Getting Started

First Runs

On your first runs, get in, grab what you can, and leave. The dungeon gets more dangerous the longer you stay.

Sell most of your copper and dried essence when you get back. It's your main source of income early on.

If you find any lore books, submit them to the /codex to earn additional skill points from challenges.

Gearing Up

Gear is found in dungeon chests and as drops from mobs. Every piece of equipment has base stats determined by its material and type.

Materials

Equipment comes in different materials:

• ✦Wood and leather
• ✦Copper
• ✦Gold
• ✦Tin and chainmail
• ✦Iron
• ✦Diamond
• ✦Netherite

Higher materials have better base stats, more modifier slots, and higher durability.

Durability

Your durability drops as you use equipment. When it runs low, visit the Blacksmith to repair it. A repair restores the item to full.

Each repair on an item costs more than the last. The first costs 3 per point of maximum durability, and every repair after that doubles the price. A golden chestplate holds 400 durability, so its repairs cost 1,200, then 2,400, then 4,800, and so on. The tooltip tracks how many times an item has been repaired, and the count never resets.

Because the price follows maximum durability, every item costs the same per point restored. Once the next repair costs more than replacing the item, retire it and gear up again.

Upgrading

Upgrading the gear you find is a big part of progression.

Modifiers

Your equipment has modifiers, which affect its properties and stats.

A lot of the gear you find in the dungeon comes with bad modifiers. To make good gear, you have to improve it with runes at the Blacksmith.

Early on, you can also spend your copper to craft handmade copper gear. Because it's handmade, it comes with negative modifiers. You should try to get rid of them by using cleansing, chaos, or inscribed runes:

• ✦Cleansing runes remove a random negative modifier.
• ✦Chaos runes reroll all the modifiers on your item.
• ✦Inscribed runes apply their inscribed modifier onto your item, replacing a random existing one.

Stability

All of your gear has stability. You can view the approximate stability your item has left in the tooltip or use a stability rune to discover the accurate amount.

If an item runs out of stability, it becomes corrupted. Corrupted items can't have any more runes applied to them.

Stability and corruption become a concern only in the mid-game, so early on you don't have to worry about it.

Rune Strategy

There's a lot of strategy to using runes well.

One important strategy to know is how to get the most out of inscribed runes and reduce RNG. If your sword has a "-10% Attack Damage" modifier, then using an inscribed rune with a "+20% Attack Damage" modifier will guarantee to replace that one. It's guaranteed because gear can only have one modifier of each type, and if the inscribed rune were to replace anything else, you'd end up with a duplicate.

Other strategies involve managing your item stability, warding/focus rune combos, rune sequencing, etc. You'll discover them naturally as you play.

Abilities

Having ability modifiers on your armor is important for survival. Abilities have cooldowns and spend charge on use.

Confused on what an ability does? Use /explain while holding an item with a modifier to get its description or check the abilities wiki.

Ability Effects

Where you can, use elemental effect armor modifiers like fire, lightning, and frost.

By themselves, elemental modifiers on armor grant you a passive bonus: a chance for mobs to be affected with elemental ailments when they hit you.

Placed on the same armor as an ability, they give that ability elemental properties and make it significantly stronger.

Combos

Elemental effects on abilities enable synergetic combos with other elements.

For example, an AoE ability with the gas effect creates a gas cloud. Setting something in that cloud on fire ignites it, dealing high instant damage and leaving a fire area. Hit that fire area with frost and it turns into steam, dealing even more instant damage.

Read the elemental effects page for full details on elemental combinations.

Essence

The longer you stay in a run, the more essence you can collect from looting chests, killing mobs, and taking on curses from altars.

Essence can be sold for shards in town or used to unlock essence chests, activate blessed altars, and open biome gates.

You can't bring essence out of the dungeon, as it dries up on the surface and turns into dried essence.

Essence Chests

Most of the time, you'll be spending your essence to unlock essence chests. Essence chests typically contain better loot than other chests of the same tier.

Essence chests upgrade their contents over time, adding more items and higher-quality ones. The longer you survive before unlocking a chest, the better the loot inside.

Altars

You'll come across many altars in your runs. There are three types: blessed, cursed, and pact altars.

Spend essence at a blessed altar if the altar provides a good offer. Your essence is often better spent in other places, but this may be useful if you're preparing for a boss battle, or are stuck fighting for your life and trying to extract.

Take a curse from a cursed altar if you're in need of essence, e.g. to get into biomes faster. Biome gates require essence to open, and every minute spent collecting it raises the dungeon's difficulty. Even a couple of essence can save you a minute or two.

Some of the curses are consistently easy, others are only good situationally.

The third type of altar offers you pacts: both a buff and a curse, at no essence cost.

Biomes

Once you're ready, you can start entering biomes, which are higher-tier areas with better loot and new threats.

To enter a biome, you must first find the biome gate. You can craft a gate tracker to help you in that regard.

To unlock the biome gate, you need a catalyst, which appear scattered across the dungeon.

The catalyst also requires essence to use. The amount of essence required depends on the biome and the amount of players on your game.

Skill Points

You need XP to level up, which grants you skill points. You can spend them by talking to the Trainer in the inn.

You unlock skills in a grid-like web. There are many paths you can take through the skill web for various benefits.

If you're unsure what to pick, going up and unlocking the Ritualist skills for extraction speed is great early on.

If you're ever running low on stash space, you can use skill points to unlock additional stash pages or join a guild with stash size upgrade perks.

Gaining XP

The longer you stay in a run, the more XP you get per minute. Binding runes, completing quests & codex challenges, and runescribing are also great sources of XP.