COLUMN: @Play: Crawlapalooza, Part 4: Travel Functions & Play Aids
March 3, 2010 12:00 AM |
['@ Play' is a monthly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre. Check out previous columns for other entries in this series on breakout Roguelike variant Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.]
One thing new players to Crawl may find dismaying is the sheer size of the dungeon. Rogue, Nethack and ADOM have dungeon levels that fit on a single screen, but Crawl's maps are much larger, many more screens in size both vertically and horizontally. They aren't as large as Angband's, but Angband has transient levels anyway; once you leave a level, it is completely forgotten and cannot be returned to, so in a sense they are disposable.
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup's levels are big enough that they pose challenges of information management for the player. And if a player has a good enough memory to handle them, or a pad and paper for writing things down, that works well, for a while at least. The game did little to help the player to keep track of it all for a while. In fact, the addition of the Travel Patch marks the root of the Crawl code fork that would become Stone Soup. (The Travel Patch and its role in Stone Soup's origins are detailed in a post at crawl.develz.org.)Since its introduction, Crawl has acquired an amazing array of automated play aids, far beyond the call of duty and unique in the roguelike world.
O: Auto-Explore
Let's start with the first one players tend to discover, auto-explore. When this feature is first discovered it feels almost like cheating. You press a key, not evem a shifted one, and the game suddenly begins playing itself....



Between each of the above screenshots, exactly one command was given to the game, to auto-explore. The exploration took more than one turn, of course.
What happens is your character takes stock of the portions of the level not yet explored, finds the reachable unseen tile adjacent to its known area that it takes the fewest turns to reach, then pathfinds to it and tries to walk to that spot. Once he sees the target tile, he picks a new spot and tries to get to it. He continues to do this either until something interesting happens (like a possibly useful item is seen, a monster comes into view, or a trap is found) or he runs out of new territory on the current level.
He will refuse to move through traps if he considers there to be any real danger from them, and also will not cross dangerous ground or the range of particularly dangerous monsters like Oklob plants or hostile statues. Your smart little guy will automatically pick up useful objects along the way, and seems to take their acquisition as a superseding priority. He even ignores items your character cannot use, like equipment a Spriggan cannot wear, eat, or gain benefit from. In this respect, a Crawl character often knows how to play the game better than a newbie player.
Moving through Crawl's huge levels takes long enough hitting a key for every step of the way takes a lot of time, so much that, after you start using auto-explore, it rapidly becomes difficult to see living without it. And it is strange but the nature of the game subtly changes through its use. You no longer have to worry about not spotting a monster and moving too close to it; auto-explore halts the moment so much as a rat enters sight. Running down long tunnels takes less than a second instead of half a minute. It even enters unseen shops automatically so you can note inventory! It turns the game, almost, into a kind of specialized random roguelike situation generator. And yet, if you ever need to manually walk through an area, all the old roguelike methods remain available.
Shift-X: Level Search & Autotravel
If you want to get to a location you've already been quickly, try hitting Ctrl-X. This brings up an interface through which you can cursor to the location you want to go and have the game automatically pathfind to it. The same rules are in place about stopping for monsters and traps as in autoexplore.
Even better, if you hit > or < repeatedly, the game will cycle through all the down- or up-stairs you've seen in the currently-accessible region of the level, in order from closest (in turns needed to reach) to furthermost. Hitting the tab key will even cycle through shops the same way! Note, if you try this and for some reason the game doesn't want to jump to particular stairs or shops, it's probably because you've yet to find a way to that spot without leaving the current level.
Remember, Dungeon Crawl's level structure are sometimes complex, and it isn't rare for all three downstairs from a level to each lead to separate sections of the level below, and sometimes this discontinuity holds through multiple levels. If the game won't go to the spot you want, try going back upstairs and finding another way down first.
Ctrl-G: Level autotravel
Here is where it gets freaky. What if you've gotten to the bottom of the Lair, and realize you need to jump back to the Hive, found earlier in the game, to replenish your food stores? Crawl's levels being as large and complex as they are, the simple act of moving through all those dungeons levels could be a real chore. Wouldn't it be nice if you could just tell the game, in essence, to go to the hive, and have it take care of all the moving and route finding for you? Yeah, you probably can guess that's what it'll do.
