10 ms·

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup

217 points by 1_player 5y ago

Naac 5y ago
I love FLOSS games. 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.
- phendrenad2 5y ago
  I call these kinds of games (roguelikes, terraria, minecraft) "learning curve games", because your peak enjoyment of the game is when you have fought your way up the learning curve about halfway. Once you know everything about the game, it becomes boring. And until you get to that halfway point, it's a lot of trial and error (or looking things up in wikis).
  - slothtrop 5y ago
    Learning curve aside, most of the gameplay loop in this and most roguelikes is movement / auto-explore, ramming into enemies and healing as necessary. Far less of the "strategic" game people make it out to be, though you can spend time tinkering if you want. Brogue tries to rectify this with more tactical play on smaller maps at the outset - it's nicer but fundamentally you end up doing the same thing. 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.
    - Naac 5y ago
      Maybe there's a slash and shoot game with the random generation aspect and pausing/unpausing of a rouguelike? That would be cool, especially if it was FLOSS.
cartoonworld 5y ago
DCSS is one of the best managed roguelikes out there. The Webtiles client has been getting some new art tiles in the trunk branch as well. You can spectate on any player's game more of less, I have enjoyed peeking at high level play on some of the bigger servers
- 1_player 5y ago
  Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup and Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead are the best roguelikes I keep coming back to after years, and getting full-on obsessed for a few weeks. 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.
  - publicola1990 5y ago
    Caves of Qud is good as well.
    - hypertele-Xii 5y ago
      Since we're recommending, Cogmind [1] is awesome. [1] https://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/ https://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/
germanjoey 5y ago
The state of DCSS is interesting because it's like a software Ship of Theseus. It's been actively hacked (and slashed) upon for so long that it is hard to claim that its the same game, even if the git commit history shows a direct lineage otherwise. Or, at least, the aspects of the game that I once so greatly admired (which I wrote about here [1]) are longer present. Only a superficial similarity remains. A very opinionated group of core developers with a minimalist design philosophy has driven the project for years now, and the game now is not the game I knew. [1] https://rhizzone.net/articles/crawl/ https://rhizzone.net/articles/crawl/
- gota 5y ago
  Can you give a short summary of the changes? I'm not familiar with the current state of the game
  - 1_player 5y ago
    The blog has a list of all recent trunk and released changes: http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/blog http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/blog 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
    - not2b 5y ago
      I haven't played rogue/hack/nethack games in a couple of decades, so I'm out of it. But: no need to eat? That was a key part of the game (though the cannibalistic part of that was sometimes weird). Cursed items, on the other hand, were a PITA so I wouldn't miss that part.
uglygoblin 5y ago
This is one of those games I play intensely for a few weeks every year before forcing myself to stop. It has so much depth and is so addicting. The spectator mode on the web version is fun and I learn a lot watching other players.
StavrosK 5y ago
Ooh, I'd love to play this again but the tile version for Android is a dead link, does anyone know why?
1_player 5y ago
I saw a few of you playing your first game and making sense of the commands. A quick cheat sheet: * `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 http://www.ultraviolent4.com/guide.html
- catern 5y ago
  The built-in tutorial is, I think, the best way to learn the game. After that, playing with hints mode on (as the tutorial suggests).
mrfusion 5y ago
Is there something similar for the iPhone?
throwawaw 5y ago
I've been playing this game for 15 years now. Somehow, it just doesn't get old. 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.
- zeofig 5y ago
  The tournaments kick ass. Agree that challenges make for some fun gameplay. Playing in a tournament with a random team I found really increased my enjoyment of the game.
swayvil 5y ago
I play this game in spurts. It's the only game I play. I would prefer that it was infinite. But that's me
- hypertele-Xii 5y ago
  I have the opposite sentiment, I wish it was much, much shorter. So much of it is just repetitive filler.
  - swayvil 5y ago
    I know what you mean. I guess there's just enough novelty to keep me going. 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.
  - slothtrop 5y ago
    This is why I played Brogue, and even then the gameplay loop is mostly repetitive in nature.
michaericalribo 5y ago
I just finished the book Dungeon Hacks by David Craddock, which is a fun history of the early days of roguelikes—encompassing Rogue itself, Nethack, Angband, Moria, and the like…roguelikes had never “clicked” for me, though I wanted keenly to “get” DCSS when I’d played it previously. 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 :)
daniel-thompson 5y ago
