Apologies, but why even mention “free” and “free-beer” terms the first time someone has a desire to dive in such miracles… or ineffably magnificent work of lore, characters, items, balances… art? How low should you even look at such art to even consider the hecking price almost instantly…?
The title has been in development since the very Crawl and Dungeon Crawl of 1997, 1995, or even before that…
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup
Copyright 1997-2025 Linley Henzell, the dev team, and the contributors Source (License)
Some of the Crawl developers hang out on the #crawl-dev IRC channel on Libera: ircs://irc.libera.chat:6697/#crawl.
The current binaries are cross-platform, support TTY (terminal), web (“WebTiles” or “web-tiles”, former “NetTiles”), and desktop-native (“tiles”; SDL - the library) portals to adventure the universe…
You may self-host any of course, including web-tiles, but due to how authentication is organized since the beginning still, the current version authentication is based on the operating system, and you may want to isolate that in containers nowadays; there are examples.
Some hosts support live-streaming, e.g.: underhound.eu:8080/#lobby
Relatively recently, when someone asked about artwork contributions in the IRC channel, they updated the contribution guide, too!
Submitting artwork
If you want to submit artwork (tiles, icons, splash screens) for consideration, you can link it to us in #crawl-dev, or you can open a github issue, or you can submit a pull request.
If you’re doing tiles art, or splash screen art, then it’s recommended to look at our existing artwork and try to match the general style presented there. This is not a hard-and-fast rule, and clear improvements are always welcome.
Q: Does DCSS accept donations?
The DCSS dev team doesn’t currently accept donations. The online server admins, some of whom are DCSS devs themselves, kindly pay all server costs. See your online server’s lobby page for the admin’s contact info if you’d like to offer them a donation. You can donate to me if you’d like to support my dev work and stream. Source
There have been discussions for release at Steam, too, relatively similar to Dwarf Fortress or Xonotic even have.
I am sorry, but… how may not you even heard about Dungeon Crawl hearing about the genre almost everywhere…
And… again… money? What does “free” mean? How is that even related here…?
Because, if it’s free, you can just try it out, no? Some people (including me) are broke and need to carefully manage their expenses. It often means I wait for months before getting a new game, however much I desire it. A free game though? I can check it out at any moment, as long as I have a time for myself.
It would be nice to live in a naive world where I can just get whatever I want, whenever I want to.
I am sorry, but… how may not you even heard about Dungeon Crawl hearing about the genre almost everywhere…
I’m not sure what you mean by that. Of course I know about Dungeon Crawl and its genre…
It’s a very mixed bag. You can (technically) do a Pacifist Run in BG3 that leans on conversation to keep earning XP in a game that heavily favors combat rewards.
But without prior experience in the story paths, it can be hard to know who can actually be cajoled and who is innately unreconcileable. Lots of NPCs lie or bluff or just bait you into giving up initiative.
You do get more story in dialogue. So if you don’t mind the odd ambush or icy rebuff, I’d say there’s more to diplomacy than just pain.
Congrats. I play a lot of crawl, and have pretty regularly since v0.16 or so. There’s been a lot of changes (there used to be food! Spells made you hungry!) but the core of it remains very good.
At one point I had a win with every species, but they added new ones and removed some since then.
Minotaur Berserker was my first win. Can’t go wrong with screaming and headbutting, I say.
Gargoyle Earth Elementalist was also fun. If you get Shatter online it can delete a lot of stuff outright. You just need another solution for flying stuff and jellies.
I think it’s an Ice spell now, but the one that takes a couple turns and then just kills the nearest creature was amazing. Did the extended endgame with that. Blew up so many pandemonium lords.
I don’t usually do the extended anymore. Hell is, appropriately, unpleasant. Pandemonium isn’t as bad, but there’s always the risk of popping in next to a very bad crowd.
Also the tomb can get fucked.
The ascent with the orb is usually pretty safe, with the occasional heart stopper. I’ve lost at least two dudes on the way up. One gargoyle ate a high damage spell from one of those hell sentinels. Should have blinked or fogged or something. One felid ate a pan lord’s chain lighting that was more than his max health.
Thanks, I had taken an English word and replaced it with Japanese characters, and I didn’t know because I’m Brazilian. But I’m always learning Japanese since I live here. Thank you for correcting me
Jisho.org is a fairly helpful site for finding words like that. Sometimes you have to scroll a bit to find the “loanword” version of a term, but it helps with showing different nuances of translated words when looking them up.
Unfortunately I think it’s EN-JP only, but helpful if you know the English word you want.
This reminds me I’m on my first ascension run in Nethack… I should go kill Yendor.
Edit: eating green slimes turns you into a green slime and kills you?! You learn new ways to die every time. Anyway, I’ll leave your Stone Soup thread alone now and go cry in a corner.
Pathos Nethack Codec (basically Nethack rewrite for mobile support with some gameplay changes) was my second roguelike, after Pixel Dungeon. I was too stupid to search for guides so I played the game without ever knowing that eating certain corpses is always safe. I just kept dying of starvation.
My favorite start was a wizard, I loved figuring out how to use starting rings and scrolls to my advantage.
Yeah I’ve been playing for decades and still learning new things. Today, for instance, I learned that eating green slimes will melt your skin off and is uncurable.
I liked Pixel Dungeon, but there were some balancing issues deeper in the game that put me off it. That was a long time ago. I never got into Stone Soup because I felt like learning another Rogue/NH like game would be too much of a time investment at this point.
In fact I did, come to think of it, try to learn Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, and I adore it. Sadly it’s just open world with no direction, which doesn’t work for me. I need a clearly stated game goal to work towards. But it’s a cool game no doubt.
