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I have to say I love what the devs did with player ghosts. So much so that often when I encounter a ghost vault in a run, I'll stop and just remark on how great a job they did with game design here.

They maintained the unique and fun element of having this vaguest of multiplayer interactions, while removing any of its accompanying frustration. The vaults themselves are also extremely well made, IMO -- the examples in the blog post are only scratching the surface. Really thoughtful approach, and really well executed.

Also a big fan of the spellbook change. I've been playing DCSS for nearly a decade I'd reckon, and it's incredible to see how the devs continue to make it better with each new release.

It's good to see writing about crawl!

I don't think this is a very accurate depiction of meleebug, unfortunately. Somethingawful alone is not at all a good source, and there's a bunch of factual inaccuracies here that are important, the biggest of which is that the bug was patched after one week (halfway through the tournament), not two. In general, strong players definitely noticed that something was up very quickly, and the increase in winrate showed up in automated stats very quickly; it took a few more days after that for someone to figure exactly what (I would put this delay on the game, not on the people). For the very basic facts about what happened when, please refer to: http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/crawl-0-16-1-bugfix-release To get a better sense for the history, I do recommend looking through dev channel communications and tavern posts at the time, again, not SA.

/r/Elona - This game was a 'rogue-lite' before rogue-lite was a thing. It takes a very different approach than the modern rogue-lite. It retains the complexity of roguelike games while not having permanent death (death hurts, though), having a hand-made world map and cities. It's kind of like "roguelike meets 16-bit RPG" so if that appeals to you, give it a try.

Transcendence Here is another rogue-lite that predates the popularity of the genre. It's a top-down space shooter, conceived as a cross between Star Control and Nethack. Hop in your little ship and upgrade it as you travel to your goal (I forget exactly what that is?)

Endless Sky You can also get this on Steam. It's similar to the previous game in gameplay. But it's not at all rogue-like. Best described as a fan-made tribute to the Escape Velocity series of games, such as EV Nova.

Those are the free games that have given me the most play time over the years. I don't get much chance to talk about the first two, but I think DCSS players are the most likely to enjoy them.

http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/trunk-updates-29-august-2021

> Summoning Changes

> For a long time summons have applied an XP penalty, stealing up to half of the XP reward from each kill. This was used as a balance tool, because allies in crawl are very powerful. However, over the past many versions a lot of the sources of ally power (summons attacking out of LOS, sources of permanent, very long lived, or cheap and powerful allies) have been removed.

> Summoning spells were still extremely powerful, owing to the large number of creatures that could be brought to bear on a problem. In trunk summons and allies are changed in the following way, to enable removing the XP penalty.

>Summon caps are reduced:

>* Summon Small Mammal, Summon Hydra, and Monstrous Menagerie are capped at 2. >* Haunt is capped at 8. >* Summon Horrible Things and Dragon’s Call keep their old summon caps. >* All other summon spells are capped at 1.

> Summon-capped summons all time out uniformly and disappear after 10 auts.

> Shadow Creatures is made a monster only spell.

> The XP penalty is removed from all temporary allies.

> Permanent allies from Beogh and Yredelemnul currently retain the XP penalty, with a hope to change their design in the future in a way that allows us to fully remove the XP penalty.

http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/howto has a list of the 'official' servers (Maybe there's a few that aren't listed there) most of them are pretty reliable.

You have two options: * connect to one of the servers via ssh (connection details here); on windows you'd probably need to use putty or the like, but other OSs have this built in. Almost all servers support this, but a few don't. * use tile_display_mode = glyph in your rc and play in webtiles.

Just for the heck of it I did up the average bonus damage that you would get from archmagi for bolt of fire across all spellpower points: https://www.desmos.com/calculator/oszzsnniij It's about 20% at the low end of power (<3 pips) and drops down to about 12% by the time you get up into the top-most pips.

no image because I can't figure out how to do it

If you're using Windows there's a built-in thing to do it. Or you could hit your PrintScreen button, open up an image editing program, and <ctrl>+v paste it as a new image.

Crop as required, save, either upload it to imgur or the reddit image server (submit new link --> reddit image thinger).

