System overview — 17 dungeons, one shared design principle

The Axis Dungeons

Seventeen Earth dungeons. Not one of them is a bigger health bar — each one scores a completely different question about HOW you fight

Blister Online's Earth continent hides a series of seventeen combat dungeons, added one at a time across dozens of versions. Rather than each boss simply hitting harder or having more hit points than the last, every single one of them is built around its own unique rule about the manner of combat — where you stand, when you strike, what you're willing to spend, how predictable you are, and so on. The game's own source code calls each of these rules an axis. This page is the index tying the whole series together — all seventeen now have their own individual page (see the roster below).

The full roster, in door order

Requirements shown are current (post-v362) total character level, not combat level in any single skill — see the shared gate below for why that distinction matters and how it changed over time.

Every axis, confirmed

All seventeen dungeons now have their own individually researched page, cross-linked to each other and to this overview:

• The Barrow of Three Seals — fully documented; see its own page. Its boss, the Barrow Warden, knits itself back together whole unless fought from inside a ward ring. The template every later dungeon's design measured itself against.
• The Tolling Vault — fully documented; see its own page. Five bells ring in a fixed, deterministic order (the game's own comments call an unpredictable version "a slot machine," deliberately avoided), guarding a boss whose health can only be permanently damaged during one timed window per cycle.
• The Cloven Reliquary — fully documented; see its own page. Its boss is completely sealed and cannot be damaged by any amount of waiting — only burning a Gold Bar at the room's Scale opens a window, while three coffers get devoured on their own schedule behind the player's back.
• The Ember Vigil — fully documented; see its own page. Its boss, the Snuffer, is a wall unless a fragile Lantern with its own health bar is planted and actively being consumed — the only way to hurt the boss is to let something the player could permanently lose keep taking damage instead.
• The Parted Hold — fully documented; see its own page. Its boss's health and the vault's entire remaining loot value are the same number — every point of damage dealt is treasure destroyed forever, and a Guard mechanic makes holding down the attack button stop working entirely after a fixed amount of damage.
• The Answering Gallery — fully documented; see its own page. Its boss can only be hit through whichever of three figures the player currently holds, and each one goes permanently deaf under sustained fire — measured live, rotating between all three lands four times the damage of holding one down.
• The Unmade Vow — fully documented; see its own page. Its boss cannot be killed by damage at all past a fixed threshold; instead a single irreversible key press chooses between two mutually exclusive rewards, and nothing in the game ever recovers the one not taken.
• The Humbled Armoury — fully documented; see its own page. Only the starter Butter Knife can damage its boss; every other weapon in the game is refused and actively heals it instead, undoing landed damage point for point.
• The Debtors' Deep — fully documented; see its own page. Its boss can only be damaged with a ledger built from injury it has already dealt the player; an untouched, flawless player lands exactly zero, forever.
• The Stilled Assize — fully documented; see its own page. Every term of the fight must be declared before its boss wakes; strike the gavel with nothing declared and every future blow lands exactly zero, forever, for that entire run.
• The Sparing Floor — fully documented; see its own page. Its boss isn't the target at all — it's a generator that pays out while alive, and the surrounding room actively kills it unless the player defends it instead of attacking it.
• The Succession House — fully documented; see its own page. Kills only pay when they land in strict rising rank order; the same three kills done out of sequence pay for only one of them.
• The Halved Claim — fully documented; see its own page. An NPC ally works the boss down alongside the player, and the room pays best when both parties' contributions come out exactly even — pure damage output alone is worth nothing here.
• The Conning House — fully documented; see its own page. Its boss publishes a prediction of the player's next move, built from their own recent habits; only genuinely unpredictable play pays, and both "never vary" and "rotate in a tidy cycle" fail identically.
• The House of Hours — fully documented; see its own page. Scores the spacing between blows rather than their size or timing against a schedule.
• The Almshouse — fully documented; see its own page. Its boss pays the player unasked for every blow that lands; the only thing scored is how many of those payments are sent back, to an exact count — refusing too many voids a dole exactly as surely as refusing too few.
• The Prompter's Box — fully documented; see its own page. The finale. It scores nothing that happens during the fight at all — only how many times the player has already entered the room this run, a number fixed before the first frame. Perfect play on a fifth visit scores 0 of 6; the identical input on a first visit scores 6 of 6.

The shared gate: one system behind all seventeen doors, tuned four separate times

Every one of the seventeen doors reads from a single shared level-gate function, and that gate has a genuinely detailed multi-version tuning history — much of it driven directly by the operator's own feedback about how the dungeons felt to actually play.

