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The player determines which skills to increase. Character advancement is based on experience points gained by defeating monsters, which increase both an experience level and a set of skills including melee weapons, ranged weapons and magic.
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Randomly generated levels may contain randomly chosen manually designed fragments called "vaults", as well as portals to special manually designed mini-levels called "portal vaults" such as volcanoes and wizard's laboratories.Ĭharacters are initially defined by their species and their background. 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, and which are authored in a Crawl-specific language incorporating Lua scripting. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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