Score

Version 0.31: This article may not be up to date for the latest stable release of Crawl.

Your score is determined at the end of the game, win or lose. It is then recorded for posterity on the high score table (along with your species, background, character level, Dungeon level, and cause of death).

Score Calculation

Your final score is based on four factors:

• The total amount of experience you collected.
• The number of runes you collected.
• The number of gems collected (even if destroyed later).
• If you escaped with the Orb of Zot, the number of turns your game took.

In order of significance, runes > turns > gems > XP, assuming you escaped with the orb.

Experience Score

The amount of points added based on your XP is not capped, but has diminishing returns, eventually only giving 10% after 3 million exp:

• 0.7 * experience points for the first 250,000 experience points;
• 0.4 * experience points for the next 750,000 experience points (up to 1,000,000);
• 0.2 * experience points for the next 2,000,000 experience points (up to 3,000,000);
• 0.1 * experience points thereafter.

See the XL article for how experience points correlate with experience level.

Note that you still gain experience after reaching level 27, up to about 9 million XP. This is a minor part of the total score for a winning game, usually less than 10%. However, in a non-winning game, it usually accounts for the majority of the total score.

Runes and Turns

Firstly, you get 12,000 * number of runes + 1,000 * (number of runes)^2 points, regardless of whether you won.

In addition to the above, if you escape with the Orb of Zot, you get 254,000 points for the Orb and an additional 2,000 points for each rune.

If you escape with the Orb, you then get a bonus of 6,250,000,000 * number of runes^2 / turns. This is where the vast majority of points come from. Therefore, it's best to complete games as quickly as possible with as many runes as possible if one wishes to maximize their score.

Assuming you grabbed all 15 runes:

Turns	Score
20k	70,312,500
25k	56,250,000
50k	28,125,000
75k	18,175,000
100k	14,062,500
125k	11,250,000
150k	9,375,000
200k	7,031,250
250k	5,625,000
300k	4,687,500

Gems

For each gem you've picked up:

• 10,000 points are added if you didn't win the game.
• 100,000 points are added if you won the game.

It does not matter if the gem timer runs out after you found the gem - if you've picked up the gem at all, you keep the points no matter what.

Gems are only available if you have low turn count. Since a high score run will minimize turns, anyways, you might as well pick up any gems on the way. The score bonus often makes up for the lost time picking up the gem.

Highest scores online

The high scores list can be found here.

The current highest score, 201,606,281 points, is held by Sapher. It was a Meteoran Earth Elementalist of Cheibriados, winning with 15 runes in 0.29.1 in 7022 turns. This game was played on December 20, 2023 - January 3, 2024. This result is 1449 (!) turns better than the previous world record, enPassant's MeEE of Chei.

• Meteorae have a strict turn count requirement, but have many traits to counteract it. They have amazing aptitudes and regenerate extremely quickly whenever you explore tiles. As high score runs minimize turns anyway, players can use all their turn-saving features with little downside.
• Earth Magic gives access to many useful spells, such as Passwall, Statue Form, and Borgnjor's Vile Clutch. Also, having Shatter online is crucial for breaking walls and inflicting full-screen AoE damage.

Currently, the most popular gods for high score games are Cheibriados and Kikubaaqudgha:

• Chei increases the time per movement, but not turns per movement. Therefore, each step taken regenerates more HP and MP per turn.
• Kiku provides Necromancy spells and a way to create an army of undead, which can deal with all your enemies for you.

Offline games are not included for the purposes of high scores. While games in explore mode or wizard mode are not scored, this is not enough to prevent foul play. Offline games display their seed, meaning players could look ahead in a different game to see the layout of the entire Dungeon. In addition, there's no way to guarantee that the source code of the game, or the morgue of the game, was not modified to change the way the game works or how it is scored.

The true highest score of any game played online is 1,859,332,704 by edsrzf, but a bug caused the game's scoring to use a Sprint scoring instead.

Dungeon Sprint

By default, Dungeon Sprint uses the same formula as a regular game. Since they tend to be much shorter, the scores tend to be higher (for how many runes you've obtained). However, each individual sprint may have its own unique scoring methods. For example, meatsprint calculates score by turns, turns * 100000, doubling that if you've won.

While impossible to reach outside of a Sprint, your score has a hard cap of 2,147,483,647 points, or the 32-bit signed integer limit.

See Also

• Speed running - like a high score, but with time instead. Tips on low turn runs in general.

History

• In 0.31, gems were added as score-increasing items.
• Prior to 0.16, high scores were capped at 99,999,999 points (at that time, nobody had reached it yet).
• Prior to 0.15, the score was affected by gold. Each piece of gold was worth 1 point (capped at 1,000,000).
• Prior to 0.9, items in your inventory contributed to score.