Welcome back, Underlord. I fear your recent...setback....may have left some of your mental faculties in a less than desireable state, and you may have lost much of the knowledge required to wage your War for the Overworld. Because of this, I have taken the liberty of preparing a series of grimoires for you - in them you will find all the basic knowledge required to keep your dungeon in a working state, and to bring down the Empire - or any rival Underlord that would dare to oppose you.

This particular guide will cover your rooms, defenses, and constructs. If you consider your minions to be the lifeblod and your magic to be the pulse of your dungeon, the aforementioned three subjects probably would count as the actual body. And as your entire dungeon effectively is your will made manifest, this body actually could be seen as yours, and... oh, don't squirm like that; you practically won't even feel all the minions running around and fighting inside of you...

In any case, I would like to remind you that the gods who made this reality are fickle in nature, and may change the function and costs of the three aforemention elements whenever they please. Because of this, some information in this grimoire may eventually become outdated, but I shall keep an eye on the fumbling of the dark gods, and implement whatever change they force upon reality.


(Last update: WftO Ver. 1.6 + Heart of Gold)

Your Dungeon Core is the beating heart of your dungeon, although some would take offensive at this particular nomenclature. It serves as your personal anchor to whatever realm within Kairos or outside of it you are trying to control, and if your enemies manage to destroy it, you will be kicked out of said realm like a mongrel dog. Even worse things would happen if your enemies were to destroy the central dungeon core in your home realm, but the Empire is far to imcompetent as if to accomplish this particular task.

Apart from serving as your anchor to the material world and projecting your hand of evil, your dungeon core also has some other useful functions. The tiles around it can be used to store up to 16.000 gold pieces so that you don't have to worry about building a vault early on, and the core itself produces enough mana of its own to supply up to five workers with magical energy. As a matter of fact, should you have less than five workers at any given point of time, your dungeon core will automatically create new ones for you until you have at least five workers again, thus ensuring that you will never completely run out of workers. If you, on the other hand, have too many workers and wish to use the mana they clog up for something else, you can throw some of them into the core to make them disappear into thin air.

Things get even more interesting when it comes to the cores of your competitors: If you manage to destroy the core of a rival Underlord, all of his defensive structures will be destroyed, and his minions knocked out (or killed, in the case of beast minions). But unless you plan on capturing his dungeon pieces by piece, you will also have to capture his dungeon core with your workers, which will instantly transfer control over all tiles and rooms he owned to you, with any prisoners, gold, or artifacts that may have been stored in them.

Naturally the same holds true for your own dungeon core, so to emphasize it again: Provide your core with at least some kind of defense. Although the arcane power that flows from it means that any damage it takes is cut down to one-third of its actual strength, the loss of your core will inevitably end your campaign for the Overworld.

As your workers dig out caverns and tunnels that will later contain and connect various rooms, the surrounding earth will form a natural barrier around them. Although these unfortified walls do a decent job of keeping out nosy trespassers and insurance agents, the fact that they are nothing more than lose soil and mud means that it is very easy to break them. Fortunately for you, your workers can and automatically will fortify dirt walls if they've got nothing better to do.

Although the act of fortifying a wall can take quite a bit of time for your workers, the result usually is worth it. as fortified wall offer several advantages:

• Protection: If an enemy worker attempts to dig through a fortifed wall, it will first have to remove the fortification itself. Unless the wall itself is made out of sand, this can take anywhere from a long time to a very, very long time, to the point that it is more or less pointless to besiege fortified walls with mere workers. As a matter of fact, fortified walls are so strong that they will even survive the blast of an underminer or a hellfire potion, although the latter can destroy them if employed in sufficient numbers.
  
  
• Room Efficiency: For some reason, the working parts within rooms operate faster there more fortified wall tiles are around them. While I am unsure whether this is some form of geomancy or plain old feng shui, each fortified wall in a two-tile radius around a prop will increase its work speed by precisely 25%, to a maximum of 150% for six fortified tiles (or a 250% total rating). Takes this into account when planning the design of your dungeon.
  
  
• Vision While regular old dirt walls will not let you see anything on their other side (including enemies attempting to breach them), fortified walls are imbued with the magic of your dungeon core and thus allow you to see what is on their other side.
  
  
• Optics And let's be honest - no proper Underlord wants to live in a proverbial dirthole.

Naturally walls are not indestructable - with enough force, the fortification that surrounds the basic dirt it is built around can be ripped off, resulting in a naked dirt wall, which is easily blown to smithereens or excavated. But this need not be a permanent scar - you can place replacement earth, which will quickly turn into good-as-new dirt wall which then can be fortified by your workers again.

Every idiot can send his workers to dig out cubical caverns and cavities, but all the subterranean space in the (under)world will do nothing for you if you do not fill it with rooms to attract and supply minions.

Rather than being placed as whole systems, rooms are constructed tile by tile, with each individual tile costing a certain amount of gold. Naturally this doesn't mean that you will have to tediously place room tiles one after another - just choose the room you want to build, and drag your hand of evil over the area you wish to be occupied by said room. If you have sufficient funds, you can thus turn a boring old cave into a fully functional barracks or tavern within a single heartbeat.

While building rooms, it is crucial to keep in mind that most rooms must occupy at last 3x3 tiles to function properly and attract minions . This is because most rooms rely on special objects (colloquially known as "props") your minions can use and are attracted by, and said objects need at least one "free" room tile in each direction to be created. Thus, a 3x3 room would contain one prop, whereas a 3x5 would have two, and the common 5x5 would have four, and so forth. Simply put: The larger a room is, the more props it will have, and the more effective it becomes both in its primary function, and at attracting minions. You may get a better understanding of this system by contemplating the masterful piece of art below:







The only rooms to differ from this standard are the Vault and the Lair (which can be built in any size or form you like), the Beast Den (which must be built at least 3x3 but otherwise can expanded however you want it to), and the Tavern (which must be built at least 3x5 because it actually requires two props to operate properly). Bridges likewise can be built in any fashion you wish, though I strongly suggest to ignore any design decisions coming from a certain "Mr Bones."


Much to the joy of your accountants, no room except for the Spirit Chamber requires regular mainentance costs to work. Quite on the contrary - if you should face a financial problem, you can always sell some of your rooms or tiles or tiles of them for a bit of quick cash, though this naturally should not become a regular habit.

Finally, your rooms enjoy one major advantage over your traps and defenses: They can not be destroyed by combat. No matter how the dire the battle fought in them may become, your rooms will always remain in pristine condition, and the only way for your enemies to permanently remove your rooms lies in capturing and selling them. Of course, you will have to do the same with the rooms of the Empire or rival Underlords, if you actually wish to get rid of them once they are yours.

As mentioned in the previous section, the efficiency with which your minions can work in your rooms can be increased by fortifying the walls surrounding them - a major factor to keep in mind while construction your dungeon.

Even the most devilish of your intelligent minions will need to take a nap every now, and the cozy, warm halls of your lair offer the perfect environment for them to set up their resting place and escape the horrors or reality by having nightmares about Whaleshrooms instead. Furthermore, intelligent minions that have been knocked out in combat can be rescued by your Imps, who will drag them back to their bad within your lair to recover, preventing their permanent death.



Though the lair itself is does not attract any minions and is not required for doing so, it should come as no surprise that your minions eventually will get grumpy if you force them into longer periods of insomnia by denying them a place to sleep. However, each intelligent minion only needs a 1x1 tile to set up his bed or whatever else he or she may choose to rest on, so your lair fortunately won't have to be as large as all your other rooms combined.

As the lair defies the standard 3x3 schematic, it often can be useful to have many smaller lairs instead of a large one. Placing them close to to your other rooms will reduce the amount of time the minions working in adjacent room will have to spent walking, and thus increase their work efficiency. Should your minions nonetheless prefer to make their bed in a lair further away from the room they work in, you can always forcibly relocate their sleeping quarters by picking them up and dropping them in a lair of your choosing. Just do keep in mind that your beasts will refuse to sleep in lair, and rest in the Beast Den instead.

GOLD COST BY TILE: 200

RESEARCH TREE: Availiable from default

FUNCTION: Resting place for intelligent minions. Defeated intelligent minions can be brought here by workers to recover.

In many ways, money is a form of magic in its own, and thus having as much as possible of it generally is not the worst of ideas. Sadly, your own dungeon core can only store up to 16.000 pieces of gold, a number that is pathetically small for every Underlord (or investment banker) worth his weight. This is where the vault comes in.

