Monday, May 22nd, 2023 06:02

0.30 Tournament Results

by

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!

2 comments!
Friday, May 5th, 2023 18:55

0.30: “The Reavers Return”

by

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-Zabusky, spiros, Sergio Thompson, Samantha Tobias, Benjamin S Wolf, yrdzrfxndfvh, Zhang Kai

2 comments!
Saturday, April 1st, 2023 07:56

Trunk Updates 1 April 2023 and Tournament Announcement

by

Hello crawlers, and welcome to the most completely serious and truthful trunk update of the year! The 0.30 development cycle is (finally!) nearing a close, and we are pleased to announce a tentative tournament start date of Friday, May 5, 2023, at 20:00 UTC for the sixteen day 0.30 Release tournament. We’ll shift towards bug fixes and balance as we get closer to 0.30′s release, sometime before the start of the tournament. More details about the tournament, including a tournament website and rules changes, will be available here!

We’d also like to celebrate the addition of two (!) new devs to the team. Félix Medrano (née robertxgray) and Implojin have both more than proven themselves by their work so far, with Félix specializing on the Crawl Android port and Implojin contributing great designs like Rampage and the toga of Victory. We’re very happy to have them onboard!

Anyway, let’s get some very real and serious changes headed your way.

  • Branches and Environments:
    • You can now enter the Vaults without holding a rune. However… you can never leave! Unless you get a rune while you’re inside.
    • Slime walls now corrode instead of dealing damage. Unless you use Oozemancy, in which case they still do damage. Also, they don’t corrode monsters. Unless the monsters take Oozemancy damage. It’s all pretty straightforward.
    • Thunderstorms now do much more damage. If you were in the habit of standing in the middle of thunderstorms before… this might be a good time to break the habit.
    • Zigsprint now lets you start with orbs of guile or mayhem. But why would you not use Gong? It’s Gong!
    • By overwhelming popular demand, you can now place up to 100 waypoints. We know you, the players, were suffocating under the previous 10 waypoint limit. Now you are freed. Go forth!
  • Characters:
    • Harm now stacks. This is a game changer.
    • Channeling effects (from Wucad Mu or orbs of energy) no longer backlash and no longer scale with Evocations. They just give -Wiz and have a flat chance of refunding spell costs. We’ve reworked this mechanic about four times this year and I’m sure it’s going to stick at some point.
    • The acidic bite mutation works again, for the first time since 2016. Oops.
    • Armataurs no longer claim to drink ten potions at once. Their tongues are long, but they aren’t actually that long.
  • Gods:
    • Piety costs are now shown more clearly for invocations. Did you know that Enter the Abyss costs Piety——-? Sort of unclear what that means, but it seems like an awful lot of -s, huh?
    • Kikubaaqudgha’s second gift is now a little less predictable. It could be anything. It’s probably about four Necromancy spells… but what if it’s not?
    • Good gods will no longer get mad when you generate negative energy clouds with a condenser vane. Instead, they’ll get even. They put their metaphysical foot down and squash the evil clouds – just like that!
    • Hepliaklqana’s Knights are now as good at attacking as ogres, or at least as slow as them.
    • Xom is no longer fixated on giving you a few different mutations.
    • Ashenzari’s trap detection ability is now only available at 4* of piety. Except that traps are always revealed these days, so this is more of a malevolence suppression ability. The world is so cruel…
    • Ashenzari’s skill boost is a little less boosted.
    • For Gozag’s gold distraction aura duration, size really doesn’t matter. (Anymore.)
    • Ru can no longer redirect butterflies’ attacks.
    • Flame Tongue is removed.
  • Unrands:
    • New unrand: the toga ‘Victory’. Gives +AC, Int, and Slay if you kill scary stuff while wearing a toga. If you drink or read anything while foes are in sight, though, you are a coward and a fool, and the toga will revert to its primal state. Victory!
    • New unrand: the Consecrated Labrys. It’s like the obsidian axe, but it’s good instead of evil, and it gets more enchanted the more scary enemies are in sight. As with the obsidian axe, we strongly recommend charging headfirst at every group of enemies while holding this.
    • New unrand: the Storm Queen’s Shield. You have probably never in your life thought “I would like to be a shock serpent”, but that’s how powerful this shield is: it will grant a wish you didn’t even know you had.
    • The Staff of Dispater is now an orb. It has +AC and *Corrode. Much to ponder…
    • The Slick Slippers are even slicker and slipperier than before. Also, they’ll no longer hustle you around when your feet are already occupied climbing stairs.
    • Majin-Bo’s spell-vamprisim now can suck up blood from a Polar Vortex. It all just flies right into the middle, it’s kinda gross.
