Posts from ·PleasingFungus·

0.16 Tournament

The 0.16 tournament will begin in just one week! From 20:00 UTC Friday 13 March through 20:00 UTC Sunday 29 March, any 0.16 game played on any of the online servers will count for the tournament. 0.16 will be officially released before the start of the tournament.

The rules page contains all the details about how to score points and earn banners in the tournament. Quite a few changes to banners, in addition to a few other tweaks to scoring rules – check up!

As usual, clans (teams of up to six players) can be formed and changed until one week into the tournament, so don’t panic if you aren’t on one yet! (Being on a clan isn’t necessary to participate in the tournament, but it can be a lot of fun.)

Once the tournament has started, the tournament leaderboard will contain the current results. (Before tournament start, some scores might briefly appear on this page as we test the tournament scripts, but they are just for testing.)

Community Contributions

With the 0.16 release on the horizon, it seemed like a good time to recognize recent non-dev contributors to crawl. Dungeon Crawl is an open source game, and we’ve always welcomed help from the community, as the name implies. Our devs all started out making volunteer contributions, and many features of the game (like Octopodes) were created by non-developers. We don’t appreciate that as much as we should; so here’s some making up for lost time, a post about non-dev contributors, initially composed by a non-dev contributor! (Thanks, Edgar.)

(If you just want advice on how to contribute, skip to the end of the article!)

== Stats ==

(Global stats as of 0.16 (ish) from openhub.net)

Over the course of Crawl’s development, we’ve had 47,577 commits by 203 authors (not counting contribs not in commit form!) resulting in 373,054 lines of code.

All this took an estimated 101 years of combined effort! A century of crawl.

For 0.16 specifically, we had

  • 50 commit authors.
    • 24 members of the team contributed, the other 26 were community members,
    • with 5 more making contributions but not listed as commit authors.
  • Nathaniel Rook, infiniplex, Edgar A. Bering IV, and Chris Oelmueller all had more than 10 commits; Chris Oelmueller had 39!
  • Altogether 54 tiles were edited or added by community tiles authors, with Bloax contributing to 48 tiles.
  • Over 150 commits credited community members for their input.

During development approximately 580 new mantis tickets were opened on our bug-tracker, and 680 were resolved.

== Highlights: ==

Volunteer contributions ranged the gamut for this commit. Some people added new items, like the unrand Gyre and Gimble (designed by argonaut before being rewritten by wheals), or the new Potion of Ambrosia that replaces Potions of Confusion (thanks again, Edgar!). Others added new dungeon features, like Nathaniel Rook‘s troves that take piety instead of items, or Infiniplex‘s new set of dungeon layout generators. (Probably most noticeable in Elf!) Bloax added an enormous number of new tiles, for monsters, items, icons & features; Chris Oelmueller contributed a preposterous number of balance tweaks, bugfixes, and general quality of life improvements.

== Full breakdown: ==

== Interested in contributing? ==

That’s great! So, what do you want to do?

If you want to make art, that’s great! If you feel comfortable working with small sprites (generally around 32×32), then we can always use new tiles for almost everything – monsters, features, you name it. (Most of our monster tiles date back to the first release of tiles, nearly ten years ago!) You can check out our existing tiles by looking through the subdirectories here, and this document provides a full guide to the rest.

If you don’t feel comfortable with sprites that small, we can always use new loading screens – our existing ones are here.

If you prefer coding, probably the simplest place to start is by looking through the list of open bugs, finding something that looks promising, and uploading a fix. The code is here, and there are also guides to creating a patch.

If neither of those are your strong suit, you can try creating a new vault – a partially randomized area of the game. Documentation is here You can also try designing a new part of the game, like a god, species, or spell, and suggest it on the forums – remember to keep a thick skin and not take criticism too personally, though!

Once you’ve made something, art or a vault or anything else, put it on mantis in a new issue. Don’t feel too stressed about all of the fields – we can fix small mistakes with that sort of thing.

For help with any of these, feel free to visit ##crawl-dev on irc://chat.freenode.org – there’s generally devs around to help any time, between 9 AM to 11 PM Pacific. (And even if no one’s around, you can leave a message and come back later – generally someone will read the logs sooner or later.)

Thanks for reading, and happy crawling!

Trunk updates, 22 February 2015

Hi, crawlers! Here’s what’s been going on during the feature freeze:

  • Gozag changes:
    • Gozag’s wrath now lasts until the player accrues a considerable amount of XP (like Ashenzari’s wrath), instead of being based on a number of punishments.
    • Gozag’s wrath no longer turns items to gold, or taxes gold that’s picked up.
    • Gozag’s wrath can now bribe more kinds of enemies, and no longer gives them invisibility.
    • Odds of Gozag preventing quaffing under wrath is up from 20% to 33%.
    • The first use of Gozag’s potion petition is now free.
    • Duplicate is no longer offered.
  • Monsters can no longer be distracted by your allies if you follow TSO. (Thus preventing annoying situations where you can’t attack an enemy, since it’s busy fighting your angel pal…)
  • Gell’s Gravitas is now level 5 (down from 6), and its confusion effect lasts somewhat longer.
  • Player ghosts now should have the proper rate of remembering spells again. (It was considerably too low for the last few months, owing to a badly named function.)
  • rMut now properly gives 90% mutation protection again, instead of 81%. (Broken since mid-September of last year.)
  • Ancient zymes’ melee attacks no longer drain stats.
  • rPois- randarts no longer generate.
  • Monster spriggans no longer have weird resistances (rPois for druids, rElec for air mages, rF & rC for the Enchantress)
  • rHellfire has been removed from most monsters that do not actually cast Hellfire, with the exception of Cerebov. Also, Cerebov is now magic immune.
  • Many previously magic-immune enemies are no longer: notably, most plants, eyes, mummies, and angels.
  • The Royal Jelly now spews jellies when polymorphed.
  • Descriptions for body armour now list the AC that they provide after Armour skill is taken into effect.
  • The Orb of Zot now always degrades controlled blink to semicontrolled blink (previously had a 50% chance of turning it into uncontrolled blink).
  • Xom is no longer amused when the player destroys the Orb of Zot. (It is impossible to destroy the Orb of Zot.)
  • Bazaars no longer ever contain oklobs.
  • THE GIAGGOSTUONO is now available for player tile use. (As “giaggostuono”.) Beware!
  • Fleshy orifices have been made a little more obvious.

