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.

Materials also differ in kind. Leather is light and gives evasion instead of armor, chainmail gives half of each, and the rest are heavy plate. See Defense for what that means.

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.

Defense

Armor is a flat number that works as a percentage increase to your effective health. 20 hearts with 50 armor means +50% EHP, so 20 x 1.5 = the same as having 30 hearts. Armor adds up across your gear and never caps.

Resistances work the same way. Undead, beast, projectile, blast, and fire resistance each raise your EHP by their number against that kind of damage. 50 projectile resistance is the same as 50 extra armor when an arrow hits you.

Evasion works the same way as armor, except it lets you dodge melee and projectile hits entirely.

Use /stats in the lobby or in a run to see how your armor, resistances, and evasion add up. For the math and the builds, see Strategies.

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, and every rune spends some. The tooltip shows an estimate, and a stability rune reveals the exact amount.

An item that runs out of stability becomes corrupted and can't take any more runes. This only becomes a concern in the mid-game.

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

Abilities

Having ability modifiers on your armor is important for survival. Abilities have cooldowns and spend charge on use. 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. Elements react with each other for extra damage. See Elemental Effects.

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 altars sell a buff for essence, cursed altars pay essence for taking a curse, and pact altars give a buff and a curse together for free. See Altars for when to use each.

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.