You don’t need to memorize but it is a good idea early on to look up all uniques here: http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/bots , as their difficulty ramps and they all should take into consideration using special tactics.

I'm not sure why you think it's complicated or lacks documentation. There's the wiki page which is rather vague, but pasting 'box of beasts' into the Knowledge Bot linked me to 'mutant_beast' which gave a pretty detailed explanation.

Basically, the higher your Evocations, the bigger the beast, but there's always a one in three chance the box will break after use.

This is the official DCSS technical support forum thread. Posting there would probably be the best thing to do.

Also, including what Operating System you're on, what version of DCSS you're using, and what exactly it does instead of starting normally will all speed you on your way to killing Sigmund again.

In the meantime, hopefully your work web filter will allow you to play online.

breaking this out into another post to make sure everyone sees it

if you like pure stealth, try brogue: https://sites.google.com/site/broguegame/

you can stack stealth gear and enjoy absurd shenanigans

because you're not required to fight, there's some fantastic tools for stealth

MiFi is usually considered one of the easier characters, or MiBe if you want to go with trog.

If you meant literally "how do you start dcss" here's the page with info on how to play online: http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/howto

It appears that the username Lynn has been used across multiple servers (CAO, CDO, CXC, CUE. Couldn't say if it was the same person, though. It's a known issue. It appears you're registered on CAO (Akrasiac) and someone(s) else's accounts are combined on the scoring page.

Some players register a (hopefully unique) username on all servers even if they only/ primarily play on one.

Check this:

http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/bots

Maybe same info as beem.

Usually more accurate than wiki but less verbose.

Anyway, the only God that has suffered major changes lately is Nemelex. The rest have not changed that much in a couple of versions at least, so even if outdated the wiki the info will probably often be relevant.

The best source of information is the ability menu. You get there by pressing "a", by pressing "!" or "?" you can toggle between ability use and description

The knowledge bots are always up to date even all the way up to trunk, and they're basically a wiki, just in a different format. If you need to look it up, you can look there.

Thank you for putting in the time to do this!

I've just registered accounts on several servers at http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/howto , as Neil recommended below, but what should I do about the servers where the griefer already has an account with my name? Is it possible to get control over those accounts---who should I talk to? I'm not in a rush, but for my own part I care more about this person having this over my head in the future than I do about this particular streak-break.

(Neil recommended registering widely; I hope it's okay that I'm asking you, or whoever reads this and knows, instead of asking him directly. It sounds like he could use a break.)

Antimagic usually blocks "innate magic", like against demons or orb of fire.

For some reason - I suspect a bug, or a left over of some sort - Gargoyles do have AM resistance. You can check this things yourself querying the bot in the IRC channel or via http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/bots - the latter isn't always updated.

We're making plans for 0.16.1. With any luck it will be released in the next few days; usually we wait until the tournament is over but I think this is an exceptional situation :)

Edit: 0.16.1 is out now.

See also Darshan Shaligram's history of DCSS, and Erik Piper's announcement of the fork.

Mountain dwarves were not removed for being 'too strong'. http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/whisper-farewell-when-you-leave-gimli

In general, we certainly do try to fix things rather than just remove them; the changelog ( http://s-z.org/neil/git/?p=crawl.git;a=blob;f=crawl-ref/docs/changelog.txt ) is full of examples, but I'd point to the Nemelex Xobeh rework (in trunk) as a great example of this. Just because something was removed doesn't mean it can't return later in a fixed form, too - formicids are, in part, an attempt to make a "more interesting" version of mountain dwarves. (They were codenamed "dwants" while in development.) But if we can make the game better by removing something, we aren't going to shy away from that.

I upvoted zxc's comment and want to add: Either you don't understand how LOS works in DCSS, or you are not controlling it well, if Grinder and Orc Priests are killing you often.

Basically, LOS is mutual : an enemy can see you if and only if you can see it. This has implications for positioning -- as a normal speed character, on most levels, you can move such that if an orc priest or other smiter appears, you can immediately break their LOS on you. Basically by staying near walls and favoring tight corridors.

This is especially effective against an enemy who also blinks (Grinder or any imp), since blinking can also effectively break LOS.

