If you’ve ever played RPGs, you must have at some point thought about how exactly the jarl, mayor, lord, governor, or what-have-you feels with the constant influx of adventurers that march through their town. Wonder no more – Dungeon Village 2 lets you play out the sword and sorcery mayoral government fantasies of your dreams.
Kairosoft’s mobile game Dungeon Village 2 is available on both iOS and Android platforms. For people using emulators, I should mention here that Dungeon Village 2 doesn’t run on 64-bit instances.
It’s worth mentioning here that Dungeon Village 2 is a paid game. Because of this, there are no microtransactions, ads, or premium currency that you can buy with real money. Anything that’s in the game, you can earn with time and effort. Or rather, the effort of your adventurers.
While there’s no PVP nor any pressure to hit the ground running, setting a town up while keeping your coffers filled can be a tricky task. That’s why we’ve put together this comprehensive beginner’s guide to help you learn the ropes as you start your infinite term in Dungeon Village 2
Invest In Your Adventurers
All RPGs are based on the idea of heroes going out to complete their quests, but this time, you’re the service provider. While you’re not playing the role adventurer yourself, these wanderers still need monsters to fight, quests to undertake, and dungeons to loot – and it’s up to you to make sure they’re comfortable doing so, since you’ll be getting a piece of that pie.
Adventurer Basics
All adventurers share a few common characteristics: they have a changeable name, they have a job, and they have stats.
Adventurer Stats
The basic stats are HP, Attack, Defense, and Magic.
HP determines an adventurer’s health; if it reaches zero, they’ll collapse and need to be dragged back to the inn by another adventurer. Alternately, if they’re in a quest, they can spend some time recovering, and their HP will slowly fill up back to full – though they can’t fight during this time.
Attack represents the physical strength of an adventurer, while magic increases their magical strength.
Defense reduces the amount of damage an adventurer takes in battle.
There are separate stats that boost the 4 basic stats. Health increases HP, Strength boosts attack, Toughness affects defense, and Spirit affects magic. Dexterity is a special stat that increases how many attacks a hero makes when it’s their turn to attack. Luck is another special stat that only comes into play when opening chests: better luck means better loot.
Boosting these stats is key to strengthening your heroes. The buildings you place around town each correspond to a stat, and adventurers that visit those buildings gain that stat boost. The Florist building, for example, has a chance to increase adventurer dexterity when they visit.
Satisfaction and Work
There are 2 other important stats for adventurers. These are Satisfaction and Work.
Satisfaction is a measure of how much a certain adventurer likes your town. This can be increased by providing adventurers with high-quality facilities or by gifting them items. The higher an adventurer’s satisfaction, the more likely they’ll want to settle down in your town.
Work represents an adventurer’s morale and motivation to work, and provides a bonus to all base stats depending on how high the work drive is. If your adventurers are just lazing around your town, that’s a sign that you need to push their Work values higher. At high Work levels, adventurers have a chance to gain a powerful aura, boosting their stats even higher.
Jobs
Each adventurer also has a job, or class, and each of these jobs have different specializations. Farmers, for example, speed up farm work, while adventurers give much higher taxes if they’re convinced to stay. All of an adventurer’s jobs have their levels tracked separately, and they can be changed at the cost of some Town Points. More importantly, an adventurer’s stats are affected by all of their job levels, so switching jobs is essential to maximizing an adventurer’s potential.
You may notice that your selection of jobs is low at the start. To unlock new job, you must first help an adventurer of that class hit level 10, which also gives them a mastery bonus.
You can change an adventurer’s job by double tapping them, then tapping the Give Task button. However, note that each job has a corresponding salary – that’s why they’re called “jobs”, after all.
Monster Tamers
On the topic of jobs, the Monster Tamer job deserves special mention. This is a special class that, when deployed on a monster pack extermination quest, has a chance to recruit monsters instead of slaying them, turning them into monster partners.
I’ll discuss monster partners more later, but essentially, a monster can be paired with an adventurer to assist them as well as increase that adventurer’s Satisfaction and Work.
