Fusion Skills are the strongest combined abilities in Fatal Claw, and they are the part of the ability system most likely to strand you: every one needs a specific left-to-right input order, and swapping two icons silently produces a different formula rather than an error. This page gives the order for all five, how to identify the five glyphs in the interface, where the clues are, and one localization trap that will make you enter the wrong sequence if you read the French text literally.
For the abilities that feed into this system, see Engraved Skills and Cabitz. For the ability-gate route that leads here, see Progression Route and Ability Gates.
What You Need First
Three things, in order:
- The Combinator — obtained from Jack’s Vault. The achievement unlocks it; without the achievement the Claw Tree option does not appear.
- The five component glyphs — found across the world, not in one place.
- The recipe order — the part people get wrong.
Once you have the Combinator, open it from the Claw Tree menu. It reads the icons left to right, so reversing two inputs is not a mistake it will warn you about. It produces a different skill, or nothing at all.
Identifying The Five Glyphs
Every recipe uses the same five images. Match shape and colour together — colour alone misleads in dark rooms, and effects animating over the interface can shift the apparent hue.
| Glyph | What it looks like | Do not confuse it with |
|---|---|---|
| Automaton eye | Orange-gold mechanical diamond with a central eye | The red starburst; both read as bright shapes at small scale |
| Blue crescent | Blue circular slash or moon with a dark centre | A blue ability effect outside the slot highlight |
| Purple shield | Pale purple curved plate with darker circular cells | The blue crescent, when the slot glow cools the colour |
| Green fangs | Two luminous green claw shapes | A poison-status icon; check for the paired teeth silhouette |
| Red starburst | Crimson spiked impact in a dark square | The automaton eye, which has a hard mechanical outline |
All Five Recipes
1. Deflecting Blade
A defensive fusion that throws a blade which strikes several enemies in sequence. It creates safe openings rather than raw damage.
Recipe: Blue crescent → Red starburst (200 mana readback)
Clue: A drafting-table scene where a character examines a diagram through a magnifying lens. The board shows the blue crescent first, the red starburst second. Follow what the board displays rather than the order the scene narrates it.
2. Mythical Creature’s Retribution
A defensive counter. Blocking with it raises a shield from the creature’s remains and launches counterattacking spikes.
Recipe: Purple shield → Red starburst → Green fangs (100 mana readback)
Clue: The clue is not a sentence here — it is a traversal path. Enter three adjacent rooms from left to right and the sequence establishes itself. Walking the route right to left reverses it, and the recipe fails without any message explaining why.
3. Nagaraja’s Illusions
A utility fusion that creates a recurring serpent illusion which bites nearby enemies before vanishing.
Recipe: Red starburst → Purple shield → Green fangs → Blue crescent (200 mana readback)
Clue: A riddle, and this is the one the localization bug affects. The English reads:
“The crimson thorns, and the recipient of their dark protection. Behold the viridian fangs that shall raze the blue moon.”
Each colour-noun pair maps straight to a glyph:
| In the sentence | Glyph |
|---|---|
| crimson thorns | Red starburst |
| dark protection | Purple shield |
| viridian fangs | Green fangs |
| blue moon | Blue crescent |
Do not reorder the nouns into a phrase that reads better. The sentence is the input sequence. A correct entry displays Nagaraja’s Illusions and a 200-mana readback.
4. Automata: Annihilation
An offensive fusion — a thrown automaton that wipes nearby enemies with an explosion.
Recipe: Automaton eye → Blue crescent (100 mana readback)
This is the shortest formula in the game and the one most often botched, because the automaton eye is easy to mistake for the red starburst at UI scale.
5. Extermination Protocol
The strongest of the five: a wide-area attack that summons a giant guardian which hits every nearby hostile target.
Recipe: Automaton eye → Blue crescent → Purple shield → Green fangs → Red starburst (500 mana readback)
If only four slots fill, the late-game name and the 500-mana readback will not appear. That is the usual symptom of a single swapped icon rather than a missing glyph.
The French Localization Trap
If you play in French, the Nagaraja’s Illusions clue does not say what it appears to say.
| Text | |
|---|---|
| English | “Behold the viridian fangs that shall raze the blue moon.” |
| French | “Sois témoin de l’effondrement de Lune bleue, provoqué par Crocs d’émeraude.” |
The English is verb-first: fangs raze moon, so the input order is green fangs then blue crescent. The French is a causal clause — the moon’s collapse, caused by the fangs — and the two colours appear in the opposite order. Read literally, it produces the wrong combination.
If you are playing in French, enter the order given in the recipe table above and ignore the sentence’s word order. Green fangs, then blue crescent.
Status: this is a player report on the Steam Bug Reports forum with no developer reply and no community confirmation as of this writing. The English ordering is independently corroborated by other wiki coverage, but the French string has not been verified against the current build. Treat this section as guidance for a suspected bug rather than a confirmed patch note — if you have checked the current French build and the text has changed, this note is stale and we would want to know.
Honest Gaps
- The clue locations come from community wiki coverage, not from NDEV patch notes or an official guide. NDEV has never published fusion recipe documentation. We cross-checked against two independent community wikis that agree on the five recipes; the Residential Area 2 attribution for the Nagaraja riddle is from that source and has not been confirmed against the game directly.
- A player report places that riddle near Masa in Strigine Quarry instead, which does not match the Residential Area 2 location above. One of the two is wrong. If you find the stone, note where it actually is.
- The mana readback figures come from community observation, not from a published data table. They are useful as a correctness check but we cannot confirm they are exact.
- No localization bug has been acknowledged by NDEV. Everything on the French trap is inference from a forum post.
Related
- Engraved Skills — the abilities that feed into the fusion system.
- Cabitz — charm sockets and the ability loadout.
- Progression Route and Ability Gates — where Jack’s Vault sits on the achievement route.
- Achievements: Rarest and Hidden — achievement gates including Jack’s Vault.
- Fatal Claw Abilities — ability index.