Getting Started in Darkest Dungeon

This is an in-depth guide to help people learn to master Darkest Dungeon. It started as a collection of basic tips and strategies, but at this point it's a fairly complete guide to the early game (levels 1-3 or so), and should answer most of your questions, perhaps even ones you didn't know you had. Read it and you'll understand how to keep and build a viable group of adventurers, get past all the early pitfalls, and understand the basic game systems.

It won't cover the late game (levels 4-6) because the game is still in Early Access and, while the level 1-3 content seems mostly finished, right now the level 4-6 content doesn't, so anything I write could still get significantly changed, so there's not much point in going into too much depth. Because this guide may need to change, I'm not going to include a lot of fancy videos -- it's a lot easier to edit text!

If this guide seems too long, don't freak out; there's a lot to be said for just diving into this game, playing it blind, and letting the chaos happen. But if you run into a problem, read this over and it should help you figure it out.

EDIT: This guide is not updated for the Houndmaster or Cove patches, but only covers the game as it was during the first month or two of Early Access. I plan for a full update with the release of the final dungeon.

First Steps

Your initial starting party is going to be a Crusader and a Highwayman. You'll have to take them through a couple fights vs. humans. In the first fight, it's just one dude; have your Highwayman use his Open Vein while the Crusader uses Smite or maybe the Stunning Blow. In the second fight, the guy in front is too big to kill quickly and you don't have enough long range firepower to take out the guy in back, so have your Highwayman use his Grapeshot to hit them both while your Crusader just Smites away at the big guy (you can try stunning blow, but given the big guy's stun resistance, odds are against you).

As soon as you hit town, go straight to the Stagecoach for more recruits. Your first two new recruits will probably be a Plague Doctor and a Vestal. Presuming your first two guys survived the tutorial, this is a pretty decent starting party, depending on what skills they start with and which you purchase for them. Your Crusader is your tank, your Highwayman is your Rogue, your Vestal is your healer, and your Plague Doctor is your crowd control and utility. Your Crusader is going to have Stunning Blow and Smite, your Highwayman Grapeshot and Open Vein; unfortunately the skills on your Vestal and Plague Doctor will be randomized.

Before you go on your first mission, be sure (again, if you can; initial rewards are somewhat random) to upgrade your "Stage Coach Network" as much as possible. Ideally, you want to come back from your first mission with four new recruits waiting. Don't worry yet about expanding your max roster.



Then go on that first mission in the Ruins.

Provisioning: At the provisioner's, buy 8 torches, 8 food, and (optional) one shovel; nothing else. (Total cost is going to be around 1450 gold, shovel included). Any extra stuff you buy but don't use is just wasted, and you're going to have better things to spend your money on very soon. 8 food and 8 torches should be enough to get you through a basic short dungeon, so that's what you need. The shovel is optional because running into a rubble pile without one is very annoying and you're probably going to see at least one rubble pile in any given dungeon.

Keep Your Torch Lit

As you move through the dungeon, keep your torch lit at 76% or higher at all times. Forgetting to watch your torch level is the easiest mistake to make for new players. The effects of the torch aren't immediately obvious but they are pervasive and powerful.

1) If your torch stays high, at 76% or above, you'll have a chance of surprising the enemy. This gives you a round of free hits and is hugely important, especially at the start when you're playing with a sub-optimal party and can't survive much in the way of things going wrong.

2) A high torch also gives you a Scouting bonus, which lets you spot traps and know which rooms are empty (and thus safe to move through), spot traps before you run over them, etc.

3) Most importantly, though, if your Torch drops too low, your heroes start taking extra stress damage. Since missions aren't a light-hearted romp to begin with, the extra stress damage really, really adds up, and you end up on a short train to an affliction cascade with your Crusader cowering in the back of the party, your Vestal stabbing herself at the start of every round, your Plague Doctor spitting out verbal abuse, and your Highwayman stealing everything that isn't nailed down. So don't do that. Keep your torch held high!

Basic Combat :

Your Crusader's Smite ability is going to be really useful, because it does extra damage to undead; conversely, though, undead are immune to the Bleed effect from your Highwayman's Open Vein ability (although it still will do more base damage than his Pistol Shot, if it can target).

