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HunchBluntley: It's sort of like a streamlined, (somewhat) user-friendly, noob-friendly NetHack. There is actually an entire section of the manual dedicated to explaining their <i>design philosophy</i>, which is rare for games in general, let alone free, community-developed Roguelikes.
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Gede: I get a 404 Error. Do you know another place with this document?
Online, I found a couple -- of which this one seems to be the most straightforward. (The manual's also included with the game if you download it, and is accessible from within the game.) You'll have to scroll down manually to get to the appropriate section in this case, though. :)

I'm not sure what happened to the officially hosted version. That's strange.
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HunchBluntley: I'm not sure what happened to the officially hosted version. That's strange.
Thank you. Yes, it is quite uncommon for documentation to disappear.

Auto explore and auto goto are great ideas! So many times I wished for them to be implemented in games I have played.
I gather it's somewhat customary to post one's character file after one successfully beats a given Roguelike for the first time, so I suppose this is obligatory: http://pastebin.com/62WX4zt3 :D

In the end, the ascent was rather anticlimactic. It turns out even the lords of Pandemonium had nothing on my beast of a character. Hell, I probably could've safely gone and got that slime rune AFTER picking up the Orb. Then again, I don't know if the onslaught ramps up over time, or what. But I actually stopped and fought everything that appeared, and still didn't have any real problems on the way out. I even stopped at the exit to recuperate fully and quaff a couple of potions to remove my mutations (though it looks like I either missed one, or was somehow mutated once more in one of the little fights while I was trying to rest -- probably the former). Cocky, I know, but I was that overpowered relative to what the game was throwing at me.

I suppose now would be a good time to finally update my copy of the game to the most recent version that came out in November, and see how that plays. I think I might take a bit of a break first, though. Or maybe not. :P

EDIT: Goddammit, there's no mention of the shield of the gong in that morgue file for some reason (maybe because its properties aren't randomized like most artifacts', though I don't know why that would make a difference). Anyway, for those both curious & unaware, this is the super awesome shield of super loudness which I had equipped for probably something like a third of the game:
the +18 shield of the gong {rElec rN+ MR+ EV-5}
It affects your evasion (-5).
It insulates you from electricity.
It protects you from negative energy.
It affects your resistance to hostile enchantments.
(RE-EDIT: In hindsight, I figured I might as well replace the wiki link with the less-spoilery in-game info for the shield, in case anyone else likes to avoid consulting external sources too much in games like this. Info taken from the .lst file accompanying Mueblukk's main morgue file, which is also where I had gotten the below info for the hand axe.)
Oh, and "Mueblukk's Doom" was the weapon that probably allowed me to survive long enough to get powerful enough to make it through the mid-game (and also what gave me my first few mutations):
the +7 hand axe "Mueblukk's Doom" {venom, -Tele *Contam MR+ Str+8}
It poisons the flesh of those it strikes.

It affects your strength (+8).
It affects your resistance to hostile enchantments.
It prevents most forms of teleportation.
It causes magical contamination when unequipped.
I found this thing on the fourth floor of the Dungeon, when my character was but 5th level. XD

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HunchBluntley: I'm not sure what happened to the officially hosted version. That's strange.
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Gede: Thank you. Yes, it is quite uncommon for documentation to disappear.

Auto explore and auto goto are great ideas! So many times I wished for them to be implemented in games I have played.
Yeah, it's pretty cool. Not flawless, but still fairly well-implemented. I think several other roguelikes have autoexplore nowadays, though -- I know Tales of Maj'Eyal does, and I think Brogue.
Post edited January 18, 2017 by HunchBluntley
Congratulations!

Yeah, the orb run is usually one of the less threatening parts of the game and lacks a bit of bite. OTOH, Panlords are semi-random generated and can be dangerous at times, MiFi is a quite strong combo and you got four runes and thus more experience than needed so I guess it's okay that you weren't challenged that much.

Unrandom artifacts don't show up in the morgue so if you want to have them there you have to have them in your inventory at the end of the game.
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Looger23: Congratulations!
Thanks! :)

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Looger23: Unrandom artifacts don't show up in the morgue so if you want to have them there you have to have them in your inventory at the end of the game.
Do remember ever hearing why that is? That shield of the gong played a huge role in my playthrough, and it's just stupid that it doesn't even appear in the list of important occurrences near the end of the morgue file. I probably also found some other unrandarts, but I'm not so experienced with most of them that I'd necessarily know/remember if they're random or not (I usually don't pay much attention to the item "tags" or whatever unless I need to do a search involving one); the only other one I can think of is the cursed +14 obsidian axe that I found somewhere later on (probably in the depths), and I only used that for a couple floors early in Zot before deciding that it might be too dangerous (despite the fact that I had more than two dozen scrolls of remove curse with me) and swapping it back out for my +9 broad axe of freezing.
the +14 obsidian axe {chop, +Fly Str+3 SInv *Curse}
It inflicts extra damage upon your enemies.

