This site already has one Binding of Isaac piece: a launch story on Repentance+ Online arriving for PS5, Xbox Series and Switch 2 on 19 November, covering platforms, the $69.99 Switch 2 listing and what four-player co-op includes. That article answers “when can console players play together.” This one answers the question that arrives a week later, once the file is yours: given 34 playable characters and thirteen rows of completion marks each, what order of operations produces the good items soonest without turning the save into a chore?
Nothing below restates it. Where a ranking is my argument rather than a page’s claim, I say so.
What this covers: the full completion-mark set, every character unlock condition, which marks are cheap and which are gated behind timers or donations, and a five-phase order for working a file. Why it matters: marks are not interchangeable. Some unlock items that improve every later run; some cost an hour of resetting. Doing them in the wrong order is the difference between a file that gets finished and one that gets abandoned. Who should care: anyone past their first few hundred hours who wants the strong unlocks rather than a scattershot of half-finished notes, and console players about to start a Repentance+ file from zero.
The baseline this advice assumes
Repentance+ is the newest content layer, and its status is easy to check rather than guess. Steam’s DLC block for Rebirth lists five entries — Afterbirth, Afterbirth+, Repentance, Repentance+ and a soundtrack — and prices Repentance+ as Free. The wiki’s version history runs the Repentance+ build line from v1.9.7.4 on 18 November 2024 to v1.9.7.17 on 20 April 2026, and that April build is the top of the list. So “current” in this article means the PC build line at 1.9.7.17, which is also the build family console players inherit on 19 November.
It is also the only thing Repentance+ adds to a marks file. The wiki’s marks page records that Online added “a new Delirium icon and also blue and purple Completion Marks (only shown online)”: blue for online-only completions, purple for both Hard and online, with the page noting that “online is Hard mode only.” Normal or Greed runs finished online turn the mark blue; Hard or Greedier runs turn it purple. Solo players never see it — a parallel colour layer, not a fourteenth mark.
What a mark actually is
A mark is awarded per boss, per character, and recorded separately for Normal and Hard — the wiki’s table carries two columns of the same mark for that reason. Kill the associated boss with that character and the row fills in. Two quirks matter before you plan anything:
- A mark earned after a transformation counts for the character you became, not the one you started as. The wiki states that “all Completion Marks earned in that run from the moment of death onwards will count towards the new character.”
- Mega Satan is a special case in the other direction: you could always fight him, but the wiki notes that completion marks for defeating him “and their respective unlocks are only available in the subsequent DLC.”
| Mark | Awarded for | Where it happens | Cost (editorial) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Heart | Mom’s Heart or It Lives! | Chapter 4 (Womb, Utero, Scarred Womb) | Cheapest. Most runs hand it over |
| Cross | Isaac | Cathedral | Medium |
| Polaroid | ??? | — | Medium |
| Inverted Cross | Satan | Sheol | Medium |
| Negative | The Lamb | — | Medium |
| Brimstone | Mega Satan | Behind the Golden Gate in the Chest or the Dark Room | Expensive; a whole fight after the floor’s own boss |
| Star | Boss Rush | The Boss Rush room | Timing gate, not a skill gate |
| Hush’s Face | Hush | ??? | Timing gate, then a long fight |
| Cent sign | Ultra Greed | Greed mode | Cheap per attempt: seven floors, no route choice |
| Cent sign (red) | Ultra Greedier | Greedier mode | Locked until 500 coins are donated |
| Wrinkled paper | Delirium | The Void | Chance gate |
| Knife | Mother | Corpse | Expensive |
| Dad’s Note | The Beast | Home | Set-piece: Dogma, four Ultras, then the Beast |
Two cells are deliberately blank. The marks table names its Polaroid and Negative icons after the Chest and the Dark Room, but no page I read states that route in prose, so I am not describing it as though I had read it.
The prerequisite layer: 34 characters, not 17
Repentance adds a Tainted version of every character — the wiki’s character page puts it at Tainted versions “of all 17 characters,” each with their own marks. So a complete file is 34 characters wide, and the Tainted half is not optional: the wiki’s achievement table defines the Death Certificate as earning “all Hard mode Completion Marks for all characters, including tainted ones.”
