Mechanics

Dungeon Settlers is a colony sim wrapped around a dungeon crawler. You build a settlement and recruit a squad, then level it and push expeditions deeper into…

Units gain experience from expeditions and combat and level up on a fixed ladder. The ladder is defined up to level 12. In this build a unit stops 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 6 major stats and a separate talent rating for each one. The talent rating decides how much that stat grows each time the unit levels up. Rati…

The campaign runs on a single global clock shared by the settlement and any active expedition. There is no separate dungeon calendar.

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

When you begin an expedition into a region, the game can first drop you onto a safe floor. It is a small staging area with no enemies, where you regroup befo…

Dungeon Settlers opens its regions in a fixed chain. In play, clearing a region is the only thing that opens the next one. The save stores each region's 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). A summon's power scales off the summoner's Magic Attack Power at the moment of the summ…

Despite the colorful spell names, damage in Dungeon Settlers is binary: everything is either Physical or Magic. Weapons come in one-handed types that can car…

Each unit has 7 equipment slots. Weapons contribute a flat attack value on top of the wearer's stat-derived attack, and gear can carry additional status effe…

New units are hired from a pool of candidates that refreshes every 480 in-game minutes. The number and level of candidates scale with clan rank. You can insp…

Quests come in 4 lines, and every quest below links to its row on the quests index.

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

Advanced, at-your-own-risk. This article describes the raw files on disk.

The damage pipeline, per-point stat coefficients, crit and resist math, DoT scaling, encirclement and summon scaling - every number cited to its table.

How monsters spot you - Vision Range, line of sight, aggro and threat, day/night, stealth - and every lever that changes it, cited to the tables and code.

The mood ladder a squad climbs while it is inside the dungeon: when each stage lands, what it costs on every management difficulty, and how safe floors reset it.

Where each NPC appears in the dungeon, the chance per floor, and the quest-report boost

How skill cooldown and global cooldown work, and what cooldown reduction does and does not change.

How attack speed is built, how it shortens a swing, and what the percent bonuses actually do.

Every stat that changes over time by itself: health, energy, hunger, stress and food freshness, with the formula and the timings.

How weapons wear from attacking and armor from getting hit, what reduces it, and how to repair - with a hits-until-break simulator.