Cursemark Secrets and Sigils Guide: All Unlocks (2026)

Updated 2026-10-23: Added the full riddle text and community solution for the deathly spot (Shrine of Death, stand still for about 10 seconds), Sunfish Pond and the Spring of Life ward slot, plus seven more riddles and new locations for three others. No patch has come out since Boreal Ascent on September 25.

Cursemark entered Early Access on June 8, 2026, from CLYDE games and publisher Mad Mushroom. It's $14.99, and it was Very Positive on Steam when we last pulled the review count on October 13: 586 of 672 reviews positive, about 87%.

Step-by-Step: find your next Sigil and your next secret

1. Beat the boss. The Sigil is auto-collected after the win (June 16 patch); the boss guide covers the fights. If an older save still left one on the floor, the June 9 patch made it spawn again the next time you beat that boss.
2. Don't shatter the seal by accident. Since June 16, the game warns that shattering a boss seal will end the run.
3. Clear Corruption before you shop. Corruption blocks many points of interest until you clear it with Astral Tears, and the Forge upgrade prompt appears right after.
4. Open the notebook, then look elsewhere. Since June 16 you can page through the notebook to see clues from other regions. The developer's rule of thumb: "The clues generally don't refer to the same level they're in."
5. Read the map before you route. Botyl Jars, Wells, Talisman Chests, Runestones and Forges now show on the map with their remaining uses.
6. Bring the right element. Riddles and puzzles are solved with specific elements, which come from your spell school and runes: lightning for one tree, ice for a pair of fires.

Attunement Sigils: the part you can stop worrying about

The early patches spent a lot of effort on Sigils. On June 9: "If an Attunement Sigil dropped by a boss isnt picked up, it will spawn next time you beat them." On June 16: "Attunement Sigil should be automatically collected after winning." So the old advice (grab it before you leave or lose it) is obsolete. Win the fight and it's yours.

What it unlocks is your arsenal. The Boreal Ascent update on September 25 added 16 new skills "to unlock, equip, and master": four weapons (Charging Stars, Galvanized Blade, Sapping Flurry, Unseen Edge), four spells (Fulgor, Gelidus, Morning Star, Nox Foras), five wards (Aura of Decay, Crystal Shield, Sanguine Veil, Scaled Nova, Storm Deflection) and three ultimates (Anomalis, Inspirare, Splendoria).

GODEEPER: For the fights that drop them, the Cursemark boss guide covers each launch boss.

The 22 riddles, mapped

Steam user chibu mapped every riddle on the world map in June: "1-10 are ashford lowlands clues | 11-16 are cursewoods clues | 17-22 are mire glades clues," in notebook order. That count lines up with the June 26 patch, which "Added 6 secrets to the Mire Glades area." The thread has 57 replies of players helping each other; it and three other Steam threads are where the solutions below come from. Where nobody has posted the notebook number, the first column says n/a.

Riddle 15 is the best design decision in the launch riddles: the solution is the menu option every other roguelite treats as failure. Riddle 13 is the one players get backward. The fires go out; you don't light them.

Screenshot: Steam store page (CLYDE games / Mad Mushroom)

Getting there is half of it. If Cursewoods seems sealed off, chibu's answer to another player was that the Clearlake East node "leads to the entire cursewoods area," with a cartographer NPC. Riddle 16's water spot also confused players on r/Cursemark, where one described a spot with six rocks by a river and the payoff on the far side: "Both have slot upgrade statues on them." Another player's advice on whether every water crossing can be solved was blunt: "If it’s a map without clue yet then it shouldn’t be possible yet."

You may not even need the clue. chibu again: "i just randomly solved and then the clue appeared in my notebook greyed out." So if an area has something odd in it, poke it with every element you have.

The deathly spot, Sunfish Pond and Spring of Life

Each of these three has its own Steam threads of players asking for help, and each one fails for a different reason: the wrong room, the wrong runes, or the wrong swing.

