Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup - Gameplay

Gameplay

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is a roguelike game where the player creates a character and guides it through a diverse branching dungeon, mostly consisting of persistent levels, full of monsters and items, with the goal of retrieving at least 3 of the 15 "runes of Zot" located there, fetching the Orb of Zot, and escaping alive.

Gameplay is designed to provide interesting strategic and tactical choices within a balanced game; to offer replayability based on random dungeon generation; to make the game accessible and enjoyable without deep knowledge of its internal mechanics; and to present a friendly user interface that can optionally automate several tasks like exploration and searching for previously seen items. Conversely, the developer team seeks to avoid providing incentives for mindlessly repeating boring actions and providing illusory gameplay choices where one alternative is always superior.

The dungeon features 27 main levels, but all the objective items are situated on the bottom of thematic dungeon branches: the Snake Pits, the Slime Pits, the merfolk-populated Shoals, the Vaults, the mummy-infested Tomb, the four Hells and the demonic Pandemonium, with the orb at the bottom of the draconic-themed Realm of Zot; the dungeon also contains the Lair of Beasts, the Orcish Mines, Elven Halls, Crypt and Hall of Blades which reward loot.

Most levels are randomly generated to maximize variety, while the levels containing the objective items are randomly chosen between several challenging, manually-designed layouts, which usually contain random elements, and which are authored in a Crawl-specific language incorporating Lua scripting. Randomly generated levels may contain randomly chosen manually designed fragments called "vaults", as well as portals to special manually designed mini-levels called "portal vaults".

Characters are determined primarily by their species, their background and their religion. Character advancement is based on experience points gained by defeating monsters, which increase both an experience level, and a set of skills that the player decides to focus on, which consists of melee weapon, ranged weapon, magic and auxiliary skills.

The species choice determines the aptitudes of the character for each of the skills, which represent how much experience is needed to raise the skill to higher levels, and adds species-specific abilities. In the 0.10 version 24 species are available, from those with little deviation from the common mechanics such as Humans, High Elves and Orcs, to species such as Deep Dwarves, Mummies, Vampires, Felids and Octopodes which are characterized by special gameplay mechanics giving them a unique flavor.

The background choice instead determines the starting skills and equipment, with 28 choices available in the 0.10 version, including for instance Fighters, Berserkers, Wizards, Necromancers, Elementalists, Priests, Healers, Assassins, Hunters and Arcane Marksmen; unlike species choice, background choice only affects the start of the game, and the player is free to pursue any skills and use any equipment.

Some backgrounds also start with a fictional religion, and in general it is possible to acquire or change the character's religion once the appropriate altar is found; in the 0.10 version 15 gods are available, and the choice of the god to worship deeply impacts gameplay, because each god rewards and punishes a different set of actions, and offers a specific set of abilities and gifts inspired by original lore. Some gods offer enhancements to existing play styles, such as Okawaru gifting weapons and boosting combat, Sif Muna gifting spell books and extra MP regeneration, while others force unusual demands on the players in exchange for significant bonuses, like Cheibriados who wants devotees to move slowly and Ashenzari limiting the ability to swap equipment in return for divinations and skill boosts, and Xom, who is the DCSS equivalent of the trickster god archetype.