If you are not already aware, enemies will not follow you up/downstairs if they are not immediately adjacent to you when you take the stairs. This makes stairs very useful for escaping ranged attackers, to the point you may want to remember where the nearest one is. (if not, you can find the nearest one using Shift+X followed by <)

If you are saying "I know the first thing I should do is run away", that's a pretty clear indicator you are not running away enough. Only Naga and Chei worshippers are slow enough that running away is a bad proposition. Stealth is pretty much irrelevant to running away, as long as you make sure to run towards already-cleared areas and in a way that maximizes your opportunities to break LOS.

I may have mentioned this before, but if you want help on tactical problems (like Grinder and Orc Priests are here), it's a pretty good proposition to play in Webtiles and ask a few people to spectate. (various webtiles servers are listed here in the sidebar 'Playing online' section; CAO is a popular one). Unless the occasional lag bothers you.

From the knowledge bots:

0.13 order: Lair -> D:13 -> Orc -> D:20 -> Vaults (but not Vaults:5) -> D:27 -> get three runes -> Zot.

0.14: D -> Lair:8 -> Orc:3 -> D:16 -> Snake/Spider:5 -> Vaults:4 -> Depths:6 -> Swamp/Shoals:5 -> Vaults:5 -> Zot

Do some research on various branches (especially Vaults:5) before you just jump in there.

Extra branches (elf, crypt, Pan, Slime, Hell, etc.) are more likely to get you killed than their rewards are to help you. Avoid them unless you are trying to with the game with 15 runes.

I'm not entirely sure what your criticism is, this isn't a "first" attempt, this is a strategy that consistently works as long as you can finish the first 3 doors (which takes about 1.5 minutes of time). If you have trouble with the third door, use blink and the wand.

In a previous reddit post I've mentioned that I've tried other common strategies (ogre throwing big stones, worship Cheibriados and slouch), they work for the first ~50% of the map and then fail (i.e. ogre getting mesmerized), which causes a lot of lost time and frustration.

Here's another play through up until the orb of zot (no time to do extended today),same strategy as in the guide, worked flawlessly, the only complicated part was Menas; I had to kill him by laying out carpets of freezing clouds and switching my armour to something much heavier: http://termbin.com/0zy3

The first 5 air elementalist I've tried today died before finishing room 3, the one that finished room 3 and got to the orb of zot is the one in the log above, there simply aren't any problems further on, you have enough EV + repel missiles to not care about centaurs and yaktaurs, swiftness lets you run back and swap rings of resistance against dragons or mages (it also helps vs ghost moths which are lethal to many other kinds of mages).

The font is Inconsolata, and the colour scheme is tango, one of my terminal's built in ones.

You won't find a ghost of this guy, but if you happen to run into a DDBe on Zot:5 hit him with a fireball or two. I was playing at 3am like an idiot, fucked up when swapping rings and fought an orb of fire with rF-.

There is plenty of good, specific advice in this thread already (and some bad advice too; that's how the internet works). So I won't tell you anything specific you can do during a game; instead, here's a couple of out-of-game suggestions.

I originally learned to play by watching youtube videos of other players. It's not a silver bullet, but you can learn a lot of good habits by watching, and listening to what we think about. In the Videos section of the /r/dcss sidebar there are links to a few YouTube channels of experienced players. Of course I recommend my own channel, but especially if you prefer to play tiles (as most players do), Demise and zxc are both players with very good qualifications. Watch some of these videos and let good play seep into your subconscious.

Treat every death as a lesson. There will be plenty of such lessons! Every time you die, it's because you did something wrong. Review your morgue file, the situation you died in, and try to think of something you could have done differently to survive. Once you've found something, pay attention to that specific thing in future games to try to stop it happening again. And here I'll break my rule by telling you a specific thing you can do in games: more often than you'd think, running away from the monster early enough will be a perfectly good solution. No prizes for bravery.

But there will inevitably be some deaths that feel unavoidable to you. Ask about those, on /r/dcss or in ##crawl on IRC, or in the Tavern. There will almost certainly be someone who can tell you what you missed, and how to stay alive. It will sting to admit that every death is a mistake, but if you blame the game or bad luck you won't be able to improve. There may be some unavoidable deaths in the game, but after 2 years and 60 wins I don't think I've ever seen one. If zxc ever tells me he had an unavoidable death maybe I'll believe him!

