This is a work-in-progress.

This is just a guide to give new players some basic information to lessen their frustration, and help them learn to enjoy a great game. We won't be going in-depth on different character builds or anything else really focused. If there is any content you feel should be covered here that isn't, please let me know. Also, please let me know if any information is incorrect.

Dungeons of Dredmor is a roguelike. If you're not familiar with what a roguelike is, it is a game that is similar to Rogue. I mean, it says it right there in the word. If you're not familiar with Rogue, that's kind of understandable. Rogue is a pretty old ASCII based RPG. Dungeons of Dredmor, like a lot of modern roguelikes, has legit graphics.


(Roguelikes before the wonderful world of graphics)

Despite looking visually different, the basic core concepts are very much the same with most roguelikes. If you haven't played games in this genre, it can be overwhelming at first. Here's what you can expect in Dungeons of Dredmor, and most roguelikes in general.

• The game world is randomly generated each time you play.
  
• Many choices when creating your character.
  
• Turn based gameplay.
  
• Permadeath.
  
• Tons of different pieces of equipment, potions, and other items.
  
• Very little hand-holding.

The hand-holding point really deserves mentioning. Dungeons of Dredmor is actually a lot easier than most roguelikes, but is still a fair bit more difficult than something like Final Fantasy or Dragon Warrior. You will die. You will probably die a lot. It's not uncommon for people to get frustrated and give up on this genre, but those that stick with it will find some really amazing gameplay and near unlimited replay value.

When creating your adventurer, you have a large number of skills to choose from. If you happen to own the DLC for the game, you will have even more. Mousing over a skill will give you a basic description of them, but for some skills that description doesn't really convey what the skill is all about. The choices you make here are final, and you should pick skills suited to your play style and complement each other. If it's your first time, or you randomly select your skills, it is very possible to pick skills that will make the game near impossible for your adventurer to finish.

After you have picked what skills you want to start with, you will name your character and pick their sex. The choice of sex is only visual, and does not seem to affect gameplay.

The user interface in Dungeons of Dredmor is a lot more straight forward than most roguelikes, but we'll briefly go over it anyway.

The majority of the elements of the UI are along the bottom of the screen. You have buttons for opening the menu, character sheet, and various other windows. Each button has it's hotkey colored gold and capitalized for easy reference.

You can also easily see how much gold you have, as well as your life and mana bars. The character portrait will bloody as you get closer to death, and you can mouse over it to see your current score. If you're playing in widescreen, you can click the icon in the top right of the portrait to stretch the UI across the bottom of your screen.

To the left and right of the portrait you have the item and skill action bars. The left-most space on the skill action bar (right next to the portrait) is your currently readied skill or item. Skills are readied by clicking them, and can be changed by mousing over a slot and clicking the + icon that appears. You can right-click an item from this bar to use it (or to ready it, in the case of wands, bolts, and the like) or use the hotkeys. Note that you hold the shift key while hitting a number to select a slot on the item bar, while just the number will select a slot on the skill bar.

If you've found the mage keys, there will be a blue portal icon to the right of the skill bar that you can use to enter the pocket dimension.

There is an easy to miss Digest button under the gold display, that will cause you to wait while you digest any food and drink you have recently consumed.

Combat messages and other information will be displayed in the upper left corner of the screen.

The game has a very useful minimap in the top right corner, which we will go over next.

The minimap is a very helpful feature in Dungeons of Dredmore. A lot of information can be obtained from it, but if you don't know what you're looking at it might take awhile to make use of that information. This section is a work in progress, and images are coming soon to better show how these appear on the map.

Stairs up - A green arrow pointing up. Go back up a level.

Stairs down - A Brown arrow pointing down. Descend further into the dungeon.

Mellow Shrine - Focus point for side-quests.

Anvil of Krong - Anvil shaped icon. Obviously.

Shrine of Eyeballs - Focus point for side-quests.

Monolith - Focus point for side-quests.