Each vault tiles can store up to 1000 gold pieces, so a proper 5x5 vault would allow you to horde an additional 25.000 gold pieces (plus whatever gold you have lying around your Dungeon Core), ready to be spent at your discretion. You can even move gold from one vault to another by picking up gold from the former and dropping in the latter.

Aside from simply allowing you to store more gold than before, you can also build vaults near gold veins or gold shrines that are being mined by your workers. While this, on the one hand, will allow your workers to spend more time mining and less time running from your mining site to your Dungeon Core and back, vaults outside of your dungeon itself naturally are much easier to capture for your enemies, just as the gold stored inside them. You should ideally replace such proxy vaults by Gold Vortexes, if you have them.


GOLD COST BY TILE: 100

RESEARCHED IN: Availiable from default

FUNCTION: Allows the storage of up to 1000 gold per tile

"A full belly fights better" an old saying goes, and both your intelligent and your beast minions will undoubtedly echo this sentiment. In older times, dark rulers would rely on chickens to feed their armies, but the recent eavian flu panic has led most Underlords to go for the squeaky micro-piglets instead.

The Slaughterpen, while seemingly little more than a glorified cesspit, will produce an endless stream of these micro-piglets for you, and hence will let you laugh into the face of world hunger by keeping your minions well-fed and letting everyone else stay hungry.

Each prop within a slaughterpen will spawn micro-piglet every few seconds and also acts as its home, so the more props, the more piglets will be produced and the more the pen can hold. A 3x3 pen thus will only feed a handful of minions, but a decent 5x5 slaughterpen should produce more than enough piglets to keep a reasonably-sized dungeon well-supplied.

While your intelligent minions can eat micro-piglets directly from the slaughterpen if necessary, they very much prefer to dine in the tavern instead. Thus, your intelligent minions may not starve if you only have a slaughterpen, but the more sophisticated amongst them will eventually grow unhappy over having to eat their pork raw.


GOLD COST PER TILE: 200

RESEARCHED IN: Availiable from default

FUNCTION: Produces micropiglets, which can be eaten directly or put into the tavern's meat cannon.

There's nothing quite like a good ale and hearty pork sausages after a long day bashing in skulls. The tavern will provide both of the two to your intelligent minions, and thus will help you to keep them happy.

Unlike all other rooms in the game, the tavern must be build at least 3x5, the reason being that it actually has two props associated with it. The first of these are simple tables, which can store up to four plates from which your minions can eat their meals. The second prop is a massive meat cannon; essentially a mixture between a grinder, a cook, and a food delivery service that will supply the table(s) of your tavern with food.

Unsurprisingly, the meat cannon can not produce meals from thin air. Instead, it continously has to be supplied with micro-piglets from your slaughterpen. Thankfully your own Imps will usually take care of keeping the meat cannon of your tavern well-supplied, but if you notice that the cannon has no more piglets inside to process, you can always manually grab some with the hand of evil and drop them inside. And if you should run out of micropiglets...well, let's say the cannon is rather simple machine, and could not differentiate between pigs and prisoner if one of the latter would somehow find its way into it.

As for your intelligent minions - the warm food served in the tavern is so much to their liking that they will spend a bit of their wages on it every time they visit the tavern, allowing you to get back at least a bit of the wages you have to pay those greedy little buggers. Atop of that, they will also work harder for a short while after having eating in the tavern.

Beast Minions, not knowing how to eat with fork and knife, will not dine in the tavern, and instead eat piglets directly from the slaughterpen.

GOLD COST PER TILE: 300

Researched from: Neutral Tree

Function: Provides meal for intelligent minions if stocked with micro-piglets. Each tavern meal increases the minions' productivity for a short time. Minions pay gold for each meal. Intelligent minions will become unhappy if they have no tavern to dine in.

As an Underlord, it is in your best interest that the minions serving you have at least a bit of combat experience, or, to put it bluntly, do not hold the sword on the wrong end. While actual combat is the true and time-tested method to gain said experience, it also tends to come with other experiences, such as disfigurement, dismemberment and death; a drawback that may quickly render any gained martial knowledge null and void.

Thankfully enough, a well-outfitted barracks will allow your minions to fight against a variety of elaborate automatons that offer a life-like simulation of actual combat. Though this form of training is a bit slower than the real thing, it is also much safer - according to our lawyers, no minion has ever suffered any sort or form of lasting physical trauma to the head while training in the barracks, and the gossipy gnarling who spread this rumor did not end up in the torture chamber, either.

In its normal state, each of the props within the barracks will allow two of your minions to train with it. Should you have researched the Barracks Upgrade, however, the Gnarlings who permanently clog up the place anyway can become mentors of a sort, assisting one or two minions as they are sparring to increase the amount of experience it gets, while also training themselves. In other words, the upgrade basically allow three minions to train on a single prop, so long as one of them is a Gnarling.

Be aware that said Gnarlings also are the only minions who see training in the barracks as their main priority, so if you see a particularly scrawny minions of your working on a project that is not of your particular importance of you for the time being, you can always force him into a workout by picking him up and dropping him into the barracks. To ensure that all of your intelligent minions actually get a chance to use the barracks, it also is advisable to make it a bit larger than your other work rooms - the fact that all of your intelligent minions can use it means that it would frequently be overcrowded otherwise.

Two reminders: Beasts can not and will not work in the barracks, as they know that the training dummies are inedible, and have a nasty tendency to poo on the sensible mechanisms that power the damn thing. Furthermore, the training dummies in the barracks become less rewarding the more experienced your minions are, so veteran minions will only get experience at a very slow rate if they train in the barracks.

COST PER TILE: 300

RESEARCHED IN: Neutral Tree

FUNCTION Allows intelligent minions to gain experience outside of combat, attracts Gnarlings

Your fall from disgrace has robbed you of much knowledge, Underlord. Fortunately, not all of it is irrecoverable, but the more brainy amongst your intelligent minions will have to pore over hundreds of old books and arcane tomes to to reclaim it. The Archive is built for this specific purpose.

Each of the work stations within your archive allows one cultist (which the archive conventiently attracts) to delve into your lost secrets, although your necromancers and witch doctors will also work here if they have nothing better to do. As they perform their unholy research, you will gain Sins, a form of metaphysical currency you can use some of your former knowledge and abilities within the veins of evil.

Apart from its role in the creation of Sins, the archive also is used to store and identify artifacts - should your workers find one, they will drag it atop one of the work stations, and your researchers will identify its function while continuing to research sins for you at the same time.

Should you decide to spend a sin on upgrading the archive, its work-stations will become double-sided, allowing two researchers to work at them simultaneously and potentially doubling your research rate.

One last thing - there's a reason why only specifically trained researchers are allowed to work in the archive. More than one Gnarling has had his face eaten by a particularly irritated magic book, and we still couldn't coerce the Tome of Shadows to release the soul of that one luckless crackpot.

COST PER TILE 300

RESEARCHED IN:Neutral Tree

FUNCTION: Allows minions to unlock sins; attracts cultists; allows minions to identify artifacts, stores artifacts.

Though a good offense might be the best defense both above and under the surface of the earth, seeing some random goody-two shoes getting shot in the face by a bombard still is hilarious enough to warrant a few of them (and other nasty surprise) in your dungeon. But to construct these technomagical wonders, you will need material, and for the material, you will need a foundry.

Within the infernal heat guaranteed by the complimentary lava lake each foundry comes with, the chunders that are attracted by its permanent smell of sulphur will hammer away at ambossess of dark steel to produce defends parts, which will also be stored in this room. Should you place the blueprint for a defense, your workers will rapidly drag the boxes to the designated location and use their contents to build whatever you have planned there. And if that isn't fast enough for you, you can speed up the process by grabbing some defense parts with your hand of evil and dropping them upon the blueprint yourself. You can even repair damaged defenses by dropping defense parts on them, even though they rapidly regenerate health on their own.

In case you have any big construction projects planned, you can also upgrade the foundry, which will give you a bit more space to stockpile defense parts. But be wary Underlord - should your foundry be claimed by an enemy, all defense parts inside will become his, and you suddenly find blade loti and bombards springing up uncomfortably close to your dungeon core.

...coming to think of it, I still wonder how a door and a bombard can be built with the same basic defense parts...

Cost per tile: 400

Unlocked in: Sloth Tree

Function: Allows minions to produce defense parts, stores defense parts, attracts Chunders.

As it turns out, surprisingly many Underlords have a weak spot for animals - particularly if the latter reward the care of their masters by biting and clawing their enemies into thin, mouth-sized pieces. Should the thought of this mutual affection manage to bring a spark fo wamth to your dark heart as well, you consider building a beast den.

