Dungeon cities – a week in review
I started playing dungeon cities about a week ago. I initially heard about the game thanks to a collab between them and Splinterlands(which I’m also a fan of.) The two games are quite different with Dungeon Cities being an old school dungeon crawl.
A few major pluses for the game right now.
It’s free to play. If you join their discord(link at the end. And it’s a referral link) you can get your starting key for free. At some point it’ll cost 5 HBD but while supplies last free key to start playing. I like when I can get my toes wet into something without investing my hard earned HBD. It also meant I could start playing right away. I went from having to run away from rats to taking on orcs and beating bosses regularly. So with a little investment of time and such, it's easy enough to grow your character.
Second major plus – The community.
On discord, there’s a lively and incredibly helpful and friendly community. The Dev is open to suggestions and feedback about mechanics and how things work. If you’ve got question about strategy, equipment or what the next smart move is, or just to chat, this is the place to go.
Third major plus
It’s fun. There’s more then a few crypto “games” I’ve played where it’s just “buy the best equipment you can afford and hit this button ounce every ” or the stake this and you’ll earn by more and earn more, sorta thing that never seems to work out in the favour of most.
If you enjoy wandering through dungeons looking for loot and fights, like progressing through levels and getting stronger and stronger, as well as joining a freindly community this is a great game to try out.
There’s a few major mechanics that I want to cover as usefull info for those who are considering playing.
The Mechanics
The Mechanics
Stamina
Every action you do takes stamina. Wandering to a new room of the dungeon, stamina, going back to town, stamina, starting a fight with a monster, stamina, running away cause it’s scary and you aren’t ready, stamina.
You can get it back either by waiting or eating food. Cool thing, each day you log in you get an emberfruit which restores 50% of your stamina. As you explore and fight monsters you’ll find food, most of it I just eat right away or as soon as my inventory is full. It often only recovers a little bit, but every little bit helps.
Inventory space
Starting off you get 10 inventory slots. Which gets full quite quickly, forcing you to go back and forth into town to sell stuff, go through your chests, and sell the junk from those. There’s a few ways to get more inventory space, one is leveling up. Every five levels you get five inventory slots. Gaining VIP levels also gets some inventory slots. The last is with backpacks. By default you have one backpack slot in your inventory, however, all backpacks cost DCD unless purchased from another player. (DCD being a currency that can only be purchased with HBD)
Levelling Up
There’s three requirments to leveling up. The first is experince. Go kill monsters, you get exp. Pretty standard. The second is core fragments. Each town’s dungeon drops a different core chest, these cores are needed to level up. The last is Drubble, the in game currency earned by selling things. As a result many folks(myself included) end up with far more exp then they have the items to level up. However, the main benefit of gaining levels is inventory space, not stats. For a fairly resonable price weopons and equipment that far outstrips the gains from levling can be purchased on the player market.
VIP
VIP has quite a few benefits including increased health, inventory slots, attack, defence, and daily claimable Drubble.
VIP can be slowly earned by logging in everyday. Some is earned for every purchase of DCD, and at the end of a week of of premium, there’s bonus VIP points. 2 weeks of premium(costs 2 DCD a week) will get you up to bronze. (which I’m doing)
Those are the big mechanics that I felt were worth going into, now into the economics of it.
But what about paying for stuff? They gotta make money some how right?
Yup.
There’s three main ways investing in Dungeon Cities can change your player experince.
1- Buying the in-game currency Drubble.
Buying 1 hives worth of Drubble so you don’t start your adventure without a weapon is a great way to start and pretty cheap. But you don’t have to. You can earn enough to buy a weapon or get lucky and find one in the dungeon without one, buuut it’s a rough start.
2- Weekly pass.
This pass gives you some Drubble, and the coveted Vital flames which restores your stamina 100%. In addition, it gives extra VIP at the end.
3- Bags
Backpacks or bags give more inventory space. Some a measly 2, others 200 hundred or more. Depending on how expensive you want to go.
But how to earn? It says play to Earn!!!!
Currently the only real way to earn is to withdraw Drubble which is limited to 500 a day. Then you can swap that to hive or hbd. However, that’s only about 20 cents worth at the moment, so in a week that’s about 1.4 HBD. If the price holds, personally I think the game is going to succeed and that price will go up eventually. However, that’s not nothing, and as you get further into the game, it’s not that hard to earn 500 drubble. It’s a question of if you want to slow your progress for it.(Which in my case will soon be yes cause I am gonna use that profit to buy more DCD and start saving for a good bag)
Which is why you should get in now and join the adventure!
Use this link to join the discord and get your free key! (Yes it’s a referral link. You don’t have to use it, but I’d appreciate it.)