Incantations and Gathering

Hecate's Cauldron Incantations that permanently unlock features, the four gathering tools you craft, and how to plan your material gathering around them.

Two systems in the Crossroads turn raw materials into permanent progress: Incantations at Hecate’s Cauldron, which spend gathered materials to unlock features for good, and the gathering tools you carry into runs to collect those materials. They feed each other. You gather to perform Incantations, and one of the first Incantations unlocks the gathering tools themselves. Getting this loop spinning early is how you stop running into walls where a weapon, an ability, or a path is locked behind a material you have not been collecting.

What Incantations do

At Hecate’s Cauldron you spend gathered materials to perform Incantations, which are permanent unlocks rather than in-run effects. They open up entire features of the game. A few of the important ones:

Consecration of Ashes: unlocks the Altar of Ashes, and with it the Arcana Cards and their rarity upgrades. This is the gateway to your biggest permanent power source.
Night’s Craftwork: unlocks crafting of the gathering tools. It needs 1 Moly, which is why grabbing Moly in Erebus on early runs matters.
Reagent Sensing: points you toward nearby reagent deposits during a run, so you stop walking past materials you need.
Soil Plots: opens growing plots near Odysseus in the Crossroads, where you plant seeds for a steady supply of greeneries.

There are more beyond these, and exact material costs shift with patches, so check current numbers before you count on a specific recipe. The principle holds regardless: Incantations are how the Crossroads grows, and they are gated on materials you have to go and collect.

The four gathering tools

Once Night’s Craftwork is done, you craft the gathering tools and bring them on runs. There are four, each tied to a different resource.

Tool	What it collects
Crescent Pick	Mines mineral nodes such as Silver and Adamant found in regions
Silver Spade	Digs up seeds to plant in the Crossroads Soil Plots
Tablet of Peace	A short minigame with large Shades that rewards Psyche
Rod of Fishing	Fishing at certain points during a run

The Crescent Pick is the workhorse, because it banks the Silver and Adamant that unlock new weapons. The Tablet of Peace is the one to prioritize alongside it, since it rewards Psyche, the resource that raises your Arcana Grasp pool. You only carry what you slot, so you bring the tool that matches the region and the material you are short on.

Match the tool to the run before you set out, do not bring all four and use none. Heading into Oceanus or Olympus for weapon reagents means the Crescent Pick. Short on Psyche to grow your Arcana grid means the Tablet of Peace. A run where you fight clean but gather nothing is a half-wasted run early on.

Planning your gathering

The two systems only pay off if you plan around them. Decide what you want to unlock next, an Incantation, a weapon, an Arcana expansion, then work backward to the material that gates it and the tool and region that supply it. Early on the sequence most guides point to is straightforward: grab Moly in Erebus to clear Night’s Craftwork, craft the Crescent Pick, then run regions banking Silver for new weapons and Psyche from the Tablet of Peace to grow your Arcana grid. Reagent Sensing makes every later run more efficient by flagging deposits you would otherwise miss.

How it ties into a run

Gathering is a deliberate cost. Time spent mining a node or fishing a spot is time the room is not threatening you, but it is also a small detour from pure combat, so you fold it into the route rather than chasing every node. Reading the region you are in tells you which reagents are on offer, and your tool loadout decides which ones you can actually take. Over many runs that steady collection is what funds the Incantations, the weapons, and the Arcana upgrades that make the next run easier.