I played the game since 0.29 (released in August 2022) splatting hundreds of characters in all sorts of ways. One of them even touched the Orb but didn’t live long enough to escape (ironically, it was another mountain dwarf). This run, I did something different: I actually started using my god’s abilities in any viable situation.
It was a fun run, and I’m really surprised that the escape sequence isn’t that difficult! For some reason I thought it would be really difficult. With that said I did it with 10 !haste and 11 ?blinking so maybe I’m just lucky :D
The hardest parts were probably Depths and Zot (although amusingly Z:5 was pretty easy) because the lack of resistances (particularly rElec and rCorr) was VERY noticeable.
I didn’t want to do any late-game optional branches except for Elf (because Depths is scary and I rather grind a bit before it) but I found the dreamshard necklace and figured it’d be more useful on the run than my amulet of faith so I went to Crypt to grind Nem’s piety a bit (wasn’t needed at all in the end).
Anyway, here’s my character file for the curious: https://pastebin.com/6NhHY03U
Happy new year crawlers!!
Congrats. I play a lot of crawl, and have pretty regularly since v0.16 or so. There’s been a lot of changes (there used to be food! Spells made you hungry!) but the core of it remains very good.
At one point I had a win with every species, but they added new ones and removed some since then.
Minotaur Berserker was my first win. Can’t go wrong with screaming and headbutting, I say.
Gargoyle Earth Elementalist was also fun. If you get Shatter online it can delete a lot of stuff outright. You just need another solution for flying stuff and jellies.
I think it’s an Ice spell now, but the one that takes a couple turns and then just kills the nearest creature was amazing. Did the extended endgame with that. Blew up so many pandemonium lords.
I don’t usually do the extended anymore. Hell is, appropriately, unpleasant. Pandemonium isn’t as bad, but there’s always the risk of popping in next to a very bad crowd.
Also the tomb can get fucked.
The ascent with the orb is usually pretty safe, with the occasional heart stopper. I’ve lost at least two dudes on the way up. One gargoyle ate a high damage spell from one of those hell sentinels. Should have blinked or fogged or something. One felid ate a pan lord’s chain lighting that was more than his max health.
Hm I’m rambling. Great game. Highly recommend.
I play a lot of crawl, and have pretty regularly since v0.16 or so. There’s been a lot of changes (there used to be food! Spells made you hungry!)
I want to try older versions someday but the lack of QoL features from modern versions is scary. I still remember my Vine Stalker who was sent to Abyss by a elf necromancer with a chaos dagger that I overlooked in logs. I’m SO glad that distortion brands are now marked on screen.
If you get Shatter online it can delete a lot of stuff outright. You just need another solution for flying stuff and jellies.
I never dived too deep into Earth magic but had a powerful ice mage with Permafrost Eruption, destroying entire screen worth of enemies. Then a unique caught me on the Spider’s entrance and I realized too slowly that I need to escape. YASD
I don’t usually do the extended anymore.
I’m curious about extended but I also prefer my runs to be pretty short… I’ll probably manage to get a few big runs to explore Pan and Hells and whatnot but can’t see myself sticking to it. Short and sweet is great!
This reminds me I’m on my first ascension run in Nethack… I should go kill Yendor.
Edit: eating green slimes turns you into a green slime and kills you?! You learn new ways to die every time. Anyway, I’ll leave your Stone Soup thread alone now and go cry in a corner.
Pathos Nethack Codec (basically Nethack rewrite for mobile support with some gameplay changes) was my second roguelike, after Pixel Dungeon. I was too stupid to search for guides so I played the game without ever knowing that eating certain corpses is always safe. I just kept dying of starvation.
My favorite start was a wizard, I loved figuring out how to use starting rings and scrolls to my advantage.
Yeah I’ve been playing for decades and still learning new things. Today, for instance, I learned that eating green slimes will melt your skin off and is uncurable.
I liked Pixel Dungeon, but there were some balancing issues deeper in the game that put me off it. That was a long time ago. I never got into Stone Soup because I felt like learning another Rogue/NH like game would be too much of a time investment at this point.
In fact I did, come to think of it, try to learn Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, and I adore it. Sadly it’s just open world with no direction, which doesn’t work for me. I need a clearly stated game goal to work towards. But it’s a cool game no doubt.
I learned that eating green slimes will melt your skin off and is uncurable.
Damn Nethack is something else lol. At some point I tried to play it (not Pathos, the OG) and died to a floating eye that paralyzed me for a few dozen turns or something. Didn’t touch it ever since :D
there were some balancing issues deeper in the game that put me off it.
I’m not the biggest fan of PD personally but I find Shattered Pixel Dungeon (the most popular fork, very active) pretty fun. It was actually the first traditional roguelike I’ve ever beaten (not counting 7DRLs)!
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, and I adore it. Sadly it’s just open world with no direction, which doesn’t work for me. I need a clearly stated game goal to work towards. But it’s a cool game no doubt.
I tried that one too, and had the same experience! I like its character creator, the complexity, even the inventory system. But… I don’t know, the moment I find a safe base I lose any motivation to play. I’m not a survival girl after all.
