Skill

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

Skills represent your character's effectiveness in offensive, defensive, and magical disciplines. Starting skill levels depend on character species and background. As characters earn experience, the XP is spread across different skills, according to the distribution specified on the Skill Screen (m). Species aptitudes will make certain skills easier or harder to train. Skill levels are capped at 27.

Skill management is central to strategic play. Allocating your XP to align with your aptitudes, available equipment, and playstyle will make or break your character.

Every species is rated from -5 to +9 in each skill, with higher scores yielding faster skill progress. Training skills with poor aptitudes is possible, but will be notably slower and may leave characters unprepared for later challenges.

Skill Types

Skills can be divided into three categories:

Offense

• Fighting: Improves melee damage, melee accuracy, and max HP.
• Weapon skills: Improve damage, accuracy, and attack speed with a weapon group. Training a weapon skill also gives a bonus to any skills that cross-train with it.
  • Strength-based: Damage scales with strength:
    • Maces & Flails: Maces, flails, and whips. The most straightforward weapons. (Cross-trains with Axes and Staves)
    • Axes: Axes. These weapons are able to cleave. (Cross-trains with Maces & Flails and Polearms)
    • Polearms: Spears, tridents, etc. These weapons are able to reach. (Cross-trains with Axes and Staves)
    • Staves: Quarterstaves, lajatangs, and magical staves. (Cross-trains with Maces & Flails and Polearms)
    • Unarmed Combat: Fighting without a wielded weapon. Most auxiliary attacks are not improved.
    • Throwing: Stones, darts, boomerangs, javelins and large rocks. Also increases the success chance of atropa and datura darts.
  • Dexterity-based: Damage scales with dexterity:
    • Short Blades: Daggers, short swords, rapiers etc. (Cross-trains with Long Blades)
    • Long Blades: Swords. (Cross-trains with Short Blades)
    • Ranged Weapons: Bows, crossbows, and slings.

Defense

• Armour: Improves the AC bonus from wearing armour (more effective with heavier armour). Somewhat reduces the impact of armour EV and spell success penalties.
• Dodging: Improves EV. More effective with lighter armour and higher dexterity.
• Shields: Improves the SH bonus from wearing a shield. Reduces and eliminates the impact of shield EV and spell success penalties.
• Stealth: Reduces the likelihood of unaware monsters detecting you, increases the chance of out-of-sight monsters losing track of you, and improves stabbing damage. More effective with lighter armour and higher dexterity.

Magic

• Spellcasting: Slightly increases the spell power and success rate of any spell you cast, increases your max MP, and grants you extra spell levels to memorize more spells.

• Spell school skills: Improve spell power and success rate for all spells of that school. Many spells rely on more than one skill.
  • Conjurations: Direct attack magic.
  • Hexes: Magic used to weaken enemies.
  • Summonings: Spells that temporarily create allies.
  • Necromancy: Spells involving manipulation of life, negative energy, and the undead.
  • Translocations: Move yourself, enemies, or objects.
  • Alchemy: Spells about transmuting matter and inflicting poison.
  • Fire Magic: Spells that involve fire.
  • Air Magic: Spells that focus on wind, clouds, and electricity.
  • Ice Magic: Spells that involve cold and ice.
  • Earth Magic: Spells that involve physical damage and manipulation of the earth.

Miscellaneous

• Invocations: Improves the effectiveness of powers granted by your god, increases your max MP. Some gods do not require training of this skill.
• Evocations: Improves the effectiveness of using wands and evocables.
• Shapeshifting: Improves the effectiveness of, and reduces and eventually removes the max HP penalty from, the use of talismans.

The MP bonus from skills is the highest of your Spellcasting skill and half of your Invocations skill.

The Skill Screen

Pressing m will bring up the Skill Screen, allowing you to select which skills you'd like to train and how you'd like the game to invest your XP. It also shows your character's current skill levels and aptitude for each skill, complete with adjustments made for cross-training and opposed magic schools. You can switch between displaying only those skills you can train/have trained and all skills with the * key.

You can select which skills to train by either clicking on its name in the list or pressing the key associated to it. Any skill that you haven't selected will have its name displayed in dark gray, and it will not improve. You can also choose to focus certain skills, causing them to gain twice the amount of experience they'd normally receive. Focused skill names are displayed in white, and their tiles icon will display with a blue glow.

