How the Tomb Prospectors Mapped Bloodborne
Bloodborne was a marked departure from the sword-and-board fantasy setting of FromSoftware’s iconic Souls series, asking players to instead navigate the winding streets of Yharnam, a horrific Lovecraftian world. But regardless of the setting, FromSoft games are known for their deliberate and intricate level design, making the inclusion of Chalice Dungeons—semi-randomized levels that players can explore for loot and experience—a surprise.
Bloodborne’s Chalice Dungeons were first revealed at a preview event back in February 2015, when director Hidetaka Miyazaki told GamesRadar+ that the game would contain dungeons that were “procedurally generated.”
“[For] whoever is looking at the dungeon,” Miyazaki said. “It will appear differently.”
Players can generate new dungeons in game using a consumable item called a “Root Chalice,” and can share codes for these “root dungeons” with other players.However, they proved somewhat divisive in the community: it doesn’t take much research to find various forum threads full of players venting about the optional game mode.
Still, many players latched onto Chalice Dungeons, most notably the Tomb Prospectors, a group of players who comb dungeons for rare discoveries. Their biggest project would be kickstarted by the modder Zullie The Witch, who is credited with discovering that Chalice Dungeon layouts aren’t actually random: there are exactly 2,300 possible variations.
Zullie’s research, published to Twitter in November 2017, would spark a community project spanning almost two years, culminating in November 2019. This is the story of that community, the Tomb Prospectors, and their project: exploring all 2,300 dungeons.
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Author’s Note: For this piece, all interviewees requested they go by their online handles.
It all started when Zullie used a PS4 save editor to access information stored in Bloodborne save files.
“I was interested to discover how Chalice Dungeon information was structured on a save file, and how comprehensively it could be edited,” Zullie said.
This let her map out “the area of memory Chalice data was stored in on [a] save file” and discover that every dungeon has predetermined geometry, character models, enemy placements, and AI models. Only certain elements, like the spawn rates of special enemies and merchants, are truly random. Zullie described the system as “effectively a level select tool.”
Dungeons created by players are assigned a “depth” of one through five, determining how difficult the level will be and a world area that the dungeon is based in, like the misty swamps of Pthumeru. From depths one through three, dungeons have a total of 100 possible layouts, doubling to 200 possible layouts for depths four and five. Factor in every area type, and you get a grand total of 2300 possible layouts.
Moros Nyx, co-founder of the Tomb Prospector community, focused on Chalice Dungeons after getting hugely invested in Bloodborne’s main campaign and PvP. Although Moros criticized the prevalence of “inconsequential dungeons” and the “repetitive architecture” of Chalice Dungeons, “the idea that there was something new to discover” kept him coming back.
“There were also myths abound… that only fuelled my sense of wonder and excitement,” Moros said.
Moros initially wrote farming guides and uploaded videos documenting dungeon oddities, saying that “there wasn’t really any proper dungeon research before the formal Root Chalice mapping project”.
The community expanded to Reddit in early 2016, where prospectors created dungeons and posted about interesting discoveries. They went viral after prospector KolbrotKommander discovered a Flaming Undead Giant, an enemy which was previously thought to be cut content, over two years after the game’s release. The video on Moros’ channel has now been watched almost 550,000 times as of writing.
This discovery is what inspired Prospector DrAnger, or “Doc,” to get involved with the community. “Since the dungeons always fascinated me [and] a new enemy was found, then you start to think, what more is possible?” Doc said.
Likewise, the Prospector Trin got involved after seeing one of Moros’ videos. “I wanted to know what crazy things there are in the Chalice Dungeons, what secrets could the developers possibly hide there,” Trin said.
The social side of the community was important for the prospectors as well. Since then, Trin and Doc have collaboorated with each other and with other Prospectors for various Chalice Dungeon research projects, such as analyzing drop rates, and both have solace in the social connections they’ve made through the community.
“This is like an escapism thing, doing these things with people I like means a lot to me,” Doc said.
Towards the end of 2017, the Prospectors were starting to run on empty as “the feeling that we had found everything started to settle in,” Moros said. However, discovering the Flaming Undead Giant was hugely invigorating for the community. Then, after Zullie’s research was published, the community had a concrete goal.
“We could never really say for sure if we had seen every dungeon or discovered everything before, we had to go based on feeling,” Moros said. “Now, we finally knew what we were up against, and [could] work with facts.”