The Android version I'm using (not sure about other people) recommends Hacker's Keyboard. It has all the keys you need, though some are a couple keystrokes away. It has a few different layout options that take up more or less screen space; that's probably going to be a personal decision.

The best piece of advice I can give is, learn to use hjkl movement. I know, it's a pain in the butt. But eventually you get to where you can use it as well as you use the numpad, and then you don't have to toggle back and forth.

Other than that, learn to play the game with the fewest possible keystrokes through Crawl's advanced interface features. Do you know how to set travel exclusions, so that you can mash 'o' without waking Sigmund? Can you make a macro to cast Regeneration, Shroud, Oxocubu and Confusing Touch at the beginning of every fight with a single keystroke instead of eight? How's your rc file?

Some of this may seem like a hassle, but if you're playing Crawl on your phone, you've already accepted some hassle. The smarter you get, the more you can minimize it.

I used to play with a soundpack I made for myself. It's messy if you play fast, but it works if you play at a normal speed. Game version is prolly old, I haven't played for a couple years.-

Ill upload it for you

https://gofile.io/d/UP09Oz

Let me know if it you find it useful

They're amazing and I love the work Sastreii has done recently.

Have a look at the screenshots from 0.14 and notice how much graphics have changed in the past years. Whether you like the new tiles or not, enjoy the fact that we've got a volunteer working on them.

I usually like playing with ASCII on my roguelikes, but DCSS looks too good not to play with tiles.

It looks like there might be some sort of webtiles bug when loading with no skills selected; I made a copy of your save so that someone can debug it later (I can't take a look right now). If you log in via ssh you should be able to select a skill in the console version and continue. Some instructions here: http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/howto

1) I have never tried this myself, but have you enabled the NetHack option for the numeric keypad state in PuTTY? Also see the PuTTY section of &quot;How to play online&quot;.

Congrats! As a relatively new player I dream of an octowin.

And just an FYI, Abyss was just tweaked to address the monotony. First item from last week's blog post: http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/trunk-updates-23-march-2016

If you go and check the fire dragon entry in here: http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/bots, it'll say something like Spells: fire breath (3d24) [!AM, !sil, breath] which means it's on a breath timer. The monster timer is pretty short though, like maybe 1d4 turns.

http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/trunk-updates-22-april-2015

>Poisonous chunks have been merged with rot chunks to form ‘inedible chunks’, which are inedible by all non-ghouls, regardless of rPois status. Several formerly poisonous monsters (e.g. beetles, snails) have had their meat cleaned up.

Are you playing trunk? Because it's no longer necessary; you get piety from killing now.

>Trog no longer accepts corpse sacrifices. (Piety from kills & piety decay have been improved to compensate.)

http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/trunk-updates-7-april-2015

Get the latest version from here. Your description of the layout is impossible in the current version, so I expect you're playing something older. (in 0.15 orcish mines can't appear before level 8 and are always an optional branch)

You will definitely find better players on webtiles than on popular video platforms like youtube. Check out http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/player-status for who is currently playing online (this overview can take quite a while to load, alternatively you can check the lobbies of the different servers directly).

Hey, you've probably already beaten Red Sonja, but a new strategy popped into my head and it worked beautifully, I actually felt guilty of how overpowered it is on this map.

Ghoul Monk! http://termbin.com/yiwx

The beautiful thing about ghouls is that, they're completely immune to poison (even clouds of foul pestilence near the orb) and never mutate. This allows you to abuse this map, get to Qazlals altar, and train only Invocations until it's 20, killing Sonja is trivial (you're immune to poison and she uses poison needles), pick up her curare needles and blowgun to shoot the troll in the next room, use Qazlals upheaval if you have to.

Now comes the amazing part, since you don't mutate, you can go to the room with mutating eyes and slaughter all of them, this will give you an enormous Skill boost (invocation up to 19), There's plenty of meat to cure your rotting (i.e. the room with hogs). With this much invocation an upheaval one hit kills many enemies (2 of the demonologist kobolds, 2 of the centaurs), 2 hits kill an Oklob plant. Now since you're immune to poison you can easily kill the poisonous spiders and gargoyle, disaster area kills all the zombies and red blobs in one shot. Upheaval will also kill the 3 hydras, 2 dragons, the Daeva, all the purple invisible eyes, the red Giants and the master archer! A single disaster area will clear the room where the oklob plant, mummy, nagas and bees are.

