The ImpKeep field guide

The first two minutes

You open with 120 gold, 20 mana, a Dungeon Heart on 500 hit points, and 60 seconds before the first wave arrives. The map is 22 by 22 tiles, solid rock apart from the open ring around the edge — which is where every wave walks in from — and a small chamber around the Heart that is dug out for you at the start. Any gold seam inside that opening chamber is banked immediately, so a lucky map can put you above 120 before you have clicked anything.

What you do not start with is imps. The dungeon buys its own workforce: about six seconds in, and on a repeating timer after that, the Heart spends 18 gold to summon one imp — but only while you are under the imp cap and hold at least 18 gold. The cap starts at 4 and the timer is max(2.5, 7 − hatchery levels × 0.9) seconds.

Rock takes 3 points of damage to clear and an imp digs 1 point per second, so one imp clears one tile in about three seconds. Roughly one buried tile in eight hides a gold seam worth 40 to 90 gold, which is your entire income until warriors start killing things. Imps bank what they carry at a Treasury or at the Heart, so you can mine perfectly well before you own a Treasury tile.

What should I build first?

The ordering falls out of three facts. Nothing in your dungeon fights except warriors and heroes; warrior slots come only from Training Rooms; and every warrior costs 25 gold and 12 mana to train.

1. Training Room (30) and Barracks (34) — both, or neither is worth anything. The Training Room is the only source of warrior slots and the Barracks is the only place hiring happens, so one without the other produces exactly zero warriors: a lone Barracks has nowhere to put a recruit, and a lone Training Room has nobody to recruit him. Once both exist the dungeon trains a warrior on its own every 8 seconds while you are under the slot cap and can afford 25 gold and 12 mana.
2. Your first warrior costs 89 gold and 12 mana, all in. That is 30 for the Training Room, 34 for the Barracks and 25 for the warrior himself, and the 12 mana is not optional. You start Normal with 120 gold and 20 mana, so the first warrior is three quarters of your opening purse; you start Hard with 90 gold and 16 mana, where it is very nearly all of it.
3. Watch the mana, not the gold. With no Library you make 0.25 mana per second, so the 12 mana for the next warrior is 48 seconds of regeneration away. Early on, mana — not gold — is usually what caps the size of your garrison.
4. Lair (18) before wave 3. Stalkers arrive at wave 3, move faster than your warriors and go for whatever is nearest, which is usually an imp. Without a Lair a wounded imp has no way back to full health at all.
5. Treasury (10) whenever it is convenient. One tile earns 0.12 gold per second, so it repays its own cost in about 83 seconds and everything after that is profit. Its storage half does not matter yet: the base cap without any Treasury is 300, which is well above anything you will be holding in the first minutes.

Controls: the keys behind the mouse

Everything above is playable with a mouse alone — click a tool, click a tile — but the game also answers a fixed set of keys, and one of them (the keyboard cursor below) is the only way to play a tile without pointing at it at all.

Next: Room guide →

Room guide: what each of the seven rooms does

If you have arrived here looking for a Dungeon Keeper style room guide, the thing to unlearn first is that rooms in ImpKeep are built and levelled per tile. There is no minimum size and no "this room is too small" warning — one tile of Treasury is a real, working Treasury. Size matters through the adjacency bonus instead.

Costs below are per tile. The effect column describes a single level-1 tile standing on its own. The last column is the one worth reading before you spend: what the room needs before it does anything at all. The game charges the moment you click and never tells you the requirement first, so a room bought without its precondition is gold that sits there doing nothing until you buy the other half.

Two of those are easy to underrate. The Hatchery looks like a convenience until you notice the replacement timer starts at 7 seconds and cannot go below 2.5 no matter how much you build, so the first two levels buy most of what is available. The Forge looks expensive at 28 gold until you count how much of a run is spent waiting on rock.

The Lair is the one room whose headline effect is the less interesting half. "+2 imp cap" is what the tooltip says; the reason to build it is that it is the only place a hurt imp can recover, and an imp that cannot recover stays hurt for the whole run. It is also the only room your fighters get anything out of between waves — a wounded warrior standing on Lair tiles heals at 10 hp/sec instead of 4, and a hero at 15 instead of 6.

Next: Chambers and adjacency →

Chambers, adjacency and occupancy

A chamber is a run of tiles of the same room type that touch each other edge to edge. Diagonals do not count and two room types never share a chamber, so an L of five Treasury tiles is one chamber of five, and the same five tiles with a gap in the middle are two chambers.

