Posts from ·gammafunk·

0.31 Tournament Results

The 0.31 tournament is over. On behalf of the Dev Team, many thanks to all the server admins, outside contributors, bug reporters, and to the many DCSS players who made the 0.31 release and tournament possible!

For 16 days, players could compete for tournament points and banners by playing 0.31 games on the public servers. The only major rule changes compared to the 0.30 tournament were the addition of a Gem Collection category, making Uskayaw’s banner be based on gems, and allowing Felids to win the Ruthless Efficiency banner.

Congratulations to Sergey,  for once again taking first place in the individual competition, with 115,521 points and 16 wins! Sergey got the most points for combos won, with species high scores for HO and Hu, and class scores for Hu and Wn, won the most pacific game (a SpEn with only 421 kills), achieved an 8 win streak (3rd best overall), a 64M HuEE high score (3rd best overall), collected 17 tier 3 banners, and won 6 Nemelex’s Choice combos.

Other big winners:

  • Wizard1ke: 2nd place overall with 106,191 points and 28 wins. Wizard1ke was the only player to collect all 24 tier 3 banners, and had the most points in the piety category, reaching max piety with 21 gods and winning with 21 gods. They also got the second most points for combos won, including the Te, Dj, and On species high scores, and won 13 Nemelex Choice combos.
  • Flugkiller: 3rd place overall with 99,209 points and 13 wins. He got a 0:25:20 realtime MiFi win (2nd overall), collected 19 tier 3 banners (2nd overall), won a TrFi in only 14,063 turns (3rd overall), got a 7 win streak, and won 6 Nemelex Choice combos.
  • TheMeInTeam: Longest win streak with 19 wins and highest in the winrate category (won 22 of 23 games played).
  • Sapher: Highest scoring win at 91M points with an OpEE.
  • EnegeticOcto: Fastest realtime win with a 0:22:48 MiFi.
  • qw: Fastest realtime win by a bot with a 0:10:50 DjHu. qw won 3 games this tournament, including first ever wins of Dj and Dg (with DgHu). It also got 3 runes twice this tournament with SpHu.
  • zran: Lowest turncount win with an AtCj winning in 10,274 turns.
  • bookman: 23 Nemelex’s Choice wins, the most in the tournament.
  • The first three wins of the tournament were by FlugKiller (a MiFi in 0:46:25), ShadowRider38 (a MiFi in 0:41:59), and p0werm0de (a MiFi in 0:27:52; 3rd fastest realtime win overall!).
  • The last win of the tournament was by sewnkin, an OnEE that ascended 14 seconds before the end of tournament.

The clan competition was won by Retired Ogres Bocce Club (captained by EnegeticOcto) with 132,494 points. They bested the 2nd place clan in the Combo High Scores (1st overall), Best High Score (1st overall), Fastest Realtime Win (1st overall), Most Pacific Win (1st overall), Fastest Realtime (1st overall), Low Turncount (1st overall), Banner Collection (tied for 1st overall), and Piety (1st overall) categories. In 2nd place was The TeAM in MeEE-Cosplay(captained by TheMeInTeam) with 102,015 points, and first place in the Streak Length category, and 2nd place in the Piety and Nemelex Choice categories. Not far behind in 3rd place was Harold and a Few Mara Go to Wight Castle (captained by Wizard1ke) with 98,358 points, and 2nd place in the Combo High Scores, Best High Score, Low Turncount Win, and Most Pacific Win categories.

To close out, here are some overall tournament statistics (with the 0.30 numbers in brackets for comparison). 2,817 non-bot players started a game at some point during the tournament; of those 2,728 completed a game without quitting or leaving the dungeon sadly orbless. This definition of “player” (players who completed a non-boring game) is used for subsequent calculations and was used for the 0.30 statistics.

  • Players: 2,728 (0.30: 2,708)
  • Total player time: 30,498 hrs (0.30: 30,426 hrs)
  • Average player time: 11.18 hrs (0.30: 11.24 hrs)
  • Games played: 71,851 (0.30: 69,571)
  • Players who got a rune: 861 (0.30: 926)
  • 454 winners and 1367 wins (0.30: 454 winners and 1433 wins)
  • Win rate: 1.90% (0.30: 2.06%)
  • WebTiles win rate: 1.85% (0.30: 1.94%). Console win rate: 3.59% (0.30: 6.18%)

Thanks to you all for playing! Many thanks as well to server admins, developers, and contributors who made the 0.31 release and tournament possible!

The 0.32 season has begun, and changes are already in motion. We have two online experimental branches that implement a new Steel Elf species and redesigns the gods Beogh and Yredelemnul. The Legends Say that Watch this space for further information as the 0.32 trunk update posts begin to flow. Until next time, happy crawling!

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0.31 “The Alchemy of Forms”

We are pleased to announce the release of Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup 0.31 “The Alchemy of Forms”!

DCSS 0.31 features some major spell school and starting background changes, a variety of new spells, many dangerous new monsters, and some major species changes.

The Transmutations forms spells have been moved into talisman items, which allow permanently shifting into forms based on the new Shapeshifting skill. The remaining Transmutations spells and the Poison Magic spells have been merged into a new Alchemy school. The Shapeshifter and Alchemist starting backgrounds replace Transmuter and Venom Mage, respectively. To support these changes, this release adds 4 new spells, sees 7 spells reworked into improved replacements, and has many tweaks to the levels and schools. In fact it’s a bit too much for me to write up as we’re getting ready for tournament! So please check out the “Spells” section of the release for full details.

The new Oni species replaces Ogres. Oni love a good drunken brawl, gaining double effect when drinking any potion that restore HP or MP, and also perform an immediate cleaving melee attack. They are otherwise similar to Ogres, but also have horns and some increased apts. Starting at XL 7, Armataurs now regenerate HP and MP while rampaging. They also lose their double potion effect, and no longer read scrolls slowly. Felids now have an extra life at XL 1 and don’t lose XLs when dying. Tengu have an inherent acrobat effect (like the amulet) at XL 1, and gain 4 EV at XL 7 instead of gaining an EV bonus and fast movement. Humans gain the exploration healing effect formerly found on Meteorans, which are no more. Instead, players of any species can now rush to find gems stashed at the end of many branches as achievement items.

Download DCSS 0.31 here or play it online on one of many servers across the world! Packages for Windows, OS X, and Linux are available now. See the full list of changes on the release page here.

The tournament starts on Friday January 19th 8pm UTC and runs through Sunday February 4th 8pm UTC, with all online 0.31 games counting towards your score. See the tournament page for more details, including how to join or setup a clan. Clans membership can be changed until Friday January 26th 8pm UTC.

Many thanks to all those who have contributed to DCSS over the years. Thanks especially to the DCSS development team, whose contributions made 0.31 possible, and to the admins who run and maintain the official servers. A special thanks to the following community members who contributed to 0.31 and a warm welcome to the first-time contributors. (Let us know if someone is missing, this data is tricky to collect in bulk!)

910rd, aedyr, AlexanderPosch, Aliscans, Alvin, Anabel, Antal Spector-Zabusky, CipHuK, cureja, DevJac, geekosaur, Jared Miller, kippig, laserbat, MainiacJoe, mgdelmonte, Monkooky, Nephila Hirsch Oliveira, NormalPerson7, orjb1, Perren Yang, Quinten Konyn, Roadster Tracker, Rosstin Murphy, RypoFalem, Rytis Petronis, sandertyu, sdynet, Sean Dewar, Sebastian Zivota, Skrybe, yrdzrfxndfvh, Zhang Kai

0.31 Tournament Page

Hello crawlers! We’re letting you know that the official 0.31 tournament page is online! The will run from Friday January 19th, 8pm UTC to Sunday February 4th, 8pm UTC. Please bookmark the 0.31 tournament page and use this page to track your progress throughout the tournament. We have some rule changes planned and will update the tournament page with any changes. As we test the tournament scripts, you may see summaries of test data in the “Overview” page taken from recent 0.31 beta games. Don’t worry, we’ll reset everything before the tournament starts.

