Goblins are intelligent dungeon inhabitants whose clan occupies a neighborhood on the First Floor. Carl initially encounters them as attackers riding a steam-powered Murder Dozer. His later return to their territory reveals engineers, explosive specialists, shamankas, a war chieftain, and families living alongside the clan's machinery. The goblins can fight crawlers, bargain with them, and recognize a pass that suspends their automatic hostility. Their encounters give Carl both his first close view of the dungeon's organized mobs and some of the equipment that shapes his early survival.
The Murder Dozer at the tutorial guild
Three goblins pursue Carl and Donut soon after they enter the dungeon. Two are ordinary level-two goblins; the driver, wearing a pot on his head, is a level-three Goblin Engineer. Their Murder Dozer is a steam-powered vehicle built to run down crawlers. Carl cannot simply flee along the broad corridor, but the machine's wide turning radius gives him time to reach the door of the tutorial guild. The two passengers dismount when the dozer struggles around a corner. They carry wooden clubs topped with pineapples, an incongruous detail that recurs when Carl later meets other members of the clan.
Carl sees that the ordinary goblins are small, green, mostly bald, sharp-toothed, and comparatively easy for him to hurt. One passenger falls after Carl strikes him; the other retreats toward the dozer. Mordecai cannot admit Carl to the guild while mobs are directly outside its door, so Carl kills the downed goblin to clear the entrance. The vehicle then rolls over that goblin's body as Carl reaches shelter. The fight shows that a weak individual goblin can still be part of a dangerous combined attack: the passengers can chase a target through passages that obstruct their vehicle, while the dozer threatens anyone caught in the open.
Mordecai warns that a survivor could return to the clan and bring others. Carl consequently goes back out to stop the remaining crew before they can summon help. He climbs onto the stranded dozer, throws the ordinary goblin into its spinning front mechanism, and fights the engineer as the unattended machine grinds against the wall. The engineer speaks to Carl in Syndicate Standard and tells him that Carl's apparent command of that language has been programmed into his brain. The exchange interrupts Carl's assumption that the goblin is merely making unintelligible noises: the engineer understands the crawl and recognizes Carl's status within it.
Carl kills the engineer by jumping onto him from the vehicle. Without a driver, the dozer enters an imminent boiler breach. Carl escapes behind the guild's reinforced door before it explodes. Mordecai believes a local shaman probably enchanted the machine to focus a breach toward the nearest nongoblin. He presents this as an explanation, rather than something Carl has independently seen the shaman do. The episode establishes two separate dangers of goblin engineering: its machines can kill while functioning, and their failure can itself become an attack.
The Goblin Pass and clan territory
One of Carl's early reward boxes contains a Goblin Pass. It brands a skull-shaped mark onto his forearm, visible even through his jacket. Its stated effect is to remove automatic goblin hostility and permit passage through goblin-controlled territory. The same description warns that natural enemies of goblins, including fairy-class creatures, will inflict more damage on its holder. Carl later encounters a fairy-class mob whose identification confirms that penalty. The pass is therefore a practical way into one territory with a continuing cost beyond it.
Carl and Princess Donut return to the goblin neighborhood because Carl wants transportation across the floor. They approach three armed level-two goblins and Carl displays his mark. The goblins stop their attack, lower their clubs, and change from hostile red dots to neutral white dots on his map. They still question where he obtained the mark, and Donut immediately tells them he destroyed a dozer and killed its crew. Neutral status does not erase that history; it gives both sides enough space to talk despite it.
One of the three says he does not think he has a name. Donut calls him B.A. and names the others Face and Murdock, then persuades them to lead the pair to the engineers. She attributes her influence to her high charisma and to the fact that these goblins can speak, are no longer marked hostile, and are neither bosses nor too high in level. Carl's pass opens the encounter, while Donut's social ability turns it into an escorted visit. The scene also distinguishes the goblins' own speech and choices from the simple hostile markers Carl first sees on his map.
Engineers, Bomb Bards, and shamankas
The goblin workshop is a working industrial room rather than an empty boss antechamber. About twenty-five engineers tend a huge steam engine and a line of six parked Murder Dozers. Tools and greasy parts cover the tables, coal stands near the boss-room door, and other goblins move among the workers. The engineers wear varied headgear, including sports helmets as well as cookware. Their labor explains why the clan can field several vehicles and replace or adapt them, instead of depending on the single dozer Carl destroyed.
The pair also pass level-five Goblin Bomb Bards. One casually tosses a glass explosive while nearby ordinary goblins flinch each time it rises. When the clan later mobilizes, Bomb Bards put on spiked helmets whose sparking tips can light their bombs and dynamite. Their ranged explosives make them a distinct military role within the clan, while the reactions of their companions show that goblin weapons can endanger goblins too.
Two level-seven Goblin Shamankas stand near the far side of the workshop. A shamanka is the female form of the goblin shaman leader class; the system places shamans below a war chieftain or, more rarely, a warlord. The first shamanka Carl meets is larger than the ordinary goblins, wears a black robe, carries a staff carved with a pineapple, and has many facial piercings. She recognizes his pass but tells him he is unwelcome in that part of the workshop. The pass prevents the automatic attack that would otherwise bar the visit, yet it does not oblige a clan leader to accept a stranger's request.
