Dungeon Settlers Expedition Guide – Party, Rations & Camping Supplies

An expedition is the part of Dungeon Settlers you cannot take back. Up to four settlers leave, the dungeon is randomly composed, and the settlers who die stay dead. Everything that makes a run survivable is decided before it starts.

Work through it with the expedition planner open — it keeps the party, the supplies and the checklist in one place and remembers them between sessions.

Party: up to four

Four is the ceiling, not a requirement. The choice is about coverage: the same four settlers bring their equipment, their trained skills and their traits, and the party's weaknesses are whatever none of them cover.

Officially mentioned weapon and combat options include swords, maces, bows and fire magic — a spread of melee, ranged and magic rather than a single line of progression. The party guide goes into how skills and traits combine.

Equipment

Equipment comes from your own settlement. What the party can carry is limited by what you have researched and produced, which is why the settlement and the expedition are the same problem viewed from two ends. Check gear before the run, not at the entrance.

Rations and camping supplies

Two different needs:

• Rations keep the party fed while it is away from the settlement.
• Camping supplies let the party rest and recover during a run.

Both are produced at home, both consume settlement resources, and both compete with the settlers who stayed behind. Decide the split deliberately — the food calculator shows what the settlement can afford to give up.

This site does not recommend quantities. The Early Access build launches on September 4, 2026, and consumption rates will be checked in the live game before any number appears here.

Dungeons are randomly composed

Dungeon layout and contents are randomised, and environments carry their own effects. That changes what preparation means: you are not solving a known map, you are covering a range of situations.

Practical consequences:

• Redundancy beats optimisation. A party that can only do one thing well has one bad room away from disaster.
• Consumables matter more than they would in a fixed dungeon, because you cannot see the length of the run in advance.
• The correct depth is the one you can retreat from.

Risk and reward

Dungeons hold resources your settlement cannot produce. Going deeper is how you get more of them, and it is also how you lose settlers. There is no external timer forcing depth: the decision is always yours, and the honest question is whether the settlement can absorb losing this particular party.

Permadeath

Settlers who die are gone, along with their trained skills and whatever they were carrying. A trained settler represents accumulated settlement investment, so a death is more expensive than the equipment loss suggests. Retreating with less than you hoped for is a normal outcome, not a failure state.

Pre-run checklist

The planner's checklist covers the six things that actually go wrong:

1. Weapons equipped — including the settler you swapped in at the last minute.
2. Skills reviewed — you know what each member is bringing.
3. Food prepared — rations packed, not merely produced.
4. Camping supplies prepared — the recovery half of the run.
5. Inventory space checked — the reason people leave loot behind.
6. Settlement tasks reviewed — four workers just left; make sure home keeps running without them.