Chambers are what the room panel talks about when you click a tile. It reports the chamber's size and how many of your own creatures are standing inside it right now — "This chamber: 4 tiles — 2 creatures inside". That count is presence, not assignment: nothing in ImpKeep is ever assigned to a room, units walk in and use what is there while they happen to be standing on it. Enemies are not counted. A Lair that always reads "empty right now" is gold that is doing nothing for you.

Adjacency: why a block beats a scatter

Room effects are not driven by tile count but by a level sum, and each tile's level is multiplied by 1 + min(0.40, 0.08 × (chamber size − 1)) before being added in.

So six level-1 Treasury tiles scattered around the map contribute a level sum of 6. The same six tiles packed into one block each get the maximum +40%, contributing 8.4 — the storage they grant goes from +900 to +1260 for exactly the same gold. Six tiles is where the cap is reached; a seventh adds its own level but no further multiplier to the others.

One consequence surprises people: because the bonus is a multiplier, level sums are usually fractional, and the caps built on them are rounded up. Three adjacent level-1 Lair tiles give a level sum of 3 × 1.16 = 3.48, which is 4 + 3.48 × 2 = 10.96 imps — and the game lets you have 11. Gold storage is the exception and is not rounded, because it is a quantity rather than a headcount.

Synergy: which rooms want to be neighbours

Adjacency asks whether a chamber is big. Synergy asks whether it is next to the right neighbour. Three pairs of room types are rewarded for touching, and nothing else in the game is:

• Forge and Barracks — the forge arms the warriors it stands next to.
• Lair and Hatchery — imps sleep and feed in the same quarter.
• Library and Training Room — theory next to drill.

A chamber that touches a chamber of its partner type gets a flat +10%, which is added to the adjacency bonus rather than multiplied with it. So the full multiplier a tile contributes with is 1 + min(0.40, 0.08 × (chamber size − 1)) + 0.10, and the ceiling on a tile's contribution is 1.50 rather than 1.40.

Three things about it are easy to get wrong, and all three are deliberate rather than incidental:

• It is yes or no per chamber, not a count. One tile of one chamber touching one tile of the other, edge to edge, is the whole test. Wrapping a Forge in nine Barracks tiles gives exactly the same +10% as a single shared wall — otherwise the bonus would scale with how long a wall you built, which is what adjacency already rewards.
• It is mutual. Both chambers get it, so one shared wall between a Library and a Training Room is +10% to your mana regeneration and +10% to your warrior slots. The second half of that is worth more than it sounds, because slot counts are rounded up: a single level-1 Training Room contributes a level sum of 1.10 with a Library against it, and ceil(1.10) = 2 warrior slots out of one 30-gold tile.
• It applies to the whole chamber, not just the tiles on the shared wall. The chamber is the thing you built, and the room panel describes chambers.

Click any tile of a paired room type and the panel tells you which side of that test you are on — "Next to a Barracks: yes (+10% to this chamber's effect)", or the same line saying no with the fix. Treasury is the one room type with no partner at all, so its panel has no synergy row: it is the only room whose effect is pure storage and income with no unit or task attached, and every candidate partner for it would have been arbitrary.

Next: Levels and branches →

Levels and the level-5 choice

Every room tile goes to level 5. Upgrading a tile from its current level costs round(base cost × 1.4 × current level), so a Treasury tile costs 14 to take to level 2, 28 more to level 3, 42 more to level 4, and 56 more to level 5. Demolishing refunds floor(base cost × 0.5 × level), which is deliberately less than you paid.

The level 4 → 5 upgrade asks which of two specialisations that tile takes. It is chosen once and cannot be changed without demolishing.

Note also that a branch bonus is counted from level-5 tiles only. A branched tile you demolish and rebuild comes back as a plain level-1 room; it does not keep the specialisation you paid for.

Next: Imps, warriors, heroes →

Imps, warriors and heroes

One number is worth stating before the tables, because it changes how every other one reads: attack is damage per second, not damage per swing. A warrior with 18 attack facing a 200-health monster needs about eleven seconds, and the numbers that pop off the monster are a quarter-second's worth of that, shown four times a second so the fight is legible.

Imps

34 hit points, 2.6 tiles per second, and no ability to fight anything. They rank up from completed digs, not kills — one point of experience per tile cleared:

• Novice — from 0 digs. Normal dig rate, carries 90 gold before it has to walk back.
• Experienced — from 4 digs. ×1.25 dig rate, carries 160.
• Master Digger — from 10 digs. ×1.5 dig rate, carries 250.

Since a single seam is 40 to 90 gold, a Novice is a one-seam-then- deposit unit and a Master Digger clears two or three before the trip back. That is most of the value of an old imp. The full dig rate is 1 × forge bonus × rank multiplier per second, times another 1.5 while a slap is running, against a tile that takes 3 to clear.

