Score

Version 0.28: 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 three factors:

• The total amount of experience you collected.
• The number of runes you collected.
• If you escaped with the Orb of Zot, the number of turns your game took.

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 10,000 * number of runes + 1,000 * number of runes * (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

Highest scores online

The high scores list can be found here.

The current highest score, 130700237 points, is held by Sapher. It was a Mayflytaur Transmuter of Cheibriados, winning with 15 runes on the April Fools branch of 0.29 in 10873 turns. Mayflytaurs were"evolved to be exceptionally overpowered in just about every imaginable way", at the cost of a turn timer.

Of species still playable online, the former WR is 109,233,703 points, was also by Sapher, playing as a Gnoll Necromancer of Cheibriados and winning with 15 runes in version 0.21.2 in 13,041 turns. This game was played on August 15-18, 2020.

• Gnolls had strong attributes and train every skill at once with high aptitude (meaning spells of all types and melee could be trained effectively).
• Necromancers in 0.21 started with Borgnjor's Vile Clutch, which was even stronger in this version.
• Chei increases the time per movement, but not turns per movement. Therefore, each step taken regenerates more HP and MP per turn.

Offline games are not included for the purposes of high scores, because there is 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 be inflated.

See Also

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

History

• Prior to 0.16, high scores were capped at 99,999,999 points (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).