Try to take out enemies as quickly as you can. Both your HIghwayman and your Crusader have a single-target attack and an AoE that hits multiples. Generally, it's better to focus-fire single enemies, but depending on who can target who, that may not always be possible. Where you can, bring down the back row enemies first, as they're generally more vulnerable and more deadly. Use AoE's sparingly and strategically: it's better to kill one enemy than wound two, but it's best to kill an enemy *and* wound two. You can use stun attacks if you have them, but don't over-use them; enemies get increasing resistance, so it's best to just use stuns to buy one or two extra rounds, rather than to attempt stunlocks.

Fight your way through the dungeon as best you can and try to avoid dying or going insane. (If you have problems, you can skip ahead to the Combat Tips section below).

Oh No, Everyone Went Crazy and Died, I Need to Restart

No you don't.

If you have some bad luck at this stage, no worries; it happens. Even if you have a total party wipe, you'll still have a new set of fresh recruits waiting at next week's wagon. If you really really really feel you must, you can, but as long as you've upgraded your stagecoach, you really don't need to.

If you keep wiping over and over again and just feel like the random number generator is stomping you, you're *probably* making some sort of mistake. This game is unforgiving and it does not always tell you when you're making a mistake, it just kills you. Read the rest of this guide and with a little luck you'll be able to power through.

Initial Development

Once you're back in town, you'll (hopefully) have four more recruits waiting at the stagecoach and can form a new party of dewy-eyed innocents for your second mission; if any of your first group have relatively low stress levels, you can run them for a second mission also. If some of your guys freaked out too badly and have high stress levels or Afflictions, you may want to send them to the Abbey or the Tavern to unwind and recuperate, but I would actually suggest *not* doing that, at least not without thinking about it first.

1) Your Troops Are Disposable.

The first mental hump to get over: this is not like other games. Your adventurers are going to die, and they are going to go insane. Do not get attached to them. They are poor disposable chumps who you've suckered to your Estate with promises of wealth and dreams of glory.

Your job as "adventurer coach" is not to keep all your adventurers happy and sane and healthy, or even alive. Your job is to maintain and build effective adventuring teams. That means protecting and nurturing your best players, and ruthlessly cutting and firing your bad players. This is *especially* true at the starting levels, when removing afflictions and negative quirks is especially expensive.

This means a few things in practice.

First, it means that that you want to recruit adventurers with more useful, positive quirks, you want to avoid hiring adventurers with negative quirks, and if you get an adventurer with more than a few significant negative quirks, you want to fire that adventurer, because it's a lot easier to replace a broken egg than it is to put it back together again.

So the question then is which adventurers are *useful.*And that tells you which adventurers you want to spend money on.

A) Does this adventurer have a good set of quirks? A level one character with three negative quirks and one positive quirk probably isn't worth the cost of redeeming him at the Sanitarium; dismiss him and grab a replacement from the stagecoach. Melee characters with negative quirks that reduce their melee damage? Yeah, maybe get rid of that one, but the same quirk might not be a problem on a support character. Similarly, if they're low level and have just picked up too many quirks that make them difficult to deal with -- for example, "Flagellant" and "Love Interest" at the same time, so that they can't use any stress-reducing options while in Town -- just fire them and hire a replacement. (If you can't find the "dismiss hero" button, see the screenshot directly below).


B) Caveat: make sure you have the classes you need. It's better to have a half-mad, bad, and dangerous to know healer than it is to have no healer at all. Sometimes the stagecoach brings nothing but Jesters for three weeks running and you have to keep that Occultist in your roster because he's the only healer you have. That's ok and is going to happen sometimes, but don't go investing a bunch of money training that Occultist; just keep him around until someone better shows up.

The second thing it means is that, strategically, if all else fails, if you overextended and now you're bankrupt and you can't even provision a basic mission, remember: your troops are disposable. Grab four poor fools from the cart and send them in without supplies. See how far they get! Maybe they'll succeed. If they look like they're all about to croak, retreat, and use whatever loot they retrieve to finance a real mission. If they die or go crazy, it doesn't matter. Fire 'em. That's why adventurers don't get retirement benefits. There's always four more suckers on next week's wagon.

