Saving one world is well and good. Saving the universe is even better. But what if we could switch between these realms on a whim? What if our journey could change from old-style high fantasy RPGs to more casual “you all meet in a tavern” games? That’s what video games are for, after all.
So why don’t we play a video game inside a video game? That’s what Brown Dust 2 is.
In Brown Dust 2, you are essentially a character playing a video game. In this meta-tastic world, you’ll meet companions from across several worlds and different genres, eat disgusting slime to level up, experience both touching drama storylines and more down-to-earth RPG hijinks, and generally have a grand time hopping from game cartridge to game cartridge.
And did I mention the graphics? They’re gorgeous, so much so that I don’t mind my phone heating up. Those looking to join this melting pot of adventure can hop in on both the Google Play Store and the App Store.
Brown Dust 2 has a bit of everything for everybody, but its core gameplay is highly tactical, almost puzzle-like battles that will test your ability to plan and envision the battlefield from different angles. While veterans of RPGs will no doubt take to Brown Dust 2 quickly, players new to the genre may feel a bit lost as it’s admittedly a lot to get used to in a short time. Either way, if you want to go over and clarify the basics or just want a running start to the game, this Brown Dust 2 beginner’s guide is for you!
In this Brown Dust 2 beginner’s guide, we’ll be covering:
- The two UI’s (yes, I know)
- Character basics – stats, elements, abilities.
- The intricacies of the battle system.
- How to strengthen your husbandos and waifus.
- Where and how to gather resources – new characters included!
- Making the most out of Brown Dust 2’s gacha system.
A Foreword – Getting Used to the UI
I tend to reserve UI guides for MMO-style games because God knows those have incredibly messy interfaces with so much information overload. However, because Brown Dust 2 has two layers of UI, I thought I should lead with that first.
The two layers of UI are what I call the main and in-game interfaces. The main interface is where you interact with everything on a “real world” level – these include missions, achievements, rolling for characters, participating in events, settings, and so on. The second interface is the in-game one, which takes place inside the vidya you and Elin are playing. The in-game interface is where you can access your characters, inventory, and formation.
Initially, you’ll be in the in-game interface. To return to the main interface, tap on the “home” icon on the upper right of the in-game interface.
To go back to the in-game interface and continue your journey, tap on the back button to the left of your username.
Reading Your Characters
Character gachas have a ton of cute (and hot) husbandos and waifus to pull for, but you need to understand what you’re getting into. By being able to read their stats, you’ll be able to determine who you should gun for and what they can do!
Related: Brown Dust 2 Tier List: A Complete Ranking of All Characters
Quick Tips:
- Characters have four basic traits – they have stats, they have elements, they have a costume, and they have unique exploration abilities.
- Stats in Brown Dust 2 are minimalistic and easy to read.
- Elements follow a rock-paper-scissors formula: Fire -> Wind -> Water -> Fire, and Light <-> Dark.
- You get bonus damage for attacking an element you’re strong against, and a damage penalty when attacking enemies with the element you’re weak to.
- Costumes unlock more skills for a character. If you’re just after looks, you can swap to whatever costume you have available – it makes no difference.
- Characters have unique exploration abilities that can help you in your journey; these can range from item crafting to material gathering to plain, reliable healing.
Basic Stats
Each character in Brown Dust 2 has a few basic stats. Fortunately, Brown Dust 2 has a minimalistic approach to stats, doing away with 2-page long stat sheets or stats that don’t do anything at all. To view a character’s stats, go to their page, then tap the plus button beside their combat power.
The stats in Brown Dust 2 are:
- HP – hit points. How much punishment a character can take before they get knocked out, or fatigued in official terminology.
- ATK – attack power. This covers both physical and magical attack, but note that bonuses to either physical or magical ATK exist.
- Crit Rate and Crit DMG – the chance to land an extra-strong attack and the amount of bonus damage said attack gains.
- DEF – defense. Physical damage mitigation. This is shown as a percentage.
- Magic Resist – magic defense. Magic damage mitigation. This is also shown as a percentage.
- (Element) DMG – bonus damage done by this character’s attacks of that element.
- (Element) Resist – damage mitigation against that specific element.