The skill screen also allows you to choose whether to divide your XP in auto or manual mode by pressing the / key. Auto mode adjusts the XP division so that skills you use more will receive the greatest share of new XP, while those you rarely use receive less. In manual mode, each active skill receives a perfectly equal share of gained XP, while focused skills receive double that. Experienced players advise always using manual mode, as it allows for far more precise control over where your experience goes. Furthermore, you can ensure your XP is split between fewer skills, which is generally good strategy.

You can set skill targets by pressing = in the skill menu, then the letter of the skill you want to set a target for, then entering the value to set a target at. Once that skill reaches the skill target, it will automatically turn off. This can also be done for weapons' min-delay and shields' skill-to-remove-penalty by entering the item description and pressing s. Skill targets let you much more easily control exactly how many points you want in a particular skill, and stop you from forgetting to turn off skills. Additionally, should all of your skill targets be reached and you're no longer training anything, you are prompted to turn on a skill.

Pressing ! will switch between 3 views: training, where you can see how much of your experience is going towards each skill; cost, which compares the experience requirement of raising that skill by 1 level with a level 0 skill at 0 aptitude; and targets, which shows your current skill targets.

Note that you can train all the skills from the very beginning of the game. So be careful not to train skills that don't give an immediate benefit for your character.

Experience Required

Note: Outdated as of 0.28

The chart below shows how many total skill points must be allocated to a skill for it to reach each skill level, from 0. The percentage column shows the amount of experience required to reach a given skill level from 0 as a percentage of the amount of experience required to reach level 27.

Level	Total skill points	Percentage		Level	Total skill points	Percentage		Level	Total skill points	Percentage
1	50	0.2%		10	2,800	9.4%		19	12,300	41.3%
2	150	0.5%		11	3,450	11.6%		20	13,950	46.9%
3	300	1.0%		12	4,200	14.1%		21	15,750	52.9%
4	500	1.7%		13	5,050	17.0%		22	17,700	59.5%
5	750	2.5%		14	6,000	20.2%		23	19,800	66.6%
6	1,050	3.5%		15	7,050	23.7%		24	22,050	74.1%
7	1,400	4.7%		16	8,200	27.6%		25	24,450	82.2%
8	1,800	6.1%		17	9,450	31.8%		26	27,000	90.8%
9	2,250	7.6%		18	10,800	36.3%		27	29,750	100%

These amounts are then adjusted based on your character's aptitudes. An aptitude of n means you'll need 2^(-n/4) times as much XP to advance as a character with an aptitude of zero for that skill would. The resulting multipliers are in the chart below.

Aptitude	+9	+8	+7	+6	+5	+4	+3	+2	+1	+0	-1	-2	-3	-4	-5
XP Multiplier	4.76	4.0	3.36	2.83	2.38	2.0	1.68	1.41	1.19	1.0	0.84	0.71	0.59	0.5	0.42

History

• 0.29 - Merged Bows, Crossbows, and Slings into Ranged Weapons.
• 0.28 - reduced XP needed for higher level skills.
• 0.26 - Removed Charms skill and training restrictions; previously, many skills required an item to use before being trained. A shield was required to train Shields. or a god who grants invocable powers was needed to train Invocations.
• 0.21 - Added skill targets.
• 0.18 - Added the ability to see the relative cost of training different skills.
• 0.15 - Removed anti-training, which was aptitude penalty for training opposed magic schools (Fire/Ice, Air/Earth). Changed cross-training to give a direct bonus to cross-trained skills, rather than increasing aptitude.
• 0.13 - Removed Stabbing and Traps skills.
• 0.12 - Equalized all skill costs. Formerly, Spellcasting cost 130%; Invocations, Evocations, and Stealth 80%.
• 0.10 - Stealth cost changed from 50% to 80%.
• 0.10 - Equipment impact on skill training standardized from skill level 0-27.
• 0.9 - Change to current skill system. Formerly, XP was saved when earned, then applied to skills as they were used, resulting in repetitive and annoying victory dancing designed to funnel the XP appropriately.

See Also

• Skill titles