How the Deadlock shop works: slot counts, the Weapon, Vitality and Spirit categories, tier names and filters - what Valve publishes and what it never has.
Deadlock Items Explained: Slots, Tiers and Shop
Deadlock items are bought with souls at the Curiosity Shop, and every hero gets 12 slots to hold them: nine are open from the first second of the match, and three more unlock as your team destroys enemy Walkers. Items are split into three categories - Weapon, Vitality and Spirit - and four price tiers: 800, 1,600, 3,200 and 6,400 souls.
- Twelve slots, all universal. Any item fits any slot since the May 8, 2025 shop rework; guides describing 16 slots or category-bound slots predate it.
- Four tiers, one price each: 800 / 1,600 / 3,200 / 6,400 souls, read off the community wiki on October 10, 2026.
- 156 buyable items plus 17 Street Brawl legendaries, all community counts.
Twelve slots: nine to start, three from Walkers
Valve fixed the count in the May 2025 shop rework and has not touched it since: 12 slots in total, each accepting an item of any category or price. Before that update the inventory held 16 slots split by item tree, with Weapon slots holding Weapon items and Spirit slots holding Spirit items.
The split as it stands now, from the community wiki's Extra Slots page:
| Inventory position | Slots | Unlocks when |
|---|---|---|
| Base slots | 9 | From the first second of the match |
| Extra slot 1 (bottom left) | 1 | Your team destroys one enemy Walker |
| Extra slot 2 (top right) | 1 | Your team destroys two enemy Walkers |
| Extra slot 3 (bottom right) | 1 | Your team destroys three enemy Walkers |
Every slot takes any item: no category is fenced off. The ceiling of 12 bites late game, because after the third enemy Walker falls you are replacing items rather than adding them.
Official source: Shop Rework Update, Valve on Steam - "Item slots are now all universal, rather than tree specific." and "Total slot count reduced from 16 to 12."
One mode sits outside this: Street Brawl had its item slot limit removed outright on March 6, 2026, and each of its rounds hands you three items from a random set. The Street Brawl rules page covers that loop; the objectives that open your extra slots are on the Patron and objectives page.
Weapon, Vitality, Spirit: the three categories
The shop is divided into three categories, and every item belongs to exactly one:
| Category | What it buys you | Example items, cheapest to dearest |
|---|---|---|
| Weapon | Gun damage, fire rate, ammo, bullet effects | Extended Magazine (800), Stalker (1,600), Alchemical Fire (3,200), Arctic Blast (6,400) |
| Vitality | Health, regen, stamina, resistances, barriers | Grit (800), Return Fire (1,600), Healing Nova (3,200), Unstoppable (6,400) |
| Spirit | Ability damage, cooldowns, ability range and duration | Extra Spirit (800), Cold Front (1,600), Knockdown (3,200), Refresher (6,400) |
The category is not cosmetic: your total spend inside each one drives a free stat bonus. Valve rewired that system in the same 2025 rework so the bonus scales with what you spent in a category instead of counting items, and the patch says the curve is not linear - "maxing out one tree fully isn't optimal bonus-wise".
The soul breakpoints are official and dated. As of the May 22, 2026 patch, all three categories share the same five lines:
Official source: Gameplay Update - 05-22-2026, Valve on Steam - "Weapon Investment Bonus now has a 6.4k line, changed from 4.8k/7.2k/9.6k/16k to 4.8k/6.4k/8k/11.2k/16k", with the Vitality and Spirit bonuses moving to the same five lines.
The first line, 4.8k, is what players call the 4.8k spike, which is why the souls guide treats income and purchases as one topic. The first matches guide has the same thresholds with a spending order attached.
Crossing a breakpoint grants that line's bonus; sitting 200 souls short grants nothing. Because the curve is deliberately non-linear, spread the spend across Weapon, Vitality and Spirit to reach more lines per soul. The September 29, 2026 update put an Investments readout on the HUD, so the total is on screen while you shop.
Four tiers, four prices
Tiers in Deadlock are price brackets, not rarity ranks. Every item in the same tier costs the same, across all three categories, and the community wiki sorts the whole shop into four of them:
| Tier | Price | What it typically is | Example items |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tier 1 | 800 souls | Laning stats, small actives | Grit, Healing Rite, Golden Goose Egg, Rusted Barrel |
| Tier 2 | 1,600 souls | First real power spike | Cold Front, Fleetfoot, Split Shot, Slowing Hex |
| Tier 3 | 3,200 souls | Build-defining passives, mid-game actives | Alchemical Fire, Decay, Knockdown, Heroic Aura |
| Tier 4 | 6,400 souls | Match-shaping actives, late-game caps | Arctic Blast, Refresher, Unstoppable, Colossus |
Two shop rules sit on top of the brackets:
- Components upgrade instead of being sold. Many Tier 2+ items list a cheaper item from a lower tier as a component. Buy the upgrade and the component is consumed, with its full price discounted off the new item: Extra Spirit at 800 souls feeds Improved Spirit and Surge of Power, and each of those purchases comes down by 800.
- Selling refunds half. Sell any item back for 50% of its cost - the full price if you sell before leaving the shop area, the yellow-marked floor inside the shop. A wrong first purchase is cheap to undo.
