Don’t Come in Last: Floor Ten: Dungeon Crawler Carl Lore Guide

Vehicles, drivers and repairs

Teams select a category and receive a random vehicle or mount. Rivals can attack it but cannot steal it. Movement spells cannot teleport vehicles or put crawlers inside an opponent’s ride. The normal minimap also stops working while moving, making the onboard navigator essential.

Garage attendants fully restore surviving vehicles or mounts between heats. Hedy cannot enter a safe room, so the Royal Court must protect her to keep that service. Ordinary Repair and Fix effects do not work in its place, and the special racing mounts resist normal pet spells. Damage during a race can still leave a team stranded.

A driver must sit out the next heat. Sharing controls counts too: after Carl steers while Donut works the pedals, neither can drive Heat Four. They can hire mercenary drivers before a race but cannot recruit one midway through. Emergency Gremlins cannot drive for them.[2]

Why Carl initially tries to save his opponents

Prepotente suspects that eliminated opponents will be replaced by crawler teams. Keeping an NPC rival alive could therefore spare Carl from racing a friend later. He explains this when offering to tow Team Free Love’s wrecked minivan.

Free Love can still qualify in its ruined van, while the Trauco Triplets are eliminated when a giant manatee kills their mount. Carl loads the van onto a cart and tows it, keeping the bugbears in their own vehicle for the finish.

Eight teams survive Heat One. The Royal Court comes seventh and Free Love eighth; the Trauco Triplets are the only elimination. Later, five losses bring four replacement teams, two of them crawlers. Akuma says the available NPC teams are running out, confirming the danger Carl hoped to avoid.[5]

Upgrades and audience choices

Completing a heat earns an upgrade. The initial first-place reward is three ordinary upgrades or one Golden choice, though later prizes vary. Heat Four awards the Royal Court two Golden choices, and Hedy offers conversions for additional ordinary upgrades. The last surviving finisher gets an audience-selected upgrade. Louis voluntarily lets viewers choose after placing second to last and receives more neon; Carl later gets a diagnostic hologram for the troublesome navigator.

Carl prepares for the jungle with a stabilizing gyro, a Bubble Buddy shield and adjustable all-terrain tires. The shield initially lacks its later flotation ability. Before the final race, Hedy spends an ordinary upgrade choice to improve the truck’s existing rockets to Golden quality.[6]

The first three heats

Heat One runs through the Caves of the Screeching Death Manatees. Weak headlights and the truck’s enormous decorative gun obstruct Carl’s view. Donut provides light as the manatees turn the road into a battle and rescue operation.

Heat Two requires teams to remove or kill their assigned gatekeeper before continuing. Bucket Boy drives, with Donut’s homemade steering arrangement available in reserve. The Royal Court finishes seventh again, and Girth the Trouble is eliminated. Paved roads are guaranteed only for the early heats.

Heat Three follows migrating Sugar Hermits along a shared route toward a giant skull blocking the finish. Temporary invulnerability protects vehicles at the start. The Royal Court wins, while the Wild Hunt and Jugglers are eliminated. Their mounts, Onikuma and Old Shuck, survive.[7]

Heat Four: jungle, pit stops and containment

Heat Four covers ninety-nine kilometers with a twenty-hour limit. Its varied routes include compulsory objectives and converge on Upano for at least two hours of refueling. Several heats now share the course. Carl must kill his assigned Maurice before finishing; other teams have different targets with the same name.

Each vehicle or mount receives an indestructible Survival Containment bubble against the environment. Spells and projectiles can still pass through it. From this heat onward, teams whose vehicle or mount is destroyed may finish on foot if they find their own environmental protection, but the lost vehicle will not be restored.

When the leading team’s pit timer expires, the course changes and unfinished quests move with it. The Royal Court goes from jungle to Satan’s Water Park, owned by an invulnerable giant hedgehog. Their Maurice objective remains compulsory.

With Carl and Donut barred from driving, losing their hired drivers threatens to strand the truck. Second Chance lets Olga’s corpse drive temporarily, and Carl extends the workaround with Clockwork Triplicate copies. A reanimated camel eventually takes over. The summons keep the truck moving without bringing Olga herself back.

On the new course, Carl uses summoned zipper shrews and a trailing mass of weapons to kill Maurice. This clears the finish requirement but destroys the engineer they might otherwise have gained.

Donut’s vermin summon draws Lucienne of Team Sparkles away from her living mount. She catches hold of Carl’s truck and dies at the finish barrier. Her team has not lost its mount, so the exception allowing racers to finish on foot does not apply. Sparkles remains in the results, the Royal Court wins, and One Fine Pig is the only listed elimination.[8]

Heat Five: the factory course

A heat winner receives a key to an eliminated team’s garage. It can provide supplies, another vehicle to use at a pit stop, or a way to recover abandoned creatures.