You can still invest in your best heroes if you want -- often, a couple high-priority upgrades like a party heal for your Vestal or a weapon for your Crusader can be a great investment -- but think of everything you buy for every character as an investment, and one with downside risk.

2) Town Planning.

After the first and second missions, you're going to get new options for heirloom investment showing up; the Tavern and Abbey will appear, then the Sanitarium and Guild Hall and Blacksmith. It's going to be really tempting to invest in expanding the Blacksmith and Guild Hall, renovating your Brothel, etc. Don't do it, or at least, don't do it randomly. Make a plan.

You're still in the recruiting stage; to continue the sports analogy, you're in preseason. Until you get your characters to level 2 or 3 at least, you haven't invested sufficiently in them for the Sanitarium or the Guild Hall to be worthwhile. You may dump all that cash rehabilitating some bad set of quirks only for the adventurer to die on you three steps into their next mission; you may get a better recruit with better quirks showing up at the Stagecoach at any moment.

So what I would recommend, especially at first, is that you prioritize expanding your stagecoach over all other town development options. Once you have a roster of 12-16 adventurers and are getting four or more new recruits every week, you can afford to skim off the best recruits with the best quirks and to dismiss any who develop too many bad quirks or just break under the strain.

Otherwise, spend your Pages developing your Coach, your Portraits on expanding the Bar in your Tavern, and rather than improving your Abbey, save your Busts to buy a second slot in the Sanitarium (you'll need a lot). You can improve the Guild Hall and Blacksmith slightly if you want, but generally speaking you're going to be better off waiting until your characters hit level 3 or so to boost those.

If you need Pages, run missions in the Weald; for Portraits, run missions in the Warrens; for Busts, run missions in the Ruins.

3) Mission Logistics.

At first, I'd suggest only going on "short" missions. Each *short* mission costs about 1450 gold to finance, base cost, for your eight torches, eight food, and shovel. *Most* of the other things you can buy aren't worth it (sometimes I'll grab a key if I know there's a boss fight). Bandages, antivenom, etc., may go unused and cost money; your guys might as well suck it up. "defeat every room battle" missions are slightly easier than "explore 90% of room" missions, because sometimes there are only one or two actual actual room battles in the whole dungeon and you can beat those very quickly.

Longer missions cost correspondingly more, and thus represent a bigger investment and a bigger risk. With short missions you can sometimes bulldoze your way through with no healer, but for Medium or Long missions you're going to want to bring along significant healing or maybe a couple Level 2 guys or both just to help make a wipe or affliction cascade less likely.

In order to Camp, click on the firewood in your inventory (if you don't have firewood, this isn't a camping mission). You can only camp in Rooms, not in hallways. Timing your camping is complicated and depends on what camping skills your guys have and how stressed they are; generally it's much much better to camp a little too early, get your stress and wounds under control, and then dive in again than it is to push things too long and get an affliction cascade before you're halfway through the dungeon. This is especially true if you have "until next camp" skill buffs; the sooner you camp the sooner you get those into play.

The numbers next to the dungeons indicate what level of boss has been unlocked for each area. Doing missions in an area will build up the meter. Once it gets to 100%, the next tier of boss in that area is unlocked, and the meter stays at 100% until that boss is killed. Once the boss is killed, the meter will reset, and start building up towards the next boss tier.

Choosing Your Recruits: Class and Skill Guide

Ok, all that discussion above doesn't address the question of which character types & builds are "good." This is a big topic and would be extraordinarily difficult to cover in depth, especially because all the classes are "good" if used properly. The better questions then are "which classes are easiest to use effectively" or even "how do I use the classes I have well?"

Here's a subjective and non-comprehensive attempt to answer those questions, in rough order from easiest to use well to most difficult. Partly this is just a list of what I and others have found useful; partly it's what I think it's easiest for new players to use well with limited resources.

1) Vestal. She's your basic healer character and you're going to probably want at least two of her (one to recuperate while the other adventures). I like to put her in the very back row and give her Judgment, Dazzling Light, Party Heal, and Direct Heal. The two heal skills keep your party alive, Dazzling Light is a powerful stun and ranged damage, and Judgment is good damage and self-heal (note: if you kill the target with the Judgment, you won't get healed; this may be a bug).

