Dungeon Sprint

Version 0.28: This article may not be up to date for the latest stable release of Crawl.

Dungeon Sprint is a fast-paced Crawl variant in which you must explore a single, often brutally hard, floor in pursuit of the Orb of Zot. Each map is a unique, mostly fixed floor for you to complete. The floorplan, monsters, and locations of items and shops usually remain the same (some maps feature sub-areas with multiple variations), while the exact items and shops you find are usually random.

Over the course of a single floor, you will find yourself jumping from fighting goblins and rats to high level uniques, including some bosses only found in them. In order to compensate, there are many mechanic changes compared to a regular game of Crawl.

Maps

There are currently nine Sprint maps:

• Red Sonja
• The Violet Keep of Menkaure
• The Ten Rune Challenge
• Fedhas' Mad Dash
• Ziggurat Sprint
• Thunderdome
• The Pits
• Arena of Blood
• Linesprint (|||||||||||||||)

Players can easily modify existing levels or even make a new level for Sprint by editing files in the source/dat/des/sprint/ folder. Making new maps is pretty straightforward: Crawl's .des files aren't hard to read and change even for a non-programmer, and there's a how-to guide available.

Differences from Crawl

Dungeon Sprint features only one one level, densely filled with monsters and hazards. As a result, it has many mechanical differences from vanilla Crawl.

• Since the game is much shorter, you gain experience 9x faster.
• You gain 9x more piety from killing, and 27x more piety from exploration.
  • Followers of Gozag get more gold from corpses.
  • Okawaru and Uskayaw do not get a piety boost.
  • Ashenzari and Ru make their offers at an accelerated rate.
  • Brothers in Arms and Greater Servant of Makhleb are 2.5x more costly to invoke.
• There is only one floor:
  • Shafts, Formicid shafting, the Delver background, and Ignis' Rising Flame are all disabled.
  • The Abyss does not exist, so players can not be banished. Abyssal Knights start in the Dungeon.
  • Okawaru's Arena also doesn't exist, so Duel doesn't, either.
  • As it would mess up sprint progression, floor-wide teleportation (of you and monsters) is disabled. Blink is still allowed.
• To avoid waking up all monsters, the noise made by shouting is halved, and scrolls of noise are removed.
• To win, you must return with the Orb of Zot. Runes are not always required; maps can feature zero to all 17 (all 4 Lair branches) runes.
• Depending on the map, there may be unique items, monsters, and method of scoring.
• Some mechanics from the vanilla game are reverted:
  • There are no exploration traps.
  • There is no Zot clock.
  • The Abyssal rune does not give you experience.

Trivia

Dungeon Sprint was inspired by the Tomb of Horrors, a Dungeons & Dragons module from the 1970's notorious for being unfairly deadly.

History

• Sprints themselves don't update too much, but changes of new versions of Crawl will often seep and change the balance of various sprints.
• Dungeon Sprint was initially invented by Chapayev. It was included as an official part of the downloadable version of Crawl in 0.7, and has had multiple maps added since then.

See Also

• Zot Defence - Another Crawl variant coded by Chapayev.
• Sprint guide - Tips and tricks for beating Sprint.

External Links

• Initial release's source code