How to Unlock Spells in Grimoire Groves

Grimoire Groves features a hefty list of unique spells for you to heal the forest with. Every spell performs in a different way, effectively changing your playstyle whenever you alter your loadout. However, spells are fairly limited at the start. Grimoire Groves keeps the best spells tucked away inside its progression system, expecting you to put in the work to gain access to them. This process is intentionally unexplained; the game wants you to explore and figure out its systems on your own. For those of us who’d rather know ahead of time, or just haven’t been able to wrap our heads around it yet, here’s how to unlock and equip spells in Grimoire Groves.

How to Unlock Spells in Grimoire Groves

A list of available spells can be found in your grimoire, but you’ll notice it has a lot of missing pages. Spell progression in Grimoire Groves hides spells you’re too far from unlocking. The spell section doesn’t highlight progression paths, but something else does. The upper left corner of Lavender’s garden houses the Witch Wi-Fi area. Each of the mushrooms you see here represents a spell you can unlock. If you notice, there are little moss paths connecting these mushrooms together, starting from the big mushroom up top. In order to unlock spells further down the path, you first have to unlock the spells in the path leading up to them.

Walking up to any of the mushrooms will reveal the spell’s name and crafting requirements. These materials can all be found inside the Groves, and are dropped by specific enemies. You can cross-reference the materials the spell needs with the materials creatures drop in the plants section of your grimoire. Once you have materials for the spell you want, interact with the mushroom to deposit them there. After unlocking a spell, the next mushroom on the path will bloom, allowing you to check the requirements for the next one!

Remember: you don’t need to deposit all the materials in one go to unlock the spell. You can partially fulfill the requirements little-by-little until you satisfy them. Because materials can’t be carried over to new runs, it’s a good idea to pump as many materials as you have into the mushrooms to advance through the spell tree quickly. The crafting cost of spells starts to get pretty expensive the further into the game you get. Many of the materials for spells can only be obtained after blooming a specific plant in your garden. Doing so will allow you to encounter those plants in the forest, which you can then collect the materials from. In other words, make sure you’re growing plants in the garden as well!

How to Equip Spells in Grimoire Groves

Once you’ve unlocked the spell, you’ll need to equip it. However, you can’t equip spells from your grimoire. To equip a spell you’ve unlocked, interact with the big mushroom in the back of the spell area. This will bring up the equip menu. Selecting a slot (which also denotes which button you need to press to activate the spell) will allow you to pick from your available spell list. You can only have three spells equipped at any given time, so make sure to choose carefully!

There’s plenty of spells to choose from, but you should try to pick spells that synergize together. Check out our guide on the best spells to use in Grimoire Grovesfor some ideas on how to build your loadout! In the beginning, your weaker starting spells might make runs difficult to complete. Knowing where to find healing items in Grimoire Grovescan offset your disadvantage.

Grimoire Groves is available now on Steam.