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 thanks to the good folks at crawl.akrasiac.org (CAO) and crawl.develz.org (CDO). These public servers allow you to meet other players’ ghosts, watch other people playing, and, in general, have a blast!
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup has an active community with a lot of discussion in ##crawl on Freenode IRC, on the crawl-ref-discuss mailing-list at SourceForge, and on popular web forums such as Game Spite, Bay 12 Games and Something Awful
Everything you find on this website will get you started playing or even actively helping development of the game. Check the links to the right and feel free!
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
Peter Berger, Adam Borowski, Jude Brown, Matthew Cline, Paul Du Bois, Eino Keskitalo, Vsevolod Kozlov, Nat Lanza, Jesse Luehrs, Steven Noonan, Haran Pilpel, David P., Johanna Ploog, Stefan O’Rear, Charles Otto, David Lawrence Ramsey, Robert Vollmert, and Enne Walker.
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.
Rachel Elizabeth 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!