Temple diving

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

This article contains advice from other players, which may be subjective, outdated, inaccurate or ill-advised. Take advice as you see fit, and read at your own risk!

Temple diving is the process of reaching the Ecumenical Temple as quickly as possible, in order to reach a desired god. Instead of fully clearing out the beginning floors, a temple diver will skip levels until D:4. After obtaining a god, a diver goes back up and explores the skipped levels.

Strategy

The idea behind temple diving is that it gives more piety. Generally, a rat gives the same piety as a dragon, and exploring D:1 gives the same piety as D:5 or D:6. So if you get a god before you kill D:1 rats, you get piety you otherwise would've missed.

However, it is a low winrate strategy, as you are not guaranteed to find the Temple before a too-difficult monster just kills you. It also leaves you vulnerable to sourceless malevolence traps, since you'll lack items and XP that could let you survive the trap. So if you care about winrate or winstreaking, diving is ill advised. If you don't care about those things, though, you can always start another character.

Of course, you are not married to this strategy. If you find a dangerous monster, you can revert to plan A: go back to D:1, kill all the monsters for XP, and come back stronger.

Character Choice

Delver, as its name suggests, is a natural background for temple diving. You start on D:5 - where the Temple can spawn - along with a scroll of magic mapping to scout out the level. High stealth and a few escape items also help. Also, Delvers are very easy to start scum until you get good temple RNG.

For species, Spriggans are the quintessential divers. Their speed gives them the ability to run away from the vast majority of dangerous enemies. Other stealthy races may also be good choices for temple diving. Just remember that you are below your normal depth, and higher level monsters will usually see through your stealth pretty easily.

Tips & Tricks

• Make sure to check any faded altars you encounter. You could get a desirable god that way.
• While diving, only use stairs to descend levels. Using trapdoors means you have no reliable way to run away.
• If you get to the temple and your god's altar isn't there, it's often best to revert to Plan A. Overflow altars will be found between D:3 and D:10.

History

• In 0.27, monsters in the Dungeon were made more difficult overall. Therefore, this strategy is less reliable than before.