Sanity

Sanity is one of the primary attributes that affect your character in Grim Quest. It represents your psychological stability, and the lower it gets the more unstable you become, affecting you both mentally and physically.

Sanity is drained through failure options in most dungeon events, some city events, critical hits from enemies and morale-reducing abilities such as **Rend Flesh**. In addition, sanity quickly runs out when you move with no supplies.

Effects of Sanity

Sanity is important for two reasons: it affects your stats, and influences the appearance of Psyche Manifestations. It is also an additional healthbar, and if it is fully depleted your dungeon run will end with you going insane (*this does **not** delete a permadeath file, although the gold setback will still apply*). This cannot be prevented by the Ring of Undeath or the Stone-Heart, making enemies like Shrikes very dangerous to late-game players.

Sanity Ranges
**MAX - 8 sanity: Lucid**: At this rate, your manifestation spawn chance is at 3% and you suffer no penalties.

**7-6 sanity: Psychotic**: Your manifestation spawn chance starts increasing around this range.

**5-2 sanity: Delirious**: At 5 points of sanity or below, enemy names and stats will start to be hidden, with affected enemies only showing their icon and having their exact health values be replaced with *???*. You will also be unable to see your own health, and stat debuffs will show up. You first suffer a CRIT and EVA penalty that increases with less sanity you have. At four points, your damage range will be shifted down and your cooldowns for spells and skills will increase by one turn. The Psyche Manifestation chance further accelerates as you descend into insanity.

**1 sanity: Raving Mad**: Any more morale losses in-battle will result in you going insane and retreating to Farhaven. This also includes losses in morale from dungeon events.

Maintaining Sanity

Sanity has a lot of sinks, but also has a moderate level of methods that can keep it balanced. Items are the most common but underhanded way of reclaiming sanity, coming in the form of the Soma, Soma Tincture and Bottled Madness. While generally helpful in a pinch, they can be substituted for more elegant and reliable methods that do not depend on going to the shop. Similarly, you can restore sanity through drinks in the Dancing Dragon, but it still requires a portion of your hard-earned gold.

Certain Accessories and Armor, such as the Bard's Clothes, increase your maximum sanity and allow you to tank traumatic blows. However, without a way to recover it easily, you'll just be spending more money at the Dancing Dragon instead of saving it for something big.

To keep your sanity afloat without paying large sums of gold, you can invest in Nature's Embrace, Meditation and Drifter. Nature's Embrace allows you to restore 1 sanity in-battle on the spot, while Meditation allows you to restore lots of sanity over the course of a single battle. Drifter allows you to gain a large amount of sanity; even at level 1, it can restore around least 2 points of sanity in a run depending on the dungeon size. If you are running Aspect of the Beast, the value of these spells and skills are amplified further, as the sanity cost must be paid back for Aspect to be worthwhile.

Alternatively, the Fire Salamander pet allows you to get the sanity from Meditation when casting offensive instead of buff spells. This lets mages virtually ignore sanity loss when they get enough spells to cycle one per turn. However, against a boss that can deal huge blows to it over the course of a single battle, this is less effective. In this case, resort to items, or use Calming Herbs and the Potion of Tranquility to soften critical hits.