Starting DCSS

[Findleman]

Hey guys, starting out stone soup. I have no idea how to play and after about 25 deaths I don't understand what I'm doing wrong or where to look for help. HELP!

[ydeve]

Have you played any other roguelikes before?

[Findleman]

Yes. I've played some net hack but never got too far, and played and beat dungeonmans, Dungeons of dreadmore (hard), DOOM RL.
I just cant get the mechanics yet. just looking for solid starting advice and things to do that would make a run even possible.

[goodcoolguy]

If you're not playing online, that's your problem. If you are playing online, your problem is probably that you aren't spectating and asking for advice.

[ydeve]

Probably the easiest combo for a beginner is MiBe (minotaur berserker). You can leave autoskill on. Otherwise train your weapon skill first, later training fighting (for hp) and armour/dodging.

[Findleman]

how do you even play online?

[goodcoolguy]

Go to crawl.develz.org, it will offer numerous options for online play. Some servers have more players and spectators than others, so take that into account in making your choice.

[Findleman]

Okay. I think i'll try some berserker builds for a while. thanks guys!

[crate]

Don't walk toward monsters that you can see. I'm being entirely serious here.

[ydeve]

If you prefer console (ASCII/Unicode) to tiles, you can ssh into any of the online servers using putty. Passwords are all easily googleable.

[Arrhythmia]

(1) Rest up to full after every fight
(2) Take a note of what you die to most and stop fighting that thing

[Magipi]

When I started playing, there was a tutorial built in the offline version of the game. I wonder if that was removed though.

[CypherZel]

Demse's tutorial on crawl should help after you have played a few games


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[gammafunk]

Another good rule when you start out playing crawl: when a monster comes into view and notices you, don't move towards it. Instead use the '.' key to wait one turn at a time, letting it come to you so you can fight it from where you already are.

This rule is useful because moving closer to a monster can reveal new monsters. Even if it doesn't reveal any, when you do combat with the monster you make noise, and it's better to make this noise at your current position than making it closer to unexplored territory, where monsters could be around but out of view. They'll hear the noise and join in the fight. It's very often better to fight monsters one at a time in crawl, fighting them in groups only if you're going to use an attack that affects multiple squares.

Later on when you have more experience with the game, you can relax rules about fighting monsters one at a time, or not moving towards monsters, or even resting until full after each fight, since you'll have a much better sense for which monsters and situations are more dangerous.

[mopl]

how do you even play online?

When you're started, post your CiP characters on the forum (hit '#' for a dump) and ask for help.
Tell us the server you're playing on, I'll come and spectate

[4Hooves2Appendages]

Something that helped me a lot is to look up detailed monster information all the time. Knowing how fast enemies can move, how hard they can hit and what their spells actually do is really very useful. Obviously don't do this if you don't like spoilers, or you find constant window-swapping tedious.

Check out the knowledge bots. The information there is usually sound.

The wiki has some useful information too. Just don't follow the advice there religiously, especially on character builds.

I would also recommend to post some morgues in the YASD! sub-forum. People often give detailed and useful advice on how to avoid specific deaths.

And finally, just post questions here!

[Sprucery]

Note that you don't have to kill every monster. There's plenty of exp in the game. It's perfectly fine to run away from something dangerous. Especially some uniques and player ghosts fall into this category. Early game ogres with giant clubs as well.

[seren]

Note that you don't have to kill every monster. There's plenty of exp in the game. It's perfectly fine to run away from something dangerous. Especially some uniques and player ghosts fall into this category. Early game ogres with giant clubs as well.

If you play online with tile,
* a red monster, just run away, go upstairs and use another downstairs to avoid it.
* a yellow monster, be really cautious, you might need some help : a potion, a scroll, a wand or a god ability (like berserk)
* a grey monster, should be easy to beat.

Anyway you should check any new monster capabilities (and speed !) with Explore mode : Shift + X or Ctrl+X

The wiki is not always up to date nor accurate, (and some advices are dubious) but if you are just starting you can learn a few tricks from :

http://crawl.chaosforge.org/Escaping_fr ... 29_trouble
http://crawl.chaosforge.org/Tips_and_tricks

[Dracunos]

You can also check out the irc on freenode, it really helped me become better.

It's linked to the webtiles servers, so you can pull up monster and player stats and links to live games and all sorts of info. Great community, too.

