Be sure to play this campaign on the newest KeeperFX 1.4 alpha! Many essential features will not work correctly on older KeeperFX versions.
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This campaign, where you play as the Heroes, has 10 main levels and a good amount of custom content and changes.
- Playable heroes with re-balanced stats, buffing some of the weaker heroes
- New spells - promote Thieves into Knights, summon hero patrols, or turn dirt path back into diggable rock
- New traps (Berserk Trap, Candles, and a few more)
- New creatures and updates to older ones with new skills
- Adjusted research order
- An optional hard mode with unique challenges per-level
Dawn paints a flame-colored sky, as the warriors of the Diamond Hero Guild stand inside their meeting room, to discuss the invasion of the depths under the land. The red keeper Scarlet threatens the safety of the overworld, and it’s up to you, Lord Diamond, to lead your fighters underground and into battle to exterminate evil at its root. And worse than that, the underworld is known to be the hideout of the Onyx Rogues, turncoat heroes that would steal, scavenge and ally themselves with keepers. They’ll be sure to stand in your way as you explore the depths. Stay vigilant, descend the 10 layers of the underworld, and destroy those who would stand against you.
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Hard Mode
All main levels feature an optional hard mode, for players looking for more of a challenge. The cursed magic orbs can be used to make the current level more difficult. If you want to play a harder version, look for singular, standalone gold blocks on the minimap. If you don’t want to play the hard mode, you can either ignore or slap the curse orbs to dismiss the hard mode for the current level.
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For credits and special thanks, see the credits and included .txt file.
All comments and feedback are welcome!
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1.1 Changelog
- Level 1 - Made some early progression smoother/clearer and improved the creature introduction messages
- Level 2 - Ensured that the final party engages with the player faster
- Level 3 - Fixed an issue with a message showing up when the keeper was already dead
- Level 5 - Added some enemies early on and added a new objective message after claiming the entrance
- Level 6 - Slightly changed the enemies present on the map
Other
- The cat can now be resurrected with special boxes
- Priestesses now learn flight
- Added backwards compatibility so transforming creatures work on older KeeperFX versions
- Adjusted some graphical elements in the tileset recolors (digging selection box)
1.2 Changelog
- Arachnomancer introduction now shows whenever the player first finds one
- Midas Touch now also drops gold when the creature dies before the timer ends
- Restructured some code and removed dead code and assets, fixed log warnings
- Improved the casting animation for the Create Earth spell
- Future proofed effect ids
- Removed some unused temple recipes
Changed handling for how Hard Mode is communicated:
- Now explicitly mentions Hard Mode is on when a curse is activated
- Curse tutorial in level 1 now has no expiration anymore
- When the curse orb expires, it doesn’t get replaced with gold anymore, but with a consumable item that explains the Hard Mode timer
Well, this was so enjoyable. When I seen another campaign by aqualakitu i quicky updated everything and I will say, I was not disappointed. Every level was distinct brining different aspects to the campaign.
Some niggles I did have where: Chapter 1 my Tunnellers became angry and starting beserking, I got spammed throughout this map that they where destroying rooms, but they carried on doing there jobs (good boys). This did seem a continuous thing throughout the whole campaign, but I slapped them into the lava or killed them to stop it, WALA! I did think the verbiage when the candles where found to active the portal said "take these 4" candles, but I only needed two. Bit confused, also why did we not use this way of claiming a portal for the rest of the campaign, amazing addition I though.
Chapter 2: The red keeper tunnelled to me and to bits of the map, therefor stopping me exploring the map, I used non of the side quests and went straight to kill him before he spread too much.
Chapter 3: When the wave of demon spawn and dragons spawn, they walked in the lava and did not follow the path. The little cheaters!
Chapter 4: I got two lovely lava traps to control the waves coming at me, shame the dwarfs walked over the path wrong and dropped the traps on the corner of the path where they jagged and met the lava. I did a work around and floated my Tunnellers to collect them.
Thank you for building such a fantastic campaign I had an amazing three days playing 5 Star
I'm very glad you enjoyed it!
Dwarves are sadly a little dumb, and more easily upset than imps. In terms of pathfinding they sadly do have their problems around lava or narrower areas. As for them getting angry, that may be down to food or pay. Unlike imps, they do have needs, but I would be surprised if they were constantly angry. I'll have a look if it could be a bug.
There were 'Beserk Traps' in this campaign, that temporarily made units go beserk. You got to build them too.
My Tunnellers stayed Beserk for quite some time, after replying i think it was due to hunger.