It affects your strength (+3).
It lets you see invisible.
It lets you fly.
It may re-curse itself when equipped.
(info taken from the .lst file accompanying Mueblukk's main morgue file)
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Gede: Thank you. Yes, it is quite uncommon for documentation to disappear.

Auto explore and auto goto are great ideas! So many times I wished for them to be implemented in games I have played.
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HunchBluntley: Yeah, it's pretty cool. Not flawless, but still fairly well-implemented. I think several other roguelikes have autoexplore nowadays, though -- I know Tales of Maj'Eyal does, and I think Brogue.
X-Com: Terror from the Deep really needed autoexplore.

What are your thoughts on ToME? I am a bit curious about it.
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HunchBluntley: Yeah, it's pretty cool. Not flawless, but still fairly well-implemented. I think several other roguelikes have autoexplore nowadays, though -- I know Tales of Maj'Eyal does, and I think Brogue.
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Gede: X-Com: Terror from the Deep really needed autoexplore.

What are your thoughts on ToME? I am a bit curious about it.
It's pretty cool, but I realized after a while that I don't really like having every "spell" and special ability be based on cooldowns, and the proliferation of loot with different randomized properties that you have to constantly compare to one another (like in a Diablo-clone) got really tiresome after a while, too. But if you're the sort of person who likes trying out tons of different race/class/abilities/gear combinations, and don't mind the somewhat MMO-like interface, you might love it. It's certainly got a lot of cool things going for it.
Just saw that the latest stable version of DCSS was released late last month, so here's the obligatory thread bump. :)
<span class="bold">Crawl 0.20: &ldquo;Scarf Our Wanderful Fried Frogs&rdquo;</span>

We’re toadally pleased to announce the release of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup 0.20: “Scarf Our Wanderful Fried Frogs”! 0.20 features a new species, some new items and spells, dungeon updates, and many other additions, streamlinings, and general improvements to the game.

Download DCSS 0.20 , or [url=http://crawl.develz.org/]play it online on one of many servers across the world! Packages for Windows, OS X, and Linux are all available now.

[...]

0.20′s highlights include:

- Characters: Barachim have been added, a new species that moves slowly but has good aptitudes, a powerful Hop ability, and can see one tile more than other species. Ogres have had their aptitudes and stats reworked, allowing them to be more proficient spell-casters and not just melee brutes, and mummies have a much higher spell-casting aptitude.
- Spells: Two new spells have been added: Ignition, a high level Fire Magic spell that drops a weakened Fireball on every monster in view, leaving the player and their allies unaffected, and Poisonous Vapours, a Poison/Air spell in the Venom Mage starting book the creates a very short-lived poisonous cloud on a single monster.
- Items: Scarves have been added, which are auxiliary armour for the cloak slot that has 0 AC and can’t be enchanted, but have special powerful egos like Repel Missiles, Cloud Immunity, Resistance (rF+ & rC+), and Spirit Shield. Mutation potions are now the only mutation-changing potion, and each quaff cures multiple existing mutations and grants several new ones. Additionally, spells formerly found on rods have been moved to wands of clouds and scattershot and the new rod of lightning XP evocable, and other wands have had their ranges and effects adjusted.
- Dungeon: Many new dangerous vaults have been added, including an epic level-wide Depths vault as well as tricky loot vaults using the new one-way transporter dungeon feature. The Tomb of Ancients now features more dangerous one-way stairs that don’t allow easy, immediate return, and the treasure walls of the Slime Pits now always breach when the Royal Jelly dies.
- Interface: A new noise meter now shows the relative loudness of each action, and in console mode this can be replaced by a bar showing the glyph of each equipped item. Stash searches now exclude distant duplicate matches of vanilla weapons, armour and ammo by default. Finally, the mouse can now be used in WebTiles by default and the species selection menu is reworked to have groupings in “simple”, “intermediate”, and “advanced” categories.

