Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup
crawl.develz.org
crawl.develz.org
As I mentioned in the sibling comment, there's a vocal minority in this game loudly complaining about any change. My suggestion is to decide for yourself, play an older version if you prefer, or any of the dozen forks, all available on most public servers.
Off the top of my head, they have recently:
* removed the whole hunger/food system: no need to eat, no need to butcher corpses or collect food, magic doesn't make you hungry.
* removed cursed items: an issue only in the early game, trivially managed by careful identification of unknown scrolls
* removed unremarkable species or monsters
* removed trivial spells such as Deflect Missiles or Regeneration
That doesn't sound fun to me, and don't miss it for one second.
I think I liked it but I'm not sure it helped me master the gameplay (I sometimes felt rushed even when hunger management wasn't obviously an issue).
That being said I want to play Djinn eventually so I'll upgrade when that time comes.
- Eating questionable meat for random powers
- Losing your great items permanently
- Not getting poison resistance and putting off the hive for ages
- Not being able to carry as much as a weak character
- Putting a stash on Hive:2 so monsters can't get your items
- Being a mummy summoner and having a full screen of summons (no hunger requirement)
- Hill orc priests would wander the map gaining converts
A lot of these things became part of the game muscle memory to avoid. They were hilarious and emotional as a new player. They are now obsolete. I have mixed feelings - I always felt enough mitigation existed in the game and I enjoyed learning about it
Weight management - yes, hard to have too much nostalgia for that one
My last win was an Spriggan Venom Mage that could backstab poison resistant enemies with a +11 artefact dagger.
I for one appreciate the underlying philosophy of the game and the overarching intent for any change: to remove tedium, grinding, trivial optimal play, remove the requirement of spoiling yourself to beat the game - the latter point making it basically the opposite of a game like Nethack.
https://github.com/crawl/crawl/blob/master/crawl-ref/docs/cr...
Typically players get upset because they like the majority of the quality of life changes, and new content, but don't like that something was removed that they can't enjoy in that new version. Community knowledge also deteriorates over time; you can ask questions about recent versions, but antiquated versions require meticulous code diving / commit log scanning to figure things out.
I find ToME has much more unique classes too, doing a lot of interesting things, even if luring monsters into a 1-tile wide corridor is still the safest way most of the time...
If there's one thing where I believe that "if you don't like it, just fork it" is warranted it's this type of game. It's not like it's production-critical for anyone, so there's no deadline and you can take your time. It's a rather minimalist 2D game, no complex game engine knowledge is required. When I looked into the code a few years ago I found it very readable so it's a nice target for customization.
If you feel like modern DCSS doesn't go in the right direction just fork whatever version you preferred and go from there.
My chief lingering complaint with crawl is that the game is too long. Early game is tedious and last I played seriously the midgame tended to drag on. I'd like to see the standard game contracted to twenty-seven levels. Squeeze down Orc, Lair, the Lair branches and so on.
For anyone unfamiliar, 27 is a number ingrained deeply into the game, with some traces very well hidden.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dcss/comments/mvrc1w/did_anyone_of_...
I disagree about the early game though, this is the most exciting part of DCSS, and the hardest.
What aspects do you feel have changed the nature of the game?
I've only played DCSS for a few years and it seems the game now is a bit kinder with newbies but not substancially different.
I had a miserable time trying to contribute to this game. The code wasn't the problem; it was the team. Lots of bad personalities. During my short stint, two of their most prolific team members rage quit in profanity-laced exits. It was some Office-Space style shit. And after my own rage quit, I humorously got invited to a chat room full of people like me: people the DCSS devs stepped on. And there were many.
For what it's worth, bad behavior can be excusable if said team were full of talent (think Linus Torvalds). But with DCSS, it's a handful of medium-talent stewards who inherited a popular game and turned it into an exclusive honor society of pointless change. I wonder if they realize how ironic it is for a game titled "Stone Soup" to be closed to outside contributions.
*Not all the devs are bad, of course.
I love this sentence...
He's a great Crawl player, but happy to see the back of him on the subreddit.
I've been following DCSS very loosely for about 10 years but I only noticed that there seems to be drama around I'm not understanding the reasons for in the 2 or 3 years.
