At a glance: you can remove perks in Noita, and there are exactly 2 legitimately intended routes. The Nullifying Altar, built into the Sandcave below the Overgrown Cavern, wants 3 materials in 3 basins — Blood, Whiskey and Silver, left to right — then strips every perk except one-offs and floats them above you to re-take. In NG+ it relocates to the bottom-left of the Snowy Chasm.
This is the answer to a question the game never explains, and it is buried behind a room most players never find. There are exactly two ways to remove a perk you already own: the altar, and a Quantum Split entity-ID exploit that is not an intended mechanic. Everything else people call “perk removal” — the reroll scales at the Holy Mountain exit — does not touch perks you have already taken.
Why the reroll machine is not removal
The most common misconception is that the scales at the Holy Mountain exit let you swap a perk out. They do not. Rerolling only affects perks still sitting on that altar’s three slots; if you have taken one, the machine will not spawn a replacement for it.
The economics are still worth knowing, because rerolling is how you avoid taking a bad perk in the first place:
| Reroll number | Cost | Cumulative gold spent |
|---|---|---|
| 1st | 200 | 200 |
| 2nd | 400 | 600 |
| 3rd | 800 | 1,400 |
| 4th | 1,600 | 3,000 |
| 5th | 3,200 | 6,200 |
Each use doubles the price. Prices are tracked per Holy Mountain, so rerolling once in a later mountain does not raise the price of the one you skipped earlier — you can walk back to the first altar and still pay 200. The absolute ceiling is your gold cap of 2.15 billion, which works out to a maximum of 23 rerolls, though the display shows infinity while you cannot afford the next one.
So: reroll before you commit, and go to the altar when you have already committed and regret it.
Getting to the altar
The Nullifying Altar sits deep in the Sandcave, below the Overgrown Cavern. It is a brickwork structure with three material basins, each engraved with the alchemical symbol of the material it wants.
You need to bring those three materials with you, which is the actual difficulty of the trip — a basin is not a hint system, it just does not work if you pour in the wrong thing.
Blood is the easy one. Summon Deercoy, Summon Fish, the Blood spell itself, Blood Cloud and Touch of Blood all produce it, and any enemy corpse will do in a pinch.
Whiskey comes from Explosion of Spirits, Touch of Spirits or Sea of Alcohol.
Silver is the wall. Realistically the only route is Chaotic Transmutation, which has a 5.44% chance of producing it — the same 5.44% that gates blood and whiskey from that spell. If you are not carrying Chaotic Transmutation and willing to reroll it, plan the trip around getting one first.
What actually comes back
When the three basins are filled, every perk you hold flashes out of you and hangs in the air overhead. The important detail is that the remaining perks do not disappear when you pick one up, unlike a Holy Mountain altar. You can take one, leave the rest floating, and come back for them.
That is what makes the altar useful for two different jobs: dropping a detrimental perk, and banking non-stackable perks you want to collect twice.
The exceptions are where most players get burned:
| Perk | What the altar does |
|---|---|
| Extra Life | Not removed |
| Fungal Shifts | Not removed |
| Curse of Greed | Not removed |
| Extra Health | Cannot be removed — but you keep the max HP |
| Faster Wands (and other one-offs) | Removed, not placed in the air, so gone permanently |
| Vampirism | Removed, and re-taking it applies the health reduction a second time |
| Telekinetic Kick | Removed, but you keep the telekinesis; you only get the default kick back by re-taking it |
| Iron Stomach at high satiation | Your satiation is set to 100% when the perk is removed |
The Iron Stomach row is the one that kills runs. If the reset fails — which has been observed at 76,767% satiation, with no confirmed threshold — you will not die of the usual overeating explosion, but the very next thing you eat will detonate you. Eat nothing until you have taken Iron Stomach back.
Vampirism is the sleeper. It is a strong perk, and cycling it through the altar costs you max HP twice rather than once.
Perk duplication, and the god that shows up
Because the perks hang in the air instead of vanishing, the altar can duplicate non-stackable and limited-stack perks — save them in the world, re-take them later. Some perks gain nothing from extra copies: additional Glass Cannon or Teleportitis Dodge stacks do nothing at all.
The aggressive version is to be polymorphed when the altar fires. Polymorph keeps your perks, so all of them get duplicated at once. The catch is that polymorphing near the altar spawns a Stevari with Berserk — a 50% chance it appears at the centre of the altar and a 50% chance it appears 30 pixels above you, with up to ±40 pixels of scatter in both axes. After your third polymorph, Skoude spawns instead.
Three ways around it, all sourced rather than guessed:
- The spawn detection is a circle centred above the altar, reaching from slightly into the Dense Rock below to just into the Sandcave above. Polymorph outside that circle and nothing spawns.
- An egg with Destruction in your inventory detonates on polymorph and kills both, but only if you polymorph into a sheep — otherwise Destruction targets you too.
- Peace with Gods still lets them spawn, but they are friendly if you are a sheep.
There is one more asymmetry that matters. Duping in a Parallel World has a 50% chance to make the polymorph permanent; duping in the Main World never does. Build a wand that teleports you home just before the altar fires and you can dupe repeatedly with no permanent-polymorph risk.
When to actually do this
Not early. The altar costs a long dig, a Silver source and a fight you did not need, and it pays off in exactly three situations:
- You took a detrimental perk early — the classic case, and the reason the room exists.
- You are setting up a long run and want duplicate Extra Perk or other limited-stack perks banked in the world.
- You are chasing an achievement pillar that a perk is actively blocking.
For the first case, it helps to know which perks you should never have taken. The perk tier list ranks them with the reasoning, and the common mistakes page covers the habitual ones. If the perk you want gone is a defensive one, check the survival guide first — sometimes the perk is not the problem, the wand is.
And if you are wondering whether a specific boss drops the perk you are about to give up, the boss guide lists every drop in the roster.
A note on version drift
The altar’s layout and interactions have been stable, but perk-specific behaviour is exactly the kind of thing patches change. Every value here — the three basin materials, the eight removal exceptions, the 5.44% Chaotic Transmutation odds, the 50/50 Stevari placement and the 200-gold reroll doubling — was read from the Official Noita Wiki in October 2026. Re-check the Nullifying Altar page before a serious duplication run.