Strength

Version 0.12: This article may not be up to date for the latest stable release of Crawl.

Strength (or STR) is one of a character's three main attributes, along with dexterity and intelligence.

Strength affects the following:

• Slightly increases accuracy and damage in combat (heavy weapons with a high strength weight benefit slightly more). Also reduces attack delay for launchers. See weapon damage and ranged combat for details.
• Increases constriction damage.
• Increases your carrying capacity by 25 per point.
• Having less than 3 times as much strength as your body armour's base evasion penalty effectively increases the base penalty by 1 per point of strength short for the purpose of calculating AEVP (affects spell success and melee accuracy, but not evasion). For example, you need 18 strength to avoid extra penalties from plate armour, since it has a base evasion penalty of -6. If you wear plate armour with only 15 strength, it's like having an evasion penalty of -9 for the purposes of spellcasting and melee, but not for dodging.
• Slightly decreases body armour's penalty to dodging. Dexterity is a much more efficient way to raise your EV, however.
• Slightly increases your SH bonus with shields or large shields.
• Increases the chance of doing auxiliary attacks.
• Increases the chance of doing retaliatory headbutts when you are a minotaur.
• Increases the range of large rocks.

More dexterity is almost always more useful than more strength if you have enough strength for your armour (and more intelligence is almost always better than either one if you are ever going to cast spells). The damage increase from strength is very small and not as good as the evasion boost from dexterity, even in heavy armour.

If your strength is ever reduced to 0 or lower, you will eventually suffer stat death.

History

In 0.13, the weapon damage bonus strength provides will be doubled.