Ctrl-G presents a list of all of the dungeon branches you've found so far in the current game along with a key letter for each. Enter the letter, then the number of the level you want to go to, and the game will start your character on his way without further input from you. It'll even find the fastest way there, and will wind through other levels if need be.
Once in a while when you do this, the game will say it doesn't know how to get there. This usually happens when you fall down a shaft from a higher level and the explored zone you're currently in doesn't yet intersect with that of the destination. Try exploring a bit more, maybe moving a level closer to your goal manually, then trying it again. If you just want to remember where a branch or shop is without travelling there, try Ctrl-O to bring up a helpful dungeon overview.
When a new feature is added to a game and, suddenly, you wonder how you ever did without it? That's a good sign that there was something wrong to begin with that you hadn't recognized. DCSS's travel options are unequaled among almost any game in terms of ease of use. They direct the player away from relatively uninteresting movement chores and focus attention on the items and monsters that make the game fun. It could be argued that some verisimilitude is lost in using them, turning the game into more of a situation generator than an integrated dungeon exploration game, but Crawl is so expansive that it arguably was a bit overdone in that regard.
Ctrl-F: Stash management
In Nethack, did you ever find an item you really wanted, but didn't want to risk going into Burdened or Stressed, so you left it there to find a good stash location for your less essential loot, but then discovered you'd forgotten where the item you wanted to pick up was?
Crawl has a solution to this kind of problem, and to my knowledge it is the only game that offers nearly so complete an item management system. The game remembers the name and location of every item you see throughout the entire game, and allows you to do a text search through them. It will provide you with a list of all the items with names containing the words you specify, and you can pick from any of the hits to begin moving there. You can search for traps, shops and shop contents this way too. With some compilations you can even use regular expressions in your search! Not only is this useful for recalling the location of that object you saw several levels back, but it can even sometimes find objects your character saw but you overlooked.
You can also set a waypoint in the dungeon with Ctrl-W then specifying a number, then travel there by hitting Ctrl-G then that number, great for getting to that stash back in Lair:1 by the most expeditious means possible.
In addition to the question-mark help screens that all sane roguelikes provide, there are several other ways Crawl subtly helps the player to learn how to play. It contains a surprisingly helpful tutorial, for instance, not a mean feat in a game as randomly generated as Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. New players may wonder why different items and messages are printed in different colors.
Items that are known to be bad to use (in their primary use, if they have more than one) are colored red, and useless items (like stuff you can't equip, or won't provide useable benefits) are dark gray. Artifacts show up in a brilliant white, whether identified or not; this is actually the easiest way to tell if an item is really special, since sometimes the attached adjective on an artifact is similar to one of Crawl's more-ordinary enchanted or ego adjectives. Messages, too, are color-coded by default, depending on the danger or benefit provided, or depending on their source.
This is the end of Crawlapalooza, although we may end up returning to the game fairly soon.... Next will be a fairly long-awaited article, both for me and apparently for some of you, a review of Atlus and Chun Soft's English release of Shiren the Wanderer for the Wii. See you soon.
Categories: Column: At Play
19 Comments
Another great article about a great game - thanks JH :-)
Oh, and by the way...
Level Search & Autotravel - it should be Shift-X
Xardas-3 | March 3, 2010 2:54 AM
Wow.... I had no idea these commands existed. I really, really have to try DCSS. I wonder how I'll like them. Before even trying it, I'm guessing that I will dislike auto-explore and like waypoint setting. Exploring, to me, feels like something I'd want to control, but setting a point of interest to go back to seems like a very natural help.
MPF | March 3, 2010 7:11 AM
Xardas-3: Ah, you're right. I will correct it, thanks!
John H. | March 3, 2010 3:20 PM
Thanks for this great series. DCSS has quickly become my favorite roguelike, thanks to your introducing me to it.
jokermatt999 | March 3, 2010 9:03 PM
Here are some more of these aids:
You can take notes (with :), and the game automatically makes many notes (view the notes with ?:)
You can inscribe items (with {) and artifacts are autoinscribed with their properties.
You can create macros (with ~) that can automate even more things.
Also, shift+G can also be used for level autotravel, in addition to ctrl+g
Nate | March 4, 2010 2:44 PM
@MPF:
Yeah, I initially thought that way about auto-explore. But then, you get used to it, and after playing Crawl for a while and going back to Angband? The first thing I did was hit 'o' and groan when nothing happened.
