7 ms·

Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup

98 points by nodivbyzero 10y ago

out_of_protocol 10y ago
Works on android beautifully. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.crawlmb https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.crawlmb
- deathanatos 10y ago
  Interesting. It consistently crashes for me after the character selection screen on Android. (e.g., I hit "q - Gargoyle", "a - Fighter", "c - flail", and crash.)
  - out_of_protocol 10y ago
    No issues for me, playing & updating versions for _years_
- devopsproject 10y ago
  Looks like all the graphics are missing, it is just showing a bunch of weird computer type symbols, dashes and what not. Still needs a lot of work /s
  - barbs 10y ago
    That's cos it's the ASCII version :).
    - devopsproject 10y ago
      whoosh
      - barbs 10y ago
        Doh! Was wondering what the /s meant ><
- barbs 10y ago
  I'm the maintainer of that port, glad you like it :)
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  meh. Given how I've never found a good keyboard on Android (as in, I consistantly screw up on all of them), RLs like this are unplayable. But in general, RLs are ill-suited to mobile play, due to the keyboard interface. There are only a few RLs that I've seen buck this, and thus work properly on mobile. The first is Pixel Dungeon (which should surprise nobody) The second is Hoplite (although that's defining Rogulike a bit broadly). It has a very limited set of player actions, but also an interesting twist: enemy movements are completely deterministic, so the game bares more resemblance to a puzzle game than anything else.
- slim 10y ago
  A great roguelike on android is Pixel Dungeon https://f-droid.org/app/com.watabou.pixeldungeon https://f-droid.org/app/com.watabou.pixeldungeon
- viewer5 10y ago
  Thanks for pointing this out! Never would've thought to check for DCSS for my phone... How up-to-date is this kept, do you know?
  - barbs 10y ago
    I basically try and update the game whenever a new stable version is released. I don't typically monitor the website myself though - usually someone will email me asking when I'll update it, and even then I'll need to find time to do the update.
SlyShy 10y ago
As someone who came second in a DCSS tournament back in the day, let me tell U that this game rocks if U enjoy tactical gameplay. It can brutally punish U until U learn sufficient caution and U tune your situational awareness and resource management. Have fun!
- GavinMcG 10y ago
  I might be speaking for myself, here, but I really value clear and precise communication. Saving yourself a single keystroke (shift-U vs. y-o-u) has much greater costs than you might realize in terms of how people perceive you, trust you, and are willing to engage with you. I'm not trying to be prescriptive – I don't think using U vs. you is a moral issue, or makes you good or bad or smart or dumb or anything like that. But people react to things like that, even if it's not fair that they do so.
  - cmdrfred 10y ago
    I thought it was some sort of pun that I didn't get.
    - fencepost 10y ago
      Yeah, as an old Nethack player my thought was "Does DCSS use 'U' instead of '@'?" but no, it doesn't and a quick look at the source code (mon-data.h) doesn't show any monsters using 'U' as the display character.
  - PeCaN 10y ago
    Eye might be speaking for myself, here, but Eye don't really see the point of nitpicking that.
  - thaumasiotes 10y ago
    > Saving yourself a single keystroke (shift-U vs. y-o-u) has much greater costs than you might realize in terms of how people perceive you, trust you, and are willing to engage with you. This is true. However, it has no costs in terms of whether your message will be understood as you intended it, or whether the audience will even have any doubt as to what you meant. Thus, I find your lead comment, "I really value clear and precise communication", interesting. What about the U symbol do you feel is unclear or imprecise? On a different note, I generally see people use "u" rather than "U". U is harder to type, but it does bring out a certain parallelism with "I".
deathanatos 10y ago
