Dungeonbound Long Haul Guide: Seven Heroes, Five Descents

What The Long Haul is

The Long Haul is the incremental half of Dungeonbound. You pick one of seven heroes, build a board, descend through a dungeon, and return to the hub with what you found. The official promise is simple: progress on one hero is never lost while you play another, and dying is a setback measured in floors, not hours.

That makes it the best mode for learning the item system. You can experiment with a fusion, discover that the result is worse than the parents, and still keep the levels and gold you earned along the way.

The trade-off is that The Long Haul asks more of your attention than an idle game. A pre-release reviewer noted that a Start Battle button waits before every encounter, so the mode does not fully play itself. That is a design preference, not a bug.

The seven heroes, and why switching is a commitment

The roster is Warrior, Mage, Rogue, Monk, Archer, Alchemist and Paladin. Each has their own gold pouch, level and permanent upgrades. The official page is explicit that switching heroes does not overwrite progress.

The practical consequence is more important than the feature list: you cannot farm gold on your main and hand it to a new hero. Every hero is their own economy. If you want to try the Alchemist, expect to start the Alchemist’s economy from the beginning.

That changes the right way to play:

• Pick one hero to be your main for the first several hours. Learn the dungeon layouts and the shop rhythm on a track that compounds.
• Treat a second hero as a new save, not a loadout swap. Play it when you want a different board puzzle, not because you are stuck.
• Spend permanent currency on the hero you are actually playing. A brilliant upgrade on a hero you have not unlocked yet does nothing.

For the confirmed identity of each hero, see the hero database. Only some heroes have enough official detail to plan around; we mark the rest as unconfirmed rather than inventing a kit.

The Mage is three tracks in one

The Mage is the exception to the “one hero, one economy” rule in spirit: it branches into Lightning, Frost and Fire, and each subclass keeps its own purchases. Switching is the respec. You do not erase the Mage or start over.

That is generous, but it is also a trap for new players. If you split purchases across all three schools, you have three half-built subclasses. Pick a school, build it until it works, then use the others as experiments. Our Mage subclass guide covers the decision in detail.

The five descents

The Steam page lists five named zones plus The Daily. They are not interchangeable skins; each advertises a different pressure.

Descent	Official theme	What to prepare for
The Mudking Warrens	Kobolds, orcs and brutefolk in the mud	A mixed physical crawl; a clean place to learn board geometry
The Bonevault Crypts	Restless dead, curses and cold	Curse drawbacks and effects that do not stay down
The Chittering Deep	Beasts with deep health pools	Long fights that reward sustained damage and statuses
The Infernal Court	Demons that hit hard, crit often and burn everything	Burn wards, healing behind your block, crit spikes
The Wyrmroost	The dragons at the bottom	The final listed descent; no official dragon mechanics published yet

The exact unlock order is not documented in the public material. The order above follows the Steam page’s listing, not a confirmed progression gate. Our dungeon database keeps the official descriptions and the planning implications in one place.

The death loop, without the marketing

The official loop is: descend, fight, bank loot, spend gold, buy upgrades, rework gear, descend again. Losing a run returns you to the hub with your loot, levels and upgrades.

Two demo-era details are worth knowing, but label them as community observation:

• A reviewer reported that each campaign run gives you one life and one weapon, with health carrying between fights rather than resetting.
• The same reviewer reported the next inventory row cost 800 gold at their point in progression. Row costs scale; do not treat 800 as a universal price.

If those rules survive launch, they push the campaign toward a careful attrition plan rather than a series of disposable runs. One weapon means your weapon slot is a long-term commitment. Health carrying between fights means a small chip-damage problem becomes a real problem over a floor.

Where the permanent upgrades go

The Steam page sorts 400+ permanent upgrades into five categories:

1. Damage - flat damage, crit, execute thresholds and tempo tools.
2. Defense - block, armour, resistances and dodge.
3. Sustain - life steal, regeneration, healing on kill and cleansing.
4. Economy - gold drops, shop discounts and luck.
5. Unlocks - class unlocks, weapon slots and board rows.

A practical spending order for a new campaign:

1. Unlock the next row when the board is the reason you are declining good items. Space compounds: every future item, rune and fusion is easier to place.
2. Buy one reliable sustain node before buying a second damage node. The status reference explains why long fights punish a pure block plan.
3. Improve your main damage engine - the item or tag you already build around, not a hypothetical future drop.
4. Buy economy only after the board functions. Extra gold is excellent, but it cannot fix a board that dies on floor two.
5. Leave speculative unlocks for last. A new weapon type is only worth it if you have the space and the support gear to use it.

This is a framework, not a spreadsheet. The game does not publish upgrade costs or level curves, so any exact “best purchase” claim before launch would be invented.

The board still decides everything

The Long Haul changes the stakes, not the core combat rules. Attacks still resolve on speed-driven turns, items still fire as the attack sweep passes them, and the board still has to fit.

That means the board-building guide applies here more than any hero-specific trick. The short version:

• Use the grid’s shape, not just its size. A large item that blocks two smaller synergies can be a downgrade.
• Match your hero’s affinity when you can. A reviewer measured a frost item at 39 damage without the hero’s affinity bonus and 47 with it - a real gap that the base tooltip did not show.
• Treat tags as sets. Multiple pieces with the same tag can activate tiered bonuses; the game does not always make this obvious.
• Do not cover a rune by accident. Runes are 2x2 squares that power the item covering most of them.
• Merge duplicates before the bag fills; fuse when you need two effects on one footprint.

Quests are part of the progression

The official Paladin quest screen shows 28 quests split into Combat, Items and General, with rewards including Skill Points, gold and permanent item unlocks. Examples visible in the screenshot include:

• Tempering - get an item to level 7, reward +3 SP.
• Master Melder - fuse 15 items at the forge, unlock Emberbreaker.
• Hexbound - curse 15 items, unlock Storm Sabre.
• Plaguebringer - inflict 500 status effects, unlock Venom Claw.

Only the Paladin page has been shown publicly. We do not know whether every hero has 28 quests or whether the objectives repeat. The safe reading is that quests reward the exact behaviours the hero wants you to practise: cursing, fusing, upgrading and applying statuses.

Common Long Haul mistakes

1. Spreading gold across three heroes. Each purse is separate. Pick a main.
2. Buying a rare item that does not fit. Rarity is not a board plan.
3. Ignoring the quest tab. It is a free source of SP, gold and item unlocks tied to actions you are already doing.
4. Skipping the log. The battle log is the only reliable way to see which item is carrying the fight.
5. Fusing the only copy of a sustain piece. Merge a duplicate or wait for a second copy.
6. Assuming The Long Haul is fully idle. It still asks for a battle confirmation each encounter, at least in the demo build.

What we still don’t know

• The exact unlock order for the five descents.
• Whether The Long Haul has an endless or post-campaign mode at launch.
• Whether rival builds appear in the campaign.
• The full quest list for heroes other than the Paladin.
• Upgrade costs, level caps and difficulty scaling.

We will update this page when the launch build provides sourced answers. For the date and unlock time, see the release page.