How does this game relate to nethack, if at all?
- galimaufry 5y ago
  It's kind of the anti-nethack. Explicitly not simulation-y, big effort to be playable without spoilers, character building is de-emphasized.
- schoen 5y ago
  I was once going to write 20,000 words or so on this question, but haven't gotten to it yet. 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...)
pubby 5y ago
Here's a glassdoor review: 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.
- samstave 5y ago
  *>prolific team members rage quit in profanity-laced exits* I love this sentence...
- hypertele-Xii 5y ago
  Malcolm Rose Gaming [1] who holds the longest win streak record in DCSS loves to rant about the developers on his streams. [1] https://www.youtube.com/c/MalcolmRoseGaming/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/MalcolmRoseGaming/videos
  - 1_player 5y ago
    Ah yeah, the guy that got banned because he couldn't create the team White Lives Matter, rants at large about questionable political matters and shits on any decision the developers make because he wasn't consulted on any change, created an official-looking website for the game at dungeoncrawlstonesoup.com, with crypto donations links directly to him, and a video in which he blames the dev for being mistreated and persecuted. He's a great Crawl player, but happy to see the back of him on the subreddit.
    - moomin 5y ago
      And whilst he is a great player, that win streak is mostly a record because no-one else wants to play DDAr consecutively forever just for questionable bragging rights.
aetherspawn 5y ago
Honestly, I can't figure out where are the full list of controls. I have been crawling the wiki/site/game for ages. Edit: scroll down on this thread for a small list.
- catern 5y ago
  There's a built-in tutorial, that's the best way to learn.
- kibwen 5y ago
  You can press ? in-game to view the help, including a list of controls.
  - aetherspawn 5y ago
    I was mashing H for help! Thank you.
- MiddleEndian 5y ago
  While the built-in tutorial is great for the basics, someone made this graphic and it's very useful: https://i.imgur.com/Yzp0qS3.png 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.
valyagolev 5y ago
The gateway drug into real roguelikes would be Brogue. It’s beautiful, very well designed, focused, and very true to the roots. https://sites.google.com/site/broguegame/ 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.
dang 5y ago
Some past threads: Behind the Scenes on Retrofitting Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup's Random Seeding - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19596504 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17460667 - July 2018 (54 comments) Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13126045 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 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2549531 - May 2011 (1 comment)
e12e 5y ago
It's kinda funny - I played a lot of moria on the Amiga - which had a very nice tile set. Then I spent long, dark hours in angband on Linux, with no tiles (there are and was tiled variants for Linux - I just played the text tiled ones). 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.
thayne 5y ago
I recently discovered this game, and am really enjoying it. I've played roguelikes such as nethack, angband and even rogue itself. Although I'm not really very good at them and haven't ever won any of them. But at least right now stone soup is my favorite. It's less tedious and grindy. There are commands to wait for health to recover, and to auto-explore. I don't have to worry about searching for traps and hidden doors. I don't have to worry about running out of food. But it is still plenty challenging.
thom 5y ago
Not having screenshots obviously available is like these programming language homepages that don’t show you any example code.
- 1_player 5y ago
  http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/screenshots http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/screenshots
dave333 5y ago
Played the original rogue in the 1980s and dabbled in various versions nethack, angband, moria over the years but they always seemed too complex for my simple brain. I prefered the original rogue, because I could usually get to level 18 before the Umber Hulks got me - even fighting them in a corridor. WIll give this a go - I like the mouse capability although my fingers can move me around a dungeon using hjkl almost as fast.
- bhaak 5y ago
  If DCSS is still too complex for you, give Brogue a try. It's basically a reimagining of the original Rogue with modern design principles applied.
ajkjk 5y ago
I don't even remember the mechanics of this game, but a few years ago I obsessively grinded out a small personal achievement: a DUHZ run where you only go into dungeon, depths, hell, and zot. That took a _long_ time. I don't even remember why it was difficult, just that it was really hard and I was very pleased with myself after. Would recommend.
MiddleEndian 5y ago
As a fan of the game, I always wondered why there wasn't an infographic drawing lines between desired species and desired roles in DCSS. Having made one, I found out why. It's not really readable by humans. But it works as an interactive chart! https://www.middleendian.com/dcss https://www.middleendian.com/dcss
Ntrails 5y ago
Dear submitter, 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...

