Introduction to Dungeons

Dungeon's 101 - From D1 to D3
Primarily made and edited by nonomo4 with information provided by the ITRTG discord. Feel free to update any part of the guide if you know if there's a better way to do something, like gear, evolutions, team composition, etc.

Introduction
Welcome to Dungeon's 101. This guide is to help you begin your journey with dungeons. From those who will not spend a dime to those with all the pets in the world, this should help you understand what you should be doing to start progressing in dungeons.

This guide was built with the help of the discord community, so please feel free to add your input if there's something that isn't right. After all, this is really just a community guide at the end of the day.

The New Player (Non-token)
When you start out, you will probably not have any pets until you reach Odin. Once you do obtain your 6th pet, you are ready to begin your dungeon journey. Trust me when I say it's better than doing normal pet campaigns.

* One thing to note is that there's a pet you can unlock if you press the feedback button called bug. I'd recommend making it into a BS, as a non-specialist fire blacksmith is decent for this stage of the game if you aren't using tokens. As for the other pets, I'd still recommend the roles I mentioned. 3 BS's may feel like a lot, but you'll eventually find yourself making good use of the sheer amount of BS's you have.

From Newbie Grounds to Mountain
Unless you used a token or obtain a pet via an event, these will likely be your first six pets. Your first task is to send them into the Newbie Training Grounds to level up to around level 10 or whatever level is necessary to beat your first elemental dungeon.

Since you are just starting out, the dungeon you will eventually send them to is the Mountain dungeon, which will help your pet growth increase and help train your pets even more.

The key is that for depth 1, only levels really matter. A team of level 50's should do well in these depths, regardless of class, gear and items. I'm not saying that you should do this, but this is something to keep in mind.

Swapping Out Pets, Creating a Blacksmith and Alchemist
As you progress outside of dungeons, you will eventually find yourself with new pets. While you can obtain them via token, we are just assuming you still don't have a token. You will likely have Squirrel, Rabbit and God Power.

Out of the three, Squirrel and Rabbit will replace Bee and Mouse respectively. Bee will be used for your first Alchemist most likely and Mouse should become a Blacksmith.

Now your team should be the following:

You should make your Mouse into a Blacksmith as soon as you get enough Growth. As he is the easiest pet to make into any class, having a Blacksmith as soon as possible will help you begin gearing up your pet with the minimal gear that's recommended to reach depth 2.

For more details on the importance of Blacksmith's and Alchemists, please see Crafting.

As I said, you can get there with sheer levels, but it is definitely faster to work on gear, items, and classes to speed up the process of reaching depth 2, reducing the level your pets need to be.

Choosing Classes and Gearing Up
Your pets should be well on their way, leveling up slowly but surely. As they do this, we can begin thinking about the classes and gear of the pets.

Classes

If you still have the same team, then it is recommended you chose the following classes for your team.

* Note. Cupid normally is an adventurer pet, but we need a wind pet. To avoid losing the benefit of a Bee Alchemist, making Cupid an early Blacksmith is recommended, as it will assist with your resource gains early on. Eventually, you may swap it with a fairy supporter and you can use it as a normal Blacksmith.

What class a pet becomes plays a key role in their job in a team. Defenders help protect the other pets. Supporters makes sure everyone has health. Rogues improve the drops from a dungeon. Assassin's and mages provide the main damage of the group.

The team positioning also starts becoming relevant, as each position should have a place in either the front row or back row. You want to make sure your Cupid, Armadillo, and egg are in front, with the other 3 in the back.

The main pet page can explain the details about each class, but this guide is mainly to give you the basic information you need to progress.

Gear

Your Mouse should be hard at work crafting the gear you need at this point. The gear listed above is for specifically Mountain. If you move these pets to other dungeons, they gear may change depending on the dungeon.

Before leveling any of the gear, you will want to craft at least something to fill the slots. After all, something is better than nothing. It's when everyone is properly geared and the starting rank is good enough that you being upgrading pieces of gear.