Gifting Items
As town mayor, you can gift items to an adventurer to improve their performance. Any arms and armor you give them will be automatically equipped, and any consumables you offer are used to increase their base stats. While gifting an item increases an adventurer’s Satisfaction and Work, you can’t take back any gifts, and neither will you get any old equipment back if you give them new gear.
It’s also worth mentioning that you can gift consumables in batches, though this will incur an additional gold overhead. Batches come in sets of 3, 10, 20, 50, and 100; gifting items this way will save you quite a bit of time.
If you don’t have any items on hand, you can also opt to gift items from your stores. Naturally, this will set you back that item’s price, as you’re essentially buying it then giving it away.
Adventurers also have their own individual likes and dislikes. Although adventurers will never refuse a present, a disliked gift will give notably less Satisfaction to the adventurer.
Medals are special items that you get at the end of the year, or by achieving certain popularity milestones. These medals can be given to an adventurer of your choice in a rather showy year-end ceremony, meaning that whoever gets the medals gets a hefty bonus to both Satisfaction and Work.
Adventurer Housing
Adventurers come and go, so wouldn’t it be nice to form a reliable pool of talents to draw on?
That’s where building housing comes in. By building a place for adventurers to move in, you not only guarantee that they’ll stay in your town, but they’ll also pay taxes at the end of the year, depending on how many monsters they’ve slain.To move an adventurer into a house, double tap an empty house (after it’s been built, of course) then go to the applicants list.
Adventurers must have a satisfaction of around 30 before they will apply for permanent residence. Giving an adventurer a new home also costs a small amount of gold. Once they’ve moved in, they’ll give a little speech as gratitude. More importantly, they’ll also give you a random item.
Grinding for Profit
When left to their own devices, adventurers will not only partake of your town’s facilities, but also venture outside your town to fight monsters. Defeating these monsters will not only increase an adventurer’s level and stats, but they also drop gold and loot – both of which are yours to keep. As your adventurers keep fighting and as they gain strength, more powerful monsters which yield better loot will begin to spawn, eventually replacing the weaker enemies in the area.
Other ways for adventurers to grind are dungeons and monster pack quests, but let’s deal with those later.
Popularity
Raising your town’s popularity is key to success in Dungeon Village 2. The higher your popularity, the more adventurers will visit your town, meaning they’ll fight more monsters, grab more loot, and make you richer.
Gaining popularity is easy – by satisfying your adventurers with high-quality facilities and gifts and completing tasks, your town will grow in popularity. Every time the popularity bar at the bottom right fills up completely, you’ll go up in a popularity rank, and potentially attract a new adventurer.
On the other hand, there are also events that can drop your popularity. Boss monsters are the main culprit for popularity loss – as long as they’re alive and rampaging near your town, nobody will want to move in, and you’ll lose popularity.
Town Infrastructure and Business
Your cast of heroes will need places to heal, to gear up, and to eat, and as mayor, it’s your job to make sure that these facilities are available – that way, you’ll rake in cash and keep your heroes happy.
Basic Buildings
There are a few core buildings that every town should have.
Once you start up the game, you’ll automatically be given an inn, which is pre-placed for you. The Inn is very important as it serves as a hub for adventurer activity – new heroes will have to check in here, and adventurers need to pay a visit here to heal their wounds.
You’ll also want to set up armor and weapon stores. This will not only allow new adventurers to buy equipment, but also let you stock and sell any loot you find in dungeons.
You also start with one farmland. Adventurers can work here to boost the growth of whatever crop you’ve selected (which is Snow Potato by default). Note that you have to manually tap the farmland to harvest the crop once the icon appears. Crops will also continue growing if you haven’t harvested them, with each growth cycle adding one of that crop to the produce when you withdraw crops.
Finally, you can set up stat buildings – by default, you’ll have the Florist unlocked. This allows your adventurers to gain stats by chance, and also gives you an alternate revenue stream. Other facilities, like food and drink, give your adventurers greater max HP. And while you would be correct in saying that there’s no advantage building multiple food and drink buildings since each of them provides the same bonus, they do count towards your facilities, and variety improves adventurer Satisfaction.