Happy crawling!

Trunk updates, 8 February 2015

Hi, crawlers! The feature freeze came down last week (Tuesday the 3rd); that means we’re focusing on bugfixing and small balance changes for roughly the next month, until the release of 0.16 (which should hopefully be early March.)

Anyway, here’s some changes:

  • Card changes:
    • The Storm card can no longer create a twister & storm clouds at the same time (thus blowing you into the clouds & killing you), and can no longer create elemental wellsprings.
    • The Water card is back; it now creates temporary shallow water & summoned wellspring allies.
    • The Repulsiveness card will now always create at least one friendly ugly thing if it creates any hostile ugly things.
  • The Abyss that Abyssal Knights start out in has been tweaked. It can now generate stairs down; it’s once again possible to get a rune without leaving the abyss. (In theory!)
  • Monsters can now shout even if they’re already awake; in practice, this means the “tossing stones at wandering monsters” tech is considerably weaker.
  • Zombies, skeletons & other non-healing monsters can no longer be healed by any effect. (Including e.g. Ghostly Fireball.)
  • Josephine’s band of zombies & skeletons has been replaced by a band of wraiths.
  • The Dark Maul has had its enchantment & base damage increased; it should be more usable now.
  • Monstrous menagerie has had its summon cap decreased from 4 to 3.
  • Fake languages can now only be stacked up to 3 times. ‘Butt’ is now parameterizeable.
  • Friendly monsters should chatter a bit less.

Happy crawling!

Trunk updates, 1 February 2015

Hi, crawlers! Changes:

  • Ely rework:
    • Piety gain now comes from exploration, not pacification or weapon destruction.
    • Abilities have been reworked: Lesser & Greater Heal Self are now 1* and 4* abilities respectively (and have been renamed), Greater Heal Other is now 2*, 3* is Purification, and Lesser Heal Other has been removed. The “Heal Self” abilities have been renamed to just “Lesser/Greater Healing”.
    • Wands of Heal Wounds can no longer be used to pacify monsters.
    • The Healer background has been removed.
  • Other removals: the spell Forceful Dismissal, the spear of the Botono, and rN- effects.
  • Tomb monster tweaks:
    • Death Scarabs no longer cause draining (or rN-).
    • Bennu no longer have sticky flame.
    • Ushabti now only create negative energy clouds, not miasma.
    • Anubis guards no longer have Control Undead.
  • Shadow traps now deactivate temporarily after being triggered.
  • Display of artefact weapons in non-webtiles HUDs has been tweaked; the names no longer display if it would cause the line to become too long.
  • Elemental evokers no longer stack.
  • Meatsprint lost souls have been renamed to wretched souls, so as to avoid ambiguity with the completely unrelated monster, non-meatsprint lost souls.
  • Dispersal & Gell’s Gravitas have had their confusion effects slightly buffed.
  • The lantern of shadows now drains MP while wielded, and summoned shadows disappear after reaching 0 MP or unwielding the lantern. It no longer recolours the environment in console.
  • Large rocks no longer have a randomized throwing range.
  • Steel ammo now mulches at the same rate as normal ammo.
  • Two new Ru sacrifices: “sacrifice skill”, reducing all skill apts by 1 point (and adjusting your existing skills accordingly), and “sacrifice experience”, costing you 2 XL and reducing the XL cap by 2. (So max level becomes 25.)
  • Beogh now has the same chance of blessing followers after a kill, regardless of whether you or your followers made that kill. (Previously, the odds of a blessing were dramatically higher for kills made by followers.)
  • The ‘pizza=’ rcfile option has been added back & improved, after over two years in rcfile exile. As the famous pizza chef once said: Have It Your Way.

Happy crawling!

Trunk updates, 23 January 2015

Hi, crawlers! The newest changes, organized by a completely arbitrary and arguably meaningless set of priorities:

  • Major:
    • Shoals tides have been reworked: they now shift only between shallow water & land, never creating or destroying deep water tiles. They also move fifteen times faster.
    • New fake language: ‘butt’. To quote the purpose statement of the original:

      Buttbot is a social experiment in humour and interaction, it
      playfully mocks those around it. Almost deconstructionist in
      nature by manipulating the context of the text it parodies,
      it forces people to reexamine what has been said in a new light.

      It builds on the tradition of mechanising surrealist techniques,
      such as example Dadadodo by Jwz implementing the cut-up technique
      made famous by William S. Burroughs (and used by Radiohead).
      However instead of merely rearranging the content, buttbot aims
      to augment it with the simplistic low brow humour.