The 0.31 release which will be made and announced either this Thursday or Friday. In the meantime, the 0.31 branch is being rolled out to our online servers. Servers CBR2, CKO, and LLD all have it available, with more to come soon! You can configure your tournament clan in your RC files right now on one of those three servers, or simply wait until your favorite official server has 0.31 installed. Finally, we’re finishing up one last belated Trunk Update to fill you in on the torrent of changes we had in December. So stay tuned, and good luck in the tournament!

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0.30 Tournament Results

The 0.30 tournament is over. On behalf of the Dev Team, many thanks to all the server admins, outside contributors, bug reporters, and to the many DCSS players who made the 0.30 release and tournament possible!

For 16 days, players could compete for tournament points and banners by playing 0.30 games on the public servers. This was the fourth tournament held after the major revision of the tournament rules done for 0.25. There were changes based on previous input, and once again we’ve collected the feedback posted on tavern and reddit.

Congratulations to Sergey (aka yegreS),  for once again taking first place in the individual competition, with 87,793 points! Over the course of the tournament, Sergey won all 11 games he played (!), the 3rd longest win streak overall. He also achieved an 86M MeIE high score (5th highest overall), a 0:30:53 realtime win (6th best overall), collected 14 tier 3 banners, got a species and a background high score (from a 45M score GnEE), won 4 Nemelex’s Choice combos, got 4 combo high scores, and completed 27 ziggurats.

This is the first time someone has won the tournament with 100% winrate since theglow won all 18 of their games in the 0.11 tournament in 2012. elliptic (27th(!) overall) notes that there have been 24 tournaments with the 16-day format, and in the first 12 of them there were 15 distinct players who won at least 18 games in a single tournament, while in the second 12 of them there were 66 such players. Despite this trend, Sergey, who also took 1st place in the previous 0.29 tournament, took 1st place in this tournament with 14 fewer wins (11 vs 25 in 0.29) and played over 3 hours less per day on average (4:43:25 vs 7:58:28 in 0.29)!

Other big winners:

  • kuniqs: 2nd place overall (82,079 points, 19 wins), with a 96M MeEE high score (2nd overall), a 0:29:35 realtime win (4th overall), 18 tier 3 banners (4th most overall), a 5 win streak, 7 Nemelex’s Choice wins, two combo high scores, and 28 Ziggurats cleared.
  • ShadowRider38: 3rd place overall (77,239 points, 21 wins), with a 0:35:02 realtime win (7th overall), a 17,829 turns MeFi win (8th lowest overall), 15 tier 3 banners (5th most overall), 8 Nemelex’s Choice wins (9th overall), 11 combo high scores, a 5 win streak, and 27 Ziggurats cleared.
  • narz: Highest scoring win at 132M with MeEE and the most pacific win with a SpEn that killed only 186 monsters.
  • FlugKiller: Fastest realtime win at 00:21:48 with a MiFi.
  • TheMeInTeam: Longest win streak with 15 wins.
  • Wizard1ke: The only person to collect all 24 tier 3 banners.
  • removed: 30 Nemelex’s Choice wins.
  • FizzleGong: Lowest turncount win with a MeEE winning in 5,881 turns.
  • SnakkuSnakku7: 3 species (At, Gh, HO) and 3 background (Ar, CK, Hs) high scores, and 1st in the Combo High Scores category.
  • The first three wins of the tournament were by EnegeticOcto (a MiFi in 0:56:35), ShadowRider38 (a MiFi in 1:08:58), and hihot (a MiFi in 1:31:43).
  • The last win of the tournament was by RailBird80, a HuFE that ascended 16 minutes before the end of tournament yet took over 4 days to win.

The clan competition was won by Heavy Weight Lifting Club (captained by EnegeticOcto) with 112,811 points. They sealed their victory by besting the 2nd place clan in the Combo High Scores (1st overall), Most Pacific Win (1st overall), Fastest Realtime (1st overall), Piety, Nemelex’s Choice, and Streak categories. In a close 2nd place was Uncle Xoms Tabbin (captained by themargong) with 104,283 points, and first place in the High Score and Lowest Turncount Win categories. They tied for 1st place with Heavy Weight Lifting Club in the banners category, together collecting all 24 tier 3 banners. 3rd place was held by My Boolean is Binary (captained by TheMeInTeam) with 93,023 points, and 1st place in the Nemelex’s Choice and Streak categories.

To close out, here are some overall tournament statistics (with the 0.29 numbers in brackets for comparison). 2,765 players started a game at some point during the tournament; of those 2,711 completed a game without quitting or leaving the dungeon sadly orbless. This definition of “player” (players who completed a non-boring game) is used for subsequent calculations and was used for the 0.29 statistics.

  • Players: 2,711 (0.29: 2,573)
  • Total player time: 30,408 hrs (0.29: 27,360 hrs)
  • Average player time: 11.2 hrs (0.29: 10.6 hrs)
  • Games played: 69,601 (0.29: 64,339)
  • Players who got a rune: 926 (0.29: 759)
  • 454 winners and 1433 wins (0.29: 368 winners and 1183 wins)
  • Win rate: 2.06% (0.29: 1.84%)
  • Proportion of players using WebTiles: 97.1% (0.29: 96.9%)

Thanks to you all for playing! Many thanks as well to server admins, developers, and contributors who made the 0.30 release and tournament possible!

The 0.31 season has begun, and changes are already in motion. Watch this space for further information as the 0.31 trunk update posts begin to flow. Until next time, happy crawling!

0.30: “The Reavers Return”

We are pleased to announce the release of Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup 0.30 “The Reavers Return”!

DCSS 0.30 features the return of the legendary Reaver background. These warrior-mages start with two new powerful yet situational spells: Kiss of Death and Momentum Strike. They also start with the Hailstorm spell, which has been moved down to level 3 yet can sometimes miss.

The new Armataur species replaces Palentongas, who have rolled peacefully off into the sunset. Armataurs are large, scaly mammals that wear bardings, but instead of rolling and curling, they have innate rampage and a long tongue mutation that doubles potion effects and slows down scroll reading.

A grand total of 7 new spells have been added! Two we’ve already mentioned for Reaver, with two more being likewise new designs and three replacing existing spells:

- Kiss of Death (L1 Conj/Necro): does high draining damage to an adjacent enemy, at the cost of significant max HP drain to the caster.
- Momentum Strike (L2 Conj/Tloc). Redirects the caster’s momentum for a damaging attack that doesn’t require line of fire, but locks the caster in place for some turns after a hit (and cannot be recast until this expires).
- Cigotuvi’s Dreadful Rot (L2 Necro/Air/Pois). Rots away the caster’s flesh to create a cloud of deadly miasma on their tile. Replaces Corpse Rot.
- Volatile Blastmotes (L3 Fire/Tloc). Creates an explosive cloud on the caster’s tile, usable as a land mine or tricky tool. Replaces Conjure Flame.
- Vhi’s Electric Charge (L3 Tloc/Air). Launches the caster at a nearby foe and launches a crackling melee attack, phasing through creatures en route.
- Arcjolt (L5 Air/Conj). Electrocutes everything adjacent to the caster, everything adjacent to those creatures, etc, etc, in a chain. Replaces Lightning Bolt.
- Plasma Beam (L6 Fire/Air): Fires a bolt of lightning and another bolt of fire, both at the most distant foe.

We’ve added 6 new unrands and made changes to 11 existing ones. Additionally you can now find randart orbs, scarves, and magical staves!

Finally, Lugonu has been mutated into a new form. Banishment is available at 2* piety (instead of 3*) and mutates foes that resist getting banished. To encourage adventurers to abandon their current god, Lugonu helpfully banishes some hostile monsters whenever other gods act with their wrath. There are also now more Lugonu altars in the Abyss, and more piety is awarded for conversions in the Abyss.

