Dungeon Settlers Beginner's Guide: Your First Days

Dungeon Settlers opens inside a dungeon, with no settlement and no party to speak of. From there the game builds toward its core loop: keep a colony alive on a barren surface while sending expeditions underground for what the surface can’t provide.

Everything in this guide is drawn from CanOpener’s Early Access announcement and hands-on reports of the pre-launch demo. Exact numbers, controls, and build costs will be documented once the Early Access build is live.

What does the tutorial dungeon teach you?

The opening dungeon introduces the three things you’ll do for the rest of the game, in order: managing your party, picking up and interacting with items, and fighting enemies. A quality-of-life auto-collect feature — added during the Steam playtest after alpha players flagged manual pickup as tedious — keeps item gathering from dominating your attention.

The tutorial ends at a blue portal. Take it, and you emerge onto the overworld.

What happens on the overworld?

The surface is deliberately desolate. Per the Early Access announcement, your settlers need housing, food, crafting facilities, and research — those are the systems you’re introduced to once you arrive, alongside hiring additional settlers.

The practical split that hands-on reports confirm:

Where	What it’s for
Overworld	Building the settlement: housing, food, crafting, research
The dungeon	Food, treasure, and the advanced materials the surface doesn’t provide

What does a repeat dungeon run look like?

Once your settlement can feed itself, the loop pulls you back underground:

• Parties cap at four recruits — each defined by equipment, combat skills, statistics, personality traits, race, and background.
• The departure screen checks your readiness — a panel flags missing gear before you leave (hands-on reports describe warnings like “3 of 4 party members lack head armor”).
• Floors deplete as you clear them — each run drains a segment of a floor’s offerings, so repeated farming of the same level has diminishing returns (demo reports describe waiting for floors to reset)

Where to go next

• Combat Basics: Real-Time with Pause
• Party System: Four Recruits, Six Dimensions
• The Two EA Dungeon Regions: Safe Floors & Depletion