Black Rose Garden: Overview

October 22, 2026 // IOTM Overview

For October’s IOTM, TPTB have released a lovely new garden with quite the unique hook: here, you navigate a three-dimensional mazelike environment that adds rooms with each day of growth. It’s fun! But is it good? That, dear readers, is the question I intend to answer. So let’s get to it.

General Summary

The Black Rose Garden is – surprise! – a garden. Clicking on it spawns a first-person maze, similar in functional form to the sorts of environments from DOOM or Wolfenstein or other maze-crawling games from the 90s. The first-person maze contains three general points of interest:

• MONSTERS: you can start a free fight with a random selection from 5 monsters; there are three types of statue monsters (flamingos, hollow-eyed angels, and garden gnomes), rose golems, or rose garden ghosts. The statues all drop statuary chunks, the golem will (rarely) drop a black thorn key, and the ghost will (vanishingly rarely, and never before the 4th day of a run) drop a black rose pentacle. All are scaling fights.
• CONSUMABLES: you can encounter various consumable items; there is a black rose bowl (2 fullness, 4.5 adv/full), black garden rosé (2 drunkenness, 4.5 adv/drunk), and clove incense (1-toxicity spleen item; gives 50 turns of +200% myst).
• FOUNTAIN: you can encounter a fountain of blood where you can exchange currency for an effect. If you toss in 1 meat, you will get 50 turns of Black Rosacea (+50 HP, +25 MP). If you toss in 1000 meat, you will get 50 turns of Black Rose Guardin’ (+50% init). If you toss in a black rose pentacle (via a rose garden ghost), you will get one charge of Lucky! and 50 turns of One Coin in a Fountain (+5 fam weight, +5 fam XP). You can only exchange currency in a given fountain once per day.
• CHESTS: you can encounter a locked chest. Using the black thorn key (via a rose golem), you can open the chest for either a piece of black rose gear (all giving minor stat boosts + passive damage to enemies) or, rarely, a pressed black rose (a daypass for the garden itself).

The garden itself is a procedurally generated maze; it is seeded random, so you can predict what monsters and points of interest will exist in a given path/class combination. On day 1, the maze will have four points of interest: two monsters, and two out of the consumable/fountain/chest¹ mix. With another day of growth, the monsters from D1 will regenerate, and the garden will add one new monster and one new consumable, fountain, or chest.

For quick access to all of the garden’s options during an ascension, you can use the tab key on your keyboard to bring up a choice-adventure-esque loadout of all the options you can interact with in the current maze.

Speedrun Applicability

I want to caveat all of this by saying I would highly recommend playing the garden maze. It’s quite cute and fun. It is perhaps the most ambitious KoL graphical project TPTB have ever done, and feels much more like an offshoot of West of Loathing or Shadows of Loathing than our silly old stick figure game. It’s very pretty and neat and fundamentally cool as hell.

Now, having said all that…

On its face, this is a somewhat disappointing haul from a garden.

• The fountain buffs are useful; in particular, I would reckon that the shot of Lucky! + the familiar XP buff is probably worth a black rose pentacle pull in softcore. The 50% initiative buff is expensive (1000 meat for 50 turns?), but perfectly cromulent and will be more important next year once we lose about 450% worth of initiative boosters from the 2024 class of IOTMs.
• The consumables are nothing of note; the spleen item is never going to be worth shoving in your spleen and the food/booze are (at 4.5 adv/full) essentially just filler items that are easily replaced by other items you find passively in a speedy run.
• The chest is useless; you almost certainly aren’t getting a black thorn key in-run, and the actual equipment is minimally useful even if you get it. A little bit of passive damage and a 30% stat boost is just not much to write home about. The pressed roses are more interesting, as you can use them to get an entirely separate entrance to the garden with new free fight monsters and new points of interest; however, they are vanishingly rare, so the likelihood of you finding them in-run even if you happened to luck into a thorn key is minuscule.

If that was all the garden did, this would be a short post. But we are missing one important thing: the statuary chunks generated from the statue-type monsters in the garden. These chunks are usable, and using specific quantities will generate new items:

The bed is among the best beds in Standard right now, and will be better next year in the aftermath of the Sept-Ember Censer; after all, we currently are largely using frigid air mattresses to increase the gains from our Mmm-Brr mouthwash, and the stone roses will just give us a small boost of direct stats next year in replacement.² The familiar is pretty minimally useful, but it is a familiar, so it’s a beautiful friend that we will all treasure forever. The food is meaningfully good, I think; a 5-fullness food at 5.5 adventures per fullness is reasonably solid as filler food, and will help us generate easy turnbloat for 1-day runs for the next few years.