Elements
Yes, there’s a rock-paper-scissors elemental system in Brown Dust 2.
By attacking an enemy with an element they’re weak to, they’ll take more damage, and by blocking attacks with characters of resistant elements, you can mitigate the damage done to your team.
- Fire is strong against wind, wind is strong against water, and water is strong against fire.
- Light and dark are both strong against and weak against each other.
You get a damage bonus for attacking foes weak to that character’s element, and a damage malus for attacking foes that have an elemental advantage over that character.
Costumes
A Brown Dust 2 character’s fighting abilities are tied to their costumes.
Each costume gives a character a unique skill, and you can use them interchangeably. We’ll discuss costumes in more depth in the “Mastering the Battlefield” and “Dusty Gacha 101” sections. Just know that if you get a costume, you get the character, and the choice of which costume you wear on the field and info screen is purely cosmetic.
Abilities
Most characters also have an ability that can help you in exploring. Whether it’s stealing from NPCs, cooking ingredients into a possibly edible mass, or detecting treasure, these abilities are sure to come in handy during your adventure across worlds.
Abilities aren’t free. Each one of them consumes a variable amount of ability points, with stronger abilities tending to cost more. These points can be found in the upper middle of the screen – it’s the rightmost resource. Ability points can be regenerated by using items.
Some abilities only become available in certain situations, such as Rigenette’s steal ability. To use these, you’ll need to get into the right position – check the ability itself for more details. For abilities that need to be selected to be used, tap the star icon to the lower right while you’re in the in-game interface. Note that a character does not need to be in your active party to use their ability!
We’ll discuss abilities in-depth later, but you should know that higher-rarity characters have better abilities than lower-rarity ones.
Mastering the Battlefield
Now that you know how to read your characters, it’s time to take them to the battlefield. Brown Dust 2 utilizes a tile and position-based approach to combat and learning its intricacies outside of the tutorials (which, let’s be honest, is just the game telling you straight-up what to do) is important if you want to triumph over stronger opponents in harsher areas.
Quick Tips:
- Combat is team turn-based; the player always gets the first turn.
- You can drag and drop characters on the turn order list to sequence your attacks. Properly sequenced actions are the key to a good alpha strike!
- Combat occurs on three lanes. You can freely move your characters around on your turn to avoid enemy attacks and retarget skills.
- Characters have three attacks by default – a normal attack, a knockback, and a skill. These attacks have their own targeting logic based on the character and their weapons.
- Characters will prioritize attacking enemies on their own lane. If there are no enemies on that lane, they’ll look for the next closest foe.
- Skills are powerful moves that have both a skill point cost and a cooldown.
- Skill points are shared between your characters. You gain skill points by using normal attacks and knockback and spend them via skills.
- Skill points persist between battles.
- When using a skill, the game will show the final computed value. This does not account for defense, resistance, deviation, and other extenuating factors.
- A character can use all the skills you’ve unlocked if you have multiple costumes for them. These skills do not share a cooldown.
- The tiles beside a character’s skills and attacks show their AOE. The central tile is the main target.
- Hitting the same foe multiple times in the same turn builds up chain stacks. Characters with chain stacks take extra damage per hit based on the number of stacks. Stacks reset at the end of a turn.
- If a fight goes on too long, Death Time activates. All characters gain a massive ATK buff and a def/mdef debuff during this time.
- You can tap on an enemy to see its moves as well as what it plans to do during the AI’s turn.
- You can tap on the buff/debuff bubbles on top of a character’s portrait in the turn order to read what each of them does.
Combat Flow
Combat in Brown Dust 2 moves in the form of alternating turns between you and your foes.
During your turn, you can tell your characters what to do by either tapping on their chibis on the battlefield or their portraits on the left side. You can also drag and reposition them on the different lanes (more on that in a bit) to affect their targeting. Finally, you can drag them up and down on the turn order on the left to change who goes first – the topmost character will be the first to perform their action, then everyone else follows in descending order. Success in Brown Dust 2 isn’t just about having the biggest caveman numbers but also creating a battle plan that capitalizes on all your heroes’ strengths.