Nethacks timeless motto is “Dying Is Fun!”.
I didn’t remember the graphics of Stone Soup to be so tight, though! It looks really good! Maybe I’ll give it a go after all. I’m usually an ASCII purist because I’m masochistic like that, but that looks pretty. :)
DCSS = Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup
Dungeon Crawler Stone Soup. I haven’t heard of this and it looks fun.
It’s free (in both meanings) and can run on a potato, it’s definitely worth a try!
Apologies, but why even mention “free” and “free-beer” terms the first time someone has a desire to dive in such miracles… or ineffably magnificent work of lore, characters, items, balances… art? How low should you even look at such art to even consider the hecking price almost instantly…?
The title has been in development since the very Crawl and Dungeon Crawl of 1997, 1995, or even before that…
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup
Copyright 1997-2025 Linley Henzell, the dev team, and the contributors
Source (License)There are numerous contributors, programmers, artists, donators…
The Universe is close-related to Rogue, Hack, and Moria of 1983.Some of the Crawl developers hang out on the
#crawl-devIRC channel on Libera:ircs://irc.libera.chat:6697/#crawl.The current binaries are cross-platform, support TTY (terminal), web (“WebTiles” or “web-tiles”, former “NetTiles”), and desktop-native (“tiles”; SDL - the library) portals to adventure the universe…
You may self-host any of course, including web-tiles, but due to how authentication is organized since the beginning still, the current version authentication is based on the operating system, and you may want to isolate that in containers nowadays; there are examples.Some hosts support live-streaming, e.g.: https://underhound.eu:8080/#lobby
Relatively recently, when someone asked about artwork contributions in the IRC channel, they updated the contribution guide, too!
Submitting artwork
If you want to submit artwork (tiles, icons, splash screens) for consideration, you can link it to us in
#crawl-dev, or you can open a github issue, or you can submit a pull request.If you’re doing tiles art, or splash screen art, then it’s recommended to look at our existing artwork and try to match the general style presented there. This is not a hard-and-fast rule, and clear improvements are always welcome.
If not hard art work-wise, some do donate, too:
Q: Does DCSS accept donations?
The DCSS dev team doesn’t currently accept donations. The online server admins, some of whom are DCSS devs themselves, kindly pay all server costs. See your online server’s lobby page for the admin’s contact info if you’d like to offer them a donation. You can donate to me if you’d like to support my dev work and stream.
SourceThere have been discussions for release at Steam, too, relatively similar to Dwarf Fortress or Xonotic even have.
I am sorry, but… how may not you even heard about Dungeon Crawl hearing about the genre almost everywhere…
And… again… money? What does “free” mean? How is that even related here…?
Because, if it’s free, you can just try it out, no? Some people (including me) are broke and need to carefully manage their expenses. It often means I wait for months before getting a new game, however much I desire it. A free game though? I can check it out at any moment, as long as I have a time for myself.
It would be nice to live in a naive world where I can just get whatever I want, whenever I want to.
I am sorry, but… how may not you even heard about Dungeon Crawl hearing about the genre almost everywhere…
I’m not sure what you mean by that. Of course I know about Dungeon Crawl and its genre…
Well done, my only win was years ago with a Gargoyle Fighter of the Shining One, went all in on shield blocking and armor, no evade. I was told this is a terrible strategy but I don’t know, it’s my only win in many years of playing so it can’t be that bad.
God powers are a lot of fun. It does take a minute to get past the piety hoarding mindset but hey, if you don’t use your powers when they’re useful then you’re more likely to die, and dead means zero piety
I ran most of the game with a ring of evasion on, and my stats show that I dodged almost 3000 points of damage, so I’d say getting some EV is optimal even for dwarves and gargoyles with their low dodging apt.
With that said, in crawl clever play can mitigate many “sub-optimal” decisions and builds which I really love! I’m 100% sure I made several mistakes for this build too. Another roguelike like TOME is much less friendly to sub-optimal builds (at least in my experience).
The main reason I tend to not use gods’ abilities is just that there’s so much you can do in dcss that I sometimes just forget about what I can do. I’m way too fast in my decision making lol
I believe, rings of evasion are generally quite good for tanks, because you can be running around in the clunkiest armor and still get a flat +6 or so to evasion. Same goes for mages and rogues with rings of protection.
But yeah, I’ve also killed so many characters due to hasty decision-making. Just killed an Armataur + Wu Jian run today, because my health was running low and I figured offense is the best defense. I could’ve blinked away no problem. Hell, I could’ve launched a much better offense at practically no cost by using Serpent’s Lash, but nope, just ended up tapping the keys I always tap and hoping for RNGesus to save me.
I figured offense is the best defense. I could’ve blinked away no problem. Hell, I could’ve launched a much better offense at practically no cost by using Serpent’s Lash, but nope, just ended up tapping the keys I always tap and hoping for RNGesus to save me.
I feel this. Splatted a lot of characters because I didn’t decided to just keep hitting/walking away when the situation requires a much more involved solution. At least I die with lots of consumables in my pocket :)
