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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 Structure and Room Structure The Critical Path, Bonus Rooms and Guide Mode

When you appear in the starting room of your dungeon, your first step will be to equip yourself: putting on equipment, taking supplies from the tables in the room, and possibly buying items from the smuggler. Then what? You (and possibly your teammates) will begin the process of exploring the dungeon floor. Your immediate goal will be to figure out which doors you can open and rooms you can reach; your ultimate goal will be to find the boss room, so you can beat the boss and end the level.

I get into the specifics of all of this when I talk about the particulars of raiding, but I first want to explain a few tools that you have at your disposal to help you out as you explore and navigate the dungeon. These are useful for all floors, but especially medium-sized and large maps, which can become quite challenging to keep track of.

When you are reading to leave the starting room at the beginning of your adventure, or any time you finish dealing with a room and need to move on, you’ll naturally look towards the doors. You’ll want to examine these doors carefully to determine what type they are, and whether you have the keys, tools or skills necessary to deal with them. Simply looking at the door may tell you enough about it, or you may want to “Examine” it to see if you get any hints.

When faced with multiple doors, you have to decide which to open based in part on how you want to explore the dungeon. It is usually best to discover and “clean out” side rooms and dead ends before proceeding on the hunt for the boss room, but this really depends on how you and your team like to play.

Opening a door in Daemonheim is different than it is in the rest of RuneScape. Even though the left-click default action is “Enter”, the first time you click a door that leads to a new room, you won’t actually go into that room. Instead, you’ll see the interior of the room appear on both your main RuneScape viewer window and on your minimap.

This is a mild form of “cheating”, I suppose, in that you are able to see what’s in the room before you actually open the door to it! But it is essential in allowing you to be prepared before barging into the next room, especially if that room contains the boss. You can actually use this to examine what monsters are waiting for you, and to decide if you want to proceed or try a different route.

Note that in a team, it is important to be careful that two players don’t click a new door at once. If this happens, one player will activate the “sneak peek,” and the other will then actually open the room. That player will immediately pushed into that room, ready or not! If this is the boss room, he or she may then be unable to leave, and forced to face a tough boss alone and unprepared.

One problem with a dungeon entirely comprised of square rooms in a grid is that even though the interiors of the rooms may change, the regular structure makes them all seem alike. It is very easy to lose track of where you are. In multiplayer teams, this difficulty is made even worse by the potential for teammates to become separated from each other.

Fortunately, you are provided with the perfect tool to deal with these problems. While within Daemonheim, the world globe that usually marks the RuneScape world map is replaced by a scroll called the Daemonheim map. Clicking this icon brings up a display that shows the structure of the current floor, marking all of the rooms you have so far discovered and how they are linked together with doors.

On the map, regular rooms are shown as empty squares, with passages between rooms representing doors. These squares may have different colors if guide mode is enabled. The room with the staircase and the arrow pointing up is the starting room, and if there’s a room with a mildy scary red face in it, that’s the boss room. Squares with question marks (“?”) in them are rooms that you know exist (because you have discovered doors leading to them) but that you have not yet opened.

The positions of all party members are shown on the map as small, inverted colored triangles; you can hover your mouse over one to see the name of the person it represents. Thus, this is really a “locator” map that shows not just the floor structure but where you are within it. This helps especially on bigger maps, when you might lose track of where you are.

Note that the player position display is not updated if teammates move while the map is open. You have to close and reopen it to see their new location.

Be sure to watch your compass direction when using the map. It is always oriented with north up, so if you are not, you may get yourself even more lost than you were before. :)

The map also provides another useful tidbit information if you use it when first entering a level. The map’s display only has room for the maximum possible 8x8 rooms, and it doesn’t scroll. So for a large map, you can usually figure out roughly where on the floor your starting room is simply by looking at where the start room is plotted on the map. If you enter a floor and the starting room is in the middle, this is good as it means you probably won’t have to travel too far to get anywhere. But if it’s in a corner, be prepared for some long treks.

For medium and small maps that have only 4 squares in one or both dimensions, just picture the map being centered on the screen and you can at least get a guess of roughly where the starting room is relative to the rest of the floor. It’s not as reliable as with large floors, but still pretty good.

The usual Home Teleport spell used in normal RuneScape to get back to a neutral base after exploring, is replaced in Daemonheim by Dungeon Home Teleport. This spell will send you back to the starting room from pretty much anywhere. Like the normal home port spell, Dungeon Home Teleport is level 0, requires no runes, takes about 15 seconds to activate, and will not work if you are in combat or are attacked while it is in progress. Unlike its above-ground equivalents, though, the casting of this spell is unlimited: there is no 30 minute wait period after using it.

Home Teleport is a useful tool that you’ll take advantage of in several circumstances. It is handy when you need to get back to the start room to obtain supplies or equipment from the smuggler (often in combination with the Gatestone Teleport spell; see below). It is also useful if you head out exploring one part of the dungeon, get stuck, and want to come back to try a different route without being forced to retrace your steps. Finally, this teleport is also sometimes handy when you want to avoid having to get through annoying puzzle rooms multiple times (such as the toxin maze or the suspicious grooves).

This is a really nifty feature that is unique to Daemonheim. It allows you to essentially place a “bookmark” anywhere on the dungeon floor, and then return to it at a later time.

There are two related spells here. Create Gatestone requires level 32 Magic and one each of law, cosmic, air and earth runes. When cast, it creates a greenish-blue pyramid shaped stone in your inventory (and you must have a free inventory slot to cast it). You can carry this stone around as long as you wish, and drop it anywhere. To return to the spot where the stone is, cast Gatestone Teleport (which requires no runes). You’ll instantly be swirled up in black tentacles, and then will appear where the stone was dropped. The stone itself is destroyed in the process, so you have to make another if you want to use the spell again.

It is only possible to have one gatestone at a time. If you have left a gatestone somewhere else but would rather have one in your present location, you can just cast Create Gatestone again. The game will warn you that your existing stone will be destroyed if you do this.

Gatestones have a number of essential uses:

• When exploring large dungeons, use them to quickly return to dead ends. For example, if you find you need a gold crescent key a long distance from the starting room, drop a gatestone there and instantly return once you find the key, then go back to the starting room.
  
  
• Use it in combination with Dungeon Home Teleport to get supplies or items from the starting room and then immediately return to where you were.
  
  
• Teleporting out of a boss fight in progress; this is the only way to get away from a boss if you run out of food or get into trouble.
  
  
• Gatestones are often important to the strategy for defeating certain bosses, such as the gluttonous behemoth or Stomp.

The only place I have discovered so far where you cannot use Gatestone Teleport is in the boss room of the luminescent icefiend, which is a special exception that Jagex put in the game to prevent that monster’s special attack from being bypassed.

Dungeon Structure and Room Structure The Critical Path, Bonus Rooms and Guide Mode