Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup ======================== Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is a game of dungeon exploration, combat and magic, involving characters of diverse skills, worshipping deities of great power and caprice. To win, you'll need to be a master of tactics and strategy, and prevail against overwhelming odds. Players of versions 0.3.4 and older beware: please read the file 034_changes.txt in the docs/ directory for a list of the interface changes, and how you could possibly retrieve the 0.3.4 standards. Contents: 1. How to get started? (Information for new players) 2. The file system of this version. 3. Contact and reporting bugs. 4. License and history information. 5. How you can help! There is a list of frequently asked questions which you can access pressing ?Q in the game. 1. Getting started ------------------ If you'd like to dive in immediately, your best bets are to * start a game and pick a tutorial (press 'Ctrl-T' when asked for species), or * read quickstart.txt (in the docs/ directory), or * for studious readers, browse the manual (see below for all doc files). Internet play: You can play Crawl online, both competing with other players and watching them. Check the homepage at http://crawl.akrasiac.org/ for details, including information about additional servers. You just need a ssh or telnet console; on Windows, the PuTTY program works very well. Read docs/ssh_guide.txt for a step by step guide on how to set this up. Tiles: Crawl features an alternative to the classical ASCII display; Tile-based Crawl is often a lot more accessible to new players. Tiles are available for Linux, Windows and OS X. Unfortunately, it is not yet possible to combine tiles and Internet play. 2. File system -------------- The following files in the Crawl's main folder are essential: * crawl These start the game. (The actual name depends on your * crawl.exe operating system.) The docs/ folder contains the following helpful texts (all of which can be read in-game by bringing up the help menu with '?'): * crawl_manual.txt The complete manual; describing all aspects in detail. Contains appendices on species, classes, etc. * options_guide.txt Describes all options in detail. The structure of init.txt follows this text. * macros_guide.txt A how-to on using macros and keymappings, with examples. * tiles_help.txt An explanation of the Tiles interface. The settings/ folder contains, among others, the following files: * init.txt These contain the options for the game. The defaults * .crawlrc play well, so don't bother with this in the beginning. Permanent death is not an option, but a feature! * macro.txt Playing Crawl can be made even more convenient by redefining keys and assigning macros. Ignore early on. 3. Contact and reporting bugs ----------------------------- The official webpage is at http://crawl-ref.sourceforge.net/ and there you can find both trackers to add bug reports, feature requests, or upload patches, as well as sources and binaries. This is the best way to report bugs or mention new ideas. There is a Usenet newsgroup dealing with roguelikes, including Crawl: rec.games.roguelike.misc It is polite to flag your post with -crawl- as other games are discussed over there as well. This is a good place to ask general questions, both from new players as well as for spoilers, or to announce spectacular wins. If you want to chime in with development, you can read the mailing list crawl-ref-discuss@lists.sourceforge.net which can get pretty busy on the occasion. 4. License and history information ---------------------------------- This is a descendant of Linley's Dungeon Crawl. Development of the main branch stalled at version 4.0.0b26, with a final alpha of 4.1 being released by Brent Ross in 2005. Since 2006, the Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup team has been continuing the development. See the CREDITS in the main folder for a myriad of contributors, past and present; license.txt contains the legal blurb. Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is an open source, freeware roguelike. It is supported on Linux, Windows, OS X, and, to a lesser extent, on DOS. The source should compile and run on any reasonably modern Unix. Stone Soup features both ASCII and graphical (Tiles) display. Crawl gladly and gratuitously uses the following open source packages; the text files mentioned can be found in the docs/license/ folder: * The Lua script language, see lualicense.txt. * The PCRE library for regular expressions, see pcre_license.txt. * The Mersenne Twister for random number generation, mt19937.txt. * The SQLite library as database engine; it is properly in the public domain. * The SDL and SDL_image libraries under the LGPL 2.1 license: lgpl.txt. * The libpng library, see libpng-LICENSE.txt 5. How you can help ------------------- If you like the game and you want to help making it better, there are a number of ways to do so: * Playtesting. At any time, there will be bugs -- playing and reporting these is a great help. There is a beta server at http://crawl.develz.org. Besides pointing out bugs, new ideas on how to improve interface or gameplay are welcome. You can mention them at the homepage, http://crawl-ref.sourceforge.net. * Vault making. Crawl uses many hand-drawn (but often randomised) maps. Making them is fun and easy. It's best to start with simple entry vaults (glance through dat/entry.des for a first impression). Later, you may want to read docs/develop/levels/introduction.txt. If you're ambitious, new maps for branch ends are possible, as well. If you've made some maps, you can test them on your system (no compiling needed) and then just mail them to the mailing list. * Speech. Monster talking provides a lot of flavour. Just like vaults, speech depends upon a large set of entries. Since most of the speech has been outsourced, you can add new prose. The syntax is effective, but slightly strange, so you may want to read docs/monster_speech.txt. Again, changing or adding speech is possible on your local game. If you have added something, send the files to the list. * Monster descriptions. You can look up the current monster descriptions in-game with '?/' or just read them in dat/descript/monsters.txt. The following conventions should be more or less obeyed: Descriptions ought to contain flavour text, ideally pointing out major weaknesses/strengths. No numbers, please. Citations are okay, but try to stay away from the most generic ones. If you like, you can similarly modify the descriptions for features, items or branches. * Tiles. Since version 0.4, tiles are integrated within Crawl. Having variants of often-used glyphs is always good. If you want to give this a shot, please contact us via the mailing list. In case you drew some tiles of your own, tell us via the list. * Patches. If you like to, you can download the source code and apply patches. Both patches for bug fixes as well as implementation of new features are very much welcome. If you want to code a cool feature that is likely to be accepted but unlikely to be coded by the devteam, search the Feature Requests tracker on the Sourceforge site for Groups "Patches Welcome". Please be sure to read docs/develop/coding_conventions.txt first. Thank you, and have fun crawling!