Eating corpses (with consequences) in Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup In DCSS, you can carve up dead beasts for “a chunk of flesh”, and eating these chunks of flesh is a standard way to gain nutrition. But if you kill and carve up a sky beast in DCSS, you will then have “a chunk of mutagenic flesh”. Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is a variant of Linley's Dungeon Crawl. It is developed openly and welcomes participation from the community. As in the original Dungeon Crawl, players are tasked with finding runes to enter the Realm of Zot at the bottom of the dungeon, before returning to the surface with the Orb of Zot. This is a community-edited encyclopedia for the open source roguelike game Dungeon Crawl, focusing on the actively developed Stone Soup branch. Crawl may seem easier than many other roguelikes at first glance, but dig a little deeper and you'll find it's just as challenging as some of the most difficult variations out there and a good deal harder than the rest. From the Roguelike Celebration: eternal war against the Hypothetical Optimal Player: how to avoid players' worst instincts and make. Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is a free open source software roguelike computer game, which is the actively community-developed successor of the 1997 roguelike game Linley’s Dungeon Crawl, originally programmed by Linley Henzell.

Corpses are the deceased remains of monsters, and may be left behind (50% chance, or 100% in certain vaults) when you kill them. Like skeletons, these items cannot be picked up. Once created, they eventually decompose, becoming a skeleton, which then rots away even later. Corpses have a variety of uses, depending on your species, religion, and set of spells.

Uses

• Corpses can be butchered (command c) into edible chunks of raw flesh. This process takes 2 turns, during which time enemies may attack you, though you'll be asked if you want to stop butchering when an enemy is spotted. Any butchering progress you made toward the 2 turns before your cancellation will remain. Characters do not need any specialized equipment for this, as they are assumed to carry a boot knife for this purpose.
  • Butchered corpses leave behind skeletons, if the creature had a skeleton.
• In addition to a corpse, slain dragons may also leave behind scales (66% chance), which can be worn as powerful body armour. Similarly, killing trolls may leave behind (66% chance) troll leather armour.
• Corpses and skeletons can be reanimated into undead servants through Necromancy or the invocations of Yredelemnul. Various other necromantic spells also use corpses as raw material, such as Corpse Rot or Simulacrum. Notably, the spell Animate Skeleton not only works on whole corpses (if they're a species with a skeleton), but leaves the meat behind.

Unlike treasure, corpses are never generated randomly on the Dungeon floor. Thus, finding a corpse that you didn't kill may indicate the presence of a vault. The corpse of any unique monster you kill will retain its name, though butchering it will only create generic chunks.

Types of Meat

Butchery is the most common use for corpses, but not all creatures are equally edible to every species. For example, trolls and kobolds enjoy meat enough that they can eat raw flesh until they're completely stuffed, while spriggans can't consume flesh at all. Many monsters do not leave corpses at all, and of those that do, not every creature has clean meat.

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup Controls

The 'Meat' rating on a monster's page indicates what kind of corpse it leaves:

• No Corpse: The monster leaves no corpse (e.g., jellies, zombies, summoned beings)
• Clean: These chunks can be eaten without risk (e.g., most animals)
• Inedible: These chunks are too toxic for most species to digest and can only be eaten by ghouls.

Luckily, a corpse's (or chunk's) description will always describe what type of meat it is. Furthermore, they are color coded as described on the Food page.

History

• 0.26 will remove the use of corpses for food.
• Prior to 0.25, vampires could either immediately 'eat' corpses, draining the blood out of them, or 'butcher' them, bottling their blood to save for later.
• Prior to 0.24, Fedhas Madash appreciated allowing corpses to decay and allowed its followers to grow toadstools and ballistomycete spores from them.
• Prior to 0.23, butchering a corpse did not always leave a skeleton.
• Prior to 0.21, there were mutagenic chunks, which would cause random mutations. These came from the corpses of mutants and other shapeshifting monsters, such as sky beasts, ugly things, and glowing orange brains.
• Prior to 0.19, butchering dragon or troll corpses sometimes left behind hides, which could then be turned into proper armour with a scroll of enchant armor.
• Prior to 0.17, followers of Lugonu or Trog could earn piety by sacrificing corpses to their god. There were also poisonous chunks, which could only be eaten by those with poison resistance, and rot-inducing, which could only be eaten by ghouls. Also, necrophages, ghouls, and hungry ghosts could eat corpses from the floor.
• Prior to 0.16, corpses would become rotten after some time had passed, but before they decayed into skeletons. These corpses would only produce rotten chunks, suitable only for saprovores and ghouls. Also, followers of Okawaru or Makhleb could sacrifice corpses for piety by praying over a fresh corpse.
• Prior to 0.15, players were able to pick up and transport corpses. In addition, players in Wisp Form or Fungus Form could not butcher corpses. Also, contaminated and contaminated + poisonous corpses existed; these were somewhat edible, but provided less nutrition than clean chunks. See below for further contaminated chunk details.
• Prior to 0.14, players could not butcher corpses while in Spider Form, Pig Form, or Porcupine Form.
• Prior to 0.13, eating contaminated chunks could cause nausea or sickness in non-ghouls; the Saprovore mutation reduced the risk of this.
• Prior to 0.12, the player character was unable to butcher corpses while wielding cursed blunt weapons. Corpses also sprouted toadstools even when the player was not a worshiper of Fedhas.
• The presumed boot knife for butchering was added in 0.9. In earlier versions, you needed to carry an edged weapon to butcher.
• Contaminated+Poisonous corpses were added in 0.8.