Building Placement
You can move the screen around to place buildings. However, if you’d like to make fine adjustments, you can tap and hold on the building itself. Note that you cannot move buildings until your town achieves its first star rank, so be careful when selecting construction sites.
Building placement is very important as nearby commercial buildings affect each other by raising their appeal, and consequently, their prices. With that in mind, you should also build a dedicated residential sector in your town as houses do not increase appeal or quality in the same way that commercial buildings do.
It’s also important to not overspend when putting up new buildings. Each building has a maintenance cost that will quickly chew through your coffers if you’re not careful.
Sprucing Up Your Buildings
You can further play mind games on your town’s tourists by adding natural decorations near your facilities. Each decoration increases the appeal of a facility, causing it to sell items for higher prices and go up in quality. While these decorations don’t serve any purpose other than boosting appeal, their maintenance costs are quite low.
Monster Farms
Monster farms are a special building that becomes available as soon as you befriend one monster, and are a great way to get more mileage out of your adventurers for a relatively low cost.
Each monster farm can house up to 5 monsters that have not yet been assigned to an adventurer. Once assigned, they’ll assist that adventurer in combat, and give them a boost to Satisfaction and Work – it’s like having an extra pair of hands that help in a fight. You can also feed your monster partners snacks to boost their battle performance.
Apart from this, monsters also give your town some extra traits, so they’re a great way to supplement or patch up any holes in your trait list.
Upgrading Buildings – Usage
Some buildings, usually those that offer stat boosts, will be upgraded once used a certain number of times. When a building is upgraded, its appeal, quality, and cost to use increases. A building will have a red level up bubble above its head when it’s ready to upgrade – which will require you to double tap the building to confirm the upgrade.
Note that these buildings do not track upgrade progress nor level individually – if your cake shops are level 3, all new cake shops you establish will be level 3, and if a customer uses one, all shops gain experience. It’s easier to think of it as upgrading the business itself rather than the storefront.
Upgrading Buildings – Stipends
If you’re running out of space, or if your inventory is getting full, why not send some items to your facilities as a show of governmental support?
By using items on buildings, you can manually increase their quality and appeal, forcing adventurers to spend more to avail of the same services you’ve been offering. I love capitalism.
While you can use any item on any building, it’s far better to optimize your item upgrades. When you’re on the building gift screen, there will be a small info readout at the bottom of what effect the item you’re about to give will have on the building. This can also help you beeline for certain upgrades.
Smart Investment Pays Off
Upgrading your town, especially at the start of the game, can be slow going. With only a handful of novice adventurers who are just as likely to get their butts kicked in combat and have to be dragged back to town, you probably won’t see any really great loot.
With that in mind, I highly recommend sinking your resources into your inn, simply because every single adventurer has to go to this place. If you’re feeling cruel or want to maximize profits, you can deliberately keep some adventurers weak – that way they get beaten up and are forced to pony up for medical treatment at your inn.
Town Expansion
Your starting town (more of a hamlet) is going to need space to grow, and luckily, there are ways to gain more space.
There are two thresholds for gaining expansions: the first is achieved by having 1000 popularity, and the second arrives once you’re certified as a 4 star town.
Expansions are actually town events that you’ll need to hold before you can use them. These events use a lot of town points (90 for the first expansions), so you may want to set some points aside if you’re near the threshold for gaining an expansion.
The Pumpkin Store
As you play Dungeon Village 2, you’ll eventually gain access to the Pumpkin Store.
The Pumpkin Store gives you access to a lot of things – first off, you can sell consumable items here, such as produce from your farms. You can also buy items from the Pumpkin Store, which are often of a higher quality than anything you’re able to produce.
It’s also at the Pumpkin Store that you can buy new blueprints at the cost of town points. Finally, you can also redeem your hard-earned diamond points here for rare items, or in a pinch, extra cash.
Town Economy And Development
Putting up buildings is one thing, but keeping the money flowing is a different monster altogether. You’ll need to juggle investments, maintenance, uneven cash flow, and sudden infusions of gold into a stable economy. Ready?
