My Pet Dungeon

The My Pet Dungeon Menu

My Pet Dungeon is a single-player sort of "sandbox mode" in Dungeon Keeper 2. These maps afford you the luxury of building any kind of dungeon you want, within the physical constraints of the terrain, of course. You begin with the ability to build a Lair and a Hatchery, and all of the other rooms become available to you over time (with the exception of level 6, "Masterpiece", in which all rooms and Keeper Spells are available to you from the beginning). The levels are as follows:

1. Liberty - Dragos (lots of good things to exploit, limited mainly by space and the availability of bridges)
2. Discovery - Vexus (many neutral rooms to claim)
3. Bottleneck - Djocasta (finite gold supply)
4. Recruits - Nasreem (no Portals, only neutral allegiance creatures to be claimed)
5. Furnace - Frimley (oddly-shaped islands surrounded by lava)
6. Masterpiece - Sanddar (lots of space, no room timer)
7. Torment - Omelas (best resources hard to reach, mostly protected by Traps)

Each level has a particular point total as its goal, and two special tasks that will grant you most of the points you need to reach this goal.

The only enemies you face on these maps are the ones you want to; each map contains a "Hero Toolbox", which contains one of each kind of non-unique hero as well as the Level Indicator (which resembles a fruit machine, but is not, and is not the same thing as the Casino's cut fruit machine) to increment their level (or to set it from 10 back down to 1). This enables you to pick up any hero of any level to drop into your dungeon. Each map also contains a Hero Gate from which you can launch a single invasion of Heroes of a single level, or trigger a continuous invasion in waves that progress through the levels up to 10. In the lower-right corner of the GUI, where the pieces of the Horny Talisman or the Summon Horny button appear in the campaign, are buttons allowing you to trigger either kind of invasion or zoom to the Hero Toolbox.

Despite the lack of living enemies, some of the maps do pose an element of risk to your creatures (especially to your Imps) in the form of Traps, some of which begin the game hidden, so be cautious!

Also, in My Pet Dungeon mode (with the exception of Masterpiece), the only spell you start out with is Create Imp; all of the rest must be researched in your Library. Your Library should therefore be bigger than normal, to accommodate nine spell books in addition to any magical items you may find (upgrading existing spells does not take up shelf space, but requires there to be at least one empty space in order to proceed).

Tips

• The heroes in the toolbox itself aren't really for converting. They don't tend to have all the possible hero creatures anyway. (If you convert them, their experience level remains tied to the Level Indicator, which you do NOT want. Although this may not constantly be the case with newer versions.) They are good for:
  • Trap testing,
  • Torture Chamber testing,
  • turning them either into Skeletons, or Vampires,
  • once defeated and imprisoned, they can be dropped into the Combat Pit to be a live training foe,
  • target practice, both possessed and otherwise,
    • either dropped amidst any group of creatures anywhere,
    • or stranded on a 1x1 Claimed Land or Stone Bridge surrounded by lava for simulated real combat training to gain experience.
• Do not kill them on the Hero Gate. You won't be able to drag their bodies away.

Bugs

• If you pick up a level 1 creature from the toolbox, put it back in, and quickly set the level to 10 and back to 1 again, the creature will lose consciousness and lie on the floor, eventually rot away which will count as their cue to respawn in the same place. This bug just temporarily doesn't let the player use the toolbox to its full potential.

Trivia

• When you initiate a right click zoom to the toolbox for the first time from the control panel, Horny will chime in: "To return to your Dungeon Heart, you will need to right-click your Dungeon Heart icon, located next to your Mana Bar."
• Converting heroes straight from the toolbox keeps them under the control of the Level Indicator. This is not ideal. To keep your converted heroes from changing levels each time you set the attack wave strength is to beat them when they are part of a wave and pick them up from a Prison after they are dragged there by an Imp or Dwarf.