The deathly spot. The clue reads "Stand still a while in a deathly spot, the way to the cemetery shall be wrought," and its stone isn't in the room you need. As one player put it, "the 'deathly spot' is in an entirely different room." It's the Shrine of Death. Stand in the middle of the ring of stone obelisks (chibu puts it "above the blessing pad") and don't move. Time is what trips people up. A Mad Mushroom developer answered the day after launch that "you need to stand there for ~7-10s," and another player replied that this was the fix: they had been "standing in places for like 5-7 seconds." Count to ten.

Sunfish Pond. This is the weapon slot upgrade in the middle of a pond in Mire Glades, north of Brackwater. Until the June 26 patch it had no clue at all, and the only way in was a frame-rate glitch that one player found "consistently reproduceable at around or near 24 FPS." You don't need that any more. The clue now says "Those which come easy, those that come hard, where bright fish swim, these four you must discard." That means one rune of each rarity, not any four runes. chibu dropped them "just south of the upgrade," a path opens to the slot, and the runes can be picked back up. One player who had dropped runes all around the pond with no result found the fix in the first line: "Nvm the first part was also important."

Spring of Life. The ward slot upgrade sits across the water in Spring of Life, in Cursewoods, and the crescent stones riddle opens it. There are six stones in a half circle by the river, and the clue asks for "east and west in answering strokes." One player hit them left, right, left, starting from the stone furthest from the river, and concluded: "It seems what matters is the order of the east and west." Another said to stand between the stones and "swing your basic attack left and right (east and west)" until it triggers. Spring of Life also has the Soulmonger, who just says "..." when you talk to him. When a player asked about him on July 2, the developer replied: "the Soulmonger doesn't do anything yet but I have some fun plans for him." No patch note since has mentioned him.

Don't mix it up with the other water riddle, "Touch the headstone sunk in the deep, step into waters if spring you would reap." That one is in Temple Courtyard in Ashford Lowlands, and it's in the table above.

Elemental puzzles: what the game won't explain

The January 2026 demo update added "elemental interactions and environmental puzzles to a lot of stages," and the developer listed the examples: "Braziers you need to light, brambles to burn away, rocks you need to blast for instance - all solved by specific elemental / spell types." Those are separate from the 22 riddles and usually guard shortcuts or loot.

The launch patches fixed two named secrets on June 9 ("Fixed Twinkling Tree secret" and "Fixed Chill and Frost secret"), made "a few clues less obscure," and on June 10 "Made the Twinkling Tree clue more clear." If a guide from launch week told you a secret was broken, it probably isn't now.

One player's honest summary of the riddle UX: "it wasn’t very clear where to do the actions needed, so just try a few spots that seems right." That's the method. It's fine. It's also exactly what "no hand-holding" looks like from the inside.

Screenshot: Steam store page (CLYDE games / Mad Mushroom)

GODEEPER: Elemental puzzles need the right element in your loadout. The Cursemark spell schools guide shows which schools bring fire, ice and lightning.

Permanent progression: shrines and forges

Steam's description is short on this: "Discover permanent shrines and forges that expand your power and rune slots. Upgrade them for future runs." That's the permanent layer, alongside Sigils.

There are two kinds of forge. Since June 10 the Runic Forge says "Upgrade Runes" and the Talisman Forge says "Upgrade Talisman." Their locations moved around in June: the June 14 patch put Runic Forges in Shrine of Death, Sorrows Gap and Spire of Ghen and Talisman Forges in Cascadia and Sedgepool, then June 16 "Reverted Shrine of Death Runic Forge, its a Talisman Forge again."

Some things don't carry over. Since June 9, "Essence doors no longer persist their open state between runs," and Runestones use the level seed, so they "cant be scummed" (June 22).

Reading the map

Three June patches turned the map into a planning tool:

• June 11: "Level Info on the map now shows how many uses each item has left."
• June 12: "Botyl Jars and Wells should show up now as map features," Talisman Chests and Runestones show remaining uses, and Forge uses show at the start of a run.
• June 22: the Cartographer "now mentions fast travel using your map," and the map got a legend.

So read it first. A Talisman Chest with no uses left isn't worth a detour.