Download DCSS 0.30 here or play it online on one of many servers across the world! Packages for Windows and OS X are available now. Linux debs are coming soon. See the full list of changes on the release page here.

The tournament starts on Friday May 5th 8pm UTC and runs through Sunday May 21st 8pm UTC, with all online 0.30 games counting towards your score. See the tournament page for more details, including how to join or setup a clan. Clans membership can be changed until Friday May 12th 8pm UTC.

Many thanks to all those who have contributed to DCSS over the years. Thanks especially to the DCSS development team, whose contributions made 0.30 possible, and to the admins who run and maintain the official servers. A special thanks to the following community members who contributed to 0.30 and a warm welcome to the first-time contributors, listed in italics. (Let us know if someone is missing, this data is tricky to collect in bulk!)

Aliscans, Ernest Antanishin, Antern, bfaires, Josh Braendel, Marcelo Henrique Cerri, Perry Fraser, greenscarf, Duong Hoang, Alex Jurkiewicz, kippig, kd7uiy, mainiacjoe, Monkooky, Michael Del Monte, pdpol, Brian Power, Roadster Tracker, Rypofalem, Rytis Petronis, Aleksando Sansan, sdynet, Skrybe, Antal Spector-Zabuskyspiros, Sergio Thompson, Samantha Tobias, Benjamin S Wolf, yrdzrfxndfvh, Zhang Kai

0.28 “The Rise and Fall of Ignis Zotdust and the Spiders from Hell”

We are pleased to announce the release of Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup 0.28 “The Rise and Fall of Ignis Zotdust and the Spiders from Hell”!

DCSS 0.28 features a new Cinder Acolyte zealot background that begins the game worshiping a new god, Ignis, the Dying Flame. Cinder Acolytes start with the new Scorch spell, a -1 flaming branded weapon of choice, and five stars of piety. Ignis worshipers cannot gain piety, losing it only when using Ignis’ abilities. The abilities are Fiery Armour, which grants AC and retaliation flame damage, Foxfire Swarm, which summons many foxfires, and Rising Flame, a one-time ability sends the player one level above. Once all piety is spent, players will typically abandon for another god, and Ignis dies forever when wrath is over.

The Hell branches have been revised to offer substantially more challenge. Each branch features a distinct and persistent negative effects that applies while in the branch along with timed effects common to all Hells. The branches all have revised monster set with many new monsters and smaller layouts for the first six levels, each of which has only one downward staircase. The Spider branch has likewise been retooled with a roster of new creepy-crawlies, new and revised end maps, and updates to the existing layouts and vaults.

A new magical orb item type exists for the shield slot. Each orb type grants an ego with a powerful passive effect, such as a 3-radius halo or a reduction of monster willpower at the expense of your own. The god Yredelemnul has been completely redesigned, granting passive reaping and accepting the reaped zombies as payment for its dark abilities. Okawaru and Jiyva have also seen significant, though not quite as sweeping, changes.

A batch of new spells have been added, As always, there are dozens of new deadly vaults, and many more changes small and large alike!

Download DCSS 0.28 here or play it online on one of many servers across the world! Packages for Windows and OS X are available now. Linux debs are coming soon. See the full list of changes on the release page here.

The tournament starts on Friday February 4th 8pm UTC and runs through Sunday February 20th 8pm UTC, with all online 0.28 games counting towards your score. See the tournament page for more details, including how to join or setup a clan. Clans membership can be changed until Friday February 11th 8pm UTC.

Many thanks to all those who have contributed to DCSS over the years. Thanks especially to the DCSS development team, whose contributions made 0.28 possible, and to the admins who run and maintain the official servers. A special thanks to the following community members who contributed to 0.28 and a warm welcome to the first-time contributors, listed in italics. (Let us know if someone is missing, this data is tricky to collect in bulk!)

AdamPG, Alex Jurkiewicz, Aliscans, ArmiesAndCastles, Brian Power, Chris Landry, Justin Clark Ong, David Damerell, DreamDust, Ed Dewey, Elliott Bernstein, Gopall, Goratrix, Implojin, Jonathan Klabunde Tomer, Kiëd Llaentenn, MainiacJoe, Hurricos, Matthew Daley, Monkooky, Nikolai Lavsky, Oneirical, Perry Fraser, RojjaCebolla, Santiago Acosta, Zachary Chandler, Zhang Kai, amcnicky, dilly, floraline, John Stahara, Beargit, mgdelmonte, Nikolai Lavsky, Robert Gray, Paul Pollack, sdynet

0.27.1 Bugfix Release

We’ve uploaded the 0.27.1 bugfix release. Packages for Windows, MacOs, and Linux are all available on the download page. Thanks to all the many contributors who helped with this release, including patches and bug reports!

Highlights (full commit list via github):

  • The frequency of D:1 jackals is reduced.
  • Sigmund and Robin are nerfed gently.
  • Maxwell’s Capacitative Coupling now has LOS range.
  • 80 other fixes, tweaks, copy-edits, and interface improvements.

Updating is recommended for all players. Happy crawling, and report more bugs here!

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0.27 Tournament Results

The 0.27 tournament is over. On behalf of the Dev Team, many thanks to all the server admins, outside contributors, bug reporters, and to the many DCSS players who made the 0.27 release and tournament possible! For 16 days, players could compete for tournament points and banners by playing 0.27 games on the public servers. This was the third tournament held after the major revision of the tournament rules done for 0.25. There were changes based on previous input, and once again we’ve collected the feedback posted on tavern and reddit.

Congratulations to Yermak, perennial champion, for once again taking first place in the individual competition, with 105,402 points! Over the course of the tournament, Yermak won 48 games, including a streak of 24 games (best in tournament), an 86M high score run (also best in tournament), an XL 14 win (also tied for best in tournament!), 27 Nemelex’ Choice combos, 5 species high scores, 3 background high scores, and 19 tier 3 banners. In 2nd place was Sergey with 91,825 points and 34 wins, including a streak of 21 games, 3rd lowest turncount win, 2nd 15 win of the tournament, 4 species high scores, 3 background high scores, and 14 tier 3 banners. Rounding out the top 3 was dilly with 84,283 points points and 38 wins, including a streak of 7 wins, 28 Nemelex Choice wins (tied for most in tournament), and 18 tier 3 banners.

Our top three took several of the top spots in the individual category rankings, but they weren’t the only players on the leaderboard. Acrobat set the top standard in Win Rate once again, winning 37 out of 43 games over the tournament for an adjusted win rate of 84%. Third place finisher dilly tied with Prakerore in the Nemelex’ Choice competition, both winning 28 Nemelex combos for points over the course of the tournament. Yermak and Sergey took the number one and number two spots in the quest for Combo High Scores, with CryingNoob rounding out the top 3. The lowest turncount was 9,903 turns, shared in a tie by Caminho and DrMan. Seasoned speed runner p0werm0de took the fastest real-time win with a 22:37 victory. Spriggan Enchanter was the power-combo of the Low XL win category, with Acrobat, Yermak, and Prakerore in a three way tie at XL14. The tournament start was heralded by p0werm0de who posted the first win after 33 minutes, and dilly brought home the first 15 rune win in an hour and 20 minutes. The Ziggurat Dive was more restrained than the 0.26 tournaments’ 100 ziggurat fiesta, with Ge0ff clearing 60 Ziggurats. Finally, both poncheis and booing earned every banner, the only two players to complete this feat.

The clan competition was won by Gozag or Stay Home (captained by Ge0ff) with 105,343 points. In 2nd place was Team Splat (captained by shummie) with 78,267 points. Following close on their heels in 3rd place were ABCDEF (captained by fbynet) with 76,046.

