travel_delay = -1
explore_delay = -1
rest_delay = -1
show_travel_trail = true

The second-to-last setting (rest_delay) is a new setting that was also added so resting/healing now happens instantly (this only makes a difference in webtiles, since in console the stats area always updates).

These settings will make online play better by default for webtiles users who are being particularly affected by lag. The game is much quicker and more fun to play without waiting for autoexplore/travel/rest. Additionally this should reduce overall server load which will hopefully be significant during the tournament!

Webtiles players should also be aware that there was recently a change to the way webtiles data packets are batched, which should also result in a significant speed gain for laggy connections (much less round trips are being made overall).

See the options guide for more details on these options, and please comment here if you have any issues or questions with the new settings.

The rules page contains all the details about how to score points and earn banners in the tournament. 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.

Head over to the Downloads page to get 0.12, or see the How to play Online page for a list of available servers.

There will be a tournament from May 11-27 to celebrate the release. All 0.12 games played on one of the online servers (CAO, CDO or CSZO) will count for scoring. See the 0.12 tournament website for the rules and start forming clans!

Some of 0.12′s highlights include:

• Places: The Vaults branch is now 5 levels deep, with a revamped layout and new guardians. The Abyss consists of 5 (still infinite) levels of increasing danger, with the rune found only on the deeper levels, and contains many new monsters. There are many new layouts and vaults in other branches. Secret doors have been removed. Three Sprint maps have been added: “Thunderdome” by evilmike, and “The Pits” and “Arena of Blood” both by st.
• Monsters: In the Vaults, vault sentinels alert monsters to your location, ironbrand convokers recall monsters from elsewhere directly to you, vault wardens seal nearby doors, and ironheart preservers reduce the damage that their allies take. The Abyss is inhabited by a variety of new eldritch horrors: ancient zymes, tentacled starspawn, lurking horrors, starcursed masses, wretched stars, apocalypse crabs, thrashing horrors and spatial maelstroms. Two uniques have been added: Jorgrun, a deep dwarf earth elementalist, and Lamia, queen of the nagas. Other new monsters include moths of suppression (with an aura that suppresses the effects of magical equipment) and deep troll shamans and earth mages. Ant larvae, bumblebees, rock trolls and wood golems are no more.
• Spells: Many non-elemental conjurations have been added: Force Lance (causes low-range knockback), Dazzling Spray (blinds multiple enemies), Iskenderun’s Battlesphere (creates an autonomous globe that attacks alongside your other conjurations) and Fulminant Prism (creates a smite-targeted time bomb). Another new spell, Disjunction (blinks away all nearby enemies for a duration), can be found in high-level translocation books. Fulsome Distillation, Evaporate, Cigotuvi’s Degeneration, See Invisible and Insulation have been removed. Venom Bolt, Bolt of Magma, Teleport Other and Dispersal have been made more effective.
• Characters: Conjurers now start with a spellbook containing the new non-elemental conjurations. Summoned allies now only attack while both the summon and the target are in line-of-sight. Levitation and controlled flight no longer exist – all sources of flight are controlled instead. Stalkers have evaporated.
• Items: Axes cleave through multiple targets when attacking, but have slightly reduced damage. One-handed maces and flails have been improved. The wand of polymorph other is now the wand of polymorph, and causes random transformations instead of mutations in players (with a number of new bad forms: tree, wisp, porcupine and fungus).
• Gods: Vehumet now gifts destructive spells one at a time, starting with low-level spells at low piety and ending with multiple high-level spells. Vehumet no longer supports summoners. Worshippers of Yredelemnul and Beogh can recall their allies from different floors, and Beogh allies gain experience when the player gets kills. Xom has a number of new available actions, and some negative effects are toned down or removed.

See the changelog for a summary of other major changes. Thanks to Stone Soup’s many contributors, and enjoy playing 0.12!

Anyone willing to host a WebTiles server, especially in Europe, please let us know in The Tavern. For now there are WebTiles servers available in the US.

Thank you all for participating!

