Dungeoneering



Dungeoneering is a skill that was released in RuneScape on 12 April 2010 that is open to both free players and members. It features a castle named Daemonheim, which contains 35 underground floors. There, players explore and use other existing skills to clear each level, which involves finding keys, fighting monsters, and solving puzzles involving a wide variety of skills. Unlike other skills, players may venture under the castle in groups of up to five people. Additionally, players may earn a small amount of experience in other skills by accomplishing various tasks. Similar to other skills upon release, players cannot use experience lamps, penguin points, or Tears of Guthix to level up Dungeoneering until two weeks have passed since the skill's release.

The skill is trained entirely within Daemonheim - essentially an alternate portion of Gielinor - into which almost no external items can be taken and none can be removed. It is heavily dependent on other skills trained outside of Dungeoneering. The items and skilling materials used within Daemonheim are all different and the game is group-oriented rather than being individual-oriented (although it is possible for players to train by themselves). In addition, players can train Dungeoneering past level 99 all the way to level 120, with over 104 million experience. This new maximum level is called "True Skill Mastery" as opposed to "Skill Mastery" (which is achieved at level 99). As of April the 23rd, the current minimum requirement to be ranked (at approximately rank 80,000) is level 30 with 13,363 xp.



Travel
Players may make their way to Daemonheim by one of three methods:
 * Take a ship from the dock behind Al Kharid bank.
 * Venture through the deep Wilderness to the eastern part.
 * Teleport using the Ring of Kinship given by the Dungeoneering Tutor at Daemonheim.

If using the ferry, players must walk from the Eastern side of the peninsula North-West to the central part of the castle.

At Daemonheim
There is a Dungeoneering tutor and a Fremennik Banker standing at the entrance to the castle. Players who are new to the skill or who have lost the Ring of kinship should speak to the tutor to obtain one. To gain access to Daemonheim, it is necessary to bank ALL worn items and all items carried, with the exception of the Orb of oculus and the Ring of kinship. All armour, weapons, runes, ammunition, and other supplies will be provided inside the dungeon.

After players have received a ring and banked all their items, they may proceed into the castle courtyard.

In the courtyard, there are three energy barriers that players can go through:
 * Left barrier
 * 'Free-for-all' barrier EnterancetoDaemonhaim.png
 * Right barrier

The left and right barriers are provided for players who would like to venture alone. To pass through these barriers, players have to use their ring of kinship to set the settings before going through. In the central 'Free-for-all' barrier, players are automatically teamed up to form a party. If there are no other suitable adventurers waiting, the player will be allowed to enter the dungeon by themselves. Players should ensure that their companion list is empty before going in, or they will be rejected.

Complexity


Complexity is a 6-tier scale that determines the number of other skills involved. Note that lower tiers will incur a penalty on the amount of experience gained at the end of a level as shown in the screenshot to the right. Each additional complexity level involves all skills from the level before plus some more; complexity level 6 includes every skill.

Floors


Floor levels, from 1 to 35, and the combat levels of party members determine the combat levels of the monsters that players encounter; the higher the floor level, the higher the combat level of the monster.

Dungeoneering level required for a certain room is: Floor number times 2 minus 1. For example you need level 39 for floor 20 (20 x 2 - 1 is 39). Plus, of course you must have cleaned all the previous rooms.

If players are in a group, the floors other members have cleared would also be shown on separate columns. The highest floor accessible to a group is the highest floor accessible to the player with the lowest Dungeoneering.

Starting out
The main purpose is to progress through the various floors of the dungeon with teammates and kill the boss monster at the end of each level. To do so, players must travel through a series of rooms while using their collective skills to equip themselves and their teammates with items that will help you to complete the level. Therefore, teamwork and division of labour may help in achieving better results and efficiency.

