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Playing the free, open source fantasy roguelike game Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup on the crawl.akrasiac.org server, Trunk/git build 0.28-a0-925-gd5e1996, as a Minotaur Fighter.
First though I spend an awfully long time comparing playing over SSH with playing via the web, and with the local console client version.
Besides playing online in ASCII through SSH command line, or on the web through the "WebTiles" version with tile-based graphics, the game can also be downloaded for play on Windows, Mac, Android, and Linux.
Links to get playing DCSS via SSH:
The official how to play online, including how to play via SSH:
http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/howto
PuTTY configuration tips, as well as settings specific to playing on CAO server (US west coast):
http://crawl.akrasiac.org/docs/ssh_guide.txt
Crawl terminal color settings:
http://crawl.chaosforge.org/Playing_online
(I found out after recording that "allow_extended_colours = true" is now set by default, so there's no need to have it in the .rc file.)
I keep forgetting how dangerous poison is in DCSS; I think it stacks, so if you get poisoned multiple times you're taking more and more damage per round from poison, even though your status readout still just says "Poison" or whatever (it would be more like Poison x 4)--hm well and sometimes the status message may say something like "fatally poisoned"; that was in a previous run, I think it was when the game calculated that the poison (cumulative) damage I was about to take in the next round would definitely kill me. ; ) So anyway not resting and letting the poison wear off between the two snake encounters led to hUge trouble (was also just plain dumb in any situation not to rest and recover when at about half health--my subconscious "it's getting late but I don't want to stop or save" creeping death wish really kicked in hard ; P).
(System: PC isn't totally accurate here, you can play via anything that can run an SSH terminal; likewise, I picked EUR for Location because that seems to be the location of the current "crawl.develz.org" official home site--but there are servers in the US, EU, Australia, South Korea, and Japan, and probably developers in at least as many countries; although, I think the only language supported in-game is English. Linley Henzell, the creator of Linley's Dungeon Crawl, upon which DSCC was based, is Australian.) |
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"Skills screen; left to itself, auto trains stuff you've been using lately...I think."
Time-limited tasks are really dangerous for me in roguelikes because they get me to rush, make more mistakes, and take more chances than I usually would--which if of course why they put these "find the entrance before it collapses" exploration puzzles into DCSS! That +10 unique freezing short sword I oh-so-conveniently found in front of the hydra's lair in Lair:1 last episode (hydras are vulnerable to cold, and a short blade doesn't cause their heads to multiply like a longer blade would) was saving my buns, but could it save me from all the blunders as I repeatedly followed false or just plain imagined clues into the clutches of all sorts of specifically placed tough guardian monsters, blowing through my most powerful potions and scrolls at a record pace just to try to stay alive? = ooo
Well, heck, it was...an adventure!! |
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I teased showing the Pacific Northwest server I found, then got obsessed with impaling monsters and had totally forgotten to show the other server by the end. = o Maybe I'll remember next time (hint: it's crawl.dcss.io, but it's specifically a "testing and development" server).
I'd thought I was all about the axe--being able to hit everyone around you at once!--but I got totally addicted to "v" long-range stabbing tactics after finding that artifact trident! (This last run has been throwing an absurd amount of magic weapons and artifacts at me. : oo) I scorn any monster that can't even hit me from two squares away! I guess I'm a pole-arm minotaur now!
I think I also wanted to get back to about where I'd been before, level-wise, because I felt bad about dying in the volcano. I really didn't realize I'd been playing so long, though--time just flies on me in roguelikes. : oo
Giants are so mean = oooo
It occurs to me now that it was very silly to discard the shield, given how weak my armor is; I think next time I'd better switch to the freezing sling (one handed) from the bow (two handed), and go back through completed floors to find a shield to use. I should try to compare bow and sling damage, I suppose; and do I really use missiles that much? It feels like the bow did come in handy a bit.
Persistent levels and completely random (or non-existent) shops definitely make DCSS a lot more random in term of outcomes than Angband--you can go through and just be stuck with scraps! Well...it keeps you on your toes! = oo SO many of the encounters in this episode felt like (or actually were!) life or death situations! And I still gotta work up the power/nerve to tackle that stone giant in Dungeon:9. = o
Death 1 was me being totally cavalier about the new-to-me monsters surrounding me in that tight volcano encounter, and not checking how much damage they could inflict!