Adventurer Spending and Steady Income
As a new mayor, your eyes may turn into huge dollar signs the first time your adventurers loot a new weapon and you see how much it sells for. The catch here is that there’s no guarantee that someone will buy this item. I’ve found that it’s far better to gift these items to adventurers and focus on leveling up your facilities, such as your inn or your food shops, as these give a more reliable stream of income than the occasional purchase.
It’s also important to boost your adventurers’ Work stats as much as you can so that they’ll be more proactive in helping out around town. High Work adventurers will fight more, shop more, and quest more – all of which translates into a steady flow of gold for you.
Titles
You’ll eventually receive a visit from a wandering writer, who checks up on towns and gives them titles based on his findings. These titles provide a boost in your town’s popularity, so make sure to constantly improve your town. But more importantly, getting new titles gives you a lump sum of valuable diamond points, which can really accelerate your town progress!
There are a lot of titles to earn, and you’ll need to shuffle town specialties to find them all. To do this, you’ll need to leverage town traits.
Town Traits
Every single thing you do in your town – whether it’s putting roads, throwing apples at the inn so that it makes more money, holding 5 marathons back-to-back, or befriending monsters – affects your town traits. Town traits are key to getting new titles, and serve as a rough indicator of what kind of town you’re running; for example, a high fruit score means that your town is a great place to get healthy snacks.
If you’d like to check your current traits, go to the menu, then info, then town details, and then go to the third panel. In this menu, you can also tap on a trait to see what actions you can take to increase that particular town trait.
Town Events
If you need a quick boost in town traits, why not run some town events?
Town events are one-off festivals that provide powerful effects, like raising adventurer satisfaction or luck. Town events also raise certain town traits for a while after they complete, making it that much easier to earn new town titles. The downside here is that events use town points, meaning that you’ll have to carefully budget these points between the Pumpkin Store and holding events.
To unlock more town events, you’ll need to increase your town’s rank. Also, since they’re special events, you can only hold so many town events in a season. To check the current season, have a look at the upper left of the screen, at the very edge. The icon there will let you know what season you’re in – cherry blossoms for spring, sunflowers for summer, and so on.
Town Guide Contests
Town guide contests are another way to rapidly accelerate your town’s development.
Town guide contests require you to reach a certain amount of trait points in some areas. If you succeed, you can submit your town for certification, upon which you’ll earn a bundle of rewards – namely popularity, gold, town points, and diamond points.
To apply for town guide contests and to check the requirements for each, go to the menu, manage, then town guide contests.
Tourists
After all that investment in promoting your town as such-and-such, is it any surprise that you might attract specific clientele?
By fulfilling certain traits, you can entice certain residents to visit your town, which can lead to big things. To see who you can lure to your town, as well as what you need to pull them in, you can go to info, then world map. Note that you first need to win 2 or 3 town guide contests before this option becomes available.
Town Upgrades
The biggest way to improve your town is by qualifying for new stars via the town upgrade menu.
Upgrading your town’s star rating requires you to fulfill certain conditions as detailed in the menu. Once these have been met, simply go to the menu and submit your town for certification, which will earn your town a new star.
Each star your town earns unlocks a lot of new things – facilities, events, and more. The game’s end goal is to get all 5 stars, so keep that in mind!
In The Red
With all the money you’ve been spending, it’s not unusual for your cash reserves to dip into the negatives during your first playthrough. Luckily, Vicky Ville (your assistant) will bail you out – but only once – with 3000 gold, and no, you don’t pay her back. Be sure to reward her confidence in you with actual results!
Dungeon Delving for Maximum Taxation
From time to time, dungeons will appear outside your town’s borders.
These dungeons are, of course, rife with danger, but also loot. Thus, it’s in your best interest to post quests for adventurers to clear dungeons. To do this, tap on the dungeon, then pay the hiring fee. After you’ve done this, sit back and watch adventurers take the quest. Hopefully, there’ll be enough.
Your adventureres are either the most gullible protagonists ever, or they’re just completely altruistic. Anything they find in dungeons is yours to keep, including loot, gold, and anything else. They won’t take anything apart from the initial hiring fee.
