How to get more time and loot in Kurast Undercity in Diablo 4

Kurast undercity is a time attack style dungeon exclusive to Diablo 4‘s first expansion, Vessel of hatred. Here you’ll delve beneath Kurast, the capital of Nahantu, to blast through the dungeon as quickly as possible, recoup time spent killing monsters and increase 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 avoid running out of time.

Kurast Undercity takes place… underneath the city of Kurast, as you might imagine. To unlock this activity, you must first complete the progression Vessel of hatred campaign until you reach Kurast and do some work for the municipality there. This should be around the time you face the first big boss.

A member of the council will then teach you how to do the basic version of the Kurast Undercity. (In the endgame you can apply modifiers, which we won’t get into here.) As you progress through the questline, you’ll unlock new districts to adventure through.

Kurast Undercity is a time attack dungeon, and you’re just getting started 100 seconds standard. But to complete the dungeon and earn your rewards, you’ll have to fight through multiple dungeon floors to find the boss. Unless you’re at too high a level for the difficulty you’re on, this process will almost certainly take more than 100 seconds, meaning the dungeon will kick you out and end your run before you can finish.

There are scattered throughout each floor of the dungeon Affected samples And Affected structures (which usually look like large hamster wheels). These objects and enemies have an orange hourglass next to their icon on the map. Defeating affected monsters or destroying affected structures will grant you time back and can even exceed the 100 second start timer. However, these are elite monsters and structures with high health, so you have to decide whether the time it takes to kill them is worth the time you get back.

Ideally, you can stack multiple affected monsters at once and deal area damage to kill them all at once, giving you a lot of time back while not spending much time.

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 full of loot if you reach the final floor of the dungeon in time and then kill the boss. But you can upgrade this loot by your Tuning meters. You must be at least Alignment Level 1 to receive reward upgrades.

To increase your Attunement, which you can stack up to four times, you must activate it Beacons And Great beacons as you race through the floors. These Beacons will spawn a horde of monsters that are all connected to the Beacon itself. If you can kill every enemy attached to the Beacon, it will spit out a bunch of Attunement, steadily increasing your meter. In our experience, there are more Attunement Beacons and Grand Beacons than you need to fill your Attunement meter, so you can skip a few along the way and still get decent rewards.

The only thing you need to be aware of with Attunement is that it is designed as a trap, meaning the push and pull of the Kurast Undercity activity is trying to test your greed. If you’re running out of time, stopping for more attunement can cost you the entire run, meaning you get no loot instead of slightly less loot. Try not to be greedy, and you can get great rewards while grinding the Kurast Undercity.

Then check out our guides to all the Tenets of Akarat locations and the best Spiritborn build.