Shops only sell items they don't buy, no matter how many lovely items you've picked up from dead monsters. Monster generation slows down once the player has cleared a level, and so there's no point in hanging around for more experience since the player has to eat, they have a reason not to. For this reason, limits are always in place. The main goal of the makers is to discourage grinding, which they feel bores the player. Where Crawl differs from most roguelikes is in its philosophy, which is explained in the manual. The plot is minimal: the player's task is to go to the bottom of the dungeon, get the Orb of Zot, and escape.
The game has a similar fantasy setting to most roguelikes, having been inspired by most of the roguelikes of the time: elves, dwarves, and orcs all make an appearance, weapons are medieval, and magic is magic. The dev team has made avoiding cheap shots one of their highest priorities, and instant kills or unavoidable deaths are nearly unheard of. Also, (with the sole exception of statdeath from artifacts) identifying items by using them very rarely causes any life-threatening consequences, and nothing other than weapons, armor, and jewelery can be cursed. Picture a Nethack game in which the most powerful healing potion in the game recovers about 25 HP, you can't trust your god to save you from anything, there is no Elbereth, all of your spells can backfire and hurt you, only certain species and rare mutations can provide permanent resistances, and, most importantly, there's no amulet of life saving or wand of wishing to save you anymore!ĭespite all this, there are two areas where it's actually much more merciful than most roguelikes: very few hazards can even weaken your equipment, and none can destroy outright anything other than scrolls and potions. It is still updated as of 2012, with new versions released every few months. Not wanting to waste the game's potential, a group of people made an open source fork called Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup (look up Stone soup on Wikipedia if you feel that's an odd title), and their version is now dominant (similar to the way Hack became Nethack). It was updated a few times but development stopped in the early 2000s. The original was Linley's Dungeon Crawl, made by Linley Henzell in the late 1990s. (Or, more precisely, two games - one an open-source fork of the other.) PAGES WILL BE DELETED OTHERWISE IF THEY ARE MISSING BASIC MARKUP.ĭungeon Crawl, or Crawl for short, is a Roguelike game. DON'T MAKE PAGES MANUALLY UNLESS A TEMPLATE IS BROKEN, AND REPORT IT THAT IS THE CASE. THIS SHOULD BE WORKING NOW, REPORT ANY ISSUES TO Janna2000, SelfCloak or RRabbit42. The Trope workshop specific templates can then be removed and it will be regarded as a regular trope page after being moved to the Main namespace. All new trope pages will be made with the "Trope Workshop" found on the "Troper Tools" menu and worked on until they have at least three examples.Pages that don't do this will be subject to deletion, with or without explanation. All new pages should use the preloadable templates feature on the edit page to add the appropriate basic page markup. All images MUST now have proper attribution, those who neglect to assign at least the "fair use" licensing to an image may have it deleted.Failure to do so may result in deletion of contributions and blocks of users who refuse to learn to do so.