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The Puzzle Box and corruption

The Puzzle Box is ARK's Horadric Cube. Open Transmute from the room screen between encounters. You can use it repeatedly, with the gear you wear, what's in your bag, and what's in your Materials tab. Review the selected ingredients and the result preview before confirming. Put in exactly the items a recipe asks for and transmute. The full list is in Puzzle Box recipes.

Recipes you know

Every account knows the simple recipes from the start: lesser runes up to SER, lesser gems, and emptying sockets. The rest are learned, for good and for every hero, with Merlin's Notes: half the named bosses you beat teach a recipe group you don't know, and so do some events. The Recipes screen (from Journal on the title screen) lists every recipe group. Tap one to see its recipes, ingredients and result, even the groups you haven't learned yet, so you know what the next Merlin's Notes could teach.

Uber maps

In Hell, Morgause, Lancelot and Merlin may each drop their own key. Put one in the Puzzle Box and it opens that boss's Uber map instead of transmuting into an item — see Ubers for the full endgame track, up to Uber Camelot and Arthur.

What it can and can't do

The box never lets you choose an affix or guarantee a roll. Perfection only comes from luck, which is why a perfect item means something. What it does:

  • Converts: runes into higher runes, gems into better gems.
  • Changes structure: upgrades a base to the next tier (keeping everything), adds sockets to a white item, or empties sockets (destroying what was in them).
  • Gambles:
  • Rerolls: a magic item (or charm, or jewel) with three perfect gems, or a rare with six perfect skulls, comes out as a brand-new item of the same base and item level.
  • Crafts: a magic item plus a rune, a gem and a jewel becomes a crafted item. It has its family's fixed bonuses (Blood, Hit Power, Caster or Safety) plus 1-4 random affixes, at an item level set by both your level and the input's.

Corruption: the Excalibur Shard

A shard broken from Excalibur itself. The recipe is unknown until you kill Arthur for the first time, which unlocks it for the whole account. After that, any champion, elite, boss or superunique kill has a small chance to drop one. It is the last gamble on a finished item:

  • Usually (75%) the item gains one corruption: an extra bonus that can go beyond what it could normally roll, or extra sockets. The possible outcomes depend on the item kind: see Corruption.
  • Otherwise (25%) the item is bricked: it becomes a random rare of another base at the same item level. Sometimes that rare is better than what you put in.

Either way the item is corrupted: it can't be corrupted again and no recipe accepts it. Corrupt only what you are ready to lose, and do it after socketing or making the runeword (a corruption can't add sockets to a runeword, but it can add a bonus to one).

Use the − / + controls to choose how many units of a stack to consume. Selecting three runes from a stack of six consumes three and leaves the other three where they were. The result must fit in your equipment, bag or Materials tab (runes and gems always come out in the Materials tab); if it cannot, nothing is consumed or modified. Outputs may stack with materials already there even when it's otherwise full.