217 points by 1_player 5y ago

Naac 5y ago

I love FLOSS games. 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.

phendrenad2 5y ago
I call these kinds of games (roguelikes, terraria, minecraft) "learning curve games", because your peak enjoyment of the game is when you have fought your way up the learning curve about halfway. Once you know everything about the game, it becomes boring. And until you get to that halfway point, it's a lot of trial and error (or looking things up in wikis).
- slothtrop 5y ago
  Learning curve aside, most of the gameplay loop in this and most roguelikes is movement / auto-explore, ramming into enemies and healing as necessary. Far less of the "strategic" game people make it out to be, though you can spend time tinkering if you want. Brogue tries to rectify this with more tactical play on smaller maps at the outset - it's nicer but fundamentally you end up doing the same thing. 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.
  - Naac 5y ago
    Maybe there's a slash and shoot game with the random generation aspect and pausing/unpausing of a rouguelike? That would be cool, especially if it was FLOSS.

cartoonworld 5y ago

DCSS is one of the best managed roguelikes out there. The Webtiles client has been getting some new art tiles in the trunk branch as well. You can spectate on any player's game more of less, I have enjoyed peeking at high level play on some of the bigger servers

1_player 5y ago
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup and Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead are the best roguelikes I keep coming back to after years, and getting full-on obsessed for a few weeks. 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.
- publicola1990 5y ago
  Caves of Qud is good as well.
  - hypertele-Xii 5y ago
    Since we're recommending, Cogmind [1] is awesome. [1] https://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/ https://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/

germanjoey 5y ago

The state of DCSS is interesting because it's like a software Ship of Theseus. It's been actively hacked (and slashed) upon for so long that it is hard to claim that its the same game, even if the git commit history shows a direct lineage otherwise. Or, at least, the aspects of the game that I once so greatly admired (which I wrote about here [1]) are longer present. Only a superficial similarity remains. A very opinionated group of core developers with a minimalist design philosophy has driven the project for years now, and the game now is not the game I knew. [1] https://rhizzone.net/articles/crawl/ https://rhizzone.net/articles/crawl/

gota 5y ago
Can you give a short summary of the changes? I'm not familiar with the current state of the game
- 1_player 5y ago
  The blog has a list of all recent trunk and released changes: http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/blog http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/blog 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
  - not2b 5y ago
    I haven't played rogue/hack/nethack games in a couple of decades, so I'm out of it. But: no need to eat? That was a key part of the game (though the cannibalistic part of that was sometimes weird). Cursed items, on the other hand, were a PITA so I wouldn't miss that part.

uglygoblin 5y ago

This is one of those games I play intensely for a few weeks every year before forcing myself to stop. It has so much depth and is so addicting. The spectator mode on the web version is fun and I learn a lot watching other players.

StavrosK 5y ago

Ooh, I'd love to play this again but the tile version for Android is a dead link, does anyone know why?

1_player 5y ago

I saw a few of you playing your first game and making sense of the commands. A quick cheat sheet: * `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 http://www.ultraviolent4.com/guide.html

catern 5y ago
The built-in tutorial is, I think, the best way to learn the game. After that, playing with hints mode on (as the tutorial suggests).

mrfusion 5y ago

Is there something similar for the iPhone?

throwawaw 5y ago

I've been playing this game for 15 years now. Somehow, it just doesn't get old. 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.

zeofig 5y ago
The tournaments kick ass. Agree that challenges make for some fun gameplay. Playing in a tournament with a random team I found really increased my enjoyment of the game.

swayvil 5y ago

I play this game in spurts. It's the only game I play. I would prefer that it was infinite. But that's me

hypertele-Xii 5y ago
I have the opposite sentiment, I wish it was much, much shorter. So much of it is just repetitive filler.
- swayvil 5y ago
  I know what you mean. I guess there's just enough novelty to keep me going. 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.
- slothtrop 5y ago
  This is why I played Brogue, and even then the gameplay loop is mostly repetitive in nature.

michaericalribo 5y ago

I just finished the book Dungeon Hacks by David Craddock, which is a fun history of the early days of roguelikes—encompassing Rogue itself, Nethack, Angband, Moria, and the like…roguelikes had never “clicked” for me, though I wanted keenly to “get” DCSS when I’d played it previously. 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 :)

daniel-thompson 5y ago

How does this game relate to nethack, if at all?

