The flow of time in Crawl

[4Hooves2Appendages]

I fairly simple question, perhaps.

Does time pass on dungeon floors other than the one currently visited by the character?

From my own experience the answer appears to be no. Floors tend to be pretty much how I left them. Monsters are still next to stairs, etc. But if course human memory and observation abilities are notoriously faulty.

[Siegurt]

When you re-enter a floor crawl "fakes" some amount of time passing proportional to how long it's been since you visited it, generally speaking it appears to pass more slowly when you are off level, but some things happen at normal rates.

[Majang]

Injured monsters usually heal up while you are away. Bodies decompose, skeletons disappear. So, time passes.

[4Hooves2Appendages]

So I could hang around on another floor / in anther branch for a long time, to make some bad things potentially wander away from the stairs?

Mu power!

[Majang]

For all I know, that should work, but for some reason the baddies expect you to come back eventually, and they will be close by.

[tasonir]

So I could hang around on another floor / in anther branch for a long time, to make some bad things potentially wander away from the stairs?

Mu power!

I think this has a semi-condescending nickname of mummy stabbing, if I recall. They can eventually fall asleep, hence you could get another chance to stab them.

[Sprucery]

I think this has a semi-condescending nickname of mummy stabbing, if I recall. They can eventually fall asleep, hence you could get another chance to stab them.

Not anymore, this was changed a few versions ago. Enemies no longer fall asleep with time.

[Turukano]

Does time pass on dungeon floors other than the one currently visited by the character?

This depends on how fast you are playing. When your speed gets close to speed of light - e.g. when you tab through the game - we must consider relativistic effects.

In this case, your time passes faster.

For details read about time dilation.

[4Hooves2Appendages]

Considering that nothing in the crawl universe has any mass these days, I think relativistic effects can safely be excluded.

[tabstorm]

I wonder what the correspondence between Dungeon time and real time is. Digestion speed is probably the most useful metric.

[mattlistener]

I wonder what the correspondence between Dungeon time and real time is. Digestion speed is probably the most useful metric.

It can take a few years to fully recover from injuries that brought one to the brink of death, so there's that too.

[Chicken]

The most important time measure is that the Elf Demonologists' spells eventually run out, so that you can - after a good long wait - go back down the stairs and not die.