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

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 though the critical workings were being crushed and suffocated by the sheer weight of rock. While poking around for stories about Qud spelunking, I've stumbled on Reddit threads about zones where every room contains a merchant, together with more routine complaints about laggy performance.

Bucklew acknowledges that obsessive delvers will face a variety of technical hiccups. "This is factually true and I've received several bug reports and performance reports from players doing this," he said. "One of the key performance cases for the new UI was a save game from a player who had transformed into a crystalline monstrosity and descended at least 500 levels deep and duplicated their inventory 8 or 9 times, and was running into performance issues stepping on a stack of yet another clone with thousands of items."

I'm not sure I personally have the patience, or leftover lifespan, to play 2,147,483,646 levels of Caves Of Qud. But I do love the idea of a world without a bottom: there's something both harrowing and comforting about the knowledge that you can always keep digging. I also love terrain generators that misbehave when you roam too far, as with the horizon-wide walls of Junji Ito-ass geology encountered in certain editions of Minecraft. It's as though you were slowly transiting between the realms of two gods - the god of art, craft and intentionality, and the god of luck, white noise and decay.

Anyway, Caves Of Qud leaves early access on 5th December, and seems likely to entertain even if you confine yourself resolutely to the surface. Prodigious catacombs aside, it's got mushroom infestations, goat-charming, spider possession, and "a novel’s worth of handwritten lore". The existing version is already one of our best roguelikes.