Escape hatch

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

Escape hatches are features of every floor, similar to stairs in that they allow the player to travel from one floor to another, but different in that they are all one-way. They resemble a red set of stairs, and using them will take you to a specific spot on the floor above or below. If you keep track of where an escape hatch goes, it can be useful for travelling quickly, but be careful; there is no going back, and your destination may be hazardous.

Tips & Tricks

• If you take escape hatches whenever you see them, it may provide you with a shorter route to certain destinations (like shops or a stash). Autotravel will take them into account, meaning you don't have to remember what the most efficient route to where you're going.
• Generally, avoid taking an escape hatch to a floor when there's a chance it'll spit you out someplace hazardous with no way to get back safely. Good examples of this are floors with dangerous vaults, including (but not limited to) the various branch endings. Nothing ruins your day more than losing a promising end-game character because you took an escape hatch down to Zot:5 and landed in the middle of the Orb chamber.

History

In earlier versions of Crawl, escape hatches could prove lethal when used in the Orcish Mines or the Slime Pits. Players would find themselves suddenly trapped in small chambers with no escape routes unless they brought in their own source of teleportation or digging.

In very early versions of DCSS, escape hatches were referred to as rock staircases, as distinguished from the normal stone staircases.