While Brown Dust 2 rewards well-planned alpha strikes, you won’t always get to wipe the enemy team on your first turn. Selecting a character on the battlefield not only shows you which enemy they will attack via the green line but also shows which characters will attack them via the red line. Note that this line will also show if you will deal lethal damage to a foe!
Once you’re satisfied with your plan, execute it by tapping the End Turn button. After your characters move, it will be the AI’s turn to attack your characters; after that, it will be your turn again.
Lanes and Attacks
Brown Dust 2’s battles are heavily influenced by the lanes of combat. Both sides have three lanes with four tiles. As you cannot manually target attacks in Brown Dust 2, you’ll need to master the logic behind lane targeting.
Each character has three actions available to them in combat. These are the normal attack, knockback, and skill.
If no orders are given to a character, they will use their normal attack during turn resolution. Normal attacks simply make a character hit a foe on their lane with their weapon. The range of this attack largely depends on a character’s weapon: melee fighters tend to attack the first foe in their lane, while archers like Rigenette will fire over the first enemy, allowing them to strike the enemy’s backrow. You can see the range of a character’s normal attack above the attack damage. “Very front” means the first enemy in their lane while “Skip” means they’ll ignore the first enemy in favor of striking the next one behind it.
Note that if there are no enemies left on that character’s lane, they’ll attack the next closest enemy (horizontal rows are given priority). Normal attacks are a default action – if you haven’t given a character any orders, they’ll use their normal attack at the end of your turn.
The second skill that all characters have is knockback. Ordering a character to use their knockback attack will cause them to push the nearest enemy on their lane back by one tile. The direction of knockback can differ from character to character; refer to the arrow on their knockback skill to see which way they’ll push an enemy back.
Knockbacks do a piddling one damage, but their real purpose is to compromise your enemy’s formation and allow for more effective, devastating AOE. Note that knockbacks follow the same targeting rule as their character’s normal attack!
Last is their personal skill. These are special moves that can vary from just dealing a lot of damage to buffing oneself and allies or even inflicting a slew of nasty debuffs on your foes. All this power isn’t free though. Skills have both an SP (skill point) cost and a cooldown.
Your skill point gauge can be found at the bottom of the screen. These skill points are shared across the entire team. Fortunately, generating skill points is easy – normal attacks and knockbacks generate one skill point, and with a full team of five members, you can quickly refill the pool. Skill points persist across battles.
Brown Dust 2 also thankfully helps demystify the skill system – skills that use a percentage of ATK for calculation will show you the final result.
In the image below, you can see that Lathel’s The Sword of Fresh Blood skill is going to deal exactly 126 * 2 damage. Most other games would tell you that it would do “150% ATK twice”, but here, we can see exactly what 150% of Lathel’s attack is – in this case, it’s 126. By knowing the exact number that skill math results in, it becomes much easier to plan when and where to use skills. Do note that this isn’t an absolute value – it just shows the basic number you would get by multiplying ATK with the skill modifier; it doesn’t account for DEF, deviation, weaknesses, and resistance.
One more thing about skills – you can use every skill that you have a costume for. This means that if you have all of a character’s costumes, you’ll have a ton of skills at your disposal. These skills also have individual cooldowns, though they all eat skill points. Temper your fury with efficiency!
AOEs
Some attacks additionally have an area of effect, also known as AOE. To see if an attack has an AOE, refer to the tiles pictured to the right of the attack, where the highlighted center tile is the center of the attack.
To illustrate the point, here’s White Reaper Justia’s Quarter Moon Jab skill. If you look at the AOE squares, you’ll notice that it strikes up to two targets – the main target itself and any enemy standing right behind it!
Chain Damage
Brown Dust 2 also has something of a combo system in play via the chain damage system.
Whenever a character is attacked, they gain a chain stack, and they gain one additional stack each time they get hit in the same turn, up to a maximum of 20 stacks. For each chain stack a character has, they take additional damage from attacks equal to the number of chain stacks they have – and yes, this counts multi-hitting attacks.
Chain stacks are reset at the end of the turn.