Something to note is that you want to upgrade your mage's gear above the rest, as they are your primary damage dealer. After all, a good offense can power your way through.

With both gear and classes being work on, you are well on your way to becoming a dungeon expert.

However, I recommend looking at Equip to understand the value of the stats on each piece of gear. Knowing why you want to have more of each stat is important in building your pets, as it can determine your pets offensive and defensive potential. Simply putting it, the right combination of stats can result in a party succeeding or failing.

Items
You may want to start bringing items in as well. For Mountain, you can bring flying boots to mitigate damage and prevent your pets from being stalled in the dungeons. You could bring in healing potions so they are less likely to die. Feathers from the pet trader can let your pets be revived if they die, saving your resources. For those with tons of Pet Stones (likely not the new player) there's also talisman's that give exp and drop boosts.

Items are valuable and the higher you go, the more they matter. However, the first depth will not require items. They are there to make the dungeons easier/more valuable. Looking into the events will keep you from missing out on value/having your team suffer.

The Other 2 Dungeons
Now that I've mentioned Fire, Wind and Earth gear, you may be wondering how you get the resources for these? You will have the wind resources because you've Been working on Mountain, but fire and earth will be in shorter supply. As a result, we'll need to send a team into those two to gather more resources.

At a certain point, you probably should have 2 dungeons teams unlocked. However, it's possible that this isn't the case. This next section will be split in two to cover both dungeons.

No Dungeon Team 2
The biggest roadblock would likely be not having the second slot. That, or you don't have 12 pets. This scenario means that you'll be sending your Mountain team straight into Volcano and forest for the materials. As I mentioned earlier, depth 1 is all about levels. If your team is leveled enough, you can power through anything.

Make sure to adjust difficulty, as your team isn't normally meant for these two dungeons and thus will have a harder time doing them. If you have the pets, you will want to adjust the team to match the events. For Volcano, you want 3 fire element pets. For forest, you want pet food in your items to gain growth (the growth depends on the food used). Paying close attention to these requirements will help you gain more value verse just ignoring them.

Dungeon Team 2
There are 3 ways to obtain a second team slot. If you are a new player and starting out, then the easiest way to do this is by doing the daily Challenge Dungeons. Challenge Dungeons give gems, which can be traded in to get a pet slot. This is by far what most newer players should do to get their first slot.

The other option is to spend 300k Pet Stones to unlock it. This can be obtained over time through various methods, but the easiest way to obtain this amount is just buying it directly or getting lucky with your Lucky Draws.

The last option is to spend 1k Challenge Points to obtain it. If your a veteran player, this should be relatively easy. For most people, this is likely their 4th purchase, right after UB damage reduction, Exp Overflow, and Auto Half Stat.

Regardless of which method you pick, the second main requirement for a second dungeon team is to have the pets to field one.

Newer players starting out will have to make a choice. Either divert pets away from their [Pet Campaigns#Growth Campaign|Growth Campaign], or chose not to field a 2nd dungeon team. Growth is important, so not fielding a second team isn't a bad choice if your growth campaign is developing.

If you do field one, fielding a team of random pets can be acceptable. The main goal is to have this second team obtain resources to help grow your first team. Even if they are farming the first difficulty of a dungeon, there's still benefit to them.

Of course, eventually you should have a proper second team, but that's later down the line for a new player.

Depth 2 Preparation
If you've Been following this guide, you should be well on your way to being able to Depth 2. This section will go over a list of things that you either should be working towards or have to beat Depth 2. While you don't need everything on this list, having it would make your first Depth 2 easier.
 * Your pets should be working on reaching the level 35-45 mark. At 35, they could potentially beat D2 with a lot of gear and items, as well as proper class evolutions. However, reaching higher levels significantly reduces the gear, item and class requirements. At 45 and above, you should be able to brute force it with minimal gear and barely any class levels.
 * Pet Gear should still be t1's around this point. This is because most of your resources should go towards making a good hammer. It's better to get a T2 sss+20 hammer than spending resources trying to get the best gear at this point. Of course, it isn't expect for you to have this at this point, but this is what your focus should be on. For the exact gear you should have, everyone except your defender should have elemental matching weapons, fire swords, or knives depending on what gear you can/have available. Defenders should have a pot or knives. Your armor and accessories for your damage dealer should be the same element as the pet. Your armor and accessories for your non-damage dealers should be matching the dungeon element.

