Behind the scenes on retrofitting DCSS’ seeding

DRANK

What is seeding?The 0.23 release introduced a major and ongoing overhaul in how DCSS approaches random seeding from the player’s perspective. If you’re not familiar with this idea from other games with random procedural generation like Minecraft, Spelunky and brogue, here’s how it’s supposed to work: if you enter a specific code (the “seed”) into the game when starting it, you’ll get a repeatable form of randomness that encompasses dungeon layout, items, and monsters. Any dungeon generated with that seed should be identical. This has many applications: from Spelunky or Brogue (and many others) you might be familiar with the concept of a daily, weekly, or monthly run. In these, all players enter the same seed and over some time interval explore the same dungeon. Here are a few ways crawl community has been experimenting with this since the release:On the CPO server, run by chequers, there is an experimental weekly online challenge with a share dungeon.Ultraviolent4 has started r…