How does the Equipment Drone work?

You repair it by handing over the equipment you are holding rather than paying gold. It then activates that equipment on its own, roughly five times as often as you could, because it carries hidden cooldown reduction that drops its equipment cooldown to about 20.6% of normal.

Can I get my equipment back from the Equipment Drone?

No. Once it has been handed over it cannot be swapped, and if the drone is destroyed the equipment is gone — repairing it again means giving up another piece.

What does a Cleansing Pool give you?

It exchanges one lunar item you are holding for a Pearl, with an 80% chance of a plain Pearl and a 20% chance of an Irradiant Pearl. You need at least one lunar item in your inventory for it to do anything.

Is a Shrine of the Mountain worth activating?

It is a bet rather than a bonus. Each activation gives the teleporter boss roughly twice the spawn budget and adds another reward, so it pays off when your build is already strong and punishes you when it is not.

Do interactables cost anything to use?

Some do. The cost can be gold, lunar coins, a portion of your health, or a specific item or piece of equipment — which items and equipment fall into that last category is different from the ordinary chest economy.

Interactables & Shrines

What counts as an interactable

Interactables are the objects a stage places for you to use. They cannot be moved, most of them can only be used once per visit, and some of them charge you before they will work. The running theme is that a run is mostly a series of small trades, and the interactable is the other side of the trade.

Confirmed by official sources for the mechanics described below. Where an interactable can be paid for, the currency is not always gold — the full list of things a machine will accept is worth knowing before you spend a run holding one.

Gold
Lunar Coins
Health
A held item
A piece of equipment

The Equipment Drone

This is the interactable that catches people out, because it is the one drone you cannot buy with gold. You repair it by handing over the equipment you are currently holding, and it then uses that equipment itself — automatically, with no input from you.

The reason it is worth the trade is a detail the game never tells you: the drone spawns carrying hidden items that cut its equipment cooldown to around 20.6% of the normal value, so it activates your equipment nearly five times as often as you could from the same item slot. In practice that makes a piece of equipment it can use worth roughly five copies of itself.

The handover is permanent. Once an item has been given to the drone it cannot be swapped back, and if the drone dies the equipment dies with it. Repairing it again costs a second piece of equipment.
It carries nothing else. The drone has no inventory beyond the equipment and no skills of its own — its behaviour is otherwise a Gunner Drone's, with equipment firing taking the place of the primary. Items that trigger on-hit effects do very little for it.
Give it equipment that does not need timing. Because you cannot choose when it fires, an equipment whose value depends on hitting a window is wasted on it. The equipment worth handing over is the kind that is useful whenever it goes off.
Weigh it against your own run. The drone does not inherit your other items, so donating a strong piece of equipment can be a net loss if you are already carrying a lot of damage. The drone shines when a run has equipment to spare.

The Cleansing Pool

A Cleansing Pool behaves like a 3D printer pointed at your lunar items: it takes one lunar item you are holding, including lunar equipment, and hands back a Pearl. The split is 80% for a plain Pearl and 20% for an Irradiant Pearl, and it will not react unless you are actually carrying at least one lunar item.

That makes it the cleanest way to get rid of a lunar drawback you have decided you cannot live with. It is also the reason some runs hold onto a lunar item they have no intention of using — the pool is the exit.

Two limits are worth knowing before you plan around it. It does not appear everywhere: it only spawns in a handful of environments rather than all of them, and it is absent from Simulacrum and from runs where the relevant artifact is active. Because stage layouts are generated, you cannot count on one being on the stage you are standing on — see the environment list for how procedural spawn seeds distribute interactables dynamically.

The Shrine of the Mountain

This is the interactable that exists purely to raise the stakes. Activating it makes the teleporter event harder by spawning additional bosses, promoting bosses into elites, or simply adding more of them, and the mechanism behind that is a doubling: each activation gives the teleporter boss roughly 100% more spawn credits to spend.

The reward side is why people still do it. Each activation also adds a reward to the teleporter's drop, so the shrine trades a harder fight for more items. Whether that is a good deal depends entirely on whether your build is already ahead of the curve — and because the credits go to the director rather than to a specific boss, a single large boss can be replaced by a crowd of smaller ones.

It never appears on the third stage of a loop, so it is a stage 1, 2 or 4 decision.
It stops being usable once the teleporter begins charging, so the decision has to be made before you start the event.

Where the newest interactables live

Patch 1.21 added six new interactables with Hallowed Concepts, and one of them is the shrine at the centre of the Acolyte unlock chain. If you are looking for the Shrine of Descent specifically, it is documented inside that chain rather than here, because its behaviour only matters in that context.

The Acolyte unlock chain · Everything else in the expansion.

What is still being collected

The complete shrine list with what each one does, since this page currently covers the ones with documented mechanics.
The names of the six environments a Cleansing Pool can appear in, and the spawn rates reported for them.
Whether any pre-existing interactable was rebalanced by patch 1.21 beyond the shrines covered on the patch page.

Frequently asked

How does the Equipment Drone work?: You repair it by handing over the equipment you are holding rather than paying gold. It then activates that equipment on its own, roughly five times as often as you could, because it carries hidden cooldown reduction that drops its equipment cooldown to about 20.6% of normal.
Can I get my equipment back from the Equipment Drone?: No. Once it has been handed over it cannot be swapped, and if the drone is destroyed the equipment is gone — repairing it again means giving up another piece.
What does a Cleansing Pool give you?: It exchanges one lunar item you are holding for a Pearl, with an 80% chance of a plain Pearl and a 20% chance of an Irradiant Pearl. You need at least one lunar item in your inventory for it to do anything.
Is a Shrine of the Mountain worth activating?: It is a bet rather than a bonus. Each activation gives the teleporter boss roughly twice the spawn budget and adds another reward, so it pays off when your build is already strong and punishes you when it is not.
Do interactables cost anything to use?: Some do. The cost can be gold, lunar coins, a portion of your health, or a specific item or piece of equipment — which items and equipment fall into that last category is different from the ordinary chest economy.