The Dungeon Builder's Manual

Any lot big enough can hold a dungeon under it. You dig it by placing rooms and halls one doorway at a time, or by filling a chest with pieces and letting it build for you. You stock it with totems that summon the creatures who live there. Then you beat it yourself, and it opens to everyone else. This manual covers all of that, in the order you will actually do it.

What you need first

Three things, and the first one is not negotiable.

• 1A lot that allows a dungeon. Your lot's size sets your entire dungeon budget. A Half Row lot gets zero dungeon points and cannot hold a dungeon at all. Every other size can, from Row upward, and the bigger the lot the more you can build. The full table is in section 4.
• 2A dungeon entrance placed on that lot. This is an ordinary decoration that you craft or buy. It is the door your visitors walk through.
• 3A dungeon foyer in your inventory. The foyer is the deed. It decides the first room and the material the dungeon starts in, and how many corridors lead out of that first room.

Two limits worth knowing before you invest. A trial account cannot build: the dungeon options are visible but greyed out with the line This is not available on this lot right now. And only the lot owner may place or remove dungeon rooms. Someone you have granted decorating rights can decorate your dungeon, but the doorways will not respond to them.

The parts of a dungeon

Getting your first dungeon

The entrance

The base Tomb Dungeon Entrance is craftable. Everything else you have seen on other people's lots is the same entrance wearing a pattern: the water well, the magic mirror, the giant lich statue, the dragon, the prison cage, the stone fish, the witch's fireplace. Those patterns come from the Crown Store. They change the look and nothing else.

Place the entrance anywhere on your lot the way you place any decoration. Until a foyer is attached it is just a door to nowhere.

The foyer

Foyers are crafted at the forge from granite and a blueprint, and they are not interchangeable. The foyer sets the starting material and, more importantly, how many corridors leave the first room. That number caps how wide your dungeon can branch at the very top.

Putting them together

1. Stand on your lot and click the entrance. The dungeon window opens.
2. Choose Change Dungeon. The window switches to Select Dungeon from Deeds in Inventory.
3. Page through your foyers with the arrows and press Accept.
4. Click Enter Dungeon and walk down.

Not sure yet? The entrance window also offers Enter Sample Dungeon, which drops you into a finished showcase dungeon built at a fixed point budget. It is not yours and nothing you do in it is saved, but it is the fastest way to see what fifty or a hundred points actually buys.

Dungeon points

Every piece costs dungeon points. Your lot gives you a pool of them, and that pool is the only real limit on the size of your dungeon. There is no cap on how deep you go, no cap on the number of floors, and no cap on room count except what the points allow.

What your lot gives you

Water lots use the same numbers as their dry equivalents. A Half Row lot gets nothing, and the dungeon options on that lot will not do anything.

What a piece costs

Cost varies enormously by piece. A plain hall costs one point. A cathedral costs forty-two. The number is printed on the item tooltip as Dungeon points: N, and again in the builder's catalog as Cost N, so you can price a plan before you commit to it.

Dungeon points also buy the room to furnish the place. For every dungeon point your lot grants, your dungeon can hold ten objects, one light, one container and one non-player character. So a Village lot at 100 points has room for 1,000 decorations. Go over and placement refuses with Dungeon object limit reached: 812 of 1000.

Raising the limit

You can buy extra points permanently, either with gold or with Crowns of the Obsidians. Each purchase adds one point, applies to every dungeon on your account, and never expires. Both prices step up as you buy more.

The buttons live on the Dungeon tab of the builder panel, next to the breakdown showing how many of your points came from the lot, from gold and from crowns.

Moving to a different lot

Your budget follows your current lot, not the one you founded the dungeon on. Move the same dungeon to a bigger lot and the extra points are immediately yours to spend.

Move to a smaller lot and nothing is destroyed. You keep every room you built. You simply cannot add more until the total is back under the new limit, and the builder tells you exactly how far over you are:

Building room by room

Walk up to a glowing doorway and click it. The Dungeon Builder opens on its Build tab, already scoped to that doorway, and a ghost of the selected piece appears in the world so you can see what you are about to commit to. Left and right arrow keys step through your pieces one at a time. Press Accept to place, Cancel to back out.

You never position a piece yourself. The game rotates and slides it so its connector meets the doorway's connector exactly. There is no grid and no free placement: pieces join at their doorways or not at all.

Sets, and why some pieces refuse

Pieces belong to material sets: Dungeon Stone, Cave, Green Marble, Blue Marble, Ancient Stone. A doorway only accepts pieces from a set it shares. If you want to change material partway down, you need a Transition piece, which is an adapter with one set on one end and another on the other. No amount of turning or shuffling will make a mismatched piece fit, which is why the game tells you that first, before anything else that might also be wrong.

