Out-of-depth timer

Version 0.9: This article may not be up to date for the latest stable release of Crawl.

Crawl sometimes generates unusually hard out-of-depth (OOD) monsters to keep you on your toes. The possibility of out of depth monsters increases the longer you spend on a level (although the overall spawn rate progressively slows after 3,000 turns on that level, stopping altogether at 15,000 turns; see scumming for more details).

• Under normal circumstances, the max possible difference is 9 levels (5 on D:1).
• There are two mechanisms for generating "super out-of-depth" monsters; one can generate monsters up to (current level * 2) + 4; the other is current level + an average of two random numbers between 0 and 26. Super OOD monsters are quite rare, unless you scum on a floor for several thousand turns. The chance increases until you reach 10,000 turns, at which point all monsters generated (if any) are created using the second super OOD method only.
• Vaults will often contain overly powerful monsters (e.g. - Death yaks in the Lair).