Most of the clan categories take the best score of the member, so I won’t recap those. The Nemelex’ Choice competition was a collective effort, and and just as in 0.26 it was quite high scoring. Gozag or Stay Home came out on top, with a total of 49 clan nemelex points; closely following were ABCDEF with 47. The Combo High Scores competition was blown away by Gozag or Stay Home with 917 points in the category, a result of having both Yermak and Sergey on the team. This tournament only two clans collectively earned every banner: ABCDEF thanks to the ‘B’, booing; and chatdotcrawlBR, which had poncheis as a member.

Thank you to everyone for playing.

To close out, here are some overall tournament statistics (with the 0.26 numbers in brackets for comparison). 2,527 players started a game at some point during the tournament; of those 2,474 completed a game in a non-boring way. This definition of “player” (players who completed a non-boring game) is used for subsequent calculations and was used for the 0.27 statistics.

  • Players: 2,474 (0.26: 2,333)
  • Total player time: 27,502 hrs (0.26: 29,392 hrs)
  • Average player time: 11.2 hrs (0.26: 12.6 hrs)
  • Games played: 67,203 (0.26: 54,701)
  • Players who got a rune: 734 (0.26: 886)
  • 404 winners and 1571 wins (0.26: 476 winners and 1767 wins)
  • Win rate: 2.34% (0.26: 3.23%)
  • Proportion of players using WebTiles: 94.4% (0.25: 96.7%)

The 0.28 season has begun, and it again looks to be a very active trunk season. Watch this space for further information as the 0.28 trunk update posts begin to flow. Until next time, happy crawling!

0.27 “The Cursed Flame”

We are pleased to announce the release of Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup 0.27 “The Cursed Flame”!

DCSS 0.27 features a new Djinni species that cast spells using HP, can only learn new spells at random as they level up, and only use the spellcasting skill to train magic. We’ve redesigned Ashenzari, who now offers curses for your gear to gain piety and skill levels, at the cost of destroying the item when the curse is removed.

A batch of new spells have been added, including Manifold Assault, which attacks multiple foes at once with your melee, Storm Form, which transforms you into a tempest with electrified, cleaving melee and the ability to hurl yourself as lightning at foes, and Animate Armour, which draws out the spirit of your armor to fight by your side. Polar Vortex is a more damaging, ice-themed replacement for Tornado. Maxwell’s Capacitive Coupling is a level 8 air-themed replacement for Absolute Zero that vaporizes a nearby monster after a delay. Chain Lightning has been reworked into a more powerful level 9 spell.

Spell books have many new types and generate more often, but contain fewer spells. We’ve re-balanced branch monster sets and end maps, as well as made new end maps for Lair, Shoals, and Snake. As always, there are dozens of new deadly vaults, and many more changes small and large alike!

Download DCSS 0.27 here or play it online on one of many servers across the world! Packages for Windows and OS X are available now. Linux debs are coming soon. See the full list of changes on the release page here.

The tournament starts on Friday July 30th 8pm UTC and runs through Sunday August 15th 8pm UTC, with all online 0.27 games counting towards your score. See the tournament page for more details, including how to join or setup a clan. Clans membership can be changed until Friday August 6th 8pm UTC.

Many thanks to all those who have contributed to DCSS over the years. Thanks especially to the DCSS development team, whose contributions made 0.27 possible, and to the admins who run and maintain the official servers. A special thanks to the following community members who contributed to 0.27 and a warm welcome to the first-time contributors, listed in italics. (Let us know if someone is missing, this data is tricky to collect in bulk!)

4Hooves2Appendages, AdamPG, Aliscans, Alexei Barnes, Beargit, Elliott Bernstein, dicedlemming, dilly, DreamDust, Goratrix, hyperactiveChipmunk, Implojin, Alex Jurkiewicz,  Zhang Kai,  l33t-d00d, Nikolai Lavsky, Christopher Landry, MainiacJoe, mgdelmonte, Mintice, Andrew O’Neill, Alexander PoschrobertxgraySastreii, sdynet, WhiteShark, Shummie, Skrybe, Jeffery Stager, Cebolla Sunbeam, Wensley, Mara Williamson

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July 24 Trunk Update Post and 0.27 Tournament Page

A +6 arbalest “Damnation” {damnation} comes into view. The +6 arbalest “Damnation” {damnation} shoots a damnation bolt at the trunk update.

Hello crawlers and welcome to the last trunk update of the 0.27 cycle. We’ve been under feature freeze since last Friday, so the remaining time before the 0.27 Release and Tournament will be devoted to bug fixes, balance tweaks, and polish. If you’ve been holding out and playing 0.26 due to concerns about stability, know that all major features are fixed in trunk, and only reasonable balance changes and bug fixes will be a thing from here until release. We’ve made the 0.27 beta branch, so servers will begin installing 0.27 soon. So please play-test trunk or the 0.27 branch when that’s available on your favorite server to help us find bugs! The 0.27 release will be either Thursday, July 29th, or Friday, July 30th, depending on timing. Look out for an official release post with download links to come.

The 0.27 tournament will run from Friday July 30th, 8pm UTC to Sunday August 15th, 8pm UTC. Please bookmark the official 0.27 tournament page and use this page to track your progress throughout the tournament. We’ll continue to update this page with any rules changes. In coming days you may see summaries of test data in the “Overview” page taken from recent 0.27 beta games. Don’t worry, we’ll reset everything before the tournament starts.

Now, onto the Trunk Update! Note that this is not the full set of 0.27 changes, just the ones since our last trunk update. For the full and official set of 0.27 changes, check out the changelog. Here are the changes since last time:

  • The starting spell sets of some Mage and Warrior-Mage backgrounds are reduced by one spell. This together with the increase in book drops will give these classes more variety in how they proceed through middle portions of the game. We didn’t get to adjusting all classes this version, since for some, any spell removal would leave the class in a difficult spot. Further changes, including potentially new spells, will happen during 0.28 development, so stay tuned! The changes for 0.27:
    • Air elementalists no longer start with Lightning Bolt.
    • Arcane Marksmen no longer start with Leda’s Liquefaction.
    • Earth Elementalists no longer start with Lee’s Rapid Deconstruction.
    • Summoners and Ice Elementalists no longer start with Summon Ice beast.
    • Venom Mages no longer start with Ignite Poison.
  • New branch end maps and adjustments:
    • New “Abyssal Woods” Lair ending featuring demonic trees and abyss-themed monsters. Beware the thrashing horrors!
    • New “Lost City” Shoals ending featuring a ruined temple theme with minotaurs and sphinxes. Beware the satyrs too!
    • New “Storm Temple” Shoals ending featuring electricity-themed monsters and many possible layouts. Beware the storm dragon! Or the titan!
    • The “Ancient Temple”,  “Frog Pond”, and “Undead Jungle Book” Lair endings have been adjusted to lower monster counts significantly. And they say we never give players anything…
    • Most Snake end maps have their monster counts significantly reduced. It’s tough work slogging through all those nagas, we know.
  • All Ice Cave maps have been rebalanced to have more varied layouts, monsters, and loot. Gone are mysterious dead reapers! The changes are substantial, as detailed in this commit. You should find the cloud generator placement less arbitrary and less frequent, more possible shortcuts in many maps, and more varied monster sets at both easy and hard difficulty ice caves. Stay frosty, friends!
  • The Robe of Folly is redesigned. It now gives you a permanent brilliance effect (spell enhancer and half spell MP costs), but sets your Will to 0. Additionally it grants +8 Int (from +4) and +4 enchant (from +3). It’d be folly indeed to not wear this robe while entering one of my lich-filled vaults!
  • Dancing ranged weapons are now a thing that can kill you. Yes, of course they have infinite ammo, I’m glad you asked! But don’t worry because…
  • Tukima’s Dance now works on monsters wielding ranged weapons! It can make charmed dancing ranged weapons to fight by your side.
  • The Elemental Staff is featured in one new and one reworked vault. Both vaults also feature a greatly improved master elementalist monster that always wields the staff, appearing when these vaults place in Elf or Depths. Watch out, it knows Ozo’s Refridge, Crystal Spear, Chain Lightning, and Firestorm!
    • The new vault is the official “guarded unrand” vault, by first-time contributor dilly. Placing in Dungeon, Elf, and Depths, it features an elemental mage elf boss (for Dungeon) or the master elementalist (for Elf and Depths) and various elemental baddies.
    • Mu’s “elemental laboratory” vault, the one that initially introduced the master elementalist, has been given a complete overhaul. It has more challenging and interesting elemental monster sets and features much more interesting terrain.
  • Monster breath timeouts now reduce after their turn. So if you see that a monster is “catching its breath”, you know it won’t use a breath attack before your next turn unless it gets a double turn. That’s really nice!
  • Many new vaults for Elf, including entries, decorative vaults, monster vaults with weird things like defective dancing weapons and cool things like double deep elf blademasters with double double swords, and new main vaults and entries for the Elf:2 Hall of Blades! Also new are a batch of ecumenical altar vaults. New even though the altars inside are very old.
  • Eleionomae no longer land on and destroy trees when they travel next to you, instead picking a safe and comfy spot next to a tree. No more tree digging!
  • Ossuaries no longer have spear and dart traps. The days of step-and-rest-then-repeat for clearing some areas of ossuaries are over! Don’t worry, alarm traps and net traps still make an appearance. And there’s talk of introducing some new types of traps or trap-like monsters in 0.28…
  • The macro menu is greatly improved, with hotkeys Ctrl-D for an improved menu and Ctrl-E for a quick-add menu.
  • We have a bona-fide game menu available from the F1 key. It’s almost like we’re a modern game! For now you can use it to access save, quit, macro, and help functions, but we’ll probably expand it in the future.
  • The allow_extended_colors console option is now on by default. For console nerds only! We previously didn’t enable it because some major system terminals didn’t support more than 8 standard colors by default, but that’s no longer the case.
  • Hints mode has been updated and corrected. But it still recommends Vehumet over Sif Muna! Wrong!
  • The Desolation entrance is no longer ruined.