Essentially because you get such a huge invocation boost, and there's so much piety in Sprint, you can one shot most things with upheaval, which is disgustingly overpowered! For the Orb of Zot I used a potion of haste and blinked past Lom Lobon, closed the door, grabbed the orb and used scrolls of blink until I got to the other side of the water, after that I just had to go back to the surface!

I am now realizing that this is a MAC app, apparently

https://github.com/ParkerK/selfrestraint/

is recommended by the maker of and based on selfcontrol. He also recommends https://getcoldturkey.com/

According to your description, I suspect you may be playing an old version. The game no longer requires (or supports) the Hacker's Keyboard. Make sure you're using 0.27.0-1, it's available on Google Play.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.newtzgames.dcssonline

This is the app I use, it works great for me. No ads or purchases and the only issue is having to log back in occasionally if you switch away to another app for a while. He reccommends Hacker Keyboard but I don't use it much, I prefer the larger buttons. You do need it installed for a few weird inputs though.

ok, my comment below was about DCSS Online (I was guessing that based on the reference to CAO), but I guess this means you are playing this other app?

In that case your morgue (if it is correctly saved) should be saved locally, on your android device -- it won't be uploaded anywhere. CAO is a server for online play, which you could use through the other play store app I linked. If the ascii app is using the same setup as regular versions, the morgue will be somewhere near your save games, but I have no idea if or how you'll have access. It may depend on what the particular app developer did; I would try contacting them about this question if no one here knows.

ok, my comment below was about DCSS Online (I was guessing that based on the reference to CAO), but I guess this means you are playing this other app?

In that case your morgue (if it is correctly saved) should be saved locally, on your android device -- it won't be uploaded anywhere. CAO is a server for online play, which you could use through the other play store app I linked. If the ascii app is using the same setup as regular versions, the morgue will be somewhere near your save games, but I have no idea if or how you'll have access. It may depend on what the particular app developer did; I would try contacting them about this question if no one here knows.

I don't usually put anything special on so it's usually whatever I'm listening to at the time. However a few months back I had downloaded and gotten really into 10000000, so I had downloaded the soundtrack and put it on while playing DCSS. It worked so well that I think I was playing for a few hours before realising I had the same track looping on repeat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abw1FRGFX-g

Not without downloading anything, but there is an Android version in the Google Play store, if you can install that on your Chromebook (I'm not too familiar with the platform myself).

I like to customize my phone keyboard a lot. I found 'Real keyboard typing sound' has the most customization options, including changing the keyboard size, background and key colors.

It doesn't really. Fall noticeably short that is. The key advice to install the Hacker's Keyboard still holds. The browser has a convenient "Click to open keyboard", which works. The trick to getting a full-screen experience is this:

Open the server page of choice in the browser (I use Chrome). In the options, choose "Add to Home Screen", the close Chrome. In the home screen, click on the shortcut. It will open the browser directly to the server, but without the top bar, so full-screen. The pinch and zoom works, and I tried a simple keyboard option to work the inventory and it responded fine. The app has a few conveniences, but nothing to describe the above as crippled.

One thing though: when I click on the Play Online, it refuses to offer the servers, and instead tells me to get the app. You may wish to change that.

It's a quite stupid new/old reddit issue.

New reddit inserts a "\" before "_" in links (beats me why), but then can interpret that \ to actually render the link without it. However this leaves the plain text of the post (like if you checked "source" using RES) actually containing the \, and since old reddit (and many mobile apps) don't magically erase "\" in urls (after all, why would they?) and merely replace actual formatting (like italics, etc.), this leaves the link with the \, which makes it invalid.

