Overview
A Step-by-Step Guide on how to Screw Everything Up!(but is honestly just a joke.)
For the Record
2020 Edit – I wrote this “guide” five years ago when I was reading a lot of Cracked and tried to model it after one of their articles. I didn’t know how Steam guides worked, I still kinda don’t, I guess I just assumed this would fade into obscurity and nobody would ever see it. Not that five years later it’d have a 4-star rating on the second page of “top rated guides all time” and that people would still stumble on it and give me the occasional notification via comments.
I wish I had posted this to the forums or something more appropriate so it wouldn’t clutter up actual guides on steam. I’d take it down, but enough people still appreciate the joke for me to not want to do that. I’m happy to let it sit here as the anomaly that gets to slip by and make some people chuckle for as long as whoever is in charge of judging and deleting this content lets it sit. But if it disappears one day, I totally understand. Anyway, I appreciate everyone and their kind words. If you choose to read on and laugh at my bad jokes on an old version of an old game, I appreciate you too. And I love the comment notifications from this thing, they make me feel pretty, keep doing that.
Hope This is What You Wanted
So, You’ve bought Darkest Dungeon and you’re afraid you’re doing too well. Your adventurers are staying stalwart and brave and they’re not all dying or screaming at each other. You’re honestly worried that you’re missing out on the full experience. DON’T FRET! I’m here to help.
A little preface before we begin. Darkest Dungeon is a game about your creepy uncle using forbidden magic to make his weird fetishes come to life using books like a nerd. Now they’ve thrown a party all up in your house and, despite your uncle calling the cops pretending to be the neighbor making a noise complaint, everyone found out it was him and kicked him out of his own house and then just kind of took over that ♥♥♥♥.
So this decrepit old loser who got kicked out of his own party came crying your way all like “Nobody likes me” and “the cool kids are mean to me and have tentacles” so now it’s your problem I guess.
You show up on this cart that is going way over the speed-limit and ends up crashing (wear your seatbelts kids!) stranding you in the woods with Reynauld and Dismas, the two biggest jerks this side of wherever-the-hell-we-are.
Babies First Encounter with Bloodthirsty Brigands and Forest-Dwelling Murderers
So Reynauld and Dismas are the first adventurers you get, or at least they’ve consistently been the first adventurers I get. I hope yours are different because mine are just like, the most entitled pricks I’ve ever met. Why is Reynauld always stealing ♥♥♥♥? And why is Dismas so bad in a clutch? Jerks I tell you.
Should just be the room you start in, a short hallway, and then the “final” room. On the way there you’ll have one “random” encounter with some lost idiot who should go down pretty easily…
Whatever, he dies eventually if you hit him enough. Then he drops 1,000 Gold. It sounds like a lot, but don’t worry it will only cover the cheapest form of stress relief, you’ll be back to nothing in no time.
There should also be a tutorial tent or some object up ahead that you can search and get some extra 200 gold. Or don’t, see if I care.
Afterwards you’ve got to deal with some fat guy who’s into whips and ♥♥♥♥, and his gun-toting, banjo-playing, butt-touching cousin. These clowns will pepper Reynauld and Dismas with shots and stress in between circle-jerkin’ and trying to convince everyone around them that “it’s not gay if you don’t make eye-contact.”
Try to kill tons-of-fun before he uses Rain of Whips and stresses out the poor little adventurers. Health is just health, it restores completely when you get back to town. Stress never goes away. In other words, it’s more or less like being in college in Canada or whatever country has free healthcare, but a stressful university environment. I don’t know, I’m American, I have to earn the right to heal broken bones, they don’t just serve us casts on a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ silver platter. You had better be important if you’re going to hurt yourself or get an entirely unavoidable condition, how else are doctors supposed to afford cars that cost more than your daughter would get you on the black-market? Don’t ask me how I know that, what are you, the cops?
Anyway you’re definitely doing it right when Dismas is at Deaths Door and you haven’t completed the Tutorial yet.
Seriously though, why?
So after Dismas is about dead, go ahead and skip the definitely trapped chest in the middle of the room. It’s trapped. Don’t open it. You’d have to be an idiot…
Afterwards, Reynauld and Dismas should develop some interesting characteristics. Most likely, one of them will be entirely crippled and no longer a viable character. (Here’s looking at you Reynauld.) but fortunately for me this time Reynauld decided he’s just super spooked by ghosts and Dismas is now curious, I’m not sure on the peculiars of either of these so let’s just hope it causes some hilarious misfortune down the road.
Either way, they should be level-1 now rather than level-0. From my experience most heroes will die somewhere between these two levels. I’m actually starting to think I’m horrible at this game.
And I Bet it Smells too…
Ok so, you’re in your Estate now. Or Hamlet, or whatever the ♥♥♥♥. This is where you live. Look at this place, I bet it smells. Like if we had smell-o-vision, this place would just smell. And that caretaker would probably smell the worst. He’d be like %70 of what was causing the general smell of the area. Anyway, the “caretaker” presumably takes care of things, but so far from what I can tell his purpose is to be in the way as much as possible when trying to assign stress relief to heroes (he always takes up one relief option). His other duties include selling you provisions before you “Embark” which means he gives you food and torches and shovels and ♥♥♥♥, but I mean if I’m paying this guy to take care of this village and he clearly hasn’t been doing that (I mentioned the smell right?) then why am I paying him for provisions? That ♥♥♥♥ should come out of his paycheck, like YOU’RE the guy who hasn’t been doing his job, I’m here to fix ♥♥♥♥, but I’M the one who has to pay? ♥♥♥♥ you caretaker.