      The use of puerile humour is mainly to bring the conversation
      back down to earth, to remind us that in our intellectual pursuits
      that childish references to anatomy can bring a smile to our
      faces…

    • Fake languages are now stackable. Try adding “fake_lang = dwarven,!!!” to your rcfile, or see the options guide for more languages and options.
    • New rcfile option: “easy_door”, which toggles whether or not to ask for a prompt when (C)losing doors if only one open door is adjacent. (For consistency.) Defaults to true.
    • add_autopickup_func() rcfile functionality has changed; returning false now signifies that corresponding items should never be picked up. I am told that if your autopickup is broken by this, you should do the following: “in the function passed to add_autopickup_func, change return false to return nil and change return a and b or c and d to return (a and b or c and d) or nil”. If you don’t understand that (I’m not super confident on it myself), maybe just delete the relevant functions and hope for the best.
    • Evocables now charge & discharge per-type, rather than individually. (That is, whenever you use a lamp of fire, all lamps of fire are unuseable until you gain enough xp to recharge it.) The elemental spirits are whimsical beings…
  • Moderate:
    • Light armour now has a small penalty to spellcasting success chance, and heavy armour’s penalties to spellcasting are slightly reduced.
    • Bucklers now have a very slightly smaller encumbrance penalty.
    • Shields’ evasion penalties, & the skill required to completely mitigate them, are now displayed in their descriptions.
    • Caustic shrikes, after being nerfed, buffed, nerfed, and nerfed, have been buffed. Specifically, they’re now somewhat buffer, and less likely to appear when polymorphing earlier, weaker creatures. Celebrate!
    • Natasha has traded her Mephitic Cloud for Conjure Flame, which she’ll use to try to block off the player’s avenues of manuever. (She had a bad habit of walking into her own mephitic clouds. Ridiculous cat…)
    • All book tiles have been completely replaced.
    • New tiles for several uniques. Check out Nikola’s new look, just before the next time he electrocutes you to death!
    • Gargoyles, being statues, can no longer cast Statue Form.
    • Exploration piety no longer scales by the size of the level; it now is based solely on the number of tiles explored. (Early Ziggurat levels no longer give enormous amounts of Ash/Nemelex piety.)
    • Throwing net range no longer varies by the size of the player; all races can now throw them to the edge of LOS, up from 5 squares for most races, 6 squares for ogres, 4 for halflings & kobolds, & a mere 3 squares for spriggans.
    • The Tome of Destruction has been utterly destroyed.
    • All non-permanent summoned monsters are now unable to use stairs.
    • Trog’s wrath summons are now permanent.
    • rPois- items now prevent the player from reaching rPois+.
  • Minor:
    • Item descriptions no longer claim that rPois- “protects against poison”.
    • It is no longer possible to instantly die from putting on a -hp item, or from having your last maximum hit point rotted away, or by being tormented at 1 hp while at rN-.
    • You can no longer drink !poison, !decay or !degeneration if you know what they are and are not immune to them. Crawl does not encourage self-destructive drinking among its players.
    • Hell rats no longer appear in the Sewers.
    • Hexes with a 100% success chance should no longer fail.
    • +Twstr and +-HP have been removed from randart generation.
    • Artefacts can no longer spawn with both “cause random teleportation” and “prevent all teleportation” properties.
    • Mummies can no longer be trapped in an infinite loop when calling for merchants.

    Happy crawling!

Trunk updates, 15 January 2015

Hi, crawlers! Your changes for today:

  • Random artefact generation has been reworked.
    • Artefact property distribution is now considerably more structured, and there’s now a weak correlation between bad & good properties (an artefact with a few good properties is now less to have bad ones, and vice versa).
    • New, rare property: +Twstr, which, when evoked, summons a hostile twister nearby. Its winds shred everything nearby – including you, if you’re not light on your feet!
    • Other new properties: Regen+, HP+-, MP+-, rPois-, rN-, and probably a few others I’m forgetting.
    • Artefact stats now range +-2-6, up from +-1-5.
  • Acid walls now display the ‘acid floor tile’ all around themselves, even when outside Slime. Should help discourage a few accidental acid deaths…
  • Irradiate now has an animation – console-only for now, until I make some decent tiles for it.
  • When following Ashenzari, (p) now sacrifices one scroll at a time, and tells you which scrolls were created.
  • Gozag food shops are now 2/3rds as pricey.
  • Cigotuvi’s Embrace no longer hurls hundreds of corpses across the floor (visually). Maximum five animated corpse movements per casting. Sorry (?), zig-spammers. (The actual functionality of the spell is unchanged; this is just visual.)
  • Applying Excruciating Wounds and Warp Weapon in succession (in either order) no longer permanently changes weapons’ brands.
  • Good news – &^Ib works again!
  • Invisible giant eyeball messages have been disambiguated.
  • Confused terrified fungi stumble around.

Happy crawling!

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Trunk updates, 7 January 2015

Hi, crawlers! First changes of the new year:

  • Blurry vision’s effect has been reduced; it now adds a delay of 0.5/1/2 turns (by mutation level), down from 1/2/3.
  • It should now be possible to safely cancel controlled & semicontrolled blink in most situations.
  • New rcfile option, fail_severity_to_confirm, allowing you to set a threshold of spell failure rates above which the game will warn & prompt you before casting. The default is to prompt at dark red failure (very high to guaranteed).
  • Hydra form now only gives +30% HP (down from +50%), and gives half as much healing when devouring enemies.
  • Gargoyles no longer get 4 less AC from Statue Form than every other race.
  • Various new tiles, mainly for uniques: check out Eustachio’s sweet ‘stache the next time you see him!
  • The demonic rune now has a random tile.
  • Baileys have had their oriflamme replaced with a portcullis.
  • ?/I now lists the contents of decks.
  • The deck of oddities is now documented in-game.
  • The deck of summonings has been renamed; it is now the deck of summoning.
  • Yaktaurs are now slightly more dangerous.
  • Wasp monsters have been renamed: red wasps are now known as ‘hornets’, and yellow wasps are now just ‘wasps’.
  • Boring beetles can no longer teleport onto the player in D:1.
  • There’s a commit here which uses the word “retrogdorise”, and I’m gonna be honest, I don’t care about what the commit does. I’m not even gonna read it. I just wanted to share that with you.
  • Held weapons no longer apply their brands to thrown weapons.
  • rElec now protects against lightning.