One great DCSS tradition: whenever a new major patch is released, there's a two week long tournament. You more or less just try to win a lot, in as many ways as you can, for two weeks -- but it's more fun than it sounds, if you can believe that. For example, there's all sorts of "achievement"-like mini goals, such as "make it to level 6 of the Lair without using a potion" (approximately remembered). Between that and some other quirks, even players who aren't in the habit of winning the game can score some points for their team.
Taking a completely single player game and deciding that tournaments for it should be team-based was a minor stroke of brilliance, by the way. It's surprising how much it adds to the experience.
* `5` to rest until healed, status effects are gone, etc.
* `o` to autoexplore
* `i` for your inventory
* `z` to cast magic, `I` to view your known spells, `M` to learn new spells
* `a` for your (god) abilities.
* `m` to choose which skills to train
* `Tab` to attack the closest enemy or move towards it
* `<` and `>` to move up and down stairs
* `?` for the help menu
My suggestion for the first game: Minotaur Fighter or Berserker. Ignore any magic character for the time being.
Game guide (with pictures!) here: http://www.ultraviolent4.com/guide.html
Behind the Scenes on Retrofitting Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup's Random Seeding - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19596504 - April 2019 (2 comments)
Death: From Dungeon Crawl to Meat Boy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17460667 - July 2018 (54 comments)
Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13126045 - Dec 2016 (40 comments)
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup Webtiles (browser based rougelike) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4673564 - Oct 2012 (1 comment)
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup - WebTiles (requires WebSockets) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2549531 - May 2011 (1 comment)
DCSS webtiles is incredible and I've missed something so effective and well designed in any other roguelike. Playing online is so much better, especially when you make use of one of the help bots and have people spectating your game while making the orbrun or during a hairy situation.
https://sites.google.com/site/broguegame/
I’m sure there’s a mobile version too.
If you want to understand the game before committing to ASCII graphics, start with Pixel Dungeon.
I think I get it now! I’ve been playing Brogue, which I understand to be a bit more barebones than DCSS (eg no classes) and I’m loving it. I’ve been saving DCSS to savor it once I’ve really grokked roguelikes a bit more, this might be the cosmic sign / push I need to make the transition :)
I would prefer that it was infinite. But that's me
That's something that I think that the devs don't quite get. It's all about intelligent novelty. Not really challenge or advancement, tho that matters some. But really the whole exploring thing, and the encountering of weird new stuff. That's the important thing. Repetition is poison.
The levels need to be better designed fortresses, not just random crap.
And there needs to be truly open-ended and smart generators for monsters.
Maybe a good quest generator too. That might be hard.
But it works as an interactive chart!
Then I tried looking for other rougelikes, and found stone soup... And I find it a bit... Meh.
There's added features/"improved" ux - but I'd prefer to just play moria without tiles.
Might be similar to multi-player angband - a great idea on paper, but it involved a clock/tick - and suddenly the game was completely different, and IMNHO no longer fun.
Unfortunately, I'm not a huge fan of Rougelikes. And a significant portion of Linux games are Rougelikes.
I think these types of games are just more fun to build, and possibly simpler as well.
For my part if I'm going to spend a good deal of time grinding, it's generally more fun to slash and shoot something in the face in real time. But those actions games tend to miss out on some golden moments of random chance, tense decision making or interesting possibilities.
I think this is why roguelites have gotten so popular as they try to bridge the gap. Also the likes of Rimworld and DF that let you pause and unpause, advance time at high speed.
That would be cool, especially if it was FLOSS.
It's basically a reimagining of the original Rogue with modern design principles applied.
Edit: scroll down on this thread for a small list.
https://i.imgur.com/Yzp0qS3.png
Personally I like using the arrow keys to move, so I wrote macros for the game so that I can move diagonally while holding shift and the regular arrow keys.
I have now died on Zot 5, after what I suspect to be order 20hrs of gameplay since Sunday.
I hope you are pleased with yourself...
Crawl is much newer, much more actively developed, much more prone to radically change from version to version, much less based on learning details through experience, much more helpful to the player in the UI (both in terms of features like autoexplore, autofight, autotravel, and item search, and in terms of proactively prompting you to avoid accidentally doing wasteful or pointless actions).
NetHack is older, funnier, prioritizes and facilitates obscure knowledge on the player's part more (e.g., complicated techniques for identifying items that require memorization), has more complicated interactions between and among items, players, and the environment (e.g. many more distinct ways to use a given item), and is crueler both in terms of unavoidable deaths ("The spikes were poisoned. The poison was deadly.") and in terms of allowing the player to take actions that foreseeablely result in waste or instant death.
