Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is a free roguelike game of exploration and treasure-hunting in dungeons filled with dangerous and unfriendly monsters in a quest for the mystifyingly fabulous Orb of Zot.

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup has diverse species and many different character backgrounds to choose from, deep tactical game-play, sophisticated magic, religion and skill systems, and a grand variety of monsters to fight and run from, making each game unique and challenging.

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup can be played offline, or online on a public telnet/ssh server. These public servers allow you to meet other players’ ghosts, watch other people playing, and, in general, have a blast!

Discussing the game

Players: Stone Soup has an active community with a lot of places for discussions: In the Tavern forum, in several discords including the #dcss channel in the roguelikes discord, and in #crawl on Libera.chat IRC (or, join via matrix). Development discussion happens on github and in the #crawl-dev channel, also on libera.chat.

Developers: In the current era, discussion of dcss development primarily happens in the #crawl-dev channel on libera.chat, as well as on the project repository on github. Developers and contributors can also be found at many of the player discussion forums.

Past: Previously, discussion happened at locations that have now fallen out of use, including ##crawl and ##crawl-dev on Freenode (moved to libera.chat after the Freenode split), the crawl-ref-discuss mailing-list at SourceForge, the Game Spite forum, and the usenet group rec.games.roguelike.misc. The crawl-ref-discuss mailing-list at SourceForge has in the past been used for development communication. Many other forums, such as Bay 12, and something awful, have historically had dcss discussion. The original tavern forum is still available for reading, but new accounts are disabled. Reddit also has had an active subreddit, although as of Jul 1, 2023, we are moving away from using this in any sort of official capacity.

The Origins of Crawl and Stone Soup

The original Dungeon Crawl was created in 1995 by Linley Henzell. Crawl rapidly gained popularity because of Linley’s many innovative game-play concepts.

After releasing version 3.3, Linley eventually retired from Crawl development, leaving Crawl in the hands of a development team; this development team continued developing Crawl until early 2003 when version 4.0.0 beta 26 was released. After that, Crawl development went into something close to hibernation with only Brent Ross working on it, and development largely invisible to the public.

The Dungeon Crawl Reference project was formed to pull Crawl out of ensorcelled hibernation. Dungeon Crawl Reference is a reference version of Crawl 4.0 beta 26. Stone Soup is a branch of Dungeon Crawl Reference and the only Crawl still being actively developed.

In the beginning it was expected that Brent would soon take up working on Crawl 4.1 again, so that Stone Soup was only meant to bridge the time until then, and the initial version of 0.1 reflected that belief.

By now it has become clear that Stone Soup is a proper branch of Dungeon Crawl of its own, but for historic reasons we will continue with the versioning system of 0.x. This can be a bit confusing since it’s not at all obvious that for example Stone Soup 0.4 is more recent and better maintained than Dungeon Crawl 4.0, but if we switched now it would be confusing as well.

Stone Soup combines ideas from the Stone Soup team, the Crawl 4.1 alphas released by Brent Ross, and the Crawl community.

Also check out this more thorough blog post on the subject.

The Stone Soup Team

advil, Peter Berger, Edgar A. Bering IV, Adam Borowski, Samuel Bronson, Jude Brown, CanOfWorms, Corin Buchanan-Howland, James Bulgin, Robert Burnham, Kate Campbell, Matthew Cline, Florian Diebold, Rax E. Dillon, Nicholas Feinberg, Michael Gagno, gammafunk, Shayne Halvorson, Brendan Hickey, Aidan Holm, Pete Hurst, Eino Keskitalo, Vsevolod Kozlov, Janne Lahdenperä, Pekka Lampila, Raphaël Langella, Nat Lanza, Jesse Luehrs, Alan Malloy, Shmuale Mark, John McCartney, Steve Melenchuk, Neil Middleton, Seve Monahan, Neil Moore, Steven Noonan, Stefan O’Rear, Charles Otto, Aaron Pixton, David Ploog, Sage, Marc H. Thoben, Chris West, and Samuel Wilson.

Special thanks go to:

Marc H. Thoben, for setting up and maintaining our current Mantis tracker, Wiki, development blog and Windows trunk builds, as well as providing public telnet access to development builds, all on crawl.develz.org.

Rax E. Dillon, for all the work done in running the public telnet server crawl.akrasiac.org, its associated August tourney, and other great contributions.

And of course where would we be without the contributions of past developers and many, many players?

Thank you!