If you like rougelikes like NetHack, you should love Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup. Decently hard, but what I like about it instead of NetHack is that doesn't require the level of rote memorization that NetHack requires. (Or Wiki hand-holding.) The game does a good job of killing you, and making you feel that, "yep… I did not play my hand right there." whereas NetHack will kill you for looking at it funny. (Usually in DCSS, I find that I should have retreated much sooner than I did.) The game will generally warn you outright if you try to do something considerably dangerous. (Aside from, notably, running headlong into combat when you shouldn't. But, for example, it will warn you if you try to eat a mutagenic corpse, or wield something that will royally peeve your deity.) The artwork is beautiful, and I'm especially fond of the dungeon generator: it's a mix of random layouts and human design, and the result feels a lot more natural and interesting. On some levels, large parts of the level will be random, but a human designed piece might get integrated into it (randomly). You can play online, too: https://crawl.develz.org/ https://crawl.develz.org/ (and I prefer this myself, as you can also spectate other players, and chat w/ them. Occasionally, I learn a thing or two.) The point of the game is to get the Orb of Zot and get out, much like NetHack. Somewhat unlike NetHack, you need 3 runes to get the orb, but there are 15 in the game, making all of them considerably optional, and it's much more difficult to get all. The game has a few challenges beyond that, as well. (I've only escaped w/ the Orb once, as a Gargoyle Fighter.)
- thefalcon 10y ago
  Spectate mode is fantastic. Watching someone play now: http://crawl.berotato.org:8080/#watch-Scypho http://crawl.berotato.org:8080/#watch-Scypho Scypho: brb spectators its dinner time Scypho: also i am mad fucked Scypho: so i need to think
- pmarreck 10y ago
  Nice, I knew you could play Nethack in a browser, but not DCSS! Might have to dungeon-dive a bit! Do you know which version I should play? (is "trunk" generally safe? Is there a test suite in the code?) Any tips for noobs?
  - kibwen 10y ago
pmoriarty 10y ago
I've been playing Nethack and other roguelikes for well over 20 years. Nethack has to be the one game out of all the games that I've played that I played the longest. As you can probably tell, I love Nethack. DCSS is the game that has made me more or less abandon Nethack to play it instead. It improves on Nethack in so many ways: from the super useful auto-explore, to the beautiful and innovative use of colors, lots and lots of really bizzare and unique gods, beautiful and interesting thematic levels, a Lua scripting interface, and much, much more. I'm seriously impressed with how much the DCSS developers have achieved, and how quickly they've achieved it. It's also telling that Nethack has traditionally had a glacial development cycle, while DCSS development is super active. There are tons of new features, races, levels, and gods in nearly every release, and new releases come out all the time. That said, there are still other things that Nethack does best. The crazy number of things that you can do with items and bodies in Nethack seems deeper than DCSS, as are some of the relationships with one's god in Nethack, and the use of pets (such as training them to steal from shops). Someone told me that a DCSS deverloper motto is "when it doubt, don't do it like Nethack", which is a pity, because they could learn from Nethack and take some of the things it does best and improve on them, instead of stubbornly refusing to be like Nethack. That said, none of this is going to stop me from playing DCSS, which is now by far my favorite rougelike of all. I strongly recommend anyone who has even the remotest interest in rogulikes give DCSS a try, if you've somehow missed the boat and haven't already. Also, playing in ASCII is the one true way to play. ;) You can ssh or telnet in to a server to play, if you want to play online (or watch others play).[1] Or you can download and compile the game itself to play locally on your own machine.[2] Finally, if you ever need help, check out ##crawl on freenode.[3] [1] - https://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/howto https://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/howto [2] - https://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/ https://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/ [3] - https://freenode.net/ https://freenode.net/
- chongli 10y ago
  I've seen a lot of these threads and without fail the comparison between DCSS and NetHack comes up. I can't remember the last time somebody said they loved NetHack in one of these threads, so kudos to you! Personally, I am one of the rare birds that loves NetHack and just can't stand DCSS. NetHack feels far closer to a proper role-playing game with an actual dungeon master who will listen to your crazy ideas and give you back a result that actually makes sense. DCSS, on the other hand, feels more like an arcade beat-em-up style game to me. I guess it doesn't help that my favourite combo (fulsome distillation and evaporate) was removed from the game a few years ago. Beyond that, I find DCSS really dry. Most of the time you're just mashing the auto-explore key and then bumping into a few enemies or repeatedly casting your best spell at them. For the style of game it is (beat-em-up Roguelike with zero role-playing) I'd much rather play TOME[0], a game that has far more intricate and involved character classes. [0] http://te4.org/ http://te4.org/
