Kerkerkruip

You open up Kerkerkruip, and are greeted by a blinking cursor. That may look pretty intimidating. What to do?

Don’t panic. Navigating through Kerkerkruip is actually quite easy. This page contains all the important commands. (Some items and powers give you special abilities, and they’ll explain the necessary commands to you when you get them.)

Looking around

• Whenever you enter a room, you’ll be given a full description of everything that’s in it. If you want to see that description again, type look or l.
• You can take a closer look at any object in the room (including monsters and things you’re carrying around) by examining the object: examine blood ape, examine rapier, x me, x scroll, and so on.
• If you’re using side panels, you’ll always see what you’re carrying on the left side of the screen. If you don’t, you can get a description of your possessions by typing inventory or i.

The verbs look, examine and inventory are all free actions: they don’t take a combat turn. So you can look around as much as you want. The same is true for the information verbs below.

Moving around

• You don’t move around within rooms, but only between rooms. To go north, go north, go n, north, or even just n. For the other five directions, use s (south), w (west), e (east), u (up), d (down).
• Once you’ve been in a room or seen one of the dungeon’s rogues, you can use commands like go to entrance hall, go to Miranda. If you know a route to the destination, you’ll move one room towards it. Press enter to move another room, until you’re there.
• To escape from a fight, try retreat. If you enter an unexplored room, you’ll always get one free safe retreat. If you do anything — except free actions like examining — in the room, you’ll lose the free retreat. You can still retreat, but your enemies might be able to hit you while you’re running away.

Using items

• In order to use items, you’ll often have to pick them up first. Take scroll will do the job.
• If you don’t want to carry something around anymore, you can just drop scroll. There’s no penalty for carrying a lot of items, though, so there’s often little reason to drop things.
• To use a weapon, you must ready it: ready dagger.
• If you don’t want to use it anymore, you could just ready another weapon, but you can also unready dagger.
• Most clothing will only have an effect when worn: wear diadem.
• And it can be useful to take it off again: take off diadem.
• Many items must be used in specific, but logical, ways. What do you do with a scroll? That’s right: read scroll of protection, or just read protection.
• What do you do with grenades? Thats right, throw frag grenade! But it might be more useful to throw it into a room where you’re not: throw frag grenade north. Be careful, though: your enemies might throw it back.
• Here are some other example commands: snort ment, turn on beacon, dig north (when you have a magical digging tool), sit on throne, attack statue, get on pedestal, put dagger in machine, search pile. Note that most items will suggest the right verb if you examine them. For instance, the pile of body parts tells you: “If you really wanted to, you could search it for treasures.”

Combat

• The most important one: attack blood ape. You can abbreviate that to a ape, or even just a if there’s only one enemy around.
• In order to prepare for a good attack, use concentrate or just c.
• There are four reactions. Dodge or do will increase your defensive flow if successful. Parry, pa or p will increase your offensive flow if successful. Roll will turn your defensive flow into offensive flow. And block, for which you need a shield, will turn offensive flow into defensive flow.
• If for some reason you want to be hit, you can use the expose reaction.
• Of course, you can also retreat, ready weapons, read scrolls, throw grenades, and so on during combat.

Religion

• The single crucial command for using religion is sacrifice. Use it when you’re in a temple.

Information

• There are some special information commands. An important one is remember or r, which shows you a list ot not yet explored exits and not yet defeated monsters.
• For those using the graphical version of the game, an even more useful alternative is map.
• If you have side panels, you’ll always see your status on the right side of the screen. If you’re not using panels, just type status for a status update.
• If you want to magically sense Malygris and epic artifacts, use sense, but be careful, this uses a turn!
• You can also try trophies and achievements.

Other commands

• Need more information? Just type help.
• Want to turn the side panels on or off? Type panels.
• And by the way, you can sometimes refer to multiple objects using the world all, as in take all or take all scrolls.

Have fun with Kerkerkruip!