DTSund | March 4, 2010 9:12 PM
Uh... could you possibly edit that comment above so my name isn't shown as my email address?
dtsund | March 4, 2010 9:13 PM
Just to add some comments for upcoming 0.6 version:
Shift+X map now shows all the stairs, altars, shops and portals on the top of the screen. Extremely useful for seeing if you already found all the three stairs in each direction, and also a good reminder in case you haste too much to notice that altar.
Stash tracking not only cares for items, but also for spells in books you ever found. For more, it does support some general expressions ("food" or "short blades" for example), and most of all - it allows autotravel right to the stash of your choice.
Zicher | March 5, 2010 1:42 AM
John, many thanks for the in-depth cover of Crawl. I have implicitly accused you of Nethack-fanboyism and turning a blind eye towards Crawl, and that's obviously false and I take it back.
To advertise 0.6 some more: the dungeon overview (Ctrl-O) will mention how far in each branch you traveled (e.g. Vaults (5/8)); this is useful for getting a grip on your game after a break of some days. And Ctrl-O will also display the possible range for not-yet-seen branches (e.g. Temple: D:4-7). This is essentially spoiler information and we believe that it's best to get rid of that. Of course, the battle for a smooth and painless interface never ends...
Thanks again,
dpeg from Crawl
dpeg | March 5, 2010 2:52 PM
dpeg, I *am* a bit of a Nethack fanboy. But I am *also* a bit of a Crawl fanboy! My problem is balancing that out with the whole of roguelike-dom, since there is an awful lot going now, arguably more now than ever before, in the genre. It's a great time to be an @!
I had considered mentioning the overview command too (indeed, there's a screenshot of it above) but couldn't find a way to make a whole paragraph about it. Maybe when 0.6 comes out I could do an update article.
Since you asked for them in a comment some time back, I do have some issues with the direction Crawl's design is heading -- I actually liked the idea of divination spells for example, they were an application of the spell system that did not have a combat application, and I think roguelike play is a wider vein of ideas to mine than just tactical combat. But overall, yeah, Crawl is great. You guys should be proud!
John H. | March 5, 2010 6:16 PM
I'm actually kind of okay with the removal of Divinations... except Forescry (which was kept anyway) and Detect Creatures (which was not).
I understand why they axed the school, based on the development blog post on the subject, but Detect Creatures didn't really suffer from the problems they mentioned. That spell actually *was* a tactical aid. One of my favorite non-obvious applications: using it and Apportation in combination to steal Lom Lobon's rune without ever even seeing Lom Lobon himself. The broader issue I have with 0.6 is that the overarching philosophy seems to have been 'let's make the game even harder', when it was already very challenging (I'd rather see it easier to do a 3 rune game but also ratchet up the difficulty of Pandemonium). I'll still upgrade anyway, though.
But yeah, it's definitely possible to really like both DCSS and NetHack. I'm just getting into the latter now; I have no shame in allowing myself free access to spoilers, since I'm writing up my exploits in a Let's Play (and I would thus like to get my first win in the relatively near future).
dtsund | March 6, 2010 6:04 PM
There's one aspect of Ctrl-G Auto-Travel that I use a lot that's not mentioned here. So you've finished exploring your current level, and want to head on to the next one, but who wants to walk all the way over to the stairs? Instead you can just hit Ctrl-G and then > or <, and your character will automatically find the shortest path to the nearest down/up staircase and head to the appropriate level.
If you ever get interrupted while travelling by a monster, after you kill it, simply press Ctrl-G, then enter, and your character will resume traveling to whichever point you specified previously. If you're playing on tiles, you can also travel to an area just by clicking it on the mini-map.
EToaster | March 6, 2010 6:20 PM
dtsund, let us know when the Let's Play is up and where you post it!
Here is a piece of meta advice for Nethack, and roguelikes in general actually. My very first Nethack ascension came when I had decided to extensively document a game to make a web page out of it, so I took screenshots of everything. The result slowed me down a lot, and caused me to look more closely at situations, so it happened that the very game I chose to document was my first win! So, maybe the act of doing a Let's Play, if it's intrusive enough to cause you to stop often, might be enough to push you over the minimum-skill edge.