That means the first real bottleneck is characters, not marks. The 17 base unlocks are:
| Character | Unlock requirement |
|---|---|
| Isaac | None; unlocked by default |
| Magdalene | Hold 7 or more red heart containers at one time |
| Cain | Hold 55 coins at one time |
| Judas | Defeat Satan |
| ??? | Defeat Mom’s Heart 10 times |
| Eve | Take no hearts for two floors in a row |
| Samson | Clear two floors in a row without taking damage |
| Azazel | Make three Deals with the Devil in one run |
| Lazarus | Hold 4 or more soul hearts at one time |
| Eden | Complete Chapter 4 |
| The Lost | Die in a Sacrifice Room while holding the Missing Poster |
| Lilith | Defeat Ultra Greed as Azazel |
| Keeper | Donate 1000 coins to the Greed Donation Machine |
| Apollyon | Defeat Mega Satan |
| The Forgotten | “It’s complicated,” per the wiki |
| Bethany | Mom’s Heart or It Lives! on Hard as Lazarus, without dying |
| Jacob and Esau | Defeat Mother |
The Tainted half all share one condition with seventeen variations of the same trip: open the hidden closet in Home with the Red Key, Cracked Key or Soul of Cain, as the character whose Tainted version you want, and touch the figure inside. Two details govern scheduling. The Red Key itself comes from Mom’s room chest on your first Home visit and is permanently unlocked afterwards, so the closet is a one-time setup. And you cannot batch them: the wiki says the figure “will not change to the corresponding character” if you swap mid-run, which “means the player cannot unlock two Tainted Characters in the same run.” Seventeen closets, seventeen Home runs.
Home is reached by taking Dad’s Note and going through the ascent; the sequence is Dogma, then Ultra Famine, Ultra Pestilence, Ultra War and Ultra Death, then The Beast. That is the Dad’s Note mark, and the longest single set-piece in the file.
Cheap marks, punishing marks
The cost column above is mine, but the gates behind it are documented, and they are what actually decide your calendar:
The two timer marks. The Boss Rush entrance needs Mom beaten in Depths, Necropolis or Dank Depths within 20 minutes, or in Mausoleum or Gehenna within 25. The wiki adds a crueller detail: if you beat Mom inside the window and then duck into a Devil Room, you have to be back in the boss room before the timer expires or the entrance closes. The Hush route has its own clock — the It Lives! page records that the way onward to ??? opens if the fight is beaten in under 30 minutes. Neither is hard in isolation; both are hard to hit on demand with a weak character.
The donation gate. Greedier unlocks once 500 coins are in the Greed Donation Machine. The Keeper needs 1,000 from the same machine, so early coin grinding is unambiguously correct here.
The chance gate. The Void portal only exists once you have beaten Hush at least once, after which the wiki says it “can then appear after every major boss starting with Mom, even if Hush was not defeated in that run,” with the chance rising the deeper the boss and the portal able to appear more than once in a run. Delirium marks are therefore not something you can grind; they are something you bank when a strong run happens to offer one.
The Corpse gate. Mother is “the only boss of the second floor of the Corpse,” and the Corpse opens through the flesh door at the end of Mausoleum or Gehenna II, after the Mausoleum version of Mom. The wiki lists the opening conditions as icon bullets that a text fetch strips out, so I am not restating them from memory; check that page before committing a run.
The cheap ones. Greed is seven floors with a fixed layout and Ultra Greed at the end, so a Greed mark is a bounded, repeatable job rather than a route decision. Heart is cheaper still: almost any run past Mom’s Heart or It Lives! delivers it.
The order I would run it
This part is argument, not citation, so treat it as advice you can reject.
Phase 1 — buy the infrastructure. Get It Lives! on the board (it permanently replaces Mom’s Heart after 11 kills), bank one Hush kill so The Void portal exists, push 500 coins into the Greed Donation Machine, and take one Home trip for the Red Key. Everything after this gets cheaper.
