Last Updated on by Samuel Franklin
Darkest Dungeon Money Farming Guide – Best Way To Make Money (Gold)
Our Darkest Dungeon money farm guide will help players with gold farming to acquire a healthy amount of currency in order to succeed in the challenging roguelike adventure. With gold (or money) being pivotal to many mechanics in Darkest Dungeon having a reliable method to make money while also investing it in a smart manner provides a significant safety net for players looking to beat the game. For example gold will allow you to reinvigorate your heroes for the next adventure, improve equipment, purchase important trinkets when they become available and in general improve your hero talents.
When you first step into the dark adventure that is Darkest Dungeon gold is sparse with many players running out of gold quickly as places to spend it can feel nearly endless and leads many gamers to research the best way to make money in Darkest Dungeon. While there are many small ways to acquire and save gold the best method revolves around using the weak combat class of the Antiquarian combined with the endless supply of Stage Coach heroes to maximise gold gain. This tactic and others are detailed below to create a diverse money farm guide for new players to reference as they progress and if applied early on will allow you to significantly improve the time required to boost your overall hero power level.
Darkest Dungeon Gold Farming Overview
Gold (often referred to as money) is a core currency of Darkest Dungeon with a wide array of uses to recover your heroes or empower them and as a result can quickly slip through your fingers if players aren’t careful. While gold can be directly looted within dungeon adventures most of your gold income will come from other loot that you acquire in an adventure such as gems (citrine, jade, onyx, emerald, sapphire, ruby), the rare puzzling trapezohedron, antiques and other miscellaneous items. As this relies on players leaving the adventure with this loot in their inventory it is possible to quickly spiral down in overall gold if you have repeated unsuccessful adventures. Other sources of gold include selling unwanted trinkets from within the trinket inventory or building the bank if players have the applicable Darkest Dungeon DLC to build districts.
While there is a small number of sources to generate gold there is no shortage of ways to spend it in Darkest Dungeon that can leave you with no money if you aren’t careful. The largest investments include buying powerful trinkets from the Nomad Wagon, removing stress from heroes, removing negative quirks and locking in the best quirks for your heroes. With other smaller uses including provisions prior to an adventure, hero equipment upgrades and hero training to ensure your heroes are best setup to survive dungeon adventures.
Darkest Dungeon Gold Farming – Money Farm
When you initially start playing Darkest Dungeon gaining money can seem like a constant uphill battle but once you understand how to make money you’ll have a reliable and relatively easy method to top up your gold reserves whenever you want additional gold resource. The methods I recommend for Darkest Dungeon gold farming in Darkest Dungeon in approximate order of efficiency are:
Antiquarian and Sacrifice Hero Runs
The foundation of acquiring gold in Darkest Dungeon during the early game is utilising the weak Antiquarian class on your dungeon expeditions or if you have none available sacrificing some fresh heroes from the Stage Coach instead. This money farming strategy means that all early investments in the Stage Coach are critical as you’ll have a wider range of heroes to hire and occasionally some at higher level. The Antiquarian is important to this strategy as this hero increases your maximum gold allowed in each inventory slot during expedition and also finds minor and rare antiques from battles and curios (Antiquarian must be the hero to activate a curio) that significantly improves gold gain per expedition.
In terms of a Darkest Dungeon Antiquarian build for this method you’ll find there is little you can do to optimise them given they all start with one of their strongest abilities by default (Protect Me) and are an all around weak hero which is disposable in this tactic anyway. This means there is little need to invest into your Antiquarian as it may be wasted with your focus instead on ensuring you bring powerful consistent allies like the Crusader, Hellion, Highwayman and Houndmaster if available.
Both of these methods rely on players hiring new recruits and throwing them at an expedition with little care for their survival before dismissing them when you return to the Hamlet (either through success or simply fleeing when things look bleak). For this reason generally explore based expeditions are best given fighting is unlikely to be a strength of this team composition. Not only does this path save you money on curing the stress that heroes acquire it also allows players to tackle an expedition with a low number of supplies and spend a majority of the time at low torchlight which further increases loot gained.