Resting. Below 45% health an imp drops its job and runs — to a Lair if one exists, where it stands still and heals 3 hp/sec until it is back to 90%, then goes looking for work again. It deliberately does not re-scan for jobs while resting, so you will see it stand there doing nothing; that is the mechanic working. With no Lair it runs to the Heart instead, which is safe but heals nothing, so it stays wounded for the rest of the run and panics again on the next hit. Your only other repair is the Heal spell, which does work on imps. That, rather than the imp cap, is the real argument for a Lair.

Gold on a dead imp is not lost. It drops in a pile on the tile where the imp died. Any idle imp will path to it — a pile outranks starting a new dig, and an imp will collect one even when it is nearly at its carry cap — or you can pick it up yourself with the Hand, which puts it straight in the treasury. Sending an imp is free but slow, and the tunnel the pile is lying in is usually the tunnel the monsters came down.

Replacing imps: the dungeon does it automatically for 18 gold on the Hatchery timer, you can buy one on the spot for 22 gold from the Heart or a Hatchery, or cast Create Imp for 35 mana. All three refuse once you are at the imp cap.

Warriors

Hired at the stats their Barracks' level dictates — 50 + 20 × level health and 14 + 4 × level attack, so 70 and 18 from a level-1 Barracks — then improved by rank. Rank is earned from kills at one experience point each, and multiplies the stats they were hired with:

• Recruit — 0 xp. Baseline.
• Veteran — 3 xp. ×1.25 HP, ×1.15 attack.
• Elite — 8 xp. ×1.6 HP, ×1.35 attack.

Because the multipliers apply to the hired stats, a Veteran from a level-3 Barracks and a Veteran from a level-1 Barracks are different units with the same title. A promotion also heals — but only by the size of the increase, not to full, so promoting a warrior mid-fight rescues nobody.

Training. A warrior with nothing to fight walks to a Training Room on its own and earns the same experience there, at 1/45 of a point per second: 135 seconds of undisturbed standing for one promotion, against a wave every 45 to 55 seconds. Three rules govern it, and each of them stops people's warriors from training: it only happens while the warrior is idle and standing still, it stops at Veteran (Elite is only reachable through kills), and a rally point overrides it — an explicit order always beats the drift, so a flag planted anywhere on the map means no warrior ever walks to the Training Room again.

Healing, and where it happens. Below 30% health a warrior breaks off and retreats to the Heart. From then on it heals 4 hp/sec whenever it is guarding rather than fighting — anywhere on the map, so a warrior recovers by doing nothing. Standing on a Lair tile makes that 2.5× faster, 10 hp/sec, and an idle warrior below 60% health takes itself there without being told.

That threshold sits well above the 30% panic threshold on purpose: fleeing delivers a nearly-dead warrior to the Heart, and the walk to the Lair picks it up from there rather than competing with it. The order an idle fighter decides in is worth knowing, because each step silently cancels the ones under it: a rally point wins over everything, then the Lair if it is hurt, then the Training Room. Which is to say a planted flag stops both the healing trip and the training trip. A fighter healing in a Lair is still guarding, not resting — unlike an imp it never stops watching, and it leaves the instant a monster comes into range.

Heroes

One per dungeon, unless a Training Room takes the Reserve branch. Hiring costs 150 gold and 60 mana, and the hero arrives with 140 + 25 × barracks level HP and 22 + 5 × barracks level attack.

What actually separates a hero from a strong warrior is cleave: every hit also lands 40% of its damage on one more monster within 3.2 units of the hero — the range is measured from the unit swinging, not from the thing it hit, so a monster standing behind the hero is a legal second victim and one standing behind the target may not be. It is an anti-swarm unit, not a bigger damage sponge. It also flees later than a warrior (25% health), heals faster (6 hp/sec guarding, 15 on a Lair tile), moves faster (3.4 against 3.0 tiles per second), and is never eligible to desert on a missed payday.

Heroes have their own three ranks — Adventurer (0 xp), Champion (4 xp, ×1.3 HP and ×1.25 attack) and Legend (10 xp, ×1.7 HP and ×1.55 attack) — and they are earned from kills only. A Training Room does nothing for a hero.

Next: Waves and boss waves →

Waves and boss waves

The mission is to repel 10 waves. The first arrives after the 60-second grace period; every one after that is 45 to 55 seconds behind the previous. You can call the next wave early, and doing so pays round(seconds still on the clock × 1.5) in gold — calling a wave with 40 seconds left is 60 gold for fighting it on your schedule instead of its own. The button is refused during the opening grace period and while any monster is still alive, so it is a reward for being genuinely finished, not a way to stack two waves on top of each other.