Phase 2 — play everything on Hard from now on. The table keeps Normal and Hard marks in separate columns, so a Normal-mode mark is half a mark — and Godhead, the most useful unlock in the set, asks for Hard-mode marks specifically. Learning a character on Normal is legitimate; doing it for a hundred hours is a mistake you can only undo by replaying the character.
Phase 3 — spend the cheap marks first. Greed and Greedier marks come from short, low-variance runs, so clear them per character while the character is fresh. Two marks per character from a seven-floor mode is the best return in the file.
Phase 4 — schedule the timer marks deliberately. Don’t attempt Boss Rush and Hush on every run; attempt them when a run is ahead of pace by the second chapter, or you are paying a full run for a coin flip.
Phase 5 — Tainted sweep, then the certificate. Seventeen closet trips, then the Tainted half’s own marks. Death Certificate needs all Hard marks on all 34, and Dead God needs every other achievement plus every item, so both sit at the end by definition.
One documented shortcut helps with the Delirium sweeps. The wiki’s marks page notes that holding Clicker with a reliable route to the I AM ERROR room (Teleport 2.0 or Undefined, held alongside a Schoolbag) lets The Void be “repeated endlessly and cleared with every playable character in one run.” That is the wiki describing its own exploit, not a recommendation — but if you are seventeen Delirium marks deep and out of patience, it exists.
Five unlocks worth scheduling around
Ranking unlocks “as the community treats them” would need a poll I do not have, so here is the item-effect argument instead: these five change what every later run can offer, which is why they belong early.
| Unlock | What earns it | What it changes |
|---|---|---|
| Godhead | All 12 Hard-mode marks as The Lost | Homing tears plus a damaging aura, with +0.5 damage |
| Sacred Orb | The Beast as Tainted Lost | Items of quality 0–1 are rerolled automatically; quality 2 has a 33% chance |
| Glitched Crown | The Beast as Tainted Isaac | Pedestals cycle through 5 random items, changing every 0.2 seconds |
| Spindown Dice | Delirium as Tainted Isaac | Rerolls a room’s pedestals by internal ID minus one until a valid item lands |
| Death Certificate | All Hard marks, all characters including Tainted | A one-use activated item whose room only shows items you have unlocked |
Godhead’s requirement is printed on its page as “all 6 / 9 / 10 / 12 Completion Marks on Hard mode as The Lost” — the four numbers are the same requirement at four content depths, and 12 is the Repentance figure. Sacred Orb and Glitched Crown both come from The Beast fight, so the same Home set-piece pays out twice with Tainted Lost and Tainted Isaac, and it is the trip most players postpone.
The Tainted Delirium marks are the cheapest route to a whole class of these: the wiki notes that “most of the tainted character’s Delirium unlocks are their starting ability,” with Tainted Isaac, Tainted Lost, Tainted Keeper and Tainted Eden as the exceptions. Spindown Dice is the clean example, and its page confirms the condition as “Defeat Delirium as Tainted Isaac.”
The honest size of a full file
The wiki never prints a total, so here is arithmetic rather than a stated figure: thirteen mark rows in the table, two of which come from Greed mode, multiplied across 34 characters. That is 442 marks if every character carries the full set, before you count the achievements around them. It is not a target with a deadline.
The two caps are explicit. Death Certificate needs the Hard-mode set for all 34. Dead God needs “all the other achievements (including the 4 Repentance+ achievements)” and every item in the collection page. Those are completion goals in the sense that a museum has a completion goal, and treating them as a to-do list is the fastest way to stop enjoying the game.
The practical version: pick a character, take the cheap marks, take the timer marks when the run allows it, stop when a session stops being fun. The unlocks that matter land long before the file is full.
What I could not confirm
Three things are left out rather than guessed at. The Corpse flesh-door conditions and Mega Satan’s Golden Gate conditions both appear on the wiki as icon bullets, which do not survive a text fetch. And nothing I read addresses whether console and PC saves are shared, so I have not implied that a PC file carries to the 19 November release.