John H. | March 7, 2010 12:56 AM
The LP can be found here:
http://www.gamespite.net/talkingtime/showthread.php?t=9571
It's a work in progress, with some 13 updates so far. Progress has been difficult; I've left it up to the audience to say what builds I play, and the first four suggested were archaeologist, archaeologist, tourist, and healer...
For that matter,
http://www.gamespite.net/talkingtime/showthread.php?t=6967
http://www.gamespite.net/talkingtime/showthread.php?t=7387
http://www.gamespite.net/talkingtime/showthread.php?t=8309
There's also a few other roguelike LPs there that are well worth the read, especially Let's Play Angband by Stiv. Sadly, the third of the three links above, the Let's Play DCSS thread (like my NetHack thread!) has been using Photobucket for image hosting. It got linked to from the crawl.develz.org front page, and now Photobucket's not letting anyone see the screenshots.
dtsund | March 7, 2010 8:22 AM
Cool, I'll have a look, thanks!
John H. | March 8, 2010 9:41 AM
So, following up: I just played DCSS for the first time, having played the old Dungeon Crawl previously.
The UI stuff is absolutely phenomenal. Auto-explore is easy to follow, does not detract from gameplay, and just fits naturally. I was expecting not to like it, but I love it. It seems to focus play on what I consider to be the core elements of roguelikes, collecting, using, and identifying items while managing how strong you are (in terms of actual character attributes/equipment, as well as availability of things like escape items). Exploration and dungeon awareness are core elements, too, but the auto-exploration stuff enables you to not mess about with keystrokes, while you still have to pay attention to know where to run/not get completely lost.
All that UI stuff should be in every roguelike! Setting waypoints, enabling easy travel to obvious locations, etc.
I don't know if the DCSS team is abstracting all of the sweet syntactic sugar into pieces of code explicitly for the betterment of all roguelikes, but that would be awesome.
All around awesome job devteam, and great job John in detailing these developments!
MPF | March 12, 2010 6:49 AM
As a guy who's mostly only played crawl, I didn't realise until now how much I took all these commands for granted. In relation to John's comment about screenshots and situations, I recently tried reducing my avoidable deaths by tweeting my every (interesting) move. I found it did make me slow down and think about what I was doing, but I still died from a poor tactical choice at about level 12. I get the feeling that my avoidable deaths have different causes that come into play at different stages of the game.
Paulomus | March 31, 2010 3:29 PM
From:
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3332877&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=1
"I pretty much quit Crawl because every patch since 0.5 or so was bringing in something like this. I don't know if they're willfully ignoring feedback or if there's a big chunk of playerbase somewhere saying exactly the opposite of what I (and apparently at least a few other Crawl vets) were saying or if it's just turned into Dpeg's Bad Idea Train Central."
Basically, this is Crawl. Game balance is absolute crap - starting off is ridiculously stupid as not only do all characters start with almost nothing useful (spellcasters don't even have a measly dagger as backup until they find one). Seriously - compare starting equipment to nearly any other roguelike. Also it is possible to encounter Sigmund along with 2 other uniques as early as dungeon level 2. What the hell?!
Why are they adding features like Sprint and Arena before they actually make an attempt to balance the main game? I also LOL'd at dpeg's page in the Crawl wiki where he thinks vanilla Nethack is "dead" because of its development style. They've got something that works, and they've just chosen not to mess it up, dpeg. That's not something Crawl can attest to.
fwefje9j9 | November 16, 2010 11:10 PM
To be fair - DCSS does do a good job of appealing to newbies and not making the gameplay trial and error like other roguelikes. The tutorial is good, and it's got a solid interface (although there's something to be said for discovering stuff yourself in games like Nethack or Dwarf Fortress where dying is part of the whole point).
Really though, the gameplay is broken - later on is less difficult to survive because you'll find so many randarts that you won't know what to do with them, but the early game is broken to the point of it essentially being pure luck.
Just can't hit that first enemy? Kobold who happens to have a dagger of draining attacks you? Too bad, you lose, and nothing you could have done. Sure, real life has bad, unavoidable stuff happen, but it's much less fun and more sadism when it's present and virtually unavoidable in a game.
fwefje9j9 | November 16, 2010 11:15 PM