Kurast Undercity is a time-attack-style dungeon that’s exclusive to Diablo 4’s first expansion, Vessel of Hatred. Here, you’ll dive under Kurast, the capital city of Nahantu, to blast through the dungeon as fast as possible, earning back time for killing monsters and increasing your reward threshold by earning attunement.
In this Diablo 4 guide, we’ll teach you how to unlock the Kurast Undercity activity, how to upgrade your loot rewards, and how to stop yourself from running out of time.
How to unlock Kurast Undercity in Diablo 4
Kurast Undercity takes place… under the city of Kurast, as you might imagine. To unlock this activity, you first need to progress the Vessel of Hatred campaign until you reach Kurast and do some work for the council there. This should be around the time you face the first major boss.
A member of the council will then teach you how to do the basic version of the Kurast Undercity. (In the endgame, you’re able to apply modifiers, which we won’t get into here.) As you progress the questline, you’ll unlock new districts to adventure through.
How to get more time in Kurast Undercity
Image: Blizzard Entertainment via Polygon
Kurast Undercity is a time-attack dungeon, and you only start with 100 seconds by default. But in order to complete the dungeon and earn your rewards, you’ll need to battle through multiple dungeon floors to find the boss. Unless you are overleveled for the difficulty you’re on, this process will almost certainly take you over 100 seconds, meaning the dungeon will kick you out and end your run before you can finish.
Scattered throughout each floor of the dungeon are Afflicted Monsters and Afflicted Structures (which usually look like big hamster wheels). These objects and enemies have an orange hourglass next to their icon on the map. Defeating Afflicted Monsters or destroying Afflicted Structures refunds you time and can even push you above that 100 second starting timer. However, these are elite monsters and high-health structures, so you’ll need to decide if the time you’ll need to spend killing them is worth the time you’ll get back.
Ideally, you can stack up multiple Afflicted Monsters at once and deal area damage to kill them all at the same time, netting you a lot of time back for not much time spent.
How to upgrade your Kurast Undercity loot chest
Image: Blizzard Entertainment via Polygon
The whole point of Kurast Undercity — like most activities in Diablo 4 — is to get powerful new loot and further improve your build. You’ll get a chest filled with loot by reaching the final floor of the dungeon in time and then killing the boss. But you can upgrade this loot by filling up your Attunement meter. You need to have at least Attunement level 1 to get any reward upgrades.
To increase your Attunement, which you can stack up to four times, you need to activate Beacons and Grand Beacons while racing through the floors. These Beacons will spawn a horde of monsters that are all linked to the Beacon itself. If you can kill every enemy attached to the Beacon, it’ll spew out a bunch of Attunement, which will steadily increase your meter. In our experience, there are more Attunement Beacons and Grand Beacons than you’ll need to cap out your Attunement meter, so you can skip some as you go and still get decent rewards.
The only thing to be aware of with Attunement is that it’s designed to be a trap, meaning the push and pull of the Kurast Undercity activity is trying to test your greed. If you’re running low on time, stopping for more Attunement could cost you the entire run, meaning you get no loot rather than getting slightly less loot. Try not to be greedy, and you can get some great rewards while grinding the Kurast Undercity.
Next, see our guides on all Tenets of Akarat locations and the best Spiritborn build.