The purpose of this room is two-fold:
Firstly, a beast den that is at least 3x3 in size will create a beast portal, an entrance to the deeper parts of the underworld from which beast minions can enter your service. As the beast portal acts independently from the gateways through which your intelligent minions emerge, you can even have beast minions when you have no gateways at all, and the speed with which the number of beasts within your dungeon grows is independent of how many gateways you own.
Secondly, the beast den serves as a resting place for your feral minions, as they do not share the lair with your intelligent servants. Unfortunately for you, beasts do not set up beds, which makes it tricky to estimate just when a beast den is truly, and for the time being you're limited to guesswork in this regard.

In its basic state, the beast den will only attract two beasts minions, namely the insectoid skarg, and the eye-heavy oculus. Should you choose to enhance it by spending a sin on the respective upgrade within the Wrath vein, the beast den will also attack the flying Bafu, and the stealthy shadow - both of which are a must-have if you plan to make anything but fleeting use of beasts.


COST PER TILE: 400

RESEARCHED IN: Wrath Tree

FUNCTION: Attracts Skarg, Occulus (and Bafu, Shadow when upgraded), acts as lair for beast minions.

Let us be honest, Underlord - no dungeon would be perfect without an immensely oversized chemistry set and a horde of cackling maniac scientists working it. You can make do without it of course, but the constant deranged giggling and the occasional earth-shaking "KA-BOOM" really help to brighten the mood in your dungeon.

There's even some practical advantages in having an alchemy lab - building one will attract crackpots into your dungeon, who can apparently trace and follow the smell of particularly volatile liquids over extremely long distances. Once you give the order to brew a specific portion (and pay the amount of gold give for its resources), the crackpots start stirring the contents of the massive cauldrons that fill the lab, eventually producing a finished potion that can you can pick up with your hand of evil. You can throw said potion anywhere in your territory (or neutral territory bordering your one) and turn dirt into gold, walls into rubble, or enemies to ice, all depending on the potion at (and in your) hand.

For all of its uses, you still should be careful with just where you build the alchemy lab - the last thing you want is having an enemy capture it and use the potions inside against you. If such a situation should come to pass however, you can quickly destroy any potions currently stored within the lab with a good slap, leaving your rival with empty hands.

GOLD COST PER TILE: : 500

RESEARCHED IN: Neutral Tree

FUNCTIONS: Attracts Crackpots, allows crackpots to create potions, stores potions.






And I -TOLD- Gubba that the quickfreeze potion needs careful handling, but nooo...!

Powerful as you may be, there are some forms of magic even you can not force into reality with a mere wave of your hand (of evil). These spells are known as 'Rituals', and must be prepared by your loyal cultists before you can unleash them. To this effect, you will need a Sanctuary , where the cultists can channel the magic required for each ritual.

Once you have ordered a ritual to be conducted, your cultists will flock to the sanctuary to channel it, which may take a varying amount of time depending on the ritual in question and on how many cultists are working on it. Once the ritual has been fully channeled, you can unleash it at any time or keep it in store for a more convenient occasion. Be aware, however, that you can only channel and hold one ritual at a time, regardless of how many sanctuaries you build. Because of this, building multiple sanctuaries as opposed to one larger one is fully redundant.

Apart from its role in the creation of rituals, the blood-filled halls of the sanctuary also attract the haemophilic cultists that work in this room. Sadly, your vampires are less enthusiastic about all the blood and will still demand live victims to feed on, claiming that the blood in the sanctuary tastes stale.


COST PER TILE: 500

RESEARCHED IN: Neutral Tree

FUNCTION: Allows the player to channel and store rituals, attracts cultists.

By now, you hopefully should have understood that mana and gold are by far not the only resources you need to manage. Quite ironically, one of the most precious and valueable things you can get your hands on are enemies - and the prison will be the vault in which you store them.

Once you defeat an intelligent enemy minion, it will go to the ground and start bleeding out until it dies. Yet your workers can "rescue" these fallen enemies by dragging them into your prison, allowing them to skip death by exsanguination and suffer and even more horrible fate at your hand instead.

As they have a food source in the form of the rats which frequent the prison, you thankfully will not have to babysit captives once they have been securely locked inside your prison and, theoretically speaking, you could probably keep them locked until they die of old age.

Naturally, this would be a tremendous waste of resources (for at this point these individuals are nothing more than that to you). There are oh-so many different things you can use prisoners for, be it converting them to your side or turning them into spirits within your torture chamber, adding their bones to the soul pyres of the crypt, using them as unwilling sparring partners for your beasts in the arena, or simply making literal mincemeat out of them by dropping them into the meat canon of your tavern. Quite simply put, you have so many options that an overcrowded prison really should be a non-thing for you.

As with any other resource stockpile, you should take good care not to let it fall into enemy hands. At best, one of your rivals can use the prisoners for her own nefarious purposes, and at worst, they were hers to begin with and will happily rejoin their allies in battle.

COST PER TILE: 500

RESEARCHED IN: Neutral Tree

FUNCTION: Storing prisoners. Starting at 3x3, each "inner" tile of the prison can hold one prisoner.

Due to the nature your handiwork, the better part of your dungeon will sooner or latter be covered with the corpses of your enemies. These bodies will eventually rot away on their own, but a resourceful Underlord knows better than to let things go to waste - especially if said things could potentially form the meat of your undead army.

To create this army, you will need a crypt. Within it are the soul pyres - essentially magical crematories. If your workers spot a dead unit, they will drag its body into the soul pyre, which in turn will burn away the fleshy husk until nothing but bones remain (though you can also feed the pyre with living minions or prisoners, to the same effect). The soul pyre will also store these bones, and each of them can hold up to five bodies before becoming full.

Once a body has been de-meated in a soul pyre, one of your necromancers (who are drawn into your dungeon by the crypt) can raise it and force it into servitude as a ghoul. Although you as an Underlord can not control ghouls, these savage undead will blindly follow the necromancer that has risen them and act as his personal body guard. The Archon can also raise up to two ghouls from the crypt, but not more than that - he prefers to raise Undead on the field directly.

Finally, there is a third way to use the bones in your crypt: Should you channel and unleash the Uprising ritual, all bodies within your crypt will be instantly converted into Wraiths. The latter may have a limited lifespan and lose health even while outside of combat, but consider that a full 5x5 crypt together with the aforementioned ritual may put no less than twenty capable minions under your control, even if just for a time.

Gold cost per tile: 400

Researched in: Neutral Tree

Functions: Stores corpses, attracts necromancers

The torture chamber is the perhaps most beautiful room in your dungeon - a garden where screams fill the air and blood covers the ground. It really is no surprise that those of your prisoners who are taken to visit this blissful Elysium will quickly join your side while being tended to by the succubi whom this idyllic area attracts.

The racks and wheels you can find your torture chamber have two modes: In the first mode, your succubi will be allowed to perform their arts on the prisoners placed on them. In due to time, the famous persuasion skills of the she-demons will have brought your former enemies to the point that they will strongly reconsider their previous allegiances, and join your side instead - a happy end for everyone involved!

Should you instead feel that one of your prisoners is not fit to serve under you, you can always activate the second mode of the torture rack: Rather than letting your succubi work on them, this mode will have the prisoner consumed by infernal flames. This obviously kills the prisoner, but not before transforming his or her soul into a spirit, a ghost-like form of minion that, while only having a limited lifespan, makes for a very good scout as it is completely invulnerable and can move through closed doors or other defenses that would be impassable for your regular minions.

Lastly, you can also throw your own minions onto the rack. While you obviously can not convert them and your own minions thus will always be burnt to death, knowing some of their own kind to be on the rack has proven to be extremely motivational for minions of the same type.

GOLD COST PER TILE: 1000

RESEARCHED IN: Neutral Tree

FUNCTION: Converting prisoners, producing spirits, attracting succubi

Since ancient times, the spectacle of seeing two beasts trying to slaughter one another has served to entertain those who thought themselves more intelligent than the animals. That the educational effect of these show-battles was beyond them says a lot about these know-it-alls.

As your beast minions can not train themselves in your barracks, the arena is the only way outside of actual combat for them to gain experience in mock-battles. Although this naturally means they will get a few bruises, beasts (and even intelligent minions) gain experience much faster during these mock battles than they would in normal combat or in the barracks. Unfortunately, the beasts are unaware of this boon and must be coerced into the the arena, either by your own hand of evil, by a Beastmaster, or by a bored Behemoth.

Should you not want to see your beasts being dragged into the arena, you can toggle the mechanism in the upper right corner of the arena. Should it thumb point upwards, the respective minions can force your beasts to duel one another until their heart is content; yet if the thumb is pointing downwards, your beasts will be left alone.