2) Crusader. I really like this guy as a front-line tank, especially in the early missions where you're facing a lot of Unholy opponents. Reynauld's starting skill loadout is pretty good, but it's worth exploring Holy Lance and the single-target stress heal also.

3) Hellion. This is a really powerful second-rank melee character. The Break Through ability is good AoE damage, especially as it can hit the third rank back; Iron Swan is great for taking out the back row. The Barbaric Yawp ability seems limited but is great for keeping that last opponent locked up so your healers can heal everyone. (Note: Hellion was slightly nerfed as of the Feb 11, 2015 patch, but I think she still deserves this spot on the roster).

4) Highwayman. The highwayman is a good class. The Point-Blank Shot is a very effective attack, the Duellist's Advance gives him easy repositioning and an easy attack against the enemy back line, and the grapeshot AoE is very effective against weak enemies or as an alternate way to hit the 3rd rank. Their Point Blank Shot combines very well with the Graverobber's Shadow Fade.

5) Leper. Lepers are extremely solid tanks. They soak up a lot of damage, and they hit the enemy front rank HARD. They have a strong self-heal and a strong self-stress-reduce, and their Intimidate attack is very useful for shuffling the opponent's line. Unfortunately they have two big issues. The first is that their attacks all have low base Accuracy (but that can be remedied through buffs, trinkets, or better gear). The more significant problem is that they lack versatility. They have no way of directly attacking the back two rows (even their AoE only hits the first two), they can't heal or protect anyone else, and if the party gets surprised or shuffled, they have a really really hard time getting back into position.

6) Occultist. This guy's easy to overlook but he has the most powerful single-target heal in the game. It can heal up to ten points, which is huge, and your characters will *usually* resist the bleed effect. Still the bleed does exist and he lacks a general party heal, so overall he's not as good as the Vestal at keeping your adventurers alive when everyone's at Death's Door. His Daemon's Pull attack is extremely useful vs. the enemy back row.

7) Bounty Hunter. This guy is neat. He's got some really interesting interactions, a lot of utility with his Flashbang Grenade stun and Come Hither pull attack, and he's good at targeting the enemy back row. His downside is that he isn't as resilient as the other fighter types, has no AoE, and often requires setup to use his attacks effectively. However, if the Occultist starts Marking for him or he can take advantage of other party member's Stuns, and especially if someone buffs his crit rate, he can put out an incredible amount of damage.

8) Jester. This guy (girl?) is a force multiplier: he's hard to use well but *extremely* powerful on the right team. His song buff and his song stress heal can effect the whole party (and the buff stacks with itself twice over time). He doesn't have many powerful direct attacks of his own, though, and he can't heal physical damage, so the rest of your party has to be very solid; without a strong team to buff, he's just dead weight. I find he's best on Medium and Long missions, where consistent party-wide stress reduction is most important.

9) Grave Robber. She's very versatile, but because so many of her skills require different party positions, the more mobile the rest of your party is, the more useful she becomes. As a result, she pairs well with Highwaymen, Jesters, and Holy Lance crusaders. In the later game she can be an extremely effective dodge tank but it's harder to make that work at lower levels.

10) Plague Doctor. The Plague Doctor has one really effective ability, Blinding Gas, a couple of effective DoT's, and an emergency mini-heal & cure (Battlefield Medicine). I generally also give her Incision and keep her in the third rank back. Her bleed/blight cure can be useful (esp. in groups with an Occultist). Unfortunately (apart from some boss fights where DoTs can work surprisingly well), due to monster's increasing stun resistance and the stress penalties for prolonging fights, her DoT's and stuns just aren't as effective as they could be if the game's tactics didn't tend to resolve around bursting enemies to death quickly.

Tips and Strategies

Finally I'll just go over various miscellaneous tips or gameplay tricks I didn't cover above.

Combat

Tactically, you probably want to remove or incapacitate enemies in the back two rows first, especially stress-inducing attackers (female cultists, Bone Courtiers). Stress damage is *worse* than physical damage.

