Deskrawl Equipment Upgrade: The Real +1 to +10 Chance Table

Deskrawl caps equipment upgrades at +10, and the odds are not a smooth curve: your first four attempts always succeed, the fifth lands 75% of the time, and every level after that gets worse until +10 is a 10% shot per try. One unbroken run from +1 to +10 is a 0.09% proposition, roughly 1 in 1,111, which is exactly why the official achievement behind +10 sits at 0.2% of players.

The verified +1 to +10 success chance table

Two independent sources agree on the cap, and only one of them gives you the numbers.

Official source: [0.1.13] New Talents, Online Mode, Leaderboard and Anti-cheat! — "Equipment upgrades are now capped at +10 with a lowered success chance" (2026-06-27).

The numbers come from the game's own GameConfig in the 1.0 launch build (2026-09-28): UpgradeSuccessChances = [1, 1, 1, 1, 0.75, 0.5, 0.4, 0.3, 0.2, 0.1] and MaxEquipmentUpgradeLevel = 10. The array is indexed by target level, so entry zero is the roll that takes an item to +1 and entry nine is the roll that takes it to +10.

Multiply the column and you get the headline: 0.09% for a clean chain, and about 28 attempts on average to walk a single item from +1 to +10 — 4 on the four guaranteed steps plus roughly 24 on the six that can actually fail. The first failing step costs you 1.33 attempts. The last one costs you ten.

You do not have to take this on faith. The game prints the same value in the upgrade panel — the localization string is UI.SuccessChance = "Success: {0}%", rendered by the SuccessChanceText field on the upgrade panel class. If the panel in front of you ever disagrees with the table above, trust the panel: it is reading the same array.

Why only 0.2% of players own a +10

The Steam achievement list gives this table a population to speak to. Reading the global achievement percentages API on 2026-10-01:

Official source: Steam Community achievement list — UPGRADE_PLUS_10, display name "Forged to Perfection", description "Upgrade any piece of equipment to +10."

Roughly four in five players have a Legendary equipped, but fewer than one in five hundred has taken any single item to +10 — fewer, in fact, than have reached level 70. That gap is not a bug. A 10% final step, paid for in boss-material drops, produces exactly this shape.

There is also no mercy mechanic hiding in the data. UpgradeSuccessChances is a flat float[10] indexed by level, and GameConfig contains no pity, protection or guarantee field of any kind. Per-item state does record your misses — GeneratedItemData carries UpgradeLevel and UpgradeAttempts as plain integers — but no config field lets that counter bend the odds. Every attempt is an independent roll.

What the config does not contain is the stat gain per level. There is no upgrade-bonus field anywhere in GameConfig or ItemizationConfig, and the upgrade panel's BonusPreviewText computes the preview at runtime.

What each slot costs: ten boss materials

GameConfig.ExtraUpgradeMaterials is a ten-entry array of EquipmenSlotUpgradeMaterial, a class with exactly two fields — Slot and Material. One material per slot, with no level threshold and no rarity condition.

The list is ordered by slot, not by zone, and that ordering is the whole planning problem. Gloves only need the Ogre from a level 17–19 dungeon. Helm needs the Lord of the Cinder, the final boss in the game at levels 65–70. Every one of your ten upgrade ladders is paced by a different fight, so the sensible order to unlock is the order of the bosses, not the order of your stat sheet. If you are still working through Kings Woods South, the Treant bark is the one material you can farm today — our Venom Queen and Ancient Oak Treant guide covers that fight.

Two honest limits. No drop-rate field exists for any of these ten items — LootConfig.BossMaterial points at SoulShard, a different item — so how many mats a kill gives you is not in the data. And the boss pairing above comes from the official English item names plus each boss's SlaveData.Location, not from a drop table.

What the data does say is that you cannot buy your way up. Nine of the ten upgrade materials carry SellPrice = 1 — one gold each, against 300 for a stack of Iron Ore. They are worth nothing on the market, which is the game's way of saying the only source is the boss.

Four of the ten materials are already spoken for

Four slots do not have a private drop. Helm, Chest and Necklace draw the same three boss materials that open the Mythic Rift, and Shoulder draws the same Demon's Skull that gates the last map of every zone. Those four ladders are the only ones where a single failed roll spends a currency you also need for something else. Which maps, which item per difficulty tier, and how much each gate costs is the Demon Skulls entry guide's job, and what the Rift gives back is the Mythic Rift guide's — so the rest of this section stays on the upgrade side of the ledger.