Sorry, i did not read well. The traps would cause them to fight other creatures. Destroying rooms is indeed because you got them angry yourself. Refusing to feed them might be a cause.
Amazing!!!
Ah yes, finally another good campaign! I had been looking forward to this one for quite some time, and knowing that it was another piece of work by aqualakitu, I expected it to be a high-quality campaign.
I particularly enjoyed the lore and atmosphere introduced throughout the different levels. The interlude levels were something I had never seen before, and the final level in particular gave me some strong RPG vibes. There has been a great deal of creativity and many new ideas in KeeperFX over the past few years, but I found it remarkable that there is apparently still room for concepts that haven’t been explored before. I also enjoyed how different the levels felt from one another, with each one offering something new.
One of my favourite levels was the lava level, with its receding lava mechanic adding some pressure to the gameplay. At first, however, I was a little concerned about the difficulty. I found the first three or four levels overly easy—sometimes to the point where I could simply rush the enemy without even needing to use the mechanic that was apparently intended for beating the level. Fortunately, this changed later on. The difficulty became more appropriate, and I had to make better use of the tools available to me.
That said, I barely used any of the newly introduced traps. The speed-boost candle in particular was a buff I used extensively on my minions, and it gave me quite an advantage in the battles that followed.
I also noticed a few things that might have been bugs, although they may already have been fixed by now:
Throughout the entire campaign, I was completely unable to use the mechanic for transforming a Thief into either a Samurai or a Knight. This didn’t just happen in the first level, but in every level of the campaign. As a result, I had no choice but to dismiss every Thief who entered my dungeon.
In level one, almost every new creature—or hero, in this case—was introduced with a message explaining what it was and how to use it. However, I noticed that the Wizard did not receive such an introduction when he entered my dungeon.
In level two, the final enemy party arrived quite late. By that point, I had already destroyed the Dungeon Heart and met the victory condition without ever having to fight them. Perhaps the final party could arrive as soon as the Dungeon Heart room is breached.
I also noticed that the new creature, the Arachnomancer, was never introduced in the later levels. This might have been because it was considered an enemy creature, but I was genuinely curious about its story, especially since it was a completely new creature that I hadn’t encountered in any other campaign or map before.
Regarding the difficulty mentioned earlier, I found the lava-trap level in particular far too easy, and I never really needed to make use of the lava traps.
That is basically everything I noticed. In any case, thank you very much for this wonderful campaign! And despite appreciating my Imps even more now—since they are so much faster than the Tunnellers—I can’t wait to see another piece of work from you in the future.
Rating: 5/5 Difficulty: 3/5
Thank you for the detailed feedback, and I'm glad you liked it! As for some of the individual points...
The transforming bug only exists in 1.4, the feature was added in an alpha. So if you update to the most recent alpha then everything should work fine in that regard.
I may still adjust the balancing on some levels, just hearing out what people have to say in terms of feedback. If you want to take a shot at some harder versions, there is a hard mode to find in every level (look for a lone gold block). That should beef up even the earlier levels by a reasonable amount.
The creatures mostly get an intro to introduce their changes, the Wizard is basically entirely untouched. Arachnomancers do get an intro, but that is possible to miss if you didn't find them in the first level they can be obtained in. I may change that up some so the player still gets their tutorial message.
And I'm glad the lava level worked out well. I was pretty worried that it'd either be received really well or really poorly, I had to test it quite a few times to make sure it doesn't turn stressful and messy.
Heros Journey was very cool. Youve obviously put in a lot of effort in and its much appreciated :) i think a couple of the spells wernt working properly for me, but apart from that it was really good, thanks :)
Thank you! Which spells in particular didn't work? If you let me know what happened, I can try to fix it for future versions!
It was the spells to upgrade a thief into a knight or samari for example, when i did this, nothing seemed to happen. Also turning a magical creature into a dragon didnt seem to work. And there was one other that i cant remember at the moment!
Ah, gotcha. That's simply an issue with being on an older version, if you update to the newest alpha that should fix itself. Keep in mind that that could break campaign saves though.
Holy Mother of the Keepers. That was an awesome Journey and a lot of fun. I need more Stuff of this and yeah ofc with heroes. Maybe new idea with some defense lines to hold some big attacks back and more
Thanks! Could be I'll end up making some co-op maps with heroes in the future.
Wow... I can only say wow, I did not expect such a rich rebuilding and rebalancing. It was the most fun I had with DK since the 90'. You did an incredible job. I had to make an account just to say thank you and compliment you. You evolved the base game while preserving its soul. I sincerely had no idea the game and map developers progressed this much. Can't wait to play your other creations! Thank you!