Donut's charm changes that conversation. The first shamanka breaks down while talking with her, and the second joins them. Donut names them Rory and Lorelai. Rory eventually agrees to have the engineers make Carl a human-sized Copper Chopper with a sidecar, although she refuses to give away a Murder Dozer because the chieftain values the larger machines and would punish her. The distinction is material: Rory can negotiate over a newly made smaller vehicle, but her authority remains limited by the clan's leader and its existing equipment.
Rory rejects Carl's initial offers of gunpowder, provisions, and potions. She already has barrels of the powder her clan calls funpowder. Two bags of dungeon-made methamphetamine interest both shamankas, and they agree to the chopper in exchange for the drugs and information about where Carl found them. The trade depends on what the goblins actually lack, rather than what a crawler assumes they ought to need. It also links their workshop to the neighboring bad llamas, from whom Carl and Donut obtained the drugs.
The chopper and the raid on the llamas
The completed Copper Chopper is sized for Carl and carries a detachable sidecar adapted for Donut. Its copper frame and coal-fed steam engine are functional but unreliable. An engineer tells Carl that its water comes from a permacube and explains two valves, one for heat and one for pressure. The machine has no gauges; Carl is told to listen to it for warning signs. Rory also gives him a bag of dynamite and assorted small bombs, and Carl takes coal to keep the engine running. The goblins have supplied a means of travel, fuel, and explosives in one negotiation.
After the handover, Donut tells Rory that the drugs came from the llamas across the main road. Rory immediately orders the clan to mobilize against them. Ordinary goblins, engineers, and Bomb Bards mount dozers and choppers and leave the workshop. Carl and Donut recognize that they have set off a conflict over the drugs, but the account does not establish the outcome of the raid. Its immediate effect is clear: the workshop empties, leaving its supplies and the route to the chieftain's room unguarded.
The chopper remains useful well beyond the negotiation. Carl stores it in his inventory when he needs to move it and later rides it across the floor with Donut. The same defects that make goblin machines alarming eventually catch up with them: while fleeing a powerful enemy, Carl pushes the chopper until a boiler-breach warning appears. He cannot remember which valve to turn, and the vehicle is destroyed during the escape. The dozer's first explosion was thus a warning about a design weakness that persists even in a vehicle made specifically for Carl.
The chieftain's room and its casualties
With the clan away, Carl and Donut collect workshop equipment, including tools, wick, alchemical liquids, coal, powder, and explosive materials. Carl loads powder barrels onto a cart and packs them with metal pieces. He places Hobgoblin Pus, an explosive activated by a trigger, into the barrels rather than relying on unstable goblin dynamite. Their plan is to roll the cart through the boss-room door, retreat around several corners, and detonate it from a distance. Donut gets a brief view of the huge goblin chieftain sitting inside and reading a book.
As Carl presses the trigger, Donut mentions that she also saw many babies in the room. After the blast, she describes goblin children, older goblins, and pregnant goblins there. The explosion kills the chieftain, but it also strikes people Carl had not known were present when he committed to the attack. The shockwave leaves the workshop wrecked, its steam engine ruptured, and burning coal blocking the way into the chamber. Carl wants the neighborhood map that should be inside, yet feels relieved that he cannot reach the bodies. The approaching goblins are still white dots at first, but he expects their neutrality to end when they discover the damage.
Carl's reaction differs from the dungeon's reward logic. He is appalled by the deaths of the children, while the system grants achievements connected to the killing and more goblin-themed boxes and explosives. Donut initially argues that the victims were goblins and that Carl did not choose to enter the dungeon. Their disagreement follows directly from having spoken with Rory, Lorelai, and the ordinary goblins: Carl has already seen clan members with relationships, preferences, and knowledge of their own situation. The chieftain's chamber makes the consequences of treating the entire neighborhood as a target impossible for him to ignore.
A clan confined to its floor
Before the blast, Rory explains why she cannot leave with Carl and Donut even though Donut invites her. She remains loyal to the chieftain as the leader of her clan and family, despite thinking poorly of him. She also says that goblins who try to descend the stairs die partway down. Rory knows that she is on the First Floor and describes goblins as smart mobs, alongside other intelligent groups in the borough. Her account gives the clan an understanding of the dungeon that Carl lacks during their first fight.
Rory says the floor's collapse affects crawlers differently from its resident mobs. According to her, the goblins go to sleep and wake when another dungeon opens. They have been told that killing crawlers and becoming better at it may eventually place them deeper, where they could live and raise children without fighting for survival. That hoped-for future is Rory's reported belief, not a demonstrated reward. It explains why the clan can attack crawlers while still regarding its neighborhood as a home and its young as people to protect.
Goblin materials continue to matter after Carl leaves the neighborhood. His rewards increase his Goblin Explosives and related handling skills, and equipment taken from the workshop becomes part of later improvised weapons. Carl and other crawlers use the goblins' heavy tables, drills, bolts, and saws to build a portable defense against the Ball of Swine. The clan's contribution to Carl's survival is therefore inseparable from the raid on its stores and the destruction of its boss room. Later, when Donut charms another group of mobs into neutrality, Carl recalls how seeing the goblins' personalities changed his view of them. Their First Floor encounter remains his early example of how little a hostile marker says about the lives behind it.