Free-to-play Dungeoneering training

Dungeoneering is very dependent on other skills, with many different kinds of monsters and bosses. Many players find it essential to have skills improved to effectively train this skill. However, Dungeoneering is diverse and different methods can be used for efficient and fun training.

High combat levels, and skill levels, can make better equipments and so on. And they compound together as well. For example, you are able to create and wear Fractite equipment only if you get 40 Attack, 40 Defence, 40 Mining, and over 40 Smithing. It is recommended to have balanced levels to gain experience at the maximum rate, however, a combat practitioner can also play without much difficulty.

The actual training of the skill will be different for everyone due to the randomised nature of the dungeons. Because of this, the article will focus primarily on maximising your Dungeoneering experience gains instead of giving a step by step walkthrough, unlike many other skill guides.

Starting up

 * Here is a simplified guide for beginners who wants to gain the first levels through Daemonheim. For advanced players please read the parts after.

On entering Daemonheim, the player would be given the Ring of kinship. It is time to free some inventory space, as dungeoneering needs items banked to start. Player is supposed to start at level 1. At this point, only complexity 1 and floor 1 are available. It is strongly recommended to solo it as players would refuse to group. On playing the first level, a reliable weapon and ammo should be bound. A melee weapon heats up the character quickly, but ranged and magic weapon gives more variety to the character, since only melee weapons are easy to obtain in later dungeons. For ammo, runes or arrows can be bound. If a player binds runes, he/she should have basic runecrafting in order to craft elemental runes, and bind the highest combat rune available to him/her. (mind, chaos or death) If a player binds arrows the best available arrows should be bound.

When the player finishes the first dungeon he/she should get level 2. Reset the ring at level 2 and play floor 1 at complexity 2. That way floor 2 is unlocked and play floor 2 at complexity 3. If floor 3 is unlocked play it, otherwise reset and play floor 1 again at increasing complexity.

At this rate, complexity 6 would be available when the player gets level 6-8 achieved. Then it is time to search for a party. The experience gained will be able to push the level afar for more levels. One resource dungeons is unlockable for every 5 levels after level 15, up to level 30. With this method, it is possible to get to level 32-36 without resetting.

It is recommended to find the dungeon whenever the required level is achieved. It is also recommended to complete small dungeons in all frozen floors as prestige is low in the first raids, and time is saved, and a good party can possibly boost experience gained over time, though soloing can ensure stable process too.

Maximising Experience
You are ready to start adventuring when you get the Ring of kinship from the Dungeoneering tutor. There are several important things you need to know in order to increase your experience gains:

Base XP
Base XP includes the two numbers Floor X and Prestige X (where X are numbers like Floor 1 and Prestige 15). Those will be covered in more detail in the following sections. This section will discuss the general mechanics general to both.

Base XP is essentially the amount of experience that you will be given upon completion of a floor, where the average of both of them is taken, and then modified by the modifier to give your experience value. For example, say your average of the two was 1000, you would receive 1100 experience if you had a 110% modifier.

Even if X is the same for players (i.e. if two players complete Floor 1 and have Prestige 15) the amount of Base XP they will receive will not necessarily be the same, this is because there are three known factors that affect these values:
 * 1) The combat level of the group - a combat level over 90 will cut your base experience in half in free worlds.
 * 2) The number of rooms opened on the floor - where opening more rooms will increase your base experience. This does not differentiate between mandatory rooms and Bonus Rooms; it simply takes into account the number of rooms opened. This is explained in more detail in the Bonus Rooms section.
 * 3) The complexity of the floor; even though a lower complexity already gives you penalties in the modifier, it also lowers your Base XP.

The following do NOT affect your Base XP:
 * The boss faced on the floor.
 * The types of puzzles completed.


 * How many monsters were left alive (this only affects the Level Mod).


 * How long the floor took to complete (though faster completion will lead to a higher experience gain rate).

It is interesting to note that both Floor and Prestige appear to use almost exactly the same calculations, with the only difference between them being what decides the X value used. If X is the same for one particular run, then both Floor X and Prestige X should have the same value.
 * How many deaths occurred (this only affects the Deaths modifier).

Floor
The deeper the floor level a player completes, the higher the X in Floor X will be (for example completing the first floor gives Floor 1, completing the fifteenth floor gives Floor 15), and the more experience they will receive.

However, the Prestige system necessitates that players simply complete every floor (that they can) once per reset. This is because the Prestige Bonus is only given to players upon the first completion of a floor (per reset); repeated grinding of one floor will result in the removal of the Prestige Bonus. This is the exact intent of the Prestige system: to remove the efficiency of grinding the same high level floor over and over again. So really there is nothing a player can do to actively increase Floor experience in an efficient manner (besides opening bonus rooms).

