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
A Dungeon Finder with a region selector matches you into co-op runs
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.
Party Sizes
Party size is fixed by the entry rather than chosen from a slider, and it varies far more than the usual three-player shorthand suggests. The store text describes three-player co-op dungeons and raids for five or more, which is the norm rather than the ceiling: a handful of entries take far larger groups. The ladder below is the one players have documented from the live build, so read it as the current shape rather than a published specification.
Entry | Party Size |
|---|---|
Eastern Reach, Stable | Up to 30 |
Farpoint at Collapsing, Shattered and Abyssal | Up to 30 |
Spectra Lair, raid version | Up to 6 |
Virelda Outskirts | Up to 6 |
Operational Continuity | Up to 6 |
The Deep, Tutorial | Up to 6 |
Up to 5 | |
Train Defence | Up to 4 |
Everything else | Up to 3 |
Raids
Raids sit at the top of the dungeon list. The Abyssal Raid went live in the first weeks of Early Access, admits parties of up to five players, and opens on a tridaily schedule for a one-hour window. 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. Spectra Lair appears twice in the dungeon list: as a raid entry at the Abyssal tier for up to six players, and as a lower-tier story version of the same fight for up to three that the Dungeon Finder does not offer. The studio has said the raid version opens with a future content update, so treat it as listed rather than currently runnable, and the per-player key requirement that older guides describe comes from the earlier browser build and has not been confirmed for this one. A third raid boss, the Mecha Titan, also appears in the list, but the studio's published plan puts it after Early Access, so treat it as coming rather than currently runnable.
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. That reward portal is documented only for the two lowest rungs, Tier 1 and Tier 2. |
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.
A later patch rebuilt much of the dungeon system for performance. The studio's own benchmark on a mid-range machine measured roughly a 30% frame-rate improvement, with less stutter during heavy action and cheaper server-side handling of simultaneous ability casts and relic triggers. Hit detection was brought closer to what appears on screen, cutting phantom hits after you move away from an enemy, and last-second dodges register more reliably at moderate latency. A frequent crash was removed after that, caused by Cactaro enemies being reused before their hitbox data finished initialising. A separate fix in the same patch stopped an Elite Hovertrix from finishing one attack rotation and then stalling instead of returning to combat.
What the August 2026 Patch Changed
Three changes in the August 2026 patch land directly on how a run pays out.
Change | What It Means For A Run |
|---|---|
Dungeon ore drops rebalanced | Ore payouts were normalised across the dungeon list, so one region no longer out-earns the rest for the same effort |
Combat rooms no longer replaced by resource rooms | A fault that swapped fights out for gathering rooms is gone, so a run's room mix matches what the rung is meant to give you |
Combat skill XP scaling updated | Higher-tier dungeons now reward more combat skill experience, which makes pushing up the ladder worth more than farming a rung you have already cleared |
Party experience was raised sharply in the same patch, and it matters here more than anywhere else: grouping is now the most efficient way to earn experience, so three players in one run beat three players running separately.
The same patch closed three routes players had been using to skip content. Abandoning a run no longer clears infused and food-sickness debuffs, so bailing out is not a free way to reset them. Common Ability Core Chests can no longer be farmed rapidly by teleporting to an apartment and back. The Daito blockade can no longer be bypassed using the right-wall route.
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.