[CypherZel]

* a yellow monster, be really cautious, you might need some help : a potion, a scroll, a wand or a god ability (like berserk)

I'm not the best player by far but I'm sure that the majority of monsters you will be fighting will be yellow so wouldn't it be best to say only use valuable items like potions and stuff when there is multiple dangerous enemies or if one dangerous enemy has put you in a bad position

[Psieye]

See the link in my sig.

[MainiacJoe]

When I was starting out a guide written by patashu I believe was very helpful to me. I looked fro it and couldn't find it. "Do not walk toward monsters" was the paradigm-shifting advice fro me as well. And yes, MiBe was my first win.

[njvack]

One thing that's helped me is "treat 50% HP as dead" -- never ever get there. If an encounter has brought you to 50% health, it can take away the last 50%, so as you're approaching that threshold, it's time to be thinking about emergency escape options -- not taking "just one more swing" at that ogre.

You should win most fights very very easily, and even tough fights you want to win by a substantial margin. If you're not, you might be picking fights badly or using bad tactics. It's much more effective to do things that make your character tougher (casting buffs, calling allies) before (or early in) a fight than it is to do them once a fight has started.

Consumables are powerful. Learn how they work and use them! Dying with consumables on hand is really disappointing.

[njvack]

Also! If you have a ranged attack (and ranged is great), remember that spending a turn damaging a monster is generally better than spending a turn not damaging a monster. Relatedly, damaging monsters when they can't damage you is very strong.

[4Hooves2Appendages]

Also! If you have a ranged attack (and ranged is great), remember that spending a turn damaging a monster is generally better than spending a turn not damaging a monster. Relatedly, damaging monsters when they can't damage you is very strong.

And this is why Ce is easier to win than Mi in my opinion.

[tedric]

* a yellow monster, be really cautious, you might need some help : a potion, a scroll, a wand or a god ability (like berserk)

[...] wouldn't it be best to say only use valuable items like potions and stuff when there is multiple dangerous enemies or if one dangerous enemy has put you in a bad position

seren does say "you might need some help", so like, use your discretion I guess? But that assumes you know enough about the game to do your own second-level threat assessment, which is a bad assumption to make of newbies.

Anyway the truth is that there are way more consumables in the game than you need to win -- especially counting piety as a consumable -- so if there's any question whether you can win the fight easily, it's worth using something to balance the odds.

This is especially true for newer players, whose first and only goal is learning how to survive the first couple of floors (a.k.a. "the hardest part of the game"). There's no sense saving "valuable" items for Z:5 if you can't survive D:1.

[and into]

When you first start playing, you should expect to die. A lot.

Try not to die the same way twice, and aim to die without any useful consumables / escape options in your inventory. At least for me, when I first started I would save things like scroll of blinking, fog, etc. for when I "really need them" and then stupidly die with a few great escape options in my inventory. Same for zapping wands, using potions of might, etc.

If you mostly die to different things, and die having used nearly all your consumables and having liberally used your renewable abilities (e.g., god abilities), then you are learning one extremely important aspect of basic game play and are progressing nicely. Aside from that, another major thing to learn is good positioning, but to learn that you should spectate experienced players online and ask yourself, "Why are they moving that way?" If the answer is unclear, ask in tileschat. Finally, there is familiarity with different enemies and where they show up, which comes naturally with experience, but is greatly helped if you are careful to examine enemies (shift+x then select what you want to examine).

Those are the basic pillars of learning Crawl, I'd say: consumable use (hint: don't be stingy), positioning (minimize risk by fighting on the best terms for you), identifying risk correctly (knowing what different enemies and combinations of enemies can do to you).

[njvack]

I still have not figured out how to use ?fog :/

Also: what and into said about movement. Moving well and knowing how monsters move (it can be hard to really internalize the weird things that chessboard movement does to space) lets you do things like fight packs of monsters as serial 1v1 encounters and give monsters with ranged attacks a lot fewer chances to hit you.

And double-yes to using piety. Dying with 6 stars of Trog piety is as disappointing as dying with a scroll of blinking.

And finally: while it sometimes seem like Crawl has a vertical difficulty curve, you can definitely surmount it. Once you've made it to Lair, you've seen 90% of the things monsters do. Once you've gotten your first rune, you've probably seen 98% of the things monsters do. There are still gonna be little surprises but generally once you get a rune, winning a game is more or less "keep doing what you've been doing for three more hours."