The five refusals

When a placement is refused you get exactly one line, naming the most important reason. In priority order:

Taking a room back out

Click the doorway that leads into the room and choose the None entry. The room returns to your backpack, not to the chest. If the room still holds decorations you will be asked first: "You cannot move this dungeon piece because it contains decorations. Would you like to move all of the decorations to your inventory?"

Dungeon pieces cannot be picked up the way ordinary decorations can. The doorway menu, the Generator tab's Reclaim, and Transfer Items To Bank on the entrance window are the only three ways a room comes out. That last one empties the entire dungeon into your bank, rooms and furniture together, so treat it as a last resort rather than a tidy-up.

The Dungeon Builder panel

The window you get from a doorway is the same window you can open any time, from anywhere in your dungeon. Three ways in:

• 1Click any glowing doorway. Opens on Build, scoped to that doorway.
• 2The Dungeon Builder button on the HUD, beside the mode pill.
• 3Type /dungeonbuilder.

Opened without a doorway it starts on the room list and has no Accept button. You can browse, search, count your points and read your record from anywhere; you just cannot place a piece until you are standing at a doorway. The window is resizable and remembers where you put it.

Build

Your dungeon pieces as a grid of tiles: picture, how many you own, and what each costs. Pieces you cannot currently afford are dimmed rather than hidden, so you can see what you are saving for. Search by name, filter by material family or by kind, and narrow to Fits this doorway or Affordable when the list gets long.

Rooms

Everything you have placed, in one list: which floor it is on, what it cost, whether it can be reached from the foyer, whether it holds decorations, and what its totem currently spawns. The room you are standing in is marked. Any column sorts.

The second view answers the question every builder asks eventually: where is that last open doorway? It lists every unfilled exit with the room it belongs to, its floor, the compass direction from where you stand, and the distance in metres, nearest first. Pick one and a marker appears in the world. Walk to it and the Build tab picks the doorway up.

Dungeon

Where the whole thing stands. Your points broken into what is in reachable rooms, what is stranded in cut-off rooms and what is left. The publishing checklist, which marks which row the game actually enforces and which two are only advice. And the record from your entrance plaque, so you do not have to walk up to read it.

Generator

The generator chest's controls: what the nearest chest holds, the seed box, the five build styles, and the Build and Reclaim buttons. It is a large enough subject to get its own section; see section 7.

The generator chest

Building with it

1. Place the chest anywhere inside your own dungeon, with Adventure Mode off.
2. Open it and put dungeon pieces in. Rooms, halls, stairs, anything. Close it; the chest itself is just a container.
3. Open the Dungeon Builder and pick the Generator tab. It shows what the chest holds.
4. Pick a build style, leave the seed box blank for a random layout or type a shared one, and press Build. A confirmation appears, and the result reports in chat even if you close the window.

Build styles

Five styles decide how the pieces get used. They are preferences rather than rules: a style changes what gets tried first, but it never refuses a legal placement, so the chest empties as far as doorways, space and points allow under every style.

The build only ever adds. It will not move, replace or delete anything you already placed. Pieces it cannot use stay in the chest, and it tells you why in chat:

The seed line carries the style after the slash, and the whole token retypes as-is. Hand it to a friend and, if they feed their chest the same set of pieces at the same open doorways, they get the same halls. A bare number without a slash works too and uses whichever style you have selected. Different pieces will diverge, which is half the fun of trading seeds.

Reclaiming with it

The chest also runs backwards, which is by far the fastest way to tear a layout down and try another one. Press Reclaim on the Generator tab and confirm. The tab shows how many rooms are eligible before you commit.

Rooms come back deepest first, and anything standing in them comes with them. Some rooms always stay:

• 1The foyer. It is not an item and never was.
• 2Any room with someone standing in it, including you.
• 3The room holding the chest, because taking it would strand the chest.
• 4Anything else the game cannot move right now.

A room that stays keeps every room on the path between it and the entrance. That is deliberate: cutting a kept room loose from the foyer would strand it, and stranded rooms get emptied into your backpack on the next load. So a partial reclaim leaves you a smaller connected dungeon rather than a scatter of islands. If the chest fills up, the rest goes to your backpack; if both fill up, the run stops and says so.

Totems and encounters

An empty dungeon is a walk. Totems are what make it a dungeon.