    • Many unrands now have helpful inscriptions for their special effects, like EVERVAMP, MEGAVAMP, and probably some other things that don’t involve VAMP.
    • Morg has been removed. Actually, for all you know, it might have been removed years ago. Would you have even noticed?
  • Items:
    • Orbs, scarfs, and even magical staffs can now all generate as random artefacts. Finally, you can find the orb of “Zot” of rage!
    • Randarts are very slightly, ever so imperceptibly, worse. Yes, that is why your best character splatted the other day. How did you know?
    • Hyperinflation has hit throwing weapons, causing javelins, boomerangs, darts, and even large rocks to skyrocket in price.
    • Tremorstones and condenser vanes are now in a set: you only get one of the two per game. Star-crossed lovers…
    • When throwing weapons break, they now deal extra damage. It’s a considerate thing. They’re very sorry that you can’t throw them around anymore and they’d like to offer you a little parting gift as they go.
    • Spectral weapons now deal damage as if you were launching an extra attack, rather than using a secret and inscrutable set of spectral weapon monster stats. They’re also not allowed to attack themselves anymore, since that was really creeping us out.
    • Longbows, arbalests, and hand crossbows have all had their stats shuffled around a little.
  • Spells:
    • New spell: Plasma Beam (L5 Fire/Air), which shoots a bolt of lightning AND a bolt of fire at the most distant foe around. My first email address involved both “fire” and “plasma” so I’m very excited about this.
    • Lesser Beckoning is now level 2 (was level 3). This gives more potential design space for Greater Beckoning, to say nothing of the long-awaited Greatest Beckoning.
    • Battlespheres now fire when you cast any destructive spell, matching Vehumet. Vehumet says that a god can’t be matched by a mere L5 spell, but I’m unconvinced.
    • Arcjolt can now hit any monster in sight, as long as there are a continuous chain of other monsters between you and that monster.
    • Irradiate now only malmutates monsters sometimes. Try saying ‘pretty please’ before casting it for best effects.
    • Lightning Bolt is gone. Amazing it lasted this long, really. Not really famous for their longevity, lightning bolts.
  • Monsters:
    • New monster: sleepcaps. If they hit you, their spores might put you to sleep. If they put you to sleep, the next thing that hits you will get a big stabbing damage multiplier. And if you lose all your hit points? That’s right: you die in real life.
    • New monster: skysharks, cutting through the air (as sharks are known to). If they bite you and draw blood, somehow they’re the ones that get mad about it? And that makes them bite even harder? Seems very unfair, frankly.
    • Smitten monsters now wake up, but they’re not happy about it.
    • Giant fish zombies have been removed.
    • Endotherms have been removed.
  • Webtiles:
    • You can now enter explore mode online! Hit + to explore freely… without any fear of death. You are immortal. You are a god!
    • You can now block trolls. They cannot regenerate from this. (Not yet enabled on every server: this will roll out to servers next time they restart webtiles.)
  • Crawl has, somehow, become even more Australian.
  • We fixed a typo in which we wrote “entire the” instead of “the entire”. Not really a big deal, honestly… except that this text has been in every single morgue since 2007! Shouldn’t someone have told us? We’re so embarrassed right now.
  • Last but not least, we rewrote maybe_bool to be, arguably, better. See below for
    motivation, but here are the practical notes up front:

    * `maybe_bool` becomes a class rather than an enum.
* After this commit, nearly anywhere you would write MB_FALSE or
  MB_TRUE you would simply write `false` or `true`.
* Where you would write MB_MAYBE you now should write
  `maybe_bool::maybe`.
* Comparison to `true` or `false` is safe and will do exact
  comparison. (The latter may appear surprising, but it is because
  comparison will cause a bool to be cast to maybe_bool, rather than a
  maybe_bool to be cast down to bool.)
* Semantics change: `maybe_bool::maybe` does not convert to true by
  default under any circumstance.
* In cases where you would have previously written `mb == MB_TRUE` you
  can just rely on a bool cast (`maybe` does not convert to `true`). In
  cases where you would write `mb == MB_FALSE` you can write `!mb`.
* frombool and tobool are replaced respectively by constructors and
  the class method maybe_bool::to_bool (as well as an explicit bool
  cast).
* While bool explicit operators have weird rules and can be used
  implicitly in some cases, there are still times when you'll need
  to do the cast. In particular, if a function returns a bool, to
  return a maybe_bool you'll need to explicitly cast.
* Mixing bools and maybe_bools in logical expressions generally requires
  an explicit cast. (If you write a condition that just uses !, that
  doesn't need one.)