Satanic Displacement Glyph - Teleports you to another glyph on the floor. Glyphs are paired randomly. It may be worth noting that while stepping on the glyph is what transports you, that you don't actually transport to the other glyph. You transport to the square that it is on. This means if the glyph gets moved for any reason, you will end up on the square it was on. You still have to step on the actual glyph itself to transport back.

Quest Object - Yellow crosshair icon. Points to the location of an item for one of your side-quests.

Quest Monster - Red skull and bones. Monsters you need to kill for your side-quest.

Shop - Pink area.

Monster Zoo - Light blue area.

You can hold alt when clicking an item to remove one from a stack.

Check your experience bar before you do something (like use It Belongs In A Museum) that might gain you a large amount of experience. Any experience you gain that puts you over what you need to level up is wasted. You will start the next level with 0 experience, even if you need 10 experience to level, and gain 900 from sending an artifact away.

Both picking up an item from the ground, and placing one on the ground use a turn. If you accidentally pick up an item during combat, or another situation where you don't want to waste a turn, place it in your inventory instead.

Horadric Lutefisk Cubes can sometimes be found in Crafting Vending Machines for free.

It's usually not a good idea to put a Horadric Lutefisk Cube into a Horadric Lutefisk Cube.

Levers spawn pointing to the right. If you forget if you've pulled a certain lever or not, and it's pointing to the left, you have.

Speaking of levers, if you come across one in one of the dungeons accessed via the pocket plain (DLC required) that doesn't seem to have a purpose (ie, it isn't at a dead end, or part of a set of three to turn off a trap) be careful. There's a good chance pulling it will spawn two Evil Clones, which are much stronger than the Poorly Cloned ones that you encounter often. They can quickly kill you early on in a couple hits if you're not ready.

You can use - and = to change the animation speed to suit your needs if you feel the game is a little slow for a roguelike.

It's possible for an artifact to spawn without a unique name. If you notice an item with a common name but having stat bonuses that it shouldn't, it is an artifact and can be sent away with "It Belongs In A Museum." See example below.

This is a build that I use a lot, and is just offered as an example. I will try to explain why I pick the skills that I do. This is by no means how you have to, or should, play the game. It's just here to give some insight to someone who might be confused by the many choices and not know how to build an effective character. I might switch a skill or two out each playthrough to change things up, but this is generally my bread and butter build and I think it's a good one for learning the game.

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• Archaeology - This skill is mainly taken to expedite experience gain. It has some extra uses later on, but the main reason I *always* take this skill is because of It Belongs In A Museum. This lets you turn unwanted artifacts into free experience points.
  
• The Unarmed Art - This build favors not getting killed over killing our enemies, so I take this combat skill to get bonuses to unarmed combat. This allows us to use a shield or a tome in each hand while we kick everything to death and still get the bonuses for being unarmed.
  
• Master of Arms - Gives bonuses to our armor ratings, and some skills that can activate when we get hit, raising them even higher.
  
• Smithing - I like to make my own armor, and Smithing also gives some nice skill bonuses as you raise it.
  
• Tinkering - Allows the creation of equipment for ranged combat, and some various other things. Also raises Trap Affinity, making traps less of an issue.
  
• Crossbows - Helps kill ranged attackers, and goes well with Tinkering.
  
• Psionics - Lets us shove things around with our mind, which helps in finding secret areas and getting items that are stuck on islands. Also can push back enemies, and allow for healing. The healing skill in Psionics must be used with thought, as it lays a 3x3 grid of crystals on the ground which heal you (or an enemy) when they walk over them. This isn't really an issue given our armor.

I generally put my first skill point into Archaeology to get It Belongs In A Museum right away so it starts getting me extra experience right away. Where I go from there varies depending on my mood and what kind of gear I am finding, but it's generally a good idea to get the first skill in Psionics before you finish the first floor so you can shove items around if there is an artifact on an island. Having the healing skill, which is second in Psionics, is helpful before you start the third floor.