But better than all of that: a free kill! Three chunks for one free kill (at 11 usable per day) means that 33 turns with the Sword of S-Words at >235% item drop will get you 11 free kills. That’s an awesome return on investment for your familiar turns.

So. The best part of this IOTM isn’t even a direct point of interest in the garden; it’s the capability to generate free kills with other synergized IOTMs. Very cool. However, this does leave a bit up to seeding. Because the garden’s points of interest are seeded random, some classes get statues and others do not. To wit: in standard, you get two statues on D1 from SC, TT, SA, and AT; that means you do not get statues if you are playing as a Pastamancer or a Disco Bandit.³ This points to one funny fact about this IOTM: you can get most of the value if you spend a single summon. That is, if you use your Chest Mimic to summon up one of the statues, you can set up your Sword of S-Words to copy it without ever setting foot in the garden. A summoned statue won’t be free, since statues are only free inside the garden. But you’d still be spending 1 turn to get 11 free kills, which puts you at 10 turns saved per day. Well worth the effort if you have an S-Word.

A Sidebar on Summons

Given the note about summoned monsters⁴, it would behoove us to take a quick sidebar to think about the implications of summoning up a statue monster. In a world with summons, you could very reasonably argue that the garden itself is only worth a single turn plus the value of a single summon, since you can just summon in your needed statue. However, I believe that is an overly reductive view of this IOTM’s value. Having both the Chest Mimic and the Peridot in the same standard set has gotten us used to having a nigh infinite number of summons and ways to selectively encounter the monster you specifically need. This is in contrast to historical norms, where summons were (relatively) rare and valuable. To wit, all released standard-restricted summon sources:

• 2015’s Chateau Mantegna suite allows you to store a monster in a painting (effectively 1/day)
• 2016’s Time-Spinner allows you to summon 3/day, but limited to monsters you’ve already encountered in zones you can access
• 2017’s genie bottle allows you to summon 3/day
• 2020’s Cargo Cultist Shorts allow you to summon 1/day
• 2020’s Comprehensive Cartography Compendium allows you to pick any accessible monster within a given zone via Map the Monsters, 3/day
• 2022’s Combat Lover’s Locket allows you to summon 3/day, but only once per monster, for some reason
• 2023’s Book of Facts allows you to summon 3/day, via generation of pocket wishes
• 2024’s Chest Mimic allows you to summon 11/day, using 100 familiar XP per egg
• 2025’s crepe paper parachute cape lets you summon any eligible monster from your last visited zone, once every 50 turns
• 2025’s Peridot lets you summon any eligible monster within every accessible zone, once per day

Year by year, these add up to the following available daily summons in each standard meta⁵:

We are about to lose 11 summons per day from the Chest Mimic, leaving us without any way to summon arbitrary monsters to speak of. I suspect we will regain our summons at some point in 2027; however, it is unlikely we will have access to the sheer volume of “grab any monster you want” summons in standard that we’ve been blessed with in the last 3 years. This volume of summons is, frankly, historically bizarre.

All this is to say: I am skeptical we will return to a world where “use a summon on it” costs zero real value for a speedster. If we end up where I expect we’ll land – that is, a world with anywhere from 1 to 4 easily available summons – being able to naturally encounter the statue monsters will be critically important. It’ll certainly be important enough to warrant a summon in a situation where you can’t access the statue monster (as it can be transformed into a savings of 10 turns), but being able to bypass that and fax something else of worth provides real value. After all: the first few summons can save 3-4 turns apiece, so saving that resource can be quite valuable to an enterprising speedrunner.

2026 In-Standard Synergies

• As previously noted, there’s a ton of synergy with the Sword of S-Words (2026). There’s no real way to generate statuary chunks at scale from the garden, as you only get 2-3 fights per day in an actual speedrun. But smuggling chunks from your S-Word allows you to get the 11 tombstones per day you need to get the 11 free fights available here. It’s sick!
• This probably will only be meaningful in strange combinations of unrestricted IOTM sets, but there is obvious synergy between the homeowner’s loam (which gives you +1 level of garden growth) from the Interesting Coin (2026) and this IOTM. I imagine there aren’t a -ton- of paths where you get a statue monster on D2 but not on D1, but in cases like that, there’s a semi-reasonable case to spend your coins on loam for a free statue rather than three spleen items that are worse than other unrestricted spleen options. (If you have Thanksgarden, you almost certainly would be better off with more stuffing fluffers instead.)
• As previously noted, there is almost a level of “anti-synergy” with the Chest Mimic (2024); if you can summon up a statue, having the garden active is really only worth 1 turn (since your in-garden statue is free), the value of the summon source, and whatever value you get from the fountain + the consumable. This anti-synergy will exist with any sources of summoning arbitrary monsters in standard.