Old `maybe_bool` had the advantage of simplicity: it was just an enum
and as long as these enum values are used consistently, it is pretty
simple to use and as efficient as any integer-based type, with
effectively no implementation code.

However, there are a few complaints about it. First, the naming scheme
was quite ad hoc across the enum values and various functions that used
them.  Second, and more importantly in my mind, the enum-based
implementation led in a very non-clean way to implicit int and bool
casts, and a very ad hoc semantics for this type, especially in its
interaction with boolean expressions. Taken as a three-valued logic, it
is very weird. The law of the excluded middle *is* valid (in the sense
that `p || !p` is always true), but double negation elimination is *not*
valid (i.e. `!!p != p`); the weaker double negation inference `!!!p ==
!p` does hold conceivably classing it with some paraconsistent logics,
though I haven't found an exact analogue (see [1], though this logic
doesn't much resemble L8 there, which has the same double negation
pattern). At a practical level this ad hoc nature made mixing with bools
in both directions weird and somewhat error prone; aside from the above
concerns (which essentially result from MB_MAYBE implicitly casting to
`true`), `true` would cast to the enum value MB_MAYBE, leading to clunky
conversion code in a lot of places, needing to always use MB
constants, and error-prone comparison with regular bools.

This commit tries to systematize things more cleanly, albeit with a much
more complicated implementation. The underlying data type does still
amount to a fancy enum (now an enum class), but it's wrapped with a more
clearly defined class, largely inspired by boost's logic::tribool.  (I
considered whether importing one of the various "`optional` but for
c++11" packages out there might be a solution, but ultimately rejected
this, because these classes tend to have an even weirder, for a
bool-based type, set of implicit conversions to bool). A `bool`
constructor is provided making it generally safe to use `true` and
`false` as e.g. return values, and an explicit cast to bool is provided
that has a better default than MB_MAYBE->true. (In some cases, this may
be the desired semantics, of course, but this is still doable via
`to_bool` or direct checks against false.) The operator semantics is
based on the standard "Strong Kleene" three-valued logic operators,
which provide a (imo) very sensible set of defaults for a three-valued
logic. Note that because of the existence of the bool operator, this
won't let you mix `maybe_bool`s in logical expressions together with
bools without some explicit casting one way or the other.  The
implementation is nearly (but not quite) purely header-based.

As part of this commit, I have implemented everything as a
back-compatibility layer and purely just tried to clarify the semantics
of various instances of maybe_bool in cases where it did get an implicit
conversion. The bulk of this is around `can_wear_item` which does tend
to treat its maybe return as truth-y.  A future commit will convert
MB_TRUE etc into their `maybe_bool::t` etc equivalents.

[1] Kamide 2013, A Hierarchy of Weak Double Negations, Studia Logica 101.6

Many thanks also to Sastreii and CanOfWorms for contributing many new tiles over this period, including spell icons, artefact art, Shrek, and more.

Thanks also to all the community members who’ve contributed over the last few months, who I am too tired to credit in full. In particular, check out what SpinningBird sent us!

Happy crawling! Stay serious out there.

6 comments!
Thursday, August 25th, 2022 02:42

0.29 “Shooting Stars”

by

We are pleased to announce the release of Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup 0.29 “Shooting Stars”!

DCSS 0.29 features a sweeping rework of Necromancy, streamlining and upgrading many of its spells, along with similar improvements to the necromantic god Kikubaaqudgha. Ranged weapons have likewise been streamlined and reworked to be more satisfying to use.

For those seeking a special challenge, we’ve also added a new Meteoran species that heals when seeing new terrain and has great skills and attributes. However, Meteorans have to move fast, with only one-tenth the normal time per floor before they suffer heavy draining.

Many backgrounds now start with extra scrolls, potions, or other consumables, allowing more tactical options when faced with a sticky situation. Speaking of sticky situations, characters cast into the Abyss will find that monsters there once again give experience and piety, and an ultra-dangerous ‘deep abyss’ is now accessible…

Many new item types have been added, like scrolls of poison and wands of quicksilver. Some of these ‘alternate’, with only one type of item from a set being generated in any given game. We’ve also added many exciting new unique monsters, from Amaemon the Diabolical Poisoner to the alt-timeline troll Parghit the Mighty.