Screenshot: Cursemark Gameplay Trailer, 0:11 (Mad Mushroom)

The Luminary

The Luminary trades runes. Three patches shaped him. June 10: he "now says Trade Runes rather than Upgrade Runes." June 12: he "will no longer trade back runes you put in for that trade," which closed the obvious exploit. June 16: he was removed from Woldriver, Grotto, Oathwoods Clearing and Fungal Shrine. If you remember him from one of those four, he's gone.

Named areas from the patch notes

The geometry fixes in June name most of the launch stages. Between June 9 and June 23 they list Sedgepool, Slowbog, Shrine of Life, Cove of Awakening, Wildfire Basin, Temple Courtyard, Crow's Field, The Fingers, Fungal Shrine, Duskridge, Lastlight Fields, Bloody Fields, Stoneflow, Wildflower Meadow, Clearlake West, Spire of Ghen, Cemetery, Brackwater, Runoff Basin, Reedbank, Sorrow's Gap, Mangrove Verge, Lightless Shrine, Deepglade, Stonehold and Temple of Shadow. The riddle threads add Witch's Hut, Sunfish Pond, Clearlake East, Spring of Life, Voidmouth, Death Gorge, Lovers' Rest, Shadowverge, Forest Camp, Ashford Abbey, Crystal Creek and the Shrine of Death.

Boreal Ascent adds 37 new locations, "from snowy peaks and frozen ruins to caves and temples," with Starspawn enemies, a new miniboss and major boss, and "new secrets and shortcuts to figure out." As of October 23 we still haven't found a community riddle map for it.

What's next for the map

The July 1 roadmap plans "two major updates in Early Access," each with a new zone: Boreal Ascent (live since September 25) and then the Scarred Wastes. Each one "will also include a slew of new skills, secrets, enemies, and bosses," with Rune and Talisman drops in between. Back in April the plan was "seven unique biomes in the game at 1.0," with 1.0 before the end of 2026.

Our take

Sigils are a solved problem: kill the boss, and the patches do the rest. The riddles are the real game here, and they're good, because several of them break a rule you've learned elsewhere. Quitting the run is a solution. Putting fires out is a solution. Dropping your best runes in a pond is a solution (and you get them back).

We'd do it in this order: the deathly spot first, since it costs ten seconds of standing still, then Clearlake East, since it opens all of Cursewoods. There, riddle 15 at Voidmouth pays out an Attunement Sigil and riddle 16 opens the Spring of Life ward slot. Then Mire Glades with the four solutions in the table, Sunfish Pond included. And we'd keep the community map open in a second window. The game won't mind. It already told you there's no hand-holding.

More Cursemark: the tips guide, best builds, the weapons tier list, runes and builds at launch, our Cursemark review and the Cursemark guide hub. For other roguelites with a permanent layer worth digging into, see our best roguelike games of 2026, the Rune Dice guide and the All Hail the Orb guide.

How we checked this

On October 13, 2026 we read every Cursemark announcement and patch note on Steam from the October 2025 demo posts through the September 25, 2026 Boreal Ascent update, the store page and review summary, two Steam discussion threads with riddle solutions (all four pages of the main one) and r/Cursemark threads about water crossings. We watched the Mad Mushroom gameplay trailer for the stills. On October 23 we checked the Steam news feed again (nothing new since September 25), rechecked the price and read ten more Steam threads on the deathly spot, Cursewoods and Ashford Lowlands clues, Sunfish Pond, Spring of Life and the Soulmonger, including the developer replies quoted above. The riddle solutions are players' reports, not official answers, so a patch can still change them.

References

• Cursemark on Steam
• Cursemark news and patch notes (Steam)
• All riddles marked on the world map (Steam discussions)
• Mire Glades clues (Steam discussions)
• Cursewoods Clues Solutions (Steam discussions)
• "Deathly spot"? (Steam discussions)
• Ashford Lowlands clues: "In the place where dusk last gleams bright" (Steam discussions)
• Questions for DEV TEAM on current content (Steam discussions)
• Getting across the water/rivers? (r/Cursemark)
• Cursemark Gameplay Trailer (Mad Mushroom)