variescommercial ?Credit: Unclear: read the Notesverified 37d agoGo to source
Thousands of 32x32 top-down tiles covering monsters, items, dungeon features, and effects, accumulated over decades of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup development and packaged separately in the crawl/tiles repository. It is the largest full-colour roguelike sprite set available for free, and by far the deepest monster and item coverage in this catalog. It is filed as needs-review because the project itself says the licensing is not uniform and maintains an explicit list of tiles whose license is unknown.
[](https://tmhsdigital.github.io/Free-Game-Dev-Assets/entry/dcss-tiles/)
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Maintenance: no push to the GitHub repository crawl/tiles since 2020-09-05, per the GitHub API on 2026-09-26.
The project publishes TILES_UNDER_UNKNOWN_LICENSE.md and ARTISTS.md alongside the art; read both before using anything, and treat the unknown-license list as unusable
The upstream statement is that the majority is CC0 and new submissions are CC0 unless specified otherwise, with older pieces being the problem
Derived from rltiles, which is where much of the older and less traceable provenance comes from
Tiles are 32x32 with a consistent silhouette-first style, so mixing in a handful of your own is realistic
Do not treat the game repository's GPL-2.0 as covering the art; the code license and the art license are separate questions here, and the art is the one that is unresolved
If a specific tile matters to your project, resolve it individually against ARTISTS.md rather than adopting the set wholesale
Still open (re-checked 2026-10-04): the crawl/tiles README says the export is meant to hold only CC0 tiles, but hedges ("every care possible has been taken"), describes the grant as "a license similar to "public domain"", and the export dates from 2015 with no push since 2020. No file states one unconditional licence for the packaged set, so license stays varies and commercial / attribution_required stay unknown. Settling it needs a statement from the maintainer, or a per-tile check against ARTISTS.md
Review: confirm whether the packaged tile set has one unconditional licence, or settle each tile against ARTISTS.md and the unknown-license list.
Evidence
LICENSE in crawl/crawl, master (2026-08-24): "The majority of Crawl's tiles and artwork are released under the CC0 license"
Same file (2026-08-24): "the licensing situation may be complex, especially for older pieces"
crawl/tiles repository listing (2026-08-24): contains a file named TILES_UNDER_UNKNOWN_LICENSE.md
LICENSE in crawl/crawl via gh api (2026-10-04): unchanged, "Public Domain|CC0: most of tiles" and "the licensing situation may be complex, especially for older pieces"
README.md in crawl/tiles via gh api (2026-10-04): "Many of those artist making these changes have signed off their copyright, returning these tiles to a license similar to "public domain", CC Zero"; "While every care possible has been taken to separate those tiles released into CC Zero from those who have not or can not be contacted, if you happen to see a tile incorrectly included in this export, please contact the maintainer"
TILES_UNDER_UNKNOWN_LICENSE.md (2026-10-04): "The following tiles (as of 2010) had unclear ownership and/or the original author was unable to be reached. They will be excluded from any release."
ARTISTS.md (2026-10-04): "the list of artists that gave approval in 2010 for their artwork to be released under CC:0. It is asserted that this covers any new art submitted to Crawl."; repository releases/ holds Ancient and Nov-2015