Crawl has more replay value in terms of different ways to win [i.e., not having a standardized set of items that you need to collect and use], and even different definitions of what counts as winning [i.e., you can choose to collect anywhere from 3 to 15 runes]. Both games have conduct challenges of various kinds to make the game even harder.
In NetHack, unidentified scrolls are somewhat more dangerous than unidentified potions; in Crawl, unidentified potions are uniformly more dangerous than unidentified scrolls. :-)
In NetHack, obscure game knowledge that you acquired twenty years ago is still extremely valuable. In Crawl, it is probably already long obsolete and likely refers to monsters, items, or dungeon branches that no longer even exist in the modern game.
The two games famously differ in their approach to spoilers. In NetHack, the game almost never reveals any quantitative or concretely practical information about the purpose or effect of something, and even things like weapon hit percentages and relative efficacy traditionally are considered spoilers. In Crawl, the online help system will, in recent versions, even reveal your current exact hit probability against a particular enemy and the enemy's hit probability against you, as well as what kinds of attacks and resistances each of you has (and you can also learn more about why, if you want). In NetHack you even need comparatively rare items to learn with certainty what resistances you have at a particular moment; in Crawl you can pull this up on a convenient screen at any moment.
Religion is dramatically more important (and complicated!) in Crawl, and different gods significantly change your play style. In NetHack there are minor differences related to your god's alignment which you would probably not need to think about in a typical game; there are always exactly 3 gods, of 3 distinct alignments, in a NetHack game.
Item identification (and modification) is much more important in NetHack. Artifacts (special, unique items with abilities different from their base type) are rare and you might find or use something like 1-4 of them in a typical NetHack game. In Crawl, they're extremely widespread and you might find or use several dozen in a game, including ending up equipping 100% artifact weapons, armor, and jewelry by the end.
Your character class is more consequential in Crawl (there are comparatively larger differences in skills and intrinsics that result from it), though in NetHack it does result in a single completely unique per-character-class dungeon branch in each game.
As an example of the UI helpfulness difference: if you try to walk into lava in NetHack:
> You fall into the lava! Your small shield bursts into flame! Your pair of leather gloves bursts into flame! You burn to a crisp...
In Crawl:
> Why would you want to do that?
Anyway, that's less than 600 words, but I hope it's useful!
Edit: I like the sibling comment's observation that Crawl is "not simulation-y". To take one example, NetHack developers have thought a lot about gravity and circumstances where you or some object falls on top of you or some object or some trap and exactly what should happen then. And they've thought about what would, or wouldn't, cause flasks to shatter or eggs to break, and what the consequences of that would be, and so on. Crawl basically doesn't care about this: yes, if you stop flying and thereby fall into an unsurvivable place, you will die. Otherwise, nothing in Crawl ever falls on anything, and nothing ever shatters from impact. The extreme number of physical interactions that are simulated in Dwarf Fortress, and the resulting chains of causality, were reportedly inspired by NetHack. Dwarf Fortress has taken this much further and made the number of interactions radically larger, but NetHack does have this kind of flavor.
In Crawl, if you're telling someone why you died, it's generally "a monster hit me and I died from the resulting damage" (maybe with a surrounding tactical context about why you misjudged the fight). In NetHack, it could very often be something like "I did X, which caused Y to happen, which caused Z to happen, which then killed me instantly". (Crawl requires you to have 0 or fewer hit points in order to die, except from starvation in older versions that tracked hunger and satiety; in NetHack there are probably 100 different ways to die other than by taking hit-point damage. Maybe 6 or 7 just related to drawbridges...)
In recent versions, you just suffer severe draining (temporary max HP reduction, removed by gaining XP) for every turn you're on an unwalkable tile while not flying (which are only accessible by flying and then stopping flying while above the tile). Which I think is a good further example of the different philosophies - rather than instakill you for what's almost certain to be an oversight from a new player, the game just punishes you so you don't do it again.
And then you meet a succubus who seduces you and takes off your gloves so you turn to stone, or you are burdened, try to go down stairs and fall down them instead, so you touch your cockatrice corpse and turn to stone, or...
All of this is of course less fatal if you happened to be polymorphed into a stone golem at the time so you was already stone, but who knows how long that will last.
I can continue for ages just about cockatrices.