The Undercity: Tributes, Attunement and runes

The Kurast Undercity is a three floor dungeon entered through the Spirit Brazier after the Vessel of Hatred campaign, unlocked from around level 20. You burn through afflicted enemies, build a meter called Attunement, and finish on a boss. What you take home is decided by two things: the Tribute you burned on the way in, and how high you pushed Attunement before the clock ran out.

You spawn inside a circle, and while you stand in it the timer does not tick. The moment you leave, it starts, and the starting time depends on what you burned:

• No Tribute: 120 seconds
• Rare Tributes: 75 seconds
• Legendary Tributes: 60 seconds

That is the central tension of the activity. The better the Tribute, the less time you are given to earn its rewards. A Legendary Tribute run is half the clock of a bare run.

Killing afflicted enemies adds seconds back. The values below are the base amounts, and they are reduced as Tribute difficulty rises, which compounds the squeeze rather than offsetting it:

Attunement is the payout multiplier, shown as a four stage bar under the minimap. Your Tribute pays out only if you reach Attunement level 1 at minimum, and each level above that pays proportionally more. Finishing a run at Attunement 0 means the Tribute is simply gone.

Three things raise it:

• Killing monsters, in small increments. This is the slow trickle, not the plan.
• Igniting Beacons, in significant bursts. This is the plan. Igniting one spawns enemies you then have to kill, which is the cost.
• Treasure Goblins, which spawn rarely and are worth dropping everything for.

Beacons are where a run is won. They cost time, they pay Attunement, and the whole skill of the activity is judging how many you can afford before the clock beats you.

Tributes drop both inside the Undercity and out in Sanctuary. They come in Lesser, standard, Greater and Mythic grades, and each names the thing it pays. This is the table to keep, because it is the only place in the game where you point at a material and go get it:

Worth noting on Ingenuity: the standard and Greater versions both list Horadric Cube materials, so the upgrade is in quantity rather than in unlocking anything new.

Runes drop from World Bosses, Helltide chests and Tree of Whispers rewards, but all of those are incidental: you get what you get. Tribute of Harmony is the only lever that says "this run is for runes", and the Greater version is the only repeatable way to aim specifically at Legendary Runes, which are the half of a Runeword that is actually scarce.

Runewords pair a Rune of Ritual, which builds Offering by meeting a condition such as travelling a distance or casting a skill, with a Rune of Invocation, which spends that Offering on an effect. Excess Offering becomes Overflow and scales the payoff up. The Ritual half is usually easy to find. The Invocation half you want is usually Legendary, which is why Greater Harmony is worth banking rather than burning on the first run of the evening.

You can also convert what you do not need. Maxroll lists rune crafting at the Jeweler, combining 3 Runes with the same name into a random rune of higher rarity. Community sources widely quote a different ladder, five Magic into one Rare and five Rare into one Legendary, run through the Horadric Cube. I could not confirm that second version on a primary source, so check both stations and read the recipe in front of you rather than banking a pile of duplicates against a ratio that may not exist.

The Bargain system is an optional second layer: sacrifice materials at the Spirit Brazier to bias the run further. Bargains can guarantee an Aspect category (Offensive, Defensive, Utility, Mobility, Resource), an equipment area (Weapons, Armour, Jewellery), or targeted Tuning Prism and Rune drops. A Tribute picks the reward type, a Bargain narrows it, and stacking both is how a run stops being a lottery.

The Undercity also has its own tree in War Plans, added in July 2026. Maxroll's early recommendations are Gutter Filth for more chests, then Jade Epiphany, Pathfinder and Initiative. Remember that every tree levels on its own Activity Experience, so committing to the Undercity tree means committing plans to the Undercity for a while rather than dabbling.

Stop running the Undercity without a Tribute. A bare run gives you the longest clock and the worst payout, which is the wrong trade for anyone past the campaign. Pick the Tribute that names the material you are short of, take the shorter timer, and route between the big afflicted rather than clearing.

Bank Greater Tributes of Harmony rather than spending them casually, because Legendary Runes are the scarce half of every Runeword and this is the only place you can aim at them. Everything else here is a bonus.

The Season 14 Farming Ledger tracks which of these you have actually set up, which by week three is a different list from the one you meant to.