Beyond the four brackets sits the label set Valve actually ships. The September 29, 2026 sandbox options describe "item types like Enhanced, Legendary, and Corrupted", and none of those is a Tier 1 to Tier 4 tier: Legendary items are 17 Street Brawl exclusives, labelled Tier 5 by the community wiki at 9,999 souls; Enhanced is a stronger roll of a normal item in that mode; Corrupted came from The Broker's exchange, which ran September 29 to October 2, 2026 and now drops after the Round 5 item draft in Street Brawl. The Corrupted items page has what the exchange did, and the hero release schedule explains why the window closed when it did.
The four tiers above were read from the community wiki on October 10, 2026, because Valve publishes no price table. Official patch notes give item changes as deltas - "increased from X to Y" - and one rebalance can move a whole bracket. Check Valve's official changelog forum before quoting a price back to anyone.
Inside the Curiosity Shop
The shop is a place on the map, not just a menu: a base shop on your side plus a side shop in every lane. The community wiki notes that you can only shop at your own team's side shops, that a lane's side shop stops selling for the rest of the match once that lane's Guardian falls, and that Rem's Image buys queued items from any shop except a base shop.
What happens inside the menu, from Valve's own notes:
- Search, a quickbuy queue and upgrade markers arrived with the May 8, 2025 rework, alongside a per-item sell priority (0-100) so Quickbuy automatically sells the right item when you are out of slots, and a marker on any item whose component you already own.
- Tabs, filters and popular items arrived with City Never Sleeps on September 29, 2026: pressing 1-6 navigates the shop tabs by default, an Item Filters control sits alongside them, and Popular Items narrows the grid using live player data on how often an item is bought and in what phase. Build copy and paste came in the same update.
Official source: City Never Sleeps, Valve - The Shop section lists "Popular Items", "Item Filters", "Shop Settings" and "Pressing 1-6 by default in the shop will navigate to different shop tabs".
Actives are the one part of shopping that touches your keybinds: each active item has to sit on one of four keys - Liquipedia's item portal lists Z, X, C and V as the defaults - while everything else in your twelve slots is a passive that is simply on. Whether a build's actives fit your hands is a fair reason to edit it - the meta for beginners guide covers reading shared builds before you copy them.
What Valve has never published
Four gaps explain most of the contradictions between Deadlock item guides:
- No official item count. The 156 buyable items and 17 Street Brawl legendaries are the community wiki's tally. Valve has never stated a total.
- No tier name mapping. The game uses T1 to T4 in community shorthand and Enhanced, Legendary, Corrupted in its own tooling, and no Valve page maps one set onto the other.
- No full stat table. Patch notes give deltas - "Tier 2 Bullet Resistance increased from 25% to 35%" - never a baseline sheet, so any complete numbers page is somebody's extraction of game files.
- No price table. Every souls figure here comes from the wiki's item lists rather than from Valve, which is why the dated warning above is not decoration.
None of that makes the community numbers wrong; it makes them the best available and subject to the next patch. When two sources disagree, trust the one with a date attached.
FAQ
How many item slots do you have in Deadlock? Twelve. Nine are open from the start of a standard match and three more unlock as your team destroys enemy Walkers - one, then two, then three. Street Brawl removed its slot limit on March 6, 2026.
What is the difference between Weapon, Vitality and Spirit items? They are the shop's three categories. Weapon items improve your gun and bullet effects, Vitality items improve health, regen, stamina and resistances, Spirit items improve your abilities. Your spend in each one feeds that category's investment bonus.
How much do items cost? Four tiers at 800, 1,600, 3,200 and 6,400 souls as of October 10, 2026, with every item inside a tier priced the same. Legendary Street Brawl items sit outside the tiers at 9,999 souls.
Can you sell items back? Yes, for half price anywhere and for the full price before you leave the shop area. Components are not sold: they are consumed when you buy the item they build into, and their cost comes off the new price.
What do Enhanced, Legendary and Corrupted mean? Item types Valve names in the game client, separate from the community's Tier 1 to Tier 4 shorthand. Legendary items are 17 Street Brawl exclusives, Enhanced is a buffed roll in that mode, and Corrupted items came from The Broker's exchange.
Related Guides
- Deadlock Souls Guide: Farming, Last Hit and Deny - where every soul you spend in the shop comes from.
- Deadlock for Beginners: Your First Three Matches - investment lines and a spending order for new players.
- Deadlock Street Brawl: 4v4 Mode Rules and Rounds - the mode with no slot limit and its own legendary pool.
- Deadlock Corrupted Items and The Broker - the exchange that handed out Corrupted items.
- Deadlock Meta for Beginners - how to read a shared build before you buy it.
More Deadlock Guides
How many heroes Deadlock has right now, who the 2026 vote rounds added, and how to pick a role instead of memorising a tier chart.
You cast one hero vote per Standard or Street Brawl match at the Pregame ballot box. The winning team counts double, first win of day doubles again.
Where each setting lives: the FOV slider and the config workaround past 90, the new health bars, and the keybinds players change most.
Three lanes, four new Districts between them, and the Haunts that spawn in each. What City Never Sleeps changed about where you fight.
Average Deadlock games run about 38 minutes, with 10% going past 48. Laning, mid game and Street Brawl rounds timed, with the patch each figure came from.
Every tier list is stale within a patch. How to judge strength from mobility, damage and role fit instead of copying a chart.
Mid Boss spawns from the first minute and drops the Rejuvenator. Its HP, bounty, debuff resistance and the three-minute buff, all sourced and dated.
Souls, denies, Walkers, Guardians, the Urn, the Rift and boons defined in plain English, for players arriving from League, Dota or Valorant.