Happy crawling!

Trunk updates, 31 December 2014

Hi, crawlers! Last changelog of the year:

  • New trap: the Shadow Trap, appearing from d:3 downward. Any non-summoned creature that moves into it will summon a small group of shadow creatures from the current level, which are always hostile to the player.
  • Traps are now more common in most parts of the game, and considerably less common in Slime.
  • Elemental evocables now stack.
  • ?/ has been considerably improved, and a new ?/c(L)oud option has been added.
  • When examining features with clouds over them, both the description of the feature & the cloud are now displayed.
  • Maxwell’s Patent Armour has been moved back toward its old egos; it now has rCorr rElec instead of Resistance.
  • Cleaving’s damage to secondary targets has been reduced from 75% to 70%.
  • A number of rock wall tiles have been replaced or reworked; in particular, Sewers no longer have acid wall tiles.
  • Megazigs no longer sometimes place the player in the centre of the floor.
  • The MP cost of the wand-power mutation has been halved; it now costs 3 MP per wand use per level, down from 6.
  • Ru now applies antimagic to enemies, rather than Muting them.
  • Dithmenos no longer sometimes considers steam to be a source of fire.
  • Ironheart Preservers now have significantly worse defenses, but significantly more HP. This may make it worthwhile to bother actually attacking them.
  • Call Imp now becomes stronger at high power, instead of becoming weaker.
  • Linux and OS X no longer double all numpad inputs.
  • ?/K no longer lists the skills “Stabbing”, “Traps”, “rat”, and “bat”.
  • Chokoban has been upgraded.

Happy crawling!

Trunk updates, 23 December 2014

Hi, crawlers! Another quiet week:

  • Spells & abilities that check enemy MR now display their success chance in the targeting interface.
  • Examining monsters’ spells now allows you to see their chance of affecting you with MR-checking spells.
  • Ru’s Draw Out Power drain has increased by 20%, and the odds of Apocalypse applying status effects has increased from 3/5 to 3/4.
  • Troves that ask for the Horn of Geryon now actually take it, instead of just requesting that you present it.
  • Ashenzari no longer suppresses blurry vision.
  • Hydra Form’s duration has been increased considerably; it’s now roughly the same as Blade Hands’.
  • Dragon Form no longer enhances Dragon’s Call.
  • The rock walls of the stone huts in Shoals:5 now actually look like rock in Tiles.
  • Elemental weapon brands now only have their damage multiplied by 1.5x for each level of negative resistance the target has (e.g. rC-), down from 2x. This is consistent with the extra damage that all other sources of elemental damage get.
  • Orcish allies no longer cast Animate Dead for Beoghites.
  • The Iron Rod’s scaling with spellpower has been considerably reduced; it probably no longer one-shots the toughest monsters in the game.
  • The Arc Blade’s discharge effect has been fixed; it now arcs repeatedly to multiple targets rather than only affecting one, making it considerably more powerful.
  • Sif now gives penance for destroying books, again.

Happy crawling, and enjoy the holidays!

Trunk updates, 15 December 2014

Hi, crawlers! It’s been a quiet week for changes:

  • Monster spells can now be examined through the xv screen, in the same way as with books & rods (that is, by hitting a letter corresponding to the spell). At present, this lets you see the description and range of their spells.
  • Cigotuvi’s Embrace has been reworked; the rate at which corpses fall off is now based purely on the number currently stacked on the player, and spellpower instead increases the amount of AC+SH per corpse, from a base of 0.5 AC+SH per corpse to a cap of 1.5 AC+SH at the new max of 100 power. Skeletons now count the same as other corpses for Cigotuvi’s purposes.
  • Gell’s Gravitas now has a small chance of confusing creatures pulled by it, based on spellpower and on victims’ MR.
  • A new “item_slot” rcfile has been added, to allow you to specify which letter correspond to which items by default. Works like the spell_slot option.
  • Quite a lot of tiles have been tweaked; notably the Singularity & Sublimation of Blood spell icons, but also many many monsters, which now incorporate advanced artistic techniques such as ‘perspective’. Check out hippogrives!
  • Xom’s mood meter has been added to webtiles.
  • Shard shrike packs can no longer spawn as hell effects in Cocytus; in general, the Cocytus hell effect spawn list has been reworked.
  • Lava snakes can spit again. (They accidentally lost the ability to spit several months ago.)
  • Chaos Champions can no longer give the player Resistance for 4000 turns.
  • Gyre & Gimble can now strike up to 16 times in a single attack. (With the help of the Blade card.)
  • Artefacts may now again be named “of the Doge”.

Happy crawling!