Prestige
Prestige is the main tool players use to effectively gain experience after completing the first few floors.

When you open the floor selection screen from the party interface, you will see columns which have ticked and unticked floor blocks. The ticked floors are those you have raided after you last clicked Reset, while the unticked ones are the ones you have not. By raiding the unraided floors, you will receive a prestige bonus equal to the number of unique floors you finished between your last two resets (i.e. before your last reset).

Simply speaking, clicking reset after having raided 7 unique floors will cause you to receive a Prestige 7 bonus each time you complete a floor. You will keep receiving a Prestige 7 bonus until your current Prestige exceeds Prestige 7 (which will occur once you raid more than 7 floors without resetting).



Therefore, you can maximise your experience gains by taking the following steps:


 * Only raid floors which do NOT have ticks on them (check the floor selection screen for which ones you've done).


 * Try to get all the floors ticked (including any new floors that you unlock), then click reset.Dungeoneeringend.png

If the highest level floors are too hard, you can reset early but you will get a smaller prestige bonus at the end of each floor (until you raid enough floors again to exceed the prestige number you reset at).

You can raid floors in any order, but it is strongly recommended to raid the greatest floor last. This is because you must complete the highest level floor in order to unlock the next floor. If you complete the current highest levelled floor before you gain the Dungeoneering level to unlock a new floor, then you will have to repeat that same floor again in order to unlock the next floor when you gain the level, which as mentioned previously, will remove the prestige bonus you receive for that floor.

Prestige will raise (or lower, if repeating a floor) the total experience gained by much more than any of the other modifiers, it is important to keep that in mind when choosing the floor to raid.

Bonus Rooms
While opening Bonus Rooms might not seem like such a big contribution to your experience, being only shown as a modifier which reaches a maximum of +13%, there is actually a 'hidden' component of experience for opening bonus rooms.

This 'hidden' component of experience arises from the fact that the calculations for both the base experience numbers (the numbers in the Base XP section: Floor and Prestige) utilise the number of rooms you opened that floor; the more rooms you open, the higher your Floor and Prestige will be. The calculations do not differentiate between the number of mandatory or 'bonus' rooms opened, which essentially translates into being based only on the number of bonus rooms you open that floor (since the mandatory rooms are mandatory).

In simple terms, not only does opening bonus rooms increase your modifier (shown in the Modifier section as a +%), but it also increases your base experience (the Base XP section). This means opening bonus rooms has a much greater impact on your experience than it originally seems.

Tests have been done which show that a solo player who opens all bonus rooms will receive close to double the experience than they would if they had opened no bonus rooms.

Level Mod
'Level Mod' is written incorrectly as 'Points Mod' in the Knowledge Base. To increase the Level Mod modifier, players just have to kill monsters. It is still possible to receive the maximum of +10% with a few monsters alive, so it might be helpful to ignore monsters that do not result in a net increase of food (i.e. monsters that do not give food as loot or will deal too much damage).

Complexity
Six levels of complexity are available. However, a free player is advised to choose a minimum of Complexity 3, since this reduces the penalty of choosing a lower complexity, while simultaneously negating the need to smith their own armour, which is a requirement once players choose Complexity 4 or higher (players are advised to always have a weapon bound so they should never need to smith one).

If players are going above Complexity 3 (and hence will have to smith most of their armour), they are advised to choose Complexity 6 since this will ensure the minimum penalty of -0% is given.

However, players should be aware that choosing the higher complexities (5 and 6) may lead to Bonus Rooms which can not be opened due to requiring members only skills. This will happen fairly often and actually incurs quite a high experience penalty when it does occur (refer to the Bonus Rooms section above). If all Bonus Rooms are blocked by members doors (which is possible but unlikely), players will actually receive less experience than they would if they had chosen Complexity 3 instead (since Complexity 3 will give no members only Bonus Rooms).

Guide Mode
Guide Mode is not recommended due to the very large impact on experience Bonus Rooms have, as mentioned previously. In addition, Guide Mode is best utilised if a player opens the dungeon map after every single door (to check if the door they just opened leads to a Bonus Room); this constant checking will slow players down, which defeats the purpose of having the Guide Mode enabled in the first place. Players who do not constantly check the dungeon map will inevitably find themselves exploring Bonus Rooms, not that that is a bad thing, but it again defeats the purpose of having Guide Mode enabled.

NOTE: guide mode still has a slight defect even when NOT enabled.

Gameplay
The raiding includes several parts: Starting out, fighting, puzzle solving, restocking and fighting the boss. Moreover, it can be further divided into solo raiding and team raiding.