Death Time
Battles are expected to be quick, brutal, and savage affairs in Brown Dust 2, but there’s always an exception. If a battle drags on for long enough, you’ll enter sudden death, or Death Time in official terminology.
Death Time is indicated by a red skull status effect in the upper left corner. While Death Time is active, all characters gain 100% attack and lose 20% defense and magic defense every 2 turns.
Battlefield Analysis
Wailing on your enemies is all well and good, but sometimes you’ll face mighty enemies that can’t be felled with brute force alone. If you ever find yourself with your back to the wall against a powerful foe, it may be time to read up on what they can do.
Tap on an enemy when you’re giving orders to view a list of its abilities, just like with your guys. You’ll also be able to see what it plans to do during your next turn – this is pretty much set in stone. Forewarned is forearmed, and knowing what to expect from your foes and taking countermeasures against them will help you greatly in the battles to come.
When you tap on a character, you can also view what status effects are affecting it. Tap any of the icons to bring up a panel detailing what that status does.
Practicum
One could make an argument that Brown Dust 2’s combat is part RPG battle, part puzzle. Let’s put together all we learned to create an optimized battle flow for our team. For a controlled environment, let’s take the Knight of Blood default team: Lathel, Justia, Fred, Gynt, and Lisianne. This will also assume that Lathel and Justia are at level 20 as you get them as permanent characters. I also had Justia’s White Reaper costume at +2, so I’ll avoid using that skill.
This battle will take place against the Strengthened Undead by the river.
From the get-go, we can see that the Strengthened Undead is going to use Heavy Blow, a powerful t-shaped AOE that will devastate the front row. To counter this, I’ll disperse my units so nobody else gets caught in the AOE. Because of how lane targeting works, someone must tank the hit, so I’ll move Fred to the front as he’s got the most HP and defense out of all these characters.
Fred’s going to take just over half his health in damage, but he’ll live. Now, I need to plan my counterattack. The diamond of zombies in the middle is a tempting target, so I’ll lead with Fred using his knockback to force the 2nd row zombie back to make a neat row. I’ll follow that up with Justia’s Lunar Halo Slit – since she’s a Light element character, that should pretty much guarantee that the 3rd row gets wiped out.
It’s a shame that Lathel’s The Sword of Fresh Blood won’t hit any additional targets, but with luck, it will kill the left row zombie. Fred will be cutting it close, so I want to get rid of as many targets as quickly as I can.
Gynt’s Jump Shot skill provides a lot of frontloaded firepower at the cost of decreasing his attack for 4 turns afterward – which is fine, as it will kill the zombie to the right of the giant one. Finally, Lisianne can just use her normal attack against the giant zombie.
I end my turn and this is the result.
I didn’t get the kill on the left lane zombie and the middle big one is still alive. Fortunately, though, Fred took a lot less damage than expected. It’s time to mop up – Gynt will hopefully be able to roll high enough on his attack to kill the left lane zombie, and since the Strengthened Zombie’s Heavy Blow is on cooldown, I can move everyone else to the center lane to deal with the leftovers – chain damage will help with that.
Success!
This isn’t the only way to play the game though. Over time, you’ll develop your strategies and tactics depending on your favorite characters. Remember – there’s no time limit between turns, so take your sweet time and try to take out as many foes as you can on your first move!
Bulking Up Your Roster
Okay, maybe not literally. But your heroes do need to get stronger. Tactics will take you far, but you still need the raw strength to push those plans forward.
Quick Tips:
- If you don’t know where to get more of a resource, you can tap the “item location” button to find out where to farm it.
- Leveling up your characters provides a solid foundation and will help them keep up with tougher foes.
- You gain experience by defeating foes and eating slime.
- You can return to any pack you’ve already completed to grind on monsters. Tap on the current pack to the lower right of the main interface to switch out.
- You can activate auto-hunt while in a safe or cleared zone if you plan to grind for a while.
- Characters must be ascended every 20 levels. Each ascension gives them a star, meaning that rarer characters have higher level caps.
- Each character has slots for five pieces of gear. Gear can be acquired from chests or more commonly through crafting.
- Crafting has deviation – crafters will always make standard gear with a chance of making higher quality items.
