How to get the Horadric Cube in Diablo 2 — and what to do with it once you have it

The Horadric Cube in Diablo 2 is a very useful item. Once reclaimed by the heroes of the story, this magnificent artifact of the ancient Horadrim will allow you to alchemically transmute various recipes into existence, as well as serve as a means by which several quests in the game will be completed. It will even let you do gross things like find the body parts of a murdered holy man and turn them into a flail to hit things with, which you’ll have to do to go further in the game since it’s the only way to get past an evil magical barrier.

No, seriously. I’m not kidding. You really have to do that.

Anyway, you may be wondering how to gain this magnificent artifact of the ancient Horadrim. Well, as in so many other instances of Diablo 2: Resurrected, the answer is going out and killing a whole lot of demons and undead monsters. I mean, it’s sort of the whole point of the game, so it’s nice that it dovetails that way.

How to get the Horadric Cube

To progress from Act 2 to Act 3 you’ll need a Horadric Staff, and in order to make said staff, you need the Horadric Cube to recombine its parts into a whole item. In order to get the cube, you’ll explore the Halls of the Dead in the Dry Hills, which is just as inviting as it sounds, what with being jam packed full of undead including Mummies who aren’t pleasant fellows to deal with. At the bottom layer of the Halls, level 3, you’ll find the Horadric Cube in a chest guarded by the nearby Super Unique Huntress (a Lacuni, or cat-person) named Bloodwitch the Wild and her pack.

Kill them, grab the cube, and head back to Deckard Cain with it.

That’s how you get the Cube. As for what it does, well, that’s a slightly more involved answer.

What do you do with a Cube from Horadrim

As I said before, you’ll use the Cube several times to create plot macguffins such as the Horadric Staff. But the real power of the Horadric Cube is to serve as a means to create and modify various items. It can be used to add sockets to specific Rare items, for example, or transform Arrows into Bolts or vice versa, or even to craft Javelins out of a Spear and a stack of Arrows. It’s also used to make higher quality gems out of lower quality ones, and in the use of Runes and Rune Words to upgrade items. Essentially, in Diablo 2: Resurrected, the Horadric Cube is your one stop shop for upgrading your gear. It also can carry 12 slots worth of items like runes or gems inside it, while only taking up 4 slots in your inventory.

It can also be used to create a Token of Absolution by farming the end bosses of each Act on Hell difficulty and combining the various extremely rare items they drop, the Twisted Essence of Suffering, the Charged Essence of Destruction, the Burning Essence of Terror, and the Festering Essence of Destruction.

Again, these items only drop on Hell difficulty, and they are not guaranteed drops, so you’ll need to do a lot of farming to get them. Why would you? Because the Token of Absolution allows you to completely reset all of your stat and skill points, and there’s no limit on the number of times you can use Tokens to do this, as long as you have them to use. So unlike Akara, who only does this once per difficulty level, the Token of Absolution is a way to store potential respecializations whenever you want them.

Don’t expect to have a ton of them — the drop rates on the items used in the Horadric Cube to create them are not great. But it’s an option, and one of the most popular uses of the Horadric Cube. So if you want to eventually respec your character, get the best runes and gems available, or socket your own gear, as well as a plethora of other uses, you really want to pick up a Horadric Cube. And you really have no choice anyway, you can’t get out of Act 2 without one.