Dungeon Settlers Beginner Party: Your First Four

Quick answer: Start the Crawling Doom scenario, keep the default hard difficulty, and accept that you can only take four settlers into the dungeon. Pick candidates by their growth symbols and racial talents rather than their starting stats, and before your first descent craft torches, a cloth helmet for every settler, and far more textile than the tutorial asks for.

Start with Crawling Doom, not the sandbox

The game offers two openings. Crawling Doom is the tutorial scenario: it walks you through the basics and hands you a pre-generated party. Expedition Founding is the sandbox, where you pick your own four settlers from scratch and get no tutorial.

Run Crawling Doom first. The sandbox is more interesting once you know what a good settler looks like, and picking four characters before you understand the growth system is how new players end up with a party that quietly falls behind.

Leave the difficulty on its default, which is hard. The game bills itself as dark fantasy hardcore strategy and hard is where it is tuned; very hard is punishing for a first run, and the lower settings noticeably remove the pressure the design is built around. Ironman disables manual saves, so leave it off until you know the game.

Your starting three, and the settler you buy

The tutorial scenario gives you three settlers:

• Eric — human, City Guard background, Light Eater trait (constitution −3), fights with a sword.
• Anna — an archer. The tutorial introduces her downed, and you stabilise her as part of the script.
• Spencer — Lizardman, Exiled Warrior background (higher health), Belly Backer trait (eats more), fights with a blunt weapon.

The fourth slot is yours to fill by recruiting. Finishing the tutorial pays 500 gold, which is exactly what the game expects you to spend there. See how to recruit for how to read the candidate list before you spend it.

Four races, and what each is actually good at

There are four playable races: Human, Elf, Lizardman and Lychan. In the sandbox opening you choose all four of your starting settlers from that pool.

Talent, not appearance, is the thing to select on. Lizardmen have a poor magic aptitude, so a Lizardman mage candidate looks fine on paper and never grows into the role. Elves are strong with bows. The game does not show you every aptitude up front, so there is some guesswork involved — but the aptitudes you can see should outrank a candidate's current numbers every time.

Take these skills first

Skills come in two kinds: main skills, which are active and branch by weapon type, and sub skills, which are passive and define a role. The opening picks that carried a full tutorial run were:

• Sword — main skill Vertical Slash, which does three times normal attack damage; sub skill Two-hand Grip from the Warrior tree, +35% damage as long as the settler carries no off-hand weapon.
• Bow — main skill Sniping Shot, which does more damage the further away the target is, up to a maximum range of eight tiles; sub skill Fast Hand from the Blitz tree for attack speed.
• Blunt — main skill Battle Stomp, area damage that lowers accuracy and stacks dizziness, with two stacks producing a brief stun; sub skill Guard Barrier from the Fortress tree, which triggers a shield when a debuff is applied.

You cannot swap weapons mid-fight, so a settler's weapon type is effectively their identity for the whole expedition.

Craft this before you go down

The single most important item is the torch, made from textile and wood. It raises accuracy and, more importantly, sight range: a front-line settler holding a torch will often spot an enemy group early enough to open the fight with a free kill or two. It also gives a small mood bonus to everyone nearby.

Head and torso health are tracked separately, which has a blunt consequence — armouring the body and leaving the head bare gets settlers killed. Craft a cloth helmet for every settler, not just body armour.

On supplies, the tutorial asks for six textile. A full run's worth is closer to fourteen, especially on higher difficulty, alongside a set of cloth armour, sixty arrows and three cloth helmets. Grass processes into textile, so this is a time cost rather than a rare-material cost.

Set a consume policy before anyone starves

You can set per-settler rules about what each one is allowed to eat, and the racial reactions matter. A Lizardman who eats plants triggers plant rage and loses mood; an Elf eating meat is also unhappy. Left on defaults, your party quietly bleeds mood on the food you hauled in to keep them alive.

Food shortages are a running pressure through the whole early game, so the policy is worth setting on day one rather than after the first low food stockpile event.

Why you cannot bring a fifth settler

Party size in the dungeon is four, and that is not a soft limit you can plan around. Your population cap is set by your Expedition Rank, which starts locked at four settlers and rises with contribution points earned from expedition objectives. Until the rank goes up, a fifth recruit is not an option at all.

When it goes wrong

Losing settlers is not the end of a run. Death is permanent — a settler who is stabilised after going down carries an after-effect, and a second collapse kills them for good — but gold buys replacements, and a wiped party with a thousand gold in the bank can be rebuilt. The starting party is, however, the best-equipped group you will have for a while, so it is worth protecting.

FAQ

See also: how to recruit settlers, how levelling actually works, and the camping kit.