Instadeath

Version 0.12: This article may not be up to date for the latest stable release of Crawl.

The term instadeath can have several definitions, either in Crawl or in roguelikes in general. Of course, many people use it to describe a death which occurs instantly or very quickly, e.g. an early ogre one-shotting a low-level Spriggan. However, the term is often more formally used to describe deaths which occur regardless of a character's current HP, even if the death itself is not instant (so-called 'delayed instadeaths'). Such instadeaths are fairly rare in Crawl, and can only occur in a few ways:

• Stat death: your character will die after a few dozen turns if a stat is reduced to zero and not restored.
• Falling into water or lava and failing to scramble free will result in an instadeath. Falling into lava without fire resistance is always an instadeath. Even if you scramble free from lava when you have fire resistance, you may still be killed by the direct HP damage caused by the lava.
• Being drained to experience level 0 will kill you instantly. Generally speaking, this does not occur past D:1, since after that the character will be greater than XL1.
• Starving to death is an instadeath.

History

Statdeath will be no longer be an instadeath in 0.13; instead, being at 0 in a stat will do irresistible damage. Prior to 0.8, statdeath killed the player as soon as the stat hit zero, as opposed to being a delayed instadeath.

Due to the change in the mechanics of draining in 0.13, it will no longer be possible to suffer an instadeath from being drained of all life.