The Veteran/Token Player
Unlike a new player, a veteran/token player is more likely to have more pets or the ability to gain more pets. As a result, this next section will be targeted to the veteran players who have a decent number of pets and are just starting to get into dungeons.

Scrapyard to Mountain
Like the beginner players, veterans and token players will start with Scrapyard and move into Mountain. However, they will be able to field a future-proof team rather than a team that slowly evolves over time.

Selecting the Pets
The key is to deciding who is on this future-proof team is understanding what you will need for D2 and D3 Mountain. For example, you will need 2 defenders once you get into D2 and above. You will also want 2 wind pets to take advantage of the Mountain growth event. With this in mind, you can look through the pets you have and determine which one's can help you fit this criteria.

For example, Armadillo and Valkyrie are often cited as two solid defenders you can bring. Armadillo is an easy pet to evolve, meaning that you will have one defender within D1. As for Valkyrie, it will take more time to evolve her due to the nature of her evo. conditions. However, you should have sufficient growth to grow her to the right growth.

Tier List of Dungeon Pets to Token
The following is a list of token pets I recommend if you don't care much for pets that help your god or if you have these pets and want to know which non-god pets are good picks. As everyone's circumstances are different, I'll explain each pick and go into details on why they are in their current spots. Note: Despite me tiering them, certain pets can be priorities over other pets depending on your circumstances. As a result, determine if a pet fits your needs first before tokening them. Tier 1 represents either key pets or really easy to evolve pets that are useful.
 * Tier 1: Crab, Ghost, Question, Donut
 * Tier 2: Penguin, Rudolph, Santa, Wizard, Elephant, Pegasus, Phoenix
 * Tier 3: Fire Fox, Tanuki, Panda, Raven, Vaccina, Robot
 * Crab: Crab is a first choice pet that I recommend for 2 reasons. The first is that early on, you want a Blacksmith as fast as possible. While Mouse is a good choice and while I do recommend Cupid, both of them are wild-cards and not specialist pets. Specialist pets are better than their non-specialist counterparts since they eventually out scale non-specialist with their class bonus. Since crab is an easy to evolve Blacksmith, you generally should get it first unless you can get another Blacksmith specialist pet online faster.
 * Ghost: Ghost is one of the best pets to push difficulties with and is one of the few Rogue pets in the game. Due to Rogues being used to farm resources and meet even conditions, having more specialists, is generally a good thing. Even without it's Rogue bonus, the Ghost special ability makes it a great pet to help with fights. Ghost can reduce the attack and defense of enemies if it's attack is higher than their defense. This can mean a boss that is killing you suddenly does less damage and takes more damage, leading to an easy kill. With both of these in mind, all players should consider getting a ghost at some point.
 * Question: There are a few easy to evolve Alchemists and question is one of them. As an Alchemist specialist, Question will craft materials faster over time verses non-specialist. Alternatively, you can turn question into a wild card due to how easy it is to evolve. If you don't need a lot of Alchemist, then it can serve as a dungeon filler pet to fill a class you need like specialist or Rogue. Just keep in mind you may class change it back to an Alchemist if you fill all your dungeon teams with specialist. You may just want to keep it an Alchemist to save the resources to change it later.
 * Donut: Unlike Question, Donut's bonus can be completely ignored, making it the perfect easy to evolve wild-card. Early on, having more Alchemists and Blacksmiths can really speed up your progress. Other than that, it can perfectly fill any dungeon roll you need and you don't need to really worry about class changing it. Despite the importance of mighty food, it will become more available later on anyway and the need for Donut to do food camps will eventually disappear.

