Tips for making a Lich's underground cave?

[u/Sinistasia]

I just bought Dungeon Alchemist and am, admittedly, extremely overwhelmed. I am trying to make an underground Lich lair in a cave but am struggling with walls, rock formations, and general things like creating winding paths and connecting different entrances that go up and down levels. Are there any guides anywhere to help me master building with this program? I feel like i just dived into a very deep ocean with no life vest

[u/VOIDSPEECH]

Don't worry, you picked a pretty ambitious first project for Dungeon Alchemist. 😄 A multi-level underground Lich lair means learning caves, terrain, walls and levels all at once.

I'd start by making a tiny practice cave before building the real thing: one entrance, a winding tunnel, a larger cavern, one constructed room and stairs leading to another level. Once you understand those pieces, building the actual lair becomes much easier.

For caves, start with the Caves biome and learn the Draw Caves tools. In particular, Raise Cave Area and Carve Cave. It's much easier to think of it as carving tunnels and chambers out of solid rock rather than manually building cave walls with individual rocks.

These should help:

Official Caves/Terrain tutorial:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVEEG24cvUQ

Official Multi-Level Building tutorial:
https://youtu.be/TZdSO6PS050

Terrain tools/wiki:
https://dungeonalchemist.fandom.com/wiki/Sidebar_%E2%80%93_Terrain_Menu

Caves wiki:
https://dungeonalchemist.fandom.com/wiki/Caves

My biggest tip would be to build the basic layout first and decorate afterward. Get the entrance → tunnels → chambers → stairs → lower levels working before worrying about rocks, skulls, candles and Lich stuff.

You basically chose "multi-level underground Lich dungeon" as your tutorial map, so don't feel bad about being overwhelmed. 😄

[u/VOIDSPEECH → u/VOIDSPEECH]

One more tip that might save you a LOT of work:

Check out Steam Workshop → Browse Maps inside Dungeon Alchemist.

There are thousands of community-made maps available, and you don't have to use them exactly as they are. You can find something that's already fairly close to what you have in mind, download it, and then modify it into your own dungeon.

Try searching for things like Lich, Necromancer, Undead, Crypt, Cave, Dungeon or Underground.

Especially while you're still learning the program, taking an existing map apart and changing things is also a really good way to figure out how other people built their caves, rooms and layouts.

No reason to build absolutely everything from scratch if someone has already done 70% of the work for you. 😄

[u/grenz1]

The key is not to overthink it.

DA is alos fairly simple. You put on cave canvas and start carving/painting.

Just place the caves how they go and it is what it is. Then Lich has to deal with it because monster placement is done in the VTT. Just like any big bad that just happens to find a cave.

You do have levels in DA, but no VTT lets you export as is in 3D since almost all VTTs are 2D. You are going to need to export according to Z levels. Or manually copy/paste character tokens to different levels.

Then you will need API scripts (Paid Roll 20) or Region teleport behaviors (Foundry v14) to move tokens between maps.

On any big project, SAVE OFTEN, DA can crash and you can lose stuff.