After your first escape, the Pact of Punishment lets you add Heat — stacking difficulty conditions in exchange for richer rewards and higher resource caps. Heat is how Hades stays challenging forever, and each weapon keeps its own minimum Heat for the bosses to pay out Titan Blood, Ambrosia and Diamonds again.
How Heat works
🌡️ Heat rank
A fully empowered Pact tops out at 63 Heat from its 15 conditions — 64 from 16 conditions once Hell Mode adds Personal Liability; total Heat gates better rewards, and each weapon has its own minimum Heat for boss bounties.
💰 Higher caps
More Heat raises the cap on resources a run can pay out, so rewards refresh once you clear a new threshold.
🔁 Adjustable
Mix and match conditions freely before a run — tailor the pain to what your build can handle.
🔥 Hell Mode
An optional harder base layer with its own exclusive condition, Personal Liability: it strips the brief invulnerability shield you normally get right after taking a burst of heavy damage.
Gentle first conditions
- Extreme Measures (rank 1) — one tougher boss; a lot of Heat for a small difficulty bump.
- Convenience Fee — pricier shops; barely affects a healthy run.
- Middle Management — an extra mini-boss in some biomes; free Heat if your damage is solid.
- Approval Process / Tight Deadline — cheap early Heat, but watch the timer condition on slow builds.
Climbing Heat
- Raise one weapon at a time so you can chase its bounty threshold efficiently.
- Swap which conditions are on to suit the build — a healing build laughs at Lasting Consequences.
- Jury Summons (more enemies) and Heightened Security punish weak clear speed — add them last.
- Every Heat level cleared banks resources, so pushing higher pays for more Mirror and Contractor upgrades.
Key Pact conditions
- Hard Labor / Lasting Consequences — enemies hit harder and healing is reduced; the core difficulty knobs.
- Convenience Fee & Jury Summons — pricier shops and more enemies; cheap Heat if your clear speed is good.
- Extreme Measures — upgrades the biome bosses with new movesets; a lot of Heat per level.
- Tight Deadline / Middle Management — a room timer and extra mini-bosses; tune them to your build's pace.
- Damage Control gives ordinary foes a point of shielded health that shrugs off one hit — good AoE and piercing damage brushes past it.
- Routine Inspection turns off three Mirror of Night talents at a time, starting from the bottom of the list — plan around losing your cheapest ones first.
Extreme Measures, rank by rank
- Rank 1 (+1 Heat) arms the Furies — Megaera, and later Alecto and Tisiphone — with new attacks.
- Rank 2 (+2 Heat) upgrades Asphodel's Bone Hydra with tougher patterns.
- Rank 3 (+3 Heat) does the same to Theseus and Asterius in Elysium.
- Rank 4 (+4 Heat), called Extremer Measures, only appears at the House Contractor after you've reached the true ending and cleared one more run past it — it's the toughest version of Hades himself, and the four ranks together are worth 10 of the Pact's 63 Heat.
Cross-checked
Cross-checked on 6 September 2026 and re-checked on 1 October 2026 against RPG Site, the Hades Wiki (Fandom) and Vandal's guide. What is still unverified is the only thing reading cannot settle — nobody here has played it.