Skill

Version 0.33: This article is up to date for the latest stable release of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.

Skills represent your character's effectiveness in offensive, defensive, and magical disciplines. Starting skill levels depend on character species and background. As characters earn experience, the XP is spread across different skills, according to the distribution specified on the Skill Screen (m). Species aptitudes will make certain skills easier or harder to train. Skill levels are capped at 27.

Every species is rated from -5 to +11 in each skill, with higher scores yielding faster skill progress. Training skills with poor aptitudes is possible, but notably slower.

Skill Types

Skills can be divided into three categories:

Offense

• Fighting: Improves melee damage, melee accuracy, and max HP.
• Weapon skills: Improve damage, accuracy, and attack speed with a weapon group. Training a weapon skill also gives a bonus to any skills that cross-train with it.
  • Strength-based: Damage scales with strength:
    • Maces & Flails: Maces, flails, and whips. The most straightforward weapons. (Cross-trains with Axes and Staves)
    • Axes: Axes. These weapons are able to cleave. (Cross-trains with Maces & Flails and Polearms)
    • Polearms: Spears, tridents, etc. These weapons are able to reach. (Cross-trains with Axes and Staves)
    • Staves: Quarterstaves, lajatangs, and magical staves. (Cross-trains with Maces & Flails and Polearms)
    • Unarmed Combat: Fighting without a wielded weapon. Most auxiliary attacks are not improved.
    • Throwing: Stones, darts, boomerangs, javelins and large rocks. Also increases the success chance of atropa and datura darts.
  • Dexterity-based: Damage scales with dexterity:
    • Short Blades: Daggers, short swords, rapiers etc. (Cross-trains with Long Blades)
    • Long Blades: Swords. (Cross-trains with Short Blades)
    • Ranged Weapons: Bows, crossbows, and slings.

Defense

• Armour: Improves the AC bonus from wearing armour (more effective with heavier armour). Somewhat reduces the impact of armour encumbrance penalties.
• Dodging: Improves EV. More effective with lighter armour and higher dexterity.
• Shields: Improves the SH bonus from wearing a shield. Reduces and eliminates the impact of shield EV and spell success penalties.
• Stealth: Reduces the likelihood of unaware monsters detecting you, increases the chance of out-of-sight monsters losing track of you, and improves stabbing damage. More effective with lighter armour and higher dexterity.

Magic

• Spellcasting: Slightly increases the spell power and success rate of any spell you cast, increases your max MP, and grants you extra spell levels to memorize more spells.

• Spell school skills: Improve spell power and success rate for all spells of that school. Many spells rely on more than one skill.
  • Conjurations: Direct attack magic.
  • Hexes: Magic used to weaken enemies.
  • Summonings: Spells that temporarily call in allies from another realm.
  • Necromancy: Spells involving manipulation of life, negative energy, and the undead.
  • Forgecraft: Spells that temporarily forge allies.
  • Translocations: Move yourself, enemies, or objects.
  • Alchemy: Spells about transmuting matter and inflicting poison.
  • Fire Magic: Spells that involve fire and explosions.
  • Air Magic: Spells that focus on wind, clouds, and electricity.
  • Ice Magic: Spells that involve cold and ice.
  • Earth Magic: Spells that involve physical damage and manipulation of the earth.

Miscellaneous

• Invocations: Improves the effectiveness of powers granted by your god, increases your max MP. Some gods do not require training of this skill.
• Evocations: Improves the effectiveness of using wands and evocables.
• Shapeshifting: Improves the effectiveness of, and reduces and eventually removes the max HP penalty from, the use of talismans.

The MP bonus from skills is the higher of your Spellcasting skill or half of your Invocations skill.

The Skill Screen

Pressing m will bring up the skill screen, which displays current skill levels and your species' skill aptitudes. It also allows you to change which skills you'll train and how much.

