Playing Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup online is currently only possible in non-graphical/ASCII mode, yet it provides the following advantages:

• You will have the chance to meet ghosts of other dead players and gain a huge amount of experience for beating them.
• You can access and continue your game from where ever you are currently located (home, work, vacation, etc.).
• Your games, scores, deaths and wins will be recorded and parsed by the official statistic tools.
• Once connected to a server you can watch and learn from other players playing or get hints from players watching you.
• And what’s most important: Playing online allows you to participate in the Annual Tournaments!

The Servers

Currently there are 3 servers offering online gaming – each located in a different part of the world, each serving more than only the latest released version of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. You should choose a server closest to your location to have a fast connection with as little delay as possible.

crawl.akrasiac.org

• Also known as CAO.
• Located in Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America.
• It serves the latest released and the previous version of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.
• Additionally Zot Defense and RobotFindsKitten.
• Access via Telnet or SSH: username “joshua” – password “joshua” or SSH-key.

crawl.develz.org

• Also known as CDO.
• Located in Nuremberg, Germany, Europe.
• It serves the latest released and the previous version of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.
• It also serves the latest development version and is very regularly updated.
• Additionally Dungeon Sprint and the last beta of the original Dungeon Crawl.
• Access via Telnet (on port 345) or SSH: username “crawl” – SSH-key required.

rl.heh.fi

• Also known as RHF.
• Located in Jyväskylä, Finland, Europe.
• It serves the latest released and the previous version of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.
• It also serves the development version, updated on an as-needed basis.
• Additionally NetHack and SporkHack.
• Access via Telnet or SSH: username “rl” – no password nor SSH-key required.

Server statistics, high-scores and milestones are gathered in a single place, however separately categorized by stable/released and alpha/development games.

The Software

To play on one of these servers you need a program to do SSH or Telnet. The programs are available in many different forms and commonly used to log into a remote server and receive a shell. Using SSH is the preferred method because it’s usually faster and, especially if your delay to a server is high, its compression feature are worth it. Telnet is still supported because of its ease of use.

Connecting to one of the three servers mentioned above presents you with a menu to register your character’s name and then let’s you choose the game you would like to play, even modify your game configuration or backup your save-game.

On Windows-based operating systems

We suggest to download the open-source program called PuTTY or its feature-enhanced sister PuTTYtray, both capable of doing SSH and Telnet connections.

Once Putty starts up you will see a configuration dialog. Simply put in the host name of the server you desire to play on, choose the connection type (SSH or Telnet) and click on the Open button at the bottom.

You could also choose connection type Telnet, which will change the port selection to 23 automatically.

Beware though – if choosing to connect to CDO via Telnet you manually need to set the port to 345.

If you decide to play via SSH on CAO or CDO to speed things up a little by enabling compression you need to download the SSH-key and tell putty to use it.

The default configuration of Putty is quite OK. You may want to choose a different font like “Lucida Console”, “Consolas”, “Courier New” or “Dejavu Mono“. If you intend to play with the numeric keypad there are 2 important settings you should enable in Putty to have proper controlling:

• Terminal > Keyboard > Initial state of numeric keypad
  

  Setting Numeric Keypad to Nethack

• Terminal > Features > Advanced terminal features >
  

  Disable Application Keypad Mode

Sometimes it’s also a good idea to disable pasting your clipboard into the game.

We have created a separate website to help you prettify your PuTTY.

On Unix-based operating systems

The programs SSH and Telnet were probably installed automatically for you. Nevertheless PuTTY may also be available for your distribution. Connecting is as easy as typing telnet <server name> or ssh -C -l <username> <server name>. The following examples should answer any questions:

To connect to CAO the following 3 ways are possible. Telnet is easiest but sometimes slow:

telnet crawl.akrasiac.org

SSH without key will prompt you for the password “joshua”:

ssh -C -l joshua crawl.akrasiac.org

SSH with SSH-key authentication will log you on without a password prompt:

wget http://crawl.akrasiac.org/cao_key
chmod 400 cao_key
ssh -C -i cao_key -l joshua crawl.akrasiac.org

As mentioned above telnet on CDO uses port 345 instead of the default port 23:

telnet crawl.develz.org 345

Additionally you must authenticate via SSH-key if you intend to play via SSH on CDO:

wget http://crawl.akrasiac.org/cao_key
chmod 400 cao_key
ssh -C -i cao_key -l crawl crawl.develz.org

Connecting to RHF will never prompt for a password:

telnet rl.heh.fi

ssh -C -l rl rl.heh.fi

Alternatively, when using SSH you can give the parameters via configuration file and then just run ssh <alias> instead. Here is an example to save as ~/.ssh/config. Make sure the path to the SSH-key is correctly specified:

mkdir -p ~/.ssh
wget http://angband.pl/crawl/config -P ~/.ssh
wget http://crawl.akrasiac.org/cao_key -P ~/.ssh
chmod 400 ~/.ssh/cao_key
ssh cao