While you can view the dungeon teams as expendable (I certainly do), tending to them is in your best interests – if the party wipes, you’ll still lose money from the upfront fee. The quest will succeed if even one member reaches the end. Defeated adventurers will be ejected from the dungeon, lying stunned on the ground until someone drags them back to the inn (which means you get to charge them for medical fees, you rascal).
Before a quest starts, your assistant will say something different, depending on the strength of your party versus the dungeon’s difficulty. This serves as a forecast of how the quest may go and whether or not you have to hire more adventurers.
If your team is having a hard time fighting in a dungeon, you can hire additional adventurers to go in. Take note that because they didn’t participate willingly, you will have to pay any extra party members more money to go in. However, note that dungeon quests don’t have an expiry date, meaning your party can keep wiping, get dragged back to town, pay for healing, then go back to the dungeon to continue where they left off.
Dungeon quests aren’t instant, either. After you’ve hired an initial party, they still have to physically travel to the dungeon – don’t be surprised if the quest doesn’t play out immediately. Once the party has arrived at the dungeon, you can watch their progress on the lower part of the screen.
The loot that adventurers find in a dungeon is yours to keep and do with as you please. By default, arms and armor will be sent to their respective stores, where any adventurer can buy them. Other items, like fruit or potions, can be used in upgrading your town. Alternately, you can just gift these items to an adventurer you’d like to keep.
Finally, note that you can only take one dungeon quest at a time.
Roaming Monster Packs
Adventurers can not only find dungeons while exploring outside of your town, but they can also warn you of large packs of monsters that need to be dealt with.
Dealing with monster packs is similar to dungeons – tap on the event flag (in this case, it really is a yellow flag), then start a quest. After paying the upfront fee, adventurers will sign up for extermination duty, and will proceed to the flag once the quest starts.
The flag will spawn a large amount of monsters, which must be defeated before the next wave will spawn. Since combat here occurs on the field, it’s possible for other adventurers to join in the fray at no extra cost to you.
Do note that you have a time limit to complete a monster extermination quest. If that time elapses, you’re out – and so is the gold you sank into the quest. Unlke dungeon quests, you can take two monster pack quests at a time.
Boss monsters fall under the monster pack quest type. While they won’t actively destroy your town, you’ll lose popularity while a boss monster remains alive, so deal with them quickly.
Metagaming
To cap off our guide, here’s some tips that don’t fall anywhere else.
Save Regularly
I can’t emphasize this enough: save regularly. While Dungeon Village 2 is a very fun and engaging game, I crashed multiple times when trying to navigate the town traits menu. The game does autosave, but it’s far better to remind yourself to manually save every so often.
Always Gear Up
While gifting items to adventurers will quickly burn a hole in your pocket, it’s important that your adventurers have access to decent gear. By giving them gear, you’ll not only give them a better chance against monsters and a better chance to complete dungeons (thus earning you loot) but you’ll also increase their Satisfaction and Work – and the difference in activeness between a 0 Work hero and a 20 Work one is very noticable.
Speed Up The Game
It’s possible to play the game at double speed, but you’ll need to beat the game first by defeating the final boss in an area (which also unlocks new areas for you). However, you can speed up regular gameplay by tapping and holding the circle that appears at the bottom of the screen during certain events.
Check the Wiki
If you’re impatient like me, or would like to know what to expect from Dungeon Village 2 in advance, you can check the wiki. The Kairosoft wiki contains a lot of pertinent information not just for Dungeon Village 2, but also for other Kairosoft games.
Play How You Want To Play
Being mayor is great, but don’t forget that there are lots of paths to success – and that there’s no pressure on you to perform, as Dungeon Village 2 is an offline, single-player game. Run your town however it pleases you; the only important thing is that your town stays afloat.
While this guide gives a pretty comprehensive introduction to the game’s basics, there’s a lot to discover on your own, which I purposely left out. Finding new stuff to do in this game is a real treat, and seeing your town grow is a journey worth experiencing.
With that,the Dungeon Village 2 beginner’s guide comes to an end. Hopefully you learned something from this guide that will help keep you out of the red and assist you in transforming your little backwater village into a major adventuring hub full of AFK adventurers and spambots. If there’s anything you’d like to add, or if I missed something, let me know in the comment area below!