Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is a free and open source roguelike computer game, which is the actively community-developed successor of the 1997 roguelike game Linley’s Dungeon Crawl, originally programmed by Linley Henzell.

It’s identified as one of the “major roguelikes” by John Harris. Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup polled first in a 2008 poll of 371 roguelike players.

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is a roguelike game where the player creates a character and guides it through a dungeon, mostly consisting of persistent levels, full of monsters and items, with the goal of retrieving the “Orb of Zot” (a MacGuffin) located there, and escaping alive. To enter the Realm of Zot where the Orb is located, the player must first obtain at least three “runes of Zot” of the 15 available; these are located at the ends of diverse dungeon branches such as the Spider Nest, Tomb, and Slime Pits.

The game has an explicit design philosophy intended to provide interesting strategic and tactical choices within a balanced game; to offer replayability based on random dungeon generation; to make the game accessible and enjoyable without deep knowledge of its internal mechanics; and to present a friendly user interface that can optionally automate several tasks like exploration and searching for previously seen items. Conversely, the developer team seeks to avoid providing incentives for repeating boring actions without consideration, or providing illusory gameplay choices where one alternative is always superior.

Most levels are randomly generated to maximize variety, while the levels containing the objective items are randomly chosen between several manually-designed layouts, which usually contain random elements.