Certain pieces are spawn rooms. A spawn room has a totem slot in it, and until you put a totem in that slot the room stays empty. Drop a totem in and the room arms itself: the creature family on the totem decides who appears, and the tier decides how tough.

Totems go nowhere else. Try to place one on an ordinary surface and you get Totems go in a dungeon totem slot. Try to put the wrong family in a slot that only takes certain kinds and you get That slot does not take this kind of totem.

Families

Nine names appear in the builder's Encounter column. Seven of them are totems you can craft:

The other two, Troll or Elf and Troll, Elf or Dragon, are not totems. They are slots: a room whose slot reads "Troll or Elf" will accept either a Troll totem or an Elf totem, and the room reports whichever one you actually put in it.

Tiers, and the naming clash

Six steps of difficulty. The builder panel names them one way and the totem items name them another, and they are the same six things:

What they cost to make

Totems are crafted at the forge from the Dungeon Totems recipe book, out of the essence of the creature family in question. Level 1 takes a hundred essences. Every level after that is built from the level below it, so the price compounds hard:

An Elite Boss totem is twenty-five thousand six hundred essences of one creature type. Plan the boss room early.

Living with them

• 1Swapping a totem takes effect at once. The creatures the old totem summoned are cleared and the spawn point re-arms for the new one. You do not have to wait out the old respawn timer.
• 2Taking a totem out empties the room. A room with no totem spawns nothing.
• 3Respawn is eight minutes unless the room says otherwise.
• 4Nothing spawns outside Adventure Mode. With the dungeon in Decoration Mode the rooms are empty, which is exactly what you want while building.

Adventure Mode

Your dungeon has two states and one switch between them.

The switch is a pill in the corner of your screen while you are in your own dungeon. It names the mode you are in and offers the other one.

Switching reloads the dungeon, so the game asks first: "Switch this dungeon to Adventure Mode? The dungeon will reload, and everyone inside will be returned to the entrance." Anyone standing in your dungeon gets a short countdown and is put back at the entrance. That includes guests mid-fight, so give people warning before you flip it.

The same switch also lives on the entrance window as Enable Dungeon Adventure Mode, if you would rather not walk back in.

Decorating

Decorating a dungeon works the same way decorating a house does, with three rules that only apply down here.

A room is either a spawn room or a decoratable room

Not both. Spawn rooms hold a totem and creatures; decoration rooms hold your furniture. If you have the wrong one, there are recipes to convert between them in either direction, each costing one Ancient Essence plus the room you are converting. So a room can change its mind, one essence at a time.

Your decoration allowance comes from your dungeon points

For every dungeon point your lot grants you, the dungeon holds ten objects, one light source, one container and one non-player character. That is the lot's base points, so a Town lot at 150 points furnishes 1,500 objects, 150 lights and 150 containers.

Furniture and doorways do not mix

Hang a painting on a wall that has an unfilled doorway in it and that doorway stops glowing. It is not broken; the decoration is simply in the way. Move the decoration and the doorway comes back.

The map

Press M inside your dungeon and you get a live model of it, built from the rooms you have actually placed. Not a drawing you made, and not a map someone authored: the game reads your layout and shows it back to you.

• 1Each room is a block. The floor you are standing on is highlighted; the others sit above and below it.
• 2A gold beacon marks where you are.
• 3Rooms that cannot reach the foyer are drawn grey. This is the fastest way to spot a mistake in a big dungeon.
• 4It works in both modes, and it keeps your camera angle between openings.
• 5Drag to turn it, right-drag to pan, and there is a compass ring so you know which way is north and a Reset button when you have spun yourself around.

There is no fog of war in player dungeons. Every dungeon built on the same kind of foyer would share one fog map, so revealing yours would reveal everyone else's. The whole layout is visible from the first step instead.

Naming, access and PvP

Naming it

From the entrance window's options menu, Name Dungeon. The name shows on the entrance for everyone who walks past, in the form "Barrow of the Nine" (Astrid's Dungeon).

The rules are narrow on purpose. Three to fifty characters. Letters, including accented ones, and digits. Single spaces between words, never at the start or end. At most one apostrophe, and never at the start or next to a space. No underscores, no equals signs, no commas, no quotation marks. Leave the box empty to clear the name. A name that breaks a rule comes back as Invalid name.

Who can get in

Dungeon access is lot access, set from Manage Lot Access on the same menu. Three settings:

Someone turned away at the door gets This Dungeon is Locked. If you revoke someone's access while they are already inside, they are moved out rather than left standing at an invisible wall.