Well done, my only win was years ago with a Gargoyle Fighter of the Shining One, went all in on shield blocking and armor, no evade. I was told this is a terrible strategy but I don’t know, it’s my only win in many years of playing so it can’t be that bad.
God powers are a lot of fun. It does take a minute to get past the piety hoarding mindset but hey, if you don’t use your powers when they’re useful then you’re more likely to die, and dead means zero piety
I ran most of the game with a ring of evasion on, and my stats show that I dodged almost 3000 points of damage, so I’d say getting some EV is optimal even for dwarves and gargoyles with their low dodging apt.
With that said, in crawl clever play can mitigate many “sub-optimal” decisions and builds which I really love! I’m 100% sure I made several mistakes for this build too. Another roguelike like TOME is much less friendly to sub-optimal builds (at least in my experience).
The main reason I tend to not use gods’ abilities is just that there’s so much you can do in dcss that I sometimes just forget about what I can do. I’m way too fast in my decision making lol
I believe, rings of evasion are generally quite good for tanks, because you can be running around in the clunkiest armor and still get a flat +6 or so to evasion. Same goes for mages and rogues with rings of protection.
But yeah, I’ve also killed so many characters due to hasty decision-making. Just killed an Armataur + Wu Jian run today, because my health was running low and I figured offense is the best defense. I could’ve blinked away no problem. Hell, I could’ve launched a much better offense at practically no cost by using Serpent’s Lash, but nope, just ended up tapping the keys I always tap and hoping for RNGesus to save me.
I figured offense is the best defense. I could’ve blinked away no problem. Hell, I could’ve launched a much better offense at practically no cost by using Serpent’s Lash, but nope, just ended up tapping the keys I always tap and hoping for RNGesus to save me.
I feel this. Splatted a lot of characters because I didn’t decided to just keep hitting/walking away when the situation requires a much more involved solution. At least I die with lots of consumables in my pocket :)
But horror isn’t CoD. I will never be that big. But Konami thinks it can be, and will either sacrifice the quality of the games in order to appeal to a wider audience, or keep the games as scary as they are, and fail to meet their own unrealistic expectations.
The scariness of the games is an additional complication that AAA publishers don’t seem to get.
A bad Call of Duty still lets you click heads and scream slurs in a match lobby.
But make a horror game that isn’t scary? Or even the wrong amount, or type of scary? Complete failure.
If you target hardcore horror fans, your game has to be good enough to scare them, and you’ll never be able to sell to everyone. And if you can’t scare the hardcore fans, you need to be interesting enough for the casual fans to buy in. Getting both is near impossible, which is why indies do so well in the genre. It’s REALLY hard to make horror for everyone. Usually, a horror game interests only a subset of gamers.
And when you have a franchise, every new game needs to figure out how to scare people who have played the previous games. Or else interest them in other ways.
Horror is really easy to overplay. If your game is too long, the scares stop working because the player gets used to them. If sequels just do the same thing as the last game, entire games can stop being effective. And once you start trying to reinvent things every game, they can end up losing their identity (see RE5 and 6).
Doing this every 12 months? Just no.
Resident Evil is an excellent example. Capcom has tried and failed to increase release frequency, but titles that actually sell are about two or three years apart no matter what they seem to do. And that is WITH their new formula of using two completely different styles to reduce the sameness of the titles.
If Konami wants to release more games, they should tap their other IPs, not oversaturate the already crowded horror genre even more.
I feel like another option for horror is to spam the effort. Literally have 5 to 10 studios all making horror games, with a fraction of the budget. One of the big successes in horror is that some of the best ones were made with large restrictions on technology, effects, budget, etc. If you search the “Survival horror” tag on Steam, there’s a pretty large wash of games succeeding in the space now.
You could also note how many “horror-focused” Resident Evil games go through some form of reset where you lose your buildup of equipment, or change pace. They recognize that the genre isn’t well-suited for a constant escalation of power until you fight god, the way JRPGs do. Thus, people who enjoy those games are more likely to munch through them like doritos. Many streamers even have nights where they will buy some half-dozen of the games on Steam and just keep going through them.
Not exactly: Make it less white (maybe a few shades darker) Or give the player themself the option to change the color of their choice (also colorblind friendly)
If you just discovered Steam Link and you’re not married to it, you could use Sunshine as your gamestreaming host and Moonlight as the client. you can set it up so that you can launch Steam Big Picture on your host and play any games that are listed under your steam, even if they are non-steam games.
Apparently the dev got banned. The reason is unclear and I would love to understand the other side but this is on their Github.
I got kicked from Moonlight and Sunshine’s Discord server and banned from Sunshine’s GitHub repo literally for helping people out. This is what I got for finding a bug, opened an issue, getting no response, troubleshoot myself, fixed the issue myself, shared it by PR to the main repo hoping my efforts can help someone else during the maintenance gap.
and depending on your playstyle may require multiple playthroughs
I’m not too deep into undertale, since I only played it casually once, but aren’t there at least 2 endings that would require you to start completely over from the beginning? Meaning it would be literally impossible to get all endings without multiple playthroughs?
You could get two endings in one playthrough if you either chose to play a certain way, or had foreknowledge of one of either of the two extreme ending’s requirements.
This may go without saying, but if you’re enjoying starbound you’ll probably have more fun with terraria. For years I wanted starbound to be a spiritual successor and generally better game, but it simply isn’t.
I 100% terraria when i was younger (or, well, got all the achievements and beat all the bosses) and it kind of burnt me out on terraria. I have always wanted to do another playthrough but it really took it out of me and i can’t find the motivation to sit down and play through it all again
bin.pol.social
Aktywne