- For the plants, see Jungle plants.
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Monster camp locations on Summoner's Rift.
Jungling is the action of killing neutral monsters, which are creatures located between the lanes in Summoner's Rift. The Jungle is the part of the Summoner's Rift that is not occupied by lanes or team's bases, including the river that divides it. Junglers rely on killing neutral monsters in the jungle to keep up with their laning teammates in terms of gold and experience. In a standard 5-on-5 game of League of Legends, four players in each team are laners, and one player is the jungler.
Basis of Jungling[]
The primary reason for jungling is to maximize resource allocation. The jungle offers a lot of gold and experience that can be accessed through slaying the monsters that spawn and respawn in predetermined locations on the map. With a lone player dedicating themself to accruing it, it leaves two solo lanes available to both gain high experience and gold rather than only one solo lane.
Due to their roaming nature, the jungler performs a variety of tasks around the map. The most common task for a jungler is initiating surprise attacks against the enemy laners, commonly referred to as ganks. Their ability to freely traverse the map without being tied to a lane also allows them to support lanes when in the area, such as warding key locations without forcing someone else to abandon their lane and coming to an ally's aid when they come under duress.
One of the most important tasks for the jungler is to secure takedowns against epic monsters, powerful jungler monsters located in neutral areas of the map, that provide signficant team-wide buffs (temporary or permanent). Because of the potentially game-turning advantages that successfully killing these monsters can give to an entire team, it is often a responsibility of the jungler to ensure that these camps are not acquired by a marauding enemy team, by using the summoner spell 
Smite to secure or steal the camp at the last second. The epic monsters of Summoner's Rift are: 
Baron Nashor, 
Rift Herald, and various types of 
Dragon.
10 October 2013
09 November 2009
Monsters[]
- Main article: Monster
A Monster is a particular classification of unit. Unlike minions, monsters are neutral—they do not fight for either team, so they will only attack a unit if they are attacked. Monsters' level is based on the average champion level of both teams in the game. As their level increases, so does their bounty (gold and experience), but also their damage and resistances. Junglers rely on killing monsters in order to gain gold and experience, as they do not have access to lane minions like their laners do. They are additionally provided with essential items in order to fight camps much easier, which other players in the game do not have access to. Each monster's bounty may differ.
Monsters will not move from their designated spawning location (commonly called "camps") unless they are damaged, in which case the monster will move toward and attack the nearest champion. A 
Patience bar can be seen above each large monster's health bar, essentially indicating their willingness to fight. If the patience bar is emptied, all the camp's monsters will stop fighting and walk back to their camp, gradually regenerating health and patience, while also ignoring any damage originating from outside their leash range (the circle shown around the camp after damaging them). They cannot re-engage before some patience has been regenerated. Additionally, if the monsters move extremely far away from their camp, they will instantly run back to their designated location, rapidly regenerating health; in this case, they will not re-engage until their health and patience are both restored to full.
The 
Rift Scuttler is the only monster that does not attack, only running away from the damage source when attacked. Conversely, Baron Nashor is the only monster that does not move, although it will rotate on an axis in order to hit nearby targets.
As monsters will always attack the nearest champion, a long-ranged attack on a monster while an enemy is nearby will cause the monsters to switch targets, which can allow you to detect the presence of enemy champions out of sight. Also, monsters will not immediately "forget" champions that hide in bushes, but try to walk into the bush in order to continue attacking them. A monster that can see a champion provides vision of that champion to all monsters in its camp.
The location of monster camps are displayed on the mini-map. If a camp is killed on ally vision, their camp marker will disappear from the map until they respawn. Certain camps have timers that will display on the map when they are close to respawning, with their full timer being displayed in the scoreboard tab. A camp that is killed outside of ally vision will not update its status until vision of its location has been gained. The only exceptions are the boss monsters Dragon, Rift Herald and Baron Nashor, which will grant an accurate timer to both teams whenever slain.
Jungle Overview[]
On Summoner's Rift there are 16 monster camps: blue- and red-side jungles have an equal area with the same amount of non-boss monsters. The jungle is effectively symmetrical around the center of the map, with the exceptions of the boss monsters Dragon, Rift Herald and Baron Nashor, which are unique and reside in sheltered alcoves along the river (Baron Nashor is on the red team's side of the river and the Dragon is on the blue team's).
The practice of "leashing" monsters when they spawn for the first time at the start of the game is an important component of Jungling. Leashing involves two or more allied champions (one of them being the jungler) attacking the same monster camp at the same time. When the monster's health is low, the non-jungler champions cease their attacks and head to their respective lanes, allowing the jungler to last hit the monsters for the experience and gold reward, as expected. If done correctly, this allows the jungler to take minimal damage from the first monster camp they fight. This renders their first jungle run quicker and safer, and allows them to have the maximum amount of health for any potential encounters or ganks.
Respawn timers on the camps do not begin to count down until all monsters in the camp have been killed.
Runes[]
The following runes have an effect on jungle monsters or while in the jungle:
Items[]
Junglers must purchase a jungle item which will aid them in defeating monster camps. Players that have purchased a jungle item automatically gain significant damage against camps in their own team's side of the jungle, for the entirety of the game.
