Frequently Asked Questions

Version 0.30: This article may not be up to date for the latest stable release of Crawl.

This page lists a series of questions that players frequently ask. Crawl also has its own official frequently asked questions, which can be found in-game through the command ?Q, which are also worth reading as a new player.

To ask for advice or talk to someone about your game, you can:

• Head to #crawl on libera.chat, where there will be people around to help you out;
• Join one of Crawl's many Discord servers, in particular the roguelikes Discord's channel dedicated to Dungeon Crawl;
• Post information about your game on the Tavern forum, or on the DCSS reddit

In all four of these places it will be helpful to others if you post screenshots and/or a character dump, so that other players can offer specific advice about your game and answer specific questions. If you're playing offline, you'll find your character dump in the morgue directory of your Crawl folder. If you're playing online, you can press # while in-game, which will print a link to your character dump in the chat window.

As a new player, which species and background should I play?

The most commonly suggested species and backgrounds are any combination of Minotaur, Hill Orc, and Gargoyle with Fighter, Gladiator, or Berserker. These combos provide a more gentle introduction to the game, focusing mostly on weapon-based combat and largely ignoring spells or intense skill management.

If you instead want to play with ranged weapons, a Minotaur or Spriggan Hunter may be appropriate. If you'd rather play as a spellcaster, a Gargoyle Earth Elementalist or Draconian Conjurer would be a good starting point. While Deep Elf has the best magic aptitudes, its low HP and poor defensive aptitudes and stats mean it is generally harder to play.

Which starting weapon should I pick?

Firstly, you should take a look at your aptitudes. Displayed on the selection screen itself, you can also see your species' aptitudes by pressing % when selecting species/background. Better-than-average aptitudes are posititve, while worse ones are negative. It matters, but not as much as you may think. Large differences in aptitude, like Merfolk's Polearms (+2-3 compared to others), do matter.

• Axes all have the incredibly useful ability to cleave out of bad situations (hitting up to 8 enemies at once).
• Maces & Flails are simpler blunt weapons, and generally more common.
• Unarmed Combat is great for Trolls and Demonspawn with early Claws. Unarmed might start with low damage, but it has great potential. Claws can easily make up for said damage.
• Polearms come with an extra tile of reach, meaning an extra attack in many situations.

If you had to pick one? Axes, at least for Hill Orc and Minotaur.

How do you get a character dump?

No matter where you're playing, you can press # while in-game to find where your dump is. If you're playing offline, you'll find your character dump in the morgue directory of your Crawl folder. If you're playing online, pressing # will print a link to your character dump in the chat window. Access to a character dump will allow other players to properly understand everything about your game, and give some information about your current situation. In both of these cases it is advisable to copy and paste the file contents to a pastebin, so that the information doesn't change as you continue your game and become obsolete afterwards.

When you finish your game, a morgue file is produced, containing all the details about that particular game. This is also found in the morgue directory of your Crawl folder offline. Online, you can access it through the IRC knowledge bots (which are available on #crawl and on Discord), or through your character page on crawl.akrasiac.org, accessed through clicking your name in the WebTiles chat window. Online morgue files may take some time to update.

What do the different text colours on items mean?

Colours can be changed using the rcfile option menu_colour. These are the defaults:

• Bright green items are the items you currently have equipped.
• Dark green items are known to have a brand.
• Items in blue are unidentified. Light grey items are of a known type.
• Items in red are (almost) outright harmful, or items cursed by Ashenzari. Items in dark red are hated by your god.
• Dark grey items are useless in your current state.
• Yellow scrolls and potions are items intended to be used in emergency situations
• Items in magenta are considered dangerous: there is potentially a beneficial effect to using them, but also a detrimental effect.
• Cyan items are particularly good and rare (scrolls of acquirement and potions of experience). They also include "unrand" artefacts - unique items with predetermined (often one-of-a-kind) properties.
• Items listed in white are randomly generated artefacts. These artefacts have special, randomized properties.

For more information, see the item article.

Which branch should I visit next?

The order in which you do branches is somewhat dependent on your equipment and situation, however there is a rough order that is suitable for most characters. Specifically:

• The first 10-11 floors of the Dungeon.
• The Lair.
• The remainder of the Dungeon and the Orcish Mines, which are often done in either order.
• Your two lair rune branches out of Swamp/Shoals and Snake Pit/Spider's Nest, which can be done in either order (Note that only one of Swamp and Shoals and only one of Snake and Spider will generate in your game).
• The first 4 floors of the Vaults. It is strongly recommended to avoid entering Vaults:5 at this stage.
• The Depths.
• A third rune branch, which is usually one of Vaults:5, Slime Pits, and the Abyss.
• The Realm of Zot.

Note: the Elven Halls are often completed between the end of the first lair branch and the end of the game. There is no specific point in the game to do this additional branch, and some players don't visit it at all.

The above list applies to a standard, 3-rune game. If you want to go for more runes, potentially up to the maximum of 15 runes, you will have to do:

• Firstly, it is recommended to complete the other two third rune branches out of Vaults:5, Slime Pits, and the Abyss, as well as Zot 1-4.
• The first "extended" branch you complete should be the Pandemonium, which contains five runes. While the other runes are possible, Pan tends to be the easiest of the bunch.
• Then, you can get your final five runes in generally any order you wish, from:
  • Hell, and its four branches Gehenna, Tartarus, Cocytus and Dis, which each contain a rune
  • Tomb, which has a predetermined layout and contains the golden rune.

For more information about branches and their contents, see the Branch article, and the Walkthrough.

Which stat should I choose to increase?

Every six experience levels, you get a choice to increase one of the stats -- Strength, Intelligence, or Dexterity -- by two points (unless you are a Demigod). Which stat you wish to raise depends entirely on your situation.

• If you're killing most enemies with melee weapons and/or using heavy armour, you'll probably want to raise Strength, which increases your damage and to reduce the penalty from your armour.
• If you're using spells, you'll probably want to raise Intelligence, to improve your spell power and reduce spell failure chances.
• If you're using Stealth frequently to avoid monsters, are stabbing them, or you just want more evasion, you may want to raise Dexterity. Dex also boosts the power of Short Blades, Long Blades, and non-thrown ranged weapons as strength does for other melee weapons.

If one or more of your stats is extremely low -- below about 5 -- you may want to raise it. It'll reduce the chances of getting that stat to zero, which causes a few severely debilitating effects.