Does this image look familiar to you? If so, you have probably played the infinite dungeon before. What's the point of an infinite dungeon if I keep dying on the first ten floors? Surely there has to be something I'm missing, right? I have to be doing something wrong. Every infinite dungeon player has asked themselves these questions at least once. Well, fear not, for now I have the answers! If you want to die less, read on.

Before we discuss the infinite dungeon in detail, there is something you absolutely must know about it. This is the most important bit of advice I can ever give you about the infinite dungeon. Listen carefully.

THE INFINITE DUNGEON SUCKS.

I'm serious. The infinite dungeon is the most anti-fun gamemode in this game bar none. Take everything this game does better than any other roguelike, and watch in horror as it suddenly does them all worse instead. It is badly designed, poorly balanced, and severely underdeveloped. Weep as you press auto-explore one time and are instantly killed from full health by a mage again. Oh the joy.

It might sound like I'm complaining, but there's a point to me saying all this - two points, in fact.

1. If you haven't played the infinite dungeon before and felt like giving it a try, be prepared for what you're getting yourself in to. You will not have fun. You will die to the stupidest, cheapest stuff you can imagine, and there is nothing you can do about it. If you want to try out new builds, this is not the place to do it, you will die before you can even get off the ground, let alone before you break the level cap of 50 - one of the main selling points of the mode. This isn't to say that you should never play it, but it is not for the faint of heart.

2. If you've died in the infinite dungeon and thought "wow, that was stupid," rest assured it probably wasn't your fault. You're not bad at the game. The infinite dungeon is actually just that badly designed. The infinite dungeon is arguably more difficult on normal than the base game is on insane, which is really saying something.

Now, having said all this, let's get into the actual meat of the guide: what you can hopefully do to die slightly less.

Yes, the infinite dungeon is so punishing that the challenge begins before you have even started.

You see, not every race or class is fit to be an infinite dungeoneer. While some classes take a while to get going, the infinite dungeon pulls no punches, and will be sending rares, uniques, and high level enemies at you right from the start. This means that, for example, if your chosen class has vital abilites that they don't unlock until later, like a reaver, or that have poor survivability in general, like... a reaver, they probably aren't suited to the infinite dungeon.

Likewise, races with low hp like yeeks or shaloren are liable to be one-shot by the abundance of mages, dragons, and rares which infest the early levels. On the other hand, races with slow growth might risk falling behind the level curve, since foes in the dungeon grow ever stronger at a fixed pace, regardless of your own level.

It is also very important to avoid picking classes which rely too heavily on inscriptions to cover gaps in their kit. Infusions are very rare in the infinite dungeon, and ones which scale with one of your primary stats are doubly so. The standard healing/shielding inscriptions most races start off with will fall off very quickly, and there is no guarantee that you will be able to find a better one before death finds you.

Good classes to pick are those with high survivability, are strong early on, and who don't rely too heavily on gear, since you never know what you're going to find, and artifacts are much rarer in the infinite dungeon. Melee classes tend to suffer because they can be easily picked off by mages and aren't guaranteed to find movement inscriptions to counteract this. Finally, classes which have the survival tree unlocked by default are a nice bonus, since they have easy access to the track talent, which is vital in a mode where all foes are randomly spawned. Classes without an equivalent method to locate far-off enemies may find themselves in trouble.

One of the most important parts about infinite dungeon progression is choosing which floor to go to next. Unlike in the normal game, each floor of the dungeon has not one, but two sets of stairs, each of which lead to a different location. Once you go down one, you can never go back up, so this choice is crucial. You should never proceed without finding both sets of stairs, unless it's an absolute emergency or your're doing it for a challenge - more on those later.

Each set of stairs has a label on them when you hover over them. This label consists of two parts - something like "a crystalline, geometrically ordered area" or "a forested, carefully excavated area." The first part of the label, as well as the appearance of the stairs themselves, describes the tileset the next floor will use if you take those stairs, which is entirely unimportant and purely cosmetic. The second part of the label on the other hand is absolutely vital, and will often be the difference between life and death.

The second part of the label describes the layout of the next floor of the dungeon. Most of these correspond to the layouts of dungeons from the base game. For example, a "network of corridors" will have a layout similar to The Maze, while a "wilderness" will have a layout similar to Trollmire. For the most part, the choice here is not so much which ones to pick as which ones to avoid. Most are doable, but a few are run-endingly bad.

• Cavern will result in a series of very wide, very open caves similar to the Scintillating Caves. If you've ever picked a Shaloren, you'll know what a pain in the ass those caves are. If you pick this you are begging to get sniped.
  
