Beginner Guide

The loop, in one paragraph

Roll up the carpet. Dig the floor with your spoon. Fill your sack with what you find. Walk back and sell it to a prisoner for Rolls. Eat when your energy bar drops. Spend Rolls on storage, then speed, then a keycard. Go back down. That is the whole of Dig to Escape, and every route out of the prison is built on top of it.

Energy is the real budget

Digging drains energy. When the bar empties you stop being useful, and refilling it means finding food. That makes energy, not time, the thing you are actually spending in Dig to Escape.

Food comes from two places. Prisoners trade food for toilet paper, which is reliable but costs you currency you would rather spend on upgrades. The Chef hands out food during lunch, which is free but happens on the game's schedule rather than yours. Chicken and Apple can also be found on the kitchen counter, though the kitchen needs a keycard.

The practical version: plan around lunch. Sell your haul, eat at the Chef, buy an upgrade, and go back down with a full bar. Trying to dig through lunch is the single most common way new players lose half a day.

Buy storage before speed

You start with a Small Sack and it fills quickly. Once it is full, digging stops paying and you have to walk back. That walk is the hidden cost in every early Dig to Escape run.

Adam sells +20 Storage. Rosa sells +16 Dig Speed. Both are useful, but storage comes first, because dig speed only makes you fill a small sack faster — which means more walking, not more Rolls. Once storage is comfortable, speed compounds properly.

After that, X-Ray Vision is the upgrade that changes the game most. Seeing item locations through walls means you stop spending energy on empty dirt.

Close the door

One of the opening objectives in Dig to Escape is to close the cell door, and it is there for a reason. The hole you are digging is visible, and a guard who sees it interrupts the run.

Guards patrol the office and the rooftop, and one can be seen falling into the mineshaft. You are not meant to fight them. Avoidance is the mechanic — the ESCAPE THE GUARD objective is exactly what it sounds like.

Your first escape

Go for the mineshaft. It needs no purchases: dig down from your cell until you break into the shaft, keep going to the bottom, find the ladder, climb out. Over twelve million players have finished this route, which is the clearest possible signal that it is the intended first escape in Dig to Escape.

Bring a flashlight if you can. The mineshaft is dark, and a dark tunnel system with minecarts in it is much harder to navigate than it needs to be without one.

Once you have finished it, the keycard routes open up. A keycard costs 200 Rolls or 19 Robux and unlocks both the kitchen and the security room, which are the gateways to the janitor and rooftop endings.

Mistakes that cost you a day

Digging with a full sack. It does nothing. Check your storage before you commit to a deep dig.

Ignoring the energy bar until it is empty, then having to climb all the way back for food. Eat on the way past, not when you are forced to.

Buying dig speed first. It feels like progress and mostly generates walking.

Leaving the cell door open. The fastest run in Dig to Escape is the one that does not get interrupted.

Your first day, as a checklist

Roll up the carpet and close the cell door before you dig anything. Dig fifteen items to clear the opening objective. Walk your first sack back and sell it rather than trying to squeeze in one more swing. Buy the Small Sack, then Adam's +20 Storage as soon as you can afford it.

Eat at lunch, every time. Trade a prisoner for food if the bar drops before then. Only after storage is comfortable should you look at Rosa's +16 Dig Speed, and only after that at X-Ray Vision.

The badge counts show how forgiving Dig to Escape is about early mistakes. Newbie Digger has been awarded 32,391,119 times and Back From The Dead 40,548,662 — more players have died and returned than have taken their first dig. Nothing you do on day one is unrecoverable.

When you are ready to leave, take the mineshaft. Dug To Escape has 12,329,274 completions against 1,362,677 for the janitor route, and that gap is not about skill. It is about the mineshaft needing no keycard, no crowbar, and no shopping trip — just a spoon, a flashlight, and enough energy to reach the bottom.

How long a full Dig to Escape run takes

The mineshaft route is the short one. With a bought storage upgrade and a flashlight, the dig down, the descent, and the ladder climb are one continuous stretch that fits inside a normal session.

The janitor and rooftop routes take longer, because the time is spent earning Rolls rather than digging. A keycard is 200 Rolls and a crowbar is 100, so the rooftop route needs 300 Rolls of selling before the route itself begins. That is the real reason its completion count sits at 509,382 against the mineshaft's 12,329,274 — not difficulty, but setup.

If you only have a short session in Dig to Escape, dig and sell. If you have a long one, commit to a route. Trying to start a keycard route with 40 Rolls in hand is how people end up doing neither.

What this Dig to Escape guide does not claim

A few things have been seen but not confirmed. The Flare Gun exists in Dig to Escape and has been observed in play, but its function has not been verified, so no use is claimed for it here. Toothpaste turns up while digging in the mineshaft, but whether it has a use beyond selling is unconfirmed.

Where this guide gives a number — a price, a badge count, a completion figure — it comes from the game or from Roblox's public data. Where something is unknown, it says so rather than filling the gap with a guess.