That wraps it up for this set of trunk updates. Until next time, happy crawling!

The damnation bolt hits the trunk update!!! The damnation bolt explodes! The damnation engulfs the trunk update! The trunk update dies…

0.26 Tournament Page

Hello fellow Bogchamps! I have a quick update about the 0.26 tournament. Please bookmark the official 0.26 tournament page and use this page to track your progress throughout the tournament. As a reminder, the tournament is scheduled from 20:00 UTC Friday 8 January through 20:00 UTC Sunday 24 January. The 0.26 release will likely happen beforehand on January 7th.

The 0.26 branch is available and already installed on CBR2, CKO, CUE, and CXC. For other servers, you’ll see the 0.26 game links appear on the server lobby at some point before the tournament starts. Once 0.26 is available on your server, you can follow the instructions on the tournament page to define/join clans via your 0.26 RC file. Clans can be formed and changed until one week into the tournament on 20:00 UTC Friday 15 January. See the How to Play section of the tournament page for details.

We’ve made some rule changes relative to the 0.25 tournament, so see the Changes section of the tournament page for details. Once the tournament has started, the leaderboard will display the current standings. You may see the leaderboard, player, and clan pages populated with test data from 0.26 games. Don’t worry, the test pages and data will be wiped before the tournament begins. If you’re looking for people to play with, you can find them in the Tavernreddit, or our IRC channel ##crawl on Freenode. Many thanks to Napkin for again letting us host the tournament on CDO, and to ebering for updating the tournament scripts for our rule changes.

See you all on Swamp:4, paralyzed by a fenstrider witch!

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Dec 30 Trunk Update and 0.26 Tournament and Release Dates

gammafunk gestures. gammafunk spews toxic sludge! The Trunk Update festers in the toxic bog!

Hello crawlers and welcome to the last trunk update of the 0.26 cycle. We’ve been under feature freeze since last Friday, so the remaining time before the 0.26 Release and Tournament will be devoted to bug fixes, balance tweaks, and polish. If you’ve been holding out and playing 0.25 due to concerns about stability, know that all major features are fixed in trunk, and only reasonable balance changes and bug fixes will be a thing from here until release. We’ll be making the 0.26 beta branch soon, at which time servers will begin installing 0.26. So please play-test trunk or the 0.26 branch when that’s available on your favorite server to help us find bugs! The 0.26 release will be either Thursday, January 7th, or Friday, January 8th, depending on timing. Look out for an official release post with download links to come.

The 0.26 tournament will run from Friday Jan 8th, 8pm UTC to Sunday Jan 24th, 8pm UTC. We don’t don’t yet have a rules page installed on this server, but expect that link in a forthcoming post. Check out the pages for the previous tournament to get a sense of the rules and presentation. We’ll try to announce any rules changes in that subsequent post, but as always the final rules page will cover everything you need to know.

Now, onto the Trunk Update! Note that this is not the full set of 0.26 changes, just the ones since our last trunk update. For the full and official set of 0.26 changes, check out the changelog. Here are the changes since last time:

  • Monster draining attacks now temporarily reduce player max HP instead of skills. The UI cost of skill drain was high…beware! See a more detailed discussion in this commit. Right now, the new drain effect is a bit weak, but I plan on making a couple balance changes to it during the freeze. Don’t worry, you’ll be afraid of bolts of drain, but it’ll be the good kind of afraid. Note that drain inflicted by the player is unchanged.
  • Frozen Ramparts has its effect end upon movement. Yes, another nerf to your favorite new ice spell. That’s ok, kiting isn’t very fun, and now it works much better with Ozocubu’s Armour!
  • Eringya’s Noxious Bog now places bogs on all squares within a range of 4 where there is no adjacent solid feature. A much-needed power increase for this spell, and hopefully an interesting positional trade-off. Kudos to hellmonk for the idea!
  • Irradiate now checks monster AC but does slightly more damage. Ignoring AC was not part of the original PleasingFungus vision (which is all-powerful).
  • The cloak of Starlight gains *Dazzle, which sometimes dazzles foes like the Dazzling Flash spell upon successful dodge. It no longer has rElec and rC+. This cloak wins you so many style points when you go swish that monsters are dumbfounded!
  • The glaive of the Guard gains a spectral weapon brand in addition to electricity, and loses sInv and +Rage. That’s right, dual branding!
  • The sword of Power is now +5, vorpal, and sometimes fires a powerful but low-accuracy beam with chance based on the player’s current HP. Have you played the lesser-known indie game The Legend of Zelda? It’s a bit like the sword from that game.
  • New Vaults! Sadly I don’t have enough time to go into detail about most individual vaults, but here’s a quick summary.
    • A big set of winding woodlands vaults from nikheizen that feature a forest/woodland theme with many variations.
    • A new Swamp rune vault by nikheizen featuring a coven of 13 witches, mages, sorcerers, and wizards who want tell you all about demons.
    • A ghost vault, two greek myth themed Shoals vaults, four Swamp vaults, and 7 altar vaults from nikheizen.
    • A set of 11 arrival vaults, 4 minivaults, and 2 altar vaults from amcnicky.
    • A Wu Jian altar vault from pdpol.
  • Damage and accuracy for spells and damage for wands are now shown in the UI. No more looking up info on various pages and bots just to get an idea of how much damage you can do! Well, for the most part. Some spells like Tornado refuse to cooperate.
  • Boulder beetles now stop rolling when they can’t move towards their target (that’s you) nor will they start rolling if this is the case. I know it was funny, but beetles rolling in place behind that poor little kobold in front of them was too traumatizing for the kobold.
  • Gauntlet monsters now generate awake, and those other than the minotaur can’t pickup loot. Now characters in Gauntlets don’t have weird incentives to explore the map in certain ways to not wake up monsters or to see the loot before monsters do.
  • Temporary allies all dismiss when you leave the level. Apparently there were corner cases where they didn’t do that right away!

That wraps it up for this set of trunk updates. Stay tuned for more tournament details, and until next time, happy crawling!

