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 led 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?

The Darkest Dungeon asks what would it really be like to battle the horrors so commonly dispatched in the games of our childhood? What would facing down unholy abominations day in and day out do to someone? What good is a glowing Sword of Unholy Slaying +5 in the hands of a blubbering coward?

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

Quirks and Diseases
One of the most notable features of Darkest Dungeon is the Quirk/Affliction system. Quirks are passive effects that heroes will acquire as they travel through the dungeons. Most Quirks are passive effects that increase or decrease a hero's stats, however there are others that will cause heroes to fear certain enemies and have them make impulsive decisions.

Quirks are randomly acquired when a hero levels up, or interacts with a curio. Diseases are randomly acquired upon contact with some creatures, and are almost universally bad.

A hero can have up to 5 positive quirks, 5 negative quirks, and 3 diseases. When a hero acquires a quirk or a disease after they have reached the limit, the new quirk/disease will replace an old one.

Negative Quirks and diseases can be cured at the Sanitarium for a hefty price. Additionally, if you let a negative quirk stay too long it will become terminal, and cost even more gold to cure. On the other hand you can also lock in positive quirks to make them permanent on a hero. Another way to remove quirks is through curios, however the ones that do this are rare, so it's not wise to rely solely on this.

When you're starting out it's best to not remove quirks unless they reduce force interaction with curios (see curios section for more details.) Also you should familiarize yourself with curios and what they do to minimize that amount of negative quirks your heroes are receiving.

Stress and Afflictions
Due to enduring the hardships of battle and the sights of abominable things, heroes gain stress. Stress is represented by a bar on the bottom, that, when full, will induce an Affliction which can be the most dire thing a party can encounter, apart from a hero dying.

When an affliction takes effect, the hero may slip out of the player's control sometimes, and do many terrible things. These include randomly increasing the stress of allies, moving themselves in the formation, refusing the aid of their allies, passing their turn, or even attacking others or even themselves.

Stress can only be reduced by committing heroes to the abbey or tavern, using stress-relieving skills, or when landing a critical hit. As stress-relieving skills take up precious time and reduces comparatively little stress, it is usually better to mitigate stress in the first place by killing everything as fast as you can, and removing your heroes' stress at the end of their mission via the abbey or tavern.

However sometimes when a hero reaches his stress limit instead of getting an affliction, he will receive a Virtue instead, immediately recovering half of their stress and randomly producing positive effects on themselves and the party, such as buffing, healing health and stress of themselves and allies. Additionally, heroes with positive afflictions cannot have a heart attack.

If a hero with a negative affliction takes enough stress damage to fill his stress bar again with a brighter white, he will suffer a Heart Attack.

Equipping Heroes
Unlike other games, the heroes of Darkest Dungeon do not equip different weapons and armor. Instead the Blacksmith, one of the buildings in The Hamlet, will upgrade a hero's individual weapons and armor linearly. The hero's weapon will affect their damage, critical hit ratio and speed, while their armor will increase their dodge chance and HP. Accuracy is determined by individual skills rather than equipment. Skills will be discussed in more detail below.

However, heroes can equip 2 different Trinkets that will bestow upon them many different effects, including increasing stats, resistances and/or the chance that a status effect will affect an enemy. However many of these trinkets also have negative effects on other attributes, so you must be careful when choosing what trinkets to use.

A hero may be equip up to 2 trinkets, but they cannot be the same kind and some limit what classes can use them.

Buildings
The Hamlet is the main hub of the game, accessed when not in 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 requires 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, The Tavern and what to be aware of
The Abbey and the Tavern are the main way to reduce stress of a hero. When in town you can put heroes inside the rooms, pay a fee, and after you complete your next quest they will have recovered most of their stress, if not all of it. The rooms at the top relieve less stress but also cost less, and the rooms on the bottom are more costly and relieve much more stress.

While the Tavern and the Abbey seem to be the same on the surface, sometimes when you return from a quest you will learn of events that transpire while you were away. What if while praying your hero sees... unsightly things, hidden among the pews and pedestals? Are you willing to bet your own money and items on a game of chance you have no sway in?

To make matters worse some quirks will not only have your characters refuse using certain rooms, but other quirks will cause your hero to only accept certain rooms! What happens when your Man-at-Arms has a lover and will only go to the brothel and refuse everything else? These quirks can also exist together, meaning that your Highwayman who will only gamble can't relieve stress after he was caught cheating.

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.

One more obstacle in healing the stress of your heroes is the caretaker. He has long served your ancestor, and as a result his mind is under constant strain from what he has witnessed. Every week he will occupy a random room, preventing you from using it, which can be a nuisance with the aforementioned quirks that make characters only use certain rooms. There is no way to remove the caretaker. The only way around him is to increase the number of rooms you have.

Choosing an Expedition
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
Before entering a dungeon you are given the option to buy provisions for the dungeon. These supplies are used for purposes such as to remove obstacles, open chests, and heal Status Effects. After finishing an expedition your remaining provisions will be sold back at a tenth of their bought price. It is essential to learn what provisions to take to each region and how many so that they will last but not waste your resources.

The most important provisions to take are food. Sometimes while exploring the dungeon your party will get hunger and you can feed them or let them starve. If you choose to feed them they'll use up 1 food for each party member and heal a small amount of health, but if you choose to starve them (or you don't have enough food) the entire party will take damage and increase their stress. Additionally, some classes will bring provisions with them into a dungeon.