Heat Five sends twelve heats through roughly twenty kilometers of industrial machinery in thirty minutes. Its tracks include vertical and inverted stretches, narrow passages and gaps up to one hundred meters. Vehicles touching for more than five seconds risk losing containment when they separate, a theft mechanic disabled during the previous heat.

An early start disrupts the garage-rescue plan. Crashes scatter metal spheres and drug powder across the factory. After Corcunda’s separated body is reassembled, Grull intervenes to judge him. With regenerating Slag Elementals pursuing the truck, Dong and Corcunda charge the god with a lance enchanted by Donut’s Big-Ass Magnet. Metal and elemental bodies follow them into the attack, opening a path for their friends. Both die.

The Royal Court escapes through Hole and finishes fourth with roughly fifteen seconds remaining. The Lady Dominators are eliminated. The truck can be repaired, but Dong and Corcunda are gone.[9]

Heat Six: the En’Gle Building

The final two heats take place in the En’Gle Building, with racers shrunk to fit hundreds of heats inside an apartment block. Heat Six gives them two hours to descend through seven floors, collecting a qualifying ring on each. The Royal Court must also visit apartment 231.

The compulsory Ad Infinitum quest fills apartments with possible versions of the crawlers’ lives. Human Shells portray their inhabitants. The AI describes them as constructed alternatives, but the memories they draw on make the encounters painful.

A shell bursts after touching Carl, releasing invulnerable Sacred Feast Scarabs early. The AI blames the unexpected contact with his blessed foot. It had planned to combine the insects into a rooftop boss; instead, it cancels that encounter and leaves the scarabs invulnerable. Racers must evade or restrain them while collecting their rings.

An apartment showing Miriam as a pianist leaves Prepotente unable to move on. Carl detonates a bomb hidden among Free Love’s supplies, killing Jasha and Radoslav so he can help Prepotente without risking last place. He later discovers that Osvaldo lied about already reaching the exit. Sparkles wins, the Royal Court finishes second and Flamengo third. Carl must live with his decision to kill the bugbears.[10]

Exit deals and final opponents

Cascadia announces that only one team can survive each three-team final. Individual crawlers may accept exit deals, but their teammates must still race. Friends try to arrange departures that will leave NPC opponents in the surviving crawler teams’ heats.

The starting assignments ruin that plan. Imani and Elle face Chris, while Louis and Britney face Florin and Lucia. Another heat contains three NPC teams together.

The last pit period allows further preparation and deal negotiations. A later briefing says safe rooms will reopen when the final heat starts, revising the earlier closure announcement. Surviving garages will transfer to Floor Eleven, and hired NPCs can travel onward in a vehicle or garage.[11]

The final race and Carl’s transformation

Scolopendra’s first Nine-Tier Attack strikes before the countdown ends. Carl becomes a dachshund, losing the ability to work the pedals and ordinary hand controls as some gear goes into inventory. Samantha registers as a mercenary and steers while Donut uses the pedals, with Jamal in reserve.

The upgraded truck attacks Dwight’s defenses at the start. Donut reaches him in Smoke Form and kills him with her claw, eliminating Sparkles. Carl then detonates his Tower of Power, a vertical chain of shaped charges that blasts through the ceilings toward the roof portals.

Osvaldo launches toward the finish without Bruna, but his shortcut requires his mount to be dead. Carl keeps her alive with protective supplies, healing and Emergency Gremlins. The exit barrier stops Osvaldo, and Britney kills him. The Royal Court is the last surviving team in its heat.[12]

The casino escape

Carl sends allied teams that cannot all qualify toward a casino portal believed to lead into storage outside the race. They hope Herot can retrieve them later, although they cannot guarantee where the portal will take them.

The Russian team attempts the roof exit instead. After attacks by Imani’s group, Chris and Prepotente, Donut destroys their car with Astral Paw and receives three player-killer skulls. She has saved her friends from an immediate threat by killing three people she never knew.

Chris and Britney enter a casino portal before the others discover shadow mimics disguised as the croupier and furnishings. The crawlers survive the ambush, and Donut finds the genuine mechanism. Louis enters its portal before the wheel stops working, leaving his friends uncertain where the travelers have gone.

Donut uses Dwight’s garage keys to rescue Onikuma and Old Shuck before leaving. The Royal Court reaches its stairs with more creatures to care for, while the fate of those who used the casino remains unresolved.

Louis’s later interlude reveals that he is extracted from storage into Sheol, where Chris, Britney and Pontiff are waiting. Forkith attaches a protective leech to Louis, and Crest shoots Chris unconscious before his werewolf transformation finishes. The casino travelers have been recruited into another war.[13]