Apart from granting your beasts experience, fights in the arena will also entertain your intelligent minions, who will gather round and enjoy the bloody spectacle if they have nothing better to do. Though you theoretically could also throw said minions into the arena to let them gain experience, they usually are better off in the barracks (unwanted prisoners are fair game, though. In both meanings of the word). Curiously, Beastmasters gain experience just from watching the battles in he arena.

GOLD COST PER TILE: 300

RESEARCHED IN: Wrath Tree

FUNCTION: Allows beasts to gain experience outside of combat, attracts beast masters. While beasts are fighting in the arena, intelligent minions may observe the battle, raising their happiness.

Much to the malcontent of some Underlords (and to the glee of others), the walls and defenses of a dungeon are by no means indestructible, and just as the former can be unfortified and destroyed by the pickaxes of workers or dwarven sappers, the latter can be smashed by regular enemies. The Garrison may make neither of the two completely immune to harm, but it will nonetheless make them much sturdier.

At the center of each garrison stands a small belltower of sorts. The bells inside are arcane in nature and, when rung, they will project a circular field whose magic will drastically increase the physical resilence of all walls and strengthens all defenses inside of the seven-tile radius. While the belltower can only be activiated by Augres and Juggernauts, the former fortunately also are attracted by this room, so you won't have to worry about staff issues.

Finally, you should know that the effect of the magical fields from multiple garrisons will not stack on each other - in other words, even if a door was within range of four garrisons, it would react as if only under one of them. Should you plan to build multiple garrisons, carefuly consider where you place them, so as maximize the area they cover and prevent them from overlapping. For the same reason, it extremely wasteful to build garrisons that are larger than 3x3, as you'll need only one belltower.

GOLD COST PER TILE: 750

RESEARCHED IN: Sloth Tree

FUNCTIONS: : Makes walls 50% more resilient to all forms of damage, sets defense self-repair to 10 + 0.75% of total health per second. Lasts for five minutes per activation. Defenses in the aura of an active garrison deal 300% damage to enemies, while also receiving 50% less damage from all sources.

The Spirit Chamber is an odd place - not quite in the real world, yet also not entirely within the aether. Due to its liminal nature, it will attract the spirits of the long-dead warriors of yore, who swarm to it like moths to a nightly light.

At the center of Spirit Chamber stand one or more pedestals. If you pick up a minion with your hand of evil and drop it onto one of the pedestals, it will phase into a trance-like state in which it can feel neither hunger nor tiredness, but becomes all the more receptive for the spirits circling around it like an immense insect swarm. In this state, the Witch Doctors attracted by these room can channel the combat experience of the dead into your minions, drastically increasing their own battle aptitude.

In practice, this means minions placed onto the pedestals of the spirit chamber will rapidly gain experience while a Witchdoctor is tending to them, much faster than actual combat, a barracks, or the arena would allow them to. However, this procedure is extremely costly in gold. If you are looking for an alternative, you can always pick up the spirits produced in the torture chamber and drop them onto the minions that are being imbued in the spirit chamber - this way, whatever experience the spirit may have had in life will be directly transferd to the respective minion - an extremely fast way of turning previously weak minions into certified death-dealers.

Should you not want your witch doctors to burn through your gold at an alarming rate as they imbue experience into your minions, you can always toggle the mechanism at the upper left of your spirit chamber - this will force your witch doctors to leave the minions in the chamber alone, so that you can focus on giving them experience via sacrificing spirits.

GOLD COST PER TILE: 1000

RESEARCHED IN: Neutral Tree

FUNCTIONS: Allows minions to rapidly gain experience in exchange for gold (at a rate of 0.5 gold per experience point) or spirits produced in the torture chamber, attracts witchdoctors.

Water, while not quite as deadly as lava, nonetheless can pose a serious problem to you. Minions incapable of flight while move significantly slower when they have to wade through the rivers and lakes that one may sometimes encounter under the surface of the earth, and as your workers are not clever enough to use snorkels, they can not claim land that is covered by the floods.

To circumvent this problem, you can build wooden bridges. Although they are little more than a few planks cobbled together to create a pathway over the water, wooden bridges do act like claimed territory in many respects - you can cast attack spells on them, pick up and drop minions from them, and you can claim neutral or hostile territory that is connected via a bridge.

But be wary Underlord - a wooden bridge is always claimed as a whole, not part-by-part like regular tiles. A single end on one end of a long bridge can capture all of it, although longer bridges obviously require more time to capture.

GOLD COST PER TILE: 200

RESEARCHED IN: Availiable from default

FUNCTION: Allows minions to pass over water, allows workers to claim tiles connected to the bridge.

The Stone Bridge is a simple upgrade to the Wooden bridge. While each of its tiles cost twice as much as the wooden ones, stone bridges can be build over lava (where normal bridges would halt and catch fire), and more notably, are sturdy enough that you can build defenses like bombards or blade loti on them. Just don't forget that enemy workers can still capture the bridge from its far end, which will destroy all defenses built on it.

GOLD COST PER TILE: 500

RESEARCHED IN: Neutral Tree

FUNCTION: Same as bridge, but can be built over lava and defenses can be constructed on it.

As you dig out your subterranean realm, you will sooner than later draw the attention and ire of the local residents, be it the foolish buffoons of the Empire, or the slightly more competent other Underlords that pursue the same path of power as you. You will naturally have to get rid of either competitor by the liberal application of physical violence, but do not think that you will always be on the offense. More than often, you will have to defend your own dungeon against waves of enemies flooding through your corridors and workers trying to breach its walls. To help you with beating back both, you may build defenses.

Building defenses is a bit different from building rooms - rather than being created instantaneously, you will have to pay gold in order place a blueprint of the defense in question at the desired location. To actually build the defenses, you will require a foundry, where your minions can create defense parts. These parts can then be ferried to the blueprint you placed your workers (or by your own hand of evil should you be in a hurry), and once enough defense parts have been incorporated into it, the defense will be finished and becomes an actual object within your dungeon.

Broadly speaking, you will have two forms of defenses at your disposal: The first of these are passive defenses, such as doors. While the latter have no maintenance cost, they do not function automatically and thus require your attention to be opened and closed, and most of them must be placed between two dirt or wall tiles that serve as their doorframe.

The second form of defenses are active defenses. These defenses can act autonomously, but each of them you build will decrease your maximum mana for a bit until it is destroyed or sold . Furthermore, you will not be able to build additional active defenses if this would bring your maximum mana to below 500 - the bare minimum which allows you to cast a spell or two.

As having more than 5 imps in your workforce will also lower your maximum mana, you will have to balance your expenses - having many imps might help your economy but makes your dungeon vulnerable to attack, while having many defenses might make it easier to fight invaders but will leave you with an overburdened workforce. Not to speak of the fact that you'll want to reserve some mana for spells.

The most basic defense in your dungeon comes in the form of a wooden door. While it is cheap and will automatically block any unwanted visitors, the only thing that the wooden door will be able to reliably keep out of your dungeon are enemy workers, who will hammer their little fists against it in impotent rage like a spoiled child throwing a temper tantrum. For actual combat-trained enemies, however, this door will not be a serious obstacle.

Due to it's low price, the woode door also is the most reasonable option to prevent your minions (and especially overly curious workers) from going to places where you don't want them to.


GOLD COST: 1000

MANA LOCKED: 0

DEFENSE PARTS REQUIRED: 1

Hitpoints: 3500

FUNCTION: Allows passage for friendly minions, blocks hostile minions. Can be locked to prevent all passage.

As it turns out, it is not only reptiles that move significantly slower when their body temperature reaches dangerously low levels. The Bone Chiller, once built, will constantly emit waves of pure cold that will lower the movement and attack speed of all enemies within a 2.5-tile radius. Additionally, a soft touch with your hand of evil will cause the Bone Chiller to release a significantly stronger pulse that will stun enemies for two seconds, and deals minor damage to them. This pulse is especially effective against the fiery ember demons, who will suffers significantly increased damage from it.

Despite of its ability to harm others, the bone chiller will rarely kill enemies on its own, but instead is best used in concert with other defenses. This way, its aura of cold will reduce the damage hostile invaders can deal to your bombards or blade loti, while the latter in turn shield the bone chiller from harm.


GOLD COST: 2500

LOCKED MANA: 10

DEFENSE PARTS REQUIRED: 3

HITPOINTS: 2500

FUNCTION: Slows down enemies in a 2.5 tile area around it. Stuns enemies for two seconds and deals 50 points of damage if alternate mode is activated. Alternate mode deals 250 damage to Ember Demons and reduces their damage by 95% for two seconds.