The winning player was theglow, with 6739 points. Theglow won an impressive 18 games (all with distinct species and backgrounds), but even more impressively he didn’t die at all during the tournament, streaking all 18 games! In second place was jeanjacques, with 5915 points. Jeanjacques got the most tier III banners – 15 of them – and also had the win with the lowest turncount, just 17901 turns. In third place was bmfx, with 5646 points and the second-longest streak of wins: 9 games long. The first win and the win with the last start, which were also the two fastest wins at a little over two hours each, were both played by ophanim.

The clan competition was won by the hex pistols (21415 points). Margery and the Hell Knights (18011 points) and Hemipene (11839 points) were second and third respectively. There were 102 clans in all, a record high.

Here are some assorted statistics on the tournament games (with quits removed), compared with the 0.10 tournament (in parentheses):

Players with at least one game: 1545 (1568)
Players with at least one game to reach XL 9: 979 (908)
Players who got a rune: 400 (372)
Players who won a game: 214 (183)
Total wins: 473 (370)
Win %: 1.18% (1.10%)
Total player time: 24287 hrs (23347 hrs)
Avg player time: 15.7 hrs (14.9 hrs)
Proportion of players using webtiles: 71.3% (61.2%)
Proportion of winners using webtiles: 59.0% (45.0%)

The rules are available on the tournament website. Some rules and banners have been changed. As usual, clans can be set up and changed until one week into the tournament.

Updated 2012-10-11: CDO now has 0.11 webtiles. Thanks, Napkin!

You can get 0.11 at our Downloads page, or see the How to play Online page for a list of available servers. There will be an official tournament to celebrate this release, but we’re waiting for the new CAO server before setting a date. As soon as more information is available a new announcement will be made.

One change that may cause problems for upgrading users, especially online players, is a slight change in the way the options file works: the default options file now consists only of commented out lines. If you modified your config and are reusing it for 0.11, which is done by default on the servers, you should comment out or delete all lines that you did not change from the default. This will ensure that you are not using any default values from older versions. You may also need to update your config to use the new syntax for various list options (such as message colours or travel stoppers), by ensuring you use “option += value” to append to the list instead of “option = value” (as in the future this will replace the list entirely instead of appending to it). Using the old syntax will cause an ingame message to be displayed, to remind players that the options format has changed. See the List Options section of the options guide for full details.

Some of 0.11′s major changes include:

• Places: With the addition of the Spider Nest, the Lair will now contain one of Swamp/Shoals and one of Snake/Spider. The Swamp has an improved layout with more compact levels. The Elven Halls are shortened to three floors. As always, there are many new vaults, including new branch endings and full-level vaults. The frequency of vaults has also been slightly increased. Upon escaping from the Abyss, you now land back where you came from, but with a few turns’ banishment immunity. A new Sprint map has been added: Ziggurat Sprint by st squeezes an entire Ziggurat into one floor, and contains appropriately ridiculous amounts of loot and monsters.
• Monsters: Fannar, an elven ice mage, and Arachne, a poisonous half-spider, join the ranks of Crawl’s unique monsters. The omniresistant Hell Sentinels replace Pit Fiends. Boulder beetles can now curl up and roll at you for heavy damage. Mimics can now constrict their foes, although early mimics are much weaker: their constriction does no damage, and they don’t resist elemental attacks. Monster constriction formulae have been changed to make it much easier to escape, but blink counts as two escape attempts now instead of always letting you get out. Equipment-using monsters can now wear rings and amulets and benefit from most of their effects.
• Items: Ammo enchantment has been removed, which greatly simplifies inventory management for those who use ranged weaponry. Weapon skill now fills the role of ammo enchantment, instead. You can now abort changing your armour instead of slowly getting nibbled to death by a rat while putting on your shiny new crystal plate armour. Most fixed artefacts now start out identified. Weapons are identified by having a certain amount of the corresponding skill instead of by whacking plants with them. Rods of smiting are replaced with lightning rods that let you shoot cones of lightning. You can adjust the width of the cone to either do heavy damage to single targets or quickly clear out hordes of popcorn.
• Gods: Okawaru now gives almost no piety for killing and sacrificing weak enemies, but gives much more for winning difficult fights. Nemelex worshippers can now earn the ability to use the top four cards in a deck at once, replacing the old “Mark Four” ability. Nemelex also gifts fewer decks of summoning, and various cards have been adjusted. Kikubaaqudgha gifts randomised necromancy spellbooks instead of the fixed ones. Xom now usually times his pranks to coincide with interesting situations.
• Interface: Several new options were added, including automatically dropping old chunks when burdened, and sacrificing corpses before autoexploring. The spell targeting interface has been greatly improved, showing the affected area for AoE spells and beam paths for bouncing lightning bolts. The ‘\’ known items menu lets you adjust your autopickup options while you play. The HUD now displays current gold and game time, so you can see in brackets how long your last action took. Local versions now include a scrollable highscore list that lets you easily open the morgue files of your most successful dead or victorious characters.
• Tiles: As always there are many beautiful new tiles for the dungeon, its inhabitants, and many items. These include special tall tiles for the unique lords of Pandemonium and the Hells, and a huge amount of new weapon tiles, including tiles for the different racial weapon variations.

