Action

Version 0.27: This article may not be up to date for the latest stable release of Crawl.

Dungeon Crawl is a turn-based game. Every action your character takes progresses the turn counter forward by one, and the game is paused between each of your actions. However, new players quickly observe that character and monster behavior can't simply be measured in turns.

Every character action has an associated delay, measured in aut (arbitrary units of time). Your delay determines how much time passes during a given turn for monsters to take their own actions. Monsters that do not act during a turn are still accumulating time for their next action.

The average time required for a single turn is 10 auts.

The delay of an action is determined primarily by the type of action, but some are affected by other factors:

• Movement usually takes place at average speed (10 auts), but can be increased or reduced through wearing items of either rampaging, running, or ponderousness. Also, some species have innate mutations that affect their movement speed.
• Physical attack speeds are made slower by an amount dependent on your weapon's speed, but the speed brand and high skill in the associated weapon class (or the Unarmed Combat skill) will reduce an attack's delay. Wearing a shield will also slow your attack speed if you don't have enough Shields skill.
• Most other actions (drinking potions, casting spells, using wands, etc) take place at the average speed of 10 auts.
• There are also a few god abilities, spells, and potions that can decrease or (rarely) increase the delay of several of your actions.

A well-equipped, high level character can sometimes take multiple turns in the time it takes a monster to act once, but this depends on the particular monster you face. Although most creatures are designed to act about as often as an average character, many are significantly faster or slower than you; some creatures may even move and attack at different speeds!