Trunk updates, 8 December 2014

Hi, crawlers! Some fun new toys to play with this week:

  • New artefact: Gyre and Gimble, two quickblades linked by a chain. It takes two hands to wield, but strikes twice for every attack. Dual-wielding is finally here………
  • New spell: Gell’s Gravitas, L6 Hexes/Translocations. Targets a creature & hurls all other nearby creatures toward it, causing damage to whichever ones collide. “Basically a one-turn Singularity”.
  • The ‘blurry vision’ mutation no longer causes scroll-reading to occasionally fail. Instead, it adds a delay before the player finishes reading the scroll (and gains the benefits): one turn per level of the mutation.
  • All non-shortblade weapons now stab equally well (or poorly), excepting felid claws, which now stab as well as shortblades. Clubs no longer have a chance of confusing ‘stabbed’ enemies. Ogre Enchanters and Assassins no longer start with clubs.
  • Armour penalties to dodging have been smoothed; there is no longer a breakpoint at which Dodging goes from giving zero EV to the normal rate. Instead, armour decreases the rate at which Dodging gives you EV. Sample numbers are here.
  • The Book of Wizardry has been removed; its spells have been redistributed.
  • Monsters created by Phantom Mirrors are now only two-thirds as strong as the original.
  • Orange rats have been renamed to hell rats, and are now demonic. They also glow in the dark.
  • The arbalest “Hellfire” has had its hellfire-explosion damage roughly doubled.
  • When active, Gozag’s gold now sparkles.
  • It is once again possible for bardings of flying to generate, after they were accidentally removed earlier this year.
  • Orc wizards can no longer confuse the player for 30+ turns.
  • The lords of Pandemonium can now buzz and croak.
  • Players in hell can no longer hear gut-wrenching screams while Silenced.
  • Goblins no longer continue their peaceful slumber after being hurled through the air.

Happy crawling!

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Trunk updates, 2 December 2014

Hi, crawlers! Last week was a little quieter, possibly because of some of our US devs visiting friends and family for the holiday weekend, rather than toiling away in the Crawl mines as they know they should. Still, a few changes to report:

  • Potions of confusion have been befuddled out of existence. In their place sit Potions of Ambrosia, which grant considerable health & magic regeneration for a short period, along with confusion. If the confusion is prevented (by e.g. clarity) or cured, the regeneration immediately ends.
  • Liches (and their ancient & antique friends) now have a much wider variety of spells available, rather than being restricted to a handful of spellbooks.
  • Singularity is now considerably stronger at low spellpower, and less powerful at very long range.
  • Makhleb now gives somewhat more piety for kills, and no longer accepts corpse sacrifice.
  • Xom now has a ‘mood meter’, looking suspiciously like the piety meter for other, more boring gods. (And yet somehow different…)
  • Gozag’s “shining gold” visual effect is now only present on the tile of the gold itself, rather than on surrounding tiles. In console, it’s now a different colour from normal gold.
  • Gozag’s “duplication” ability can now duplicate stacks of items.
  • A wide variety of quotes have been added, mainly for spells.
  • Pandemonium lords now come in a riotous variety of colour; they have a number of new tiles, and their text descriptions now match up with the tiles.
  • The Plane Papyrus has been renamed to the Akashic Record.
  • Various other tile tweaks; all potion tiles have been replaced, goblins & pals were reworked, the Seraph is now considerably taller, and wretched stars now have a worrying glow about them, among other changes.
  • Irradiate now offers a warning before harming allies.
  • The game no longer crashes whenever the player takes cloud damage.
  • Delayed Fireball is now back to being two schools, after a brief, yet torrid romance with the mysterious “Utility” school.
  • It is no longer possible to hit monsters so hard that their souls are completely obliterated.
  • Messaging has been improved for attempting to close doors on Orbs of Destruction.
  • Orb spiders no longer have poisonous bites.
  • Trees can no longer enter malign portals.

Happy crawling!

Trunk updates, 25 November 2014

Hi, crawlers! This week has been simply magical, by which I mean, full of spells. New spells. Two new spells. And a bunch of other changes:

  • New spells:
    • Cigotuvi’s Embrace, a L5 Necromancy spell that turns corpses into temporary AC & SH. The corpses slowly slough off over time & (sometimes) when the player is hit or blocks an attack. Found in the Book of Unlife and (sometimes) in Kikubaaqudgha’s second gift.
    • Singularity, a L9 Translocations spell that summons an all-devouring interdimensional maw. Nearby enemies are sucked inward & damaged, moreso the closer they get. Found in the Plane Papyrus, a high-level Translocations book containing Dispersal, Controlled Blink, Malign Gateway, Disjunction, and of course Singularity. (Various other books have been adjusted slightly.)
  • Force Lance is now L4 Conjurations/Translocations, slightly more accurate, and better at knocking back enemies. Flying enemies are especially vulnerable.
  • Dispersal now affects a wider area, and has a chance of confusing affected creatures.
  • Twisted Resurrection has been removed.
  • New enemies:
    • Robin of the Strong Arm, a hobgoblin unique appearing in the very early Dungeon. She’s stronger than your average hobgoblin, and accompanied by her own personal army of hobgoblins & goblins, the latter of which she will happily hurl at her enemies. Duck!
    • Shard Shrikes, batty monsters that appear in Cocytus. They spit Throw Icicle, resist and attack with cold, and flock in small bands. They have 2 AC, but are only literally made of glass in certain non-canonical fanfictions.
  • Seraphim are now considerably more dangerous: damage doubled, speed increased by 50%, and a new spellset, including Hunting Cry, Summon Holies, Injury Bond and Cleansing Flame.
  • Seraphim now occasionally appear on the orb run.
  • Ghost crabs have scuttled sideways all the way from Crypt to Swamp.
  • Insubstantial wisps are now slightly more fragile & less numerous, but have Static Discharge.
  • Hellwings now have Cigotuvi’s Embrace, and spawn with it active.
  • If the player clears a ziggurat and enters another, they may occasionally find themselves in the center of the floor rather than the edge. The odds of this increase with depth and number of ziggurats cleared.
  • Zin’s Recite is no longer usable if no enemies with low enough HD are visible. Recite invulnerability is now mentioned in monster descriptions.
  • Gozag will no longer offer the player shops that are entirely useless for their race.
  • Ctrl-direction now always attacks, rather than sometimes opening or closing doors, or removing traps.
  • In Zot Defense, the player can now place traps on top of other traps.
  • Butchering and bottling blood now only takes a single turn.
  • Powered by Death now works with all corpses.
  • The Wild Magic card now afflicts enemies with miscast effects, rather than the player, and restores the player’s MP for each enemy affected. It’s moved from the Deck of Punishment (back to) the Deck of Wonders.
  • When in shadow form, the player can no longer be petrified.
  • Monsters can no longer block their own attacks.
  • Butterfly colours have been disambiguated.
  • The legendary weapons “Glorpy”, “Loopy”, and “Plog” may now appear.
  • Gozag’s shopkeepers have had their genders randomized.
  • Insects are no longer referred to as ‘she’.
  • Electric golems can no longer breathe.
  • Monsters no longer believe that rN+ armour allows them to see invisible.
  • Angels no longer have demonic powers.
  • Bats can now memorize spells.

