Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup

29 Aug 2016

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, or DCSS for short, is a game I've fallen in love with. I still remember when I started playing it back in 2014 and after playing Nethack on and off for a few years and getting nowhere, I was delighted. DCSS has so much depth to it and yet I felt it was much easier than Nethack to get into.

Your goal in DCSS is to dive into the dungeon and get 3 out of 15 possible runes to open a gate to the realm of Zot. Then you go to the bottom of Zot, get the orb of Zot (read: steal) and run back up and out the dungeon. When you add that there are 17 possible runes (of which only 15 can generate in a given game) you get an amazing replay value right here itself. DCSS is so much more though. It has, as of writing this article:

1. 26 races such as human, mummies, centaurs, kobolds, etc
2. 24 backgrounds such as berserker, conjurer, assasion, wizard, etc
3. 26 gods in the current development version
4. 31 skills to train ranging from weapon skills, defensive skills to magic

Plus, it's so much fun. The developers have been tuning the game every release, removing grindy aspects of the game and adding new content and making the game more tactical than random luck based. We have auto-explore, auto-fight, relevant information available about most items and monsters readily available. It makes the game much more accesible than competitors. Make no mistake though, it is still an incredibly difficult game to win.

I have become so fascinated that I actually looked at some of the pending issues and submitted patches for them. I found the developer team to be very friendly and actually conrtibutingto the game, though trivial patches, makes me want to play it even more.

I have listed a few resources to get started. The game comes with a tutorial mode. I've recently started playing it in console mode instead of the tiles version. My exploits with DCSS. If you need recommendations, play a Minotaur Berserker.

Resources:

• Play DCSS Online
• IRC Channel ##crawl on freenode (amazing place to get help)

YouTube Channels:

• Demise (Tiles)
• Amalloy (Console)

Some Guides:

• God Tier
• Race Tier
• Dungeon Overview (Spoilers) (Outdated but still quite correct)