Please Whitelist This Site? I know everyone hates ads. But please understand that I am providing premium content for free that takes hundreds of hours of time to research and write. If I can't make at least a little bit of money to support my family via this site, I'll have to stop working on it. One alternative is to become a RuneScoop member. It's cheap, you get access to all of the site with no ads, and you help keep the lights on around here. If you want to use this site for free, I'd be grateful if you could add RuneScoop to the whitelist for Adblock. To do so, just open the Adblock menu and select "Disable on Runescoop.com". Or go to the Tools menu and select "Adblock Plus Preferences...". Then click "Add Filter..." at the bottom, and add this string: "@@http://*runescoop.com/*". Then just click OK. Thanks for your understanding! Sincerely... Qeltar, aka Charles, your hard-working host and RuneScape guide-writer extraordinaire. :)

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

Understanding Dynamic Floor Generation Dungeon Difficulty Settings

Of the various parameters that a team leader provides as input into the Dungeoneering floor generation process, the floor size is arguably the most important. The size of the dungeon selected has a very large impact on how much time it takes, on strategy for coordinating the activities of players, whether or not it is worth making armor and other equipment, and how much XP players get when the floor is completed.

I’ll introduce the various floor map sizes here and describe them in general terms, including some of the pros and cons of each. I explore some of the trade-offs and discuss under what circumstances you may want to use different floor sizes in the section on overall strategy.

Small floor maps have a maximum of 16 rooms laid out in a 4x4 configuration. This is the only size available to solo players, but teams can also do them if desired. The 16 room size is the most that a map can have, but it is common for maps to be quite a bit smaller than this; it depends on how the layout is generated.

The main advantages of small maps are speed and simplicity:

• You can do them while playing solo (which is of course important if you like to train by yourself!)
  
  
• It usually takes only a few minutes to explore the entire map; medium and large maps are much more time-consuming.
  
  
• There aren’t as many doors, so there’s less hassle managing colored door keys.
  
  
• You don’t have to travel as far when it’s necessary to return to a door at a later time, or to get back somewhere after returning to the starting room for something; using the Gatestone Teleport spell often isn’t even necessary.
  
  
• If you enjoy fighting bosses, you’ll spend the greatest percentage of your time fighting them when you do small maps.

The drawbacks of small maps are the complement of their advantages:

• You end up “churning” through the floors very quickly, which means a lot more repetition. Many players find small maps tedious because the “starting over” element of Dungeoneering occurs so frequently.
  
  
• It is often not worth making armor or weapons, because you end up using them for such a short amount of time before they disappear.
  
  
• They are less interesting than larger maps.
  
  
• There are fewer resources available, so it’s more difficult to get items you may need, especially when playing as a team.
  
  
• You do not get as much XP per hour playing small maps.

Many players prefer to do small maps for the lower-numbered floors to get through them quickly, switching to larger maps for the deeper levels.

Medium-sized floor maps have a maximum of 32 rooms, laid out in a 4x8 pattern (4 rooms west-to-east, 8 rooms north-to-south) . You must have a team of at least two players to select a medium map. As with small maps, 32 is the limit, but maps often have fewer rooms; on a percentage basis, though, you’ll get closer to the maximum with medium maps than the limit with small maps.

The main advantages of medium maps are associated with them being a, well, happy medium between small and large maps:

• You only need two players, which is much easier to arrange than the four required for large maps.
  
  
• They can often be explored in about a half hour or so, which means less time starting new maps than if you play small layouts, but without the long time commitment required for a large floor.
  
  
• There are more doors and keys to manage than small maps, but it is still not that tough to keep track of where everything goes.
  
  
• You get a nice amount of starting material and resources.
  
  
• Unlike small floors, it is usually worth making armor, weapons and runes.
  
  
• You get more XP per hour than on small floors.
  
  
• There’s a good balance, overall, between resource gathering, mundane monster killing, puzzle solving and boss fighting.

The drawbacks of medium-sized floors are associated with them being not the best at anything:

• You need a team.
  
  
• Medium maps are faster than large maps but still require a fair bit of time to complete.
  
  
• There are enough doors and keys that you really need to keep track of them outside the game if you want to avoid wasting a lot of time.
  
  
• Coordinating activities among team members can be an issue.
  
  
• You may have to deal with traveling potentially long distances to ferry keys to doors, or meet up with teammates for puzzles.
  
  
• You don’t get as much “bang for the buck” with armor and weapons as you would for a large map.
  
  
• The XP bonus is decent but not nearly as good as on large maps.
  
  
• The amount of resources may be insufficient for larger groups.

Medium-sized maps are ideal for small groups of friends, especially duos, and represent a good compromise overall between the pros and cons of small and large maps.

Large maps have a maximum of 64 rooms, arranged in an 8x8 matrix. As with the other sizes, there are usually fewer rooms than this, due to the particular layout generated not using every space in the grid. Large maps can only be selected if the team has four or five players.

If medium sized maps are the happy medium, then large ones are for those who like to go large. :) They take a long time to do and can be rather chaotic, especially when combined with the fact that you’ll be in a large team as well. However, they have a number of important benefits, chief among them that they are the best way to get the most Dungeoneering XP per hour.

These are the key large map advantages:

• You receive substantial XP bonuses compared to small and medium maps.
  
  
• Lots of resources of every type are available all over the place.
  
  
• If you invest the time and effort to make armor and weapons, you get to use them for a long period of time. The same applies to familiars.
  
  
• A much lower percentage of your time is spent killing bosses, which many players find the most annoying part of finishing a floor.
  
  
• There is much less of the feeling of “starting over constantly” that you get with smaller maps, since each one takes longer to do.
  
  
• Overall, these are the most interesting and dynamic maps.

Of course, large maps are not for everyone:

• You must have four or five players, and getting large teams together can be very difficult for some players.
  
  
• A large map is a substantial time commitment, nearly always taking more than an hour to do properly, and depending on the pace of the players, sometimes more than two hours. If you need to leave early you will take a major XP hit and likely annoy your teammates.
  
  
• The large number of rooms, doors, puzzles, monsters and keys combine to make large maps much more confusing than small or even medium-sized floors.
  
  
• It is often necessary for players to travel long distances across the map when needed by teammates (for keys, to solve puzzles or share resources).
  
  
• Use of the Gatestone Teleport spell is pretty much a must, taking up several inventory spaces.
  
  
• It is essential that at least one team member spend much of his or her time keeping track of locked doors and resource locations so that activity among players can be properly coordinated.
  
  
• Far more time is spent solving puzzles and killing mundane monsters than fighting bosses, which some consider boring.

Large maps represent the ultimate Dungeoneering challenge, and are preferred by the most experienced and highest-level players. They are most often used when exploring deep (high-numbered) floors, in order to get the most XP possible for the floors that grant the most XP.

Understanding Dynamic Floor Generation Dungeon Difficulty Settings