If you need an absorbing dungeon RPG this winter, here's one with over two billion floors

rockpapershotgun.com:

Last week, Brendy left a note in our weekly Maw liveblog about a player-made map of Caves Of Qud, the reportedly excellent sci-fi roguelike RPG that lets you "chisel through layers of thousand-year-old civilizations", represented as 2D Dwarf Fortress-esque layouts. Glancing over that map as a newcomer to the game, my eye was caught by the creator's casual mention that Caves Of Qud is technically 2,147,483,646 levels deep.

"Is Caves Of Qud really 2,147,483,646 levels deep?" I asked Brendy, like a wide-eyed child asking whether there is such a thing as dog heaven. Brendy wasn't sure. (About Caves Of Qud, I mean, not dog heaven.) So I put the question to one of the developers, Freehold Games co-founder Brian Bucklew. In brief, the answer is yes, but with some significant caveats.

In fact, Caves Of Qud is bottomless. The game's world is partly procedurally generated, adding more levels as you descend, and the only real constraint is hardware. "You can go, in practical terms, till your computer's storage fills up with zones you've visited," Bucklew told me over email. The game is designed with a certain depth in mind, he added, but if you insist on burrowing further, the systems for generating encounters, treasure and so forth will strive to support this. "The designed max is about 50 levels deep but beyond that it is effectively limitless, and some of the parameters like rarity of encounters continue to grade with depth up to the maximum integer sizes."

Unearthing strange items is, of course, one of the principle incentives to keep digging. "I'm not sure the deepest place players have been," Bucklew went on. "But advanced players abusing the endgame absolutely go at least hundreds of levels deep using tools like spiral borers, typically to farm for extremely rare occurrences in the deep caves, like finding cryogenic clones of yourself, duplicating your inventory, and doing that several times."

The challenge is that Caves Of Qud's code grows more erratic with depth, as