The Trunk Update looks as sick as possible!

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0.25 Tournament Delayed But Tournament Page Now Available

Hello crawlers. The ongoing protests in the United States and elsewhere have greatly limited the availability of some community members, including those working on the new tournament project, to do DCSS things. Although we’ve basically completed the tournament script changes and could run the tournament on time, it wouldn’t be fair to those people participating in protests or those just trying to deal with this difficult situation. To that end, we are delaying the start of the 0.25 tournament for one week until June 12th, 8pm UTC, and it will run for 16 days until June 28th, 8pm UTC. We’re sorry for the abrupt change of start date, but sometimes there are more important concerns.

That said, we do have a new tournament page populated with test data from online 0.25 games that you can take a look at now:

https://crawl.develz.org/tournament/0.25/

This will give you a chance to become better acquainted with the new rule set, but just as importantly you can help us find bugs and give suggestions for improvements! If you’re a UX expert with experience in the relevant technologies, check out the new-scoring branch in our repository of the tournament source code and consider making a pull request. Everyone can feel free to leave constructive feedback for the tournament pages in comments on this post or in your favorite venue for crawl discussion where you see devs lurking! We’ll continue finishing up the scripts and fixing bugs over the next week. Note that any games you see listed on the page above are just test data, and the database will be reset before start of tournament.

The 0.25 release will be made available for download at some point before June 12, and we’ll make an announcement when that happens. Thanks again for your understanding, and we hope you all are staying safe. Hopefully, in a week’s time, we’ll be ready to begin our quest to obtain a fabled artefact, the Orb of Zot!

Last 0.25 Updates and Release/Tournament Date

The 0.25 Updates mumble some strange words. The 0.25 Updates miscasts Dragon Form. The 0.25 Updates are flooded with distortional energies!

Greetings fellow crawlers, it’s time for a quick 0.25 update with the last changes that snuck in before the 0.25 feature freeze. All changes since May 22 have been balance changes and fixes to existing content rather than the addition of significant new features. But before we get to those changes, let’s talk about the release and tournament dates.

The 0.25 release will be Friday, June 5th, with the 0.25 tournament starting at 8pm UTC that same day. We don’t don’t yet have a rules page installed on this server, seeing as how ebering, chequers, advil, and (eventually, I promise!) myself are at work on the new scoring scripts. Until then, check out the writeup ebering made that describes the new rules in detail. We’ll be sure to make a follow-up post once that page is available.

Now for those last 0.25 updates. Please note that these are only the changes since that last Trunk Update. Please see the changelog for the full set of 0.25 changes:

  • Transmutations miscasts have been reworked to remove the bad form polymorphs, given the player more contamination instead. Given how often I see you all quaffing lignification before death, I’m surprised more of you didn’t enjoy becoming a tree!
  • Allies no longer stay out of the player’s line of fire. The ranged AI was updated previously to have monsters give ranged allies a clear path to hit their foes, but having them do this for the player’s line of fire proved annoying for the most common scenarios. This functionality might return in some way in the future, if we can work out a good method and UI.
  • Xom is now stimulated when you worship from a faded altar. Just a little gift to the people crazy enough to use those contraptions. Xom, of course, thinks you’re all hilarious.
  • Trove fees have been adjusted to not ask for potions of stabbing and to add possible fees for scrolls of fear and fog.
  • Formicids can no longer cast the Swiftness spell. Look, we don’t want you crawling away that easily. Try a shaft instead!
  • Paralysis, sleep, and confusion status icons are now shown for allies.
  • Many new random artefact description words have been added. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, you name it!
  • Tiles have finally been added for Cigotuvi’s Embrace, Hood of the Assassin, and Tins of Tremorstones. What, you didn’t like those fancy TO/DO icons?

The stone_soup-0.25 branch is available in the repository, but hasn’t been installed on servers yet. This will change in coming days, and at that point you can help us test the 0.25 beta. Until then, please report any bugs you notice in trunk (now 0.26 alpha!) on github or mantis. As always, and until next time, happy crawling!

Trunk Updates – 31 March 2020

You mumbles some strange words. You chill the trunk update to absolute zero! The trunk update is frozen into a solid block of ice!

Greetings fellow crawlers, it’s time for another Trunk Update. The 0.25 development cycle is slowly winding to a close, but we have some changes for you to try out, with more to come! Expect a release and tournament in the next month or two, barring any unforeseen delays. As always, we’ll make an announcement once we have a date in mind. This update features a couple larger changes we’ll give some extra detail about, along with some smaller updates described further below.

First up is the new L9 Ice spell Absolute Zero, which replaces the L9 Ice/Conj Glaciate spell. Level 9 spells are tricky to get right since they cost so much XP, yet we want to give players a reason to learn them. We also want these spells to be both distinct from the other L9 spells and relevant to their school; the latter is especially a focus with our spell changes this version. Glaciate fits reasonably into the Ice theme we’ve established, being a “diffuse” AOE spell, but it has too many similarities with Fire Storm yet functions like a worse version of that spell! Where Fire Storm is one of the best ways to kill monsters safely, Glaciate requires close proximity to be effective, and is far less good at blocking monster movement and line-of-fire.

Instead of reworking Glaciate and likely ending up with something similar to Fire Storm, so we went for more distinctiveness with Absolute Zero. This spell kills the closest target, leaving behind an ice block. It chooses randomly among the closest monsters if there’s a tie by distance. This kill is unconditional, so it works on everything from orbs of fire to Cerebov! The positional aspect comes getting the right monsters close enough when multiple monsters are involved, which is usually the case for dangerous fights late in the game. Absolute Zero might feel too cheesy at its max range, which scales with spellpower up to 7. We may reduce the range to a fixed lower value of, say, 5, and have noise scale down with spellpower instead. The latter aspect was in fact part of hellmonk’s original implementation of this spell. Thanks to him for that patch as well as other Discord regulars for discussing the idea.

Next we have a round of item removals; that’s right, the dreaded r-word! On the chopping block are: lamp of fire, sack of spiders, fan of gales, crystal ball of energy, and staff of power. See the links for kate’s brief description of why each item was removed. The crystal ball and staff of power removals won’t surprise many long time crawl players. The former is notoriously useless in most situations and the latter is an annoying swap with an effect duplicated by other equipment. As an aside, we’d like all magical staves to have a good melee effect; see below regarding staves of poison and Olgreb, and look out for similar changes (or removals!) in the future.

Regarding the other removed items, we want the set of evocables be relevant reasonably often, as distinct as possible, and not too numerous. The fan of gales was an escape item you’d use very infrequently, and this game already provides so many escape consumables, spells, abilities, and god powers. The lamp was a strong item, yet its design was underwhelming, as kate says. Its notorious targeter was awful to use in open spaces, and while it was very good in corridors, we already have an evocable that makes clouds and which is good in both open and closed areas. The sack was a very strong item, like all summoning consumables, but the summons it created aren’t memorable, at least not until getting ghost moths at high evocations. We have a bunch of other consumable items that create interesting summons and that everyone has to carry around as things are. The sack’s net effect might show up on some future item or ability, but not attached to summons.