galimaufry 5y ago
It's kind of the anti-nethack. Explicitly not simulation-y, big effort to be playable without spoilers, character building is de-emphasized.
schoen 5y ago
I was once going to write 20,000 words or so on this question, but haven't gotten to it yet. 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...)

pubby 5y ago

Here's a glassdoor review: 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.

samstave 5y ago
*>prolific team members rage quit in profanity-laced exits* I love this sentence...
hypertele-Xii 5y ago
Malcolm Rose Gaming [1] who holds the longest win streak record in DCSS loves to rant about the developers on his streams. [1] https://www.youtube.com/c/MalcolmRoseGaming/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/MalcolmRoseGaming/videos
- 1_player 5y ago
  Ah yeah, the guy that got banned because he couldn't create the team White Lives Matter, rants at large about questionable political matters and shits on any decision the developers make because he wasn't consulted on any change, created an official-looking website for the game at dungeoncrawlstonesoup.com, with crypto donations links directly to him, and a video in which he blames the dev for being mistreated and persecuted. He's a great Crawl player, but happy to see the back of him on the subreddit.
  - moomin 5y ago
    And whilst he is a great player, that win streak is mostly a record because no-one else wants to play DDAr consecutively forever just for questionable bragging rights.

aetherspawn 5y ago

Honestly, I can't figure out where are the full list of controls. I have been crawling the wiki/site/game for ages. Edit: scroll down on this thread for a small list.

catern 5y ago
There's a built-in tutorial, that's the best way to learn.
kibwen 5y ago
You can press ? in-game to view the help, including a list of controls.
- aetherspawn 5y ago
  I was mashing H for help! Thank you.
MiddleEndian 5y ago
While the built-in tutorial is great for the basics, someone made this graphic and it's very useful: https://i.imgur.com/Yzp0qS3.png 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.

valyagolev 5y ago

The gateway drug into real roguelikes would be Brogue. It’s beautiful, very well designed, focused, and very true to the roots. https://sites.google.com/site/broguegame/ 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.

dang 5y ago

Some past threads: Behind the Scenes on Retrofitting Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup's Random Seeding - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19596504 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17460667 - July 2018 (54 comments) Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13126045 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 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2549531 - May 2011 (1 comment)

e12e 5y ago

It's kinda funny - I played a lot of moria on the Amiga - which had a very nice tile set. Then I spent long, dark hours in angband on Linux, with no tiles (there are and was tiled variants for Linux - I just played the text tiled ones). 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.

thayne 5y ago

I recently discovered this game, and am really enjoying it. I've played roguelikes such as nethack, angband and even rogue itself. Although I'm not really very good at them and haven't ever won any of them. But at least right now stone soup is my favorite. It's less tedious and grindy. There are commands to wait for health to recover, and to auto-explore. I don't have to worry about searching for traps and hidden doors. I don't have to worry about running out of food. But it is still plenty challenging.

thom 5y ago

Not having screenshots obviously available is like these programming language homepages that don’t show you any example code.

1_player 5y ago
http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/screenshots http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/screenshots

dave333 5y ago

Played the original rogue in the 1980s and dabbled in various versions nethack, angband, moria over the years but they always seemed too complex for my simple brain. I prefered the original rogue, because I could usually get to level 18 before the Umber Hulks got me - even fighting them in a corridor. WIll give this a go - I like the mouse capability although my fingers can move me around a dungeon using hjkl almost as fast.

bhaak 5y ago
If DCSS is still too complex for you, give Brogue a try. It's basically a reimagining of the original Rogue with modern design principles applied.

ajkjk 5y ago

I don't even remember the mechanics of this game, but a few years ago I obsessively grinded out a small personal achievement: a DUHZ run where you only go into dungeon, depths, hell, and zot. That took a _long_ time. I don't even remember why it was difficult, just that it was really hard and I was very pleased with myself after. Would recommend.

MiddleEndian 5y ago

As a fan of the game, I always wondered why there wasn't an infographic drawing lines between desired species and desired roles in DCSS. Having made one, I found out why. It's not really readable by humans. But it works as an interactive chart! https://www.middleendian.com/dcss https://www.middleendian.com/dcss

Ntrails 5y ago

Dear submitter, 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...