Death 2 was me not counting on a nearly solo orc priest being able to a) keep me Confused for so long and b) have his god Beogh smite me so hard and repeatedly! Sheesh! Gotta get that orc religion I guess (although I found a Beogh shrine later and he was just totally racist against my minotaur so pfff).
Death 3 was me totally daring a scimitar of distortion to "banish" me on unequip--and finding out what banishment means! = ooo I guess I won't do that again...at least not with a character who isn't much more powerful. And does the Abyss just keep teleporting in big monsters against you, or what?
Death 4 was me getting straight ganked by Ijyb with a wand of acid on Dungeon:3! When you only have 33 max HP, turns out that's real bad news!
At this point I'm pretty sick of the beginning Dungeon levels--why did they inflict their absolute worst dungeon design on new players? Just ugly and boring and hard to read and navigate. Sheesh! Really happy D&D or Angband-style square, separated rooms finally start (at least in this last run) at depth 9! But that's a pretty long burrow slog to start each run!!
The amulet of the acrobat has been saving my buns so much! When I run away, they can't hit me! Whewwww!
Psyche Polymorphing me (by spell) into a bat was a hoot! I'd run into Joseph with a wand of polymorph at the start of Dungeon:9, but he didn't use it on me--just fired his sling!
At the start of this recording, the whole finding-the-volcano saga had me kind of on edge about continuing DCSS--but 3 hours of impaling with an artifact trident changed all that! = oo |
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Continued my tradition of not being in the proper self-preservation mood when starting out, and just getting myself killed foolishly! Think I'll avoid Spider Nest until much higher than level 13 in the future--those nasty creepy crawlies just kept coming! (There was a rune of Zot in there! First time I've ever seen that message in my own game.)
Then in a rush to get through the blobby first dungeon levels and back to the crazy branching areas that start around Dungeon:9, auto-scumming with Tab and o like a maniac, I kept buying it on Dungeon:4, which I guess is where meaningful uniques and monster gangs start. 'p'
And then after navigating Dungeon:4 manually to try and fail to get into the ossuary before its entrance collapsed yet again, I finally scummed through to Dungeon:8 and died like a chump because I refused to believe that a two-headed ogre's character description did not show me their full maximum damage--but that's how Crawl's been rolling for years now, it looks like! (Also I was still not being properly cautious anyway, but still. 'p')
See, 1:39:01 I was at 45 HP and 4 MP after drinking the potion of heal wounds; it has two attacks one doing 15 and one 20 damage (1:37:58). It hit me once, taking me down to 32 HP (and 3 MP--my amulet was using MP like an extra HP pool); at that point I needed to do something else, but I didn't, and instead just tried to hit him again--I did hit him, but he hit me twice...and reduced me to -4 HP (and 0 MP), so eh he did get a little more than 35 damage in there right at the end (in fact the character dump "morgue file" ( http://crawl.akrasiac.org/rawdata/smbhax/morgue-smbhax-20211231-071907.txt ; the online servers have this super neat player page per player--mine is http://crawl.akrasiac.org/scoring/players/smbhax.html --that tracks your (recent?) characters with all their stats and stuff!) says the specifically that final blow was 21 points of damage), so maybe his description "plus +0 giant club damage" means something extra, I dunno. Gonna see if I can have the devs look at that, because the Wiki for instance http://crawl.chaosforge.org/Two-headed_ogre doesn't say a two-headed ogre should be able to do extra; in any case, the description is confusing.
--Looking at this a bit more, I found that weapon-wielding monsters in general are giving their attack damage descriptions in that "x damage plus [weapon]" format, which is weird since it seems to leave it to the player to a) know the base damage of the weapon (although this CAN be looked up with ?/i followed by the weapon name) and b) add that number to the base monster attack damage number to come up with the actual max damage number, when the game should probably just be doing that itself, if that's what it means to do; non-weapon-wielding attacks by monsters list just a single damage number. I've sent this to them as a far-too-massive bug report -- https://github.com/crawl/crawl/issues/2326 -- so hopefully there will at least be some clarification one way or another. Although it looks like this format or something close to it has been in the game since at least 2017 (version 20.0) and quite possibly before that...so I guess everyone else is fine with it and I'm the crazy one. 'p' And I should just assume that a weapon-wielding monster can inflict something like 2x the max damage number shown in their attack description--or maybe 3 or 4x if they have a really wild magical weapon.
Also I really hate that "find the entrance before it collapses!" shtick and I'm never going to make it into that darned ossuary. ;_; |
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