Starting out
Contrary to other multiplayer games, what you see on the table is all you will get. Grab everything and don't miss a single item. Sell the useless (or inferior) items to the smuggler and remember to take the key if there is one.
 * The following items are almost mandatory to buy from the Smuggler since they will be required to either complete puzzles or open doors, they are also needed in getting yourself equipped (with equipment and food), you should have enough gold from the table and selling items to the Smuggler: you could either buy the toolkit for 1320 coins and sell the knife, vial and any unwanted items.
 * 1) A hammer
 * 2) A tinderbox
 * 3) A fly-fishing rod and some feathers
 * 4) Any hatchet
 * 5) Any pickaxe


 * When starting the skill, you will be forced to go through Complexity 1 where you are given powerful equipment you can wear, this is a perfect time to Bind a powerful weapon (along with arrows or runes) for later Complexities where you will not always be given good weapons. However, the starting kits in complexity 1, 2 or 3 are unchanged except combat levels of player is increased. It is possible a player can only find tier 4 or worse items to bind. In this case a party will help the player by providing better starting kit. For details please see the next part.
 * Stick to one or two combat styles, otherwise you will waste inventory space.

Binding items
Players can bind 1 weapon or armour all the time and an extra for 50+ dungeoneering, In addition to it, one kind of ammo (rune or arrow) up to 125 units can be bound too. The weapon(s) or armour(s) bound will decide the playing style for the player. The recommended equipments to be bound are:


 * Two handed weapons
 * Platebody (50+ dungeoneering)
 * Bow, please note that shortbows have lower ranged bonus than longbows.
 * Any staff (except for water staves, for they can be made by buying a tangle gum staff and enchanting it with level 10 runecrafting)
 * Mind, chaos or death runes
 * Arrows

It is worth noticing no staff can be gained except as starting kit or drop from Unholy Cursebearer. No bows can be gained except from starting kit or drop from Saggitare and forgotten rangers. Smuggler only sells the lowest quailty weapon, and free players cannot fletch bows and staffs. As a result, it is nearly impossible to fight effectively with ranged or magic except when effective bow or staff is bound. However, finding a high tier rock is also not easy, thus a player still suffers from lack of melee abilities if a reliable melee weapon is not bound.

It is possible to bind normally unreachable items, such as a Spinebeam longbow at 40 ranged. This is considered very rare for F2P players as it is only dropped by Saggitare and Level 45 Forgotten Rangers or higher. A player should bind the best item in complexity 1 or 2 first (Utuku longbow as example), and then form a party to search for better bows throughout dungeon. As the floors go deeper, better starting kits can be found. For arrows it is advised to buy the maximum amount of best arrows and bind them once the player has money. For runes, it is recommended to bind those the player cannot craft (which means that at 65 runecraft, binding death runes is not as effective), and players should also rely on starting kit and monster drop to collect and bind them regularly.

Solo raiding
Solo raiding is mainly aimed to the sense of player. There are some important notices to soloists:
 * Always remember to look at the minimap to locate yourself.
 * The home teleport spell has unlimited uses, so do not waste time and run energy if teleporting home would be faster. The same applies to group raids - unlimited home teleport uses is not restricted to soloists.
 * A good internet connection is highly recommended since lagging can interrupt game play and cause deaths while fighting enemies (especially bosses, which require good reflexes). This also applies to full or nearly full worlds where autotype macro users will lag the server.
 * It is strongly recommended to finish a dungeon before leaving or logging off, since without team members to rejoin with, you will only have ten minutes to rejoin where you left off.
 * Do not overstock or understock, as doing so will either waste your time or increase your death count.
 * Avoid moving across a lot of rooms, especially when the boss is far from the smuggler. (Use Dungeon Home Teleport)
 * Learning to use the gatestone and gatestone teleport can drastically speed up a player's trip through a dungeon. If you come to a door that requires a key you do not yet have, placing a gatestone there to allow quick return when you have the key will cut off significant time. Also, if you plan to complete the entire level, placing a gateway at the door to the boss or even at the stairs to the next level (if you have already beaten the boss) will help speed things along as well.
 * When soloing you must remember that when being away from keyboard you will enter the Lobby and will only be able to reenter the dungeon within ten minutes since logging out.
 * Due to the update on 19 July 2010, the party leader gets a free group gatestone upon entering a floor. This is extremely handy for soloers especially if doing a medium dungeon. The portal is in the main room so one may wish to use the home teleport and then go through the portal to shorten time.

