How to Win DCSS

So, How Do You Actually Win?

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup (DCSS) can seem overwhelming when you're starting out. There are dozens of species, backgrounds, and gods, with even more spells, weapons, and strategies to learn.

The good news is that you don't need to understand everything to win. You need to learn a few important fundamentals, and gradually build on them.

This guide focuses on the things that will help you survive, improve, and eventually get your first win with a few resources to help you along the way.

1. Learn to Stay Alive

The most important skill in DCSS isn't killing monsters. It's knowing how to survive.

• You don't need to fight every monster you encounter.
• Avoid fighting while surrounded. Fight in corridors so you face one enemy at a time.
• Keep an escape option available. Always know where the stairs are relative to your position.
• Use consumables before the last possible turn. Using them early means you survive long enough to find more.
• Don't auto-explore until your character feels stronger than the average monster in the zone.

2. Choose Your Fights

DCSS rewards careful decision-making rather than clearing every monster from every level. Learn to recognise which enemies you can safely fight and which are better avoided.

• When you see a dangerous threat, press 'X' to enter selection mode. Highlight the enemy and press 'v' to examine it and learn what it does. You can learn its max melee damage, the spells that can be cast and what they do, and resistances among other details.
• Use 'e' from this select mode to exclude dangerous enemies and tiles in their line of sight.
• If you're unlikely to win an engagement, don't take it. Walk away and come back when you're stronger, or avoid it entirely.

3. Make Your Character Stronger Through Skilling

As you explore, you'll gain experience that can be used to improve your skills. Learning how to spend that experience efficiently is important for keeping up with the difficulty curve through the game.

• Use the skill menu to manually control which skills receive experience, rather than leaving every skill training automatically.
• Focus your training on the skills that support how your character actually fights.
• Prioritise the skills that give you the most immediate benefit, rather than trying to train everything equally. Most agree that you should train your "Kill dudes" skills first.
• It's generally better to train 1 or 2 skills at a time so they hit their breakpoints faster rather than having many skills slowly coming online.
• Once an important skill has reached a useful level, consider training something else that will provide a greater benefit. Training new skills, in a strategic manner and only once your build works, is a great way to add utility and survivability.
• Aim for at least 1.0 attack delay for your weapon (look at the weapon or use '@'), and eventually the weapon's minimum attack delay, 10% fail chance or less for spells, and always have a few points in stealth to help you avoid fights you don't want to take!

Your goal isn't to maximise every skill. It's to spend your experience where it makes your character better at doing what you need them to do at the time.

4. Choosing Your God

One of the biggest decisions you'll make in DCSS is choosing a god. It can be tempting to look for a simple rule like "this god is for melee" or "that god is for casters," but many gods don't fit neatly into a single category.

Some gods are specialists that strongly encourage a particular style of play. Others are generalists that can work well with a wide variety of characters, but change how you approach the game in different ways.

When choosing a god, don't just ask "Is this god strong?" Ask "What does this god want me to do?" and decide whether or not that matches your own goals.

• Specialist gods tend to reward a particular playstyle. For example, a god that rewards making many attacks early and often (like Uskayaw) needs you to lean into any number of ranged/melee/spellcaster types that do that.
• Generalist gods can support many different characters, but each uses a different approach to make you stronger. Some improve your skills and flexibility (such as Ashenzari and Cheibriados), some provide powerful consumables or resources (Gozag and Nemelex), while others ask you to sacrifice some options in exchange for powerful abilities (Ru).
• God abilities shape your playstyle. Some gods will offer panic buttons that should be used early, like consumables.
• Species and background matter too, but they don't have to determine your entire build. A character's god, skills, equipment, and abilities all work together to create its playstyle.

You also don't need to understand every god before choosing one. Early on, it's often better to pick a god and learn how that god wants you to play than to try to memorise which god is theoretically optimal for every species and background.

As you play more characters, you'll start to recognise which gods complement the characters you're building and which ones offer a playstyle you enjoy.

Watch: Which God Should I Choose?

5. Master the Identification Minigame

Consumable items in DCSS are initially unidentified.

Learning how to identify items efficiently can give you access to useful resources earlier.

• Begin by blind-reading your early 2-stacks of scrolls until you find the Scroll of Identification. You should do this at the very start of floor 2 while standing on the upstairs so you can retreat if necessary.
• Use your Identifies on unknown potions (in stacks when possible), until you find the Potion of Curing. This counters poison, one of the major killers in the early game.
• Use subsequent Identify scrolls on scrolls until you find Scrolls of Teleport and Blink.
• Continue blind-reading your 2 stacks of scrolls in this manner through the game.
• Buy cheap identified consumables you don't know yet from shops to make the process faster (even bad items like moonshine to remove them from the 'unknowns' pool).

Watch: The Art of Identifying Potions & Scrolls

6. Learn From Your Deaths

Early on, you're going to die. A lot.

After a death, ask yourself:

• What actually killed me?
• When did the situation become dangerous?
• Could I have escaped?
• Did I choose to fight when I could have walked away?
• Did I understand what the monster could do before taking the fight?

Every death is an opportunity to learn something that can keep your next character alive. Usually, you can take one of the above questions and use it to survive that scenario next time.

7. Get Your First Win

Your first win doesn't require perfect knowledge of DCSS. It just requires putting together enough good decisions to survive all the way to the end.

Once you've won, you'll have a much better understanding of how the game works and can start experimenting with more unusual characters and strategies.

Choose a character that lets you concentrate on learning the fundamentals of DCSS, work on seeing more of the game more often, and you'll solve the puzzle before you know it!

Resources

Want to learn more? These resources cover DCSS strategy from a few different angles:

Want to Practice?

Crawl Cosplay Academy (CCA) provides a series of guided challenges designed to teach different DCSS playstyles and core skills.

It's a good place to put these fundamentals into practice while working towards your first win.

Where can I get more help?

Ask questions in the Crawl Cosplay Discord.