Happy crawling!

Trunk updates, 17 November 2014

Hi, crawlers! Lots of fun changes this week:

  • Enemy-held weapons now have their brands ID’d on sight.
  • The Death Knight background has been removed.
  • New item: the Iron Rod, which fires a spray of shrapnel in a wide arc. Extremely effective against agile, low-AC enemies, but ineffective against armoured enemies or at a distance.
  • Nemelex & deck changes:
    • New cards:
      • Elements, which summons three beasts of the four elements.
      • Rangers, which summons two or three ranged-missile users.
      • Placid Magic, which removes all status effects and applies heavy antimagic to all creatures in sight, including the user. (Dazing enemy spellcasters as if they’d been hit with antimagic weapons repeatedly.
    • Revamped destruction cards:
      • Storm has replaced rain and swiftness with summoning air elementals, an elemental wellspring, or thunder clouds alongside a wind blast.
      • Pain has lost Torment; it can now instead summon flay your foes alive.
      • Venom has lost Sting for earlier Venom Bolts and Poison Arrows, but at low power will briefly make the user vulnerable to poison.
      • Degeneration now applies a temporary malmutated effect to targets, along with polymorphing them to creatures with lower HD. Undead are dazed.
      • Vitriol now can provide Corrosive Bolts at higher power.
      • Orb bursts will now attempt to home on monsters they might reasonably hit.
    • Revamped battle cards:
      • Potion has strictly-negative effects taken out, and will also apply its effects to allies if possible.
      • Blade now solely gives a cleaving status. It doesn’t stack with the reaching of polearms or the original cleaving of axes, but otherwise applies to all forms of armed & unarmed combat.
      • Helm can apply Stoneskin or Shroud of Golubria effects to allies at high power.
      • Elixir gives a small amount of temporary vitality to your allies, alongside its restorative effects to the user.
      • Shadow gives the darkness status (reduced LOS) instead of invisibility.
      • Dowsing is now significantly stronger in duration and range.
    • Revamped summoning cards:
      • Pentagram now summons a more constrained set of demons (stronger at lower power and weaker at high power), and an additional accompanying hell hound, rakshasa, or pandemonium lord.
      • Dance has replaced its short swords with quarterstaves and its dire flails with executioner’s axes. It also has a chance of summoning a randart.
      • Foxfire has lost butterflies and gained ravens.
      • Repulsiveness can now summon both an ugly thing and a very ugly thing.
    • Revamped emergency cards:
      • Cloud surrounds all hostile monsters with varying types of clouds, instead of randomly scattering clouds in all valid places in sight.
      • Shaft now randomly places shafts under other monsters as well.
      • Tomb can now raise rock walls on stone stairs and deep water.
      • Velocity will always apply a overall-positive effect (with allies present).
      • Banshee now drains victims, in addition to causing fear.
      • Solitude can now cause Disjunction at high power.
    • Dowsing is no longer in the deck of battle.
    • Decks of war have lost their set of destruction cards.
    • The Cloud card has moved from decks of destruction to decks of emergency.
    • Mercenaries now have slightly better kit, and mercenaries that your god would dislike are not offered.
    • In general, cards that your god would dislike will have their dislikeable effects suppressed. (E.g., Venom for TSO.)
    • Removed cards: Metamorphosis, Herd, Bones.
  • Monster tweaks:
    • Draconian & deep elf knights are considerably stronger (and have had their spell sets changed up).
    • Caustic shrikes are now a little weaker and a little rarer.
    • Revenants are no longer affected by Silence.
    • Enemy necromancers can now cast Inner Flame.
    • Pan Lord spells have been considerably reworked.
    • Anubis Guards now have Control Undead.
    • Hell Beast HD, AC, and EV are no longer randomized (and are set to the max value they could have had before). Their speed is still randomized.
    • Sphinxes are now sometimes (presumably) androsphinxes.
    • Basilisks are now little.
    • Green rats are now known as river rats. Beware their swimming prowess…!
  • All gods now give piety for kills made by followers (undead and otherwise) in the exact same way as for kills made by the player.
  • Vampires now bottle blood with (c), instead of (a)(a). They can now bottle blood from level 1 onward.
  • Different types of melee attacks (slashing, piercing, blunt, etc) no longer cause different amount of noise. (Melee noise still varies by damage done.)
  • Summon Greater Demon now provides a more() by default when the summoned demon stops being charmed.
  • Ziggurats now have a reliable supply of restore abilities potions, and a very small number of beneficial mutations potions.
  • The rod of striking has been removed.
  • Monsters now return to their original forms in death. (Like poor Prince Ribbit.)
  • Runed doors & Lugonu’s Corruption are now noted in level annotations, by default.
  • Ctrl-f can now find runed doors.
  • Qazlal’s Disaster Area is now stronger at low invocations.
  • Felid Monks have been buffed.
  • Mimics are now immune to telepathy.
  • High-pitched whines have been removed.
  • The game will no longer claim that skeletons can be bottled.