Wave size is min(1 + floor(wave number ÷ 2), 10). Wave 1 is a single monster, wave 10 is six. The cap of 10 exists for runs longer than this mission; a ten-wave run never reaches it.

Every monster in wave n starts from 40 + 14n health and 6 + 0.8n damage per second, then its archetype's multipliers apply:

Base monster speed is 1.9 tiles per second, so a Stalker at ×1.45 moves faster than your warriors do and a Brute at ×0.68 is slower than everything on the map, including your imps. Warlord never appears in the ordinary wave pool — it only ever fills the boss slot, and only from wave 10 onward. How far each of them looks for a victim differs too — see how monsters hunt.

The shape of the curve

Health and damage do not simply climb in a straight line. On top of the per-wave formula sits a third multiplier that depends only on which wave it is:

• Every fifth wave is a boss wave and everything in it, boss and escort alike, is at ×1.15.
• The single wave straight after a boss is at ×0.75 — a deliberate breather while you rebuild. The HUD labels it "(lighter wave)" in the preview.
• Every other wave is at ×1.

In a ten-wave mission that means waves 5 and 10 spike and wave 6 — the wave Brutes unlock on — is the discounted one. Wave 1 is explicitly excluded from the discount, since the opening wave hardly needs help. Two design notes worth knowing rather than guessing at: the shaping is applied to health and damage and never to the number of monsters, so a breather is easier to survive without teaching you less; and the multipliers are pacing decisions, not values tuned against play data.

Boss waves

The boss is drawn from a dedicated boss-only pool the moment one has unlocked — Warlord, from wave 10 — and otherwise falls back to the most dangerous regular archetype unlocked so far, ranked by health × damage, which puts the Brute far ahead of everything from wave 6 on. Whichever it is, it carries ×5 health, ×1.8 damage and ×1.55 size on top of the boss wave's own ×1.15. The boss counts as one of that wave's monsters rather than arriving on top of them — the escort is the rest of the wave's own size, one short — and it is built by taking one of each unlocked type in turn, so it may include more of the boss's own type.

Non-boss waves are built from one of three templates, cycling by wave number: a swarm of mostly one type, a mixed wave that takes one of each unlocked type in turn, or a spearhead with the heaviest unlocked type in front and lighter escorts behind. The HUD names the composition before it arrives, which is the point of having templates at all.

Killing anything pays 15 gold.

How monsters hunt

A monster's default plan is to walk to the Dungeon Heart, and everything else is an interruption of that. Twice a second, while it has no victim, it looks around itself for one. How far it looks is the one sense that differs by archetype: the base scan range is 3.2 units, multiplied by ×1.35 for a Stalker and ×0.75 for a Brute.

What it does when there is no route. The walk to the Heart is a search over dug floor only — a monster never digs and never crosses rock. If the search comes back empty it steps to a random neighbouring floor tile instead, re-deciding every 2.5 seconds, which on an unconnected map is a slow shuffle around the outer ring. It still scans for victims the whole time, so an imp digging near the edge is in just as much danger as it would be anywhere else; the Heart simply is not. The one exception is a door: if the reason it is stuck is a door on a tile it is touching, it stops and bashes that instead of wandering — see doors.

The middle column is not a second tuning knob — a monster gives up on a victim at exactly 1.5× its own scan range, so acquiring and losing are two ends of one band. Attack range is a flat 2.6 for everything, which is the one place a Brute's short sight actually helps it: it notices you at 2.4 and is already within reach.

That the numbers differ at all is a design decision with a stated reason on each side. A Stalker is the fast flanker, and a wide radius is what makes it read as a hunter rather than a quick Grunt — it can afford the detour because it catches up. A Brute is the opposite: at ×0.68 speed a detour costs it more than anyone, so a narrow radius keeps it beelining the Heart instead of spending its whole life chasing an imp it half-noticed.

Two rules decide who, once something is in range. Warriors and heroes are considered first and imps only if there are none — a monster that ignores the fighter hitting it to chase an imp looks broken — and within each group it is plain nearest-first. A unit you are holding in the Hand is invisible to all of this, and a victim it cannot find a path to is dropped and the monster returns to the Heart.

Splash damage

Most monsters hit exactly one thing at a time. Brutes and every boss — whatever type the boss happens to be — do not: each hit also lands 35% of its damage on up to two other units within 3.2 units of the monster, imps included. The extra numbers pop in orange over whoever caught the edge of the swing.

It is capped at two victims because it is a swing with an arc rather than a blast radius; an uncapped version would scale with how tightly you packed the corridor, which is the opposite of something you can plan against. And it is given to the heavy archetypes only: a Stalker picking one target out of a crowd is correct for what a Stalker is, and universal splash would multiply the damage of an entire wave without a single tuning number changing.