For a full list of provisions, you can check the provisions page.

Light Meter
When traveling through the labyrinths surrounding the hamlet, even light is a precious resource. At the top of your screen is a meter that shows how much light you have. Every expedition you will have 100 light and the higher the light is the less dangerous the monsters are. The lower the light is, the more dangerous the fiends become. However you will also find more treasures when the torch is dim.

WARNING Never travel the hallways with 0 light. There is a chance that you will run into a very powerful enemy that can only be found in pitch-black darkness, and it can break your hero's bodies and minds easily...

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.

When activated, Curios have many effects such as stress infliction or heal, damage, the application of buffs and debuffs, or the gain or removal of a Quirk that affects 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.

Combat
Combat is turn-based. In battle you click on a character's skill and then click on a highlighted target to use that skill. Some skills attack enemies and some help allies.

The most important thing to be aware of when using skills is the hero's position in the combat. You can have 4 heroes on a team, and enemies can have up to 4 monsters on their team, as well. The combatants in the middle are at the front of combat facing each other, and the combatants on the left and right are in the back.



Skills and Abilities
Depending on the position of a hero they can use different skills. This is shown to you by yellow, red, and grey dots on a skill, with yellow being where you can use a skill, red being what enemies you can hit with it, and grey showing where the skill is not allowed to be used. We'll look at a few skills now.

This is the Crusader's skill SMITE. The upper dots show where he needs to be in order to use the attack, and the lower ones show who he can hit. From this we can see that the Crusader needs to be in position 1 or 2 to use this attack, and he can only attack the enemy in position 1 or 2. We can also see the attack is classified as a melee attack, so we can expect most melee attacks can only be used from, and effect, the front ranks.

The ACC MOD shows you what the attack's accuracy is, which is how likely it is to hit. This attack has an ACC MOD of 80, so it normally has an 80% chance to hit. It also has an ability modifier that allows the Crusader to deal extra damage to Unholy enemies.

Zealous Accusation is another of the Crusader's skills, however it reduces the Crusader's attack for this skill. However notice that the two red dots are connected, which means when using this attack it will have a chance to hit every enemy within those positions.

This is the Highwayman's skill PISTOL SHOT, and as you might expect, it is a ranged attack. Unlike the Crusader's SMITE, this skill cannot be used in the first position, however it can be used in every other position. Likewise, PISTOL SHOT can hit any enemy except for the one in the very front. It has three ability modifiers. The first decreases the amount of damage it does to enemies. The second increases the chance to land a critical hit. The final one increases the damage it does against an enemy with a mark on it.

Healing Abilities
As heroes take damage in fights, it is necessary to heal them. There are a few characters that have healing skills, but the two best healers are the Vestal and the Occultist. Here's a quick summary on both:


 * The Vestal is a good consistent healer. At first she can heal 3-5 HP and is the only character that has a skill that heals the entire party, albeit only healing 1 HP at first


 * The Occultist is a powerful inconsistent healer. His Wyrd Reconstruction is the most powerful healing skill in the game, at first healing anywhere between 0-10 HP at once. However in addition to having a chance to heal nothing, it can also cause bleed and further damage your party. This is a very powerful skill, but you should be aware of the risks before using it.

By topping off your heroes' hit points and learning how to utilize healing effectively, you can minimize your heroes' chances of dying.

Unlike other games, using an item will not take a turn. So if your hero is bleeding you can use a bandage to cure his wound and still attack an enemy.

Choosing a Target
Generally monsters in the front deal damage to your frontlines, and the ones in the back will attack your entire party and may even cause stress. It is very important to take out the back row as quickly as possible. There are also small, quick monsters that aren't very durable but they cause many status effects. These are also priority targets, but are hard to hit.

Like heroes, enemies also have skill and many of them can only be used in certain positions. If you know how their skills work, you can move them out of position to waste their turns. For example if you see a monster firing from the back ranks, he may not be able to use that skill in close combat. Alternatively if a monster's melee attacks are causing you trouble you can try and push it back to lower the damage you take.

Status Effects
Various monsters and allies have attacks that will affect a character outside of physically harming them. These usually last three rounds, however their are some exceptions.

* Be careful when dealing with enemies that inflict Bleed and Blight. It can be inflicted multiple times to increase the damage done.

** After recovering from stun, a character will become resistant to it for one round.

Corpses
When most monsters die, they will leave a corpse that act as wall that prevents the enemies from moving up a rank. Corpses last for 4 turns.

There are a few ways to get rid of corpses. First you can attack corpses to destroy them, but often a better approach is to use ranged skills, push/pull skills, and even corpse-clearing special skills that some heroes posses. If an enemy dies from a critical hit, bleed, or blight they will not leave a corpse.

Also some smaller monsters and quest bosses do not leave corpses.

Death's Door
Rather than immediately dying when a hero has 0 HP, they instead reach Death's Door. In this state they are significantly weakened and any attack has a chance to kill them. If you can heal them they'll be safe again, however they will be weakened for the rest of the quest for being so close to death.

Retreating
If you feel the need to run from battle, there is a flag in the top left corner of the screen that will give you a chance to flee from combat. However, running from combat will hurt your hero's confidence and they will gain stress because of it. Furthermore sometimes you can fail a retreat or an afflicted hero will stop you from retreating on his turn.