Launchers, long blades and short blades all now use dexterity instead of strength when calculating damage, allowing new evasive playstyles. Monsters no longer gain and lose ‘random energy’, and can instead launch opportunistic attacks on fleeing players. As always, there are many more changes small and large alike!

Download DCSS 0.29 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 August 26th 8pm UTC and runs through Sunday September 11th 8pm UTC, with all online 0.29 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 September 2nd 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 0.29 possible, and to the admins who run and maintain the official servers. A special thanks to the following community members who contributed to 0.29 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, Aliscans, Ernest Antanishin, Spencer Baugh, Elliott Bernstein, David Damerell, DreamDust, dilly, Diego Essaya, Perry Fraser, Goratrix, Implojin, Alex Jurkiewicz,  Nikolai Lavsky, neo-bop, Oleksiy Pavlikovsky, Rytris Petronis, Brian Power, Reono, riverfiend, robertxgray, Rosstin Murphy, ruxi, sdynet, Jeffery Stager, Cebolla Sunbeam

7 comments!
Monday, February 21st, 2022 23:31

0.28 Tournament Results

by

The 0.28 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 0.28 release and tournament possible!

For 16 days, players could compete for tournament points and banners by playing 0.28 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 Yermak, perennial champion, for once again taking first place in the individual competition, with a spectacular 111,412 points! Over the course of the tournament, Yermak won 43 games, including a streak of 13 games (second-best in tournament), an 76M high score run (first in tournament), 30 Nemelex’ Choice combos, 4 species high scores, 3 background high scores, and 19 tier 3 banners.

Other big winners:

  • Acrobat2: 2nd place overall (101,150 points, 34 wins), longest streak (18 games), 4 species high scores & 1 background high score, tied for lowest XL win at 16, all level 3 banners completed.
  • Fagentul: 3rd place overall (89,909 points, 21 wins), 5 species and background high scores, tied for lowest XL win at 16, 16 level 3 banners completed, 8-win streak.
  • p0werm0de: Fastest realtime win (an auspicious 27 minutes 44 seconds), 2nd place low turncount, 8th place overall.
  • Caminho: Lowest turncount win in a scanty 8,492 turns.
  • sweetandcool: A third tie for lowest XL win at XL 16; 14th place overall.
  • Lici The Crawler (alias Borgnjor’s Vile Crotch): First win of the tournament.
  • Ge0ff, RubberyChicken and NoScrollMutBadDesign all tied for most ziggurats completed at 27 apiece.

The clan competition was won by Gozig or Gozag (captained by Ge0ff) with 105,656 points, sealing their victory by winning 40 Nemelex Choice combos to second place’s 30. In a close 2nd place was That felt unstrangely rewarding (captained by acrobat2) with 98,434 points, and first place in the Clan Combo Highscores and Streak Length leaderboards. 3rd place was held by Team Splat (captained by shummie) with 85,513, following up on last year’s 2nd place ranking by maxing out the Clan Low Turncount Win leaderboard.

Thank you to everyone for playing! I hope you all had fun.

To close out, here are some overall tournament statistics (with the 0.27 numbers in brackets for comparison). 2,559 players started a game at some point during the tournament; of those 2,504 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 0.27 statistics.

  • Players: 2,504 (0.27: 2,474)
  • Total player time: 28,008 hrs (0.27: 27,502 hrs)
  • Average player time: 11.2 hrs (0.27: 11.2 hrs)
  • Games played: 69,201 (0.27: 67,203)
  • Players who got a rune: 742 (0.27: 734)
  • 357 winners and 1160 wins (0.27: 404 winners and 1571 wins)
  • Win rate: 1.68% (0.27: 2.34%)
  • Proportion of players using WebTiles: 96.6% (0.27: 94.4%)

The 0.29 season has begun, and changes are already in motion. Watch this space for further information as the 0.29 trunk update posts begin to flow. Until next time, happy crawling!

2 comments!
Friday, February 4th, 2022 00:34

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

by

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

1 comment...
Saturday, August 21st, 2021 20:45

0.27.1 Bugfix Release

by

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!

Comments Off
Friday, August 20th, 2021 12:31

0.27 Tournament Results

by

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!