The classical spike pit was an ingenious concept, but suffered from one single drawback - its victims had to fall into the spikes to actually get hurt. The Blade Lotus revolutionizes this idea by utilizing a spring-powered platform to bring the spikes straight to its victims.

Once built, the Blade Lotus will initially remain concealed within the floor of your dungeon, but once an enemy comes close to it, the blades attached to it will shoot upwards, damaging all nearby foes. It will then remain in this position for a few seconds until its spiky bits return into the ground.

Apart from simply harming enemies, the sturdy blade loti also serve as a handy barricade, and will block the path of hostile minions if their blades are raised. This makes them extremely useful to protect more fragile defenses such as your bombards or gargoyles.

Apart from all this, you can touch the blade lotus with your hand of evil to activate its alternate mode: While in this configuration, the blade lotus is hidden from enemy eyes and can be walked over by your enemies. You can then reactivate it with a second gesture, causing it to block the path of fleeing enemies, or hostile reinforcements.

GOLD COST: 1500

MANA LOCKED: 5

DEFENSE PARTS REQUIRED: 2

Hitpoints: 2750

FUNCTION: Deals 120 points of damage to enemies that get to close, blocks their path. In alternate mode, it remains invisible, does not attack and can be walked over.

As your researchers have realized, being shot at with a well-sized cannon usually poses a serious health hazard to most people. Thanks to scientific progress, you can now harness this primal power by installing said cannon in your dungeon and having it fire at tresspassers.

The Bombard will most likely be the most common type of defense in your dungeon, as it combines reasonable firepower and range with a fairly modest price. Its only downside is its relatively fragility, but even that can be migitated by placing it behind a barrier of blade loti or constructing a rampart around it.

In case the regular firepower of your bombard should still not be enough for you, you can always activate its alternate mode. This will rapidly increase the bombard's rate of fire, yet the defense will also continously lose health as its parts break away under the strain of it. Thus, I recommend to only activate the bombard's overdrive mode if your defensive lines have turned into what strategists call a "target-rich environment".

GOLD COST: 1500

MANA LOCKED: 10

DEFENSE PARTS REQUIRED: 2

HITPOINTS: 2000

FUNCTION: Basic ranged defense, deals 135 points of damage with each shot. Can be toogled to Overdrive Mode, increasing its rate of fire but also damaging the defense with each shot.

The portcullis is a sturdy construction of steel whose bars can take a solid amount of punishment before breaking away. While it can be opened and closed much like a regular door, the portcullis does not suffer from the former's restriction of having to be built between two blocks that serve as its frame - instead, you can build it wherever you like so long as it's on your own territory, allowing you to use the portcullis as a gate in places where building regular doors is simply not possible. You naturally will still have to close the portcullis by hand if you don't want hostile (or your) minions to walk through it.

If you are bored, you can also build a shifting maze out of portculli, or use them as makeshift-walls to imprison unruly workers. Then again, you should not get bored if you have but an ounce of competence in you, Underlord.

GOLD COST: 4000

MANA LOCKED: 0

DEFENSE PARTS REQUIRED: 3

FUNCTION: Allows passage to friendly minions, blocks hostile minions. Can be locked to prevent all passage.

They say that, back in the old days, the solid statues actually were very much mobile and could be entailed into an Underlord's dungeon much like regular minions....but these times are long-gone, and nowadays Gargoyles seem to be content with permanently sitting on their cold, stony behind.

But don't let their calm disposition fool you, Underlord. Once foes enter the gargoyles line of sight, it will fire a continous beam of pure energy that may not deal much damage of its own, but can drastically weaken the armor of the enemy, making it highly vulnerable to other defenses or your own minions.

However, you will personally have to turn the gargoyle should enemies attack if from another direction, and you can only do so in 90° moves - in other words, the gargoyle can only fire in a straight line. To compensate for this, it is advisable to construct gargoyles in front of bottlenecks (be they natural or created by your own hand), so that attacking enemies will have no option to escape its line of fire.

GOLD COST: 5000

MANA LOCKED:10

DEFENSE PARTS REQUIRED 3

HITPOINTS: 2000

FUNCTION: Deals minor damage and doubles all other damage received by affected enemies in a range of four tiles.

For all their firepower, your active defenses fairly fragile objects, and will easily break should your enemies make a conscious effort to dismantle them. To counteract this problem, you can build a rampart around your - essentially a cage of wood and metal that allows the defense inside to keep firing while at the same time shielding it from harm.

Once a rampart has been built around a defense, it will absorb any and all damage directed at it, and even if the rampart is destroyed, the defense inside of it will emerge unharmed - at least if whatever destroyed the rampart followed in kind.

Another notable trait of the rampart is that it will block the path of enemies whereas normal defenses usually can't do this. On the good side, this means that enemies won't be able to simply march straight through your defensive lines once your blade loti (which you hopefully have placed in front of your other defenses) have been destroyed. On the bad side, the rampart also blocks the path of YOUR minions, so a closed line of ramparts will prevent your own workers from venturing past it - be it to retrieve gold, corpses, or still-living bodies for your prison. Because of this, the lines of your ramparts should have at least one gap through which your minions can walk through.


GOLD COST: 3000

MANA LOCKED: 0

DEFENSE PARTS REQUIRED: 8

Hitpoints: 7500

FUNCTION: Can be built around bombards, bone chillers, gargoyles, and the well of souls, absorbing all damage the defense would take until destroyed. Blocks the path of all minions.

Gold, despite of its immense value, is not a particularly hard metal. A door purely made out of gold thus might look shine but would be a very bad investment when it comes to defensive value. Bind an avaricious demon to it, however, and things will start to look very much different.

Very simply put, the demon that inhabits the Midas door will protect it with its considerable power, effectively making it unbreakeable - so long as you can pay him. Greedy as he is, he will directly subtract any damage the door (and hus he) takes from your coffers, so while the door might remain intact, the same can't be said about your wealth. And should your monetary reserves be exhausted, the door can be destroyed like any other.

Given the way this door works, it can either be your strongest defense or little more than a drain on your already scarce resources. So choose wisely if and when you want to make use of it, Underlord - opening the doors might let your enemies into your dungeon, but will in turn keep the demons fingers out of your wallet.


GOLD COST: 5000

MANA LOCKED: 0 (consumes gold when attacked)

DEFENSE PARTS REQUIRED: 3

FUNCTION: Allows passage for friendly minions, blocks hostile minions. Can be locked to prevent all passage. When attacked, drains 0,33 points of gold for every point of damage taken instead of losing hitpoints. Loses actual hitpoints if no gold is available.

Your walls may stand true and solid, but a group of enemy workers or even mere dwarven sappers can quickly change this. Though there are no means to make them stand forever (which seems to drive certain Underlords quite mad), you do have the option to replace them with Augrum walls - structures with have been fortified with the very same metals the augres use for their hammer-arms.

Unlike regular walls, you can not create augrum walls by simply reinforcing regular old dirt. Instead, each piece must be bought, hand-placed on a free tile owned by you, and then be supplied with defense parts, just like other defenses. Once fully 'constructed', it will look like a mere box, but a touch by your hand of evil will cause the latter to miracously unpack into a fully finished and heavily fortified piece of wall that is much tougher than your regular ones.

Due to it's high price, augrum walls should ideally only be used to replace those sections of your dungeon that are most likely to be besieged by enemy diggers, be it that one backdoor you walled off which is conveniently far away from your heavily defended main entrance, or the thin layer of stones that blocks the waterways which you just can't get a hold off.

To maximize its lifespan, consider building a garrison near augrum walls. But be careful - even with this additional measure, enough underminers or hellfire potions still can raze even the mighty augrum wall. And even when they can't destroy it, your enemies still can conquer your augrum walls and use them against you.

GOLD COST: 2500

MANA LOCKED: 0

DEFENCE PARTS REQUIRED 4

FUNCTION: Same as regular walls, but has 750 health of which 500 points are fortified (200 health with 100 fortified in regular walls). Tells attacking players to ♥♥♥♥ off and breach somewhere else.

A terrible weapon even for the likes of an Underlord, the Well of Souls does not simply maim the body of those enemies coming too close to it, but drains the very essence of their souls until nothing but an empty husk remains of them.

Once constructed, the well of souls will create a field of powerful and utterly dark magic around it. Those enemies foolish enough to enter it will continously take damage as this dark artifact sucks the souls out of their bodies. Moreover, should the well of souls be allowed to gobble down enough spirit essence, it will transform the latter into wraiths, undead spectres that may have a limited lifespan but will happily follow your every order without need for food or sleep.