- Gear can be upgraded until +9; each upgrade level increases its base stats.
- At levels 3, 6, and 9, a piece of equipment rolls for a random substat. These substats have letter grades which indicate how high their roll was.
- You can refine an item to reroll its substat letter grades. Only the highest level of total substats will be applied.
- Every time a character uses an ability, they gain some ability experience. Get enough experience and you can level that ability up.
- Skills can be upgraded by pulling duplicates of a character’s costume.
- Every character you get contributes a minor passive buff to your entire roster. Special trios of characters yield bigger buffs.
The Item Location Button
Before we begin, you should familiarize yourself with the “item location” button. This can be found at the bottom of an item’s info panel.
If ever you find yourself in need of a resource and don’t know where to get more, you can tap that button.
Leveling Up – Grinding
Levels! The bread and butter of most RPGs. The higher a character’s level, the better their base stats. While levels by themselves won’t give you the strength to really shine, they form the basis of your strength and are a deterministic way to get stronger. Pump those levels anytime you can.
Gaining experience points is done in two ways. The first way is to bring a character to battle. Have them survive until the end of the encounter and bam, free experience. While you get some experience for your cast during a pack’s story quest, it’s more efficient to breeze through the story and then return to the pack to do some good old-fashioned grinding. This way, you also get crafting and cooking materials that can be used to bulk your characters up even further. You can switch packs at any time via the main interface – just tap the current pack on the lower right to bring up the pack shop menu.
If you plan to leave the game running, it may be a good idea to turn on auto-hunt. This can be turned on by tapping the sword button at the bottom right of the in-game menu. Be careful though, as the auto-combat AI isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. Expect losses!
Do note that you must be in a safe zone (towns will do) or a cleared battle zone with activated magic circles (meaning you’re done with the story quests) to turn this on!
Leveling Up – Slime
The other, more practical way is to use slimes.
Slimes come in three variants: yellow, blue, and red. The higher the quality of the slime, the more experience it gives to the character that “interacts” with it, with blue as the most common and red as the best.
You can get slime from completing story quests, but a far more reliable method is to grind for them via the “Path to Adventure” pack. This pack becomes available after clearing the “Mist Man” pack, which is the third story pack.
Ascension
It would be great if you could level to max off the bat, wouldn’t it? That’s why you can’t. That’s where ascension comes in.
Every 20 levels, you need to ascend a character to raise their level cap. To ascend a character, you’ll need a certain number of rank-up stars which you can get by grinding on monsters.
Ascension is intimately tied to a character’s rarity. Each ascension rank gives them one star, and each character can only have a limited number of stars. Thus, common characters have a level cap of 60, and so on.
Equipment and Equipment Crafting
Each character can have up to five pieces of equipment to help boost their stats to the next level. The five slots are for a weapon, body armor, headgear, a trinket, and gloves.
Equipment can be acquired from chests, or more commonly, by crafting. Some characters also have exclusive equipment which can (usually) only be acquired from gacha. Exclusive equipment is very powerful, but as the name suggests, they can only be equipped by the character they belong to.
To craft gear, just use the ability screen – tap the star on the bottom right if you forgot – and select someone with the Gear Craft ability. If you didn’t roll any crafters, don’t panic as Fred from “Knight of Blood” will suffice, though you’ll want a better crafter down the road.
Making gear is simple – give the crafter the items they need and voila, a brand-new item. Note that there is a modicum of randomness: while a crafter will always produce an “average” quality item, there’s a chance for them to create better, higher quality gear that has higher base stats.
Crafting materials can be acquired by beating up monsters. If you’re lucky enough to have recruited someone with the alchemy ability, they can synthesize higher grade materials for you.
The higher the ability level of your crafter, the better the stuff they’ll be able to make. While you shouldn’t break your back trying to make the Very Best™ equipment at the start of the game, do try to at least keep your main team up to speed and fully geared in all their slots. Equipment really makes a difference!
Upgrading and Refining Gear
Wearing your freshly crafted gear is a good start, but it’s only the beginning.