Skill XP is split between trained skills; the more XP you invest into one skill, the less XP you'll have in the others. You can select which skills to train by either clicking on its name, or pressing the key associated to it. The exact split will depend on the training mode. There are two modes: automatic and manual. You can swap between modes with the / key.

Automatic mode: Skills that are used more in game will gain a greater share of the XP. Selecting the skill will cycle through three modes:

• Normal (grey name; + next to the skill): Regular training.
• Focused (white name; * next to the skill): Selected skill will gain more XP, even if never used.
• Deselected (dark grey name; - next to the skill): Skill will gain no XP, even if used constantly.

Manual mode: You select which skills to train directly, and XP is split between all selected skills evenly, unless a skill is focused.

• Normal: Regular training.
• Focused: Skill will gain twice the share of XP.
• Deselected: Skill gains no XP.

In addition, you can set skill targets by pressing = in the skill menu, then the letter of the skill you want to set a target for, then entering the value to set a target at. Once that skill reaches the skill target, it is deselected. This lets you precisely control how much XP gets put into each skill.

Pressing ! will switch between 3 views: training, where you can see how much of your experience is going towards each skill; cost, which compares the experience requirement of raising that skill by 1 level with a level 0 skill at 0 aptitude; and targets, which shows your current skill targets.

Note that you can train all the skills from the very beginning of the game. So be careful not to train skills that don't give an immediate benefit for your character. By default, only skills that are usable are displayed; press * to access the list of all skills.

Strategy

Skill management is central to strategic play. Allocating your XP to align with your aptitudes, available equipment, and playstyle will make or break your character.

Manual training is better than automatic. Automatic training will spread XP between many different skills, even if they wouldn't be helpful. For example, it could make your noisy melee brute train Stealth just because an enemy didn't notice you once. This doesn't mean you have to manage every single facet of skill training though: you could "manually" set 4 skills to be trained equally for the entire game, and mostly be fine.

Skill Micromanagement

In theory, it is best to train only 1 skill at any given time, switching constantly as appropriate. For example, one may set skill targets so they'd train Fighting 0 -> 1, then Armour 0 -> 1, then Fighting 1 - > 2, and so on.

The main reason for this is that the cost of a skill only increases for every whole level of a skill, which can create a breakpoint. In the example above, Fighting 0 -> 1 could be more cost-effective than Armour 0 -> 1, but Fighting 1 -> 2 is less effective than Armour 0 -> 1. Note that it is often impractical to do this - not only due to the amount of time/effort required, but because it's not trivial to gauge the impact of a skill level.

In addition, many skills have at least one breakpoint, which can make single-skill training worthwhile:

• Weapon Skills: Weapons have a minimum delay - past minimum delay, training the skill is less effective, as it no longer increases your attack speed. In addition, reaching 1.0 attack delay (after shield, if applicable) can be considered a breakpoint, as it prevents 100% speed enemies from double-striking you.
• Spell Schools: The skill level where a spell becomes "comfortable" to cast is the single most important level for casters. This comfort point will depend on player and character. E.g., if 10% failure rate is comfortable to you, then getting Fireball to a 10% failure rate will add an entire new spell to your repertoire.
• Fighting, Spellcasting, Invocations: You can't have fractional HP, MP or spell levels. For example, you gain 1 MP for each 1.0 Spellcasting or each 2.0 Invocations (whichever gives more MP).
• Shapeshifting: Talismans have a defined minimum and maximum skill. Below the minimum skill you have reduced HP in that form, and no further benefits are gained above maximum skill.

That being said, (micro)managing your skills like this has a relatively minor effect on gameplay. It is more productive to focus your time and energy on combat, when to use consumables, etc.. Even if you do care, by the time you reach the late-game, precise skill training basically doesn't matter.

Example

Say you want the following skills:

• Air Magic 2 (to cast Static Discharge)
• Conjurations 2 (to cast Searing Ray)

Note that these values are not accurate to the game. Also assume that each floor gives 2 levels of a skill, that levels of skill don't increase in cost, and that you have even aptitudes in each skill.

