Minecraft Dungeons – Beginner Guide with tips and tricks (Loot, Power, Enchantments and Artifacts)

Minecraft Dungeons is the new game from Mojang and Xbox Game Studios combing the world of Minecraft with a Diablo-style dungeon-crawler with weapons, armour and abilities. It’s super fun and available on pretty much everything, so now is the perfect time to jump in either solo or with your friends. The following is a beginner Guide with tips and tricks for Minecraft Dungeons.

This is a new action role-playing game that expands the Minecraft world with loot, levelling up and exploration. There’s a bunch of lite-RPG mechanics introduced here including vendors, artifacts and the need to repeat levels to get the best loot in the game. This is a great place to start if you don’t know anything about the game, or if you want to pick up a few tips for your first few hours into Minecraft Dungeons.

First of all, pick your character and work your way through the tutorial level. This will teach you the basics of slashing with your sword and shooting arrows. As you progress through the tutorial you’ll level up where you’ll be introduced to Enchantments and Artifacts, and I’ll go through those in more detail later. Finish up the tutorial and you’ll get a loot drop, which is central to Minecraft Dungeons.

Once you’re finishing with the tutorial you’ll be introduced your Camp. This is a space where to can check your gear, practice with your short-range and longe range attacks as well as find hidden chests and pick up things from vendors (although you’ll have to complete a few story missions to open up these options).

Before you jump into the story, you’ll want to get used to the layout of the character screen. You have 3 slots at the top – left is your melee weapon, the middle is armour and right is your ranged weapon. Your level is displayed to the left of your character and to the right is your power. Below your character, you have 3 slots and these are for artifacts and are linked to 3 buttons on either your joypad or keyboard. At the top on the left are your Emeralds, which is the currency in the game and next to that are your Enchantments. We’ll need to fill this up with loot before we go into more detail.

Select the map, pick a level and it’s time to start your adventure. Let’s dive into some tips along the way.

Exploration

When you’re in story missions make sure you’re looking around for hidden chests. You can follow the yellow marker which will take you the fastest way through the level, but you can bring up the map (by pressing down on the d-pad) to find areas where you haven’t explored before. Hidden chests are a great source of Emeralds and also contain some of the best loot in the game. You can find chests and also hidden rooms that can be full of enemies protecting more great loot. When you open up chests you’ll come across emeralds too, you’ll want to save these up so you can purchase items from vendors back at camp later.

Levelling up & loot

As you progress through levels, kill as many enemies as you can to level up your character and watch out for items that they drop. Loot can come from chests thorough exploration, however, loot can drop from enemies and bosses too. So keep an eye out for this and pick up as much as you can. You’ll naturally level up as you play the story campaign as the story missions will get progressively harder as you work your way through.

You’ll pick up higher power gear as you progress, but higher power gear doesn’t always mean better. In other games, this can be the case but Minecraft Dungeons has the Enchantment system, which can offer up unique buffs and improvements, so make sure you’re checking out the Enchantments on gear as well as the power level.

Combat

There’s a few types of combat in the game. There’s close-range combat with Swords, Knives, Glaives and Axes and there are also longer-range attack weapons too with bows. You’ll pick up different weapons as you make your way through the game and they have different benefits. Knives, for example, have a shorter range and you can attack faster, whereas the Glaive will give you more range but a slower attack speed.

There are different bows too – you have your standard bow that shoots a single arrow, your triple bow that shoots multiple shots and also a crossbow for fast, precise attacks from range. Find the weapons that work for you and experiment to see what you like best. When you find something you like, then invest some Enchantments into them to give them unique abilities and perks.

As well as weapons you can also use items to attack including TNT. Pick this up, throw it and try and take out a group of enemies within the blast radius.

Enchantments

As you level up you’ll get Enchantments, which you can apply to weapons and armour. These can apply unique abilities to your gear. When you first get an item you have the chance to choose which Enchantment you place on an item and you can cycle through the available options. Pick one and then start to level it up. You can upgrade enchantments up to 3 levels each time costing more, so use them wisely. Enchantments can stack on top of one another so if you find an Enchantment you like, then you can boost the effectiveness by using more than one.

Some of my favourite Enchantments so far are Thundering, which gives you a chance at a lightning strike when you kill enemies with an effect that also damages enemies that are close, so this is useful for big groups. Piercing is also good for your range attacks as fired arrows sometimes gain the piercing effect which allows them to fly through multiple enemies. I tend to prefer attacking at range, so I’ve added Cowardice to my armour which boosts damage when you’re at full HP. Check out your enchantments, experiment and find out what works best for you.

Artifacts

These are items that modify your playstyle further. They can be found in loot chests at the end of levels, or they can drop from enemies. They include special abilities including dropping a healing rift, summoning a wolf that will help you out in attacks or adding fireworks to your arrows to increase the damage. Artifacts combined with Enchantments, weapons and armour can be combined to create specific builds.

I like the Totem of Regeneration which creates a circular health aura healing you and your allies. This is helpful for when your low on energy and need a quick boost before getting back into battle. Also, Corrupted Beacon is very good which fires out a high powered beam that continuously damages mobs

Managing health

There’s a big heart in the middle of the screen that acts as your health container. As you get hit in battle, your health will go down so you’ll want to top this up from time to time. You can pick up potions, food that enemies drop after killing them and also some artifacts provide health regeneration. You’ll notice that there are some cows and other animals around the map, you can take these out with your weapons and have a chance for some health to drop – allowing you to get out of a sticky situation.

Camp

Once you’ve made it through a few levels back at Camp there will be 2 vendors – The Blacksmith and the Wandering Trader. The Blacksmith offers random gear and The Wandering Trader offers random artifacts, both for emeralds. It’s also worth noting that secret chests can be found in camp, so make sure you explore the camp to find those chests to pick up some bonus emeralds. There’s also a house and upstairs it looks like your room and as you progress through the game you’ll add more detail to your personal room.

Salvaging

Once you have plenty of loot, which you’ll get as you go through the story mode, your inventory will fill up with older gear. You can break this down, with an added bonus of getting back your Enchantments. So if you’ve invested into your gear then you’ll get that back when you break down older gear.

Repeat levels

It’s unlikely you’ll find all the secrets on your first time through levels. Use your map and find the hidden nooks and crannies in levels. When you’re higher in power, you can also adjust the difficulty of levels. This will add more enemies, or buff enemies to make them stronger, but the higher difficulty you go the better loot you’ll get from these levels – so more risk, the greater the reward.

Item Rarity

Next to the items, you’ll have a type which includes common, rare and unique. These are indicated with different colours on the character screen. It’s random as to when these will drop for you in the game but the rarer the item the better that item is. Keep an eye out for Unique items as these are some of the most powerful weapons in the game.

Play with friends

Finally, this game is best enjoyed with friends. You can play online or in local co-op with up to four players in total. The game scales the difficulty based on the number of players in the game, but if you can get together a group it’s a whole lot of fun.

Let me know down in the comments what you think of Minecraft Dungeons. Let me know what loot you’ve found and you’re cool enchantments and artifacts. If I’ve missed out any tips, let me know in the comments below.

That’s it for this beginner guide with tips and tricks for Minecraft Dungeons. For more content like this check out the reviews and guides or This Week In Video Games YouTube Channel.