1 comment...
Friday, July 30th, 2021 09:06

0.27 “The Cursed Flame”

by

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 Posch, robertxgray, Sastreii, sdynet, WhiteShark, Shummie, Skrybe, Jeffery Stager, Cebolla Sunbeam, Wensley, Mara Williamson

Comments Off
Saturday, July 24th, 2021 09:37

July 24 Trunk Update Post and 0.27 Tournament Page

by

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…

4 comments!
Tuesday, June 15th, 2021 18:06

IRC presence moved to libera.chat

by

Because of the change in ownership in Freenode, over the last few weeks we have migrated the DCSS IRC channels and infrastructure, including the Sequell/Cheibriados infobots, to #crawl and #crawl-dev on libera.chat. (Note the single “#”!)

Also: we had planned to maintain a presence on old freenode in order to point visitors to the correct new place. However, as of 6/15 the new owners have apparently wiped the network’s nickserv and chanserv databases entirely, so we no longer have control over our old channels (or identities) and are not using them at all.

Comments Off
Friday, February 5th, 2021 15:06

0.26.1 Bugfix release

by

The 0.26.1 bug fix release is now available on the download page. Thanks to all the many contributors who helped with this release, including patches and bug reports!

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

Comments Off
Wednesday, January 27th, 2021 11:45

0.26 Tournament Results

by

The 0.26 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 0.26 release and tournament possible! For 16 days, players could compete for tournament points and banners by playing 0.26 games on the public servers. This was the second tournament held after the major revision of the tournament rules done for 0.26. There were changes based on previous input, and once again there will be discussion threads on the tavern and dcss subreddit to collect feedback on the tournament rules.

Congratulations to Yermak, perennial champion, for once again taking first place in the individual competition, with 95,456 points! Over the course of the tournament, Yermak won 47 games, including a streak of 16 games, 29 Nemelex’ Choice combos, an XL 13 win, 3 species high scores, and 3 background high scores. In second place was EnegeticOcto with 80,792 points and 38 wins, including 29 Nemelex’ Choice combos and a 28 minute 17 second real-time win, the fastest of the tournament. Rounding out the top 3 was booing with 78,169 points and 38 wins, including the first win of the tournament, 50 minutes and 27 seconds after the start, an XL 16 win, 3 species high scores, and 2 background high scores; they also collected every banner!

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 a high standard in Win Rate and Streaking, playing and winning 22 games over the course of the tournament, for the top streak and an adjusted win rate of 95.65%. Behind Acrobat in Win Rate was DrMan with a 20 game streak. For much of the tournament Acrobat and DrMan were engaged in a high-stakes back and forth at the top of this category. The Nemelex’ Choice competition ended in an impressive 3-way tie, with Yermak, EnegeticOcto, and Shummieall winning 29 Nemelex combos for points over the course of the tournament. Yermak blew away the competition for Combo High Scores, with 329 points in the category; booing was the only other player to earn more than 200 points in the category, finishing second with a score of 226. The Best High Score of the tournament was the 72,401,124 point run by iamserjio. In the Lowest Turncount Category, Caminho won with 3 runes in 8,617 turns, the 7th lowest turncount of all time! EnegeticOcto’s 28:17 win was the Fastest Realtime Win, but Shummie was only 33 seconds behind with a 28:50 win. Felids were the weapon of choice for the Low XL Win category; Yermak’s XL 13 cat was followed by CurlyBrace who won at XL 15. The tournament was herladed by booing, who posted the first win 50 minutes after the tournament start. DrMan followed an hour later with the first all rune win. The Ziggurat Dive was an exciting back-and-forth for much of the tournament, until Sentinel decided to clear a definitive 100 Ziggurats. Finally, in seeking the favor of the gods, booing was the only player to collect every banner over the course of the tournament.

The clan competition was won by Irradiated Dongers (captained by EnegeticOcto) with 88,667 points. Following very close on their heels were Gozag or Stay Home (captained by Ge0ff) with 88,333 points. Rounding out the top three was TeamSplat (captained by Shummie) with 72,456 points.

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 each of the three-way individual tie members were on different clans, which led to a very high scoring clan competition. Gozag or Stay Home came out on top, with other clan members contributing 30 more Nemelex Combo wins on top of Yermak’s 29, for a total of 59 clan nemelex points; following were Irradiated Dongers with 52 and TeamSplat with 50. The Combo High Scores competition was similarly astronomical at the top; Gozag or Stay Home earned 533 points in the category, followed by Irradiated Dongers with 449, and Make Beogh Great Again with 392 points. These three clans were also the only three to collectively earn every banner.