Perhaps most brilliantly, the harmful aura of the well of souls works even through walls, so if your enemies will repeatedly try to destroy a particular section of your dungeon walls, build a well of souls on the other side and see how the life is sucked out of those stupid workers.

GOLD COST: 7500

MANA LOCKED: 30

DEFENSE PARTS REQUIRED: 5

HITPOINTS: 5000

FUNCTION: Continously deals damage against enemies in a 2.5 tile radius. Once enough damage has been dealt, the well of souls can be clicked to release a wraith under the player's control.

Ice, when existing is sufficient mass and in cold climates, can be a surprisingly solid material for something that would otherwise liquify into water - a trait very neatly illustrated by the mighty glaciers that have existed for millenia and will continue to do so until you bring about a climate change.
Thanks to a collaboration between your augres and witchdoctors, you can now channel the power of the eternal ice unto a frame of massive steel to create the glacial door

While the glacial door will look like nothing more than a slightly more resilient regular door when open, its true power becomes apparent once it is closed: The second the door has been locked, the ice crystal that otherwise harmlessly floats in the center of the door will begin to spread a thick cover of ice over the entire structure, drastically increasing its resilience to physical damage. The longer the door remains closed, the further the ice spreads, until the door finally is completely frozen and extremely hard to breach, while the two wall segments connected to it will turn into permafrost that is significantly more resilient than the usual earth of the underground.

As this bonus is lost whenever your own or allied minions pass through the door, it is recommended that you keep this door locked unless you absolutely need to open it for your own servants to pass through.

GOLD COST: 7500

MANA LOCKED:

DEFENSE PARTS REQUIRED: 5

HITPOINTS: 6000 (when open) 12,000 (when closed and fully frozen)

FUNCTION: Becomes more resilient the longer it stays closed. Closed by default; opens whenever a friendly unit has to pass through it, unless the door has been locked by the player. Wall tiles connected to the glacial door will turn into extremely tough permafrost tiles if the Glacial Door has reached maximum hitpoints.

Unlike most of your minions, your sentinels are not attracted via underworld gateways, but instead have to be "built" by constructing this strange shell.

Once finished, you may unleash the sentinel from its shell by clicking it. On the other hand, the sentinel's hefty wages may encourage you to leave it asleep within it's golden sarcophagus until enemies come too close to it, causing the sentinel to emerge and attack them.

Being a mere shell, this defense will be automatically destroyed once the sentinel inside has been released.

GOLD COST: 5000

MANA LOCKED: 0

DEFENSE PARTS REQUIRED: 10

HITPOINTS: 10,000

FUNCTION: Contains a sentinel. May either be clicked to release the sentinel, or will automatically release the sentinel if an enemy draws near.

Apart from rooms and defenses, the structures at your disposal also include a few constructs, nifty little machines that can easily be mistaken for defenses but have a much more varied range of uses.

Building a construct is fairly simple: Just will first have to pay an amount of gold to place the construct's blueprint. Unlike as with rooms or defenses, you can not only place constructs on your own territory, but also on neutral one (but not on the tiles claimed by your enemy). Once the blueprint has been set, one of your workers will rush to the construction site and focus your unholy energy to force the construct in question into existence, without the need for defense parts or additional funds.

Generally speaking, your constructs will serve a more aggressive and expansionistic role, and while you obviously will want to keep your defenses guarding your own dungeon, your constructs will be spread all over the subterannean realm you are trying to conquer, potentially up to and including right on your enemies doorstep. All it takes is a bit of money, and a worker in the right spot. And though you can not manually hasten the construction of construct by dropping defense parts on them as you could with traps, a few slaps to the head will motivate the worker in question to perform his task in a timely fashion (as will a well-placed Obey spell).

For long, long millenia, the worst enemy of the Underlords were not the disgustingly righteous forces good, nor their competitors from the ranks of evil, not even the faceless terror that is the whaleshroom. No, the thing an Underlord would fear the most was its own clumsiness, especially the kind that resulted in holes popping up in the dungeon wall where there shouldn't be any, coupled with the fact that, until recently, there was no way to close these holes again.
Entire generations of Underlord have howled and screamed in blind rage once they realized they had dug out an area that they actually wanted to remain standing, and more than one major battle has been lost because an Underlord had accidentally breached a critical section of his own walls and could not close the resulting hole again. Truly, these were dark, dire times for all those building a dungeon.

But do not despair Underlord, for in a rare moment of mercy, the dark gods have gifted us replacement earth, a simple construct that may look like a chest but will rapidly unfold into a brand-new 1x1 earth tile once its construction has been finished. Be it mistakes made on your own part, breaches created by your enemies or mere natural caverns that offend your sense of architecture, the replacement earth can fix them all, and for a very reasonable price at that. Just keep in mind that you'll also need to let your workers fortify the newly-created earth tiles before you get proper walls, and that the box is extremely fragile - don't try to set up new walls right in the heat of battle.

GOLD COST 350 G

HITPOINTS: 1000 (when in box form) 100 (as a regular earth tile)

RESEARCHED IN: Availiable from default

FUNCTION: Creates a single earth tile at the designated location.

Although enemy workers may not seem very threatening at first, losing your own territory (and hence the ability to cast spells such as Lightning ) to them quickly can become quite disturbing. Thankfully, you can build warding totems to alleviate this issue.

Once constructed, the warding totem will project a repeated pulse of energy that repels enemy workers in a three-tile radius, making it impossible for them to claim any tiles around it. This makes the warding totem especially useful for those zones of the battlefield which you want to protect from a hostile takeover even when you can not spare minions to guard them. In addition, the aura of the warding totem even affects workers on the other side of your walls, making it a useful tool to prevent enemy workers from undermining your walls.

Of course, the warding totem alone will not repel combat-ready enemies - don't expect it to do anything against gnarlings or hells-know-what fiends your enemies may throw against you in an effort to gain control over your territory.

GOLD COST: 2000

RESEARCHED IN: Wrath Tree

MANA LOCKED: 10

HITPOINTS: 1000

FUNCTION: Repels enemy workers. Does not affect regular minions.

Amazing as the ability of your workers to claim territory may be, it has one major drawback - tiles that are to be claimed as yours must border ones already under your control. In some cases, this may lead to rather annoying situations where it is in your decided interest to claim an area of neutral territory as fast as possible, but it's distance to your own territory means that it would take ages for your imps to get there, or obstacles like water, lava, or enemy territory would make it difficult if not impossible.

The outpost allows you to circumvent this problem. Once built, it will claim a 3x3 area of neutral tiles around it as yours, completely regardless how far away the place might be from your main territory. The only downside is that this construct needs a worker to be built, and the worker naturally will have to get there on foot given that you can not simply drop it on neutral territory. Hence, obstructions like water are less of a problem, but don't expect your workers to go running for the outpost if a lava river without a bridge, or a fortified enemy position stands between them and their target. On the other hand, you could always see this as an opportunity to do a bit of training with the possession spell.

The secondary function of an outpost lies in keeping the tiles around under your control. No matter how many times enemy workers might try to claim tiles for their respective Underlord, the outpost promptly will recapture them for you, so long as it remains intact.



GOLD COST: 2500

RESEARCHED IN: Wrath Tree

HITPOINTS: 2500

FUNCTION: Claims a 3x3 area around it if built on neutral territory. The outpost will automatically reclaim any tiles in its area of influence that have been claimed by enemy workers before.

The outpost will not be constructed by the Construction ritual if it is placed on neutral territory

Though your workers are capable of razing walls, their puny little pickaxes will take an awful lot of time to do so. Furthermore, enemy workers can reverse the process from the other side of the wall, and I can assure you that few Underlords will sit idly by as you breach their dungeon - expect it to rain lightning bolts or minions once the first pickaxe hits stone.

To make the entire process easier, you can instead an construct an Underminer, which, very bluntly put, is a bloody big bomb that will damage all walls (and walls only) within a three-tile radius once you have built it and lit the fuse. While a single underminer does not suffice to completely destroy a fortified wall, two of them will fully remove the fortified stone surrounding the weaker earth tile, and three underminers going off at the same time will blow up regular fortified dirt tiles. However, fortified rocky earth tiles or augrum walls will require considerably more firepower to be blown up, and your opponents naturally will try to destroy the underminer before it goes off.

A secondary use of the underminer lies in blowing up brimstone. As the latter already is highly volatile by nature, the explosion of the underminer will cause a chain reaction, causing the entire brimstone vein to combust in a rather violent fashion.