Buffs, bleeds, and blights all stack with themselves and with each other, and each instance tracks its own timer independently. Stack four Bleed attacks on one target and they'll all do all their damage on each turn. This makes repeatable buffs, like the Jester's songs or the Grave Robber's Shadow Fade, very powerful. (Conversely, though, additional Stuns do not stack, and in fact additionally buff enemy stun resistance, so there's no point in stunning an already-stunned hostile.)

Healing is powerful, but damage prevention is even better.

Criticals are King: not just because of the damage, but because of the secondary effects critical hits have on stress levels. Small buffs to critical hit percentage are very powerful, especially when stacked.

Your party is going to get shuffled around.
It's therefore generally a good idea to make sure your adventurers have either an attack they can use from any position or a way to quickly reposition themselves in the party. Some classes have attacks that let them reposition themselves, and the "Move" action functions differently for different classes.

Other side of that coin: Monsters do not have a basic "move" action at all, and many monsters (and especially those back-row nasties) can't use their best attacks if you knock them out of position. Sometimes a push or pull can be more effective than a stun.

It's better to retreat early than to retreat late. You don't lose anything by retreating from combat (apart from any equipped trinkets your dead heroes leave lying on the floor). Conversely, your retreat chance gets much worse if you have Afflicted heroes. If you have been surprised or the enemy is spawning lots of extra creatures, retreating to re-sort your group can be a great tactical move.

Don't over-use AoE's. They can be very powerful in the right situation but it's generally better to kill one enemy outright than half-kill two of them.

Try to end fights before the seventh round or so. If you're at round five with only one enemy left, that can be a good time to stun that enemy and spend a round healing, but if you prolong things past about round seven, there's an increasing chance that your party will take a significant stress hit.

Dungeon Interactions

You generally want to click on all the treasure objects you find -- statistically, in the long run, you're better off opening everything -- but since sometimes nasty quirks can result it's often a good idea to use your most disposable, lowest level character to do it.

One way to make it less risky is to use the right inventory object on the treasure item. To do so, manually drag them from your inventory onto the little center panel box on the chest or other object. (If you have an adventurer with a mania about the dungeon object, you may not get a chance to do this).

A short and incomplete list of some of the interactions:

• Shovels are best used on rubble obstacles, but can also be used on graves in the Weald to avoid disease and to smash open locked cabinets.
  
  
• Holy water works on pagan altars, ashes, shrines, and skull piles; it will give a debuff on occult scrawlings and removes 50 stress when used on confessional booths.
  
  
• The key works on locked chests, most Heirloom Chests for extra loot, and locked cabinets.
  
  
• Medicinal Herbs work on animal carcasses in the Weald, Meat Wagons in the Warrens, and Alchemy Tables and Iron Maides in the Ruins.
  
  
• Bandages will protect your hands from mummified corpses, spiderwebs in the Weald and knife-boards in the Warrens.
  
  
• You can use torches on alchemy tables to get instant 100% light and on piles of scrolls to remove negative quirks (using torches on books piles is generally not a good idea).

You can change what abilities you have readied for use even mid-dungeon, so long as you aren't actively in a battle -- just right click your adventurer to bring up their character sheet.

Scouting has a random chance to happen every time you enter a new room; a high torch and certain quirks and trinkets make it more likely.

If you have Scouted a trap, you will see it on the dungeon floor and can attempt to disarm it. You can see which characters are better at disarming traps by checking their "Traps" resistance on the character sheet.

Hunger is a semi-random event and not on a specific timer.

Don't be afraid to retreat from a mission if your guys are overextended. It's better to cut your losses keep your gains than to push on and lose everything. On the other hand, sometimes if you're on a mission with disposable lowbie adventurers, pushing on is worth the risk. At worst, you lose the loot they're carrying; at best you gain the mission rewards.

Remember your goals; "Cleanse" is different from "Explore." If your mission is just to visit 90% of all rooms, you don't have to fight through them; you can retreat and it'll still count.

In boss missions, the boss is always in the room farthest from the entrance.

For camping skills, "Religious" appears to refer to the character's class (Leper, Vestal, Crusader count), but that status can be changed by quirks (Faithless, God-Fearing).