Thank you to everyone for playing. The rules were adjusted after 0.25 based on collected feedback, and once again there are feedback threads on the tavern and reddit.

To close out, here are some overall tournament statistics (with the 0.25 numbers in brackets for comparison). 2,760 players started a game at some point during the tournament; of those 2,333 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 0.25 statistics.

  • Players: 2,333 (0.25: 2,772)
  • Total player time: 29,392 hrs (0.25: 34,433 hrs)
  • Average player time: 12.6 hrs (0.25: 12.4 hrs)
  • Games played: 54,701 (0.25: 62,125)
  • Players who got a rune: 886 (0.25: 1010)
  • 476 winners and 1767 wins (0.25: 548 winners and 1871 wins)
  • Win rate: 3.23% (0.25: 3.01%)
  • Proportion of players using WebTiles: 96% (0.25: 95.9%)

The 0.27 season has begun, and it again looks to be an active trunk season. Watch this space for further information as the 0.27 trunk update posts begin to flow. Until next time, happy crawling!

Comments Off
Friday, January 8th, 2021 18:45

0.26 “Roll Around the Clock”

by

We are pleased to announce the release of Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup 0.26 “Roll Around the Clock”!

DCSS 0.26 features a new Palentonga species that has a rolling attack and gets bonus AC after getting hit, a new Delver background that starts the player on D:5 with a variety of escape tools, a reworked Swamp branch with new monsters and other layout changes, and a vastly reworked quiver system that lets spells, wands, and abilities be quivered, fired, and autotargeted. Additionally, food is gone, replaced with a Zot clock that prevents players from lingering too long in one branch. The Kobold species now has the Nightstalker 3 mutation, the Ghoul species has chunk eating replaced with heal-on-kill, and there are a bunch of reworked spells, monsters, and items (including nine overhauled unrandart weapons). As always, there are dozens of new deadly vaults, and many more changes small and large alike!

Download DCSS 0.26 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 (Update: The Linux debs are now available). See the full list of changes on the release page here.

The tournament starts today in just a few hours at 20:00 UTC Friday 8 January and runs through 20:00 UTC Sunday 24 January, with all online 0.26 games counting towards your score. See the tournament page for more details, including how to join or set-up a clan. Clans membership can be changed until 20:00 UTC Friday 15 January.

Many thanks to all those who have contributed to DCSS over the years. A special thanks to the following community members who contributed to DCSS 0.26 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!)

Aaron Golden, AdamPG, Alex Jurkiewicz, aMcNicky, Anders Papitto,
Byrel Mitchell, CrawlCycle, Elliot Dronebarger, Emily, Eugene Abramchuk,
Gittourarmy, Goratrix, Heinrich Ody, hellmonk, Implojin, Joe
Childers, Kieron Dunbar, Marcelo Henrique Cerri, mgdelmonte,
Midn8, Naruni, nikheizen, Nikolai Lavsky, Paul Pollack, Peter
Gerlagh, Peter Hurst, Petri Salminen, Quipyowert2, randomMesh,
RJ Cunningham, Roderick Schertler, Cebolla Sunbeam, Ryan McNeive,
sdynet, Sebastian Łużyński, Shummie, Skrybe, syranez, Umer
Shaikh, ukdong99, wjchen

Comments Off
Wednesday, December 30th, 2020 19:41

Dec 30 Trunk Update and 0.26 Tournament and Release Dates

by

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!

Comments Off
Wednesday, September 23rd, 2020 03:11

CBRO upgrade/transition plan

by

Sad news: CBRO will be retiring. But good news: CBRO will be replaced by CBR2, which will not run out of hard drive space for at least 10 years! Here’s the full plan:

  • CBR2 (cbro.berotato.org) is a completely new server with a much bigger disk and better cpu, administered by ZureaL, advil, and johnstein, hosted by ZureaL, and located in the midwest.
  • We have imported the CBRO login database from CBRO to CBR2, but most other data (including save files) will not be imported, for a fresh start.
  • CBR2 is currently open for test games only, and the server will be reset on 9/25 at 11:59 EDT — games played before then are not on the record. Games played after this reset will appear in CAO scoring and Sequell. (We will do one last pull of the username db around then as well.)
  • After CBR2 goes live on 9/26, CBRO will stop allowing new games to begin. CBRO will remain open for a while to allow finishing off any old games, and will continue hosting its current data until its shutdown (we are estimating final shutdown around 12/1/20). Any games finished until that point will also be on the record. At that point we will most likely archive long-term data away from the CBRO server into cloud storage.