EDIT: ah! By mistake, I think I noticed that there are new temple recipies, is that correct? Is there a way to see a list of them?
I'm glad to hear you liked it so much, I hope you'll enjoy the other campaigns as well! That was my goal, keeping it feeling authentic while adding a bunch of new stuff. And the modding tools are genuinely super impressive. Definitely gotta give credit to the other devs that did so much to make extending the game like this possible. Wouldn't have been possible without their work.
As for temple recipes, level 9 has a strong hint on how some of the new recipes work. So if you want to figure some of them out in-game, that's a place to look.
Otherwise, if you just want an overview, the file rules.cfg in the campaign's config folder has a list of them.
Just played through the campaign and it was really fun! !! liked the mechanics with knights, samurai and avatar. was fun with the rebalance of some creatures. levels are good and the difficulty was medium but i think that is perfect for this kind of campaign. Very well done !
Thank you! Yeah, I try to keep the difficulty engaging, but still accessible.
and you nailed it. keep up the good work !
I feel really silly but I have a question, there are many different structures that have fully fortified walls and I simply can't get into, in the first world for example, inside the keepers dungeon is a fully fortified area near the purple gold vein, when you use the eye spell, you can see there is stuff inside but I don't know how to break the walls to get in
That's something new to KeeperFX taken from Dungeon Keeper 2, there are so called Secret Doors, that look like walls but can be destroyed. There's a variety of ways to find them, your creatures will attack them if they're dropped close enough to one, or you can poke around in possession to check. Once you have found/hit a secret door, it'll also be revealed on the map that it isn't actually a wall. Hope that helps!
And creatures with sight can see them from far away. Also if you spot a creature go through them they are revealed.
Thank you so much, I was so confused
Remarkable game made, not that difficult for each level but a little stressful, having to deal with restless skirmishes around your dungeon corners. It makes quite new game experience by playing as heroes in that dwarves are efficient armed forces in a very early game, especially against enemy keepers starting with limited minions. I failed to update thieves to knights or samuri by the way, current version is newest clean 1.4.0.
Glad you liked it! Yeah, I wanted to keep tunnellers distinctly different from imps, even if they can be a bit frustrating.
For the creature promotion to work, you need to be on the newest alpha of 1.4. Keep in mind, if you update now, this will very likely break your current save, and you'd have to either restart the campaign, or you can use cheats to skip to the level you're currently on. But with the alpha, everything should work fine.
Great Work! Should be merged into core game for mapbuilding etc. Very fun and alot of great ideas!
Thank you! Yeah, eventually when the campaign has received some fixes and adjustments, I'd like to aim for the campaign to be bundled, or to make some of the custom elements I made to be available for other mapmakers.
The first card is interesting, but... How do you deal with a Knight and a Samurai against 25 tens?
Did you check the lower left corner of the corner of the map? There is a way to get more creatures there, an objective message points you there after you get the knight.
Yes, I figured it out!
I don't want to burst your bubble, but that last update won't let me change the thief into a knight! 😭
yeah i get this too makes it very long and boring using a thief only lmao
The latest version is allowing the transfer. But it appears the auto update is NOT working. I had to install keeperfx-1_4_0_5291-Alpha-patch manually and use the "Dungeon Keeper\KeeperFX-3-2\KeeperFX\keeperfx.exe" to run the game. If I try to use the "KeeperFX.lnk" it uninstalls the update and backpedals the game to 5136.
You're also likely on 1.4 or an older version then. To get it working, please do a clean install of 1.4, and then install the most recent alpha over it. Then everything should work fine! You're certainly not supposed to use a thief for the whole level, he's supposed to become a knight. 😄
Hey, which version are you on exactly? I just checked it on alpha 5821, and it should work fine there. Otherwise, can you provide more details or an error log?
Also, I did play yesterday on 5821, and it would NOT change the thief into a knight. It did produce the text, but the thief stayed a thief.
Very strange. It could be that something is off if you're not on a clean 1.4 -> alpha install, and upgraded from earlier version. If the issue does keep happening, you can share the error log on the discord server and I'll try to fix the bug asap.
The latest version is allowing the transfer. But it appears the auto update is NOT working. I had to install keeperfx-1_4_0_5291-Alpha-patch manually and use the "Dungeon Keeper\KeeperFX-3-2\KeeperFX\keeperfx.exe" to run the game. If I try to use the "KeeperFX.lnk" it uninstalls the update and backpedals the game to 5136.
Not sure, but it was one of the ones on 8/11. But the game will let me change the thief into a knight on this version, keeperfx-1_4_0_5278-Alpha-patch