After purchasing a jungle item, a jungle pet hatches which follows the jungler around. The jungle pet deals extra damage against monsters that the player is fighting and heals them for a portion of that damage dealt. Killing a large monster restores some health and mana to the player, and feeds the pet a treat, which awards bonus gold and experience. Jungle pets passively store bonus treats over time.
- Once a jungle pet has been fed 20 treats, they will grow and upgrade
Smite into Unleashed Smite, increasing its damage and allowing the player to cast smite on enemy champions in order to damage and slow them. - Once a jungle pet has been fed 40 treats, they will reach their final form and upgrade Unleashed Smite into Primal Smite, increasing its damage further, granting damage reduction against epic monsters, and rewarding the player with a special, unique effect depending on the type of jungle pet they originally purchased.
Historical Items for Jungling[]
Jungler itemization has gone through some considerable changes over the course of League of Legends' lifespan, mainly owing to the unique difficulty in balancing a relatively unorthodox role with the more traditional laning positions.
During Season One, the jungle was a highly profitable source of gold, so much so that often a Jungling champion could even obtain more farm than the lanes with some effort, eventually letting them afford expensive and deadly items if their farming efforts were not halted. This was offset by the enormous difficulty of the jungle monsters of the time - there were extremely few junglers who could even clear effectively in such an rigorous environment and even fewer junglers who could begin the game with anything other than a 
Cloth Armor and 5 
Health Potions.
The jungle rework of Season Two reduced the difficulty of the jungle monsters and the gold and experience that they gave out in an attempt to open the jungle to more prospective champions. Despite the decreased monster health, however, it was found that the decreased gold meant that dedicated farming was simply no longer an economically viable strategy, and many junglers were forced to find alternative solutions to the resultant gold starvation (most often amounting to early stacking of gold generating items such as 
Philosopher's Stone and 
Heart of Gold), while other junglers whose core item builds often demanded a high gold income to be feasible simply could not function in such a low-gold environment.
The jungle in Season Three attempted to compromise between the high farm of Season One and the low difficulty of Season Two. The introduction of 
Hunter's Machete allowed many junglers to successfully clear without many sustain issues and offered fallback solutions in the form of the highly gold efficient items it built into in case of a poor early game, and the increase to passive gold generation saw most junglers in possession of at least passable amounts of gold. These changes saw the number of viable junglers increase greatly.
Season 2014 was built upon the framework set by Season Three, with several gameplay refinements aimed at combating issues seen at higher levels of play. Of particular note, all of the high-tier jungle items provided benefits exclusively involving killing monsters and an entirely new jungle monster, 
Wight, was introduced, enabling much higher potential profits to both farming junglers who are sufficiently fast to keep up with the respawn times of the four camps and ganking junglers who do not perform well early on. These buffs to farming junglers were boosted further with the addition of 
Feral Flare, which provided massive bonuses to junglers who could farm fast enough to acquire the upgrade early on. On the flipside, the addition of 
Quill Coat kept slower utility junglers useful during a metagame period dominated by heavy early offense.
In Season Five, the jungle received a major update that coincided with the Summoner's Rift visual update. It introduced 4 items that upgraded Smite: 
Poacher's Knife, 
Ranger's Trailblazer, 
Skirmisher's Sabre, and 
Stalker's Blade. It also added new effects to jungle camps when smited, 
Gromp would grant a buff that poisoned enemies when attacked, 
Ancient Krug would grant a buff that stunned jungle monsters every 5 basic attacks or dealt bonus true damage against turrets, 
Crimson Raptor would grant a buff that revealed wards when detected, 
Greater Murk Wolf would spawn a sentry that would alert the presence of an enemy champion, 
Blue Sentinel would restore a portion of maximum mana, and 
Red Brambleback would restore a portion of maximum health.
In Season Six, Poacher's Knife and Ranger's Trailblazer were replaced by 
Tracker's Knife, which didn't upgrade smite but stored sight wards. It also introduced jungle plants to the game and Elemental Dragons to the game. Tracker's Knife was eventually removed in V8.4. In Season Eleven, smite items were removed and replaced by 
Emberknife or 
Hailblade, which upgraded Smite once the user has Smited 5 times.
Leashing[]
A common strategy used by junglers is obtaining a "leash" from one or more teammates to start their first camp. Typically a leash is obtained for either the Red Brambleback or Blue Sentinel camp, where the side lane closest to the camp helps the jungler do damage to the camp but lets the jungler secure the last hit. In the later stages of a game, junglers may also leash these camps for a laner, allowing the laner to obtain the 
Crest of Cinders or 
Crest of Insight buffs for themselves. Leashes provide the advantage of clearing a camp quicker than farming the camp solo while also minimizing the damage taken from the camp. 
Ivern cannot receive a leash from teammates due to his 
Friend of the Forest passive.
Ganking[]
Ganking refers to the act of ambushing one or more players with the intent of scoring a kill. It is one of the most important aspects of the jungle role, as, while anyone in a match can effectively gank to some extent, the jungler is the champion who has the greatest capacity to do so as he is not bound to any particular lane, allowing him to freely roam across the map to appear wherever he is needed. As the game progresses and more and more champions begin to roam the map and band together as opposed to extending out alone, ganking becomes less limited to the jungler and less of an important factor to success overall, but it nonetheless remains a valuable element of team strategy all the way up until a game's end.