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Prismatic Beret: Overview

June 7, 2025 // IOTM Overview

For this month’s IOTM, we get a hat. This makes sense, given that the current challenge path is primarily a chapeau-focused affair. June’s hat is a beret, a style of hat that is actually quite a bit more common in the kingdom than I realized. We have berets of the following flavors: bark, bauxite, brimstone, Elf Guard red/white, raspberry, seasonal, and silent. Since it’s Pride month, the prismatic beret is going to massively increase the number of accessible colors beret-lovers can plop on their head, as the item’s color range adds 42 additional berets. But will these myriad colors help you ascend faster? The answer is yes — let’s find out how!

General Summary

The prismatic beret is a hat. The hat gives you access to three skills (busking, boasting, and blasting), as well as a truly bonkers quantity of enchantments. The beret’s enchantments are all tied to the calculation P = HAT POWER + SHIRT POWER + PANTS POWER. In my view, the easiest way to understand the menu of enchantments is to hew back to the beret’s bonus Damage Absorption. The beret’s DA is BDA = P / 5. Every other enchantment increases as the BDA increases, like so:

There is a soft cap on the value of P at 1100 power; after 1100 power, additional P is added at the discounted rate of of P ^ 0.8, slowing the enchantment gains. P is subject to several boosters — Tao of the Terrapin (which doubles hat/pants power) is counted for this equation, as is the effect “Hammertime”, an effect from 2011’s Tome of Clip Art that adds +300% to your pants power.

For the three skills:

Speedrun Applicability

Let’s get the enchantments out of the way first. In a speedrun, most of these enchantments are relatively unhelpful. There are a few small niche benefits you can glean from them. In rough order of power:

Beyond that, you get a bit of survivability; similar to the June Cleaver’s combat simplification, this will have you rolling into fights with a bunch of extra damage and a bit of extra DA, which is cute. The Boast/Blast skills are similar here; a neat little gob of prismatic damage or small deleveling might help a low-shiny adventurer in some hard fights.

If these were the only things this IOTM did, this would be a pretty awful IOTM. Luckily, there’s one last thing, and it’s the crux of why this IOTM is going to be a useful player in the next 2.5 years of speed ascending.

We Must, We Must, We Must Increase Our Busk

… and, yes, of course: it’s busking. It makes us feel good, or so I’m told. For the next few years, it’ll probably make speedrunners feel crazy.

The way busking works is pretty wild. In a nutshell, it’s an out-of-combat skill that generates a paltry amount of meat, along with 10 turns each of a bunch of effects. The number of effects you get is based on the overall P used to derive the rest of the hat’s enchantment amounts — the higher the P, the more effects you get. The effects are from a pool similar to the ittah bittah hookah and Crazy Horse effect pools. If you are unfamiliar with how these pools operate, here are some basic rules:

In addition to these general rules, there are a lot of otherwise positive effects that are ineligible due to TPTB manually declaring the effects to be nohookah (the internal game tag for an effect ineligible for these positive random effect generators). Some effects are ineligible because they’re -too- good — for example, do-it-all effects like Shadow Waters. Some are ineligible because they only come from very specific IOTM sources and are not meant to be accessed without those sources and the associated resource tradeoff from those sources — for example, the +rollover adventure effects from the April Shower shield food and booze. And some are just not eligible due to random toggles unknowable by man, like Beefy, a +1 prismatic resist effect.

If the effects were truly random, this IOTM would be a frustrating roll of the dice every single run. Instead, this IOTM is a puzzle to be solved in each and every run, because the effects you get are not random. They aren’t predictable through some easy heuristic, but the noble spades of the Ascension Speed Society (namely Semenar & Phillammon, with assistance from Beefy & The Hunters) figured out how to crack the random number seed and solve the derivation of your busk effects. There are now multiple ways to access your menu of busks:

Having covered the basics of busking, let’s get to the heart of busking’s strategic value — the actual effects you can generate in a run.

Busking: Notable Singular Effects

First, we’ll start out with a few interesting turnsaving effects that may be worth busking for.

Busking: Notable Enchantments

Having covered the singular effects with interesting non-enchantment boosts, let’s cover a few key enchantments that may be worth busking for, alongside a few of the best busk options for each.

In addition to these six enchantments, there are two other useful enchantments that bear mentioning even though there aren’t many actual options for them:

Busking: Considerations & Routing

Having covered a few of your busk targets, it’s worth discussing a few important considerations that this IOTM introduces.

Firstly, busking gets better the more busk options you have. In some theoretical ascension where you only had one pair of pants and no shirts, you’d be locked in to only 2 different configurations (beret + pants, beret + no pants) for your 5 buffs, which (probably) wouldn’t have any of these effects in it. The more pants and shirts you can acquire, the wider range of P values you can achieve with your equipment, which means you have more and more options of what to grab. Increasing this optionality is critical to get the most out of your busks.

Secondly, this IOTM dramatically increases the value of Tao of the Terrapin; paths with Tao and without Tao will feel completely different, as they will have different available suites of effects from your 5 daily busks. In general, busks of a higher power have a better chance of being “good” than busks of a lower power. This is due to simple math — if you have, say, 10% of the effect pool that helps you, you’re more likely to draw one of those effects if you have more chances at drawing them. If you haven’t permed Tao, you probably want to. (Also, this probably goes without saying, but you should be perming Torso Awareness as well; that opens up a TON of new busk options.)