For me (and anyone using old reddit and most mobile readers), the original link looks like that:

https://libregamewiki.org/Linley\_Henzell

(which obviously doesn't work)

Also, "Bug & Patch Tracker" in the blog main left-hand navigation menu, under "Development," links to Mantis http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/blog . It's already somewhat redundant given there's a button for "BUGS & SUGGESTIONS" at the top of the menu. I guess I'll try putting this stuff in as an issue on github soon.

Recently i stumbled upon the list of roguelikes on slant, and i had to admit that the top pro/contra arguments feel bloody accurate for each game i know. There were some variations of "difficult to get into" and "rng influence", just what you would expect, but for Stone Soup? It is "devs removing content". Heartbreaking, really.

https://www.slant.co/topics/1657/~best-roguelikes-roguelites-on-pc

&#x200B;

I arrived late to the party (a few months ago) and the absence of encumbrance struck me odd in this game. Never seen how it was to play with it, but at least i can come up with design principles and see the points that probably made its removal justified. In contrast, the removal of a perfectly viable item for the reason of not being a viable item is a telltale sign.

Honestly, reflection does its job admirably. There are a few factors that limit its usefulness, but none of these are the fault of the amulet in question. Aside that not every level being "centaur country", the sole reason my latest fighter with a shield skill of 25 could not see the benefit of it because i could not swap the faith amulet. (And since the god was Makhleb, spamming ufetubus was just as effective countermeasure against archers.) But when the conditions are met, reflection is delicious in the pre-Zot game; it clears high-damage ranged mobs without user input, entangles Harolds, barbs manticores, and so on. Safe and satisfying.

If you want to participate in the leaderboards, you'll have to play online. No client that hooks in AFAIK.

Eg. pick a server based on your location from here: http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/howto and then play tiles in your browser tiles or ASCII in console. I much prefer console for no lag but the ASCII is not for everyone.

If you check the tournament blog post, it mentions that you will see test data on the tournament overview page that will be reset before the tourney begins.

No idea with regards to when CWZ admins plan to install 0.27, but they still have time to do so. Your trunk games will not be recognized for the tournament.

u/gufysgybjd

Just to tack on you can go here for a list of available servers and find one that is close to you. There are various methods but the one I like is 'webtiles' which is the graphical mode played in your browser. It's neat because you can select from a list of versions (including trunk, which is the current working draft of the game) and you can spectate other players active game/have them spectate yours, theres even a chat! Plus theres a knowledge bot called beem that can answer questions about the game. Plus plus it keeps tracks of your runs so you can see your win% and other stuff. Basically I'm a big fan and think you should consider checking it out.

I just learned that the guy who maintains sequell is greensnark (who also started stone soup: http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/the-dawn-of-stone-soup ).

Crawl Cosplay Clans discussion

The 0.25 tournament is coming up, likely starting either May 29 or June 5. I'm going to have a thing that's going to make me fairly busy around that time, and I'm still rather uninterested in playing, so I'm not going to take part this time around. I'm up for helping organize CCC clans if needed though.

So this is just a general poll-for-interest post. Feel free to reply if you've played some of the cosplay challenges at some point, and would like to be part of a CCC clan.

1) Unseen horror are faster than Ce, but have batty movements, so it is possible to run "away" from them in open LOS, if a staircase is nearby enough or lose them using a layout with enough corners.

Don't get me wrong: while running away from them you'll get hurt and not always will be possible to escape without using consumables.
Considering you "knocked down HP significantly" I'd use !paralysis or ?fear asap.

2) You should check the bot for unknown monsters (although in lastest versions x-v is decently informative enough). The site isn't 100% accurate, it would be better to use beem, meem or other online bot or Irc channel - dunno how use them.

I understand the point when you say ammo is scarce early on.

However the trick is that you haven't to spend that on every monster.

With a Ce you can safely melee most of early enemies, as you can just move to disengage if things go bad. And you can just avoid most of dangerous melee ones - as there are only few faster than a Ce.

You should use ammo on the few dangerous ranged monsters you may face - such as Orc Priests, Wizards, uniques and so on.

Btw, some of the best melee weapon especially early for a Ce are polearm: you poke something, you retreat, you poke again. Very long, very boring but also very safe.

Everything in this game looks like complex jargon until you start to get through the newbie-layers. Just start with any character you want. The game recommends you choose from the left side of the species (Hill Orc, Troll, Ghoul, etc) because they have an easier time getting started.