The “Isz glitch,” first discovered by the Tomb Prospector Kazin, was critical. Bloodborne only lets the player generate a limited number of dungeon layouts until they pick up specific key items, like a weapon. Afterwards, the game will generate dungeons from a different layout pool, containing a different key item.
In the Isz area, players can become soft-locked if they collect too much loot, generating only 32 dungeon layouts out of a possible 200. Once the Prospectors learned how to circumvent the glitch, the allure of exploring the remaining Isz dungeons kickstarted the rest of the exploration project. The prospectors were driven by a desire to find secrets, like discovering the first Wandering boss in Isz.
“That sort of feeling you get when you see something that you know is extremely rare and special is unforgettable, it’s what makes exploring so fun,” Trin said.
Initially, Trin, Doc, and Moros worked manually, generating and exploring Isz dungeons with new characters, cataloguing them with screenshots and taking notes of their bosses, items and layouts in a database. However, this method was hugely time consuming due to the chance of generating repeat dungeons. Additionally, dungeons normally have three levels to beat, but each has a 20 percent chance of generating a “fourth layer,” further impeding the Prospectors.
Various other community members helped out with the project, including FoxyHooligans, Claude, Qqalia, KitPes and Altair. However, few people were willing to “get their hands dirty” with the project, according to Moros, who was mainly involved in the early stages of the project and described the work as “grueling.”
“But when we [discovered a new dungeon], man was it exciting. We’d co-op through it and go very slowly to take in every room, hoping that the wandering boss was around the next corner,” he said.
After nine months spent generating dungeons manually, a save editor was used to generate the remaining dungeons. This allowed the prospectors to use Zullie’s research to generate the exact dungeons they needed to explore, using their map file ID.
Trin was the “main person” involved with the project after this point, generating and publishing dungeons for the community to explore, according to Doc. “Suddenly, exploring 2,300 dungeons was a very doable goal, even if it was a drag sometimes,” Trin said.
Trin acknowledged that save editing can be used maliciously: players can use it to inflate their stats to “impossible levels”, making PvP fights unfair. However, she thinks it greatly helped the project.Moros describes the use of a save editor as a “double-edged sword.” On the one hand, he feels it’s “borderline impossible” to manually generate every single dungeon of any particular chalice type. On the other hand, the hacking “took some of the magic of Tomb Prospection away” for Moros, who stepped away from the project after mapping Isz, his “main focus”.
Additionally, Moros described a side effect of the Prospectors using the save editor—which also lets the group access developer dungeons and create customized dungeons— where “people don’t take real finds seriously anymore because the general public assumes everything is hacked.”
Still, the save editor “made the community excited to explore together and achieve our goal, which is only a good thing in my eyes,” Doc wrote in a Reddit post last December.
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On November 17th, 2019, after over two years of prospecting, Trin made the announcement on Twitter that the project was completed. All 2300 dungeon layouts had been explored. “Seeing it finally complete is so satisfying,” she wrote.
Doc described finishing the project as “a hell of an achievement, not only for ourselves but for the community also.” Although Moros is less involved with Bloodborne and the Prospectors nowadays, choosing to focus on college instead, he was “proud” and “emotional” when the mapping project was finished.
However, it’s unclear how much the research is being used outside of the Tomb Prospector community. Trin described it as a resource “to make things easier for prospectors who can’t use glyphs but still want to farm top tier gems from specific bosses.”
Moros agreed, describing the spreadsheet as a resource for advanced players.
“Because glyphs tend to become inactive if not used for two weeks, we’d often lose dungeons that had really rare things in them. Now, we can just recreate it without a problem,” Moros said.
Zullie described the project as “more of a conceptual achievement than a practical one,” although she said that it was “an amazing group project to see completed” and “one of the most magical experiences I’ve had in gaming”. Additionally, Zullie claimed that some community members reacted negatively to the project and her own research.
“Some players hated knowing that the dungeons weren’t as open-ended as they thought… in some ways, they apparently felt like the game has been diminished for being able to see the whole extent of it,” Zullie said.
For Trin, exploring the dungeons was a fun personal challenge, even if bittersweet.
“For me it meant that we will finally get to truly see everything this game has to offer, discover and document all Chalice Dungeon anomalies and rarities,” Trin said. “[But also] it meant there is nothing more left to find.”
Over four years later, the Prospector community on Reddit is almost 9000 members strong and continuing like they started out: exploring dungeons and sharing cool discoveries.
“Because it’s such a niche and nerdy practice, I feel like a lot of people bonded very closely over tomb prospecting,” he said. “I think we are the heart of the Bloodborne community.”