Thanks very much to johnstein for solo-running CBRO for so many years, and to ZureaL for taking the lead in setting up CBR2!

3 comments!
Friday, July 17th, 2020 21:38

0.25.1 bugfix release

by

We have just uploaded the 0.25.1 bugfix release, 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):

  • Artefacts from acquirement now leave a note in morgues.
  • Scarf of harm is fixed.
  • Foxfire will no longer attack out of LoS.
  • Stacking from empty Nemelex decks is no longer possible.
  • Wizlab entry now generates a milestone / note again.
  • Fix a bug where cloud generators triggered on load when no time had passed, leading to a different cloud arrangement from saving + reloading.
  • Seeded play fixes for seed instability in a few cases, as well as crashes related to seed stability and pregeneration code.
  • Several speedups for dungeon rendering, especially in zigs.
  • Sprint 3 cloud generators have been retuned.
  • Improvements to the behavior of restart_after_save (on by default since 0.25.0).
  • Using [] in map view from stairs to view other levels now correctly finds the matching stairs.
  • Crashes to do with annotation, off-level map view, and custom flashes have been fixed.
  • It is no longer possible for a bug to cause the player to drown or fall into lava, emergency flight will be activated instead.

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

Comments Off
Saturday, July 4th, 2020 19:04

0.25 Tournament Results

by

The 0.25 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 0.25 release and tournament possible! For 16 days, players could compete for tournament points and banners by playing 0.25 games on the public servers. This was the first tournament held with a major revision of the tournament rules, and there will be discussion threads on the tavern and dcss subreddit to collect feedback on the tournament rules.

This post is going to focus on the results. First, a few highlights from the player and clan results. For comprehensive results with first through fifth place winners in all categories, please see the tournament overview page.

The winning player was Yermak with 5,819 points. Over the course of the tournament, Yermak won 44 games, including a streak of 17 games and a low-turncount world record of 8,783 turns (Sapher, the previous record holder has reclaimed the throne with a post tournament 8,331 turn win). In second place was shummie with 4,235 points and 20 wins, including the lowest XL win with an XL 15 SpEn and a 52 Ziggurat mega-zigging character. Rounding out the top 3 was Flugkiller with 3,513 points and 14 wins, including the first win of the tournament 35 minutes and 32 seconds after the tournament started with a duration of 35 minutes and 12 seconds.

The new tournament format divided scoring in to several categories, and our top three took several of the top spots in these categories. They weren’t the only players at the top of the leaderboard. Yermak maxed out the Piety category, championing and winning every god over the tournament. The Unique Harvesting category included player ghosts, and by diving Ziggurats for player ghosts ehdcjf2142 won the category with 1,332 points. Long time crawl dev elliptic topped the tournament Win Rate category, with an impressive 90.91% adjusted win-rate, winning all 10 games played over the tournament. Yermak had the longest streak, and tied for second place were GordonOverkill and MrMan with 13 game streaks each. Acrobat was the master of Nemelex’ Choice, winning 25 choice combos over the tournament. Yermak also took the Combo High Scores category with 62 points (21 combo high scores, 20 of which were won, 4 species high scores and 3 background high scores), followed by aperiodic with 34 points (17 combo high scores, 6 of which were won, and the Spriggan and Ice Elementalist high scores). It should be no surprise that Yermak continues to top category leaderboards, with the highest score of the tournament (56,717,235 points); followed by Flugkiller (51,589,384 points) and aperiodic (45,485,504 points). I already mentioned Yermak’s turn-count world record; EnegeticOcto came in second place for best turn-count win, completing a game in 10,320 turns itself one of the lowest turn-count runs of all time. p0werm0de topped the fastest real-time win category with an impressive 24:20 win. Our top players were also at the top of the Low XL-win leaderboard; shummie at XL 15, Yermak at XL 16, followed by EnegeticOcto and sentinel who both posted XL 17 wins. Flugkiller heralded the start of the tournament with his first win; the first all-rune win came from p0werm0de a mere 40 minutes after that. shummie and Flugkiller topped the Ziggurat Dive leaderboard, followed by ehdcjf2142′s 26 consecutive Ziggurat dive for 3rd place. Finally, Ge0ff and shummie were the only two players to complete all tier 3 banners both finishing the tournament with a perfect Banner Score.