phs 10y ago
I've never played DCSS, but after a few nethack ascensions I've found its "chores" (getting the wand, etc) interfere with actually enjoying the parts of the genre I like most: resource management in an unknown world. I suspect DCSS will be a similar experience. For those that feel similarly, I heartily recommend giving brogue[0] a try. It's beautiful, balances many strategies without giving dominance to any (dwarven valkyrie, anyone?) and drops the "schlepping" associated with nethack and related titles. [0]: https://sites.google.com/site/broguegame/ https://sites.google.com/site/broguegame/
- paroneayea 10y ago
  If you've never tried DCSS, I think you should try it. I think it also mitigates a number of the same things you complained about. The game's built-in manual has a whole section about its game philosophy you're likely to find appealing, especially if you were frustrated with Nethack for those reasons: https://web.archive.org/web/20160304070026/http://crawl.develz.org/other/manual.html#n-philosophy-pas-de-faq Anyway, you should try it!
  - phs 10y ago
    Interesting! Glad to hear that they're explicit design goals.
inconshreveable 10y ago
Unlike many other games, DCSS has an explicitly articulated design manifesto explaining the ethos of what is fun and why. It's _amazing_ and you should read it: https://github.com/crawl/crawl/blob/master/crawl-ref/docs/crawl_manual.rst#n-philosophy-pas-de-faq https://github.com/crawl/crawl/blob/master/crawl-ref/docs/cr... I've pulled a few highlights: > Speaking about games in general, wherever there's a no-brainer, that means the development team put a lot of effort into providing a "choice" that's really not an interesting choice at all. And that's a horrible lost opportunity for fun. > Another basic design principle is avoidance of grinding (also known as scumming). These are activities that have low risk, take a lot of time, and bring some reward. This is bad for a game's design because it encourages players to bore themselves. > The interface is radically designed to make gameplay easy - this sounds trivial, but we mean it. All tedious, but necessary, chores should be automated. Examples are long-distance travel, exploration and taking notes. > the joy of discovering something spoily is nice, once. (And disappears before it can start if you feel you need to read spoilers - a legitimate feeling.) The joy of dealing with ever-changing, unexpected and challenging strategic and tactical situations that arise out of transparent rules, on the other hand, is nice again and again.
- bhickey 10y ago
  crawl dev here! I'm generally pretty dumbstruck by the rest of the team. They're as good or better than professional groups I've worked with. A handful of super devs really drive the project along and we've had a fairly long history to develop over. My own involvement is 7 years, while I think there are others who have been hacking on it since 2005. For a lot of the time dpeg has been our de facto tastemaker/PM.
  - inconshreveable 10y ago
    i've been impressed with how well the crawl dev team has maintained the velocity and consistent vision over the many years (5+) that i've followed the project. thank you, and well done! is dpeg the author of that section of the docs?
    - 10y ago
Mizza 10y ago
$ brew cask install Caskroom/cask/dungeon-crawl-stone-soup-console If you were wondering!
xenihn 10y ago
DCSS is the only roguelike that I've been able to sink lots of hours into.
empressplay 10y ago
Some travelers come to a village, carrying nothing more than an empty cooking pot. Upon their arrival, the villagers are unwilling to share any of their food stores with the hungry travelers. Then the travelers go to a stream and fill the pot with water, drop a large stone in it, and place it over a fire. One of the villagers becomes curious and asks what they are doing. The travelers answer that they are making "stone soup", which tastes wonderful, although it still needs a little bit of garnish to improve the flavor, which they are missing. The villager does not mind parting with a few carrots to help them out, so that gets added to the soup. Another villager walks by, inquiring about the pot, and the travelers again mention their stone soup which has not reached its full potential yet. The villager hands them a little bit of seasoning to help them out. More and more villagers walk by, each adding another ingredient. Finally, the stone (being inedible) is removed from the pot, and a delicious and nourishing pot of soup is enjoyed by all. Although the travelers have thus tricked the villagers into sharing their food with them, they have successfully transformed it into a tasty and nutritious meal which they share with the donors.