Overall Rating

We’d rate the Black Rose Garden a Tier 2 IOTM. In our scale, that’s 4-7 turns saved per day. I’ll be honest: it’s really hard to rate this one. At the low end, you can very reasonably argue that the “value” of the Black Rose Garden is the value of one summon, 1 turn for encountering a free statue in the garden rather than a non-free summoned statue, and the fractional turn value of the consumables and the fountain effects. It is almost comically reliant on the Sword of S-Words to unlock the true “11 free kills a day” function, which makes it hard to really evaluate what portion of those 11 turns should be afforded to the garden itself. But as I discussed in the summons section, I think we will (in less than 3 months) enter a meta where summons will be considerably more valuable, so the fact that garden access saves you the value of a summon will be worth more than the current quasi-valueless state it exists in. I also think that in a general sense, attributing the turnsaving value of the statuary chunks entirely to the S-Word is mildly wrong; the garden deserves a little of that shine, right?

In the end, I settled on about 4-7 turns of value per day from this IOTM. It is a vanishingly low-tier IOTM completely on its own, and should not be purchased prior to getting the best IOTM of the year in the Sword of S-Words. But if you DO have an S-Word, this garden is fantastic, and well worth your Mr. Accessory. (Also, as mentioned earlier, the actual experience of playing in the garden is fun as heck. Real DOOM-coded. I felt like I was in the 90s again!)

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One last non-speedrunning note. This could reasonably be classified as a partially incomplete post. We are all pretty sure there is one remaining puzzle to solve in the scope of the Black Rose Garden; there are a number of symbolic plaques that appear to be non-randomly generated and map to odd letter buckets. Initial attempts to brute force a Rozier cipher have been unsuccessful, even though it would be thematically very pleasant if a rose-themed grid-based cipher were the tool needed to solve the plaque puzzle.

Luckily, one of the KoL community’s best coders, Irrat (#3469406), has put together a cavalcade of resources for the group that is trying to gamely solve the puzzle:

• First, there’s Rose Garden, a relay script that lets you easily submit data, see a map of your garden, and download it.
• Next, there’s an online repository of data at the Rose Garden Data website. That link goes to the main page; there is also a lovely map explorer on said website that lets you trawl through the submitted data.
• Finally, this isn’t really germane to the topic, but it’s so fun it bears special mention – Irrat also built a Rose Garden Editor/Simulator that allows you to walk through maps generated via submitted user data, or make your own rooms. It’s really cool!

On the Ascension Speed Society Discord, we have a thread for our puzzlers located here; feel free to jump in and try to help. My assumption is that anything here that is super important to speedrunners probably wasn’t enclosed behind such a complex puzzle, but I could always be wrong; in the event the solution is notably ascension-relevant, this post will be updated at a later date.

Have a great day, folks!

Footnotes

1. In current spading, it looks like you will always get one fountain and one consumable on D1. But the current spading is pretty light, so I want to be cautious when affirming that this is universally the case. ↩

2. It is worth calling this out: do not rest with this bed active while you are cursed for the Hidden Apartment Building. Once, Twice, and Thrice cursed are all considered negative effects and will be removed on rest if you rest with this bed installed. You don’t want to lose your curse! ↩

3. We don’t have all seeds populated yet across every path/class combo. You can help! Please add your day 1 garden state for paths that haven’t been populated in the community spading sheet, or submit them using the Rose Garden relay script. ↩

4. If you would like to read more about summon strategy, check out our primer on faxes and summons. I updated it to add the statues! ↩

5. One small caveat: I am not counting Manual of Numberology’s frat warrior. Grabbing your war outfit eats a fax in paths where you cannot access Numberology, but it is a single-purpose summon. Similarly, I am not counting Heartstone summons. They are weird and wonky and quite limited in monster scope, so they don’t really meet the criteria I’m thinking about here. ↩

Article contributed by Captain Scotch