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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 Exploration and Navigation Door Types - Regular, Guardian, Locked, Skill and Boss Doors

While exploring the dungeon floor you will come across many rooms, some of which are essential to finishing the level, and some of which are not. These are distinguished within the game because of their different importance and function.

This term refers to all of the rooms that must be visited at least once in order to complete a floor in Daemonheim. It includes the starting room and the boss room, plus the additional rooms necessary to get to the boss room and open it.

The critical path represents the minimum amount of a dungeon that must be explored in order to finish it. In some cases this can amount to far less than the total number of rooms in that floor; it can be half of the rooms on the floor or even less.

It’s important to realize that, because of the way Dungeoneering uses colored locks and keys, the critical path is not just a straight path of rooms linking the starting room to the boss room—it also includes other rooms that must be visited in order to get the keys needed to proceed on the path to the boss. On some levels, most of the critical path is not rooms between the start and the boss. In fact, it is quite common on small maps for the boss room to be directly connected to the starting room, but only accessible after you’ve visited a number of other rooms to get keys that unlock other rooms that finally give you the key to get to the boss. All of those rooms are needed to access the boss, so they are all on the critical path.

Dungeoneering floors are designed so that players will always have the necessary skill levels to open all rooms on the critical path. This ensures that you’ll never be unable to complete a floor. If you ever encounter a door that demands a level in a skill above what anyone in the party possesses, that door leads to a room not on the critical path.

Bonus rooms, also sometimes called optional rooms, are all of the rooms on the dungeon other than those on the critical path. These are all of the pathway branches off of the critical path that lead to dead ends, or that only contain keys for other dead end branches or rooms.

It is possible to omit all of these optional rooms and still complete the floor. However, doing so can often lead to a very high XP penalty. Not only do you lose a potential bonus room modifier by not visiting these rooms, but your base and prestige XP also get knocked down, sometimes substantially.

Bonus rooms can sometimes have skill doors with requirements above those of anyone in the party. In some cases you can use a potion to boost up high enough to open the door, but if not, you’ll have to skip those rooms and complete the level with a lower XP reward.

Bonus rooms are not found on floors made with complexity levels 1 through 4.

When setting up a dungeon floor, the party leader has the option of enabling guide mode. In the RuneScape knowledge base, Jagex describes this as something that “can be activated to show the critical path through a dungeon, giving you the exact route to follow.”

Well, not quite. :)

The first part is true: guide mode changes the floor map so that rooms on the critical path are shown with a brighter background than bonus rooms. This tells you, when you first open the door to a room, whether you need to enter it in order to solve the floor. If the square has the same yellowish color as the starting room, then it is on the critical path; if it is a duller shade of brown, it is optional.

However, that’s as far as guide mode goes. It doesn’t actually give you the exact route to follow, nor in fact any route at all. For example, if you get to a room on the critical path that requires the blue pentagon key, all that guide mode does is ensure that whatever room has that key gets the brighter background marking it as a room that needs to be entered. It doesn’t tell you where the room containing the blue pentagon key is located. In the event of multiple keys being needed to traverse the critical path, it also doesn’t specify in what order rooms must be visited to get keys in the correct sequence.

When guide mode is activated, a penalty is imposed on XP gained at the end of the floor. The amount seems to vary from about 5% to over 10%. Since floors with complexity levels 1 through 4 have no bonus rooms, guide mode is always forced on for these floors, and the XP penalty applied.

In practice, guide mode is pointless. If you are doing a floor “properly” to get XP, you really need to explore all of it, because doing only the critical path means you save a few minutes but at a very high XP (and token) cost. It simply doesn’t make sense. The only time guide mode might have been worthwhile would be if you just want to rush through the floor. But in that case, you’d generally want to use a lower complexity level, which means no bonus rooms and guide mode forced on anyway.

Dungeon Exploration and Navigation Door Types - Regular, Guardian, Locked, Skill and Boss Doors