Ultrapool Ritual Explained: What Happens When You Unleash It

The card text

The ritual is not a ball you can buy. It is a counter that only one ball feeds:

Upgrading changes only the number: a level 2 Candle adds 2 strength per pocket, level 3 adds 3, up to 5 at level 5. The “5th candle” trigger never changes. So the ritual has two dials — how many Candles you sink decides whether it fires, and what level they are decides how hard.

That is everything the game printed on the card until this week. The v0.15.0 patch (4 September 2026) lists “Added a tooltip for ‘Ritual’” among its changes, which is the developers acknowledging that nobody could tell what the thing did. The patch notes do not quote the tooltip.

What players say it does

Before the tooltip existed, the answer came from the subreddit. In the thread “What does ‘the ritual’ do?” (r/ULTRAPOOL, 25 August), the accepted explanation is:

It automatically pockets balls, the number of which directly corresponds to the ritual strength value. By default it’s 5, one per candle.

A second player in the same thread describes the same thing more loosely — the ritual “launches a few balls into pockets, and slightly more when the strength is increased”. Those two accounts agree with each other and with the card maths (five level-1 Candles add up to strength 5), so this site treats “unleash = auto-pocket one ball per point of strength” as the working rule. It is a community reading, not a quoted tooltip; if the v0.15.0 tooltip says something different, this page will be corrected.

What is not published: which balls the ritual chooses, whether the auto-pockets keep each ball’s pocket effects, and whether the Candle count carries over between rounds. Every player describing a successful ritual fired it inside a single round, so plan for that.

How strength scales

Reading the card literally, strength is the sum of what each pocketed Candle adds:

That table is arithmetic from the card, not something anyone has verified at level 5. It does explain why the thread’s tone is split: at level 1, five auto-pockets in exchange for pocketing five Common balls is a poor trade (“seems pretty bad”), while a player who levelled their Candles alongside Eyeballs, a Rat and a Rat King reported their longest run, finishing rounds at “an easy 700-800 points”.

Making it fire

Five Candles in one round is the hard part, and the Spooky set gives you tools for it:

• Buy Candles early and rack them to be pocketed on the break. The player with the 700-800 point rounds describes pocketing every Candle on the break, then shooting Eyeballs to build the table, then knocking the last Candle in on the final shot so the ritual fires on a full table.
• Fill the table before the fifth Candle. The ritual pockets balls that are there, so it wants bodies. Eyeball (“Pocket: if you have no eyeballs, spawn two level 1 eyeballs with +1 score”) and Coffin (“Pocket a non-spirit ball: spawn a level 1 spirit”) both add balls mid-round; Gravestone gives +1 to every ball that spawns.
• Upgrade Candles before mixing them. The cocktail bar averages levels, so fusing a level 3 Candle into something else drags its ritual contribution down.
• Mind the shields. The Spooky set is full of shielded balls (Ghost, Skull, Lantern); whether the ritual can pocket a shielded ball is unpublished, so do not rely on it to clear them.

Where the ritual sits in the set

The Spooky set’s identity is transformation, shields and the ritual — see the sets page. Among Spooky’s four Rares (Reaper, Rat King, Witch, Werewolf) and its Legendary Lich, the ritual is the only Common-driven engine, which makes it the cheapest thing in the set to build and the easiest to build badly. Every Spooky ball, with full level tables, is on the ball list.