You can find the items list of your research for a good cash flow and rating in Dungeon Tycoon in this guide.
Research Items to Target
Recommended order of items to Research for a good cash-flow & rating in early game.
Dungeon Basics
Potion Business [Starting Research] and Energy Potion
Since unlooted money is lost at the end of the day, Vendors/Sales are the best way to power up and sustain your economy (along with quest rewards and entrance fees). Potions serve as the first gateway to wealth.
- Health Potion: Sells for 10 coins with 5 bottles in each sale.
- Energy Potion: Sells for 15 coins each.
During the demo, you can increase the price, and adventurers will still buy them despite complaining about the cost. However, in the released version, they will not purchase the potions at all if you increase the price by even 1 coin.
You want to place these potions in every nook and cranny of your starting room. I typically have up to 6 potion stands of each type, chests to accompany them, traps, and 3-4 spawners to keep the heroes busy and damaged. The faster the monsters die and regenerate, the more money is stored in the chests and, therefore, the wealthier your heroes will be. This encourages them to keep buying more potions.
Once the stands run out of potions, any hero that lingers for too long will get mopped up and contribute to your soul tally. Since they will be fighting monsters on and off, you can guarantee they’ll die happy and won’t hurt your rating too badly. In the first few days, you might need to manually time and drop in additional monsters to keep the heroes occupied.
I like sticking potions everywhere I can—in the room with the monsters as well as in the traveling corridors. Generally, you won’t see a lot of excess potions at the end of the day.
Attack Totem, Respawn Pedestal & Goblin Grill
The Respawn Pedestal is critical for keeping your heroes alive and happy (for long enough) in this Lotus Hotel. Did they die without purchasing a potion? Here’s their second chance.
The Respawn Pedestal repays its value quickly once you add other vendors to your dungeon. If the potions are sold out, the adventurers might start looking at alternatives, which are often more expensive and, therefore, more profitable for you (e.g., Grill burgers sell for 20 coins each).
From my observation, it doesn’t seem like the heroes respawn with full health/energy. They often beeline for potions and burgers right away before carrying on their journey. So you can guarantee the heroes will buy potions if they’re respawning. At the beginning, when you’re dealing with weak monsters, you can place the pedestal inside the room. The heroes can respawn and resume fighting. Later on, move the respawn pedestal to a safer spot.
You can also place some attack totems in the starting room if you find that too many heroes are dying in your potion-farming starting room. This will significantly boost their survival chances (so they can live to buy the potion).
During mid-game, as you start building more resting areas, you can place more respawn pedestals down. The more you have around, the more heroes you can respawn, and the more money they’ll keep paying you.
Legendary Heroes
I recommend getting these online ASAP, as they can be a reliable source of income early game as well as a way to gauge your dungeon’s difficulty. Even if your rating/prestige is not there yet, having the tab available gives you a tangible goal/challenge. Getting the Prestige research will also be a great addition.
Once you’ve unlocked a hero, you can invite him every day, and every day that he is satisfied with your dungeon, he’ll give you 100 coins. Even if he isn’t, there’s no penalty, and you can just re-invite the same hero the next day.
Higher-level heroes will provide better gold rewards for repeated satisfaction. This also counts toward your research’s visitors requirements, so sometimes the legendary heroes visiting 3 days in a row can shorten the research duration by a day or two.
Best First-Time Rewards to look out for:
- Prince Tristan’s Statue of Tristan: (Attack/Defense Totem)
- Midas Goldenthirst’s Chest of Midas: (Stores 150 coins)
- Sir Silvermane III’s Throne of Silvermane: (Pairs well with Midas’s chest; both are so gold and sparkly)
Camping Spot, Grouping Table
These don’t provide you with money, but they give the heroes a better chance of survival, which leads to more opportunities for them to splurge further down the road. However, this can hinder your soul income if your monsters aren’t leveled up enough, so a good idea might be putting the grouping table after your monsters have greeted the heroes. This will kill off a couple of adventurers at the beginning for souls and also stall the group/creating solo adventurers.
Groups keep everybody alive for much longer and immediately boost your rating and sales, as they will be purchasing in bulk. Depending on how you structure the dungeon, the groups may double back, which will only further boost sales. However, by late-game, when you’re dealing with 40+ people per day, these potions and grills are usually emptied and clean during their return trip—making the groups vulnerable to monsters and easy to farm for souls.
Ancient Spawn
The groups will mow down the monsters left and right, so getting a spawner that saves you 10 seconds of spawning is a great deal, especially for rooms designed to farm coins and happiness.
Large Healing Well
I acquired this much later compared to everything else on this list since they are free and eat into my potions business. However, if you find the potions running out much faster than you want, these wells are good for giving your poor heroes a chance to resupply.
The Underworld, Inferno & the Forest
The research trees for these three are pretty much the same. I recommend researching Inferno first, as there are 2 vendors you can unlock from that list immediately, while the others only have 1.
Key Upgrades from Each Realm:
- Blacksmith & Large Health/Energy Potion Dispenser
- Blacksmith & Large Energy Potion Dispenser can be found in Inferno’s research tree.
- Large Health Potion Dispenser is found in the Underworld’s research tree.
- The Blacksmith sells attack buffs to heroes (11 buffs available, 15 coins each). Meanwhile, the large dispensers take up a 1×2 space but can hold up to 15 potions and work faster compared to the single ones.
- Enchanter
- Found in the Forest’s research tree, the Enchanter sells random buffs to heroes for 25 coins each spell (up to 11 spells available).
- Buffs include defense, attack, speed, etc. I like placing the Enchanter and Blacksmith close together since they function similarly.
Other Recommended Upgrades
Other general upgrades you should target on your research trees whenever you come across them:
- Soul Trades: You have the option to lock the chests using souls, but a better investment is to spend them on Soul Trade (9 souls = 350 coins), level up your monsters, or use them to unlock realms.
- More Monsters: Unlock all More Monsters upgrades before researching the Bosses of each Realm. Bosses count toward your monster reserve, so if you summon the bosses before hitting your monster cap, you’ll be stuck with fewer monsters than you’d like (I got stuck with 26 during my first run).
- More Visitors
- Bigger Pockets: If heroes have more money, they’re more likely to purchase items upfront and during their trips.