These removals make the remaining evocables feel more distinct, free up a lot of item slots, and reduce the cognitive load in a game with such a large number of items. Speaking of loadstones, if you’ve been using the new tin of tremorstones and found it underwhelming, have no fear. We’ll be taking a look at these and seeing how they can be improved before release. Now, for the rest of the changes:

  • Phial of floods now applies a silencing “waterlogged” debuff to all monsters in the flooded area and no longer summons water elementals. So you can still get those cool silencing debuff on monsters, just without so much accompanying summoning cheese.
  • D:1 level spawns can no longer generate within LOS distance of the player’s starting position. A surprising nerf to tiny arrival vaults, to be sure, but a welcome one.
  • Potions of Brilliance now only provide a stronger universal spell enhancer and remove spell hunger. They no longer provide an Int bonus nor wizardry.
  • Staves of poison now do resistable poison damage on hit like other staves instead of just having a chance to poison.
  • The Staff of Olgreb now has a chance to deal poison-arrow flavored damage on hit, based on evocations skill. It no longer has an additional chance to cast Venom Bolt on top of casting OTR when evoked. Once again, I await kills from the Gauntlet minotaur wielding this.
  • Potions of Might no longer provide a bonus to strength. Don’t worry, the 1d10 bonus damage remains, and that’s the really good part.
  • The Dragonskin Cloak now provides rCorr instead of sticky flame resistance. Waiting for the complaints to roll in from the die-hard rSticky fans.
  • The -Tele property no longer appears on artefact weapons and jewellery. Sorry, no more cheesing those Zot traps with your -Tele stick!
  • Ziggurats now have a level set featuring many player ghosts. Zig ghosts are back! Accompanying them are a variety of undead assistants. This set replaces the “draining” monster set, since that idea is well covered by this new set and the existing ones.
  • Frozen Ramparts has its radius of effect reduced to 2 and its damage was slightly reduced. Even with the removal of the monster slow movement debuff, I found this spell to be too strong, doing lots of damage over huge areas in many situations. With these nerfs, Ramparts feels like it has damage more appropriate to a level 3 spell.
  • Many arrival vaults have been reworked to allow better player tactics. After all, tactics are important, or so the wiki guides say.
  • All Evocable items can no longer be used by the player while confused. Target fuzzing, be gone!
  • Trog now hates use of all magical staves and pain weapons. On the upside, Troglodytes won’t get offered these by scrolls of acquirement!
  • Nemelex abilities can no longer be used while silenced. This was a loophole from when decks used to be items. Remember those long gone days?
  • Call Imp no longer bases the type of imp summoned on spellpower. Don’t worry, this spell is still really good, crimson imps included!
  • The WebTiles server has seen a major overhaul and now supports python 3 as well as Tornado 5+. Thanks to advil, aidanh, and chequers for all their work on this development and testing. More WebTiles updates will be rolled out after testing, with work to come from aidanh on making it easier for us to upgrade server chroots. That way we can have a modern development toolchain on every server.

Play-testing trunk is always appreciated, especially as the release gets closer. Please report any bugs you find on mantis or on the github issues page. I myself had great fun ascending a merfolk ice elementalist to experience all the changes to ice magic; looking forward to trying a fire elementalist or venom mage next. Look out for more trunk changes and likely another Trunk Updates before next release. So until next time, Happy Crawling!

Trunk Updates – 21 February 2020

You quaff a potion. It was a potion of stabbing. You feel ready to backstab. You open the trunk update like a pillowcase!

Greetings fellow crawlers. The 0.25 development cycle has proved to be a busy one, so we’re back with another Trunk Update. Many of us usual suspects have been hard at work bringing you some new toys to play with. I’m also happy to note that PleasingFungus has recently returned to drop some new crawl creations of his own. How he managed to escape from the dreaded Tower of Lemuel, we’ll never know!

Now, on with the update:

  • Frozen Ramparts, a new L3 Ice spell that makes all walls within radius 3 become covered in icicles that release when a monster walks nearby. The icicles do light damage that checks AC but is only partly resistable. Affected monsters additionally receive a “frozen” debuff that slows their movement by 4 aut for a few turns. Available now for any Ice Elementalist in their starting book!
  • Tin of Tremorstones, a new multi-use evocable. When used, it creates two radius 2 explosions at range 3 that are triple-affected by AC (like LRD), but the explosions are randomly skewed and may hit the user. Most useful for players with good armour. It has a 33% chance to fall apart with each use. It’s a tin of angry earth elementals waiting to explode!
  • New Potion of Stabbing that gives a 50% chance to upgrade weak stabs (e.g.distracted monsters) to strong ones (e.g. sleeping monsters). I wonder what this potion would taste like?
  • New unrand: Cigotuvi’s Embrace, a +4 leather armour with rN+, rRot and *Drain that automatically gathers corpses to increase AC. The AC decays slowly over time but decays more quickly as more corpses are added. That’s right, the former Cigotuvi’s Embrace spell has returned, but as an unrand!
  • Ledas’ Liquefaction gets a boost: the player is now immune to the effects of liquefied ground made by casting it. With this spell, we can all pretend to be a centaur.
  • Scrolls of Magic Mapping now reveal any floor traps on the level. Now you can feel the pain of finding of a double-zot-trapped Hall of Zot:5 right after you enter the level!
  • The vorpal weapon ego no longer has distinct adjectives for each weapon class. Now all such weapons are described as ‘vorpal’. Vorpality is the new reality.
  • Shields have gotten a reskin. Ordinary shields are renamed to kite shields and large shields have been renamed to tower shields. Sword-and-tower sounds cooler than sword-and-board, in my humble opinion.
  • Confusing Touch is now level 3 and checks MR instead of monster HD. Additionally, the Confuse spell has been removed. Now there’s exactly one “confuse exactly one thing” spell and it’s not so overpowered.
  • Boots of the Assassin are now called the hood of the Assassin and use the headgear slot. Imagine wearing this while quaffing a potion of stabbing and standing next to a distracted Rupert. Nothing personnel, kid.
  • The demon blade Leech gains *Rage/+Rage and loses its AC-3 and EV-3 properties. Bloodbane has been removed, having been merged into Leech.
  • Warlock’s Mirror can now reflect piercing ranged weapons. Is there anything this little gadget can’t do?!
  • God conducts for harming allies now apply to spells and items that place harmful clouds. But don’t worry, demonspawn, your ignite blood mutation won’t anger Oka.
  • The Staff of Olgreb now grants poison immunity to monsters wielding it. The gauntlet minotaur can’t wait to try this out when he next finds Olgreb in his loot pile.
  • Potions of Agility have been removed. Among the less interesting of the many buff potions that fill our inventories, agility potions have been replaced with the more specialized potions of stabbing.
  • Monsters such as spiders can no longer cling. Rest in peace, a myriad of clinging code bugs.

Some of the above items will continue to receive balance adjustments and tweaks over coming weeks. And we’re not done adding new stuff for 0.25, so stay tuned. Until next time, Happy Crawling!

0.24 Tournament Results

The 0.24 tournament is over. On behalf of the Dev Team, many thanks to all the server admins, outside contributors, bug reporters, and to the many DCSS players who made the 0.24 release and tournament possible! For 16 days, players could compete for tournament points and banners by playing 0.24 games on the public servers. First let’s give a few highlights from the player and clan results. For comprehensive results with first through third place winners in all categories, please see the tournament overview page.

The winning player was Yermak, with 8149 points. Yermak won 50 games during the tournament, including a streak of 22 wins, and won 18 tier-three banners. In second place was JiyvaJigglypuff, with 7979 points and 36 wins, including a streak of 18 wins and 19 tier-three banners. In third place was cosmonaut, with 7717 points, a streak of 24 wins (!), and 14 tier-three banners. MeekVeins was the only player to win all 24 tier-three tournament banners.

The fastest win by turncount was achieved by JiyvaJigglypuff (10299 turns with a DDFi of Makhleb). p0werm0de had the highest scoring game of the tournament, a 15 rune VSWr of Chei won in 28978 turns for 50M points. Caminho had the lowest level win with an XL 14 MiFi of Okawaru. The first victory of the tournament was claimed by p0werm0de, winning a DDFi of Makhleb in just 43 minutes (52 minutes after tournament start). The first 15 rune win of the tournament was by Mintice, winning a MiBe of The Shining One in 1h 47m (2h 11m after tournament start).

The clan competition was won by Grow Some Ballistomycetes (26661 points), followed by Gozag or Go Home (26172 points), and XTAHUA RAWR (22185 points). There were 143 clans in all with points scored in the tournament.