Thirdly, this IOTM adds a lot more crafting pressure than previously existed in speedruns, and adds new value to many unused pieces of the base game. When it comes to producing busks, the more shirts and pants you can generate to modify the P value that produces your buffs, the larger universe of busk options you’ll have available to you. To wit, here is a table going over nearly all in-run accessible shirts and pants. (Note that we only included one option per power level; we tried to include the most accessible at each level!)

table of pants and shirts accessible in-run

As you can see, differentially powered pants are significantly easier to access than shirts, with the only two shirts available on turn zero being the astral shirt (50) and futuristic shirt from the Wardrobe-o-Matic (100). There are a bunch of shirts you can craft using Armorcraftiness, however, with the White Snakeskin Duster (45), Demonskin Jacket (80), and the yak anorak (115) perhaps the most interesting three. There are also some you may just want to grab, like the bronze breastplate (105).

Pants-wise, there are a bunch of power levels you can get from smithing as well — specifically, the barskin loincloth (25) and basic meat pants (40) open up new power levels. The Armory in Market Square gives you access to 20, 30, 50, 80, 110, and 140 as soon as you have the meat (which, in all cases, double when you have Tao, or quintuple when you have Tao + Hammertime).

Still — if you need to craft in order to get a specific power for a buff you want, you’ll want to make sure you can do it for free. In the case of the loincloth, the meat pants, and a frilly skirt, that can be done simply by choosing a friendly Degrassi Knoll sign in your ascension; Smith Innabox can freely create those two craftables, and the skirt can be snagged in the store. For the other Armorcraftiness entries, you will either need to busk up Craft Tea or Inigo’s (as previously discussed) or snag crafting plans from the Leprecondo.

None of this is impossible to juggle, but all of it creates a lot more routing pressure around snagging the shirts and pants you need to properly optimize your busks. It also creates an ever-widening universe of busk availability. As an example, let’s say that you grab all of the easily available items in the table above, along with a yak anorak and a bronze breastplate. That’s 4 shirts and 12 pants. Counting the possibility of not wearing shirts/pants, that gets you (roughly) 65 different options for P. Add in hammertime, and that’s 130 different options. Every additional pant you get adds 10 more options for P, and every additional shirt gets you 13-15. And it gets even more complicated — that’s only for one busk. Because each busk has a different seed, the 130 options for one seed becomes roughly 650 options over 5 seeds. (Math nerds: yes, this is the upper limit, I know.)

That’s a lot! Too much, perhaps. So let’s try and make it a bit easier.

Busking: Example 2025 Standard Busks

Having covered singular buffs, enchantments, and the various considerations one might think about when selecting their targeted busks, we are now going to do three levels of example standard busks, with increasing complexity. Our hope is that the first level is good enough for a speed ascender who just wants an easy, straightforward suite, the second level gives you a bit more to chew on, and the third level gives you an intro to HAMMERTIME.

For this set of busks, we want the simplest usage possible. We are ignoring the existence of Hammertime and are just giving you one busk per cast that should be generically useful and good in one specific situation that will save a decent number of turns. To try and avoid routing confusion, these are all meant to be used (essentially) on top of each other.

  1. YAK ANORAK + ANTIQUE GREAVES = +100% meat
  2. NO SHIRT + UNION SCALEMAIL PANTS = +80% meat, +40% item
  3. NO SHIRT + TEARAWAY PANTS = 60% meat
  4. YAK ANORAK + ANTIQUE GREAVES = 100% meat, 90% item
  5. NO SHIRT + TEARAWAY PANTS = 50% meat, 25% item

If done during nuns, this gets you (in total) 390% meat and 155% item drop; that massive gob of +meat will likely get you way below 10 turns on nuns, so the item% can be used after you finish nuns on any of the item% targets discussed above. Pretty good stuff!

Having covered one simple suite, we’re now going to give a selection of the best busks for different situations and goals, with 3 different “goals” to achieve per busk slot. Please note that these power levels are all assuming that you have permed Tao of the Terrapin, as discussed earlier.

And finally, if you want to experience Hammertime, likely in a 1-day run, get yourself 540% meat drop for nuns alongside +5 turns generated with…

2025 In-Standard Synergies

In addition to those in-standard synergies, there is one out-of-standard synergy that bears mention:

Overall Rating

We rate the prismatic beret a tier 2 IOTM. I struggled a lot with what to rate this one. It’s genuinely pretty hard to rank! The non-busk uses are worth fractional turns at best, so that can be mostly ignored for the purposes of ranking the IOTM. Busking represents a massive amount of extra item and meat drop, and is flexible enough to help you in a lot of different areas. It opens up your wishes for more items snagged with the Monkey’s Paw and interesting edge case uses for your pocket wishes. If you use the Hammertime suite noted above, or the other simple “item/meat” configuration, busking represents about 4-5 turns saved; if you’re a bit more clever and use it judiciously to solve a bunch of different tasks, you can inch it closer to 6-7 turns saved. In my head, I tend to think of wishes as worth “roughly a 1-2 turns” — due to the shorter duration on these effects and the (frankly) annoying resource tradeoffs you have to make to generate them, I think it’s more apt to consider busks as closer to a flat 1 turn saved, with maybe two that edge higher than that. That lands us around 6 turns saved in expectation — on the edge of a T1 IOTM, but not quite there.

Article contributed by Captain Scotch