Oh yeah. Crawl is really fucking long. Winning a 3-rune game takes me 8+ hours (I'm bad and slow but still). Take breaks. The longer I play, the punchier I get and the more likely I am to take silly risks and get killed. Crawl isn't so much "kill all the monsters as fast as you can" but "don't die even once over the course of 3,000 encounters."

[andreas]

When I was starting out a guide written by patashu I believe was very helpful to me. I looked fro it and couldn't find it. "Do not walk toward monsters" was the paradigm-shifting advice fro me as well. And yes, MiBe was my first win.

This?

It's also included as part of a useful faq on reddit. IIRC some of the details there are outdated (references to items that have been removed, that kind of thing), but a lot of the less nitty-gritty info should still be useful for someone new to the game.

[Sprucery]

I still have not figured out how to use ?fog :/

I read ?fog when there's something dangerous with a ranged attack several steps away and I don't want to be hit by that ranged attack. Most often I then run away and/or read ?tele.

[infinitevox]

I still have not figured out how to use ?fog :/

I read ?fog when there's something dangerous with a ranged attack several steps away and I don't want to be hit by that ranged attack. Most often I then run away and/or read ?tele.

This, particularly if they can smite you.
I also use ?fog when I'm being attacked by something invisible and I cannot see invis.


Do you guys really think MiBe is easier than TrBe?

[tasonir]

When I was starting out a guide written by patashu I believe was very helpful to me. I looked fro it and couldn't find it. "Do not walk toward monsters" was the paradigm-shifting advice fro me as well. And yes, MiBe was my first win.

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=12062&p=168952#p168952

[ydeve]

Do you guys really think MiBe is easier than TrBe?

For a newbie, yes. Tr has bad AC, and newbies have bad tactics. These combo very poorly in the S branches.

For an experienced player, that's a different topic.

[amalloy]

I still have not figured out how to use ?fog :/

I read ?fog when there's something dangerous with a ranged attack several steps away and I don't want to be hit by that ranged attack. Most often I then run away and/or read ?tele.

This, particularly if they can smite you.
I also use ?fog when I'm being attacked by something invisible and I cannot see invis.


Do you guys really think MiBe is easier than TrBe?

TrBe is better in the super early game, but the terrible aptitudes, armour restrictions, and size penalty make it hard to get any defenses other than a large HP pool. MiBe can gradually build up a great defensive profile that makes it much harder to be surprise-killed, making it actually easier to finish the game.

[njvack]

MiBe (or HOBe) is probably easier for me than TrBe, and I think it's more fun. You actually get to use the weapon gifts, and getting AC early is good. Getting to wear gear is also fun. Yeah, a berserking troll kills all the dudes, but a berserking orc kills all the dudes too.

I guess the I like normal-size berserkers best because the power gradient is so apparent -- you get better offense and defense and at first you need to separate the yaks and deal with them 1v1 and then later you're tabbing into a pack of them and yak guts are everywhere and it feels great.

[seren]

* a yellow monster, be really cautious, you might need some help : a potion, a scroll, a wand or a god ability (like berserk)

I'm not the best player by far but I'm sure that the majority of monsters you will be fighting will be yellow so wouldn't it be best to say only use valuable items like potions and stuff when there is multiple dangerous enemies or if one dangerous enemy has put you in a bad position

A potion per yellow is definitely overspending. Yet this is an advice for a new player, to be extra careful when you see something yellow. So it is not necessarily an advice on how to win, but on how to survive the first dungeon level.

After while a new player can assess himself how bad the creatures are.

Often this is going to be a monster with a new dangerous mechanic, like poison for adder, or a unique, which can have dire consequences. (The first time I was banished by an ogre mage was rather puzzling because I always assumed it was not part of their spellset )

[CypherZel]

My worst loss was getting banished by an ogre Mage, everything was going swimmingly well and then I got shadow realmed, worst part about that was that I found an exit and just when I got near it a monster stood on it ;_;


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[MainiacJoe]

Yes, tasonir and amdreas, that was it! Rereading ti now I'm still getting tips eleven wins later.