Next: Gold, mana and payday →

Gold, mana and payday

Gold comes from seams (40–90, roughly one buried tile in eight, +15 more with a Prospector Forge), kills (15 each), calling waves early, and Treasury income at 0.12/sec per Treasury level plus 0.20/sec per Coffer tile.

Storage capacity

You can hold 300 + 150 × treasury level sum + 200 per Vault tile. Gold beyond that is discarded as it arrives, not queued — if the counter has stopped moving while your imps are clearly still working, that is what is happening, and the advisor line at the bottom of the screen will say so. The one place the game tells you the exact amount lost is when you scoop a floor pile up with the Hand, because there you deliberately clicked a number and got a smaller one.

Demolishing a Treasury lowers the cap immediately, but it never destroys gold you are already holding. You simply cannot gain any more until you have spent back under the new ceiling.

Mana has exactly one source: 0.25 per second flat, plus 0.6 per Library level and 0.5 per Archive tile. It pays for spells, for the 12 mana every warrior costs to train alongside its 25 gold, and for 60 of the hero's hiring price.

Payday, and who deserts

Every 45 seconds, each imp and each warrior draws 3 gold. Heroes are not charged. If you cannot cover the bill:

• nothing at all is taken from the treasury — the gold you had saved toward the fix stays where it is;
• exactly one unit walks out, chosen at random from imps and warriors that have never ranked up;
• a unit you are holding in the Hand at that moment is not eligible — the overlord's own grip is a safe place to stand;
• if there is nobody eligible, nobody leaves and nothing is lost. The log tells you every fighter is a veteran and stays put.

Which makes rank double as insurance, and makes the count on your end-of-run summary worth reading: deserters are tallied separately from deaths, because a deserter walked out alive.

The advisor warns you 15 seconds ahead when the next payday is short, with the exact shortfall. That is the window in which selling a room or calling a wave early actually fixes it.

Next: Spells, traps and the hand →

Spells, traps and the hand

Spells are armed from the spell bar and cast on your next click on a dug-out tile. Mana decides how many you can afford; the cooldown decides when — which is what stops the answer to every emergency being the same strongest spell twice.

Three rules about cooldowns that are easy to discover the hard way. A cast that the game refuses — an undug tile, not enough mana, no fighter who can reach the spot — costs nothing and starts no cooldown, and leaves the spell armed so you can simply click somewhere better. Cooldowns run on game time, not wall-clock time, so speeding the game up does not quietly make your spells rarer. And Create Imp having no cooldown is a design decision rather than an oversight: it is the one spell meant to be cast several times in a row, so a cooldown would fight its own purpose.

A Spike Trap costs 25 gold, is placed on any dug floor tile that has no room, no door and no trap on it already — a trap under a door could never fire — deals 40 damage to the first monster that steps on it and then breaks. Your own units walk over traps safely. It is worth doing the arithmetic before buying: 40 damage is most of a wave-1 monster and about 1% of the wave-10 boss.

Doors

A Wooden Door costs 40 gold and hangs on a dug floor tile that has no room, no trap and no door on it already. It has 120 hit points and one rule that defines it: your own imps, warriors and heroes walk through it as though it were not there, and monsters cannot path across it at all. A door is not a wall, it is a toll — what you are buying with 40 gold is time and a say in which corridor the wave uses.

Because it is a toll, a door only ever gets hit when there is nothing left to walk around. A monster paths to the Heart ignoring every tile a door stands on; if some longer route exists it simply takes it and never touches the door. Only when no route to the Heart remains does it look at the four tiles it is touching, and if one of them holds a door it stops there and hits it with its own damage per second until the door is gone. A living victim always outranks carpentry: the moment a warrior or an imp comes into range the monster drops the door and fights.

You cannot seal the dungeon with one. A door is refused, before any gold is spent, on any tile whose removal would cut the dug-out floor into two disconnected halves — the single-tile corridor case. The refusal names itself in the log rather than failing silently, because that tile looks exactly like any other. The test only looks at which tiles are floor, though, and never at other doors, so two doors across two parallel corridors are each perfectly legal on their own and together leave a wave with nowhere to go. That pair is precisely what bashing exists for: without it, the wave would shuffle around the map forever and the run would end in a stalemate rather than a win or a loss.

The Rally Point and the Hand are free and reusable. The rally flag is where idle warriors and heroes drift back to instead of standing wherever their last fight ended — remember that it also stops them walking off to train.

The Hand does two different jobs. Click one of your units to pick it up and any dug tile to drop it there, which interrupts whatever it was doing — the fastest way to get four imps onto one seam, and the fastest way to accidentally cancel four digs. A unit in your hand is also out of reach: monsters cannot see it, and it is not eligible to desert on a payday that lands while you are holding it.

