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.
Stoat Soup is a variant of Stone Soup. Stoat Soup for people who play modern Crawl, Stoat Soup for people who played old versions, or the changelog may shed some light on the differences.
If you'd like to dive in immediately, we suggest one of:
- Start a game and pick a tutorial (select tutorial in the game menu),
- Read quickstart.txt (in the docs/ directory), or
- For the studious, read Crawl's full manual.
There is also an ingame list of frequently asked questions which you can access by typing
?Q.
You can play Crawl online, competing with other players or watching them. General instructions on how to play come from the vanilla developers; we have a page mentioning places you can play Stoat Soup online.
Periodically we make Windows releases available. It is reasonably straightforward to compile it on Linux, and the procedure is identical to vanilla Stone Soup.
Scoring for Stoat Soup is available.
Stone Soup's official homepage is https://crawl.develz.org. You can find online play, offline downloads, a community forum and the development bug tracker/wiki.
Chat with fellow crawlers in ##crawl on irc.freenode.net, or talk development in ##crawl-dev.
If you like the game and you want to help make it better, there are a number of ways to do so. For a detailed guide to the crawl workflow, look at the contributor's guide.
In the (unlikely) event that you want to contribute to Stoat Soup, you are welcome to submit patches but you MUST NOT use any form of generative "AI" / LLM (such as "Claude" or "Copilot").
At any time, there will be bugs -- finding and reporting them is a great help. Many of the online servers host the regularly updated development version. If you find a bug while playing Stoat Soup, please report it. Please don't report our bugs to Stone Soup unless you really can reproduce them there.
Crawl creates levels by combining many hand-made (but often randomised) maps, known as vaults. Making them is fun and easy. It's best to start with simple entry vaults: see simple.des for examples. You can also read the level-design manual for more help.
If you're ambitious, you can create new vaults for anywhere in the game. If you've made some vaults, you can test them on your own system (no compiling needed) and submit them to our bug tracker.
Monster speech provides a lot of flavour. Just like vaults, varied speech depends upon a large set of entries. Speech syntax is effective but unusual, so you may want to read the formatting guide.
Current item descriptions can be read in-game with ?/ or out-of-game
them in dat/descript/. 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.
We're always open to improvements to existing tiles or variants of often-used tiles (eg floor tiles). If you want to give this a shot, please contact us via forums or IRC. In case you drew some tiles of your own, you can submit them to our bug tracker.
For developers (both existing & aspiring!), you can download/fork the source code and write patches. Bug fixes as well as new features are very much welcome.
For large changes, it's always a good idea to talk with the dev team first, to see if any plans already exist and if your suggestion is likely to be accepted.
Please be sure to read docs/develop/coding_conventions.txt too.
Crawl is licensed as GPLv2+. See licence.txt for the full text.
Crawl 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 continued development. CREDITS.txt contains a full list of contributors.
Crawl gladly uses the following open source packages; thanks to their developers:
- The Lua scripting language, for in-game functionality and user macros (license).
- The PCRE library, for regular expressions (license).
- The SQLite library, as a database engine (license).
- The SDL and SDL_image libraries, for tiles display (license).
- The libpng library, for tiles image loading (license).
Thank you, and have fun crawling!