Getting Started

Note: This page is still under construction.

Darkest Dungeon tells the story of your late ancestor who opened a portal to another plane of existence that let terrible things into our world, and now it is your task to drive back the darkness. You will hire a group of heroes to help you in this task, but what price will they pay for righting the wrongs of your family?

Buildings
The Hamlet is the main hub of the game, accessed when not into a dungeon. The hamlet contains various buildings that allow the player to form, manage and improve a roster of adventurers to send into the various expeditions needed to reach and purge the Darkest Dungeon from the evil that has encroached it.

The Hamlet contains a variety of facilities with disparate purposes, most of which revolving around the management of heroes.

Most buildings can be upgraded through the use of heirlooms in order to unlock further benefits, make the facilities more efficient and reduce the prices of their services. Each building consistently required the same kinds of heirlooms, though the amount needed for each upgrade increases exponentially.

The most important building to start upgrading is the Stage Coach as it will let you recruit heroes, which is free. However, upgrading it will allow you to have more room to keep heroes and have more heroes available for recruiting each week

Here is a list of the upgradable buildings in town, along with what they do and which heirlooms are need to upgrade them. Also note that every building needs Crests.

The Abbey and Tavern events
While the Tavern and the Abbey seem to be the same on the surface, putting a hero in one of the different rooms will yield different events.

For the most part it is not recommended to go to the tavern's bar or gambling hall, since they will most likely cause you to lose gold and Trinkets

Heroes
Heroes, or Adventurers, are characters used by the player when assembling parties and expeditions to explore dungeons. They are divided into several classes, specializations that define their appearance and abilities. Each character has different skills and can fill different roles in combat. To recruit new heroes, players must go to the Stage Coach within the Hamlet.

Fortunately every hero you will encounter is strong and very useful. The challenge here is to figure out how to use them effectively. This short overview will help you familiarize yourself with all the heroes in the game. It starts with the first 4 hero classes you will meet, and then lists the rest alphabetically.

For more details on heroes, check here |here

Expeditions
An expedition is a mission that heroes can undertake by visiting one of the various locations near the Hamlet. Each of the locations outside the Hamlet will have a number of different types of missions to accomplish, with various dungeon sizes, objectives and difficulty levels. Greater mission length and difficulty make expeditions harder, but also increase the rewards for completion. Each mission's objective, difficulty and size are generated randomly, with size and especially difficulty being weighted depending on the heroes of the current roster. Regardless of the composition of the roster, there will always be at least one apprentice level mission possible, in case the player wants to recruit new heroes from the Stage Coach.

Provisions
Provisions are items that can be bought before entering a dungeon or by finding them inside of dungeons. They possess effects that are helpful during exploration, including various ways to heal your heroes or remove obstacles. After finishing a dungeon and returning to the town, supplies are refunded at a greatly reduced price (5% of original value) so it's advised to to carefully plan their usage before embarking on a travel.

Curios
During expeditions there is a chance of encountering various objects that can be activated for various effects, both positive and negative. These interactive objects are called Curios.

Once the party enters the room or segment that contains the curio, it can be clicked to activate a prompt. Through the prompt, the curio can be activated directly or with the use of a provision item: curios will react differently to certain items. Normally, the use of the correct provision item will trigger a positive effect, removing the chance of negative effects occurring, but there are exceptions.

Some curios grant loot upon activation. There is a fixed pool of items that can be looted by specific curios, but additional loot due to a low light level will be calculated separately and can thus be dropped even by curios with very specific loot drops.

Many curio effects such as stress infliction or heal, damage, the application of buffs and debuffs or the gain or removal of a Quirk affect individual heroes. The affected hero is always the one currently selected at the moment of activation. It is advisable, upon activating risky curios, to select a hero with good resistances or one that could potentially be affected by the negative effects without endangering the expedition.