#BEATING DUNGEON CRAWL STONE SOUP UPDATE#
#BEATING DUNGEON CRAWL STONE SOUP CODE#
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(Charmingly, the game uses successive numbers of exclamation points to give a vague sense of how much damage you did. However, the actual damage numbers are not exposed in a game of Crawl. This isn’t a bug that’s highly contingent or complicated: all player melee damage was simply doubled every attack.

#BEATING DUNGEON CRAWL STONE SOUP CODE#

A small refactor in melee damage code ended up causing the outgoing damage to be added to itself. The bug itself is one of those hilariously simple mistakes that computers are great at enabling. It is March 6th, 2015, and a bunch of nerds are about to fail to notice something. But once you’ve gotten good at making this assumption, a new question arises: what happens when the system really is inconsistent? Always assuming that the system is consistent and fair, and that changes in outcomes are tied to your actions, is the path to victory. The reward you get for suffering short-term damage to your pride is a long-term improvement in outcomes that you know is directly tied to the lessons you learned. Winning reliably at Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup requires you to suppress this impulse. I can decide that it was the game's fault, really, and go into the next run with exactly the same mental model as before. This lets me assuage my ego at the extent of invalidating the chance to learn from the run. Of course, I could also just conclude that this particular lich was simply some sort of super-lich, or that his crystal spear was an unavoidably extra-crispy spear, or some other unique-to-this-run factor means that nothing that happened was my fault.

But if you predict that you can beat that ancient lich and you can’t, then you are Dead With No Do-overs, and It Sure Looks Like You Don’t Know What You’re Talking About With Ancient Liches, and Maybe You Should Work On That. You can make all sorts of incorrect predictions in real life and simply forget about your misses and remember your hits.

#BEATING DUNGEON CRAWL STONE SOUP UPDATE#

It naturally forces you to take responsibility and update your internal model, and it does so in a rigorous, no-nonsense way that’s hard to come by in everyday life.

After all, if you kill off a character with eight hours invested in them (something I’ve done more than my fair share of!), those hours were completely wasted unless you manage to learn something from what happened. So beating Crawl requires some degree of self-reflection. And if you die, all of your progress is gone - the only difference run to run is what you learn. You can’t endlessly grind to improve your level, nor can you look up exactly what steps to take or memorize a route. Combining these factors means that there’s no way to guarantee yourself a victory in Crawl. The second is that consequence is permanent - you can’t ever reload a save to a previous turn, and if your character dies, your file is deleted. The first is that the levels are procedurally generated every time - you can’t memorize the layout of the dungeon, because each run takes place in an entirely new version of the dungeon. ) Crawl is a roguelike, a genre of game that’s undergone some linguistic expansion in the last decade, so we’ll focus only on the two attributes that are core to our story.

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(You also could just play it - it’s free to play and available both in browser or as a local download. Very much including myself, here - I was an active Crawl player at the time and fell prey just as much as everyone else.īefore explaining the bug, some background on Crawl is needed for those who haven’t played. It persisted for two weeks before it was removed, and it has a lot to teach us about just how easily domain rationality can make you vulnerable to certain kinds of ignorance. Today we’re going to look at a piece of video game history: a bug introduced six years ago to the game Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup (abbreviated DC:SS or just Crawl, as distinct from the game named simply Crawl ).

Beating dungeon crawl stone soup