Happy crawling!

Trunk updates, 11 November 2014

Hi, crawlers! More behind-the-scenes work this week (we’ve finally switched to C++11!), not so many new features. Still, we’ve got a few:

  • Gozag changes:
    • Monsters slain while following Gozag will now always drop gold if they would normally have a chance of leaving a corpse.
    • Gold from monsters now depends significantly less on their body mass.
    • Gozag shop item quality has been considerably improved.
    • Food has been moved from a potion petition (porridge/blood) to a guaranteed food shop offer in each use of Call Merchant. Vampires get blood shops; Ghouls get corpse shops. (Butchers?)
    • Potion Petition no longer contains negative effects.
  • Potions of blood no longer give nutrition to non-vampires.
  • Porridge has been removed.
  • Okawaru no longer asks for corpse sacrifice; piety from kills has increased, and piety loss over time has decreased.
  • Followers of Kikubaaqudgha and Nemelex Xobeh now get their respective special titles when their highest skill is Necromancy or Evocations (respectively).
  • Snake now has an extremely cool set of new mosaic floor tiles – check them out!
  • In Dis, the Serpent of Hell now has a reaching attack. Other Serpents of Hell have been weakened slightly.
  • Players’ movement speed now maps directly to their ghosts’ movement speed, rather than action speed. (E.g., spriggan ghosts or ghosts of characters wearing boots of running now only travel faster, rather than also attacking, spellcasting, etc faster.)
  • Condensation Shield is now melted when blocking a fire attack, not when failing to block one.
  • The player can now be corroded when blocking an attack with a shield.
  • The Transparent Skin mutation now gives -enemy accuracy at all levels, not just at level 3.
  • Killer Klowns corpses are now as colourful in death as they were in life.
  • Anubis Guards will no longer be slain by the traps of the Tomb they guard. (Likewise, Death Scarabs.)
  • Monsters that aren’t Donald can now talk outside Dungeon. (Fixing a bug introduced in January of 2010.)
  • Ghosts in console are no longer represented by ‘ ‘.
  • Insults have been considerably improved, you decrepit pissant boot-licking toady!
  • Cats now like fish.

Happy crawling!

(And be sure to check out our new servers, if you missed them last week.)

New servers!

In the last year, a whole host of new servers have come online for play.

  • CKR, in Korea. Webtiles only.
  • CBRO, in Georgia, USA. Webtiles and console.
  • LLD, in Japan. Webtiles only.
  • CXC, in France. Webtiles and console.
  • CPO, in Australia. Webtiles and console.

The full server list is available here, as well as instructions for getting started.

Many thanks to the people who have kindly volunteered to host these – and happy crawling!

Trunk updates, 3 November 2014

Hi, crawlers! Lots of refactoring this week, with the usual mess of bugs; not so many feature changes. That said, here’s the list:

  • New monster: Caustic Shrikes, appearing in the nastiest parts of Depths. They come in packs, hit hard, resist fire and cold, and cover you with acid. Also, they’re twice as fast as you. Caution is recommended.
  • New item: phantom mirrors, one-use evocables. When used, they create a temporary friendly clone of a targeted monster.
  • Irradiate now does somewhat more damage at low power, and somewhat less at high power. The malmutation effect (for enemies) is now guaranteed.
  • Rust devils do somewhat less damage, but their corrosion now triggers every time they hit.
  • Death scarabs now do considerably more damage.
  • Silver statues are now obsidian, instead. (This has no mechanical effects.)
  • Rings of slaying are now capped at +6, not +8 or +144.
  • Blessed Blades are, tragically, gone.
  • Card changes:
    • All decks can now be evoked from the inventory.
    • Nemelex’s Draw One and Peek at Two have drawn their last breaths.
    • The Metamorphosis card has magically transformed into nothing at all; it is no more.
    • Dowsing is no longer in the Deck of Battle.
  • Mennas no longer mumbles.
  • Norris now follows the one true god, GOD_NAMELESS.
  • Prince Ribbit no longer turns back into a frog when raised from the dead.
  • Monsters casting Freeze now check their targets’ cold resistance, rather than their own.

Happy crawling!