Oh also, he greets you by dropping off this huge list of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ monsters that you apparently have to go assassinate like you’re his personal ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ general and your whole life is running some idiot army to smash against the horde of unknowable aberrations.
Actually now that I think about it, that’s a pretty good description of this game.
So the next step is to check that carriage and see who else made it through. I guess it’s always a Vestal and a Plague Doctor. That’s about the only consistency though, so let’s see what I got….
A faithless Vestal named Bretteville. How can you be faithless, you literally cast ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ miracles?
And a Plague Doctor named Hall with exclusively ranged attacks and a “Scattering” quirk making him less accurate with ranged attacks…
Fan-♥♥♥♥♥♥♥-tastic.
The upside is that while the implications of a Clergywoman who is “Faithless” are rather stupid, it actually only means she won’t flagellate or use prayer to relieve stress. So, not so bad. Hall though, he’s not long for this world.
Oh and don’t forget to take this opportunity to upgrade your stage coach, you don’t want to be dragging in worthless trash like this all the time. From what I hear the ideal strategy is to recruit a lot, keep the ones that don’t develop crippling quirks, and replace the ones that suck like disposable batteries. Once you’ve got some good ones you can upgrade their armor and abilities and camp abilities so you don’t hate yourself so much. I bet if you do this well enough, dad might even come back.
Back on track, most things should be closed, they’ll open up in the following weeks regardless of success or failure. By Week 5 I think everything should be open, I’m not certain though, if you really need to know go look up a real guide, you should have figured out by now that this one is pretty much ♥♥♥♥.
Whenever you’re done ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ around, go to the bottom and click Embark. This is where all your nightmares come true. Once you’re on this new Estate Map screen the only option available to you is some Short Skirmish in the Ruins. Things won’t get too bad in here so long as you didn’t get terrible quirks or starting abilities for your starting party, so you SHOULD be able to make it through without ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ up too hard.
Generally you want Reynauld up front, Dismas in second, and the last two are probably interchangeable, but make sure they’re optimized. If your Vestal has Divine Grace and Divine Comfort then keep her on round-the-clock healing duty, using any offensive abilities sparingly as the other three should be able to make up the difference. Use your Plague Doctor to kick Bleed / Blight effects when they pop-up with Battlefield Medicine if he’s got it.
But if he’s anything like mine and only really has Plague Grenade and Blinding Gas and the complete inability to hit anybody with them, then maybe just stick to Emboldening Vapors on Dismas or Reynauld and Disorienting Blast on any enemy support who hides behind their beeftanks. Mainly the ones using Tempting Goblet or Stressful Incantation. If you can drag those guys into Reynaulds target area with Disorienting Blast, then drop Smite with some Emboldening Vapors empoweing it, right on their bony asses, then good on you.
So you’ve got a battle plan, the game will tell you 8 food and 4 torches will probably last you, and for this first mission they probably will, but in the future you may bring some extra. For a Short I bring about 10 Food and 6 torches, adding about 4 each as the length increases. Shovels are also a thing to consider as barricades can drain your health, stress, and light. I have never brought along all the other ♥♥♥♥, but I assume I should eventually. Who knows, this isn’t even a real guide anyway, let’s just do this thing.
Rage Quit
The mission should be “Complete %100 of room battles” which translates into “Try and survive walking into every room. No go ahead, I dare you.” So try to plan out the most efficient path with the least amount of backtracking. Just idling in the dungeons can increase stress. And be swift about it as light is precious.
If your first fight goes like mine did, you should end it with about half health and wondering why exactly the Vestal can’t heal everybody outside of combat. But we won’t worry about that, there’s monsters afoot.
If your second fight goes like mine did, Dismas should have 3 health left and his stupid “Curiousity” quirk should have just triggered him to set off the trapped chest in the middle of the room giving him the bleeding condition while you still have three rooms to search.
Now I have a habit of pushing these idiots as far as they can go, mainly because I just don’t appreciate my opening squad the way I maybe ought. Reynauld isn’t always so bad, and Dismas has been dealing mad damage whenever he isn’t taking mad damage, plus the Bretteville is doing a good job of keeping it all together and even Hall with his Disorienting Blast is doing well at clearing out the corpses (a thing I didn’t know that ability did until I used it, and it did that. So there’s something else for your tactics.) So maybe we CAN push forward and if Bretteville just focuses on Dismas he won’t lose his 3 HP and we won’t have to rage quit and end the guide.
Ok, three heroes left, let’s just push anyway. What do we even have to lose?
The battle after we lost Dismas drove the stress so high that the next wall we tried to clear without a shovel literally sent all three remaining party members past %100 stress and turned Bretteville Abusive, Hall became Selfish, and Reynauld became Masochistic as well as developing a fear of beasts.
But the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ icing on the ♥♥♥♥ cake was Bretteville developing Nymphomania which grants a %20 bonus to stress healing while in the Brothel. At the same time, she developed Deviant Tastes, a quirk whick disallows her from entering the Brothel. Fitting for our Faithless Vestal.
So there you go. If you’re ever worried that you’re doing to well in Darkest Dungeon, just follow in my footsteps and watch how quickly the game hammers turds into your eyeballs.