There are two ways to upgrade your gear. The first is upgrading. Each upgrade raises the stat bonus that a piece of equipment imparts. Upgrading items is simple – pay some gold and pray to RNG that the upgrade succeeds. Luckily, you can press the “repeat” button on the lower panel to automatically attempt X refinements, though you may find that your gold purse is significantly lighter when you’re through. As a general rule, the rarer a piece of equipment is, the lower its refinement success rate!
The next step is refining. At certain thresholds (+3, +6, and +9), an upgraded item does two rolls – one to determine what substat it gets, and the other to determine how much of that substat it gets. The quality of substat rolls is represented by a letter grade, with C as the lowest and S as the highest.
It ain’t much, but it’s honest work.
While you can’t reroll what substat an item got, you can reroll low threshold rolls. This is done via the refining system, which lets you reroll all three of the letter grades you got – hopefully into something better this time. Refining only keeps the best total result across all three substat slots. If, for example, you have B-A-B and roll A-B-B, you won’t keep the new rolls as the game calculates its value to be equivalent to the previous one. If, however, you roll S-A-B, your current B-A-B will be overwritten by the S-A-B as it’s better.
Refining costs refinement powder per attempt, which you get by smashing equipment that you’ve crafted. Finally, a use for all those regular-grade items.
As a new player, I’d advise against refining this early in the game – you’re going to be replacing your equipment as soon as your crafter reaches a new tier. It’s better to hold out until you hit a brick wall in progression or get some good equipment. That said if you’re lucky enough to pull an SSR character’s SSR exclusive gear, refine away!
Honing Your Abilities
Yes, we covered abilities in the character section. However, leveling these abilities is also a way to get stronger – you find more materials, cook better food, and revive people with more health, for starters!
Each time a character uses an ability, it gains a bit of experience. Get enough experience and you can advance that ability via skill book, whereupon it goes back down to 0% experience.
Note that ability enhancement limits are tied to rarity, so prioritize your high-rarity crafters!
Costumes and Skills
The question “Can I level up my skills in Brown Dust 2?” has probably crossed your mind at this point. The answer is yes, but you may not like the method.
Unlike leveling up your abilities, upgrading character skills is dependent on your gacha luck. To upgrade a character’s skill, you’ll need to pull a duplicate of that skill’s costume. Skills can be upgraded up to +5.
Once you have a duplicate of a costume (also known as a design), just tap on that character’s skill in their info panel to start the upgrade process. You’ll need to pay a small sum of gold to perform the enhancement.
Upgraded skills are great because not only do they have bigger numbers, but they also tend to have reduced cooldowns. On the downside, the difficulty of finding duplicates makes raising skill levels more of a problem for your SSR characters.
Collection Buffs
Just having characters makes everyone ever so slightly stronger. This is manifested as your collection buff, which you view via collection -> character on the main menu.
Each individual character contributes a small number of stats to everyone else; the rarer the character, the bigger the buff they give, though even SSRs will only contribute 0.24%. You can get bigger buffs by having trios of characters, which can be viewed in the same menu. And yes, these buffs stack with each other.
Gathering Other Resources
Thanks to the “item location” button, you now know where to get most of the stuff you’ll need for strengthening your characters, crafting their gear, and honing their abilities. But what about other stuff that’s not covered by that – things like gold, dias, and even new characters?
Quick Tips:
- Check back with pubs in the packs you’ve already unlocked. Characters will sometimes show up in these pubs, and these characters can be recruited via contracts.
- You can exchange 10 3* contracts for 1 4* one at the shop, and 10 4* contracts for a 5* one.
- Do your daily and weekly quests as dailies give 60 dias and weeklies give 200.
- Check bulletin boards in completed packs for some quick quests that reward gold.
- Finds and chests are treasures that can be found in the wild. Finds are denoted by blue sparks, give common materials, and respawn. Chests give dias and rarer fare like gear but don’t respawn.
- Every achievement you earn gives you some achievement experience. Achievement levels give out good sums of dias and gold.
- There are two battle passes in the game – the newbie pass and the regular battle pass.
- Do all the newbie pass quests over 7 days to get a ton of free resources, including recruitment tickets, dias, contracts, and more.
- You can buy the paid version of the battle pass for 1000 dias.