That side is unforgiving, because the spend is not refunded on failure. A +9 to +10 roll on your necklace is a 10% shot that consumes one of its materials whether it lands or not, so a single success costs you about ten of them. Rift entry is the opposite kind of cost: one unit per entry, every time, no variance. So on those three slots a gamble is running against a fixed drain on the same stack, and every miss is a Rift entry you did not buy.

The ore cost is a separate, rarity-based recipe

The ores are not part of ExtraUpgradeMaterials. They come from GameConfig.UpgradeRecipes, which binds each ItemRarity value to a RecipeData:

One quirk worth knowing: rarity 1 points at UpgradeRecipeCommon, not at a recipe of its own. The asset UpgradeRecipeUncommon.asset does ship in the build with a two-Iron-Ore cost, but nothing in GameConfig references it — it is an orphan. Common and Uncommon gear therefore pay an identical ore bill.

Every one of these five recipes has GoldCost = 0, which is the closest thing to an official answer on the gold question. Do not conflate the two systems: the ore bill is set by rarity, the boss material is set by slot. A Legendary chest piece pays Legendary ore (three Iron, two Gold, one Earth Essence) plus a Defiled Wyrm Scale from a level 58–64 boss. Rarity changes what you pay in ore; it does not change your odds — the rarity tier guide covers what each tier actually rolls.

What a failed attempt really costs you

The odds are the gamble, but tradability is the penalty. The game asks for confirmation before it binds an item, and the string is unambiguous: UI.UpgradeBindsTradableConfirm reads "Upgrading makes this item untradable forever. Upgrade anyway?" A second string, UI.Auction.NoUpgraded, spells out the consequence — "Upgraded or socketed items, and runes that have been equipped, cannot be traded."

So the moment you click Upgrade, that item leaves the Auction House permanently, whether the roll succeeds or fails. Unlike a talent mistake, there is no way to undo it — so before you list anything on the Steam market, settle the upgrade question first.

On gold, the honest answer is that it is officially not published. There is no upgrade price anywhere in the shipped config: all five RecipeData.GoldCost values are zero, and TownData has only Prerequisite, TownPrefab and music fields across its three instances — no shop, no price table. The nearest comparable number the game does publish is TalentRefundCostPerPointSpent = 8, eight gold per talent point refunded, which makes a wrong talent trivially cheap to reverse. An upgrade is not, because it is not reversible at all — see the talent refund rules for the contrast.

The Back slot is the one place +10 can never exist

EquipSlotType has eleven values, Weapon at 1 through Back at 11. ExtraUpgradeMaterials covers 1 through 10 and stops there. And all nine Back items carry NotUpgradable = 1 — RareBack1 to RareBack3, LegendaryBack1 to LegendaryBack4, and DivineBack1 and DivineBack2. Every other slot has zero non-upgradable items.

Two more pieces of the same pattern: the ten "Mystery" random-equipment items exist for slots 1 through 10 and there is no Mystery Back, and the 1.0 launch build ships 209 equipment entries across the eleven slots in total. So your best cape can never be forged, whatever your odds are.

Where the blacksmiths are, and what players say about them

Three blacksmiths carry the same official job description, "Salvage and upgrade equipment", and each is placed in a town environment prefab: MainTownEnvironment.prefab holds "Magnus, The Blacksmith" in the City of Aldenreach, DesertTownEnvironment.prefab holds "Farida, The Blacksmith" in the City of Tazan, and SnowTownEnvironment.prefab holds "Brynjar, The Blacksmith" in the City of Veldak.

The strongest community read on the panel's value is short and not about +10 at all. A player working through the Ancient Oak Treant wrote: "I neglected the blacksmith until tonight, and now I'm clearing the Ent pretty easily." Treat it as community-reported, not as an official measurement — but it points at something the table above confirms. The +1s through +4s are free, so the blacksmith is worth using long before you can afford to gamble at +8.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does a failed upgrade destroy my item or knock it back a level? Officially not published. No config field handles failure. The only per-item upgrade state is UpgradeLevel and UpgradeAttempts in GeneratedItemData, so the item keeps the level it had and simply counts the miss.

Are the odds better on Divine gear? No. UpgradeSuccessChances is indexed by target level only — rarity is not a factor in the roll. What rarity changes is the ore recipe, and nothing else about the attempt.

How much does one upgrade attempt cost in gold? Officially not published, for the reasons above. All five recipe GoldCost values are zero and TownData carries no shop fields at all. The materials are the cost.

Can every equipment slot reach +10? Ten of eleven. The nine Back items are flagged NotUpgradable = 1 and have no entry in ExtraUpgradeMaterials.

Should I upgrade before or after I have the material? Both, in the sense that the material is consumed per attempt and nothing refunds it — which is why the three-sink budget above matters more than the order you roll in. The gold farming guide covers the income side of that budget.