The Vampire Survivors Grimoire is the in-game evolution and union reference unlocked by collecting the Grim Grimoire relic in Inlaid Library. Once picked up, you can open it from the pause menu during any run to see every weapon combination you have discovered, every ingredient you already own, and every evolution that is still out of reach. It is the single most useful planning tool in the game once you start chasing evolved weapons and unions.
This guide covers where to find the relic, how to read the menu, the Yellow Sign interaction that hides certain recipes, the Milky Way Map quirk that changes how you access it, and the spell shortcut that unlocks the Grimoire without ever visiting the library.
The Grimoire is a pause-menu screen that displays every weapon evolution and union in the game as a set of equations. Each row shows the base weapon plus the passive item (or second weapon) that combines into the evolved form. When you have discovered an evolution before, the full equation stays visible. When you have not, only the outline of the recipe appears until you meet its ingredients.
It is not a relic itself in the spoken sense. The Grim Grimoire is the relic. The Grimoire is the menu that the relic unlocks. The two terms are used interchangeably in the community, which is why searches for "grimoire" and "grim grimoire" land on the same information.
The Grimoire also lives behind the Vanillaware strategy reference GrimGrimoire, which is where the relic gets its name.
The Grim Grimoire is located due west of the starting area in Inlaid Library, the second base-game stage. It is tracked by a green arrow on your screen the moment you enter the stage, so you do not need to memorize coordinates. Walk west until the arrow disappears and the relic prompt fires.
Two patrolling Undead Witches guard the pickup. They slow you down with a beam attack while firing bullets, so any character with ranged clearing can walk the route without real danger. Most players grab this relic on their second or third run of the game because Inlaid Library is unlocked by reaching level 20 in Mad Forest.
everywhere in the Forbidden Scrolls of Morbane if you have the spell menu unlocked.If you already have access to the Forbidden Scrolls of Morbane (cast spells from the Secrets menu), you can unlock the Grim Grimoire without ever running the stage by casting thisshouldhavebeenunlockedbydefault. This is the same unlock with no strategic downside. It was presumably added because the developers considered it a quality-of-life tool that should have been on by default.
This is where the interaction between the Grim Grimoire and the Milky Way Map catches people out. Your pause-menu layout depends on which relics you own.
Most players end up in the second configuration quickly because Milky Way Map is also an Inlaid Library-adjacent pickup and is widely considered a day-one grab. If you have grabbed the Grim Grimoire and think the menu has moved or disappeared, you are almost certainly just on the Milky Way Map version of the pause screen.
The Grimoire lists every evolution and union in the game as a visual equation: base weapon + required item = evolved weapon. The menu is paginated depending on how many evolutions you have discovered, so owners of multiple DLCs scroll through several pages.
The layout above is how a single evolution equation appears inside the Grimoire. The base weapon is on the left, the required passive or second weapon is in the middle, and the evolved form is on the right. Every equation in the menu follows this pattern.
When you pick up a weapon or passive in a run, its sprite in the Grimoire gains a yellow-greenish circle around it. That is the game telling you "you have this; here is what it combines with." If you evolve a weapon during the run (for example, Garlic plus Pummarola into Soul Eater), the entire equation for that evolution highlights. This also fires for characters that start with an evolved weapon. Peppino, who begins with Soul Eater, sees the Garlic plus Pummarola equation pre-highlighted even though he has not picked up either ingredient.
Once you have the maximum number of weapon and passive slots filled, the Grimoire starts fading equations that you can no longer complete. Equations stay fully visible if one of three conditions is true: the evolution has already occurred, all ingredients are currently equipped, or you hold one ingredient and the other can still come from leveling up naturally. Everything else fades to signal that this run is not the one where you get that evolution.
Weapon and passive selectors that only appear in specific chests, like Candybox and Arma Dio, do not count toward the "still possible through leveling up" logic. If you need a selector item to complete an evolution and you do not already have it equipped, the Grimoire treats that equation as unreachable for the current run and fades it.
If you have unlocked the Grim Grimoire but certain evolutions from your save file are still not showing up, two explanations are almost always the cause.
The first is the Yellow Sign gate. Evolutions that require the Yellow Sign relic to be obtained are hidden from the Grimoire until you pick up the Yellow Sign itself. The Grim Grimoire lets you preview every other recipe, but Yellow-Sign-gated recipes are deliberately masked so the relic's discovery sequence stays intact.
The second is DLC-specific. The 17 August 2023 patch (v1.6.0) fixed a bug where Tides of the Foscari evolutions did not show in the Grimoire by default prior to being seen or unlocked. If you are playing on a very old build or a lagging port, update before assuming something else is broken.
A separate known issue, acknowledged by the developers on Steam, is the completely empty or missing Grimoire after certain updates. The wiki does not specify a workaround beyond waiting for patches; poncle has stated they are working on it.
The Grim Grimoire is one of the two or three relics every new player should grab inside their first hour. The reason is simple: without it, you are playing the game with no evolution recipes on screen. You either memorize every combination from the wiki or guess at what a given passive pairs with. With the Grimoire on, your next evolution is a glance away at any pause.
There is also a strategic layer. Late-game characters on Endless Mode runs routinely chase specific evolutions to scale. Being able to see at a glance that, for example, you are one Candelabrador away from a Vento Sacro evolution changes which chest choices you keep and which you reroll. The Grimoire converts evolution planning from a memory task into a recognition task, which is a huge cognitive savings during bullet-dense late-stage play.
Players also use the Grimoire to plan their collection completion runs. Every faded equation is a hint about what items are missing from your build, and the yellow-green circles make it obvious which slots are already filled.
Yes. The Grim Grimoire is a base-game relic found in Inlaid Library. The word "Grimoire" in the community usually refers to the in-game menu that the relic unlocks, but both refer to the same system. Grim Grimoire is entry 397 in the relic collection.
Due west of the starting area in Inlaid Library, tracked by a green arrow once you enter the stage. Two Undead Witches patrol near the pickup.
Cast the spell thisshouldhavebeenunlockedbydefault in the Forbidden Scrolls of Morbane from the Secrets menu. This requires the Scrolls to be unlocked first, which itself requires the Yellow Sign relic path.
Two common causes. First, Yellow-Sign-gated evolutions are deliberately hidden until you obtain the Yellow Sign relic. Second, some older updates had bugs where DLC evolutions did not display correctly. Update the game and acquire the Yellow Sign if you have not yet.
thisshouldhavebeenunlockedbydefault. You type this into the spell input inside the Forbidden Scrolls of Morbane to unlock the relic without visiting Inlaid Library.
Yes, all discovered DLC evolutions appear alongside base-game ones, separated by pagination as the list grows. The 17 August 2023 patch fixed an earlier issue where Tides of the Foscari evolutions were not showing by default.
It marks an item you currently have equipped in this run. When both ingredients of an evolution are circled, the entire equation highlights, signaling that the evolution is ready to fire as soon as your base weapon hits max level.
If you like deep dives on one roguelike, you will probably like the rest of the library. Here are the hub pages and the most popular genre roundups on Rogue Ranker.
Wiki citations: Grim Grimoire, Relics, Inlaid Library.
Sprites and screenshots sourced from the Vampire Survivors Wiki (vampire.survivors.wiki) under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.