98 points by nodivbyzero 10y ago

Works on android beautifully. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.crawlmb https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.crawlmb

deathanatos 10y ago
Interesting. It consistently crashes for me after the character selection screen on Android. (e.g., I hit "q - Gargoyle", "a - Fighter", "c - flail", and crash.)
- out_of_protocol 10y ago
  No issues for me, playing & updating versions for _years_
devopsproject 10y ago
Looks like all the graphics are missing, it is just showing a bunch of weird computer type symbols, dashes and what not. Still needs a lot of work /s
- barbs 10y ago
  That's cos it's the ASCII version :).
  - devopsproject 10y ago
    whoosh
    - barbs 10y ago
      Doh! Was wondering what the /s meant ><
barbs 10y ago
I'm the maintainer of that port, glad you like it :)
qwertyuiop924 10y ago
meh. Given how I've never found a good keyboard on Android (as in, I consistantly screw up on all of them), RLs like this are unplayable. But in general, RLs are ill-suited to mobile play, due to the keyboard interface. There are only a few RLs that I've seen buck this, and thus work properly on mobile. The first is Pixel Dungeon (which should surprise nobody) The second is Hoplite (although that's defining Rogulike a bit broadly). It has a very limited set of player actions, but also an interesting twist: enemy movements are completely deterministic, so the game bares more resemblance to a puzzle game than anything else.
slim 10y ago
A great roguelike on android is Pixel Dungeon https://f-droid.org/app/com.watabou.pixeldungeon https://f-droid.org/app/com.watabou.pixeldungeon
viewer5 10y ago
Thanks for pointing this out! Never would've thought to check for DCSS for my phone... How up-to-date is this kept, do you know?
- barbs 10y ago
  I basically try and update the game whenever a new stable version is released. I don't typically monitor the website myself though - usually someone will email me asking when I'll update it, and even then I'll need to find time to do the update.

SlyShy 10y ago

As someone who came second in a DCSS tournament back in the day, let me tell U that this game rocks if U enjoy tactical gameplay. It can brutally punish U until U learn sufficient caution and U tune your situational awareness and resource management. Have fun!

GavinMcG 10y ago
I might be speaking for myself, here, but I really value clear and precise communication. Saving yourself a single keystroke (shift-U vs. y-o-u) has much greater costs than you might realize in terms of how people perceive you, trust you, and are willing to engage with you. I'm not trying to be prescriptive – I don't think using U vs. you is a moral issue, or makes you good or bad or smart or dumb or anything like that. But people react to things like that, even if it's not fair that they do so.
- cmdrfred 10y ago
  I thought it was some sort of pun that I didn't get.
  - fencepost 10y ago
    Yeah, as an old Nethack player my thought was "Does DCSS use 'U' instead of '@'?" but no, it doesn't and a quick look at the source code (mon-data.h) doesn't show any monsters using 'U' as the display character.
- PeCaN 10y ago
  Eye might be speaking for myself, here, but Eye don't really see the point of nitpicking that.
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
  > Saving yourself a single keystroke (shift-U vs. y-o-u) has much greater costs than you might realize in terms of how people perceive you, trust you, and are willing to engage with you. This is true. However, it has no costs in terms of whether your message will be understood as you intended it, or whether the audience will even have any doubt as to what you meant. Thus, I find your lead comment, "I really value clear and precise communication", interesting. What about the U symbol do you feel is unclear or imprecise? On a different note, I generally see people use "u" rather than "U". U is harder to type, but it does bring out a certain parallelism with "I".