Pub Recruitment
Certain packs have pubs, which are great not only for getting drunk but also for finding new companions.
When visiting a pub, keep an eye out for potential recruitable companions, who you can identify via the star on their head. These mercenaries can be negotiated with if you have enough contracts matching that character’s rarity. Keep an eye out for characters whose costumes you want to upgrade.
If you find yourself drowning in 3* contracts, you can head to the shop in the main interface to exchange them for higher rarity ones. 10 3* contracts will net you a single 4* contract, and 10 4* contracts will get you a 5* one.
Pub mercenaries refresh every half hour, but you can also pay diamonds to the innkeeper to fast-forward the timer.
Missions
Missions in Brown Dust 2 are divided into dailies and weeklies. They can be accessed on the lower panel of the main interface.
All you need to do is complete the listed tasks, and you get the prizes on the left side. Do note that as you complete missions, the bar on top will fill up. At certain thresholds, you can claim a chest from that bar – this is very important as the daily activity bar gives 60 dias, while the weekly one gives 200!
Bulletin Boards
Every RPG has people putting up a board for chores they don’t want to do. Luckily for us, doing these chores is a quick affair. And we get paid, too, so that’s nice.
Most settlements in main story packs have a bulletin board that becomes active once that pack’s main quest has been completed. Bulletin board quests vary from pack to pack, but all of them are easy to do, and you get some gold for doing them.
You can only accept a limited number of bulletin board quests per real life day.
Finds and Chests
While exploring the world, you’ll occasionally come across treasure. This comes in two forms – finds and chests.
Finds are indicated by glowing blue sparks. You can collect these just by walking over or near them. Finds give out common loot depending on the pack they’re found in – the ones in Lugo Village (“Knight of Blood” pack) tend to give out cooking ingredients, for example. While finds are nothing fantastic, they can save you the effort of gathering common items. What’s more, they replenish over time!
Treasure chests, on the other hand, are a one-time deal. These containers hold valuable loot – dias, gear, leveling materials, and such – but once you open them, they’re gone forever. Still, the prizes they contain will be invaluable to your quest, so open them up whenever you see them!
Achievements
You may have noticed the achievement popup appearing at the top of the screen while playing Brown Dust 2. That’s not just to tickle your dopamine receptors as you can get rewards based on the number of achievements you’ve unlocked.
Each achievement you get is worth a certain amount of experience; get enough experience and your achievement level will increase, allowing you to redeem a good amount of both dias and gold!
To view your achievements and claim your rewards, head to the achievement menu at the bottom of the main interface.
Battle Passes
Of course, there’s a battle pass. It’s accessible via the left side of the main interface.
New players, take heed: there are two passes in this menu. One of them is the newbie pass, exclusive to new players, and will give you a hefty amount of slimes, recruitment tickets, contracts, dias, and more. Be sure to complete all the quests over the seven-day starter period!
The other is the standard free/paid battle pass; naturally, the paid pass gives better rewards. However, do note that you can buy the premium pass for 1000 dias.
Both of these passes require you to complete missions, so be sure to check the menu often to see what you need to do to get those tasty, tasty prizes.
Dusty Gacha 101
A dia saved is a dia earned, and in Brown Dust 2, you need to be careful where and when you spend your dias. To that end, let’s talk about the gacha system.
Quick Tips:
- There are multiple limited banners and one standard banner (Integrated Draw) in Brown Dust 2.
- Limited banners let you draw once per day for 90 dias.
- Pulling on a limited banner nets you draw points exclusively for that banner. At 200 draw points, you can exchange for that banner’s featured costume/equipment.
- Once again, draw points are not shared between limited banners.
- Draw points vanish at the end of a limited banner. Any unspent draw points become Powders of Hope, which can be spent in the shop.
- Getting a costume unlocks that character permanently. There is no such thing as a “base” character to whom you equip those costumes.
- Brown Dust 2 lets you perform infinite 10-pull rerolls with a guaranteed SSR character and equipment until you decide you like the result. Use this infinite reroll to pick out a great starting character like Alec or Justia as well as their gear if you’re patient enough.
Banners
There are multiple banners in Brown Dust 2, and knowing which is which can help you ration your dias better.
