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RuneScoop.com  >  The RuneScoop Ultimate Skill Guide for RuneScape       >  The RuneScoop Ultimate Skill Guide - Dungeoneering            >  The RuneScoop Ultimate Skill Guide - Dungeoneering - Understanding Floors, Rooms, Doors and Related Features

Dungeon Complexity Levels Dungeon Exploration and Navigation

Once a team is formed and the team leader has specified parameters such as the floor number, difficulty setting and complexity level, it’s time to enter Daemonheim. The team will be teleported to its custom, dynamically generated dungeon, ready for action.

Even though every dungeon is unique, they all follow the same overall structure. The same goes for rooms as well: there are hundreds of different conbinations of room layouts and items within them, but overall, they adhere to a general set of rules. Let’s take a look at the structures of dungeons and rooms, which will help us understand more about what raiding a floor is about.

Every dungeon is based on a 4x4, 4x8 or 8x8 rectangular grid of rooms, depending on its size. The dungeon generally contains the following fixed elements:

• Starting Room: This is the room where the team first appears at the beginning of every dungeon level. It contains many essential tools and resources for completing a floor, including the smuggler, a set of “guaranteed” skill stations, and starting equipment and supplies. It also contains a ladder that can be used to exit the dungeon.
  
  
• Boss Room: The opposite of the starting room, this is the room that is considered to be the end of the floor. The team’s general goal is to locate the boss room, kill the boss, and then complete the floor by using the ladder that appears to go down one level. However, it is not strictly mandatory to always do the boss room last.
  
  
• Challenge (Puzzle) Rooms: These rooms have locked doors that can only be opened by completing a particular combat challenge or non-combat puzzle. They are not found on all dungeon floors, but are fairly common on complexity levels 5 and 6.
  
  
• Regular Dungeon Rooms: All of the other rooms on the floor are considered “regular” dungeon rooms, because they don’t play a particular role in completing the floor. They may contain a variety of monsters, skill stations and resources. They are accessed by using many different types of doors, including ones secured by color shape locks.

Every dungeon has a path that you must follow, at a minimum, to complete it. Often called the critical path, this is the set of rooms that you must visit at least once in order to get the keys needed to unlock the boss room. Dungeons of complexity level 5 or higher also have bonus rooms, which aren’t strictly necessary to get to the boss, but that must be explored to achieve the highest XP rewards.

Just as every dungeon is different but they all have a consistent overall pattern of rooms, the rooms themselves are all different, but also fit a general structure.

All of the rooms in Daemonheim are what I call “mostly square”. By this I mean that they aren’t always comprised of four equal-length walls meeting at right angles, but they always take up the same overall space as a square room. This is necessary for the rooms to fit the standard rectangular grids used for dungeon floors. There are no rooms that take up more than one square in the grid.

Every room can have up to four doors, one located on each of the north, south, west or east doors. As mentioned earlier, these doors come in different varieties, each requiring a different approach for opening them. The first time you click to open a door, you won’t actually enter; you’ll just be shown what’s in the room. The second time you click, you’ll go in.

The starting room, boss room and challenge rooms have mostly fixed internal structures. Regular rooms are highly variable, but will contain some combination of the following:

• Monsters.
  
  
• Resources.
  
  
• Skill stations.
  
  
• Partitions that you must maneouver around when running through the room.
  
  
• A colored key on the ground.
  
  
• “Eye candy” (tables, chairs, carpets, pillars, wall hangings and other “mood items” that have no use and cannot be interacted with).

It’s also common to find gaping holes of various shapes in some rooms. These are also “eye candy” in that you cannot interact with them, but they restrict where you can run.

There doesn’t appear to be a strong relationship between the shape of a room, its location in the dungeon, and the resources or elements it contains. I have noticed informally, however, that I do seem to find certain stations more often in particular rooms. For example, prayer altars seem to be much more common in “dead end” rooms than in rooms on the critical path to the boss.

Dungeon Complexity Levels Dungeon Exploration and Navigation