You'll die, a lot, and start to learn the game. It's got a wide variety of traps, surprises, and encounters that make it very fun to figure out. Take your time, get as far as you can each game, and try to learn from each death.

You can play online on various servers or watch others to learn from their experiences.

The object of this game is to go down into the dungeon, retrieve the Orb of Zot, and escape with it through the entrance. Much easier said than done.

The levels and monsters are mostly randomly generated, but have certain styles/layouts and monster tables depending on where you are. Also, "vaults" can be placed which are hand-designed sections which usually have a pile of loot guarded by something dangerous.

The game is completely free and open source. There is also the ability to play/spectate live matches in your browser. I play on http://crawl.akrasiac.org:8080/ but there are other servers you can play on that may have better performance for you depending on where you live. http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/howto

You can have rc that makes you press space when certain baddies show on screen so you don't tab into paralysis or banished.

If you look up beem you can add the bot to your chat and @??Hellion

To get actual dmg numbers, AC, MR, etc. http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/bots

Since you're getting eyestrain I think it's worth it to learn how to connect to the game using a terminal. Once you've done that you can edit the font type, size and colors to your hearts content.

The guide is here: http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/howto (scroll down to "The Software")

Uh, according to the knowledge bots:

>In 0.16+, successfully polymorphing the royal jelly will cause it to spawn all the jellies at once as if you had one-shotted the rest of its HP.

So you should really be ready to blink/tele as soon as you try it, if you ever do.

There is no mutation that gives more than rF+ on its own IMHO. But there are two different mutations (tier 2 and tier 3) that have an rF+ component.

Check out the knowledge bots:

http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/bots

A search for "ds mutation rules" lists the possible mutations. You have to figure out which it actually is, I don't know if the orders listed there have a meaning, but I'd think so.

You'll need to download a Telnet client. I've read positive reviews about the Telnet client included in IT Manager app, but there may be better. See this page for instructions on how to connect to DCSS servers from a Telnet client.

Official site is up now, might try it again.

Also consider checking this page out, it tells you were the various webtiles servers are located, so you can find one with better ping.

Here is more info on the tournament. There is no set amount of time you are committing to--probably if you want to win a game you would be looking at around 10 hours of play, but if you are a beginner the chances of a win are small anyway. Don't let that stop you, though--it's just for fun. Also keep in mind that you can still be in the tournament without joining a team.

Where are you located? CAO is located in Arizona.

There are several other servers that you could try, including some in Europe. Maybe one of those would give you a better latency / less lag.

I live on the east coast of north america, and the best for me is CSZO.

I know this isn't the answer you're looking for, but I never have these kinds of problems on webtiles:

http://crawl.akrasiac.org:8080/#lobby

or, find a server here: http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/howto for a list of servers.

As for your actual issue, no idea, sorry!

That appears to only be the very start of a dump. A full character dump will look more like the link in my post (though not exactly the same, mine has some custom settings). To get your dump:

• If you are playing online, it depends on the server you're on. Go to http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/ and look in the right hand menu for "Online Server XYZ" where XYZ is your server, and click the "Morgue" link under that. In the list that comes up (patience, this website may be slow to load) find your username on the server and click that. The morgue for your current ongoing game will be YourUsername.txt. Morgues for finished games will have timestamps in their filename (you still want the .txt file).

• If you're playing offline, press the # key while you're in the game to create a morgue file. Unless you've changed the settings, a morgue file for your character should appear in the morgue/ directory of your DCSS install.

I used OBS and didn't have any problems. Followed this guide for making local recordings with the program:

>Encoding

>Use CBR: Disabled

>Quality Balance: 10

>Bitrate: 1000

>Use custom buffer size: Enabled

>Buffer size: 0

Local recording setups tax the CPU less because there's less compression to do. Greater file size, less CPU drain. Anyways I have a pretty powerful PC so it wasn't a problem.

Here's my videos if you care, most people thought they were pretty boring.

Huh? That doesn't make sense. Perhaps there's something wrong with the way you're doing it?

Here, I have an example I can show. (https://repl.it/DIPW) Just run it and it should achieve the desired effect. Could give you some idea of what's going wrong.

