Zockau is the northern capital of the sixth-floor Hunting Grounds. The dungeon confines the arriving hunters there during the crawlers' initial grace period, making the city both the source of the impending hunt and an unusually dangerous place for a crawler to enter. It also contains an exit to the seventh floor and an entrance to the Desperado Club. Carl and Princess Donut reach Zockau before the hunters are released and attack its club district. Their raid destroys the local Desperado entrance, disrupts the hunters' preparations, and leaves a route through which Bomo can continue to observe the city. As the floor changes around it, Zockau shifts from a secure hunter base to a refuge threatened by the brambles.
The northern capital
The sixth-floor announcement places every hunter in Zockau at the start of the grace period and says they will be released after thirty hours. Crawlers are expected to use that interval to move away. The city is therefore more than a settlement among many: its position governs the first phase of the hunt. Ian, a former crawler working as an NPC, warns Carl that Zockau lies far to the north, that the aliens are gathered there, and that they will not fight fairly. He relates a prior season in which a hunter killed his brother, a food-stand worker, without the guards intervening. His warning includes the city's NPC population as well as the danger facing crawlers.
The dungeon also announces 2,344 exits to the seventh floor across the Hunting Grounds. At least one unguarded exit is in Zockau, with others in the valley beyond it. This makes the capital a possible descent point despite its concentration of hunters. The exit count applies to the entire floor; the announcement does not place all of those stairwells in or near the city. Zockau's known exit is especially conspicuous when Carl arrives: it stands in a landscaped park, with a column of light rising from it toward the artificial ceiling.
An entry in the Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook describes the recurring layout behind the city's role. In that account, the Hunting Grounds has one named metropolis in the north, near the map's edge and above a valley containing lower-level monsters on which hunters can train. The city's name and ruling race can change between iterations. Its government is vulnerable to takeover: according to the entry, a hunter usually kills the NPC leader and assumes the office of Grand, the title used for the mayor of a major settlement. The account distinguishes this capital from the smaller settlements where hunters cannot take the same office. It describes a recurring floor pattern, while Carl's visit establishes the particular city called Zockau in his season.
The geography gives the threat a direction. After the raid, Carl and his allies remain only a few hours from Zockau and expect hunters to spread outward when the grace period ends. Other crawlers head south, deeper into the map, even though the high-elf territory they approach is dangerous in its own right. A main road leads from Zockau toward a river crossing and continues into the jungle. Miriam reports that caravans use that road and that their guards' spells clear traps along it. Carl passes that information to Katia for the crawlers' shared map. The road is a practical way out of the northern area, but its connection to the capital also makes it part of the hunters' prospective route into the rest of the floor.
Arrival at the stairwell
Carl reaches Zockau by having Bomo teleport him and Donut to its stairwell. They arrive at night, before the general release of the hunters, using invisibility to conceal their approach. The park surrounding the exit has grass, hedges, cobblestones and a statue of a bear-headed figure. Armored, bear-like NPC guards patrol nearby. Carl's map shows hunters as purple dots and the hostile guards as red ones, while ordinary NPCs and pets appear in other colors. The guards' hostility tells him that a hunter has already taken control of the city government.
The nearby commercial blocks are active despite the grace period. A row of pubs faces the park, with music and drinking inside; Carl sees a drunken hunter stumble from one pub into another. The large Desperado Club entrance stands at the end of the row. Its exterior matches Zockau's streets more closely than the club entrance Carl saw on an earlier floor. This arrangement puts a seventh-floor exit, ordinary taverns, a genuine saferoom and the club entrance within a short walk of one another. Carl exploits that proximity, but it also means he must work within sight of guards, hunters and other residents.
The park is not an open path to the street. Carl nearly steps on an alarm trap and finds many more around the stairwell, including a movement-blocking trap. Most of the traps he identifies were placed by a hunter named Ontario and target crawlers. Bomo crosses the area without triggering them because he is an NPC. Carl sends him to a small tavern with a broken sign, later identified as the Scuttlebutt, and instructs him to enter their personal space from its saferoom. Donut uses her Puddle Jump spell to carry herself and Carl over the trapped ground toward the clubs.
Carl determines that only the Scuttlebutt is a genuine saferoom among the ordinary pubs on the block, although the other pubs also connect to personal spaces. This difference becomes decisive when he starts placing explosive barrels in the alleys between the buildings. He has positioned a launcher of homing missiles in the park as well. The weapons are directed at hunters, and the barrels are close enough to damage the crowded entertainment district. Carl is conducting an attack on the city's hunter gathering place while keeping a protected doorway available for his own escape from the blasts.
Attack on the club district
A drunken, unaffiliated hunter named Chin'Dua emerges from the Scuttlebutt as Carl places the last barrel. Carl marks him with the Ring of Divine Suffering, accepting the ring's healing debuff until the marked hunter dies. Meanwhile, Xindy, a flying mantis hunter of the Dark Hive, sends lights over the area as the hunters begin to detect intruders. Carl casts Ping to reveal nearby targets and uses his toe ring's Super Spreader ability to pass his debuff to Xindy. He then launches homing missiles at the fastest moving hunter. The missiles kill Xindy in the air. Chin'Dua identifies her as Vrah's younger sister before Carl kills him at the barrel.
