tower, is coming in just a few days on May 25! Featuring 34 streamers, this 4-player co-op competition will be co-casted by FrostPrime and Otzdarva so it's sure to be a good time. The winners of the tournament may even get a special gift, courtesy of Mega Crit. ;) Check out FrostPrime's Twitch for more details!

Merch Madness

Make a Dramatic Entrance with our first ever piece of Makeship x Slay the Spire apparel! Now you too can don the iconic garb of The Silent--in hoodie form! Available to pre-order until May 29 at 5AM PST, so Pounce on this opportunity soon!

Connections Section

Another Neowsletter, another Slay the Spire Connections Puzzle!

Map Masterpieces

As usual, let's check out some of the incredible in-game map creations from our community!

This incredibly adorable drawing of the Regent by AplphaE!

This stunningly detailed illustration of the Necrobinder and Osty by 白板红中碰發财!

These adorably pathetic doodles from salty final boss!

Lastly, this funny drawing involving the Doormaker (RIP) by SnakeFangz!

Community Corner

Thank you to doshiBAP for this month’s gorgeous cover image featuring everyone's favorite Mother of Resurrection! (It was actually a late submission from April but we thought it fit this month's theme too!)

Next month's theme is: Slay the Summer! If you'd like to submit your art for consideration, reminder that it must be submitted to us via [email protected] or in our Discord's fanart channel, have dimensions of 800x450px, feature no text, and leave room for a title!

Now on with some more community highlights:

This series of beautiful illustrations by dk000484!

This super clever graduation cap from lizard--congradulations!!

Last but not least, if you are craving more ways to test your StS2 knowledge than just our monthly Connections puzzle, check out Spiredle!

That's it for this month's issue of the Neowsletter, see you again in June!