Dungeons are the instanced, roguelite half of Soulbound: Online. Where the overworld is persistent and shared, dungeons are private runs that never play the same way twice. Every floor reshuffles its encounters, hazards, and loot, so success depends on adapting rather than memorizing.
How Runs Work
Each room reshuffles, and many rooms unlock relics that warp your abilities mid-run
Party size depends on the entry: most beacon rungs admit up to three players, the entry-level Eastern Reach run admits far larger groups, and the weekly raid admits up to five
A Dungeon Finder with a region selector matches you into co-op runs on nearby servers
Combat is fast and bullet-heaven style, with screen-filling waves
Pushing deeper raises the rewards, and higher rungs spawn faster, tougher and more numerous enemies
Because the dungeon layout and relic offers change every time, two runs of the same dungeon can produce completely different builds and outcomes. This is the loop the studio describes as fusing meta progression with survivor-like chaos.
Raids
Raids sit at the top of the dungeon list. The weekly Abyssal Raid went live in the first weeks of Early Access and admits parties of up to five players. It is entered from its own entrance rather than through the Dungeon Finder, and its list entry reverses the usual labels, showing its type as Abyssal and its tier as Raid. The Spectra Lair fight is documented as a team-only encounter where every player needs a key. A third raid boss, the Mecha Titan, is on the studio's published plan rather than in the build.
Reaching the hardest content is gated by story progress as well as gear: the Shattered and Abyssal rungs and the raids all require the quest Onward and Upward, which opens after Diplomatic Relations.
The roadmap also plans new dungeon types for later in Early Access: an endless mode that keeps scaling the deeper you push, and optional high-risk dungeons that pay out extra loot but cost you your bag or gear if you die. Those high-risk modes are opt-in, so ordinary runs do not carry that full penalty.
Difficulty Tiers
Beacon dungeons appear once per rung, so a region's ladder is a set of separate entries rather than one dungeon with a difficulty slider. The five named rungs map onto tier numbers T1 to T6, and the numbers still show up in some in-game labels. Each rung raises how fast enemies spawn, how many must be cleared before a stage ends, and which enemy types appear.
Rung | Tier | Notes |
|---|---|---|
Stable | T1 | The entry rung and the least dangerous version of a beacon. |
Fractured | T2 to T3 | Deeper into the storm, with more aggressive enemies. Eastern Reach carries this rung twice. |
Collapsing | T4 | The middle-upper rung. |
Shattered | T5 | Second from the top, and gated behind Onward and Upward. |
Abyssal | T6 | The hardest rung, and the tier the endgame raids use. |
Not every region carries every rung. Eastern Reach has all five, Everdune and Farpoint start at Fractured, and the Lunar Plateau starts at Collapsing. Four more labels sit outside the ladder: Normal is used by the Farpoint entry beacon, the smaller Spectra Lair fight and one tutorial entry; Tutorial by the other tutorial entry; Unstable by both Arcadia fights; and Raid by Abyssal Raid.
An older three-tier scheme (Tier 1 easy, Tier 2 hard, Tier 3 extreme) has been replaced by these named rungs, so older guides and tables that talk about three tiers no longer match the dungeon list.
Claiming a run's reward chest is free. An earlier version of the game charged Yoku energy per chest, scaling with difficulty; that cost has been removed and chests now open at no charge.
Run Structure
A beacon dungeon is split into stages that you climb through using portals. A constantly spawning swarm and a closing sandstorm shrink the arena as time passes, so you must clear the enemies and advance.
Stage | What Happens |
|---|---|
Stages 1-3 | Waves of normal enemies. |
Stage 4 | A demi-boss. After it, a Healing Oasis portal lets you heal to full, or a second portal offers extra rewards instead. |
Stages 5-7 | More waves of normal enemies. |
Stage 8 | The final boss. Clearing it opens a portal to the treasure chest, then a home portal to leave. |
Beacons
Beacons anchor the dungeon list by region. Eastern Reach sits near Virelda and carries the full five-rung ladder; Everdune and Farpoint start partway up it; and the Lunar Plateau opens at Collapsing and runs to Abyssal. Around thirty-one dungeon entries are available in the Early Access build, twenty-five of them selectable through the Dungeon Finder and the rest entered another way. Story quests open each area's first dungeons, and clearing a rung for the first time unlocks the next rung above it. The first successful Eastern Reach run is the important one: it opens the Fractured rung in Eastern Reach, Everdune and Farpoint at once, plus Everdune Arena and Operational Continuity.
Post-Launch Tuning
The first weeks of Early Access brought steady balance work. Solo runs were made slightly tougher and three-player runs slightly easier so difficulty scales more evenly with party size. Portals in rooms where the chest has already been opened now stay open longer, giving players more time to collect loot, and several encounters that could strand a run were fixed, including bosses jumping out of bounds on the Lunar Plateau and cleared Farpoint Storm rooms that opened no exit portal.
None of the current dungeons penalise you for dying early. Full bag and gear loss was implemented at one point and has since been disabled; the studio's plan puts it back only in opt-in high-risk modes.
Dungeon names, rung labels and party sizes describe the Early Access build and are actively being tuned.