Click a pile of gold on the floor instead and it goes straight into the treasury, with no imp making the trip. That is what the Hand is really for — the moment a pile appears is usually the moment no imp is free to fetch it, because the pile appeared when one died.

Next: Difficulty multipliers →

Difficulty multipliers

Difficulty does not swap in different content. It multiplies six starting numbers, and everything else in the game is unchanged. The figures in brackets are those multipliers applied to the base values.

The wave-timing row is the one that changes how the run feels rather than how hard a fight is. Hard removes about a fifth of every preparation window, which compounds: less digging between waves means less gold, which means fewer warriors facing monsters that already have 30% more health. Note what difficulty does not touch — payday, storage capacity, room costs, rank thresholds and spell costs are the same on all three settings.

Next: Missions and maps →

Missions and maps

There is one playable mission. "Repel 10 waves", on a 22 by 22 map, is the whole game today — there is no campaign, no level select and no map generator seed to type in. What there is instead is a mission registry: everything a level is allowed to decide has been pulled out of the engine and into one descriptor, which is the groundwork a second level needs and not itself a second level.

A descriptor is nine fields, and the mission you play reads:

Two of those repay a second look. The numbers in a descriptor are the pre-difficulty ones — Easy and Hard multiply them when they are read, not when they are written, which is why the difficulty table above can show both the multiplier and the result. And goldSeamChance is per tile, so the gold buried in a map scales with its area, not with how wide it is: 0.12 across 484 tiles is the roughly one-in-eight seam rate you actually dig through.

A second descriptor sits in the same file — a 28 by 16 map, six waves, a 45-second grace period and 100 starting gold. Monsters would still spawn all round its perimeter, but two thirds of that perimeter is the two long edges, so the pressure arrives spread out rather than evenly around a square. You cannot play it. Nothing loads it, and the engine still treats the map as one number for both axes in half a dozen places, so a rectangular map would not crash so much as quietly address the wrong tiles. It is a fixture written to prove the registry can describe a different mission and to be the thing the rectangular-map work is built against — which is a real answer to "is a second level coming", just not a playable one.

The authoring bounds are worth stating for the same reason: a mission's map may be between 8 and 48 tiles on a side. The floor is exact rather than tasteful — below 8 the one-tile border plus the six-tile starting chamber around the Heart no longer fit, and the chamber gets silently clipped. The ceiling is a guard against somebody shipping a 500-by-500 map by typo and blaming the renderer.

Next: Beating the ten waves →

Beating the ten waves

The general answer to how you beat a dungeon builder like this one is that you are not solving ten fights, you are solving two: wave 5 and wave 10. Everything between them is preparation, and the specific failure is arriving at a boss wave with a garrison of Recruits.

1. Waves 1–2 are your build window. One monster, then two. Two warriors can hold that while every imp you own keeps digging. Spend the grace period on rock, not on rooms you cannot staff yet — and keep 18 gold spare so the Heart keeps buying imps.
2. Get a Lair up before wave 3. Stalkers arrive at wave 3, move at 1.45× and go for whatever is closest, which is usually an imp. Without a Lair, every imp they wound stays wounded.
3. Bank rank before wave 5. The wave-5 boss is a Grunt with 635 health, and your warriors want to meet it at Veteran. If the run has been quiet, leave idle warriors alone with no rally point set and they will take themselves to the Training Room — 135 seconds each, and it only goes to Veteran, but it is free.
4. Wave 6 is the cheapest wave in the run — use it. It is the post-boss breather at ×0.75, and it is also where Brutes unlock, so you meet the new archetype at a discount. That is the wave to call in early for the gold, and the window to put up a second Treasury and a Forge.
5. Wave 10 is a 2690-health Warlord plus five escorts. Save 45 mana for Lightning and cast it into the escort, not the boss — 60 damage kills escorts outright and is a rounding error against the boss. Then Call to Arms onto the corridor the boss is walking down. At ×0.62 speed it is the slowest thing on the map, so you get to choose where that corridor is.

The single highest-value habit is calling waves early during quiet stretches. It converts time you were going to spend waiting into gold at 1.5 per second, and it lets you take the fight while your warriors are healed rather than 20 seconds into a dig.

Next: When it looks like a bug →

When it looks like a bug

Everything in this section is a rule working as intended. They are collected here because each of them is invisible until it costs you something.

My gold stopped going up

You are at your storage cap and the excess is being thrown away as it arrives. Build another Treasury tile, or spend down. See storage capacity for the formula.

