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All 2300 Root Dungeons Explored

All 2300 Root Dungeons Explored [by DrAnger90]

Good hunters! Many of you probably heard about this great news already from different sources: The Tomb Prospector community has mapped and explored [archive] all 2300 different Root Dungeons in Bloodborne! I would like to explain in this post how we started, how we were able to achieve this and some considerations we had to make doing this project. At the end of 2017, @ZullieTheWitch shared with the community the true nature of procedurally generated dungeons in Bloodborne and revealed that each Root Chalice has 100 (depth 1-3) or 200 (depth 4-5) different dungeons, bringing the total different Root dungeons to 2300. At this point, people grouped together with the goal to explore them all. Prior to this, a known prospector throughout the community, u/Kazin79, noticed that Isz seemed to have a problem where some dungeons would repeat a lot, something that did not happen in other Chalices. Therefore this was the best starting point for us to reach our goal. After generating hundreds of Isz dungeons, Kazin was only able to generate 32 different Isz dungeons while there supposedly should’ve been 200 different ones. It was clear that there was something going on here, something that we now call the Isz glitch. To shortly explain what it does, the glitch basically prevents players from generating all 200 different Isz and Sinister Isz dungeons on their altars based on the amount of unique items from Isz the players character possesses, like weapons, runes and more. These unique items are looted from Isz/Sinister Isz coffins and when you have all of them, you’re fully glitched and only able to generate the common 32 dungeons, like Kazin did when we started this project. Why this happens is a little bit more complicated and can be read here. Eventually, we managed to circumvent this glitch by using new characters for generating Isz dungeons, characters that haven’t explored Root Dungeons at all, which made us able to generate dungeons outside these common 32. In order to explore every dungeon, we needed a reliable way to identify different dungeons, therefore we used a dungeon screenshot database. The way it worked was that each dungeon would be able to be identified with screenshots from the start of the dungeon and sort them by main layer architecture and the presence or absence of a bonus room. Every time we generated a dungeon, we would look at the main layer architecture first (which we assigned different names to), then at which side the bonus room was on followed by the notes of that dungeon to see if we already explored that dungeon. If we already explored it, we ignored it and generated a new one. Whenever we found a new dungeon using this method, we would take screenshots, make notes and add it to the screenshot database and exploration sheet. This continued until we found most dungeons for the Isz Root Chalice and after that, we used the same system for the Sinister Isz and the Cursed and Defiled Root Chalices. Exploring dungeons this way has 2 big disadvantages. First, some Chalices only give a 4th layer to a dungeon 20% of the time, which means that even if we found a new dungeon, there is only a 20% chance it would have a 4th layer. And second, due to more randomness, a Chalice gives you a random dungeon out of a pool of 100 or 200 dungeons. Meaning that if you start exploring a Chalice, you will find a lot of different dungeons, but as you find more and more of them, it becomes increasingly harder to find ones you haven’t explored yet. To give an idea, we had to generate close to 1000 Isz Root dungeons to only find 192 different ones. not to mention how many more we needed to generate to find the last 8 or even all the 4th layers. In total, we generated close to 2000 dungeons for Isz Root, Sinister Isz Root and Cursed and Defiled Root Chalices and we didn’t even came close to completely explore those Chalices due to randomness which resulted in dozens of dungeons and even more 4th layers missing. This is not even counting the dungeons other people created to help us.

The way of exploring dungeons this way, was extremely time consuming. Imagine generating thousands of dungeons, identifying all of them with the use of screenshots, knowing that even if you found a new one, there would only be a 20% chance it would have a 4th layer. At the time, we had only a handful of people generating the dungeons, and only 2 people that would do the identifying. It took us almost 6 months to achieve this, so we definitely needed more help. Despite asking for more help multiple times, people just didn’t want to spend so much time only generating and identifying the dungeons. And after so many months of hard work, we didn’t really feel like continuing this way as well. During this time, we also started to understand more how dungeons were built in the code and how we could use this to achieve our goal. Because, with the save editor, we could explore new dungeons 1 by 1 using their internal ID and as a bonus, we could open up the 4th layer manually as well. This would remove the randomness aspect and save a lot of time, which was really necessary since doing this with the method I described above would probably result in us never finishing this project. Not only because it would take ages, but also because it really wouldn’t be fun to do it that way. Using the save editor to create the dungeons also made it possible for more people in the community to join the fun and explore with us. But even when we did this, there was still a lot of work to be done. But now 1,5 years later, we managed to finally explore all 2300 Root dungeons, including 4th layers! One might argue that exploring dungeons that way is not intended, and I get that. To me it is the same discussion about edited dungeons and if they are good for the game or not. And my answer to that is that if edited dungeons bring a lot of people back to the game because they offer something interesting, than it is a good thing and totally worth it. All our work figuring out how to edit dungeons made us able to make shortcuts for build making by skipping most of the boring story dungeons, edit gem pools of dungeons to allow for new exciting farming possibilities and it even made us able to make crazy challenging dungeons for people to test their skills. You can even wander around in developer dungeons, see cut bosses and arenas. Since our community has grown significantly, it shows that people really enjoy these new aspects of the game. And exploring the dungeons with the save editor made the community excited to explore together and achieve our goal, which is only a good thing in my eyes. The fact that we were able to explore every dungeon also doesn’t mean you shouldn’t explore them yourselves. Just have fun with the game, bring a friend and explore some dungeons and farm some gems together. We’re always happy to see new people exploring the dungeons and show us what they have found. That’s why you should also join our Discord if you haven’t already, which is the place where we coordinated all the exploration and did all our research. It would’ve simply been too tedious to do all of this via Reddit. There are still mechanics in Chalice Dungeons that only have been found recently, so who knows what might be lurking out there still. It is mind boggling to me how much work our community put into this, pure because of the love for this awesome game. There are too many people in the Tomb Prospector community to thank for this wonderful achievement, yet I would like to give a special thanks to u/XTrinX, who went through dungeon identifying hell with me at the start of this project and put more time into this than any of us.