There are a lot more changes, and as always the changelog lists all major ones. Many thanks to galefury for writing most of this post, and to all the contributors to Stone Soup. Have fun playing DCSS 0.11! Beware of the spiders!

You can read the full article here.

After finding out about his blog entry (via reddit), I contacted him and asked for permission to link it here. Not only was John fine with that, he decided to thank everyone by creating a new opening splash screen for the game that will appear in the upcoming release.

Read his message about the response to the article and see a large version of the new splash art here.

Some private closing remarks by me: When we started the Stone Soup fork, one crucial part was to encourage players to become active with the development. This has worked very well, ranging over speech, descriptions, maps/vaults, bug fixes and patches for sometimes elaborate new features. An area where contributions were, and still are, particularly rich is tiles. It is both a pleasure to thank John for his amazing work, and a shame to acknowledge that so much went unused. The arguments brought forward against his ideas could have been mine, or in some cases actually were mine. Further discussion on the matter should go the comments, ideally on John’s blog. Many thanks John, and farewell!

Games are shared between webtiles and ssh, and can furthermore be watched across interfaces (e.g. watch an ssh game in webtiles; chatting across interfaces doesn’t work that well for now, though).  You can even watch yourself in webtiles while playing ASCII, or vice versa, to get the best of both interfaces.

Ttyrecs and morgues are available for browsing at http://dobrazupa.org/ . Games and milestones are recorded by Sequell and reported in ##crawl on freenode by the new bot Sizzell; this also means that CSZO games will count for the upcoming tournament. Note that the user database is separate from CDO and CAO, so you will have to register an account for CSZO.

I plan to at some point publish the configurations, git branches, and instructions online to make it a little easier to set up a new server.  Eventually we’d like to make this all available as a Debian package or something similar, but first things first :)

In the meantime, you can get your fix here on CDO or play on the new US-based server at crawl.s-z.org - for console use SSH (port 22, username crawl, OpenSSH key here, PuTTY key here).

Check the How to Play Online page for more detailed information on online play.

* Lots of fixes for various crash cases
* Grey draconians can’t drown — we mean it this time
* Slaying now works as expected for magical staves
* Allies are not allowed to smite enemies through glass
* Allies can now cast Orb of Destruction
* Reaching with polearms is not allowed while trapped in a net/web
* Description text updates to match 0.10 changes
* plus many other small updates and fixes.

A bit more detailed list of changes can be found in the changelog.

Work on the next major release, Crawl 0.11, is proceeding rapidly. This
release will land in time for the next tournament, most likely sometime in
August. Bug fixes on the 0.10 stable branch will continue, as we are trying to give more than just lip service to actually maintaining the released version. You can help by
reporting any bugs you find (not counting spiders, giant cockroaches,
and killer bees — those are your problem!). And don’t forget to take a
few minutes to complete the Stone Soup Survey.