A warrior left the dungeon and I never saw it die

It deserted at payday. See payday — one unranked imp or warrior leaves whenever the wage bill goes unpaid, and the summary screen counts it separately from a death.

Nothing is digging and no imps are arriving

Check your gold: the Heart's automatic replacement costs 18 and simply does not fire below that. With no imps and no gold there is no way to earn any, and the run is stuck until you spend 35 mana on Create Imp.

An imp is standing in the Lair doing nothing

It is resting, and it will not take a job until it is back to 90% health at 3 hp/sec. Slapping it will not hurry that along — a slap costs 8 health, which makes the rest longer.

I built a Barracks and it will not train anything

You have no Training Room. Warrior slots come only from Training Rooms, so with none built the cap is zero and the Barracks — its 34 gold already spent — hires nobody. Build a Training Room (30) and the dungeon starts hiring on its own. The full bill for a first warrior is 89 gold and 12 mana; see what each room needs.

I built a Hatchery and no extra imps arrived

A Hatchery only shortens the timer between replacements; it does not raise the imp cap at all. The cap starts at 4 and rises only with Lair tiles, and each replacement the timer fires still costs 18 gold. At the cap, or under 18 gold, a faster timer buys you nothing.

I demolished a trap and got no gold back

Correct, and deliberate: traps and doors refund nothing, only rooms do. See spike traps. Demolish does at least remove a trap now and say so in the log — clicking Demolish on a trapped tile used to do nothing whatsoever.

My warriors never go and train

Most likely a rally point is set somewhere: an explicit order always beats the drift to the Training Room. The other two causes are that the warrior is already a Veteran, which is the training ceiling, or that it never has an uninterrupted stretch to stand still in.

A spell did nothing and my mana is unchanged

The cast was refused, which costs nothing and starts no cooldown. The usual reasons are an undug tile, a Call to Arms nobody could path to, or Create Imp at the imp cap. The spell is still armed, so click somewhere else.

The wave after the boss was suspiciously easy

It was: the wave straight after a boss runs at ×0.75 health and damage on purpose. The HUD marks it "(lighter wave)". See the shape of the curve.

My imp died carrying a fortune

The gold is on the floor where it fell, with a marker. Any free imp will fetch it, or you can pick it up yourself with the Hand.

I picked up a 250-gold pile and only got some of it

You were near your storage cap. The Hand takes the whole pile off the floor and banks only what fits; the rest is lost, and the log says exactly how much. Nothing is left behind on the tile to come back for.

The wave arrived and then nothing happened

Your dug floor does not reach the map edge yet, so there is no route from where they spawned to the Heart and they are shuffling around the outer ring. Nothing is broken and nothing is coming — but nothing is being won either, because the mission ends only when every wave has been killed. See how monsters hunt.

A monster walked straight past my imp

Probably a Brute. Its scan radius is 2.4 units against a Grunt's 3.2 and a Stalker's 4.32, so it genuinely does not notice things a Stalker would have crossed the map for. See how monsters hunt.

One Brute hurt three of my warriors at once

Brutes and bosses splash: 35% of every hit also lands on up to two other units within 3.2 units of the monster, imps included. Everything else in the game is strictly single-target. See splash damage.

The game will not let me hang a door on this tile

A door is refused on four kinds of tile: undug rock, a room, a tile that already has a trap or a door, and — the one that looks like nothing is wrong — a tile where the door would cut the dug floor in two. The log names which of the four it was, and no gold is spent on a refused placement. See doors.

My door is untouched and the monsters got past it anyway

They walked around it. A monster only ever attacks a door when it has no route to the Heart at all; a door that merely makes the journey longer is pathed around and never hit. One door on a map with two ways in is a redirection, not a barrier. See doors.

My warriors keep wandering off to the Lair

They are below 60% health and healing there at 2.5× the normal rate. They will still drop everything and fight the moment a monster comes into range, and a rally point overrides the trip entirely.

Next: Questions people ask →

Questions people ask

How do you beat the ten-wave mission?

Reach wave 5 with a Training Room, a Barracks and two or three warriors, and reach wave 10 with warriors that have ranked up at least once. The boss on wave 10 is a Warlord carrying five times a normal monster's health on top of the boss wave's own difficulty spike, so it is the only fight in the mission that a fresh Recruit line cannot absorb.

Why can I not train any warriors?

Because a warrior needs both rooms. Warrior slots come only from Training Rooms; hiring happens only at a Barracks. A dungeon with one and not the other is capped at zero warriors, whichever half it is missing. All in, a first warrior costs 89 gold and 12 mana — 30 for the Training Room, 34 for the Barracks, 25 and 12 for the warrior — against the 120 gold and 20 mana a Normal run starts with. Every room's precondition is in the room table.