deathanatos 10y ago

If you like rougelikes like NetHack, you should love Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup. Decently hard, but what I like about it instead of NetHack is that doesn't require the level of rote memorization that NetHack requires. (Or Wiki hand-holding.) The game does a good job of killing you, and making you feel that, "yep… I did not play my hand right there." whereas NetHack will kill you for looking at it funny. (Usually in DCSS, I find that I should have retreated much sooner than I did.) The game will generally warn you outright if you try to do something considerably dangerous. (Aside from, notably, running headlong into combat when you shouldn't. But, for example, it will warn you if you try to eat a mutagenic corpse, or wield something that will royally peeve your deity.) The artwork is beautiful, and I'm especially fond of the dungeon generator: it's a mix of random layouts and human design, and the result feels a lot more natural and interesting. On some levels, large parts of the level will be random, but a human designed piece might get integrated into it (randomly). You can play online, too: https://crawl.develz.org/ https://crawl.develz.org/ (and I prefer this myself, as you can also spectate other players, and chat w/ them. Occasionally, I learn a thing or two.) The point of the game is to get the Orb of Zot and get out, much like NetHack. Somewhat unlike NetHack, you need 3 runes to get the orb, but there are 15 in the game, making all of them considerably optional, and it's much more difficult to get all. The game has a few challenges beyond that, as well. (I've only escaped w/ the Orb once, as a Gargoyle Fighter.)

thefalcon 10y ago
Spectate mode is fantastic. Watching someone play now: http://crawl.berotato.org:8080/#watch-Scypho http://crawl.berotato.org:8080/#watch-Scypho Scypho: brb spectators its dinner time Scypho: also i am mad fucked Scypho: so i need to think
pmarreck 10y ago
Nice, I knew you could play Nethack in a browser, but not DCSS! Might have to dungeon-dive a bit! Do you know which version I should play? (is "trunk" generally safe? Is there a test suite in the code?) Any tips for noobs?
- kibwen 10y ago

pmoriarty 10y ago

I've been playing Nethack and other roguelikes for well over 20 years. Nethack has to be the one game out of all the games that I've played that I played the longest. As you can probably tell, I love Nethack. DCSS is the game that has made me more or less abandon Nethack to play it instead. It improves on Nethack in so many ways: from the super useful auto-explore, to the beautiful and innovative use of colors, lots and lots of really bizzare and unique gods, beautiful and interesting thematic levels, a Lua scripting interface, and much, much more. I'm seriously impressed with how much the DCSS developers have achieved, and how quickly they've achieved it. It's also telling that Nethack has traditionally had a glacial development cycle, while DCSS development is super active. There are tons of new features, races, levels, and gods in nearly every release, and new releases come out all the time. That said, there are still other things that Nethack does best. The crazy number of things that you can do with items and bodies in Nethack seems deeper than DCSS, as are some of the relationships with one's god in Nethack, and the use of pets (such as training them to steal from shops). Someone told me that a DCSS deverloper motto is "when it doubt, don't do it like Nethack", which is a pity, because they could learn from Nethack and take some of the things it does best and improve on them, instead of stubbornly refusing to be like Nethack. That said, none of this is going to stop me from playing DCSS, which is now by far my favorite rougelike of all. I strongly recommend anyone who has even the remotest interest in rogulikes give DCSS a try, if you've somehow missed the boat and haven't already. Also, playing in ASCII is the one true way to play. ;) You can ssh or telnet in to a server to play, if you want to play online (or watch others play).[1] Or you can download and compile the game itself to play locally on your own machine.[2] Finally, if you ever need help, check out ##crawl on freenode.[3] [1] - https://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/howto https://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/howto [2] - https://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/ https://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/ [3] - https://freenode.net/ https://freenode.net/

chongli 10y ago
I've seen a lot of these threads and without fail the comparison between DCSS and NetHack comes up. I can't remember the last time somebody said they loved NetHack in one of these threads, so kudos to you! Personally, I am one of the rare birds that loves NetHack and just can't stand DCSS. NetHack feels far closer to a proper role-playing game with an actual dungeon master who will listen to your crazy ideas and give you back a result that actually makes sense. DCSS, on the other hand, feels more like an arcade beat-em-up style game to me. I guess it doesn't help that my favourite combo (fulsome distillation and evaporate) was removed from the game a few years ago. Beyond that, I find DCSS really dry. Most of the time you're just mashing the auto-explore key and then bumping into a few enemies or repeatedly casting your best spell at them. For the style of game it is (beat-em-up Roguelike with zero role-playing) I'd much rather play TOME[0], a game that has far more intricate and involved character classes. [0] http://te4.org/ http://te4.org/