GOLD COST: 1500

RESEARCHED IN: Wrath Tree

HITPOINTS: 1000

FUNCTION: If fired, takes 10 seconds to detonate, dealing 150 damage to all wall tiles in a three-tile radius and blowing up brimstone instantly. The detonation pushes back nearby minions but deals no damage to them.

Mining gold that is not within immediate reach of your dungeon can become rather tedious when your workers have to run back and forth between your dungeon and the mining site. To prevent this, you theoretically could place a vault near the gold vein you're excavating, but vaults outside of your dungeon proper have the unfortunate tendency to be captured by your enemies, together will all gold inside.

Fortunately, a bit of research will allow you to build the gold vortex, essentially a kind of wormhole that transports all gold placed inside of it to your dungeon core, or should the latter be full, to the nearest vault. We also tested whether we could do the same with minions but the results were...ugly, and most minions prefer to walk by foot ever since.


GOLD COST: 1000

RESEARCHED IN: Neutral Tree

HITPOINTS: 1000

FUNCTION: Transfers gold to dungeon core or the nearest vault

A highly potent tool, the Aureae Monolith is built around the idea of giving you as much gold as possible. It operates in two distinct modes:

The first, passive mode causes all minions (including your own) that die within the vicinity of an Aureate Monolith to be instatly turned into golden statues as if they had been struck by the Blood Money spell, allowing you to transform any unwanted troublemakers into visually pleasing decorative objects.

The Aureate Monolith's secondary mode is activated by clicking it: This causes the Aureate Monolith to absorb all nearby sources of gold while also transfering it to your vaults; regardless of whether said gold comes in the form of ore veins, statues created by the blood money spell or the Aureate Monolith itself, or even gold stored within an enemy vault. However, using this secondary ability will destroy the Aureate Monolith, so it is best to used it in maximum profit-scenarios.

But be wary Underlord - the Aureate Monolith will not distinguish between friend or foe - if your own minions die near it, they will be permanently lost as its aura turns their flesh into gold. And unsurprisingly, you will not be able to convert enemy minions once they have become statues.

GOLD COST: 2500

RESEARCHED IN: Neutral Tree

HITPOINTS: 1000

FUNCTION: While standing, turns all dying minions nearby into golden statues. Can be clicked to activate its secondary mode, which will absorb all gold and golden statues from nearby tiles, but will also destroy the Aureate Monolith. The Aureate Monolith can not absorb fools' gold created by a transmutation potion.

Fire is a very beautiful thing - you set one and it starts spreading, expressing its almost child-like curiosity by embracing everything it comes across, and burning it down to a molten slag. With a bit of research and mana, you can build an Ember Rift, and give one of those adorable little flames a home in your dungeon.

Once constructed, the Ember Rift will summon the aptly-named Ember Demon into your dungeon, a being of pure fire that will happily will happily jump to and fro between your enemies while giving them a preview of the eventual heat death of the universe. As if that wasn't enough, should your enemies manage to extinguish your Ember Demon, the rift will simply produce a new one in as little as one minute, giving you an infinite supply of cheerful arsonists to throw against the enemy lines.

But as with all things, the Ember Rift has its drawbacks. Due to its high cost (both in mana and gold), and its deep position within the veins of evil, Ember Rifts usually will only see use in the later phases of the battle. Then, however, they will allow you to throw wave after wave of fiery attackers against you enemies - be it on their own, or as a disposable vanguard for your other minions.

GOLD COST: 5000

RESEARCHED IN: Wrath Tree

MANA LOCKED: 75

HITPOINTS 7500

FUNCTION: Spawns one Ember Demon. If the Ember Demon is killed, spawns another Ember Demon after 60 seconds

Most of the things you will find Underground are created and built by you, the Empire, or rival Underlords. But during your War for the Overworld, you will soon come across structures whose architecture befits neither of these factions, and whose builders have been lost to time.

The Gateways and Shrines which compose this category can be explained in very basic words: Capture them with your imps, and gain whatever advantage they may provide to you, be it additonal minions, infinite gold, or hardened pickaxes for your imps. It's not rocket science...whatever rockets may be.

Of course, the power which these structures hold are as coveted by you as by your enemies, and you should fully expect your foes to try and conquer them at every viable opportunity - an problem only amplified by the fact that many shrines and gateways are situated in strategically important locations, as if some sadistic higher power had intentionally put them there to encourage fighting over them.

One last thing Underlord - you can not destroy or sell shrines and gateways. These things have existed since the dawn of time and will likely exist until its end, with little you could hope to do about it. Hence, should you want to make sure that either of them remains yours, you will have to defend them.

Nice as it would be, your intelligent minions will not just magically pop up next to your dungeon core once you have built the rooms that attract them. You will first have to capture an underworld gateway, so they can magically pop out next to it, instead.

Though only the gods know how exactly the gateway manages to transport minions from all parts of the world and beyond to your dungeon, I personally have a theory according to which each of these gateways actually links to some sort of hellish employment agency. On the good side, this means you don't have to worry about any paperwork, which the agency should handle. On the bad side, each gateway will only allow a limited number of minions to enter before its pencil-pushers become overworked, and the stream of new employees ceases to flow (unless your minions leave or die, which frees up some space).

Long story short: If you want minions, capture a gateway. If you want more minions, capture more gateways. If you want to keep these minions, make sure to rap everyone over the knuckles who tries to conquer your gateways.

Oh, and before I forget: A gateway only allows intelligent minions to enter. For beast minions, you will have to build a beast den, and some minions can only be brought into your dungeon via rituals, potions, or the like.

FUNCTION: Allows intelligent minions to enter your dungeon. Increases soft unit-cap (if soft unit cap is full, minions may still enter but do so at an extremely slow rate). Gateways may or may not attract certain powerful Imperial units into your dungeon if some secret conditions are met....

Part of your role as an Underlord is to keep an eye on your territory at all times, be it to make sure that your minions are not doing anything stupid, or to prevent your enemies from sneakily capturing said territory. To help you with this task, you may captured the aptly-named perception shrine.

Apart from scaring the dear life out of ophthalmologists and optometrists, a perception shrine under you control will remove the fog of war over a large area around it, regardless of who actually owns said area. This makes perception shrines extremely useful for observing areas that are difficult to claim or defend, and as fate would have it, they`re also found in strategically important positions most of the time. In fact, perception shrines probably will be the most common shrines you will encounter under the earth.


FUNCTION: Removes fog of war from the surrounding area.

As it turns out, the originator of the popular pro-verb "Moeny doesn`t grow on trees" is a complete idiot. For even though it may not be trees on which it grows on, the aptly-named gold shrine can provide you will a literally infinite amount of gold.

Once you have captured the shrine, up to four of your own workers can happily mine away without ever depleting it, the only downside being that gathering gold from a gold shrine takes a bit longer than mining it from a regular gold vein.

But wealth attracts jealously, Underlord. Be aware that your enemies are very unlikely to sid idly by as you fill up vault after vault, and will do their worst to get the shrine into their own greedy hands. To their advantage, most gold shrines are positioned in places that are not particularly easy to defend, and massive battles have been fought out for the control of these plutonic wonders.

And the best of it? Even if your War for the Overworld should fail, you could still ravage the Imperial markets by causing a hyperinflation will all that gold.


FUNCTION: Can be mined by up to four workers for an endless supply of gold, but mining gold takes longer than from regular gold veins.

Mana is a very fickle resource, Underlord - thought it will automatically begin to regenerate mere seconds after you have casted a spell, excessive use of your magic may often leave you temporarily incapacitated, particularly if a large sum of your total mana is already locked by an abundance of workers, traps, or both.

To mitigate this issue, you may capture a mana shrine. Despite of their name, mana shrines to not actually affect your mana in any way (which shows that the ancients who named them were complete fools), but instead lower the amount of mana which you have to spend for spells, allowing you to cast more spells until you run out of juice.

This gift, together with the natural rarity of these shrines, makes them a very precious object to most Underlords - do what you can to capture one for yourself, and make sure that your enemies won't steal it straight from under your nose!

FUNCTION: Lowers mana cost of all spells by 40%

Though your Chunders and Augres will do their best to keep your foundry well-stocked with defense parts, the rate at which your minions can create these parts may be inadequate if you need to build very many defenses in very little time. Fortunately enough, the fully automatic manufacturing shrines you may find in the underworld can mitigate this problem.

Once you have captured a manufacturing shrine, it will begin to to mass-produce defense parts, and that at a much faster rate than many of your own workers could hope to achive. You can subsequently use these parts to build up or repair holes within your defensive lines without having to worry about running out of parts for the entire mess.

