Dungeon Settlers Run the Dungeon, Then Leave

An expedition is a four-person trip into a procedurally built region. Floors and rooms shuffle each visit. Deeper floors hold rarer reagents — wood, herbs, gemstone veins, mandrake, forbidden fruit — and nastier remnants of magical experiments. This page is the logistics layer around combat. If you never read another dungeon article, remember one rule: rotate floors; never grind one tile to depletion 0.

Depletion, the expensive habit

Every floor tracks a counter from 5 (full) to 0 (empty). Farming the same floor spends stacks. When any floor in a region hits 0, the region gains Depleted Dungeon: all item drop rates −50%, including floors that are still stocked. That scope quirk is why “my favorite rat hallway” becomes a regional recession.

Recovery uses the campaign clock: 4,320 in-game minutes (3 in-game days) per stack. A floor at 0 needs 15 in-game days to refill — about 4.5 real hours at 1x. Rotation is strictly better than waiting. Spread runs across floors and, when you have them, across regions.

Time is shared with camp

There is no separate dungeon calendar. The same clock runs settlement jobs and your party. One day is about 18 real minutes at 1x. Night is 20:00–06:00 and cuts vision. Long stays apply a Dungeon Stay mood ladder that steepens each in-game day underground. Safe floors (staging rooms with an entrance, corridor, and portal) can reset parts of that ladder — use them as pit stops, not as apartments.

If research is running at camp, a three-day dive is also three days of unattended mood and farms. Plan trip length like a raid lockout, not like an open-world hike.

Regions in Early Access

The playable story regions are Veil of Silence and Festering Burrow, plus Infinite Abyss as a separate endless mode (partly implemented, not the empty Forgotten Abyss slot). Unlocking is a derived chain: the game re-evaluates locks on load rather than storing a simple flag, which is why some players think a boss “should have” opened the next map and did not. Killing the Red Monster Rat ends the tutorial story and does not, by itself, unlock the next region. Read the in-game region requirements; do not assume a named kill equals a door.

Datamined future slots include Abandoned Mine, Forgotten Abyss, Dead Swamp, and Tower of Apocalypse. They are empty placeholders in Early Access. The roadmap is the honest list.

Festering Burrow’s fiction: Elros Empire mages dumped magical waste there; Gloth wildlife moved in. Expect acid, experiments, and faction fights between monster groups. Environmental modifiers roll per region; higher combat difficulty adds more negative modifiers. Compare those knobs on the difficulty tool.

Packing list

• Food matched to racial diets (mood and food).
• Ammo for every bow.
• Ointments / aid kits.
• A backup weapon if durability is already mid.
• Camping kit if you might hit a safe floor overnight.
• Empty inventory space for wood, grass, bones, and quest reagents.

Toggle auto-pickup. Manual tagging is how you leave a vein on the floor and remember it at camp.

Goals per trip

Day-one trips: wood, grass, easy XP, home before night. Week-two trips: Bone/Carapace materials, a merchant if the room appears, one elite if packed. Never add “and also the next three floors” because the portal was close. Close portals are how depletion and Dungeon Stay sneak in.

Event rooms and blood-price trees are optional content. If the tree wants blood you cannot spare, walk away. Merchants are for selling junk and buying a missing stack, not for window shopping while a pack respawns.

Infinite Abyss

Infinite Abyss is a standalone endless dungeon, separate from the Forgotten Abyss region stub. Treat it as a late toy, not a replacement for Veil of Silence progression. If the mode still feels unfinished, that matches the developer’s own Early Access framing — core loop complete, extra regions still coming.

Coming home is a skill

Portal out when:

• A weapon is near breaking and you have no repair kit.
• Average mood is sliding toward a Mental Break.
• Night started and you are not on a safe floor.
• The floor’s depletion is 1 and you do not need that last stack.
• You already filled the shopping list from the settlement benches.

A live party with a half-full pack beats a heroic wipe. Hire replacements with the recruiting rules, not with a graveyard.

For the first named fight, stop here and open how to beat the Red Monster Rat. For loadouts, open party compositions.