Fighting
There are three types of monsters:
 * 1) Constitution based, for example ice giants
 * 2) Attack based, for example ice spiders
 * 3) Ranged/Magic based, for example Mysterious shades

Each room may or may not have obstacles. If possible, players can block some monsters behind walls and objects, and finish the weaker one first. Constitution ones should be killed lastly. Do not eat food unless you are in a safe room, so just run away and eat when your lifepoints are low. Eating while fighting will cause more damage to you than running.

When the monsters are dead, depending on your character's ability, you should pick the best equipment from the floor, but it is not needed if you have a better supply. There are only 5 kinds of food, or 6 if you use the bones to bananas spell, so simply pick the better ones and eat the inferior ones. For melee and ranged players, the armour can be swapped as you will not have very much raw materials during raiding. Magic players need not to craft all the armour as the magic bonus is usually too little to effectively hit bosses.

However, it's possible to save a lot of time by skipping some monsters. If you inspect the properties of the doors in monster-infested rooms, you will find that only the Guardian Doors will require you to kill all monsters inside; no other doors require you to clear the room of monsters. Puzzle rooms with monsters must have them killed however. For example, if you get a key, you can just run across the room and unlock the key-locked door without killing anything at all. Be careful not to double click though, as you might accidentally enter the boss room for a much harder fight.

If you meet an exceptionally strong monster, remember that there is always a door to exit and coins to buy extra food in the process.

Puzzle solving
Some puzzles may seem like a waste of time, but most can be done quite quickly once you understand what you have to do. As mentioned in the Bonus Rooms section of this article, it is important to complete all rooms in order to maximize your experience gains. This should not be too difficult as the main article link (below) will provide you with the most efficient solutions should you give up on a puzzle.

Restocking
How to restock, or even not to restock is majorly dependent on the path between the boss and the smuggler, the strength of the boss, and the equipment you have looted from fallen monsters. The home teleport spell can save a lot of time, and different bosses may require significantly more or less supply. For example, if you can use prayer, the Gluttonous Behemoth and Icy Bones would not require a lot of food, but some dangerous ones require 700+ points worth of lifepoints to defeat. If you are close to the smuggler, just buy some high quality fish and cook them. Be warned, low level wood can cause raw fish to burn frequently, so choose either tier 4 or 5 wood to cook. Facing strong bosses would need the players to use gatestone to avoid death counts. For team players it is time to use assistance in magic to save everyone's life.

Generally, when players arrive at harder areas (for example, from frozen to abandoned), the drop table of the monsters will be significantly changed. Do not use the same rules for every floor.


 * Floor 1-2: None of the bosses are very dangerous. A player with 45+ combat and a tier 3+ weapon should have no problem fighting with nothing but items looted from monsters.


 * Floor 3-11: The Luminescent Icefiend is the most dangerous boss. Just ensure you have more food, like 5-10 dusk eels (350-700 lifepoints total) in addition to those in floor 1-2. Sometimes players will loot so much food that restocking is not needed.


 * Floor 12-17: Restocking will be needed mid-raid, but usually not before the boss fight. The bosses are all easier than the icefiend, so players should pay more attention to the monsters, especially since some very powerful monsters will block your path. The monsters in the dungeon tend to give coins. You will very frequently run out of supplies.


 * Floor 18-29: Warning: Do not use up your coins until you see the boss. There is a possibility that a higher levelled boss will either exhaust your food or assault you with superior attacks. For example, it's possible to encounter Rammernaut with no coins to buy runes (for lower level players), thus stopping your progress. Without the use of the gatestone teleport (35 runecrafting and 32 magic required) it is strongly recommended to get the highest tier of food as possible.
 * Floors 30-35: Although the monsters on these levels are basically the same as those on the first set of abandoned levels, they do seem to be higher levelled. If not properly prepared, high levelled monsters such as the ranging zombie, forgotten ranger, or mysterious shade can do significant amounts of damage - even kill a player. Try to keep at least two pieces of food on you at all times, in case you come upon a difficult battle. For the bosses, be sure to save up some coins, in case you need to totally restock or change combat styles for the boss.

Equipment and Supplies
Generally, the player will get between 30k to 75k coins. Depending on luck and monsters fought, the player should obtain some food and equipment. Equipment should be superior if harder monsters are killed, and more will be received if more monsters are fought. Food loosely follows this rule but any food better than dusk eels will rarely appear, superior monsters tend to drop large quantity of dusk eel instead.

