A Skull Cavern day

Before you take the bus

The cavern is locked until the Skull Key from mine floor 120 is in your pack. The door is in the northwest of the desert. There is no elevator, so a desert totem or a clear morning matters more than a saved floor.

Bring a stack of staircases if you have them. Mining level 2 crafts one from 99 stone. On Sunday the Desert Trader sells one for one Jade. Bring a food with luck, plus coffee or Triple Shot Espresso, plus a plain food that heals without wiping the buff. Bombs clear rocks and finish mummies.

A good-luck day grows more ladders and shafts. It does not change how far a shaft drops. That distance is fixed for the floor, the day, and the seed.

Floors that pay

Floor 25 finishes Qi's Challenge. The 10,000g arrives the next day. If your first visit already reached 25, the quest still completes the next day.

Iridium picks up quickly between floor 10 and floor 100. Purple slimes, iridium bats from floor 51, and iridium crabs from floor 26 can drop ore on the way. Shafts are the fast drop: 20% of rock ladders, 3 to 15 floors, and 3 health per floor skipped, never to zero. Above floor 100, a shaft stops at 100 if it would have gone past.

An in-game hour in the cavern lasts 54 seconds, against 43 outside, so the day is longer in real time. Prehistoric floors and multiplayer use the 43-second hour. Plan to be out before 2:00 am. That pass-out costs 1,000g or 10% of your money, whichever is less. Empty health is a 1,000g clinic bill and can take items.

Nothing on this page is a time to reach a floor. Staircases, luck, and shafts change the hour. The food table and the shaft rules are on the strategy page.

• Food and shaft numbers
• Monsters, prehistoric floors, and the Qi orders
• What the iridium ore is worth