Open PvP

The entrance can be flagged for open PvP, and that flag is always visible on the entrance before anyone commits to walking in. Naming your dungeon something friendly does not hide it. Visitors also get the usual PvP confirmation on the way through.

Publishing and the record

Publishing does not lock or unlock your door. Access is a separate thing, covered above. Publishing is a claim: this dungeon is finished, it can be beaten, and I have beaten it. Once you publish, the plaque outside starts keeping a permanent record.

The one requirement

You must clear your own dungeon, in Adventure Mode, on the layout you want to publish. Cleared means every armed spawner in the dungeon has died during a single run. It is not a room-by-room order; it sticks as you go, and it counts for your whole party, so you can bring friends.

flowchart TD
  A[Build the layout] --> B[Switch to Adventure Mode]
  B --> C[Clear every spawn room in one run]
  C --> D[Publish from the entrance]
  D --> E[The plaque keeps the record]
  E -- "edit any room and you start over" --> A

Then, at the entrance, choose Publish Dungeon to the Public. If you have not cleared it the game says so in chat: Clear the current layout in Adventure Mode before publishing. The Dungeon tab of the builder panel shows the same checklist ahead of time, so you can see where you stand without walking out.

Two more rows appear on that checklist. Neither is enforced, both are worth heeding: every room should reach the foyer, and a dungeon of fewer than three pieces will not display a first clear or a record time at all.

What the plaque remembers

A first clear and a broken record are announced to everyone standing in the dungeon at the time.

What survives, and what does not

When it will not work

Traps and doors

A dungeon that only holds monsters is a room with monsters in it. The trap kit is what lets you build a place that does something to a visitor on its own, and every piece of it is placed and wired by you.

What the kit contains

Wiring

Right-click a placed piece to wire it to another. A trigger can drive several pieces, and each connection carries its own delay, anywhere from none to six seconds. That delay is most of the craft: a plate that fires a dart wall instantly is a tax, and a plate that fires it two seconds later, after the boss door has already shut, is a trap.

The Dungeon Builder panel carries a Traps line that names the first real problem in your wiring and the piece it is on. If something is not firing, read that before you start pulling pieces up.

The three rules

• 1Damage is capped, three ways. Per trap, per room, and for the whole dungeon. You cannot build a corridor that kills anyone who walks it.
• 2A trap may not be aimed at creatures. Traps are for visitors. Pointing one at your own encounter to farm it does not work.
• 3A door that shuts must have a lever on the inside. There is no configuration in which a visitor can be sealed in with no way out.

Waygates

A Dungeon Waygate is a placeable portal. It is the piece that lets a big dungeon stop being a walk.

A waygate can link to another waygate in the same dungeon, back to the entrance, or into a different dungeon entirely. Each one carries its own arrival permissions, so you decide who is allowed to come out of it.

• 1They burn green. Deliberately: a waygate should not be mistaken for the way out.
• 2You can name a placed waygate. The name is its address, and it is what the other end lists.
• 3Hover one and it reads back its name, its destination, and who may arrive through it.
• 4The destination list names dungeons. It used to name the deeds behind them, which told you nothing.

Prizes and live events

The prize chest

A Dungeon Prize Chest holds gold you put in yourself. The first person to clear your dungeon takes it. It is advertised at the entrance, so people know it is there before they come in, and it is capped, with a cooldown between payouts.

This is the piece that turns a dungeon from a thing you built into a thing people race.

Running the night yourself

You can also stop being the architect and be the dungeon master. A Live Event console sits beside the mode switch, and while an event is running you drive the place by hand:

• 1Start Event begins it. It cannot be started outside Adventure Mode, and it ends when you leave.
• 2A button for each wired channel in the room you are standing in. Fire the trap yourself, when it is funny rather than when someone steps on the plate.
• 3Speak says a boss line from the curated list, translated for every viewer in their own language.
• 4Release Reward unlocks a chest you filled beforehand.

Reference

Piece kinds in the builder's filter

Material sets

Where things are done

What is being considered next

Traps and pressure plates, the prize chest and the Dungeon Master mode were all on this list when this page was first written, and all three are built. What is left on it: a directory so people can find your dungeon, and ratings. Those are written up, with comment threads and votes, on the player dungeons proposals page, along with everything else that has been suggested. Nothing there is scheduled. What gets built first depends in large part on what people say they want.

This page is one of a series of player guides at catnipgames.net/blog/guides. It describes the game as it stands on 15 August 2026 and will be kept current as things change.

Questions and corrections

No account needed. If something here does not match what you see in the game, say so and it gets fixed. Comments are plain text, held to basic decency, and may be trimmed.