If you trained each skill together, you'd have the following skills:

Floor #1 end - Air Magic 1, Conjurations 1
Floor #2 end - Air Magic 2 (Static Discharge castable), Conjurations 2 (Searing Ray castable)

If you trained each skill one-at-a-time:

Floor #1 end - Conjurations 2 (Searing Ray castable)
Floor #2 end - Conjurations 2 (Searing Ray castable), Air Magic 2 (Static Discharge castable)

The end result is the same, but since you trained exclusively Conjurations on Floor 1, you get the benefit of having Searing Ray castable a floor earlier, instead of having "useless" levels in both skills.

Experience Required

The table below shows how many total skill points must be allocated to a skill for it to reach each skill level, from 0. The percentage column shows the amount of experience required to reach a given skill level from 0 as a percentage of the amount of experience required to reach level 27.

Level	Total skill points	Percentage		Level	Total skill points	Percentage		Level	Total skill points	Percentage
1	50	0.2%		10	2,775	11.4%		19	10,900	44.8%
2	150	0.6%		11	3,375	13.9%		20	12,225	50.3%
3	300	1.2%		12	4,050	16.6%		21	13,650	56.1%
4	500	2.1%		13	4,800	19.7%		22	15,175	62.4%
5	750	3.1%		14	5,625	23.1%		23	16,800	69.1%
6	1,050	4.3%		15	6,525	26.8%		24	18,525	76.2%
7	1,400	5.8%		16	7,500	30.8%		25	20,350	83.7%
8	1,800	7.4%		17	8,550	35.1%		26	22,275	91.6%
9	2,250	9.2%		18	9,675	39.8%		27	24,325	100%

These amounts are then adjusted based on your character's aptitudes. An aptitude of n means you'll need 2^(-n/4) times as much XP to advance as a character with an aptitude of zero for that skill would. The resulting multipliers are in the chart below.

Aptitude	+11	+10	+9	+8	+7	+6	+5	+4	+3	+2	+1	+0	-1	-2	-3	-4	-5
XP Multiplier	6.73	5.66	4.76	4.0	3.36	2.83	2.38	2.0	1.68	1.41	1.19	1.0	0.84	0.71	0.59	0.5	0.42

History

• Prior to 0.28, it was more expensive to gain high levels of a skill (levels >14 cost more XP).
• In 0.21, skill targets were added.
• Prior to 0.15, there was anti-training; when training opposing spell schools (Fire/Ice, Air/Earth), you would get an aptitude penalty for the opposite skill. Also, cross-training would increase the aptitude of the cross-trained skills, rather than increasing skill XP directly.
• Prior to 0.12, certain skills cost more or less XP than others. Spellcasting cost 130% XP; Invocations, Evocations, and Stealth all cost 80% XP. In 0.12, all species' aptitudes were modified to compensate for this change.
• Prior to 0.10, decimal levels of a skill did not matter. Your equipment's impact on skill was not standardized between levels 0-27. Also, Stealth had a cost multiplier of 50%.
• Prior to 0.9, the skill system was radically different. Previously, there was no automatic or manual mode. Instead, whenever you earned XP, it would be saved in a pool. Using a skill would divert XP to the skill. If you wanted XP to go into a specific skill, you'd have to repeat useless actions (e.g. casting Shock at nothing to train Air Magic) - this was called victory dancing.

Added Skills

• 0.31 - Shapeshifting, Alchemy
• 0.29 - Ranged Weapons
• 0.12 - Traps

Removed Skills

• 0.31 - Transmutations, Poison Magic (changed to Shapeshifting and Alchemy)
• 0.29 - Bows, Crossbows, and Slings (merged into Ranged Weapons)
• 0.26 - Charms
• 0.13 - Stabbing, Traps
• 0.12 - Traps & Doors (renamed to Traps)
• 0.6 - Divinations

See Also

• Skill titles