Upon exiting a scroll reminds them to unlock that door ASAP. ZZT only allows the player to carry one of each colored key at a time, so continuing forward to the next purple key would mean lots of backtracking to actually be able to pick it up.
Once again going through the maze by the Zapper, this time heading right, the player will encounter what's easily the worst screen in Dungeons.
"Don't miss!" is right. This screen is a very difficult test in timing, with extreme punishment. If you miss your shot, you'll be attacked from the "Wrong" objects, each throwing three player seeking stars, and the door will lock you in when this happens. If you're not clever about things, you'll quite possibly lose sixty health! You really need to lead your shots as well, a cycle in ZZT is about 0.1 seconds, meaning it will take almost 3 seconds from the time you fire your bullet to it hitting the target object.
There are ways of mitigating it however. You have enough time to hide in this crevice and usually the stars will die off on their own as their pathfinding isn't the best. (With some luck you can even make it behind the door and safely wait it out entirely.) As if this wasn't bad enough, each time you hit the target the objects blocking the exit only move once, meaning multiple hits are required.
If you simply hold down the fire button and wail on the target, the objects tend to get desynced and stuck, forcing a restart.
Though, it's also quite possible to desync the target itself by shooting it after it receives a signal to start moving, but before it actually does so. This fortunately let me get the object to move to a row where it could be shot, but missing wouldn't be recognized.
Finally free of that terrible screen, you're taunted by yet another purple key. Dungeons really likes doing that.
Dungeons is much more action focused than Town, but it does still have a few actual puzzles. Though compared to Town, they seem both tamer and less notable. This board is even called "Another Puzzle". In the hyper-abstract boards of the original ZZT worlds, a lack of things like text labels can make it really difficult to describe a board compared town which has iconic locations like "The House of Blues", "The Three Lakes", and "The Rube Board".
All the player is required to do is push some boulders into position so that there's a second exit to the main hall, then activate the bomb and time it to explode over the breakables to be able to access the rest of the board.
One thing definitely worth noting is the sudden appearance of tigers here. Touching the object erases the breakable walls, freeing the enemies inside. If you go back and count the enemies, you'll see eight ruffians, eight lions, and zero tigers, but in this screenshot there's suddenly an extra ruffian and some tigers. So where are they coming from?
Taking a look at KevEdit's stat viewer, you can see that there are a lot more stats than expected. If you look closely you'll also see that a lot of the coordinates repeat themselves, essentially meaning that there are two stats per ruffian. The only ways to accomplish this are through corruptions in ZZT's editor, or manually hex-editing a world. When two stats share a tile, whatever is in that tile gets acted upon twice per cycle. It's of very limited use since as soon as whatever occupies that tile moves off of it, only one stat gets updated, leaving a glitchy empty with stats (dubbed a "black hole" by ZZTers) in its place. It's a bizarre bug that very rarely comes up and it's interesting to see it occur in one of the original ZZT worlds.
Continuing on the path leads to one more puzzle, with a little flavor added by the ever helpful "Don't Blow Yourself Up!" sign. The puzzle elements are once again very light, mostly just not getting caught in explosions as you open up more of the board. However there is a bit more to it than that. Due to the required backtracking to get additional red keys as needed, the player will be spending a lot of time in the lower area being shot at by spinning guns. Carefully using lit bombs to push others without activating them can greatly reduce the danger of this area like so:
Of course, as you can see by my health, I also took significant damage regardless.
Exiting the bomb room circles back around to the hallway with the purple key, and this time the player gets to claim their prize. This is my second purple key, marking the halfway point of the adventure! It took me roughly half an hour to get to this point.
At this point, the eastern half of the game is completed, and the only places remaining to explore are the northern and southern paths in the dungeon's main hub. I opted to go south, which took me to a board called Whirlpool.
