Dungeon Settlers Research Planner
Write down the unlocks you can see, mark what you already have, and get back the order to research them in.
Manual Mode. No verified research tree ships with this planner. Add the unlocks you can see in your own build, tick what you already have, and the planner works out the order.
Unlock 1
How to use Manual Mode
Add each unlock you care about, tag it with a rough category, and use the Requires first chips to say what has to come before it. Tick anything you have already researched. Pick a target and the planner walks the dependencies for you, listing only what is still outstanding, deepest prerequisite first.
Costs are optional. If you enter them, the panel totals the ones on your remaining path, which is usually the number you actually want: not what the whole tree costs, but what this particular goal costs from where you are standing.
If two unlocks end up depending on each other, the planner says so rather than guessing an order.
What research does in Dungeon Settlers
Research unlocks buildings and equipment. It is the gate between “my settlement produces the basics” and “my party can survive deeper”, and it competes for the same settlement output as everything else. That makes ordering a real decision: researching towards a building you cannot supply yet is a slower mistake than it looks.
The research guide covers the system at a level that does not depend on a specific build.
Why the tree is not pre-filled
Research costs and prerequisite chains are build-specific, and Dungeon Settlers reaches Early Access on September 4, 2026. A fabricated tree would send people down paths that do not exist. The data model behind this planner already has room for the real thing — each node carries an id, name, category, cost, prerequisites, unlocks, the game version it came from and the date it was verified — so filling it in is a data change, not a rebuild.
Until then, the planner is only as good as what you type into it, and it says so on the page rather than pretending otherwise.
Planning around your settlement
Research is one of three things competing for the same production: feeding settlers, equipping expeditions and unlocking new options. Check the food calculator before committing to a long research goal, and use the production planner to work out whether you can supply what an unlock enables once you have it.