Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup


Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is a free and open source roguelike computer game, which is the actively community-developed successor of the 1997 roguelike game Linley's Dungeon Crawl, originally programmed by Linley Henzell.
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup polled first in a 2008 poll of 371 roguelike players, and later polled second in 2009 and 2010, and third in 2011.
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is released under the GNU GPL version 2 or later. The latest release is version 0.24.1, released on October 25th, 2019.

Gameplay

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is a roguelike game where the player creates a character and guides it through a dungeon, mostly consisting of persistent levels, full of monsters and items, with the goal of retrieving the "Orb of Zot" located there, and escaping alive. To enter the Realm of Zot where the Orb is located, the player must first obtain at least three "runes of Zot" of the 15 available; these are located at the ends of diverse dungeon branches such as the Spider Nest, Tomb, and Slime Pits.
The game has an explicit design philosophy intended to provide interesting strategic and tactical choices within a balanced game; to offer replayability based on random dungeon generation; to make the game accessible and enjoyable without deep knowledge of its internal mechanics; and to present a friendly user interface that can optionally automate several tasks like exploration and searching for previously seen items. Conversely, the developer team seeks to avoid providing incentives for repeating boring actions without consideration, or providing illusory gameplay choices where one alternative is always superior.
Most levels are randomly generated to maximize variety, while the levels containing the objective items are randomly chosen between several manually-designed layouts, which usually contain random elements, and which are authored in a Crawl-specific language incorporating Lua scripting. Randomly generated levels may contain randomly chosen manually designed fragments called "vaults", as well as portals to special manually designed mini-levels called "portal vaults" such as volcanoes and wizard's laboratories.
Characters are initially defined by their species and their background. Character advancement is based on experience points gained by defeating monsters, which increase both an experience level and a set of skills including melee weapons, ranged weapons and magic. The player determines which skills to increase.
The species choice determines the aptitudes of the character for each of the skills, which represent how much experience is needed to raise the skill to higher levels and adds species-specific abilities. In the 0.20 version, 27 species are available, from those with little deviation from the common mechanics such as humans and hill orcs, to species such as mummies and octopodes which have unusual gameplay mechanics.
The background choice determines the starting skills and equipment, with about 24 choices such as fighters, necromancers, and berserkers; unlike species choice, background choice only affects the start of the game - the player is not prevented from pursuing any skills and using any equipment.
Some backgrounds also start with a fictional religion, and in general it is possible to acquire or change the character's religion once the appropriate altar is found; the choice of the god to worship significantly impacts gameplay, because each god rewards and punishes a different set of actions, and offers a specific set of abilities and gifts inspired by original lore. Some gods offer enhancements to existing play styles, such as Okawaru gifting weapons and boosting combat or Sif Muna gifting spell books and extra MP regeneration, while others force unusual demands on the players in exchange for significant bonuses, like Cheibriados who wants devotees to move slowly and Ashenzari limiting the ability to swap equipment in return for divinations and skill boosts, and Xom, who is the DCSS equivalent of the trickster god archetype. Additionally, abandoning gods usually causes them to become angry at the player, which can cause them to summon powerful monsters or inflict nasty effects like slowing, reduction of max HP, or large amounts of damage on the player.

History

Linley's Dungeon Crawl

Linley's Dungeon Crawl was a roguelike computer game originally programmed by Linley Henzell in 1995, and first released to the general public on October 2, 1997. The game had a quirky license based on Bison's license and the NetHack License; Stone Soup has contacted every past contributor and relicensed to GPLv2+.