First off, there’s the standard banner. This banner gives out both SSR characters and gear. Fittingly enough, it’s called the Integrated Draw banner.
Next are the limited banners. As of writing (July 2023), any banner that isn’t Integrated Draw is a limited banner. All of these banners are found above Integrated Draw, so it’s hard to miss them.
There are limited banners for both characters (costumes) and gear. Again, as of writing, the limited character banner will only give costumes, while the limited gear banner will only give equipment. Limited banners also feature a rate-up on their cover costume or equipment; if you roll an SSR on them, there’s a much higher chance that it will be the featured costume or equipment.
One more thing about limited banners – you can do a discounted pull on them once a day, although it’s only one pull. Said pull only costs 90 dias compared to 200 for a regular pull, so who knows? Maybe you’ll get lucky.
Look for the encircled phrase in the image above to see how long a limited banner will run.
Pity and Draw Points
Next is pity. Each time you pull on a limited banner, you accumulate draw points. Once you hit 200 draw points, you can exchange them for the featured costume or equipment on a limited banner.
Do note that draw points are exclusive to their banners; if there are two limited banners and you pull 100 on one of them, you’ll still have zero draw points on the second banner!
Draw points do not persist beyond their banner. Once their banner is up, any draw points you had left will be converted into Powder of Hope. This means that if you really want a limited costume or equipment, you’ll have to pull and pull hard.
Powder of Hope can be traded with Roche at the shop (main interface) for certain costumes and other goods.
Costumes and Gacha
There’s a lot of pomp and flair with Brown Dust 2’s gacha system, so it’s easy to gloss over the difference between characters and costumes. Essentially, there are only a few characters in Brown Dust 2. Where they differ is their costumes, which serve as alternate modes for that character. By swapping out a costume, you can change a character’s personal skill – this makes a very big difference!
It’s also important to note that if you pull a costume for a character you don’t have yet, you will get that character. There’s no “base” character form that you first need to get before you can equip costumes. For example, if you get Justia’s White Reaper costume off the bat, she becomes a permanent companion from that point on, albeit restricted to only using the White Reaper’s skill. Remember that a character can use the skills of every costume you’ve collected, so costume hunting for your favorites is a must-do!
Note that you’ll get quite a few costumes (and characters) just by playing through the story – Lathel will join you in his Medicinal Herb Tracker costume once you complete the tutorial, while White Reaper Justia will follow soon after.
Infinite Draw
Brown Dust 2 has a unique F2P and newbie-friendly feature in its Infinite Draw mechanic.
After you’ve progressed in the story far enough that Elin will prompt you to look for more companions, you’ll be introduced to the game’s gacha system and the Infinite Draw. The Infinite Draw isn’t just a fancy word – it literally is an infinite 10-roll that you can keep or discard and reroll as many times as you like. This means that, unlike most gacha games, you don’t need to reroll your account, and you can pretty much reroll as many times as you like until you get a character or costume that you want.
And yes, each 10-roll here guarantees a 5-star unit AND a 5-star weapon – this means that if you’re patient enough, you can get a matching SSR character with their exclusive gear. Do note that the Infinite Draw only covers the standard banner!
For new players, you’ll want somebody easy to pick up and play, so I recommend getting somebody like Alec or Justia for their DEF-piercing attacks. If you’d like to roll with someone else though, you can always consult the costume section in the collection tab of the main menu!
Once you choose to keep the results of the Infinite Draw, you don’t get any takebacks.
The Adventure Awaits!
The lush worlds (okay, packs) of Brown Dust 2 have something for everybody, and whether you want to continue the journey of Lathel, Justia, and Scheherazade, or just want to chill with more tongue-in-cheek fare like Jayden’s Gate, the choice is yours. No matter which pack you jump into, you’ll no doubt find memorable characters, memorable encounters, and a fantastic world.
That concludes my beginner’s guide to Brown Dust 2, and I hope I was able to help demystify the game’s systems and provide a better, clearer explanation of some of the game’s more difficult mechanics. If you have any suggestions, comments, or tips of your own that you’d like to share, be sure to drop us a line in the comments below!