[dowan]

I know this is common advice, but it helped me a lot. Every time you die, try to figure out what you could have done that would have prevented it. Early on it will be things like "I should have quaffed that potion of healing, I should have read that scroll of blinking, I should have walked away 10 turns ago, I should have read a scroll of teleportation earlier, etc..." Forcing myself to do that after each death really did help me improve fairly rapidly early on.

Speaking of scrolls of teleportation, these things are lifesavers. When you first start playing, you might find yourself thinking the only worthwhile emergency consumables are healing and blinking, but teleportation is really good, and much more abundant than blinking. The trick is you have to know it's an emergency about 3-5 moves in advance, which is something you'll get better at as you play.

[seren]

Speaking of scrolls of teleportation, these things are lifesavers. When you first start playing, you might find yourself thinking the only worthwhile emergency consumables are healing and blinking, but teleportation is really good, and much more abundant than blinking. The trick is you have to know it's an emergency about 3-5 moves in advance, which is something you'll get better at as you play.

For me the breaking point between reaching mid-game and winning was learning to play like a coward, i.e. whenever you are around 50% life and there are multiple foe on screen, and feels uneasy, just teleport away, whenever you open a door and you discover 4-5 monsters quicker than you just teleport away, see a strong monster like a catoblepas and don't have the right tool at hand, just teleport away, etc.

Sure you can 'waste' a teleport but you basically buy more time to get stronger, find better weapons or armor, etc.

The only reason I don't used teleport earlier is that Teleport is random, so you can think that you will end up in a worse place. But actually given the monster density, even in Vault:5 it is relatively safe to teleport away. In the worse case, you end up in a bad place but if you still have 50% health you can probably afford to teleport a second time. (But sometimes it will end up badly but this is the safer solution. I believe that one time I tried to teleport away from a catoblepas to only find myself teleported in another cloud and get petrified anyway)


In some case it is better to drink haste and then fog/blink/teleport away.

This might be not obvious at first, but I think finding an early "Wand of teleportation" is the best win predictor.

Nowadays I always (or most of the time) use acquirement on Wands (after reading the recommendation on the Tavern!): You often get a good wand you have not found yet, teleportation/heal wounds/haste or acid. The first 3 are life-savers.

[tedric]

check any new monster capabilities (and speed !) with Explore mode : Shift + X or Ctrl+X

There's plenty of good gameplay advice in this thread already, but I think the thing that has made the biggest difference in my own Crawling is knowing interface features like these -- specifically the fact that after reading up on a monster and doing a threat assessment, you can press 'e' to set exclusions.

Anything that seems even moderately dangerous, anything that might shout or make noise, anything I'd rather approach from a different direction (for better terrain and/or stab potential) gets an immediate exclusion. Often I'll explore most of a level and mark a dozen exclusions before even fighting anything.

This habit reveals the value of stealth, because exclusions are only useful against monsters you can back away from and who will remain in place -- which mostly means those that are still sleeping, or those that can be trapped behind a door or terrain feature. It also reveals the value of positioning and helps you choose the best terrain to approach each fight from. And it provides insurance against the allure of autoexplore by making it significantly safer to use.

  Code:

To quickly set an exclusion: x=e
   'x' enters Line-Of-Sight View Mode
   '=' cycles visible creatures
   'e' toggles exclusions (LOS, single tile, off)

To quickly find excluded tiles and/or remove exclusions from the level map: XEe
   'X' enters Map View Mode
   'E' cycles exclusions
   'e' toggles exclusions (LOS, single tile, off)

In both modes, the movement keys move the cursor and shift-movement moves the cursor by big jumps.

[HardboiledGargoyle]

No mention of the manual? The first place I looked at to figure out the game as a new player was, quite naturally, the manual. Is this not its purpose? It has lots of facts, avoids giving advice, and has been getting better with time. You're reminded of it every time you start/continue a game, yet I don't see RTFM get thrown around here.

[njvack]

  Code:

To quickly set an exclusion: x=e
   'x' enters Line-Of-Sight View Mode
   '=' cycles visible creatures
   'e' toggles exclusions (LOS, single tile, off)

To quickly find excluded tiles and/or remove exclusions from the level map: XEe
   'X' enters Map View Mode
   'E' cycles exclusions
   'e' toggles exclusions (LOS, single tile, off)

In both modes, the movement keys move the cursor and shift-movement moves the cursor by big jumps.

you just changed my life, twice