Devlog #10: Dungeons

While most of your adventures will take place on the overworld of the Stormtossed Isle, there’s a special kind of content for your mercenary company to face: Dungeons!

In this devlog, we’ll give you a preview of what to expect when delving into these dungeons, and how it differs from exploring the rest of the isle.

What are dungeons?

In devlog #8, we told you that when the world randomly generated, there would be various towns scattered across the land. Alongside these towns and natural features like mountains & forests, dangerous dungeons will appear, ready for your crew to conquer and subdue them!

How do you interact with them? Instead of a normal combat encounter, where you field around 8 to 10 mercenaries, you are prompted to pick only 4 units to take into the dungeon. Who you pick is of crucial importance, since you’ll need to navigate a series of challenges, both in and outside of combat.

What challenges will I face?

Dealing with dungeon denizens in combat will be tough, since your options on recovery will be more limited than your normal overworld adventures. Taking on multiple encounters as you explore the depths will test a combination of your tactical and logistical planning skills. Expect dungeons to also be the lairs of powerful boss-type monsters, specifically designed to face your smaller group of 4 heroes.

Outside of combat, as you search the dungeon for enemies and treasures, you’ll have to navigate other dungeon features, like traps, locked doors, hidden caches, secret rooms, puzzles, and other physical impediments. To handle these, your mercenaries have specialized strengths and weaknesses, based on their class, level, and traits. When choosing your party for a dungeon, you must consider not only their combat prowess, but also what skills and bonuses they bring to the table for exploration. And, of course, your own observation skills and decision-making will play a big part as well as you explore, as it’s ultimately up to you to find your way and notice dangers.

Thankfully, you’ll have the opportunity to prepare beforehand, by taking specialized dungeon consumable supplies, including things such as health potions, lockpicks, camping items, shovels/tools, etc. To give you an idea of what to prepare for, the party’s intel on the dungeon will indicate what kinds of inhabitants are likely to be present, which traps and obstacles will be more common, and so on.

Perhaps the most important consumable you’ll take on these adventures is your lamp oil. The deeper you go, and the more time-consuming actions you undertake, the more your oil reserves will be depleted. Actions that your party is ill-prepared for will consume more oil than those they are skilled at. In the event that you run out of lamp oil, you’ll be plunged into darkness and faced with penalties and extra difficulty in navigating, which may necessitate a quick retreat. Because of this, some dungeons may require more than one delve to fully explore. Fortunately, your lamp oil capacity can be improved by upgrading your caravan.

The Rewards

For all of these restrictions and challenges, there’d better be something good waiting at the end, right? Yes, dungeons are best known for their riches and loot, especially when it comes to unique and legendary equipment, which are more likely to be found within. Additionally, you can discover some of the “wonders of the world” in dungeons. Such finds are worth a pretty penny once successfully reported at the Pathbreakers Guild back in town.

While adventuring on the main surface areas of the isle is important to building up your mercenary company, dungeoneering will also be another key part of developing your crew’s equipment, reputation, and coffers.

The Future

We hope you enjoyed learning about dungeons in Pathbreakers!

We still have much left to do to get the game ready. The amount of features we want to get in keeps growing over time, and thus we find ourselves trying to scrounge up as much extra time as we can to get everything ready in a timely fashion. With this in mind, we've decided to lower the frequency of the devlogs a tad (hence the longer delay with this one), but we hope you’ll be excited to see the fruits of our labor!

• 6 Eyes Studio Team