Bread swinging

Version 0.33: This article may not be up to date for the latest stable release of Crawl.

Bread swinging is a strategy designed to lower your turn count. Swinging an untrained weapon with high base delay, such as a heavy weapon, will take more than 10 auts, while only taking one turn. HP/MP Regeneration is based on auts. Therefore, you will have more time to regenerate health, while taking the same amount of turns. Note that taking off a shield and putting it back on again will take 10 turns (of 10 aut each).

You can press the v key or Ctrl and a direction to swing your weapon at nothing. The insert key allows you to repeat an action over and over for this purpose.

This strategy has a relatively little impact on the number of turns taken, and zero impact outside of a speedrun.

The name "bread swinging" is a relic of older versions, where it was possible to wield non-weapon items such as bread rations or scrolls.

History

• The ability to wield non-weapon items was removed in 0.33, limiting "bread swinging" strategies to wielding the slowest weapon possible.
• Rations were removed in 0.26, removing bread swinging's namesake entirely.
• Bread rations were merged to rations in 0.21.