• v276 — skill floors added. A total-level requirement alone could be banked entirely in one unrelated skill, so a character could meet a dungeon's total purely by grinding a skill that never mattered in the fight itself. This version added a floor under the three combat skills (Attack, Defence, Hitpoints) each door's boss actually tests, derived directly from the existing total requirement rather than inventing a new number.
• v285 — the floor's divisor corrected. The original floor made the first dungeon cost roughly 24 hours of grinding and the last cost roughly 824 hours. The operator's own words: "dungeon requirements were way too high." Adjusting the divisor brought the first dungeon down to about 18 minutes and the hardest to about 13 hours, without changing the relative order of any of the seventeen.
• v299 — total level replaces combat level as the actual gate. The operator's own words: "they should be based on total lvl instead of combat lvl since thats easier to achieve." The fix quietly discovered that the requirement being kept was, when actually measured, about 200 times harsher than the one being dropped — so simply swapping which gate applied would have made every door harder while sounding like a relaxation. The new total requirement was instead derived as three times the existing combat floor, which is strictly easier by construction and preserves the exact ordering of all seventeen doors.
• v362 — the whole band compressed into the early game. The operator's own words: "all the dungeons on earth should be focussed on ealier lvls (up to total lvl 1000 or so)," and separately that requirements felt too low for how hard the bosses actually were, while the bosses themselves were "almost impossible." The old band of 900–2500 total level became the current 120–960 band shown in the table above — same order, same relative spacing, just compressed into the early game as asked.

The Boss Pass: when the numbers made "almost impossible" literally true

v362's own door rework surfaced a deeper problem it deliberately didn't touch: these seventeen bosses had combat levels between 2440 and 3100, while the player's own level cap was 1200. Reaching parity with the hardest boss wasn't merely difficult — it was arithmetically unreachable at any level, full stop. The operator's complaint that the bosses "seem almost impossible" was, measured honestly, completely true.

v363, the Boss Pass, fixed the arithmetic without touching a single mechanic. The operator's own words: "the bosses should be very difficult and a challenge that requires mechanic regardless of lvl, but the bosses seem almost impossible." The fight design itself — the Vault's timed bells, the Vigil's lantern, the Barrow's ward ring — was already exactly what had been asked for, so nothing about any individual boss fight was changed. Instead, every boss's health was scaled down by the exact same factor its own door had just been scaled down by at v362, preserving the seventeen dungeons' relative difficulty perfectly while making the mechanics, rather than a stat wall, the actual thing standing between the player and victory. The strongest boss went from combat level 3100 to roughly 1194 — finally within reach of the 1200 cap. Every one of the seventeen bosses' flat damage constants was deliberately left untouched at this pass (all read 725, each carrying its own "no power creep" comment), since scaling each individually by a different ratio would have reintroduced exactly the creep those constants existed to prevent.

v392, the Onboarding Bosses, caught that the Boss Pass alone had left the difficulty curve running backwards: the very first dungeon in the game was still by far its hardest fight, while the endgame had become comparatively easy. Measured as a "fairness ratio" (roughly, how many times over the boss could kill the player during a single attempt):

A ratio of 10.5 on the very first dungeon meant the boss could kill a fresh character ten times over during a single attempt — still "almost impossible" for the door it stood behind. v392 deliberately only re-tuned the first four dungeons, targeting a fairness ratio around 3.5 (survivable by someone who has just earned the door, but still strong enough that the fight cannot simply be tanked through). Everything from the Parted Hold onward was already at 3.7 or lower and was left exactly as v363 had set it, on the reasoning that re-tuning content the operator hadn't played yet would be pure churn rather than fixing the actual complaint.

These ratios are worth reading as "was the v363 rebalance itself fair," not as today's actual difficulty — they deliberately exclude a separate, later, global change that cut all player-dealt damage to a tenth of its previous value, applied well after this retune and never specifically to any one dungeon. According to the development log, factoring that cut back in pushes every one of these ratios far higher — into the high teens through low forties across all seventeen doors, worse than any number on this page — because none of the tools that produced this table originally referred to that constant and so never noticed when it changed underneath them. See The Barrow of Three Seals for the first dungeon's own present-day numbers specifically.

Trivia

• Every one of the seventeen dungeons deliberately avoids being built on top of any of the other outdoor landmarks in the game — each dungeon's door-placement code checks its position against a published list of every other dungeon and every Wayfarer's Round landmark before settling on a spot.
• The requirement gate is called "the ONE gate" in the game's own source comments specifically because all seventeen call sites route through a single shared function — a deliberate refactor so that a future balance pass can never accidentally miss updating one of the seventeen doors by hand.