As you might expect, your enemies will be not overly happy about your limitless defensive resources. Ironic as it may sound, be prepared to defend your manufacturing shrines should your rivals set their eyes on them.

Oh, and be a bit careful when handling the shrine. It may have an inbuilt safeguard that stops the production of defense parts once it can not store any more of them, but malfunctioning defense shrines have threatened to cover the entire planet with defense parts on more than one occasion.

FUNCTION: Creates a defense part every fifteen seconds.

Much to the dislike of some Underlords, your workers are perfectly capable of tearing down enemy walls with nothing more than their puny little pickaxes. This process, however, does require very much time, and can be brought to a grinding halt should your enemies counteract it by having their own workers repair the walls from the other side, as repairing them is faster than breaking them.

To give your workers a bit of an edge in such scenarios, you may consider capturing a siege shrine. Each siege shrine under your control will magically enchance the tools of all your workers, allowing them to damage walls significantly faster than usual.

Sadly, the siege shrine only bolsters your workers should they "fight" walls. They will still get squashed by just about anything that remotely can be called a warrior, so you will have to protect them with proper minions while they breach the enemy walls.

FUNCTION: Increases attack power of workers against walls and fortified walls by 1500%

These shrines resemble the lecterns found in your archive and have a very similar function - minions can study the tomes and arcane scriptures found within to unlock new sins for you. Unlike the boring old bookcases in the archive, however, the research shrine is imbued with ancient magic that more or less directly transfers the knowledge its books and scriptures hold to the mind of your researchers, drastically increasing the speed at which they unlock new sins for you.

Although you naturally will have to capture such a research shrine before you can use it, the dramatic boost in research speed it can give you comes in very handy, particularly in the earlier moments of your campaign, where additional sins allow you to unlock better rooms and increase your mana pool.

FUNCTION: After being claimed, a single minion that can work in the archive can research new sins at the research shrine at 300% of its usual research speed.

You are not the first Underlord to have graced the Empire with his unholy presence, and in a rare moment of not being completely incompetent, they have constructed several subterranean bases and strongholds which you will have to raze during your War for the Overworld.

Much like in your own dungeon, imperial underground bases consist consist of various tunnels, caverns, and rooms. As the imperial architects do neither have the brains nor the talent to design their own rooms, the vast majority of rooms you may encounter in the dungeons of the humans and dwarves are little more than poorly-made copies of the rooms in your own arsenal. While a copyright lawsuit probably will do little to change this, it also means that you can capture almost all empire-owned rooms, and your workers will automatically redecorate those rooms so as to make them more pleasing to your metaphorical eyes.

There are, however, some structures unique to the Empire, all of whom are some sort of defense or trap. Though you can (and should) do nothing more than to destroy them, it is in your best interest to know what these defenses are, and what they can do.

Though it probably took them long enough to realize it, neither humans nor dwarves can move through solid rock. In other words, they need some kind of entrance into the underworld to fight against the Underlords.

While I can only assume that their initial paths into the underworld were little more than large holes in the ground, they eventually designed their own form of gateway. These structures seemingly make use of some sort of teleportation field, as they not only allow them to bring troops to the subterranean bases in their own realm, but also can be used to invade the realms of the Underlords themselves. But regardless of how they function, an imperial gateway inevitably means trouble.

It should be noted that Imperial Overworld Gateways come in two variatons: Regular gateways can be destroyed with sufficient tender treatment of your minions, making it impossible for your Imperial foes to send further reinforcements into the Underworld.

However, there also are some Overworld Gateways that can be claimed instead of being destroyed. Claimed Overworld Gateways will cease to sputter hostile Imperial soldiers, and will instead attract rogue Imperial minions into your dungeon that are all to happy to work for you - even if it means slaughtering their former comrades.


FUNCTION: Allows additional empire units to enter the underworld until destroyed or claimed. Claimed Overworld Gateways attract Imperial minions into your dungeon.

As the Empire largely has to rely on the permanently intoxicated dwarves when it comes to the construction of its defenses, it comes as no surprise that more complicated mechanisms like your own bombards are a very rare sight in its subterranean strongholds. Instead, the prime defense of imperial bases is the archaic ballista, an oversized crossbow shooting completely ordinary bolts.

Despite of the fact that its design is utterly outdated, the ballista nonetheless can do serious harm to your minions. Or rather, it probably could do harm to them if the empire`s strategists would ever have come up with the idea of setting them up in solid defense lines rather than placing them here and there as if they were mere decorative objects. As things stand, the empire`s ballistae are a nuissance to any proper fighting force, and only those of your minions that have already been seriously wounded by other causes will actually be killed by one of their bolts. Which you in turn can prevent by smashing them first.

FUNCTION: Basic ranged defense for Empire

As it turns out, making the central entrance to your underground fortress as broad as a barndoor holds several distinct disadvantages - it wastes space, takes longer to dig out and to fortify than a small one and, perhaps most importantly, allows all of your enemies to plainly march in with no worry in the world rather than having to make their way through a trap-riddled bottleneck.

And as it also turns out, the architects behind the empire`s dungeons had no bloody idea of what they were doing. Sadly for us, it appears that later imperial tacticians somehow got behind the fact that having a massive gap in your dungeon walls does not make defending it any easier, and decided to at least put a massive door in place to let friends in and keep enemies out.

These "Siege Doors" are massive enough to withstand a considerable amount of damage and will usually stall your progress for at least a few seconds. They only are a temporary obstruction however, and their sheer size means that you can have your entire army banging on them without things getting overly crowded.

Function: Very large, very durable gate. Looks impressive when intact, less impressive when destroyed.

One thing the Empire admittedly has over the Underlord is their ability to span subterranean chasms with their sturdy granite bridges, while your own ones can only be built over water and lava. Though their construction takes to long to use them as offensive instruments, you will have no other choice rather than to cross the empire`s own granite bridges and walk straight into their defenses should you wish to eradicate the base which they connect to the other side of the chasm.

While you may be able to capture imperial granite bridges, they are to sturdy for you magic to break them down, and thus you can not sell them.

FUNCTION: Bridge that can span over chasms.

After the previous wars for the overworld, the imperial arcanists eventually had the bright idea of trying to keep out the Underlords themselves rather than trying to withstand their armies of minions. After years of research and presumably many hilarious deaths over botched designs, the screeching old banshees finally unveiled a set of arcane inhibitors - massive crystals suspended in mid-air that emit a powerful magical field.

Each arcane inhibitor will prevent your or other Underlords from manifesting your will in a specific area within the empire. These area can be large or small, with some inhibitors protecting entire provinces from your wrath, while others may only cover a single room within a fortress.

For all of its mystical powers, these arcane inhabitors have one crucial design flaw - their protective field does not protect them. In other words, there`s absolutely nothing apart from the the weak regular imperial defenses that prevents you from smashing an inhibitor, pillage whatever it was supposed to shield from you, and have a good chuckle on your way out.

FUNCTION: Prevents you from manifesting your power in certain areas of Kairos.

This category contains all structures that can not be placed in the other categories.

These ancient doors can be found scattered around the Underworld. Imbued with powerful magic, they are by all means indestructable, and only creatures that are being possessed by the spirit of an extremely powerful being (such as an Underlord) can pass through them.

Those Possession Doors that are controlled by a specific Underlord can only be passed by those minions he or she possesses, while those doors that either are controlled by the Empire or are no longer under the control of any master can be passed through by any possessed minion.

Recent developments also have produces advanced possession doors that that will make it impossible for you to leave the tiny mind of the minion you possess after you have walked through them, and will only allow you to return to your own ethereal former if you have either left through the same door you came from, or moved through another possession door.

Function: Only allows those minions possessed by an Underlord to pass through them.

Cost: N/A (Can only be placed in the map editor)

Although it's an absolute mess to clean carpets from all the blood you will spill on them, many Imperial commanders still insist on laying down large stretches of this fabric in their subterranean bases.

Although their function is entirely decorative in nature, carpets tiles resemble regular room tiles in that you can not claim them one by one. Instead, you will have to claim the entire length on the carpet.

For reasons even I do not entirely know, you can not sell (and hence not remove) carpet tiles. It seems that the dark gods insist on the maintenance of certain aesthethic standards.

FUNCTION: Looks vaguely pretty. Can be claimed by workers like regular room tiles, but can not be sold.

All icons in this guide are taken straight from War for the Overworld and thus are property of Subterranean Games.

The author of this guide takes no responsibility for any cases of hemophilia, halitosis, OCD, or other mental or physical harm potentially resulting from reading this guide. For further information, consult your mentor.