The quickest way to learn vi keys is just to use vi for your text editing needs. It's a great little editor (I've been using it since the 90s) and the stakes are way lower if you are just editing a Banoffee Pie recipe rather than learning while trying to keep your character from a multi-hour/multi-day session alive in Depths.

You'll have muscle memory of all the keys in no time.

https://www.vim.org/download.php

~~It's temporarily locked down a bit due to this spambot epidemic on freenode, you need to have a registered nick or be set +v.~~

~~I accidentally had +R on, so I wasn't seeing messages from non-authed users, but if you message me now (advil in that channel) I can +v you. I'm also periodically +ving everyone who doesn't get instabanned by freenode.~~

~~Edit: we've switched to something different and lower maintenance which seems to be working. You don't need to do any of this nonsense to chat in ##crawl for now.~~

~~Edit 2 (Aug 3): the bots are back and even more annoying. Since I don't think any ops will be around much this (EST) evening, I've set the channel +r to require being registered with nickserv to join the channel; I realize that this is annoying to many but there isn't really a better solution at the moment.~~

~~Edit 3: probably continuing with the channel set as +r through the weekend.~~

~~Edit 4 (8/8): the spam continues, and I think it's even less viable to keep ##crawl to anything less restrictive than +r for the time being (let's hope the bots don't evolve and start registering). It's also worth being aware that freenode has force-set all users to be +R, meaning you won't be able to PM anyone on the server unless you yourself are authenticated with nickserv.~~

~~Edit 5 (8/28): Things seem to have quieted down, and I've had +r off for a day now, hopefully this will last.~~

Edit 6: Unfortunately I think spambots on freenode is the new normal, and the channel will need to be +r indefinitely. I guess I'm not going to repin this, and rather try to put a sentence about it on the website somewhere.

Take a look also at my another attempt to localise crawl: https://github.com/apollovy/crawl/tree/libintl-l10n . I didn't touch it last 3-4 months, but the way things went were very good imo. Also there's an online translation project we used here: https://poeditor.com/join/project?hash=5euR1YoLAJ

an alternative is messagease. It is an alternative if you want special keys like f1-f12, ctrl, alt and so on.

An small issue is learning to use a new keyboard layout. but after that, it is a good keyboard for the original intent.

There should be others keyboards with such support, but I didn't go further to search for another.

Sprint is just a variant of crawl that some people like. There are multiple flavours and forks of crawl that enjoy some popularity.

http://crawl.chaosforge.org/Dungeon_Sprint

Trunk is a term used in software revision control which is the base upon which a developer implements changes to a project. For crawl, all changes go into trunk, so "trunk" refers to the most recent version of the source tree, i.e. the game.

What you call "dcss online" is the web tiles version that is mirrored on several servers. Aside from that, there are console ncurses builds that run in a terminal, which can be played over ssh at those same addresses. There's also an SDL2-based offline tiles build that has features such as equipment overview.

I understand you grabbed the webtiles android program here?

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.newtzgames.dcssonline

I would strongly recommend a physical keyboard for this game, if you can at all obtain one.

I've had great success connecting to CRBO with Termius on my Android phone. Just make sure to set it to a monospaced font and pinch/spread to zoom in/out to the appropriate font size. You may have to restart the application if characters disappear over the right edge of the screen, but with some futzing you'll get it.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.server.auditor.ssh.client&amp;hl=en

>tiles or ASCII?

Whatever you prefer. It's a personal preference thing. I'm a huge Linux nerd and a computer programmer and am in the command line all the time, and I grew up on the original rogue and larn and all that ASCII goodness.. but I still prefer tiles if I have a choice.

>How can I sync my files?

Have you tried just playing on the web? Just go to http://crawl.akrasiac.org:8080/#lobby and make an account and start playing. And, as far as the Android thing, you can get an app that logs into webtiles as well. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.newtzgames.dcssonline

I've played the hell out of the ascii dcss for andrioid, probably as much as I've played dcss on PC. Ascii takes a little while to learn, but it has a much much better performance than what else was on offer when I started playing on my phone. It's been a while since I tried the other ones, but back when I did they were mostly unplayable.