Town

Don't upgrade anything in town until you are certain you need it (not want, need). Purchase as few stress-reducer options as possible to conserve resources.

When you do upgrade the tavern or church, keep in mind that upgrading each relaxation type both reduces cost and gives more recovery slots, so it might be worth focusing on one (say, the Bar, or the Cloister) and getting it fully developed.

If your characters leave on a Vision Quest or whatever after de-stressing in town, they will eventually return, but you can still take the opportunity to squeeze an extra person into your roster.

Once your characters hit level 3, they won't go on Level 1 missions any more.

Boss Fights

For the Hag, make sure everyone in your party has an attack that can hit the back row; if you run away, anyone left in the pot is dead forever; DoTs are especially effective because of her double action rate. For the Swine Prince, don't touch the little buddy till the big guy croaks. For the Necromancer, AoE are effective to clear out the trash skeletons, but back-row attacks are even better.

Trinkets:

Do Not just equip every trinket you find. Most trinkets vary between "actively bad" and "useful in very specific situations with very specific builds." The right trinket can make certain builds really shine, but they generally have big drawbacks too and the wrong one can make your characters vulnerable or weak. On the other hand, stats can't go negative: a -DODGE trinket on a character with 0 base dodge is harmless.

The Advanced Game: Level 2 and Beyond!

That should be enough basic info to help people *get started* playing the game. It's just intended as a start.

You will probably find that most of the above changes as you get a larger roster of heroes, develop your town, and start higher-level missions.

• Once you have more ready cash to throw around, upgrading the other town buildings will start making lots of sense; in fact, you might find that the level 3+ dungeons end up requiring significant investments in preparation at the Guild Hall and Blacksmith (and can benefit significantly from the Survivalist or Nomad Wagon).
  
  
• Some of the more challenging-to-use hero types, like the Jester and Bounty Hunter and Grave Robber, start to really come into their own once you can invest a little cash in them and have a deep enough roster to build the right kind of party around them.
  
  
• You may want to consider buying a wider array of provisions once you start doing longer runs, learning the dungeon interactions, and have a little more ready cash to invest.
  
  
• Once you have the right trinkets and skills, low-light no-torch parties designed to take advantage of the darkness via heavy-crit builds can be extremely effective.

So on, so forth. This game has a surprising amount of tactical depth, and I expect that depth to increase as we move further through Early Access; I'm still learning new tactics and strategies almost every time I play. Please keep in mind that the above advice is just to help make sure you don't go bankrupt and insane within the first few weeks; past that, you're on your own! Good luck!


If anyone else has any good tips please post them in the comments below.

Much thanks to the helpful posters on the Somethingawful.com forums[forums.somethingawful.com] where I gathered a lot of these tips.

[fister1088]

Thank you for the help.

[Dr. Detroit]

Thank you, very helpful!

[Gnida]

Thank you for the guide

[Onkel Weezy]

Nice guide...

Just a humorous aside..

you said: "They are poor disposable chumps who you've suckered to your Estate with promises of wealth and dreams of glory."

Chuckle.. sounds like my job! :)

[krendall2006]

So which Quirks are ones we should definitely keep and which ones are extremely bad?

[David the Goliath]

I totally agree with prioritizing the Stagecoach, but after that, I personally pretty much focus the Blacksmith and Guild, and then the Sanitarium. The first few upgrades already help much and are not too expensive. Better equiped mercs kill their targets quicker and can eat or dodge crits better, so they return with fewer scars that require treatment. And if they don't stress out too much, you don't have to put them in stress relieving facilities, let them rest for a few weeks.

[GunShooter]

There's no such thing a a bad trinket IMO. Look at the slippery shoes. +4 dodge -20% move resist. Put it on casters who already have terrible move resist. You're not going to lose much defensively but they can avoid more damage with dodge. Same deal with the jester or grave robber. In fact, even better. Those two can use abilities that actively shift them anyway, so being moved around doesn't hurt them.

[Klinsk]

Update guide please.

[Aphotic]

an update would be awesome!

[Dante]

Although this is an old guide, from early acess, it would be great to see what would you have to say about the houndmaster and the antiquarian, and other new content as events.

Great guide, thanks. I'm going to play it again and its good to remember some details.