Original gameplay

Crawl starts with the player's choice of one of over twenty races: several different types of elves, dwarves, humans, ogres, tengu, centaurs, merfolk, and other fantasy beings. Racial selection sets base attributes, future skill advancement, and physical characteristics such as movement, resistances, and special abilities.
Subject to racial exclusions, the player next chooses a character class from among over twenty selections. Classes include the traditional roles of fighter, wizard, and thief as well as specialty roles, among them monks, berserkers, assassins, crusaders, and elemental spellcasters. Wanderers represent an atypical option and receive a random skill set. Together, class and race determine base equipment and skill training, though characters may later attempt to acquire any in-game skill.
The Crawl skill system covers many abilities, including the ability to move freely in armor or silently, mount effective attacks with different categories of weapons, master spells from different magical colleges, utilize magical artifacts, and pray to divinities. Training occurs through repetition of skill-related actions, using experience from a pool refilled as the player defeats monsters.
John Harris, in his "@Play" column states that the experience pool system "deftly avoids the many problems of a skill-based development system", mainly praising the need to move on through the course of the game to further improve a PC's skills. In the same article, John Harris states that this experience system "is probably the best skill system yet seen in any roguelike; it could make a claim at being one of the best in any CRPG."
Religion within Crawl is a central game mechanic. Its diverse pantheon of gods reward character conformance to particular codes of conduct. Trog, the berserker god, expects abstinence from casting spells and offers aid in battle, whereas Sif Muna expects frequent spellcraft in exchange for magical assistance and gifts of spellbooks. Some deities campaign against evil, matched by a god of death who revels in indiscriminate killing, while others prove unpredictable objects of worship. Xom, an example of the latter, toys with followers, meting out punishments and showering gifts on inscrutable whims.
The goal of Crawl is to recover the "Orb of Zot" hidden deep within a dungeon complex. To achieve this objective, characters must visit various dungeon branches, such as the Orcish Mines or The Lair of Beasts, which often branch further in to additional areas, like the Elven Halls or The Swamp, and obtain at least three "Runes of Zot" with which to gain access to the Orb. Fifteen different runes can be obtained in any particular game, and obtaining all of them is generally considered an extra feat. While all the possible 654 race/class combinations have been won on the online servers, only 186 of them were ever played online as an all-rune win. Dungeon maps in Crawl persist, as in NetHack.

Typical ''Dungeon Crawl'' screen

Edia the Cudgeler
.........# Gnoll of Xom..*...
........?# Health: 23/23


.........# Magic: 1/1


.........# AC: 5 Str: 14
........# EV: 12 Int: 14
.........# SH: 0 Dex: 14
.........## XL: 1 Next: 0% Place: Dungeon:1
.....^.@ +0 mace
..........# ####. -) Nothing quivered

Versions

The last official versions of Linley's Dungeon Crawl were 4.0.0 beta 26, from [March 24, 2003, and a later alpha release, version 4.1.0, dating from July 2005.
Version 400b26e070t, a popular last community release, includes the 2003-2004 Patches and updates the game to the standard tile version.
The game has been ported to the Nintendo DS as DSCrawl.

DCSS

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup was begun in 2006 by Darshan "greensnark" Shaligram and Erik Piper as an attempt to restart Crawl development, which had progressed slowly in the years since Linley Henzell, creator of the original Linley's Dungeon Crawl, had retired from developing the game. Several interesting patches had been made to the game in recent years, particularly one by Shaligram known as the 'Travel patch', which borrowed the implementation of Dijkstra's algorithm from NetHack to provide an auto-exploration ability in game. These patches were compiled into the Stone Soup project, which was eventually released publicly on Sourceforge.
Stone Soup has since then developed an unprecedented variety of extensions which fit into this general vein of "play aid", such as allowing searching through every item ever discovered by regular expression. Additionally, Stone Soup has made a number of user interface improvements, such as mouse interaction and an graphical user interface.
In order to avoid featuritis, Stone Soup has also pruned gameplay elements which they considered superfluous, including several races and a magical school. The development team has also expressed a desire to maintain the current total length of the game, and so as new areas are added to the dungeon, old ones have been shortened or even removed to compensate.

Graphical tile version

One notable addition of the Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup branch is the ability to play using a graphical tile version of the game. Players unfamiliar with the genre may find the tile version more accessible.

Android versions

There are currently two Android ports of the game available.
An unofficial port of the console version was developed and released on Google Play.
There is also an official port of the tile version that is currently under development. The latest unstable builds can be downloaded from the official website.

Online play

Several public servers support online play through an SSH client and some of these also allow graphical play in web browser. Features of online play include automated high-score tracking and real-time recording of online play for later viewing. Also, ghosts of other players' characters are frequently encountered on a player's journey, providing an additional challenge. A biannual tournament for all Stone Soup players is held after each major release on the servers. Additionally, players may test experimental game modes, races, and gods, that are not yet ready to be added to the main version.