As you progress and naturally build up a few powerful Antiquarian heroes you’ll be able to shift your focus more on survival of the party and also allows players to use some different tactics such as investing in provisions to maximise curio gains, using scouting trinkets to optimise your route and manipulating light throughout the expedition. This also allows you to shift your Antiquarian build to include useful trinkets and maximising their ability combination with the likes of Festering Vapours, Flashpowder, Invigorating Vapours and Protect Me offering a blend of useful skills. For torchlight manipulation this mechanic has players drop the torchlight down to 0 at the end of each fight when there is only one enemy left (or before curio activation) and requires you bring extra torches to compensate. Alternatively some players may prefer to clear an entire dungeon without activating any curio before dropping the torchlight down to 0 and backtracking through the dungeon for each curio with enhanced loot from the low light level.
District Upgrades
First introduced in the Crimson Court (CC) DLC and later enhanced with The Colour of Madness (COM) DLC the District area provides players with another location to invest their resources with a number having positive impacts on your ability to generate or save gold. Of note is the Bank (CC) that allows players to gain 5% interest on any gold each week which with the above noted gold farming strategy can provide players a consistent source of gold and reduce the need to perform money runs so you can focus on powering up your core hero roster instead.
Other useful investments that will improve your average expedition loot gained include the Cartographer’s Camp (CC) which provides better loot gain at higher torchlight levels and the Geological Studyhall (COM) that allows you to stack one additional gem in your inventory slots. Equally you’ll find a number of money saving opportunities within the base game Hamlet through reduced costs although this also requires a decent gold investment first.
Sell Unwanted Trinkets
Trinkets in Darkest Dungeon can quickly build up over time in your trinket inventory and even common tier ones can quickly add up in gold value when sold. These trinkets will be obtained at a steady pace from completing expeditions and also randomly during an expedition at a lower rate. Given heroes are capped at only 2 trinkets at a time, the small number of heroes you’ll likely push through to the higher dungeon levels and there being several hero archetypes you might not even use given your own playstyle preferences there are many trinkets you can sell without impacting your adventure.
Focusing on selling the trinkets of heroes you don’t use in your parties, lower tier trinkets that you’ve already replaced with stronger variants and generally weak trinkets regularly will generate gold while also keeping your trinket inventory organised.
Darkest Dungeon – Gold Saving Tips
While money farming techniques are important to accumulating wealth in Darkest Dungeon being efficient with how you spend your gold is equally important. With efficient gold spending players can reduce the required amount of gold they need over the course of a playthrough in the first place and overall spend less time gold farming in expeditions. These gold saving tips and strategies include:
- Consider using the Darkest Dungeon backer trinkets that are available given these can be acquired for free and allows you to sell more trinkets for gold.
- Don’t overprovision your expeditions (other than boss fights) as this can quickly lead to gold leakage as you overinvest resources that are likely wasted. Learning the curios in each game area in particular can help you save gold and acquire additional gold.
- Stress management is vital to limiting the gold you need to spend on your core hero parties. There are many aspects to this and include having reliable ways to attack the enemy backline where the stress damage dealers primarily are, having abilities that remove stress in your party and regularly using your camp skills for stress management even if you don’t need to camp. Players can also rely on the small passive stress healing provided by heroes that rest in the Hamlet although it is often better to avoid leaving an expedition with significant stress in the first place.
- Placing any trinkets you find during an expedition on empty trinket slots on your character can allow you to leave the expedition with more total gold. These can then be unequipped when you return to the Hamlet to be sold for gold.
- Pay attention to town events as these provide a number of opportunities to spend less gold on activities. These include reducing provision costs, free equipment upgrades and reduced costs for stress healing, quirks and disease activities.
- Districts that are enabled through the Darkest Dungeon DLC content have a range of gold saving mechanics for players to utilise. This includes the Granary which provides a regular source of food, and the Puppet Theatre to improve idle stress relief with a number of other districts boosting specific heroes with power as well that likely means less stress damage taken during an expedition.
- Focus your Hamlet upgrade investments on the Blacksmith, Stagecoach and Guild as these are highly effective buildings to progress your heroes. Within these buildings and other buildings focusing on the cost reduction upgrades first can also help you save gold across a playthrough.
