The crawl arena is a special mode during which the player is absent and monsters fight each other, useful for both testing/debugging and for entertainment. It can be invoked on the command line like this: crawl -arena "kobold v goblin" Which will cause one kobold to fight one goblin, with crawl shutting down once one of them has won. To be considered valid, a monster's name has to fully match its definition, e.g. "Blork the orc" rather than simply "Blork". To make them fight for three rounds you can do: crawl -arena "t:3 kobold v goblin" You can make monsters fight for at most 99 rounds. You can stop the arena simulation early by pressing Escape, 'q' or Control-G (though if the arena has lots of monsters it might take a few second before it stops). You can also give each side more than one monster. For example: crawl -arena "rat, giant cockroach v kobold, goblin" will give team A a rat and a cockroach and team B a kobold and a goblin; a victory is declared when all of one team is dead and at lest one member of the other team is still alive. Some monsters have a band (that is, a group of monsters) that will be generated with them during normal play. You can use the suffix "band" to make a monster appear with its band (if one exists). For example: crawl -arena "Margery band v Saint Roka band" You can also make multiple of a single type of monster (note that the singular form of the names are still used): crawl -arena "2 kobold v 3 goblin: crawl -arena "2 rat, 3 giant cockroach v 4 kobold, 5 goblin" You can even have multiple instances of uniques: crawl -arena "10 Murray v 11 Boris" Additionally, you can specify the monsters by a place in the dungeon, in which case a random monster appropriate for that place will be chosen. For example: crawl -arena "2 place:Lair:10 v 3 place:Vault:7" will choose two random monsters from the 10th level of the Lair and pit them against three random monsters from the 7th level of the Vaults. The branches need to use the official abbreviations also used e.g. in the overmap (Ctrl-O): D, Temple, Orc, Elf, Lair, Swamp, Shoal, Slime, Snake, Hive, Vault, Blade, Crypt, Tomb, Hell, Dis, Geh, Coc, Tar, Zot. To let the game pick monsters completely at random, use "random" as a monster name. If you use the tag random_uniques all monsters thus chosen will be uniques. For example: crawl -arena "random_uniques random v random" If you want endless hordes of monsters to kill each other forever you can use the test spawner, an unkillable monster which does nothing but sit there and summon monsters with the Shadow Creatures spell: crawl -arena "test spawner v test spawner" If you want a *specific* set of monsters to fight each other endlessly, you can use the "respawn" tag, which will cause the initally placed monsters to be replaced when they die. For example, crawl -arena "respawn rat v rat" will make it so that when one rat dies another takes it's place, resulting in an endless fight between two rats. Commands ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ There are a very limited number of command you can issue to the arena: * You can stop the arena simulation early by pressing Escape, 'q' or Control-G. * You can look at the message history like in a normal game (Control-P). * You can look around the arena like in a normal game ('x'). * You can suspend the arena like in a normal game (Control-Z). If the arena has lots of monsters it might take a few seconds before it responds. Options and parameters ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ There are four arena parameters that you can set in your crawl options file: * arena_delay: The delay in milliseconds between turns within the arena. Can be set to 0 to make the simulation zip along. Defaults to 600. * arena_dump_msgs: If set to true causes messages to be dumped to the file arena.result. Defaults to false. * arena_dump_msgs_all: If both this and arena_dump_msgs are set to true then diagnostic messages will be dumped as well as other messages. Defaults to false. * arena_list_eq: Dump to the file arena.result the equipment of the monsters placed at the beginning of each round. The are also a number a parameters you can use by putting them in the string which specifies the monsters: crawl -arena "parameter1 parameter2 parameter3 goblin v kobold" The parameters include: * "arena:name" lets you pick the name of the arena to place the monsters in (defaults to "arena:default"). See source/dat/arena.des for a list. * no_force_ai: The monsters in the arena are somewhat smarter than they are than when they're facing the player. This parameter removes that extra intelligence. * names: Causes all non-unique monsters to be given random names. * no_animate: Prevents corpses from being animated into zombies. * no_summons: Prevents monsters from summoning more monsters. * no_chain_summons: Allows the original monsters to summon more monsters, but the *summoned* monsters can't themselves summon any more. * no_immobile: Prevents immobile monsters from being randomly generated. * allow_zero_xp: Allows zero xp monsters like plants to be randomly generated, which are forbidden from the arena by default. * "arena_place:place" sets the place used when determining which monsters the spell Shadow Creatures uses. So "arena:Lair:5" would make it summon the types of monsters you'd find on the 5th lair of the Lair. It also controls what type of monster "random" places, assuming that "random_uniques" isn't used. (This defaults to the 20th level of the main dungeon). * real_summons: Summoned monsters are made real as soon as they're placed in the arena, so they can drop corpses and equipment (no_chain_summons still prevents them from summoning more monsters, though). * move_summons: Moves summoned monsters to a new, random location as soon as they're placed, so they don't end up clustered around the summoner. * "summon_throttle:N" prevents summoned monsters from being placed if the summoner has N or more allies present. * cycle_random: If any monster summons monsters with the spell Shadow Creatures spell (including test spawners) then arena cycles through the list of valid monsters, rather than taking rarity into account. * random_uniques: If the team is made up of random monsters (e.g. "random v random") the chosen monsters will be uniques. Also, any monster using Shadow Creatures will summon uniques. * "ban_glyphs:ABC" prevents monsters with the listed ASCII glyphs from being placed in the arena. For instance, "ban_glyphs:&C" prevents demon lords and giants/cyclopses/titans/etc from being placed. * "delay:N" allows the delay between turns to be specified on the command line instead of in the options file. * miscasts: Every turn each monster (besides test spawners) will have a random miscast happen to it. * respawn: When one of the originally replaced monsters is killed it will be replaced by the same type of monster. This allows for an endless fight between exactly specified factions, rather than the random kind you get by pitting two test spawners against each other. * move_respawns: Moves respawned monsters to a new, random location as soon as they're placed, to avoid monsters clumping up in a massive brawl at the center of the arena.