Explore all, or finish quickly?

[Peter Pan]

Hey all,

Is it more cost efficient to explore the entire dungeon, or to finish things as quickly as possible before stress and health suffers more?

Currently I always try to explore everything to collect as much loot as possible, but I'm not sure if that's the best approach?

[Mhblis]

Depends entirely on your team and their status really.

If you have an Antiquirian yes it is as its generating extra gold.

If you can run another dungeon in the time it takes you to clean up the current one I probably not do it.

Ive had a few runs where the team steam rolled everything so was quick to clean up the last room or to

[Zorlond]

Keep in mind that just the act of walking around in the dungeon causes stress on your team. It's slow, but it adds up, and does so faster the darker it gets. At a point, the cost of getting your team the rest they need isn't worth the coins in the remaining curios. Plus, traps and fights can respawn in cleared hallways, more opportunity for things to go wrong.

There's also when your inventory is just completely full already and you've already tossed all the non-treasure stuff. At that point it's easier to just pack it up than stressing over the next stack of loot trying to decide what to keep.

[Gilmoy]

Yes, it is most profitable to fully explore the entire dungeon.
That means every room and every corridor.

Even better, leave all curios unopened the first time you pass them by, while your pack still has stuff you need, and you don't know what supplies you can discard because you haven't seen all of the curios yet. After 1 full pass, you know what you can drop, and you've freed up 2-3 slots of torches and food consumed.

Hence, as soon as you enter a long L5 Champion dungeon with 16-17 rooms laid out in a rectangular maze, pause and plan out a full double-tour that goes through every hallway twice, while minimizing backtracking and room repeats. Plan to camp here and there. Then do it. It maximizes your loot.

Every fight heals your health and stress to 0 damage and 0 stress. When you reach that level of play, all L5s are your playground, fights are amusements, and the only stress you keep is from walking hallways in the dark after the last fight, because there wasn't another fight to heal you. Every time you get ambushed in a hallway, you cry out YAAY free heal and more loot. Then it's optimal to maximize the number of fights and maximally delay the opening of all curios. N.B. this also works for L3 and L1 dungeons