  
• Geometrically ordered area gives you a weird sort of wide spiral going inwards. Very long, very tedious, and very open. If you randomly receive a challenge on one of these floors, you will fail it. And then, you will be sniped to death by a pack of mobs, same as above, but worse.
  
  
• Constructed area gives you a lot of very large, densely packed buildings. It is not difficult, but it is very tedious. Only pick if the other choice is an even worse option, such as everything else on this list, or if you want the game to turn into door opening simulator for the next 5 minutes.
  
  
• Settled area gives you one massive open room with an occasional house here and there, similar to ruined halfling complex or dominion port from embers of rage. By far the worst option you can get. Combines all the worst parts of constructed area and geometrically ordered area and multiplies them by a hundred. If both of your staircases lead to a settled area, there is a good chance your run is going to end on the next floor.

One of the unique features about the infinite dungeon is floor challenges. Randomly, when you go to the next floor, you might receive a "challenge" in the form of a quest. These will either reward something incredibly useful, such as stat points or talent points, or a random rare item, which is barely worth the gold you're inevitably going to transmog it into. Unfortunately, there is no way of knowing which you're going to get until after you've completed the challenge, so it's up to you to decide if you want to risk it or not.

The difficulty of the challenges range from easy to suicide. As a result, I'll cover each individually.

• Exterminator: Kill all enemies on the current floor. This is the easiest quest. You were probably going to do this anyway for the xp. However, there are two caveats: one, this quest also has the highest chance to reward a useless rare item, and two, enemies inside vaults are counted toward the kill total. It is NEVER worth it to open vaults in the infinite dungeon, as I will explain below, so if you attempt this and find a vault, ignore it and move on.
  
  
• Pacifist: reach an exit without killing anyone. This is the most rewarding quest, as it gives two rewards, and they are often both something good. However, it's very risky, luck based, and tedious. If it takes you too long to find the stairs, you will eventually wind up with a huge conga line of enemies all trailing behind you, out for your blood. If you accidentally back yourself into a corner, the conga line will catch up with you, and you're dead. What makes this especially difficult is that often a unique enemy will spawn on top of the stairs. If that unique enemy happens to be something immobile, like a slime, you're screwed. In general, you should try this one and hope to get lucky, but drop it immediately at the first sign of trouble. Oh, and you might have noticed that if a summon kills an enemy instead of you, the quest doesn't fail right away. So can you cheat? No, of course not. It fails when you reach the stairs. If you have a permanent pet like a golem, don't waste your time with this.
  
  
• Multiplicity: All monsters, including rares, uniques, and bosses, can duplicate themselves up to three times. You must survive for a specified number of turns before escaping. This one is very, very risky, and you can't take it back if you accept. Best to avoid it unless you get lucky and spawn with the stairs in sight. Fortunately, it's also much rarer than any of the others.
  
  
• Mirror match: Somewhere in the level, your clone has spawned, approach him, accept the option to fight him, and win. Remember that shadow clone boss you had to kill to unlock the Doomed class? Imagine that, but even HARDER to kill. Avoid like the plague.
  
  
• Rush hour: Find the exit within X turns. One exit is marked. This one is not too hard to complete assuming you don't get roadblocked by a ton of tough enemies. However there are two problems with this: One, if the marked exit leads to a bad floor out you'll have to risk it, see above. Two, if you rush to the exit too quickly, you miss out on a lot of xp and loot from fighting enemies on that floor, which probably isn't worth the crappy rare item you're inevitably going to get from completing this.
  
  
• Headhunter: Find and kill X "Spawn of Urh'rok" demons before killing any other enemy of elite rank or rarer. This one is extremely rare, I have only ever seen it once. It's also very RNG dependent and risky. If you encounter a rare before killing all the spawns, then congratulations, you now have a potentially very dangerous rare enemy following you around for the rest of the floor. If this happens, it's best to abort mission immediately and kill the rare. It's not worth the risk.

There is one more challenge, but I have never seen it. I'm not sure if it's bugged, removed, or just very rare, but I'll include it here for completeness with the caveat that I can't tell you anything about it other than its description.

• Dream hunter: Find and kill a unique dreaming horror. If I had to guess, I'd say this is probably one of those annoying pink bubble things that put you to sleep, but worse.