Carl and Donut dive into the Scuttlebutt just before the unstable barrel explodes. The other barrels also detonate, throwing them across the protected tavern while destroying much of the surrounding block. The front of the Desperado Club collapses and its entrance bar disappears. Hunters who had entered the club through Zockau can no longer come back out through that entrance, and those outside cannot use it to enter. The raid thus affects an access point as well as the street. Carl later learns that repairing the entrance would require the approval of Zockau's mayor, Vrah, and that the mantises have withheld it. The club becomes a place where some hunters remain trapped rather than a simple refuge from the floor.
The explosions do not clear the city of opposition. Carl sees guards, pets and hunters still moving beyond the immediate blast area. He and Donut briefly enter their personal space through the Scuttlebutt, where Bomo and the Sledge give them protective spells. Mordecai realizes where they are and reacts to their decision to attack the capital. Carl insists they leave at once: if the hunters recover and guard the stairwell, the group could be caught inside Zockau. When they return to the street, the block is burning and filled with smoke, but the city boundary is still about a quarter mile away.
Their flight exposes the limits of both invisibility and the initial bombardment. Carl sets off more traps on a residential street; one blares music loudly enough to hurt him and Donut. An unseen hunter attacks from above with crossbow bolts. Carl's Ping reveals that this level-70 pursuer is the Grand, and he fires a second missile launcher while running toward the city edge. A bolt badly wounds his leg just as they cross into the Selva. Beyond the boundary, the street becomes opaque to him and the trap sounds stop, but the bolts continue to cause bleeding and confusion. Miriam and Prepotente find the pair outside and help Carl. The escape depends on crossing the city's border, not on defeating every hunter within it.
After Miriam treats him, Carl explains the larger aim that he had not shared with Donut beforehand. Destroying the Desperado entrance was one objective; he also wanted to identify and kill the mayor. He believed that taking the office himself would let him command Zockau's guards to attack the hunters. The mayor proved to be Vrah, a mantis hunter, but she escaped his missiles. The city therefore stays under hunter control after the raid. Carl's account explains why he risked going into the capital rather than simply taking its unguarded stairwell: he was trying to turn the city's own security force against the hunters gathered there.
Consequences for the hunters
The immediate danger around Zockau persists after Carl and Donut escape. Miriam finds numerous traps on the approaches, and Carl sees nearby settlements that appear to have been looted by the aliens. Hunters subsequently disperse across the Hunting Grounds, as the crawlers had feared. Yet the raid changes their expectations. Later, the dungeon's own announcement says that some hunters have abandoned the pursuit and hidden in Zockau as crawlers fight back. The city remains a gathering place, but for some it has become shelter from the people they expected to hunt.
Zockau also serves as a fixed point on hunters' political map. When Carl examines a map dividing hunting areas among groups, unaffiliated hunters are assigned territory around the city. Later, Clarabelle explains that hunters are barred from becoming mayors in other towns; guards in crawler-controlled towns may attack them on entry. In Zockau, by contrast, Vrah's control of the mayor's office still matters. Her refusal to approve a replacement Desperado entrance keeps hunters who fled into the club from simply restoring their way out. Damage done in one street has a continuing administrative consequence because the city government controls that repair.
Bomo's connection to the Scuttlebutt offers Carl a way to act on the city without returning himself. Because Bomo last entered their personal space through Zockau's saferoom, he can be sent back through that route. Carl considers using it for another bombing but worries that the hunters may be waiting outside. The route later carries a message to the remaining Dark Hive representative in Zockau, whom Carl tries to draw into a bargain. Bomo's movements also allow the group to learn what happens within the city after the raid. The surviving saferoom has become both a hunter shelter and an observation point for Carl's allies.
As the brambles advance, the hunters' refuge grows less secure. Carl expects the spreading growth to reach Zockau before it reaches the more distant river. A small group of experienced hunters elects to stay in the city when the brambles arrive. Bomo reports on them from the saferoom. The brambles do not enter its walls, and the hunters fight the thorns outside long enough to fill the blood bar required for their return to safety. They repeat this defense despite gaining no experience from it. Their shelter is sustained by short periods of exposure to the growth surrounding it.
When the Butcher's Masquerade begins, the remaining hunters are teleported away. Carl describes Zockau afterward as nearly empty apart from a few surviving NPCs. Bomo returns to gather equipment the hunters left in the saferoom, where its former owners can no longer protect it. The capital that assembled the hunters at the start of the sixth floor has become a place they have abandoned. Its stairwell, club entrance and tavern remain distinct parts of the city's history, but the raid, Vrah's control of repairs and the brambles explain why Zockau no longer serves as the secure base promised by the grace period.