The winning player is elliptic, with 6601 points. Elliptic won 16 out of 26 games, including a 12 streak. Second place goes to jeanjacques, with 6504 points. Jeanjacques also recorded the win with the fewest turns and the highest scoring game. Both players were nearly tied going into the final hours as they competed for the win with the latest starting time (which is worth 100 bonus points) – but elliptic’s winning KoWn started slightly later than jeanjacques’ winning DDBe. Third place goes to pivotal, with 4568 points.

The top three clans exchanged first place several times, with Saint Lorocyproca (18074 points) coming out on top. Second place goes to Team Teddybear (17228 points), and third place goes to sonic yiuf (14954 points).
This tournament’s banners had three difficulty levels. Elliptic was the only player to obtain level III of every banner, while jeanjacques obtained all of them except Pious III.

The tournament statistics show an increase in number of players, time spent playing, and player performance. Below, the 0.10 tournament compared to the 0.9 tournament (in parentheses):

Players: 1628 (1337)
Total player time: 23507 hrs (16435 hrs)
Avg player time: 14.44 hrs (12.29 hrs)
Players who got a rune: 372 (264)
Players who won a game: 183 (116)
Total wins: 370 (232)
Win %, excluding quits/leaves: 1.10% (0.86%)

Alongside all the exciting new content in-game, there have been many significant improvements and additions to Webtiles. A list of visible monsters is now displayed, there are various menu improvements, and Webtiles games can even be watched by console players over SSH.

You can download 0.10 from our Download page, or play console builds online on CAO or CDO. Webtiles will be upgraded to 0.10 within the next few days, keep an eye out for an update!

We’re also conducting a survey of players alongside this release. If you have a few minutes to spare please take a look, we’d greatly appreciate your response.

Don’t forget that the 0.10 release tournament begins on February 25th! All 0.10 games played on CAO and CDO will count towards it, which of course includes Webtiles games. Check out the tournament website for the rules, start forming clans, and get ready to tackle the challenging new banners!

Some of the major changes this version include:

• New species: Octopodes, capable of wearing eight rings, but not most other items of armour.
• Removed species: Mountain Dwarves have returned to the mountains. Read why they were axed here.
• Changed species: Hill Orcs have had their aptitudes improved, and Minotaurs have gained both better aptitudes and a retaliatory attack with their horns. Centaurs have a slower metabolism, but are now somewhat herbivorous, gaining bonus nutrition from plants but less nutrition from meat. Draconians cannot wear body armour anymore, but can wear gloves and boots. Some Demonspawn mutations have been adjusted, and a number of new mutation sets are also available. Kenku have rediscovered their roots and now prefer to be called Tengu.
• Backgrounds: Arcane Marksmen are back with a Hex-based spellbook. Transmuters have Beastly Appendage (a new spell providing a temporary beneficial combat mutation) instead of Fulsome Distillation and Evaporate. Necromancers have Control Undead instead of Dispel Undead. Monks have been rewarded for their devotion to asceticism and gain a one-time boost to ** piety when they first convert to a god.
• Skills: You will now need to find an appropriate item or spell to train most skills (and doing so allows even unknown skills to be trained). Additionally, partial levels of skills (e.g., ‘15.2’) matter.
• New monsters: Blizzard demons can call down freezing cold and howling winds with but a gesture. Profane servitors are angels that have been corrupted by Yredelemnul. These undead beings radiate unholy darkness and are resistant to holy forces. Several new holy monsters have been added.
• Removed monsters: Giant toads have croaked, vipers have rolled snake eyes, and blue deaths have all died.
• Changed monsters: Reapers are much more powerful. Fiends are now known as Brimstone Fiends, and imps are now known as crimson imps. Some demons have found themselves on different glyphs. Summoning monsters bring fewer creatures with each cast, and monsters with breath attacks (e.g., dragons) need to recover between attacks. There are many new monster descriptions and quotes.
• Spells: Combining Swiftness and Flight no longer gives bonus movement speed. Mephitic Cloud and Evaporate no longer guarantee a 3×3 cloud. Passage of Golubria creates two portals when cast, and allows more than two portals to exist simultaneously. Lee’s Rapid Deconstruction and Shatter are stopped by walls unless the spell manages to destroy them. To account for the monster summoning changes, Abjuration is now a single-target spell. The screen-wide version is available as a new level 6 spell, Mass Abjuration. Maxwell’s Silver Hammer and Levitate have been removed.
• Cheibriados: Ponderous equipment has been replaced. Instead, gaining Cheibriados piety slows you down. Followers are no longer given resistances, but gain the Temporal Distortion ability, which moves nearby monsters forwards in time a few turns.
• Makhleb: The demon prince of destruction deals only in blood and souls! Makhleb’s invocations now cost health instead of magic. Followers will be rewarded for kills with a larger amount of health, but no magic.
• The three good gods now have piety decay over time, but each has new methods of gaining piety. Elyvilon piety from pacification has been greatly increased and piety from weapon sacrifices has been adjusted, Zin demands a tithe of all gold collected in return for piety, and The Shining One gives piety for meeting new monsters (and determining whether they need to be eradicated!).
• Constriction: Octopodes, nagas, some snakes, and tentacled monstrosities can now prevent their foes from escaping while squeezing the life out of them.
• Various changed mechanics: Poison resistance is now only 90% effective against most effects. No spells work through glass or trees anymore. The slaying property (incribed as {Dam+X}) now works identically to weapon enchantments. Contaminated (‘brown’) chunks always give nutrition and cause nausea instead of sickness. Nauseous characters can only eat when near starving and might make themselves ill.
• Items: All polearms have been lengthened and may now be evoked (‘v’) to attack non-adjacent squares (like the reaching brand). Potions of healing are now known as potions of curing, and wands of healing are now known as wands of heal wounds. Many new fixed artefacts have been added.
• Branches: Terrain in the Abyss now shifts with nearly every step. This may open new escape routes for stranded adventurers – or seal ones they were planning to take. Pandemonium has a dangerous new holy-themed unique level. The Hive is no more. Tiles players can enjoy the newly redecorated Snake Pit, Labyrinth, Vestibule of Hell, Crypt, Dis, Tartarus, Cocytus, and Pandemonium. Many new vaults have been added across the entire dungeon.
• Interface: Spell success adjectives are replaced with failure rate percentages which are coloured based on potential miscast severity.

Thanks to Eronarn for compiling the list of changes, and to the many contributors to this version. See the full changelog for much more!

I personally have been away from the project for a couple of months, and was pleasantly surprised by the better structure and more readable pages – I had no idea this was taking place. So big thanks to XuaXua for stepping up, grabbing a shovel, and wailing away at the mess!

Go check out the wiki now!

--Eino

But 0.10 is almost upon us — it will likely be released within a week. As with the 0.8 release last year, there will be a tournament to celebrate this release: from 0:00 Feb 25 (midnight UTC) through 24:00 Mar 11 (Mar 12 midnight UTC), any 0.10 game played on CDO or CAO will count towards the tournament. The annual August tournament will still happen later this year, as usual.

The rules are available on the tournament website. This tournament will offer far more banners to strive towards than any past DCSS tournament has, so don’t miss it!

List of significant changes for the Unified Combat Control branch:

1. Capitalization of words is performed automatic (done by Kilobyte, altered by SamB)
• Instead of passing an explicit capitalization (NOCAP or CAP) to the mprf system, mprf determines automatically whether capitalization is necessary.
2. Fight rewrite
• Restructuring of combat into phases
• Attempted
• Hit
• Damaged
• Defender Killed
• Dodged
• Blocked
• End
3. Merging of player / monster codepaths
• This comprises the bulk of the rewrite and will be subject for continued (numerous) changes in the future. Some codepaths are not entirely unified because doing so would require symmetry between players and monsters in regards to how a particular effect is handled (weapon brands, spells, etc. etc.)