Here are some basic statistics on the players in this tournament compared with the 0.23 tournament (in parentheses):

  • Players: 2880 (0.23: 3100)
  • Total player time: 35422 hrs (0.23: 36643 hrs)
  • Avg player time:  12.3 hrs (0.23: 11.8 hrs)
  • Games played: 63048 (0.23: 65857)
  • People who got a rune: 1046 (0.23: 1046)
  • 540 winners and 1930 wins (0.23: 531 winners and 1770 wins)
  • Winrate: 3.06% (0.23: 2.69%)
  • Proportion of players using WebTiles: 95.5% (0.23: 95.4%)

Looks like winrate keeps on slowly creeping up, so we’ll have to bring on more nerfs (mostly kidding). After a relatively slow development cycle, it was neat to see this release come together towards the end as some large changes landed. I had great fun working on the Sif and Fedhas redesigns, myself. The next 0.25 release looks like it will be a big one. I’m particularly excited to see where ebering’s positional attack magic project goes in 0.25. It’s playable now as an experimental branch on CKO! Stay tuned for future posts about this and other things we’ll be adding in the next version.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the 0.24 tournament! Note that we are still interested in a tournament format revamp, and will hopefully make that more of a priority for 0.25 after we nail down some of the CAO score page issues. We’ll put up a wiki page and everything, I swear! But if Xom just replaces it with a recipe for rock worm and boulder beetle soup, well that’s on Xom! Until next time, fellow Ziggurat Zaggers, happy crawling!

0.24 Release and tournament dates and CXC server info

Hello digital vampires! I’m referring, of course, to those among you who are undead, capable of turning into an adorable flying mammal, and who have had their blood states recently simplified. Trunk players probably know what I’m talking about, and soon, the rest of you will as well. We’ve been bad, greedy devs, binging on our source code and commits and template metaprogramming and querying the current scissors, but not giving you any Trunk Updates during the 0.24 cycle. I’ll try to make amends with a big Trunk Update post for all of 0.24 soon. It might take us a bit longer to write up those changes, so let’s get some important dates out there right now.

The 0.24 release will (tentatively) happen on Wednesday 23 October, and that the 0.24 tournament will (definitely) happen on 20:00 UTC Friday 25 October through 20:00 UTC Sunday 10 November. We’ll be getting a tournament page up and running very soon as this tournament date is only a week away! Watch out for a future post with the new tournament URL.

We’ve been in the feature freeze since 9 October, and the 0.24 stable branch is already available, soon to be hosted on servers. We’ll be making balance tweaks and bugfixes until release next Wednesday. Online players, please help us test the 0.24 beta by playing the 0.24 branch when that’s available or trunk until then.

Finally, let’s talk about a red dragon THAT TALKS LIKE THIS. As many of you know, the CXC server in France recently went offline after a recent server issue. Medar and Zkyp had graciously hosted CXC for many years, but no longer have time to do so. Thankfully, an admin who goes by Namanix has stepped up to host a new server using the current CXC domain. Namanix tells me that the replacement server is ready and the domain transfer should be complete by 8PM CET on 18 October. All data for logins, current and past games, morgues, ttyrecs, etc should eventually be transferred over to the new server, and games will be played at the same CXC Webtiles URL and SSH host as before. Once again, thanks to Medar and Zkyp for hosting CXC all those years, and thanks to Namanix for taking over the (dragon) reins.

See you all around the lava pit, tossing your blood potions into the fire!

0.23.1 Bugfix Release

There’s a new bug fix release of the 0.23.1 stable version of DCSS. Source packages and binaries for Windows, OS X, and Linux are available now. We recommend all 0.23 users upgrade to this version. Major bug fixes and updates:

  • Vampiric attacks by the player against allies created from Sticks to Snakes and the Ratskin Cloak no longer restore HP or give vampires satiation.
  • Damage from Ozocubu’s Refrigeration has been increased to the correct amount.
  • Placement for the uniques Aizul, Bai Suzhen, Donald, Jorgrun, and Mara has been fixed so they can place throughout their intended level ranges.
  • The chance of Boris to respawn has been lowered to match previous rates.
  • Yellow draconians now correctly receive their rCorr mutation at XL 7.
  • 45 bugfixes, adjustments, and cleanups in total.

You may have noticed during the tournament that certain uniques were a bit hard to find. Sif Muna intones: ”And with gammafunk’s fateful decision to wrap unique placement statements to an aesthetically pleasing 80 character limit, thus triggering a hitherto unknown vault definition bug, the fates of countless adventurers were altered forever…” Oops! We fixed that, so the uniques listed above should show up more often now. You may also have noticed that old Boris had a bit more life in him than he used to. Due to changing his method of placement to better support the new seeded play mode, Boris was respawning roughly twice as often as he did in previous versions. Congrats to the player Volrath on setting a new record for the number of Boris kills in one game, 10 times! This has also been fixed, so Boris should return to haunt you about as often as he did in 0.22.

Aside from the major fixes listed above, there are scores of smaller bug fixes, vault tweaks, description updates, and the like, so be sure to upgrade!

Happy Crawling!

0.23 Winter Tournament Results

The 0.23 Winter tournament is over. On behalf of the Dev Team, many thanks to all the server admins, outside contributors, bug reporters, and to the many DCSS players who made the 0.23 release and tournament possible! For 16 days, players could compete for tournament points and banners by playing 0.23 games on the public servers. First let’s give  a short summary of player and clan results. To see first through third place winners in all categories, please see the tournament overview page.

The winning player was Yermak, with 8721 points. Yermak won 35 games during the tournament, including the longest streak at 22 games, and won 21 tier-three banners. In second place was MrMan, with 8092 points and 31 wins, including the second-longest streak for 20 wins and 17 tier-three banners. In third place was JiyvaJigglypuff, with 6631 points and 36 wins and 16 tier-three banners. The players ethniccake and watermold were the only ones to win all 24 tier-three tournament banners.

The fastest win by turncount was achieved by Yermak (13586 turns with a DDFi of Makhleb). Yermak also had the highest scoring game of the tournament, a 15 rune GnEE of Chei won in 19994 turns for 71M points. p0werm0de had the fastest realtime win in 25 minutes with a DDFi of Uskayaw, and Yermak had the lowest level win with an XL 15 FeEn of Ashenzari. The first victory of the tournament was claimed by JiyvaJigglypuff, winning a MiFi of Makhleb in just 33 minutes (38 minutes after tournament start). The first 15 rune win of the tournament was by YTcomUltraviolent4, winning a GrGl of The Shining One in 2h 29m (2h 31m after tournament start).

The clan competition was won by Tab and Dab (26578 points), followed by Gozag or Go Home (22637 points), and Big Dispersal (19276 points). There were 126 clans in all with points scored in the tournament.

Here are some basic statistics on the players in this tournament compared with the 0.22 Summer and 0.21 Winter tournaments (in parentheses):

  • Players: 3440 (0.22: 3130, 0.21: 3153)
  • Total player time: 38876 hrs (0.22: 41988 hrs, 0.21: 41283)
  • Avg player time:  11.3 hrs (0.22: 13.41 hrs, 0.21: 13.09)
  • Proportion of players using WebTiles: 95.88% (0.22: 95.39%, 0.21: 94.48%)

It’s nice to see that this tournament had the most players of any we’ve run so far. It looks like the winrate decreased from the high of 2.82% in version 0.22 down to 2.46%, which is similar to version 0.21. We buff players by locking up ghosts, then we nerf players by giving them new traps and Klown pies to the face. Yet you all keep coming back for more! It must be the shiny loot…

We had a lot of fun bringing the 0.23 release together, with multiple devs individually putting in hundreds of commits. We also had lots of great outside contributions ranging from vaults to artwork to bugfixes, including some important feature implementations. Thanks to all those taking the time to contribute to the project! A 0.23.1 bugfix release is imminent, so be on the lookout and be sure to update if you’re playing offline.

In the meantime, we on the Dev Team are excited to start work on the next version. Thanks again, everyone, and happy crawling!

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