I built a room and nothing happened. Why?

Three rooms need something else before they do anything, and the game charges you before it says so. A Barracks needs a Training Room and a Training Room needs a Barracks — neither alone produces a warrior. A Hatchery only shortens the imp replacement timer: it never raises the imp cap, which starts at 4 and rises only with Lairs, and each replacement still costs 18 gold. A Forge multiplies imp dig speed and nothing else, so with no imps alive or nothing marked to dig it does exactly nothing. The room table lists all seven.

Where does my gold go when the counter stops rising?

Gold above your storage capacity is discarded as it arrives. You can hold 300 without a Treasury, each Treasury level adds 150 on top of that, and each Vault tile adds 200 more.

Why did one of my units leave the dungeon?

That was payday. Every 45 seconds each imp and each warrior draws 3 gold, and if the treasury cannot cover the bill nothing is taken at all and exactly one unit that has never ranked up walks out instead. Heroes are never charged and never desert, and a dungeon where every imp and warrior has earned a rank loses neither the gold nor anybody.

Can I wall my dungeon off with doors?

No. A door costs 40 gold, has 120 hit points and blocks monsters while your own units walk through it, but the game refuses to place one where it would cut the dug-out floor in two, and any monster left with no route to the Heart bashes the nearest door in front of it at its full damage per second. A door buys time and decides which corridor a wave uses; it never closes the dungeon. The full rule is above.

Which rooms should be built next to each other?

Three pairs are rewarded for touching: Forge with Barracks, Lair with Hatchery, and Library with Training Room. One tile of either chamber touching one tile of the other, edge to edge, adds a flat 10% to the effect of both chambers. A longer shared wall adds nothing further, and Treasury has no partner at all. The full rule is above.

Is there more than one level?

No. There is one playable mission — repel 10 waves on a 22 by 22 map. The game's mission file describes a second map alongside it as data, but nothing loads it and the engine still assumes a square map, so it is groundwork rather than a level you can play today. What a mission descriptor contains is above.

Why can I not cast the same spell twice in a row?

Each spell has its own cooldown: 12 seconds for Heal, 15 for Call to Arms, 20 for Lightning, 18 for Freeze. Create Imp deliberately has none, because it stays armed so you can conjure several in a row. A cast that was rejected — wrong tile, not enough mana, nobody to rally — starts no cooldown at all.

Is ImpKeep a Dungeon Keeper clone?

It is in the Dungeon Keeper tradition — you are the dungeon, not a hero walking into it — but heroes are units you hire rather than the enemy, there is one map per run instead of multiple floors, and a missed payday costs one unranked unit rather than starting a mutiny. The full comparison is on the game page.

Where is the rest of the wiki?

This is all of it. Everything the game currently has a verified number for is on this one page, which is why it is long — use the index below, the contents list, or your browser's own find-in-page, which works on the whole guide precisely because it is not split across ten pages.

Do these numbers stay accurate?

The game is in active development and balance changes. This page is written against the game's own constants rather than from memory, but if something here disagrees with what you see in a run, the run is right — please tell us so it can be corrected.

Next: Index of terms →

Index of terms

Every room, branch, rank, spell, monster and rule this guide explains, and where on the page to find it.

• Adjacency bonus
• Archive
• Attack (damage per second)
• Barracks
• Boss wave
• Branches (level 5)
• Breather wave
• Broodmother
• Brute
• Call to Arms
• Calling a wave early
• Carry cap
• Chamber
• Cleave
• Coffer
• Conclave
• Connecting the map (digging the way in)
• Controls (keyboard and mouse)
• Create Imp
• Den
• Desertion
• Difficulty
• Door (and bashing one down)
• Drillground
• Elite
• First warrior (89 gold and 12 mana)
• Forge
• Foundry
• Grace period
• Hand
• Hatchery
• Heal
• Hero
• Imp cap
• Keyboard cursor (Shift+Arrow)
• Lair
• Library
• Lightning
• Master Digger
• Mission descriptor
• Occupancy
• Pause (Space)
• Payday
• Preconditions (what a room needs)
• Prospector
• Quartermaster
• Rally point
• Recentre camera (R)
• Refunds (rooms yes, traps and doors no)
• Reserve
• Resting
• Sanctuary
• Scan range
• Seams
• Slap
• Spell cooldowns
• Spike Trap
• Splash damage
• Stalker
• Storage cap
• Synergy
• Training (warriors)
• Training Room
• Treasury
• Undo (Ctrl+Z)
• Vanguard
• Vault
• Veteran
• War College
• Wave intensity
• Wave templates
• Wandering (no route to the Heart)
• Win condition

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