Talisman paths
Use this to plan a progression through shapeshifting forms. All are found within the first eight floors.
Seeds
Choose what you are growing into to list the seeds.
How talismans are drawn
Crawl picks a talisman in two rolls. The first picks a tier from 1 to 5, weighted by the item level, which on a Dungeon floor is its depth minus one. The second picks a type uniformly from that tier. The weights are a fixed table in makeitem.cc, so the chance of any type on any floor can be computed rather than estimated.
| tier | forms | Shapeshifting |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | quill, inkwell | not on this page |
| 2 | medusa, rimehorn, scarab, spore, maw | 8, maw 12 |
| 3 | serpent, eel, fortress, lupine, spider, wellspring, blade | 12, blade 17 |
| 4 | granite, hive, dragon-coil, sanguine, riddle | 17 |
| 5 | storm, death | 23, death 26 |
Stages on this page follow the skill a form needs, not its tier. The two disagree twice: maw is drawn as tier 2 but needs 12, so it sits with the mid forms, and blade is drawn as tier 3 but needs 17, so it is a goal alongside granite.
Tiers 3, 4 and 5 each carry a flat weight of 5 on every floor. Tier 5 has two types to split it between and tier 4 has five, so on D:1 to D:8 storm is in 75,126 seeds and death in 75,179, while each tier-4 form is in between 34,032 (hive) and 38,798 (granite). Blade is in 43,071.
random-pick.h does; the solid line is what 1.3 million seeds hold. Each panel has its own scale.The table predicts D:1 almost exactly. Deeper floors run above it on tiers 3 and 4: on D:8 the table gives tier 3 an 8.7% share and the corpus holds 12.8%. The table is evaluated at the floor's own item level, but crawl sometimes generates an item at a higher one, and vaults place talismans directly. The corpus cannot tell those two apart.
322,637 seeds hold at least one skill-17 form by D:8, and 270,568 hold one free on the floor. Every combination of an early form, a mid form and a goal exists, and the rarest has 222 seeds. A seed listed under none by D:8 for a stage has no form of that stage on its first eight floors. It may well have one in Lair, which this corpus did not read.
1,299,999 seeds of crawl 0.34.1, read to D:8, exported 2026-09-30. Floor loot and shop stock only; items carried by monsters are not counted. Tiers, weights and skill bands are from crawl's 0.34.1 source: item-prop.cc, makeitem.cc, random-pick.h and dat/forms/. Tiles are crawl's, see attribution.