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…?
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)
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
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
i just went and did the tutorial, which i avoid like the plague due to being drained by it.
Yup. God, Starbound has so much missed potential by focusing so heavily on a bad story. It’d be one thing if it were there in the background, but you’re basically forced to play through it every single time. The dungeons are extremely repetitive (this would have been a great chance for some procedural generation), the boss fights are way too easy, and the whole portion of the game where you just search for relics to scan isn’t fun or interesting at all. Not a great design decision for a sandbox game that should otherwise have a ton of replayability.
I think the story is a point where people unfairly criticize the game, personally. After the tutorial dungeon you don’t have to engage with it whatsoever.
The parts where you have to search for relics between each dungeon are meant to encourage exploration and remove the pressure of the story. It’s the game saying “now go do whatever and have fun!” and you make progress toward the story just by playing normally, as you come across settlements belonging to the particular species you need to scan.
If your goal is to speedrun the story and drop the game, then yeah those parts are annoying, but if you want a sandbox game where you are free to do anything you want, then I don’t really understand why people complain so much about those parts of the main story.
Honestly that’s a fair point. It’s been a long while since I’ve played Starbound, and even longer since I played it vanilla. Forced is definitely not the word I should have used, but I do remember feeling constantly pushed towards completing the story because I enjoy fighting bosses. I also remember genuinely hating engaging with it any time I did. Nothing like searching for an hour for floran relics only to find a planet with two less than I needed. The game desperately needs a way to track down a specific species’ settlement. It just wasn’t fun in the slightest, and I would have preferred no story over what the game got. Boss fights are fun (even if I think most of Starbound’s are too easy), and it sucks that you’re forced to progress through the exact same lame and repetitive repeat of the story between each boss.
The tutorial dungeon is the worst though. A true pinnacle of terrible sandbox game design. It ain’t short, it’s the exact same dungeon every single time with the same enemies and loot, and it’s strictly required to make any progress whatsoever.
No disagreement with me there, I think the linear dungeons were a poor choice and the game would benefit from a way to track settlements by species.
Personally I dislike boss fights in these sorts of games (the main reason I don’t like Terraria anymore is the focus on bosses, and everything you do is just to prep for the next boss), so that’s likely a big part of why the story doesn’t bother me since I just mostly ignore it or do it passively. But for someone who enjoys the bosses and seeks them out, I can see why it’s more frustrating.
But I completely agree that the tutorial dungeon is the worst. I hate doing it whenever I play vanilla to introduce a friend to the game, and the “skip intro” option on character creation really should skip right to after the dungeon. Or alternatively it could have been designed to be more fun or interesting on repeat playthroughs
The relics are probably the furthest i’ve ever gotten in the story. I like the settlement portion, but when i get to the story it’s just a slog. If there’s something I absolutely need from it, i just use console commands to skip as much as possible. It’s really the weak point in the game
You can run Moonlight on your Steam Link and stream anything you want. I haven’t used it in awhile, but I remember it being less laggy than streaming through Steam.
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Aktywne