Loop Dungeon - Incremental Walkthrough: A Phase-by-Phase Campaign Route

Every finite incremental campaign is beaten the same way: you identify which of three possible bottlenecks is currently strangling your run, you spend against that bottleneck only, and you reset the moment resetting becomes faster than grinding. That is the whole skill. What changes between phases is which bottleneck dominates and how you should be spending — and this walkthrough maps Loop Dungeon - Incremental's campaign onto that structure phase by phase.

One honesty note before the route: specific level counts and numeric costs shift with updates, and this guide does not fabricate them. What follows is the methodology — the decision framework that works regardless of the exact numbers, because it is how the incremental genre is balanced. New to the cycle? Start with the beginner's guide for the unlock-loop-upgrade rhythm; this page assumes you know it and want the route.

Phase One: Early Campaign — Unlock Everything Cheap

The early game's defining trait: unlocks are almost always correct. When a new hero or system costs a few minutes of loop output, buying it beats deepening upgrades on what you own, for a structural reason — in incremental games, early unlock costs are priced to be almost trivially affordable, and each new hero adds a new source of output rather than merely multiplying an old one.

Practical rules for this phase:

• Buy the cheapest unlock available, always. If you can afford the next hero, the next hero is the purchase. The only exception is a combat wall where your current party literally cannot advance — and early campaigns are tuned so this rarely happens before the first few unlocks.
• Spread levels before stacking them. In most incremental systems, low levels on a fresh hero are cheaper per point of effect than high levels on an old one. Even out your roster before pushing anyone deep.
• Identify your heroes' roles as you get them. Every incremental roster splits roughly into damage (pushes floors), resource (increases earnings), and acceleration (makes everything faster) — the hero system overview covers this framework. You are assembling a machine, and phase two is decided by how well you understand which part each hero is.

Phase one ends when unlock prices stop being trivial — when the next unlock costs real minutes of output and upgrades have started competing for the same wallet. That transition is the campaign's first real decision point.

Phase Two: Mid Campaign — Allocate by Bottleneck

Mid-game is where most players stall, because "always unlock" stops being correct. Now three wallets compete — new unlocks, hero upgrades, and banking toward prestige — and the skill is diagnosis before spending.

Run this check whenever progress slows. Ask: what exactly is slow?

• Floors are slow to clear, but income is fine → damage bottleneck. Spend into combat output. Pushing further floors usually raises income anyway, so damage investment indirectly compounds.
• Floors clear fast but earnings trickle → resource bottleneck. Spend into whatever converts combat into resources — resource-role heroes and income multipliers. This is the most commonly misdiagnosed wall, because fast combat feels like progress even when it is earning you almost nothing per minute.
• Everything works but everything is sluggish → acceleration bottleneck. Spend into speed — loop rate, auto-progress, whatever makes the cycle turn faster. Acceleration multiplies the value of everything else you own, which is why the party composition guide treats speed as a first-class role rather than a luxury.

The mid-game discipline in one sentence: pick the bottleneck, spend everything against it, re-diagnose after each spending round. Splitting spending across all three wallets at once is how runs stall for hours — a budget divided three ways fixes nothing quickly.

Mid-campaign is also when prestige first becomes relevant. Do not reset on a hunch — the prestige timing guide covers the per-minute comparison method. For routing purposes: your first prestige should happen after a hard stall that upgrade spending has failed to break for two or three full cycles, when a reset's reward would let you re-reach your position faster than grinding forward.

Phase Three: Endgame — Prestige Into the Ending

The final stretch of a finite campaign inverts the mid-game logic. Through phases one and two, prestige rewards accelerate a journey that continues indefinitely forward. At the end, the campaign's remaining content becomes short enough that prestige stops being an investment and becomes a purchase: you reset not to grow a snowball but to directly buy the last walls' worth of progress.

Practically, the endgame route looks like this:

• Shorten the loop between resets. By now you know the campaign's early stretches cold. The value of each reset cycle is throughput — reward earned per minute — and the prestige mechanics guide covers why resets in incremental design are mathematically front-loaded: early reset minutes recover old progress fastest, and returns diminish near your previous frontier.
• Stop prestige-ing when the remaining campaign no longer pays for the ceremony. If one more reset saves less time than the reset cycle itself costs, finish forward — a finite campaign's final skill is recognizing when the snowball is already big enough.
• Spend down before the ending. It is a common incremental instinct to finish with a fat bank and half-spent upgrades. In a game with a defined end, unspent resources at the finish line are simply wasted — convert everything into forward progress and cross it.

What Not to Worry About

Two things this walkthrough deliberately omits. First, exact numeric breakpoints: they shift with patches, and the diagnosis method above makes them unnecessary — you are reading your own run's signals, not following a static table. Second, achievements: the pre-launch playtest shipped without any, and no claims are made here about the release list. For save behavior and demo-versus-Steam differences, see tips and tricks and the FAQ.

FAQ

Is there a fixed order I must unlock heroes in?

No verified fixed order exists. Use the principle instead: cheapest unlock first, spread levels before stacking them, and diagnose roles with the hero framework as the roster grows.

How many times should I prestige before the ending?

There is no universal count — it depends on how your income scales against the remaining campaign. The timing method replaces a fixed number with a measurement you can run in a minute.

What if I am stuck and upgrading does not help?

That is the designed signal for a prestige reset. Two or three spending rounds that fail to move the wall means the game expects a reset, not more grinding.