Mechanics

Dungeon Settlers is a colony sim wrapped around a dungeon crawler: you build a settlement, recruit and level a squad, and push expeditions deeper into the du…

Units gain experience from expeditions and combat and level up on a fixed ladder. The level cap is 12, and settlement buildings cap at level 5.

Inscriptions are permanent trait-like bonuses a unit can gain. They come from two places: a recruit can arrive already carrying inscriptions, and every unit …

Every unit has six major stats - Strength, Constitution, Willpower, Intelligence, Agility and Perception - and a separate talent rating for each one. The tal…

The campaign runs on a single global clock shared by the settlement and any active expedition - there is no separate dungeon calendar. Time is measured in ti…

Every dungeon floor tracks a depletion counter from 5 (fully stocked) down to 0 (fully depleted). Repeatedly farming the same floor drains its counter; over …

When you begin an expedition into a region, the game can first drop you onto a safe floor - a small staging area with an entrance, a corridor and a portal, b…

Dungeon Settlers opens its regions in a fixed chain, and the unlock is derived, not stored. Every time a campaign loads, the game resets every region to lock…

Every settler has a Mood stat (the UI scale tops out at 30) that quietly drives the whole management layer. Mood above 0 makes Stress fall; Mood below 0 make…

Water Magic units can summon creatures (Bubblelings and Bubbletoads), and a summon's power scales off the summoner's Magic Attack Power rather than being a f…

Despite the colorful spell names, damage in Dungeon Settlers is binary: everything is either Physical or Magic. There is no Water (or Fire/Nature) combat ele…

Each unit has 7 equipment slots (main weapon, off-hand/shield or ammo, helmet, body armor, two accessories, and so on). Weapons contribute a flat attack valu…

Your clan advances through numbered ranks by accumulating contribution points. The rank table defines 7 ranks, but the base game caps the highest available r…

New units are hired from a pool of candidates that refreshes every 480 in-game minutes (you can also inspect candidates to reveal hidden talents before commi…

Quests come in a few flavors: a scripted tutorial, an auto-advancing main story, side quests from named NPCs, and repeatable guild "Expedition Resolution" ma…

The Infinite Abyss is a standalone endless-dungeon mode, separate from the empty Forgotten Abyss region on the expedition map. It is partly implemented.

Advanced, at-your-own-risk. This article describes the raw files on disk. Always back up a save before touching it - a bad edit can soft-lock a campaign.