Finding a team:
 * Nothing in the worn slots and inventory is allowed, except the Ring of kinship and Orb of oculus.
 * Familiars and Pets are not allowed either. If your familiar was carrying anything when last summoned, it will have to be re-summoned and those items banked, otherwise you will not be allowed to enter.
 * When finding a team, many players use abbreviations. The abbreviation for Floor (Dungeon level) is 'F', while the abbreviation for Complexity is 'C'. For example, a player forming a team may say: F20 C6, meaning floor 20 at level 6 complexity. But the people who want to be invited to a party, add the 'Inv'-word in the beginning. For example Inv F15 C6 means that that player wants to be invited in a party that goes to the 15th Floor and at 6th Complexity.

During gameplay

 * After going into the entrance, players will be first transported to a room with armours, weapons and food according to the difficulty they have selected. The team is linked by a Ring of kinship, which brings up an extra interface pane in the bottom right hand window, allowing sharing of experience, monitoring of team status, and visibility of other players' inventory, stats, and worn items.
 * Dropped items do not vanish as they normally do in RuneScape, but instead appear immediately as they are dropped. This includes monster drops, inventory management drops, and drops upon quitting (which are visible to others and may be picked up).


 * When typing in public chat while in a dungeon, all messages are visible to everyone in a party regardless of where a player is.
 * Rooms of the dungeon are connected by doors. It is impossible to see into the next room until the door is opened.
 * Upon death, players will respawn in the starting room with the smuggler, and their death counter will be increased by one. All items are kept on death, however Gatestones that are in the players inventory will be dropped in place.

Ending a Dungeon
A Dungeon ends when you or your teammates enter the ladder behind the boss. For tips on defeating the boss, see Bosses

Titles
After the floor has been completed, titles are awarded to some of the players, giving no extra experience. See Titles for a full list.

Ending a raid and starting another
A raid is finished when the boss is defeated, and only then may the next raid be started. When the boss has been killed, a ladder to the next level appears on the wall. Additionally, at the end of each floor, one player will receive a random item. These items are often more powerful than ones dropped in the dungeon, and they may be worth binding.

You will advance to the next floor if your Dungeoneering level is high enough. Otherwise, the same floor will be repeated. In addition the complexity will also be increased (unless you are already on Complexity 6).

As soon as one person clicks on the ladder to leave the dungeon, a time based on the number of people in the party will start to count down. If every member of the party elects to leave, the dungeon finishes instantly.

Binding Items
No items may be brought to the next level, with the exception of bound items. When an item is bound, it appears in the player's starting inventory and a (b) is appended to the item's name. The number of items a player may have bound at once depends on his/her Dungeoneering level. Players with 1 Dungeoneering may only bind 1 item or 150 of a single stackable item. At level 50, 2 items may be bound, at level 100, 3 may be bound, and at level 120, 4 items may be bound.

In addition, you may always bind one type of rune or arrow, and up to 125 of these will be kept in your starting inventory. Since all other items and coins are lost at the end of a level, it is worth replenishing stock of bound ammunition (arrows or runes) up to the 125 that can be kept, and ensuring that the best equipment is kept.

Attempting to bind more items than a player can will do nothing, except elicit a message stating that a currently bound item must be destroyed before another item may be bound. It is possible, however, to bind more of the same item than technically allowed, but at the beginning of a new level players will be left with the maximum.

Weapon poison (of any strength) can be added to a bound dagger or spear, but cannot be added to bound arrows - you have to poison the arrows first and then bind them. Any cloth in Daemonheim can be used like a Cleaning cloth elsewhere to remove poison from a weapon. This allows you to replace a weak weapon poison with a stronger one.

Bound weapons and armour can be sold, but bound runes and arrows cannot be sold. When selling items, one must be careful as there is no check to see if a weapon or piece of armour is a bound version and once an item is sold, there is no getting it back.

Skills
Every skill can be used in some way while raiding the dungeons. They can give advantages, such as access to bonus rooms, or are sometimes necessary to complete a dungeon. The uses of skills while in a Dungeon are unique to Daemonheim.