phs 10y ago

I've never played DCSS, but after a few nethack ascensions I've found its "chores" (getting the wand, etc) interfere with actually enjoying the parts of the genre I like most: resource management in an unknown world. I suspect DCSS will be a similar experience. For those that feel similarly, I heartily recommend giving brogue[0] a try. It's beautiful, balances many strategies without giving dominance to any (dwarven valkyrie, anyone?) and drops the "schlepping" associated with nethack and related titles. [0]: https://sites.google.com/site/broguegame/ https://sites.google.com/site/broguegame/

paroneayea 10y ago
If you've never tried DCSS, I think you should try it. I think it also mitigates a number of the same things you complained about. The game's built-in manual has a whole section about its game philosophy you're likely to find appealing, especially if you were frustrated with Nethack for those reasons: https://web.archive.org/web/20160304070026/http://crawl.develz.org/other/manual.html#n-philosophy-pas-de-faq Anyway, you should try it!
- phs 10y ago
  Interesting! Glad to hear that they're explicit design goals.

inconshreveable 10y ago

Unlike many other games, DCSS has an explicitly articulated design manifesto explaining the ethos of what is fun and why. It's _amazing_ and you should read it: https://github.com/crawl/crawl/blob/master/crawl-ref/docs/crawl_manual.rst#n-philosophy-pas-de-faq https://github.com/crawl/crawl/blob/master/crawl-ref/docs/cr... I've pulled a few highlights: > Speaking about games in general, wherever there's a no-brainer, that means the development team put a lot of effort into providing a "choice" that's really not an interesting choice at all. And that's a horrible lost opportunity for fun. > Another basic design principle is avoidance of grinding (also known as scumming). These are activities that have low risk, take a lot of time, and bring some reward. This is bad for a game's design because it encourages players to bore themselves. > The interface is radically designed to make gameplay easy - this sounds trivial, but we mean it. All tedious, but necessary, chores should be automated. Examples are long-distance travel, exploration and taking notes. > the joy of discovering something spoily is nice, once. (And disappears before it can start if you feel you need to read spoilers - a legitimate feeling.) The joy of dealing with ever-changing, unexpected and challenging strategic and tactical situations that arise out of transparent rules, on the other hand, is nice again and again.

bhickey 10y ago
crawl dev here! I'm generally pretty dumbstruck by the rest of the team. They're as good or better than professional groups I've worked with. A handful of super devs really drive the project along and we've had a fairly long history to develop over. My own involvement is 7 years, while I think there are others who have been hacking on it since 2005. For a lot of the time dpeg has been our de facto tastemaker/PM.
- inconshreveable 10y ago
  i've been impressed with how well the crawl dev team has maintained the velocity and consistent vision over the many years (5+) that i've followed the project. thank you, and well done! is dpeg the author of that section of the docs?
  - 10y ago

Mizza 10y ago

$ brew cask install Caskroom/cask/dungeon-crawl-stone-soup-console If you were wondering!

xenihn 10y ago

DCSS is the only roguelike that I've been able to sink lots of hours into.

empressplay 10y ago

Some travelers come to a village, carrying nothing more than an empty cooking pot. Upon their arrival, the villagers are unwilling to share any of their food stores with the hungry travelers. Then the travelers go to a stream and fill the pot with water, drop a large stone in it, and place it over a fire. One of the villagers becomes curious and asks what they are doing. The travelers answer that they are making "stone soup", which tastes wonderful, although it still needs a little bit of garnish to improve the flavor, which they are missing. The villager does not mind parting with a few carrots to help them out, so that gets added to the soup. Another villager walks by, inquiring about the pot, and the travelers again mention their stone soup which has not reached its full potential yet. The villager hands them a little bit of seasoning to help them out. More and more villagers walk by, each adding another ingredient. Finally, the stone (being inedible) is removed from the pot, and a delicious and nourishing pot of soup is enjoyed by all. Although the travelers have thus tricked the villagers into sharing their food with them, they have successfully transformed it into a tasty and nutritious meal which they share with the donors.