Primer Eventually a Primer

From wikipedia,

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.

Movement

Learn to move around with the "rogue keys", hjkl and yubn. I recommend using home row positioning, even if you can imagine them as a numpad:

            Y K U
            H ☸ L
            B J N
          

A lot of your keyboard will become useful in this game as you learn more of the keybinds.

In a nutshell,

Navigate around, find weapons to [w]ield and equipement to [W]ear. Scrolls can be [r]ead and potions [q]uaffed.

Definitely familiarize yourself with how to attack, throw things, shoot spells, go up and down stairs, etc. You can bring up a command key menu in game by typing [??], there's an image of it here.

[ctrl-o] to see what dungeons and altars I've found

[ctrl-x] to see what's all in sight. for monsters this can be a quick way to select one and then press v to describe

Here's the dungeon order via hyperelliptic:

D:11 → Lair → D:12 → Orc → D:15 → S:3 → maybe other S:3 → get both S runes → maybe Elf (but not the Elf:3 vault) → Vaults:4 → maybe Crypt → Depths:4 → Vaults:5 → maybe Slime → Zot ("S" means Shoals/Snake/Spider/Swamp)

And here is Bcadren, which is an extended order and ignores Dungeon levels:

New Order: Orc, Lair, S:$, other S:$, Slime, Elf, Vaults:4, Crypt, Tomb, Depths, Vestibule, Zot (Clear for XP and so it's cleared), Hell Branches, Pandemonium, Abyss (if it wasn't done earlier when abyssed or something), Vaults:5, Orbrun.

Where to play

Resources

Condensed view of commands

Tools

Scoreboards

Discussion

Bcrawl

bcrawl forked from DCSS with a "more content is good" design philosophy", and you can play it on webtiles at: CPO, CKO, CUE, CXC

It measures many things: Scoring Overview, Top Players, Top Scores, Fastest Wins (real time), Fastest Wins (turn count), Streaks, Winner Stats, Top Killers, Ghost Kills, Recent Games, Combo Standings, Combo Scores

Competition

There's a tournament at every minor version bump.

Official Tournament

Weekly DCSS Challenge

You can play a weekly challenge that actually restricts run attempts to 1x, over at CPO.