For a descriptive list of the skills and their uses in the Daemonheim, see Dungeoneering Skills List

Food
Most food available in the dungeon is fish, cave potatoes, and mushrooms.

As you progress through the dungeon, you will be able to grow and cook cave potatoes, which you can then combine with fish to form more complex foods.

For example, Cave potatoes and mushrooms are grown in a farm patch and take about 1 minute to grow. To cook them you need a cooker, some logs, and a tinderbox OR just logs and a tinderbox. (Unlike on the surface, potatoes can be cooked over ordinary fires.) Use the logs with the range and then the potatoes with the range. Then add the fish, and/or your choice of mushrooms. There are two kinds of mushroom, Gissel mushroom and Edicap mushroom, the latter requiring a Farming level of 68. For example, a Gissel mushroom and Salve eel potato will heal 260 LP, whereas the Salve eel itself heals 200 LP.

A complete experience table for Cooking, complete with life points for the potatoes can be found at Cooking.

Combat
Combat while Dungeoneering consists of the three attack types: Magic, Ranged, and Melee. Magic only allows a few spells out of the RuneScape Beginning and Lunar spellbooks, with some additional spells only found in Dungeoneering. (see the following section: Magic) While Ranged and Melee only use weapons specific to Dungeoneering, all of which can be player made provided the resources can be found or bought AND the player has high enough skill to smith, fletch and/or craft them.

Spellbook
The spellbook contains a combination of the Lunar and Standard spellbook spells. There are three new spells which help a player teleport around while Dungeoneering: Dungeon Home Teleport, Create Gatestone, and Gatestone Teleport.

Bosses
For guidance on how to defeat individual bosses, click on their name to be directed.

Rewards
Upon completion of a dungeon raid, players will receive Dungeoneering skill experience and a number of tokens equal to 1/10 of the experience received, rounded down. These tokens are smuggled outside of Daemonheim so that they may be traded with the rewards trader in the Daemonheim camp for items to be used outside of the dungeons.

Quests Providing Dungeoneering Experience
''For two weeks after the release of Dungeoneering, no quests or reward lamps will offer Dungeoneering experience. Once those two weeks have elapsed, you will be able to gain Dungeoneering experience from quest lamps and other experience-giving items.''

Journal
While Dungeoneering, one can find parts of different journals usually after a boss is defeated; they can be viewed by right clicking the Ring of kinship, then selecting "Open journal".

Controversy
In the wake of its release, there was debate about whether Dungeoneering was really a skill or rather just an activity similar to a minigame. Many players felt that Dungeoneering did not meet certain requirements to fulfil the definition of a skill. The reasons given for this include the inability to take any items outside of the dungeons, the fact that it is dependent upon many other skills, the limitation of its training to only one area, and the lack of integration with the rest of the game. Since Dungeoneering was in development for a long time - with the players aware of its development for many years of that time - much hype was built up (usually in the form of threads in the Future Updates forum). When Dungeoneering was finally released, it may not have been what some people had hoped for.

Another source of controversy was the original token cost of the rewards available. Many players felt these costs were too high, citing that they do not receive sufficient tokens to buy any rewards until past level 50 dungeoneering. Other players cited the mismatch between the dungeoneering levels and the number of tokens required for a reward, which made it so that players could wield a reward they could not afford. For example, chaotic equipment costed the equivalent of level 88 in experience tokens, but required only level 80 to use. The costs of items were lowered to a more reasonable level on 21 April 2010.

Another source of controversy is the discrepancy between members and free players. Since many members were going on free worlds to take advantage of the easier monsters, an update shortly after the release reduced the amount of experience earned for free players with combat 90+ in half. (A very steep drop in experience between combat 89 and 90.) Thus, Jagex has unfairly removed the advantages of simply being a high combat free player because "they were able to kill monsters faster". Additionally, like in a member world, free players find it unfair how it is still possible to receive member doors and doors requiring more than 100 in a skill since it is impossible to achieve on a non-member world.