Tier 2 represents good choices, but not priority choices. They are more conditional versus the tier one pets. Tier 3: By no means are these bad token pets. These are just in tier 3 due to them not being the highest priority to evolve (excluding robot) due to their difficulty. If you want to argue they should be a higher priority, that generally means you probably need them and thus should token them in that case.
 * Penguin is one of two water assassins specialist. The other, shark, often becomes an adventurer because of it's growth camp bonus. As a result, penguin is an obvious choice to fill the role of a water assassin. The need for a water assassin can very, but it generally helps kill bosses faster, especially in Volcano, one of the most common dungeons to run. With this in mind, it's a pet one can argue deserves to be in tier one, but there are a few other choices you can make before it.
 * Rudolph is one of the easier Rogues to evolve. As I mention with ghost, Rogues are an important pet to meet dungeon requirements and increase loot. Since it's an easy to evolve Rogue, it earns it's tier 2 spot. The only reason it's not tier 1 is because there are a few choices you probably will want to pick first, but I'm not against getting this pet earlier than the others.
 * Santa: Volcano generally has 3 fire pets that eventually become the main team that goes into D3. Those 3 pets are Squirrel, Santa, and Elephant. Squirrel is the easiest of the 3 to get, but Santa is arguably the most important. As the only fire supporter specialist, you'll end up trusting in it to heal your team. Due to the importance of a specialist in D2 onward, Santa has an especially high priority to get at some point. Especially for D3 Volcano.
 * Wizard: Early on, mages are one of the best ways to climb. They are the main damage dealers in a team and having a mage with elemental advantage can make life way easier. In this case, Wizard is often a good choice early on as a mage to let you beat Forest. That being said, forest isn't a high priority dungeon to farm early on. Due to this, you may opt to get Wizard later on when you either can have more teams or if you need to farm forest a lot. That is why I recommend it far later than other pets.
 * Elephant. Like Santa, it is one of the 3 key pets. However, it's a hard to evolve pet at 30k growth requirements. Due to this, it's a good late choice since you may still need to develop your Growth Chamber (10 top growth pets) to be able to raise a pet to 30k growth. If you can get a pet easily to 30k growth, then you can get Elephant sooner. It's also a fine pet to get way before the evolution if you want to train it up to be ready to go when you finally get it enough growth.
 * Pegasus: Pegasus is not a super easy pet to evolve without decent god progress. That is why it's recommended lower due to this fact. Since it is a specialist wind Blacksmith, it still is a pet to consider getting at some point.
 * Phoenix: Phoenix is a relatively easy to evolve Alchemist, but not the easiest. It's a good second choice if you are trying to get more Alchemists.
 * Fire Fox: Fire fox is the best fire Blacksmith. The only reason I tossed it into T3 is because evolving it is generally a lower priority (in my opinion) over it's counter parts (Santa and Elephant). Once you do have these two evolved, then I do highly recommend getting and evolving Fire Fox.
 * Tanuki: As the only neutral supporter specialist, Tanuki is an important pet to eventually get when you need a supporter. However, it may take awhile to get Tanuki and generally, you will want to get the elemental supporter specialist before it. If you are in a position to get and evolve it, then I do recommend picking it.
 * Panda: Basically the same situation as Tanuki, but it's an earth supporter. As you will use him in forest, his value is only slightly higher than Tanuki, so you can basically get either. You'd mainly pick the one you can evolve easier.
 * Raven: Raven's another wind Rogue specialist. The only reason I have it this low is because you'll probably evolve Rudolph before raven, decreasing the need for another wind specialist. However, it's not wrong to get more if you can evolve it.
 * Vaccina: A harder to evolve Alchemist. Due to this, it's priority as a token pet is generally low, but you can get it earlier if you want to start the path to unlocking and evolving both Corona and Vaccina.
 * Robot: The sole reason Robot is at the bottom is because you never get robot for it's specialist role until extremely late game. Besides that, it's generally a top pick pet that I will not argue picking really early. Just understand it won't help with dungeons directly. It'd only help with growth camps, which indirectly help dungeons. If you ask me, growth chamber bets are probably a top tier priority, but they don't directly help with dungeons.