Dungeon bosses
Every dungeon floor hides a key room, and something in it holds the key. Until that thing is dead the transporter in the access room stays sealed and there is no way down.
Which thing it is changes. Each dungeon style keeps a pool of key-holders
in dungeons.yml, and a floor draws one from whichever entries its depth - and
the size of the room the layout happened to hand it - allow. Two runs down the
same dungeon rarely meet the same warden twice, and none of them are called the
same thing: every entry carries a pool of names and rolls one on the spot.
The roster
Dungeon: Ruins ships with eight.
| Floors | Base | Scale | What it does | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rotted Marksman | 1-3 | Zombie | 2.5x | Fast arrows that hurt, and not much health behind them |
| Rotted Bulwark | 1-3 | Zombie | 2.5x | The same silhouette in green leather, twice the health, half the sting |
| Warden of the Ruins | 1+ | Wither skeleton | 1.4x | The original: telegraphed lunges and a spellcaster’s brain |
| The Hollow Choir | 2+ | Vex | 2.5x | Barely hits. Never alone |
| Aetherium Revenant | 2+ | Husk | 2.0x | Aetherium plate and a wound that keeps closing |
| Hexrot Matron | 3+ | Witch | 2.0x | Potions, and cave spiders to carry them |
| Rustward Sentinel | 3+ | Iron golem | 2.0x | Immovable, and it hits like the building falling on you |
| Echo of the Deep | 4+ | Warden | 1.0x | Exactly what you think. Halls only |
The shallow pair
Rotted Marksman and Rotted Bulwark are the same creature read two ways: a zombie the height of the doorway, holding a bow it should not be able to use. The Marksman looses an arrow every two and a half seconds for real damage and falls over if you reach it. The Bulwark wears dyed leather, shoots half as hard and half as often, and simply does not go down - and it calls up three lesser zombies at a time to keep you honest while it takes its time.
Both are floors one to three, which is where the design starts: a floor-one party should meet something it can plainly kill.
The Hollow Choir
A vex two and a half times the size it has any right to be. It hits for almost nothing. What it does is summon two ordinary vex and let them do the work - and when both of them fall, it breaks off the fight entirely, drifts back to the spot it was standing when the room opened, waits about four seconds, and calls up two more. Killing its escort is not progress. You have to go through it.
Aetherium Revenant
The Aetherium line turns up down here too, in full plate at twice height. It does not do anything clever. It regenerates a little over a point of health a second, forever, which means a party that cannot commit real damage will never finish it.
Hexrot Matron
A witch at double scale, with the vanilla witch brain left completely intact - so it drinks, throws, and retreats the way witches do, and cave spiders arrive every eighteen seconds to keep you from chasing.
The heavy two
Rustward Sentinel and Echo of the Deep only appear in rooms with the floor space to hold them - 900 blocks of floor for the Sentinel, 1,400 for the Echo. If a floor’s key room is a corridor, they are not in the draw at all.
The Sentinel is an iron golem, made hostile and made enormous, with full knockback immunity. The Echo is a warden, which needs no further description except to say it does not appear before floor four and it pays out half again what anything else does.
How they scale
Whatever the draw, the numbers in dungeons.yml are only a starting point.
Every boss is scaled again at spawn:
- +10% health and damage per floor below the first.
- Link class: calm 1.0x, chaotic 1.4x, erratic 1.8x.
- +5% health per party member past the first - so five people make the fight longer, not deadlier.
A Rotted Bulwark on calm floor one is 260 health. The same creature on erratic floor five with a full party is a little over 1,000.