Unfixed

 * For some players, Guide Mode cannot be turned off.
 * Free players can't set the skill as an objective; it is considered members-only by the Objectives system.
 * If a player does not progress through the dungeon fast enough, an unlocked door will re-lock itself, possibly making it impossible to proceed through the dungeon.
 * Sometimes the entire game window goes black while in a dungeon. Reverting the size of your game screen usually helps.
 * Sometimes the entire game window goes white while in a dungeon. There is nothing that can be done to continue the progress.
 * The Fremennik captain outside of the Al Kharid bank addresses female players as "Sir".
 * After logging out in certain places, your character will appear inside a staircase. You can get out by walking to the side.
 * When eating a raw cave potato the player reports that they have eaten a baked cave potato even though it is not cooked.
 * Clicking on the life points globe near the minimap while poisoned and carrying antipoison displays an error message and will not cure the poison. Using the item from the inventory cures the poison.
 * Free players can smith arrowtips, which will appear as a members' object.
 * In the event that a dungeon is completed and one of the party members log off while the game is showing the stat window, the team will spawn in next round but they can move only on minimap because the stat window doesn't go away. The team must then leave the party and start the round again.
 * Sometimes if you enter a door, the game will crash and will give you an error on another page.
 * If a player loses connection during the Dungeon Completion, all of their stats will turn to 120 for about 10 seconds then revert back to normal.
 * When a player levels up from 70 to 71 smithing and the player clicks on the flashing icon indicating the level up, it will say that you can now smith a Katagon hatchet, even though it requires level 72 smithing.
 * If you are following someone (and they are part of your team) and they enter a dungeon, you will be facing their direction no matter where you move.
 * If a player invites another player and then deletes the party, the other player will see an empty list once he accepts the invitation. (see image)
 * In the Lodestone room in a dungeon if a player jumps across a gap exactly when another player opens a new door in the room the player jumping will be flung outside of the room and will be standing in nothing for about 5 seconds then will appear back inside the room. This is also true if you click too fast while attempting to cross the agility spike traps.
 * The Boss To'Kash the Bloodchiller seems to have a larger size of around 7x7, yet players are able to attack him with melee from 2-3 tiles away while there still is a relatively large distance between them.
 * Sometimes when starting a dungeon, looking at the quest bar will show up the party log completely blank.
 * The objective tab says that at level 20 you gain the ability to go to floor 10, however this is at level 19 in the skill guide.
 * There's a glitch when you right click anywhere on the map it shows the option of cancel and examine (nothing). When clicked on the examine option there's no response in the chat box except for a blank line.
 * There is a glitch where Forgotten warriors may hold their weapons in an odd way, as if it were another weapon. Like a Forgotten warrior held a dagger like a 2h while still having a shield.
 * There is a glitch where a player can get unlimited Rings of Kinship. The player must join or make a party, bank the ring, go in a dungeon, exit dungeon, join or form another party, and bank the ring. Repeating this process allows the player to get any amount of rings they want.
 * If the final lever in the lever room puzzle is pulled by 2 members of a party at the same time, it will not register as being pulled.
 * If a player sits down with a bryll robe bottom, the top of the robes turn grey.
 * In the barrel puzzle you can open the door once the barrel is full without pushing it to the pressure pad.

