Dungeon crawl caster guide Continue By Ultraviolent4 Welcome: You can still turn back now So, you stumbled upon Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. I hope you're willing to die a lot. While Crawl may look a bit daunting from the outside, there is a very rich and useful game to be found if you are willing to give it a chance. Even after a thousand passing (although a lot of lasting just seconds), I still find myself in new situations all the time. Make no mistake, Crawl is a tricky game. At least some of these are difficult, however, comes from the sheer number of things you need to learn when new. My goal is to help you by comparing all this important information in one place. So once you read this guide, you can sleep peacefully at night, safe, knowing that your last character has died completely RNG, not any oversight of yours (Disclaimer: or mine). DCSS Basics Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is roguelike with straight roots in Linley's 1997 game Dungeon Crawl. If you've never heard the term roguelike before (Warning: Last Chance to Turn Back), you tend to expect punishment, a turn-based game that has procedurally generated content and permadeath. The goal of your character is to travel to the dungeon to recover the legendary Orb zth. We don't know why Orb is important, but you really want him for some reason. However, you can not just charge to the bottom of the Dungeon and capture Orb. Before your character can enter the realm of zoth, you must collect at least 3 4. There are 17 Run zut in total, but each game has 15 available and only 3 are needed to win. Your character starts as a weak Level 1 character and gets the experience from killing monsters to a maximum level of 27. Along the way you will explore many branches and worlds with different types and themes of the enemy. You can get the favor of God (or gods), wield big weapons, find powerful artifacts, become a master of stealth and cast destructive spells. Maybe you could even do all these things in one passage! If you have at least 3 4 4 and feel strong enough, head to the bottom of the dungeon and enter the kingdom of zoth. If you manage to get your hands/paws/tentacles on Orb, all that remains is the simple task of climbing back through the dungeon. Make it outside with Orb and you win. Playing the game you can play crawling in console or tile mode and offline or online. You can also choose between stable versions and a version of the barrel (development). Console mode console mode gives you a classic ASCII roguelike experience. This mode is incomprehensible to me, but I was told it's like the Matrix. After all, all you'll see is Fire Giant, Frosty Giant, Mountain Giant. With ASCII it can be determine what weapons (if any) enemies you encounter possess and what status effects (if any) affect them. Close attention to Journal posts and studying monsters will tell you, but it's not possible to see at first sight. You also want to keep an eye on the monster list to the right of the screen to tell how the wounded monsters are. The HP bar between glyph and monster name changes color: green for full HP, yellow for medium HP and red for low HP mode. The console has no mouse support at all. The tile mode tiles in DCSS are quite appealing. And if you're like me, you need beautiful photos to understand what's going on. Enemies are displayed with any weapon they possess. If they change to new weapons, the tile will be updated. In the screenshot above, kobold has a club in hand. Note, however, that the tiles do not show what armor (if any) monsters wear. The player's character tile changes for both weapons and armor. Monster tiles also have visual indicators for many statuses (but not all), such as when they are paralyzed, confused, corrosion, hasted, relics and so on. In tile mode, your HP bar and that of any monsters you have been injured will be shown below the appropriate tiles. Colors vary as with the console, but the bar also decreases, making it easier to tell how much relative HP is left. Tile mode allows you to use the mouse, but more times offline tiles than online tiles. Offline you can find the latest stable release in the Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup Downloads homepage. Past releases here. Crawl development builds are called Trunk. Online you can find your closest online server here. A more detailed description of the servers can be found on the Online Howto page. For the record, everyone knows the Australian server (CPO) is the best. The default game mode when playing online tiles (often called WebTiles). Some servers allow the console to play through SSH or Telnet, but this requires software and a key. A guide to SSH/Telnet is also on Howto. Each server is separate and offline. If you want to play on multiple servers, you have to register your name on each of them. Games cannot be shared or transferred between servers. The differences between offline and online in terms of tile gameplay, the main differences between offline and online are player ghosts, visual stock/monster listings and mouse support. When most of the characters die, they leave a ghost for the future adventurer to encounter. If you crawl locally, ghosts will be relatively rare and will always be your own characters. When you play online, and especially if you play in busy times on a popular server, you will probably come across a number of ghosts from other people. Ignoring the opportunity to see hilarious (and/or offensive) names (shoutout Robert Barachian), ghosts offer excitement, danger and valuable XP if you succeed them in battle. Both offline and online tiles have a mini-card to the right of the screen. However, there is a sharp below the map. Offline shows a visual list of items (which can be changed to spells and abilities, among other things). At a glance, you can see what kind of support armor you are wearing and what consumable consumables you have. Instead of visual inventory, Webtiles has a list of all the monsters, subpoenas and followers the player can see. Each of them is named and the enemies are given a visual assessment of their threat to your character: in particular, yellow is dangerous and red is very dangerous. Unique have their names displayed above their tiles in a offline client. If you want, you can play most of the offline passing with your mouse. You can click places to move, click enemies to attack them, click items in visual inventory to use them and so on. Webtiles has some mouse support, but you will need to use the keyboard more often to get to different menus and inventory. There are some other non-gameplay differences, the most obvious is that the quality is nothing on the web: you pay in lag and potential outages to be able to access your game from anywhere with a clean connection. Each player who plays on any online server is given a player page (here's mine) that tracks the games you play. In addition, mortuary files for each of your characters are stored online. This is useful because there are bots that allow you to make all sorts of requests about your passing. The sequell team documentation can be found here. With a bit of practice bots allow you to pull up any particular game. yes, I remember that the time I single shot killed myself with my own firestorm... I'm joking, it's never going to happen. Offline or online? Your experience may be different from mine, but it's like two stacks for me. I love seeing the ghosts of other players who died in the dungeon. Also, if you are the one who died, there is always the chance that the grief you felt in losing your best character will still be soothed somewhat when this ghost kills the next poor day to come along. You can even track your ghost kills. I love that I can look at games that I've played in the past. To that end, I wish I had spent my entire Crawl career online because my early offline runs and very first wins are lost on the devastating effects of time. I can't even tell with 100% certainty which version of the game I first started learning. Giving up visual inventory and mouse and having to learn all the keyboard commands seemed daunting at first. It wasn't very difficult and didn't take long, though. Once I was comfortable with the keyboard, the game became much easier and smoother to play. You go from being a MOBA player, manually presses on all his abilities, until someone who knows where the keys are :D One very effective learning tool I've seen for new players is when someone more experienced spectates their game. It's just possibly online. You can even just ask the vet to come and see when you are in a sticky situation. With each new version of the release (about every 6 months), the online tournament is held for two weeks. Even if you're not trying to win it all, these tournaments are a lot of fun because there are challenged play combinations and special banners to collect.