Underkeep Tips for New Players: Party Building, Exploration, and Combat

Underkeep drops four custom heroes into a dungeon crawl that explains almost nothing, so the first few hours decide whether your expedition snowballs or stalls in a corridor with no food left. Good Underkeep tips do not spoil the discovery — they just stop you from burning lockpicks, rations, and skill points on problems the game never spells out. This guide gathers the most repeated Underkeep tips from launch-window creator guides and hands-on reviews of the Rake in Grass RPG, covering party setup, exploration rhythm, turn-based combat, and the backtracking the game quietly expects.

If you want to check the build before you commit, the official Underkeep page on Steam is the place to start.

Build a Party That Covers Every Job

Character creation asks for four heroes and very little else: race, class, name, and portrait for each one. You do not spend attribute points on that screen. Stats are rolled and shaped by the race-and-class pairing, so a dwarf wizard naturally ends up with less mana than a raven or slugman caster even though both share the same class.

The class roster includes warrior, thief, paladin, ranger, voidcaller (the cleric analogue), wizard, and blood mage. Races include human, dwarf, elk, stoneborn, raven, and slugman. Humans receive a 10% XP bonus, while ravens start with one positive and one negative mutation rolled at random.

For a first run, the quick-start party is the safest template because it hands you a frontliner, a frontline healer, a ranged damage dealer, and a caster in one click.

Two more habits worth adopting early:

• Diversify classes, not just roles. Reviews note the game reacts to class far more often than race, so four different classes surface more special dialogue options than four warriors would.
• Take passives when you are unsure. With 15 levels, one skill point per level, and five ranks on most skills, you can roughly max three abilities per character. Passive boosts are a low-risk way to stay viable while you learn the system.

Explore First, Then Progress

Every launch-window guide says the same thing in different words: Underkeep is about the road, not the destination. Interact with everything — plants that give flowers and berries, crates that break, buttons that look decorative, and walls that turn out not to be walls. Community reports describe hidden walls, obscured passages, and concealed switches as routine rather than rare.

Talk to every NPC you pass. The writing holds up, some conversations quietly award experience, and dialogue is often where a quest actually begins. Skipping it costs you both story and progression.

Pickups deserve deliberate attention. Items are collected with a right-click, and it is easy to assume a reward landed in your bag when it is still lying on the floor — one recorded playthrough shows a rescued trader offering a key that the player then had to physically pick up.

Read the tooltips, but do not expect them to be complete. A reviewer noted that during character creation the game never explains what bleed or burn actually does; that information only appears later, attached to specific items. You are not missing a menu — the text simply is not there yet.

Map Habits and Puzzle Patience

The mini map in the lower-left corner is the closest thing Underkeep has to a co-pilot. Use it to navigate already-cleared ground instead of walking it blind on the main screen.

The marker system is the real lifesaver. Press M, left-click a tile, and type a note. Guides and reviewers both recommend tagging unopened chests, rubble piles you cannot clear yet, strange walls, and puzzle rooms you walked away from. A short note like "locked chest — no key" saves an entire return trip.

Puzzles deserve their own warning. Underkeep hard-gates progression behind riddles and spatial puzzles, and at least one reviewer could not unlock fast travel at all until a developer pointed out the hidden wall guarding the final pillar. Keep pen and paper nearby for grid-style puzzles, reread in-game clues more than once, and remember that a creator guide specifically teases rocks as more useful than they look.

These Underkeep tips matter most in the first dungeon, where a single missed marker can mean re-clearing a level you already finished.

Combat, Crafting, and the Resource Squeeze

Combat is turn-based and unforgiving. Each character gets one attack or one special skill per round, and the round advances automatically once everyone has acted. The hourglass icon ends a round early and skips anyone who has not moved yet — click it on purpose, not out of frustration.

• Two front, two back. Front-row characters soak most melee damage. Back-row characters can still fight in melee if they carry a reach weapon, which is why mages walk around with staves.
• Respect reach and requirements. A distant enemy is not a valid melee target, and a weapon-specific skill stops working the moment you swap to a different weapon type.
• Potions are free actions. According to the demo tutorial, drinking from your inventory does not consume a character's turn.
• Check the round state before blaming the controls. Movement is blocked once a party member has acted, and the game will ask you to finish or skip the round.

Status effects are constant — burn, poison, bleed, and freeze all show up depending on the enemy type. Bosses and elites can hit multiple characters or the entire party, and one reviewer's impression is that there are no random encounters at all, meaning every fight is hand-placed and often shaped like an ambush.

Crafting ties directly into that pressure. Food powers resting, and resting restores health plus mana or stamina but cannot be done with enemies nearby. Potions are your in-combat answer. Because food requirements rise with your level and money is limited, the strongest Underkeep tips here are unglamorous: gather ingredients constantly, rest only in safe pockets, and use basic attacks when a fight is already won.

Difficulty is flexible. Three settings exist and can be switched mid-run, and they mainly change how fights play out — so lowering the difficulty is a legitimate tool, not a failure state.

Backtracking, Keys, and Quest Failure

Underkeep is built around returning to places you have already been. Rubble needs a pickaxe, gold veins need mining knowledge, and moonstone needs someone to teach you the technique even after you own the pickaxe. Lockpicks are single-use, and special keys are chest-specific — a chest does not tell you which key it wants, so you may haul a key across the map only to find it belongs somewhere else.

Some secrets do not exist until a quest creates them. A reviewer combed an entire opening zone, then received a quest to retrieve a doll from that same zone and learned the item was hidden behind a wall that only becomes discoverable after the quest is accepted.

Quests can also fail without ceremony. One reported case: giving the wrong password at a wizard stronghold instantly closed off an infiltration questline with no hint about what the correct answer was. Save before dialogue branches, then load and experiment — the game is generous with save slots and stingy with second chances.

The payoff is real, though. Return trips frequently reward you with higher-tier loot and tougher, better-designed encounters, so the backtracking doubles as optional high-level content.

If motion sickness is a concern, dig into the options menu. Camera shake can be disabled, movement and turning animations can be turned off, and the cursor can be swapped between your system pointer, a gauntlet, a skeleton hand, and a sword.

FAQ

What are the most important Underkeep tips for the first hour? Take the quick-start party or build four different classes, right-click every item and confirm it entered your inventory, read every tooltip, and start marking the map the moment you enter the first dungeon. Underkeep released on November 5, 2026 according to the official Steam listing and the developer's launch announcement, and those opening habits carry through the entire campaign.

How many characters are in a party, and can I change difficulty later? You create four adventurers, each with a race, class, name, and portrait. Yes — three difficulty settings exist and can be switched during a run, and they primarily affect combat rather than story or exploration.

How long does Underkeep take to beat? The level cap is 15. A launch-window reviewer who had played to level 10 estimated a full playthrough at roughly 15 to 20 hours, though slower players who chase every secret will stretch that considerably.

Does Underkeep explain its mechanics? Barely. There is no hand-holding, quests point you in a vague direction, and some tooltips omit key details during character creation. The practical workaround is saving often, testing dialogue options, and keeping your own notes on the map — the habits that make these Underkeep tips worth following in the first place.