Linley's Dungeon Crawl

Linley's Dungeon Crawl (often called Dungeon Crawl or simply Crawl) is a roguelike game in a fantasy setting. Though NetHack has inspired many features of Crawl, the two games are very different.

Few users are known to play a lot of both NetHack and Crawl, so a comparison is difficult. However, Crawl is said to be more difficult than NetHack in general. See [1] [2].

Origin

The creator, Linley Henzell, made slight changes to the NetHack General Public License to create the "Crawl General Public License", thus Crawl is free software. Crawl does not contain any source code from NetHack.

Linley Henzell created Crawl in 1995 and continued to improve the game until 1999. After that, Linley Henzell allowed a group of contributors to develop new versions of Crawl. Development stalled in 2003 with the release of Crawl 4.0.0 beta 26. The last developer, Brent Ross, proceeded to produce versions of Crawl 4.1 alpha until 2005.

A variant called Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup has displaced the original game (somewhat analogous to how NetHack displaced Hack). This variant integrates various bug fixes, interface improvements, statistical tweaks, and new dungeon branches. Most Crawl players now play Stone Soup.

Comparisons

Crawl and NetHack seem very similar in some ways.

• Crawl and NetHack players both intend to retrieve something important from the dungeon. NetHack players seek the Amulet of Yendor, while Crawl players want the Orb of Zot.
• Crawl and NetHack both use persistent levels. You may take stairs to revisit levels.
• Crawl and NetHack both feature a similar fantasy settings. Expect to find elves, dwarves, orcs, kobolds and such in both games. Both games have magic items like scrolls, potions and rings.
• Crawl and NetHack both allow you to attack monsters with melee attacks (by walking into them), ranged attacks (by shooting or throwing something at them), or magic (by zapping something at them).
• Crawl and NetHack both have traps. Step on the wrong square, and it might drop a dart on you or teleport you, for example.
• Crawl and NetHack players may starve to death unless they eat corpses.
• Stone Soup and NetHack both have bones levels.
• Stone Soup and NetHack both have various dungeon branches. Both games read the descriptions of these branches from data files.

Differences of gameplay

Players who try both games will immediately notice these obvious differences about the dungeon.

• Crawl generates larger dungeon levels than NetHack. In Crawl, the @ remains in the center of the map while the dungeon scrolls around the adventurer.
• While NetHack starts out with distinct, separate rectangular rooms connected with corridors, Crawl starts out with more complex level designs, such as parallel corridors, pillars, and multiple staircases to the same level.

However, there are also subtle differences that seriously affect how one plays the game. This presentation of the differences may be overly general, not to apply in all situations, so beware.

• Crawl encourages the use of unidentified magic items, while NetHack discourages their use. Yes, Crawl includes a few scrolls and potions with bad effects, like the a potion that slows you, but most items are good. Crawl players can deal with using unidentified items. NetHack players often cannot; NetHack has the potion of paralysis, scroll of destroy armor, scroll of punishment and especially that scroll of amnesia. NetHack players, to survive, must develop other tactics of identification.
• Crawl encourages the player to advance downward quickly, while NetHack players may linger on upper levels. Crawl players who fail to go down, will find themselves short on resources and with few monsters to fight. NetHack players like to linger to regenerate or to sacrifice at an altar, and may encounter several battles even when traveling up through the dungeon. Of course, players of both games will travel up to escape monsters or to visit their stashes.
• NetHack restricts shooting to eight directions. It is a tradition that will not disappear; it enhances strategy greatly by allowing monsters (especially those annoying unicorns) to be out of your line of fire. Crawl has a targeting system that allows you to shoot arbitrarily nearby targets, plus all of the extra controls that such a system requires.
• NetHack has containers. While Crawl players are dropping items on the ground, NetHack players like to place them in chests. In general, NetHack seems to have more complex object interactions than Crawl; the bag of holding is useful for carrying all those miscellaneous things (musical instruments, magic markers, spare unicorn horn, water-walking boots, junk scrolls to blank later, junk potions to dilute later, huge piles of food, collection of valuable gems) that an adventurer wants to exploit.

Differences of development

The development of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is quite open; the developers use a Subversion repository that provides public read access, and they chat on a public mailing list. This is quite typical both around SourceForge and with many other free, open source software projects.

Contrast NetHack's DevTeam, which employs seclusion and secrecy (even concealing bug fixes before the next release) in a manner that may reverse some of the effect of the source code being public and thus spoiling everything. This style of development more resembles a commercial video game than a free game that has spawned many variants.

External links

• Official Dungeon Crawl site (no longer updated)
• Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup Continuation of development
• crawl.akrasiac.org Crawl public server