Fixed

 * For the first four days that dungeoneering was released, a glitch existed where you could smuggle items from a dungeon into Runescape, this has since been fixed. However, Jagex has no way of detecting accounts that have items from the dungeon in their possession and thus a small amount of players have armour and weapons from the dungeon in their possession. This glitch was done by having a partner enter a dungeon of complexity level one while one item was put up in the price checker. This meant that that player couldn't enter the dungeon, but had the items that spawn with level 1 complexity added to their inventory in real RuneScape. Since you can't get spawned with anything higher than tier 8, this means that a player cannot gain a significant advantage from using items from the dungeon in PvP since tier 8 is the equivalent of barrows or a dragon weapon. However, it is possible to use any of the glitched items in PvP if desired. Only a few accounts have such glitched items in their possession however as the glitch has been fixed.
 * On the day of release, there was a condition where you could raise Runecrafting perpetually. Rune essence cost 50 coins each, but all elemental runes sold for 12 coins each. If you had a level close to 44 or above, you would earn more than 50 coins by making Air runes, thus enabling you to make progressively more runes per batch. There was an update within a few hours which reduced the value of Earth runes to 9 coins, Water runes to 6 coins and left Air at 12 coins. A few minutes later Air runes were reduced to their current 4 coins. The rollback that fixed the nature rune glitch had reinstated this 12 coins per air rune, giving once again perpetual rc xp, though at 1xp per 10 ess instead of the previous 5xp. Yet again, the day after the rollback, the Air runes sell for 4 coins each.
 * On the day of release, there was a bug where players on other spellbooks would find that after leaving Daemonheim their book was changed back to normal spells.
 * When the skill was first released, the Orb of oculus could not be taken into Daemonheim. The Game Guide states that the Orb can in fact be brought into the castle.
 * On the day of release, players who unlocked music tracks in the dungeon and who reached 463 tracks were able to perform the Air Guitar emote even though the requirement for it was 500.
 * When you left a party while you had the Orb of oculus, it would disappear. This was fixed on 14 April 2010.
 * For the first week of Dungeoneering's release, Floor 18 in the Dungeoneering skill guide had the same colour of the abandoned floors when it is actually part of the furnished floor series.
 * For the first 2 days, the lever room puzzle was impossible to complete by some people. The levers would not register being pulled and the doors would never unlock. However, players would still be damaged when the time limit had expired after the action of clicking the first lever.
 * For the first 3 days upon release, one could light a pile of logs they received from a drop or cut all on the same spot, this glitch has since then been fixed.
 * Another glitch for the Objectives system is that if you click 'Random Objectives' and if one goes through 'More objectives...' Dungeoneering won't appear, regardless of the number of pages one goes through.
 * You can light a fire on the tables in the starting room if you place some branches on a table and then use a tinderbox on them.
 * For the first 2 days, the room where players must mine a path through the rocks was impossible to complete. The last large rock before the door had no 'Mine Rock' option. The only option for players was to leave the dungeon and start over.
 * For several days after the release, the Rammernaut boss would not move if players stayed around the edges of the room and attacked him with magic or ranged, which made him extremely easy to kill. This bug was fixed by the first weekend of the release, although Rammernaut still frequently gets 'stuck' chasing players around the room.
 * Many of the bosses can be encountered at one Dungeoneering level lower than claimed by the Knowledge Base. For example, Stomp can be encountered at level 35 rather than level 36.
 * If you bound an item that is members only and then logged into a free server, your item wouldn't appear and you'd have no option to destroy it. In other words, if you had just lost your membership and had a members item bound, the result would be a 1 less binding limit. The only way to restore your binding limit was to buy membership again and destroy the item.

The skill

 * Jagex has released a trailer for dungeoneering on their official account.
 * This is the first skill in which levels greater than 99 can be reached.
 * This is the first new free-to-play skill since Runecrafting, which was added in 2004.
 * Thok is the only skill master that is not wearing a skillcape, rather, he guards it. This is because the other Fremenniks don't believe that he has mastered the skill.
 * When RuneScape 2 was first released, there was much talk about a skill very similar to Dungeoneering.
 * There were 48 new music tracks released, making the most songs released with an update.
 * Even if this is a Non-Members skill you can not set an objective for it.
 * After 1 week there were approximately 65,000 players ranked, the highest level being level 79, whereas Summoning had 33,750 players with one at level 77 and Hunter had 124K and one level 93. This could indicate that Dungeoneering trains faster than Summoning and is more popular, and slower than Hunter and less popular.
 * Many mains ruined pures/skillers when the skill was released by opening doors which gave magic, prayer and strength experience or by attacking as this gave shared experience this can be countered by simply turning off shared experience with the ring.

