We Counted Every LoL Item's Build Paths: Kindlegem's '33 Upgrades' Is Really 25 — Ruby Crystal Takes the Real Crown at 27

We counted every League of Legends component item (the building blocks of final builds) on Summoner's Rift — 277 of them — and measured how many final items each one can upgrade into, straight from Riot's own ddragon recipe data. The raw count made Kindlegem (800g) look like the leader with 33 upgrade paths. But once duplicate names are merged, that number drops to 25. The real leader is Ruby Crystal (400g), with 27.

Why "33 paths" was actually 25

ddragon's recipe data gives every component an "into" list — the IDs of items it can be combined into. Kindlegem's list has 33 entries, but eight of those final items — including Abyssal Mask, Zeke's Convergence, and Mikael's Blessing — show up twice under different IDs. Support items branch into separate recipe IDs depending on which starting trinket a player picked, so the same final item name can exist on two different recipe chains. Counting raw list entries picks up that duplication and throws off the ranking.

Only 57 of 277 components actually branch

Sorting all 277 components by how many paths they open up: 202 are dead ends (finished items or consumables with nowhere left to go), 18 lead to exactly one next item, and only 57 branch into two or more. That means barely over a fifth of all components function as a real fork in build decisions — the rest are effectively one-way streets. Averaged across just those 57 branching components, each one opens into 6.7 final items.

The versatility ranking

Component	Cost	Builds into
Ruby Crystal	400g	27
Kindlegem	800g	25
Long Sword	350g	24
Amplifying Tome	400g	24
Pickaxe	875g	21

The plainer a component is — just raw health or raw damage — the wider its reach. Rounding out the top eight: Caulfield's Warhammer (1050g, 17), Cloth Armor (300g, 14), and Giant's Belt (900g, 13). Every item in the top eight is a defensive or generic stat stick. Only 15 of the 277 components qualify as a true "hub" opening into ten or more final items.

18 one-way tickets, and almost half are boots

On the other end, 18 components have exactly one upgrade path. 8 of those 18 are tier-one boots — Berserker's Greaves, Sorcerer's Shoes, and the rest — where the tier-two upgrade is hard-coded as a single option, so there was never a fork to begin with. The remaining ones are mostly early specialist items: Bramble Vest into Thornmail, Hexdrinker into Maw of Malmortius, Dark Seal into Mejai's Soulstealer — items you buy specifically to shut down magic damage, healing, or a snowballing lane, with the final form basically locked in the moment you buy them.

Takeaway

Counting raw recipe IDs is an easy way to get a build-path ranking wrong — Kindlegem only looked like the leader because support-item branching got double-counted. Once you merge by final-item name, it's the unglamorous 400g Ruby Crystal that actually absorbs the most builds. Cheap doesn't track with versatile, and this is the proof.

Ruby Crystal out-versatiling Kindlegem says a lot about just how deep the HP-tank item pool really is