Why, you might ask, do sealed rooms get their own section? Well you see, just like in the base game, you can sometimes encounter sealed rooms which contain tough enemies and loot. This loot is often much better quality than you can find anywhere else, and is one of the most reliable sources of unique artifacts ("fixedarts") in the infinite dungeon, where unique bosses are rare. Knowing this, it may be tempting to open one.

However.

I am about to give you the second most important piece of advice you will ever hear about the infinite dungeon:

NEVER, EVER OPEN A SEALED ROOM.

You will DIE. Not "you might die." You will, 100%, beyond any doubt be guaranteed to die if you open a sealed room in the infinite dungeon. I am being completely serious and genuine when I say I have never once opened a sealed vault in the infinite dungeon and not died for it. Not once.

You see, for some reason, DarkGod, the creator of this game, thought it would be a good idea to make the enemies inside sealed rooms in the infinite dungeon massively, massively overleveled compared to the player. We're talking like 30+ levels higher. On normal. If you open a sealed room, you will probably die on the next turn, before you can even move, before you can even see what killed you. Oh, and to add insult to injury, elite bosses can often spawn inside these sealed rooms. On normal. On floor one.

DON'T DO IT. It doesn't matter if you can see an artifact on the other side. It doesn't matter if that artifact is the exact one you need to complete your build. It doesn't matter if you think you're prepared. You're not. Just don't.

And lastly, here are some minor tips that don't really need their own section.

• Occasionally, you may come across minor subfloors: a "damp cave" full of bandits, an "intimidating cave" full of dragons, a "forsaken crypt" containing the rat lich, or an "old battlefield" full of undead. these subfloors are the one exception to the "once you go down you can't go back up" rule. They're generally worth at least a try for some extra free xp and loot, and they're much safer than vaults. The forsaken crypt is an exception however. The rat lich is very powerful and will probably kill you quickly. Also, the old battlefield is not accessed via stairs, but by digging a grave. To my knowledge, this will happen 100% of the time when you dig a grave in the infinite dungeon, unlike the normal game. Don't dig a grave if you don't want to find yourself in an inescapable battle with a large group of mobs.
  
  
• At levels 1, 10, 20, 30, and 40, you can find lore notes pertaining to the infinite dungeon and its construction. Past that the dungeon contains no other unique (i.e., non-random) features. These notes do go into the sher'tul fortress library though, so if you absolutely must have every lore note keep that in mind.
  
  
• There is an achievement for reaching floors 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100, 150, 200, 300, 400, and 500... on every difficulty and permadeath setting. If my math is right that's about 120 achievements total. Is it worth it to reach floor 500 of the infinite dungeon on roguelike madness difficulty for an achievement? You decide. (Hint: no it isn't.) It may also interest you to know that according to steam the achievement for reaching floor 500 on normal has been earned by only 0.7% of all players... and said 0.7% of all players also suspiciously have every single other infinite dungeon related achievement. I do not believe for a second that a single soul alive has earned this achievement legitimately, let alone on any higher difficulty.
  
  
• There are unique potions which can occasionally be found inside the infinite dungeon which replicate the effects of training you can normally receive in the main campaign. For example, a "potion of martial prowess" will unlock the combat training talent tree, and a "antimagic wyrm bile extract" will unlock the antimagic talent tree. These are very rare and you shouldn't expect to find one, let alone on a class that can make good use of it. I'm not sure if they can be stored in the vault or not, but if so they could potentially be used to create otherwise impossible builds, such as an antimagic non-oozemancer character in Embers of Rage. However, you would have to be very lucky to both find one of these items and be able to hold onto it long enough to randomly stumble across a vault.
  
  
• On that note, the vault occasionally spawns inside the infinite dungeon. This can potentially be used to smuggle in powerful items to give a character an early-game boost, especially useful since unique artifacts are much rarer here. However, there's no guarantee that the receiving character won't go on to die and lose the artifact for nothing. They can of course also send artifacts out of the dungeon, although this is much less useful (unless you're trying that trick I mentioned above, please let me know if that works.)
  
  
• If one of the special holiday/donator event dungeons (Bearscape, etc.) spawns while you are in the infinite dungeon, the portal will appear on the next floor down. You obviously only get once chance to enter, so don't waste it if you want it.
  
  
• Unlike all other campaigns, you start with an unenchanted iron pickaxe equipped here. This is presumably to allow you to dig walls so you don't get stuck, but it also gives you +1 to your starting strength, which might be relevant for some builds.

Congratulations! You now know all you need to know to survive in the infinite dungeon. (Just kidding, you're still going to die repeatedly.)

If there's anything I missed or you'd like to add please let me know!