Curiosities

 * The Fremennik shipsman is grumpy while in Al Kharid, but when he's at Daemonheim, he seems rather happy.
 * When you click Rejoin Party, if you enter your own username it will say "You want to party with yourself?"
 * As of now, the game filter does not appear to work in Daemonheim; so players still receive messages like "You cook the Blue crab." It is unknown if this is a glitch or not; if so, it has yet to be fixed.
 * There are ghosts walking the grounds with currently no known purpose. It's possible that they may be Revenant Fremenniks, although this is just a guess.
 * The ghost to the far west is aggressive and will attack you if you are in its area.
 * Unlike other chickens, the chickens in Daemonheim cannot be attacked and when examined it says "Who are you calling chicken?".
 * When the skill was released, players found doors which needed over 99 in other skills creating speculation they were raising the other skills. However Jagex has stated that they have no plans to increase the level cap on other skills; you can open these doors by making potions to increase your level over 99 for a short time.105Crafting.png
 * Dungeoneering has many similarities to and may have been inspired by board based Role Playing Games. Most notably the HeroQuest and Warhammer Quest games which were produced by Games Workshop. These similarities include the use of "board sections", the ability to look through doors to plan your attack and the unique boss at the end of each dungeon level.
 * Free to play players can make runes that normally only members can make, but limited to runes used for free spells as long as they have the Runecrafting level required. For example, Death runes, which were only possible to craft as a member, can be crafted here as long as the player has level 65 Runecrafting. Runes used exclusively in members only spells, such as blood runes or astral runes, can never be crafted by free players.
 * When Dungeoneering first came out, the P2P and F2P difficulty was not well balanced, as it was a lot easier to train in F2P. This was fixed with a game update that limited F2P xp the next day. (see forum article)
 * On the third day after the release of this new skill, a System update was used to fix various issues. After the update there was a bug that allowed players inside the Dungeons to get loads of Runecrafting xp, (2000 xp per nature rune crafted), some players were getting 4 levels in 5 seconds. A System Rollback was needed to fix this issue.
 * Dungeoneering currently can not be levelled using penguin points, Tears of Guthix, or a Genie lamp. There is a 2 week waiting period before anyone may use penguin points/Tears of Guthix for Dungeoneering. Currently, the only way to get Dungeoneering experience without actually training the skill is through the rewards menu.
 * The shaped key element of this skill while inside a dungeon is very similar to the way Dungeons are played in the online game Mabinogi by Nexon.
 * Dungeoneering is perhaps the most controversial skill to date, mainly because it has sparked much anger, including numerous vitriolic rants and even a Facebook Page entitled "We Hate Dungeoneering!"
 * Though Thok is the skill master, the smuggler is also present on every floor.

Rollback and System Updates
On 14 April 2010, at approximately 5:00pm (UTC), Jagex had to shut down the RuneScape servers due to a Dungeoneering related bug where the exp for crafting runes was accidentally increased exponentially instead of being decreased. All accounts were rolled back by about 30 minutes. The login server went offline for about an hour. Consequently, this caused several people to lose whatever item they had bound prior to the rollback, even if it was bound more than 30 minutes beforehand.

There were also numerous system updates throughout the first week Dungeoneering was released as developers scrambled to fix a number of bugs as they were uncovered, many of which made certain rooms impossible to complete, even with all the required skill levels. There were instances of multiple updates within one hour, which made training the new skill extremely frustrating to players who were unable to finish a dungeon before the update occurred.

Helpful
Dungeoneering Help Community - Get answers about any questions you have about the Dungeoneering skill

Jagex Dungeoneering Video

Gallery

 * Click show to view the entire gallery.