Skill

Version 0.31: This article is up to date for the latest stable release of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.

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.

Every species is rated from -5 to +11 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 management is central to strategic play. Allocating your XP to align with your aptitudes, available equipment, and playstyle will make or break your character.

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 encumbrance 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 higher of your Spellcasting skill or half of your Invocations skill.

The Skill Screen

Pressing m will bring up the skill screen, which displays current skill levels and your species' skill aptitudes. It also allows you to change which skills you'll train and how much.

Skill XP is split between trained skills; the more XP you invest into one skill, the less XP you'll have in the others. You can select which skills to train by either clicking on its name, or pressing the key associated to it. The exact split will depend on the training mode. There are two mode: automatic and manual. You can swap between modes with the / key.

In automatic mode, skills that are used more in game will gain a greater share of the XP. Selecting the skill will cycle through three modes:

• Normal (grey name; + next to the skill): Regular training.
• Focused (white name; * next to the skill): Selected skill will gain more XP, even if never used.
• Deselected (dark grey name; - next to the skill): Skill will gain no XP, even if used constantly.

In manual mode, you select which skills to train directly. XP is split between all selected skills evenly, unless a skill is focused.

• Normal: Regular training.
• Focused: Skill will gain twice the share of XP.
• Deselected: Skill gains no XP.

In addition, 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 is deselected. This lets you precisely control how much XP gets put into each 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. By default, only skills that are usable are displayed; press * to access the list of all skills.

Strategy

In general, manual training is better than automatic. Automatic training will spread XP between skills, even if it wouldn't be helpful to your character. For example, it could make your noisy melee brute train some Stealth just because an enemy didn't notice you once. You don't need to micromanage it much, e.g. you can set training to 4 skills for the entire game and be fine.

Skill Micromanagement

Technically, it is best to train only 1 skill at any given time, switching constantly as appropriate (e.g. getting Fighting 0 -> 2, then Armour 0 -> 2, then Fighting 2 -> 4...). This is because each skill has at least one breakpoint:

• Weapon Skills: Weapons have a minimum delay - past minimum delay, training the skill is less effective, as it no longer increases your attack speed. In addition, reaching 1.0 attack delay (after shield, if applicable) can be considered a breakpoint, as it prevents 100% speed enemies from double-striking you.
• Spell Schools: The skill level where a spell becomes "comfortable" to cast is the single most important level for casters. For example, if a 10% failure rate is comfortable to you, then getting Fireball to the 10% failure will add an entire new spell to your repertoire. This comfort point will depend on player and character.
• Fighting, Armour, Dodging, Shields: You can't have fractional HP/AC/EV/SH. So going from Armour 0 -> 2.4 could give +0 AC, but the jump from Armour 2.4 -> 2.5 could give +1 AC.
• Shapeshifting: Talismans have a defined minimum and maximum skill. Also, certain talismans increase your AC/EV, which are affected by rounding like Armour and Dodging are.
• All skills: For every whole level of a skill, the cost of that skill rises, e.g Stealth 2 -> 3 is cheaper than Stealth 3 -> 4. So getting Stealth 2 -> 3 might be more cost-effective than Fighting 0 -> 1, but that same Fighting training might be more cost-effective than Stealth 3 -> 4.

That being said, skill micromanagement has a relatively minor effect on gameplay. It is more productive to learn combat tactics and when to use consumables. Even if you do care, by the time you reach the late-game, precise skill training basically doesn't matter.

Example

Say you want the following skills:

• Fighting 3 (for +6 HP)
• Conjurations 3 (to cast Searing Ray)
• Dodging 3 (for +1 EV).

For sake of example, assume each floor gives 3 levels of a skill, that levels of skill don't increase in cost, and that you have even aptitudes in each skill.

If you trained each skill independently, you'd have the following skills:

Floor #1 end - Fighting 1 (+2 HP), Conjurations 1, Dodging 1
Floor #2 end - Fighting 2 (+4 HP), Conjurations 2, Dodging 2
Floor #3 end - Fighting 3 (+6 HP), Conjurations 3 (Searing Ray castable), Dodging 3 (+1 EV)

If you trained each skill one-at-a-time:

Floor #1 end - Conjurations 3 (Searing Ray castable)
Floor #2 end - Conjurations 3 (Searing Ray castable), Dodging 3 (+1 EV)
Floor #3 end - Fighting 3 (+6 HP), Conjurations 3 (Searing Ray castable), Dodging 3 (+1 EV)

The end result is the same. But by training skills one-at-a-time, you get the benefit of having Searing Ray castable 2 floors earlier, and the benefit of having +1 EV a single floor earlier.

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