Trunk updates, 27 October 2014

Hi, crawlers! It’s set to be a spooky week. Get ready for some fresh changes… and maybe drop by on the 31st, for a slightly different experience :)

  • Clouds of draining now work like other sources of draining; they’re reduced by each pip of rN & negated at rN+++, rather than being completely negated by a single pip of rN.
  • Clouds of miasma now apply the ‘rot’ status, rather than causing rotting directly & immediately.
  • New tomb monsters!
    • Ushabti, fearsome funerary statues, which breathe a heady mix of draining clouds & miasma, and rumble resoundingly to alert enemies from a great distance.
    • Death scarabs, fast-moving swarming insects. They trail miasma and bite to drain life, speed, and skill, in addition to applying rN-.
    • Anubis guards, living foes that have been conditioned immunity to all forms of pain and torment. They breathe draining, dispel undead, confuse, and howl to reveal your location to other anubis guards.
  • Chunk changes:
    • All chunks of an edibility type (clean, poisonous, mutagenic…) now merge together, into an undifferentiated meaty slurry. (Also, a single inventory stack.)
    • Rotten chunks are gone; chunks rot away directly.
    • Rotten corpses are likewise gone; corpses rot directly into skeletons.
    • Blood no longer coagulates, but rots away directly.
    • Ghouls now gain as much healing from clean chunks as they previously gained from rotten chunks. (There was surprisingly little difference.)
    • Ghouls now always heal rot when eating chunks. (There was a 75% per-chunk chance, before.)
    • Gods that forbade the player from eating certain types of creatures (that is, the good gods and Beogh) now forbid them from butchering those creatures, instead. Penalties are much steeper. (The old ones were surprisingly trivial!)
    • Effects that spectacularly disintegrate creatures (Orb of Destruction, Disintegrate, etc) do not create any chunks if eating those creatures is forbidden by your god.
  • Spell miscast effects have been hugely revamped. The summary is as long as the rest of this post, just… read the commit. I’m sorry.
  • All short blades (except for the Captain’s Cutlass) now do piercing damage; this is relevant to short swords and cutlasses. The latter have been renamed to rapiers, being as they no longer cut.
  • Sense invisibility has been simplified; the range limit has been dropped, and monsters with it now have strict immunity to the ‘blind’ effect (from dazzle, zin, ru), rather than being partially affected. A number of other niche special effects (e.g. better detection of sneaking characters) have also been dropped.
  • Xtahua’s breath now creates a cloud of flames, like red draconians’.
  • Tiamat can now be any colour of draconian, except grey.
  • Mnoleg’s tentacles, so briefly with us, have departed for another realm. Mnoleg now has Malign Gateway again, as well as a new set of excitingly branded melee attacks.
  • Ashenzari’s clear vision perk now also grants immunity to the negative effects of blurry vision mutations.
  • All food other than rations, chunks, and royal jellies now takes one turn to eat.
  • Corrosion is now displayed in the weapon bar as a temporary penalty to weapon enchantment; e.g., with one level of corrosion, a +1 mace would show up as -2 (and red).
  • Branch tiles have been widely adjusted; in particular, Spider has been recolored significantly.
  • A wide variety of missing ‘emergency’ spell flags have been reinstated; liches should be significantly less likely to Banish players on sight.
  • Entering a piety-sacrifice trove while wearing an amulet of faith no longer causes the player to be excommunicated.
  • Hell beasts no longer slow down when hasted.

Happy crawling!

Trunk updates, 20 October 2014

Hi, crawlers!

First, fair warning: a very large rewrite of monster spellcasting & special abilities landed in trunk this morning. This lets us do some very cool things (some of which are already in!), but it’s also a large amount of new code, which is going to have a corresponding number of new bugs. For the next day or two, trunk will be a little more unstable than usual.

One thing you can do to help, as always, is to report any bugs you find on the official bugtracker. We get notified whenever a new bug is filed, and while we can’t promise we’ll fix everything immediately, we do our best!

With all that said, let’s get to the week’s new features!

  • Mennas can now occasionally be found wandering through Pandemonium. His Confusion ‘recitation’ has been replaced with Mass Confusion.
  • The Great Lords of Pandemonium – that is, Cerebov, Lom Lobon, etc – will reappear on later floors of Pandemonium once their rune is stolen, unless and until the player kills them.
  • Lom Lobon (and, to a lesser extent, Gloorx Vloq) are much more likely to spend their time casting spells rather than attacking in melee.
  • Player ghosts and spellforged servitors can now know more than six spells.
  • New items:
    • Shadow dragon armour. 10 AC and 15 ER, the same as Storm Dragon Armour, but instead of rElec, shadow dragon armour gives Stlth++++. (The weight of the armour naturally subtracts exactly Stlth+++, leaving players wearing this armour at Stlth+ above what they would have with no armour at all.)
    • Quicksilver dragon armour. 10 AC, 6 ER, and MR+; however, it cannot be enchanted with scrolls of enchant armour, and is always +0.
  • Scale Mail now only has 10 ER, down from 11.
  • Dithmenos now specifically hates fire (owing to a very old divine grudge), rather than ‘fire and illuminating effects’. The glimmering light of a Corona will no longer bring down the dread wrath of Dithmenos upon worshippers.
  • A new malmutation: “MP-powered wands”, which increases the power of your wands, but makes them cost MP with every zap.
  • New tiles: Irradiate, Hydra Form, Octopode & Felid Blade Hands (if that’s the right word?), triple swords, and more.
  • Various skill titles have been rearranged or replaced; notably, Cheibriados’s invocations titles have been completely rewritten from scratch.
  • Hydra Form, like most forms, now has a special message when praying at altars.
  • The legendary serpent Jörmungandr is now selectable by tiles players. (“tile_player_tile=tile:mons_jormungandr”.) Beware his ophidian wrath!
  • Wumpuses can occasionally be heard roaring in the distance.

Happy crawling!