It does take extra real-time to be this methodical, mostly because you stall to fully heal at the end of every single fight (which you should be doing anyways). If you want to win via a self-imposed challenge of most bang for least game weeks elapsed, it's this.

~~~~~~~~

Alternatively, if you want to win by the least real clock time spent, this might not be the best way. The opposite extreme is to sprint-finish each dungeon with the absolute mimimum effort involved: beeline to 3 altars, or 90% of rooms or fights, then end quest ASAP with the rest of the dungeon unseen, like you're in a chess time scramble. You could run 3 full missions and bank 3x the quest rewards in the same clock time. This exploits a different part of DD, namely that it has no clock: you are not punished in any way for taking more weeks. Win in 60 weeks or 6,001 weeks, it's all the same. Monsters don't get harder, they don't level up, they don't build anything, they don't win by an endgame win condition. So this is a valid way to play. In fact, you could have some silly fun with this mode of play, e.g. side-by-side clock racing, where you and a friend race to finish a run first, and physically ding a bell with your mouse hand on completion.

I assume you can win every fight with 0 damage and 0 stress in the end, from L1 through L5. Don't try this strategy in L6 DD1 - DD4, as there's no loot at all, and the monsters are scaled to kick your L6 butts.

[Zorlond]

Well, I can see who's running the cheat mods here.

[RopeDrink]

Originally posted by Gilmoy:

Stuff...

That level of micro is completely unnecessary.

As for OP, there's no one-track answer. If there's a risk of things going awry, it's generally safer to get things done ASAP. After all, overconfidence is supposedly a slow and insidious killer.

However, if everything is comfortable and you want to squeeze out more profit, there's no harm in staying longer to lap up some more goods -- but I absolutely wouldn't waste time doing a double-tour when gold and heirlooms are so easy to come by and a dungeon can comfortably be completed with all the necessary provisions and finished with a full bag.

[Robepriority]

Always beeline for the objective - you never know what disasters will come your way. If you find that you clear it with enough supplies to spare you can double back.

[thebadman]

Aim to explore all that appears worth it or even stay a bit after exploring to make 20-30k + heairlooms inventory from small/medium dungeons. Getting all food and torches helps a lot with it. It will let you to cure and lock quicks on 2 heroes every week pretty fast. I only would consider ending it quickly aside from IRL stuff if it would risk afflictions/deaths that I can't cure in dungeon because of team composition.

[Nakos]

Like most things in Darkest Dungeon ... it's a trade off.

You need to balance risk vs reward.

Sometimes you'll be able to manage well, and keep your health up, and your stress down and continuing to explore can be profitable.

Other times, your party may be wounded, stressed and out of supplies, and continuing to explore could potentially be fatal.

Sometimes you're just working your way through a dungeon to try to gain experience and/or rewards. Exploring further can be useful.

Other times you may be trying to kill a specific boss and be unsure if you can do it successfully, and moving to the boss as quickly as possible can be a good idea. Depending on how the fight goes, it might be worth considering exploring further afterwards. Or not.

Evaluating the risks vs the rewards is a constant part of the game. And ... each time the answer will be slightly different.

[Gilmoy]

Originally posted by Zorlond:

Well, I can see who's running the cheat mods here.

No mods at all. DD is not that hard a game.
I don't even have Crimson Court enabled, so no CC loot.

Go play ST:F and hunt the terrox xeno. By the time you finish Era IX Jyeeta Brood, you should be about 500-0 vs. ground terrox.

Then come back to DD, and it's not intrinsically harder. Every part of the game is slightly different, but the ability to prepare for peak performance is the same across genres.

My 1 trick in every game is that I have 2 physical monitors, and the 2nd monitor has a spreadsheet running. I log everything myself. Hence I don't have to fit any new game entirely into my human memory. Essentially, I use hardware to expand the size of my brain. No finite game on Steam envisioned by human devs can withstand a patient player with a spreadsheet.

Originally posted by RopeDrink:

That level of micro is completely unnecessary.

I actually agree with that. Probably no other human on Steam plays games like this. I'm fine with that.

OTOH, it is optimal for the most loot in the fewest weeks. And it's feasible.

Caveat: I play with full torch, so all of this counts as "easy" mode

[RopeDrink]

OTOH, it is optimal for the most loot in the fewest weeks. And it's feasible.

Going through the entire dungeon twice is only optimal if you want to min-max the possible profit, which isn't necessary given the volume of treasure and heirlooms in general. It also means dealing with respawning traps, fights, and hunger tiles, with food being finite.

Feasible? Sure, if you want to do it. Optimal? Not so much -- especially when a large part of the incentive for early and mid-game is the end-of-dungeon reward more than the extras found along the way. If you want gold/treasures above all else, Antiquarian will have you swimming in them long before a second trip.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1095632035

A single route through a veteran mission. It is easier to fill the bag with fewer Ant's due to lower stack size -- and it's with a team that doesn't have the luxury of overstaying its welcome, but it doesn't matter, because that + end-of-dungeon reward equalled 80k profit with minimal backtracking -- needing to do the mission as soon as possible for obvious reasons.

If you want heirlooms specifically, you can dump the Antiquarians and head to the relevant zone that provides the ones you need in particular and just ignore gold / minimize or swap out provisions. I'd argue that your method would be more useful for heirlooms because then you truly get to focus on the particular ones you want, but again, it's completely unnecessary when you can take what you get and head straight to a new dungeon with a new end-reward rather than take double the time to spring-clean an old one.

Regardless, doing a dungeon double-trip is the absolute last thing I'd suggest to new players due to all added risks, merely for the sake of better management of what you decide to take home.

[Gilmoy]

I actually agree with that. It's so efficient that it's overkill. Your pack will already be optimally full with the loot you want. You may find 0 improvements from the last 10-20 curios. In that sense, it hits a plateau of flatlined gains.

Ergo, you could actually do much less than this, leave "early" by 10-20 curios' worth of loot unseen, and earn just about the same total profit. In that sense, it's only for a die-hard completionist.

Originally posted by RopeDrink:

... respawning traps, fights, and hunger tiles, with food being finite.

Traps = -8 stress healed
Fights = free heal to 0 damage + 0 stress, and +1 loot drop!
Hunger = ... ok, that's a legit concern

So food is, in fact, a limitation of sorts (like fuel in that other game). If low or 0 on food, and the next curio is unlikely to beat your current 16 slots of best stuff, that's a good reason to short-circuit from inside the loop.

Then (re)plan your food buys so that either (A) you don't run out, even taking Hofstadter's Law into account, or (B) you do run out just as you reach about ~20 curios still unseen, and bail early. Both approaches surely work very well.

Originally posted by RopeDrink:

... take what you get and head straight to a new dungeon with a new end-reward ...

Gauntlet exit-diving That works, too. It's probably uniquely suited to DD because there's zero penalty for +1 week, and you can pump that well without bound. Even in Stygian/Bloodmoon, you could probably do this 30-40 times and still use the other 60 weeks to win in time.

N.B. I agree with you that players could learn to bail early because they're full of optimal loot, and not because they fear the dungeon. It's a fiscal policy, not a military one :) OK, maybe that's a bit advanced for a new player -- but that's exactly why we advocate the position, so that they can see it as a tangible objective to strive for.

[RopeDrink]

Traps = -8 stress healed

Which can only be guaranteed via a GR, or trap-related trinkets.

Fights = free heal to 0 damage + 0 stress, and +1 loot drop!

Let's assume that not everyone who reads the advice is a veteran, or happens to be playing meta. With questions like this, you have to account for people who may not be as comfortable, especially when suggesting they should go through a single dungeon twice for questionable worth.

Hunger = ... ok, that's a legit concern

Personally, I know how much is needed for every zone and quest-size to (a) cover the base amount of hunger-tiles and (b) have leftovers just in case. Alas, backtracking - intentional or not - can spawn more. Not everyone is attuned to the mechanic(s), and not everyone is playing sustain comps with a mind to stay 100% healthy 0% stressed at all times.

I can't think of any reason why I would suggest a blind player or veteran to rinse a dungeon twice. In fact, I wouldn't recommend anyone do any kind of backtracking unless it was absolutely necessary, even if you don't care about the risk of extra fights, have a means to deal with traps, and have food out the wazoo. Better off filling your inventory as much as possible and heading towards another worthwhile end-mission reward instead of micro-managing the potential of a completed dungeon.

The exception being, "Oh, the dungeon is complete and there are a few curios nearby? Cool, I'll just grab 'em real quick before I go home".

[Peter Pan]

Originally posted by RopeDrink:

Originally posted by Gilmoy:

Stuff...

That level of micro is completely unnecessary.

As for OP, there's no one-track answer. If there's a risk of things going awry, it's generally safer to get things done ASAP. After all, overconfidence is supposedly a slow and insidious killer.

Thank you to everyone for their replies, but for being able to use the game's quote in the answer, you win!

[ZT Xperimentor]

Leave nothing unchecked, there is much to be found in forgotten places.
The dialogue from hunting down all the bosses is both fascinating and concerning, unless you're playing on the hardest difficulty there's no reason to skip them if you can take them.