The clan competition was won by TeamSplat (captained by mandevil) with 7,007 points who topped the Piety, Harvesting, Combo High score, and Banner Score categories, as well as had several top players (including shummie). They were followed by FSTVLKers (captained by EnegeticOcto) with 6,563 points and Stick to Your Gods (Yermak’s one-player-clan). Overall 142 clans scored points in the tournament (compared to 143 in the 0.24 tournament).

Several of the clan categories simply gave the clan credit for their best player’s performance in a category, so I won’t recap those. The Piety, Unique Harvesting, Combo High Score, Nemelex’ Choice, and Banner Score categories were scored as a collective effort among clan members. In the Piety category, FSTVLKers, Make_Beogh_Great_Again, Stick to Your Gods, and TeamSplat all championed and won every god over the tournament. TeamSplat topped the Unique Harvesting category, followed by FSTVLKers and Gozags Lazy Faire fiscal policy. TeamSplat also finished first in Combo High Scores, followed by Stick to Your Gods and BLACK LIVES MATTER. FSTVLKers took the trophy for Nemelex’ Choice winning 31 Nemelex’ Choice combos between them, followed by Make_Beogh_Great_Again with 27 combos. Finally three clans completed (as a clan effort) all tier 3 banners to tie for first in Banner Score: TeamSplat, FSTVLKers, and Gozags Lazy Faire fiscal policy.

In both the individual and clan categories competition was fierce. Flugkiller came out to an early lead with his first-win points, and throughout most of the tournament held close to Yermak from 2nd place, until being edged out by shummie in the final days of the event. The Clan category followed similarly, with a fierce battle between Flugkiller’ FSTVLKers and mandevil’s TeamSplat (which had shummie as a member).

Thank you to everyone for playing, for your patience with the delayed start, and for your bug finding in the new tournament pages. I hope you enjoyed the new format, and look forward to reading your commentary in the discussion threads on the tavern and reddit.

To close out, here are some overall tournament statistics (with the 0.24 numbers in brackets for comparison). 2,947 players started a game and earned a point in some category; of those 2,772 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 0.24 statistics.

  • Players: 2,772 (0.24: 2,880)
  • Total player time: 34,433 hrs (0.24: 35,422 hrs)
  • Avg player time: 12.4 hrs (0.24: 12.3 hrs)
  • Games played: 62,125 (0.24: 63,048)
  • Players who got a rune: 1010 (0.24: 1046)
  • 548 winners and 1871 wins (0.24: 540 winners and 1930 wins)
  • Win rate: 3.01% (0.24: 3.06%)
  • Proportion of players using WebTiles: 95.9% (0.24: 95.5%)
The 0.26 season is off to a rapid start with retired dev PleasingFungus sending in some neat ideas and several projects that were started just before the tournament receiving attention. Watch this space for further developments as the trunk update posts from the 0.26 cycle begin to flow.
Until next time, happy crawling!
Comments Off
Thursday, June 4th, 2020 09:17

0.25 Tournament Delayed But Tournament Page Now Available

by

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!

2 comments!
Sunday, January 26th, 2020 18:27

Community Competitions

by

Hello crawlers!

We occasionally get asked about opportunities for competitive crawling outside of the official release tournaments. Several community members have organized a variety of competitions, and this post aims to point them out.

The Tavern Dart Board

The Dart Board on our official forums is a clearinghouse for community organized competitions as well as discussion of all things competitive crawl. It’s a good first place to go when looking for ongoing competitions and challenges.

The Crawl Cosplay Challenge

Run by kitchen_ace, these challenges give character conducts inspired by crawls many uniques. From the CCC website, “The goal is not to emulate the unique’s behaviour exactly, but to get a good starting point on playing games with interesting requirements. Challenges [...] are suitable for players of all skill levels — the Challenge is about personal achievement rather than competition.” Check them out! The current set (Set 10) is ending, but a new one will begin soon.

Crawl Sudden Death Challenges

Organized in an officially unofficial way by me, based on the popular series originally organized by WalkerBoh, he idea is for players to compete by trying to do as well as possible in a game of Crawl with one attempt only; if you die, that challenge is over. More information and sign-ups can be found on the CSDC website.

DCSS Secret Santa Tournament

Organized by CPO admin chequers (who also offers a weekly challenge seeded run on CPO), this festive adventure comes once a year. Keep an eye out next year when the temperatures start to rise and summer gets into full swing.

1 comment...
Older Posts »