If you are up to create your own armour and weapons, make sure you create equipment at least 2 tiers above those you gained from monsters (tier 5 is the best tier players can have, but level 40 for related skill is needed); otherwise you might just waste your time. Focus on completing the dungeon quickly in order to maximize the rate of Dungeoneering experience obtained. Obtaining a full suit of armour for every floor attempted may be necessary for certain players, however it is generally not and thus smithing a full suit of armour would only waste valuable dungeoneering experience. It should be noted however that gauntlets and boots require only a single ore, yet provide the player with decent strength bonuses.

Fighting Bosses
Solo bosses are usually a lower level than team bosses. Specific strategies should be referred to in individual articles here.

However, for some bosses solo fighting and team fighting makes large differences. For example two mages fighting Rammernaut would need to run less but watch out even more seriously for the special attacks.

You may or may not receive bonus equipment after you defeat the boss. However, the items you receive are exactly the same as other identically named ones, so only bind it if it is something you might want to use. The best weapon, armour and ammo should be bound to save time in later raids.

Never, never challenge a boss stronger (particularly one with a significantly higher combat) than you if your team members haven't arrived yet. You will surely risk raising your death count. Just wait at the room entrance door and search nearby places for food and armour. However a lazing player should not be waited for, unless he/she is high in combat.

Note: be warned, there are many low level players who will go directly for a boss, kill it, and then end a dungeon before all rooms are cleared. These players are best avoided at all cost!

Stock up on food before going in, as some bosses hit very high and drain or hit through your prayers.

For speed dungeoneers, players who turn the guide mode on and just go through the quickest route, it should be pointed out that by just looking into an extra room you get one percent in the xp calculator at the end of the floor, even without entering the room, so it is worth unlocking unnecessary rooms as you go.

Other Tips
It is noted in the Dungeoneering - The Basics knowledge base article that raiding with a player significantly lower in combat or skill will result in an experience penalty of up to 60%: Note - the difficulty of the dungeon is always based on the lowest skill and combat levels in your party. For example, a party of five playing a 5:3 difficulty dungeon will find that the skill challenges and creatures, combat levels are balanced according to the three players with the lowest skill or combat levels. In the instance that a high level player would receive a significantly lowered amount of experience, a warning message with appear, asking if the player wishes to continue with the experience reduction.

One of the fast ways to get XP is to always form a group of 5 players, and do small dungeons only. Players should form groups with similar dungeoneering levels so that they can complete floor rushes continuously.

Another fast way to get experience would be to speed solo raid. Go into the dungeon, collect any keys you see, open any possible doors without taking the time to battle any monsters. You gain experience even if you don't beat a boss. You can get 500 XP per raid just by running through and opening a couple doors fast. The way it works is that you do as much work you can without having to battle, or keep battling to a minimum. You stop once you are forced to battle, or have a puzzle or something time consuming. Then leave the dungeon and take the reduced XP. It is extremely fast, but the only negative part is that you receive no tokens for the raid. If one chooses this method, prestige factors in the experience gained.

Typically each game is broken down into two categories. One being a normal game which is usually denoted by "no-rush" or when no prefix is given to the game when advertised. Normal games typically give the most experience for the floor it is for, since you often open all doors, kill all creatures, and on occasion sweep most of the resources from the dungeon. A rush, on the other hand, often gives the least amount of experience for the floor given, mainly because most monsters are ignored, resources are ignored, and of course the main point is to get to the boss and kill it so not all rooms are opened. What you want to do when choosing which one is right for you is to look at what your maximum floor is. Often you want to complete normal dungeons for your last 5-10 dungeons (often upgrading to med/large instead of a rushes normal small). While you want to rush the floors before that. You get less xp for those dungeons but in the large scheme of things, you obtain more xp since you are focusing your time on the floors that give you the most experience.

As a note: The term "fastest" usually refers to a game that is played in a small dungeon, set for only one player (example: 2:1), and paired with a level 3 skiller. This forces all monsters to be level 1-3 and therefore can be 1-hit by high levels. All puzzles are very easy and can be completed by a single player, so splitting up is very easy if the dungeon is set up with more than a typical duo. The xp is as minimal as possible, but this allows high level dungeoneers to bypass the lowest floors at extremely fast speeds so they can get to the higher xp floors faster.

Due to an update by Jagex, if the average combat level of a team (regardless of players) is above 90+, SERIOUS reduction from base xp occurs. For example: if a team of 5:5 completes a floor 35, the base xp they are supposed to get is 40,000 (hypothetically); however, if their average combat level is 90+, they only get 20,000 base xp. This is a serious drawback to most f2p dungeoneers because very few f2p players are aware of this fact.

One used to be able to make money by crafting air runes from purchased rune essence at Runecrafting levels of 44 and above. An update on 19 August 2010 ended this method, as the repurchase value of Air Runes has been dropped to 1 gold. Goldcrafting is no longer possible.