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is definitely an enjoyable PC game, but not in the way you would normally expect. A lot of the currently popular PC games can either be found on a distribution service (such as Steam), or within a dedicated client (such as League of Legends and Fortnite). On Steam, you end up either paying outright for the game or purchasing DLC. Similarly, free-to-play games such as LoL and Fortnite use in-game purchases for cosmetics in order to generate profit.

This is where Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup separates itself from the pack. Not only is the game completely free to play, you can play it via a direct download or – even simpler – directly in your web browser.

DCSS was first released in 2006, but don’t let that fool you. Because the game is open source, anyone can submit bug fixes, propose improvements, and make their own variant of the game (if they had enough time and willpower). In fact, the game has over 59,000 commits on its GitHub repository, showing just how active the DCSS dev community is. In a way, this feedback system is sort of like the cosmetic purchases in the big-league games – with every discussion and iteration, you get the opportunity to impart a little bit of you into the software.

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup Git

DCSS sits firmly within the genre of roguelike games. The name ‘roguelike’ comes from the OG of the genre: ‘Rogue’ (first released in 1980). Roguelikes are turn-based. In them, you play as a single heroic protagonist in a fantasy setting, navigating through multiple, procedurally generated levels (i.e. dungeons), collecting powerful artifacts, magics, and weapons, slaying monsters, and avoiding death – because if you die you start over. This genre was born in the decade when Dungeons and Dragons was emergent, and its clear that it draws heavy inspiration from the tabletop game.

One of the most familiar things about DCSS is the character selection screen, because once you start playing you end up realizing just how often you get to see this screen. But DCSS maximizes replay-ability by letting you choose from 27 playable species (including everything from ant-man ‘Fo’ to plant-man ‘VS’), and 24 different backgrounds comprised of 5 different archetypes. Whilst many species offer exciting, game-changing abilities that affect your entire ‘run’, choosing a background will shape your early game without defining your entire play through. For instance, even though you might pick the Wizard (‘Wz’) background, there’s nothing stopping you from putting on some heavy armor, equipping a mace, and cracking skulls if you so choose. Of course, the game has natural countermeasures in place to prevent magic and armor abuse, so you may want to go for a medium approach with a dagger and some light armor.

DCSS is not an easy game by any means. Personally, I haven’t even managed to come close to beating the game, despite dozens of failed runs. If you are new to the game, you will soon find out that you will need to strategise around your specie and background for the starting levels until you level up and get some sweet loot. Sometimes, you just get unlucky. It’s ok though. It just makes it that much sweeter when you finally beat that baddie for the first time, or unlock a hidden sewer. And when I do finally get to that end screen (assuming one exists), it’s going to be glorious.

There are a couple of quality of life additions to DCSS that I can truly appreciate in my roguelikes. For starters, you can’t sell anything to a shop. Whilst at first this might seem like a bad thing if you find lots of loot you can’t use, the game feels balanced around this concept, and you are sure to find at least some decent items or spells for your play-style on your journey. Furthermore, shops do have quite large and varied inventories, so you can just focus on buying what you need.

Because there is no selling of items, the game does not need to balance with a carrying capacity. So no longer do you get punished for wearing the heaviest of armours and the largest of hammers – you can still carry as many stones as you like. Of course, if you do go for the heavies, you can expect a penalty to your encumbrance rating – however this system instead seems to be focused on balancing between strength, stealth, and magic builds. DCSS does not want you dipping into too many skills without a tradeoff.

Another great QoL feature is the auto-explore. DCSS doesn’t force you to explore uneventfully through large chunks of a level, instead giving you the option to do it for you. Once your character sees an enemy or an item you will be forced to make a decision, preserving player agency. But if you are someone that likes to take things steady and slow, you can still have the full experience not using this feature.

When I feel like having a shot at the gauntlet that is Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, I make sure to put on a killer playlist, open up the wiki in a second tab (I always seem to end up using it religiously), and get some snacks at the ready. Total victory may be a bit too far out of my reach for the time being, but I just know that next time I’ll be that much more prepared for the unknown. And that’s part of the fun – wondering with every restart “maybe this is the one“.