For a list of other major changes, see the . Many thanks to all those who have [url=https://github.com/crawl/crawl/blob/stone_soup-0.20/crawl-ref/CREDITS.txt]contributed to Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. We hope you enjoy playing 0.20!
I'm embarrassed to say that I still haven't even updated to 0.19, and I've been more into Spelunky these last few months for my roguelike fix (I know, not quite the same thing, bite me =P ), so lord only knows when or if I'll get to this version.
A year and a half later, I've finally updated to 0.19! Which is now two years old, and three stable releases out of date! =P

Anyone else playing Crawl these days? If so, does anyone playing the newer releases/online builds have any thoughts on the changes since whenever you started playing DCSS?
One to try out from my bucket list this year :) (fan of Nethack waaayy back in the day)
Latest version of DCSS is 0.25.1
0.26 will be released in around one week, so better wait a few days.

It's a fantastic game and I have spend probably more time with it than with any other game as of now. But it is not very comparable with Nethack, really.
Well, look at that! Somebody other than me posted in here. Will wonders never cease!

I just checked, and I'm apparently still on 19.5. I do plan on updating to 20.1 once I finish all my in-progress runs, but I keep starting new ones before I fail...uh, finish the previous ones, so given how my cycles of interest in the game work, it could well be another year or more before that happens. :|
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HunchBluntley: [...] I do plan on updating to 20.1 once I finish all my in-progress runs, but I keep starting new ones before I fail...uh, finish the previous ones, so given how my cycles of interest in the game work, it could well be another year or more before that happens. :|
Narrator: It was, indeed, another year or more before he updated to 20.1

Anybody else play this in the present-ish day? Anyone else still playing older versions, or forks? How about similar RL dungeon crawlers?

I just got back to DCSS about a month ago, and found that my most recent plays dated back to late '21. I finally finished the last of my old in-progress runs last night (YASD), and it turned out I had started that one five and a half years ago. But at least I could now safely update my copy of the game without worrying that it would bork something in my active characters/runs. Now I'm only 12 stable version updates & roughly 7 3/4 years behind the current one, instead of 13 & about 8 1/4, respectively!
(Joking aside, I don't know that I'm ever going to go beyond 0.25.x, since 0.26 removed hunger & food, which I consider to be a core part of the Rogue-like experience -- and which, in any case, was certainly integrated pretty thoroughly with several fairly major parts of this game, especially spellcasting. And honestly, I've also long since gotten over being impressed that the game still usually receives two major updates per year, considering a majority of the changes seem to be just fucking around with stuff to keeps things fresh for the people participating in the online tournaments which accompany each stable release, and about which I give not the tiniest shit. I think a lot of older RLs had the right idea -- just get the bloody thing into a fairly complete-feeling, stable state, then move on; if someone else wants to see more done with it, let 'em fork it. No need to George Lucas everything to death.)
I tried a DCSS once, but found it untenable due to it basically relying on your luck on the first floor to even start a run.

Personally, I've found HyperRogue among the company I keep, it simplifies the game to be closer to the root while getting rid of a bunch of annoying and useless systems.
Hello everyone and especially HunchBluntley!

I played around with "Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup" in 2018 and 2019. I only played on versions 0.22.1 to 0.24.0.
When my android tablet stopped being supported/updated, I did basically kept the already installed apps frozen in their then current state.
For whatever it's worth, I enjoyed it a lot more playing on the tablet than the regular desktop build.

Thanks for the information about the feature removals from version 0.26 onwards--I did not know it, yet. I also would not want to miss the added tension and immersion of typical roguelike hunger & food mechanics.
And I have to agree with dnovraD on the heavy emphasis on luck on the beginning floors...

There are two types of classic roguelikes which I still prefer over DCSS:
uMoria & SIL on one hand and a couple of shorter 7-Day-Roguelikes (7DRL).

My all time favorites are actually Jeff Lait's 7DRLs "Vicious Orcs" and "Smart Kobold"!

I really enjoy his overlapping dungeon layouts and non-euclidean designs. Furthermore, there is a refreshing simplicity and soo much more readability in his use of colors and ASCII symbols for representing environmental features (such as brown chairs around a round table: h O h ) and outdoor landscapes!

As you might have realized, I continue to prefer actual ASCII-based roguelikes over those graphical or tile set implementations. ADOM's modern graphical tile set is not as immersive to me as it's original ASCII counterpart. I do neither like those super deformed oversized proportions in character and enemy design nor the too small wall and room heights. They are off-putting to me. And the tile overlapping item drops cause only visual clutter in my opinion.
ASCII is much cleaner in my view.

One other rogue-lite (less classic as the aforementioned ones) that I do enjoy a round every now and then is Terry Cavanagh's "Tiny Heist". Think of a combination of a fast-paced key and treasure hunt mixed with Metal-Gear-Solid-like stealth elements. Very entertaining!

Kind regards,
foxgog