List of things for players to be aware or mindful of for bug-reporting purposes

1. Out-of-order combat messages (especially as they relate to weapon brands)
2. Combat messages which leak otherwise unknown information
3. Unusual sanctuary behavior
4. Unusual messages or behavior on the last turn of combat (when the monster is killed)
5. Brands, spell effects, or mutations which consistently do not result in a noticeable effect
6. Weapon effects or behavior which do not appropriately result in god-affects
• Examples include using speed weapons with Chei, attacking dishonorably while worshiping TSO
7. Capitalization errors in combat text
8. Missing combat effects (from uniques or from specific player-races)
• Examples include vampire-specific effects for players, or Maurice’s “thieving” attacks

Report bugs here! Thank you in advance!

We are very sorry and will add a security check to the scripts – promised!

For quite a while it was realised that MD, HO and Mi are too close to each other than is good for well-differentiated variety. In other words, developers agreed that cutting a species of the three would be an improvement. This was not urgent; that’s why it isn’t announced on the 0.10 development plan or anywhere else. However, it is also not a big change, so when we got the details ready in a session or two, we commenced with the wipeout.

First, theme. Hill Orcs are sacrosanct by Beogh’s protection. Even if you don’t like the orc god, there is no way we would get rid of HO as a player species. Choosing between MD and Mi, the lot hit the former. The reasons are less forcing than with HO, but are reasons nonetheless: Mi has a monster equivalent whereas MD has not (the monster dwarves are deep dwarves, akin to deep elves being the monster elves). Mi has an ancient mythos behind it (Minos, Crete, the labyrinth) as well as a portal vault in the game. MD on the other hand is the archetypical Tolkien-style dwarf, which in my book is a severe demerit.

Second, aptitudes. Removing a species does not happen in empty space. It might have impact on nearby species, and it certainly did so here. A table of the old and new aptitudes for Mi, HO and old MD is at the end of this text. The summary is this: new Minotaurs approached MD in certain areas (e.g. Armour is 2, also Stabbing, Traps & Doors, Evocations). Hill Orcs got additional magical competence.

Third, to dispel a myth. We didn’t use winning rates, or number of games played in order to make a decision.

Fourth, history. Over the course of DCSS, the following species had to resign: HD, GE, El, Gn, OM (Hill Dwarf, Grey Elf, Elf, Gnome, Ogre Mage). Of these, OM merged with Og into a more interesting species; the others left for the same reason MD goes now: lack of differentiation. On the other hand, some species were added over the years: Vp, DD, Fe (Vampire, Deep Dwarf, Felid). 0.10 will probably feature Octopodes. None of these are defined by aptitudes alone (but note that new Ogre is an exception!), which makes for additional complexity but also diversity. Note that species tweaking goes beyond adding and removing: Draconians and Demonspawns were changed (and will probably see further changes), and with some luck and effort, 0.10 will see more interesting Demigods.

An empty entry means no change from the old version of the species.

        Arm Ddg Sth Stb Shd T&D   Inv Evo        HP  MP   Exp
--------------------------------------------------------------
Mi old   +1  +1  -2   0  +1  -1    -1  -3        +1  -2   140
Mi new   +2          -1  +2   0        -1                 130
MD       +3  -1  -3  -2  +2  +1     0  +1        +1  -1   130
HO old   +1  -2  -2  +2  +1   0     0   0        +1  -1   100
HO new                             +2                 0      

        Fgt SBl LBl M&F Axs Pla Stv  UC   Thr Slg Bws Crb
----------------------------------------------------------
Mi old   +2  +2  +2  +2  +2  +2  +2  +1    +1  +1  +1  +1
Mi new       +1                             0
MD       +2  +1   0  +2  +2  -1  -1   0    -1  -1  -2  +1
HO old   +2   0  +1  +1  +2  +1  -1  +1     0  -1  -1  -1
HO new                                                   

        Spc Coj Hex Cha Sum Nec Trl Trm   Fir Ice Air Ear Poi
--------------------------------------------------------------
Mi old   -3  -3  -3  -3  -3  -3  -3  -3    -3  -3  -3  -3  -3
Mi new           -4  -4              -2                -2
HO old   -3   0   0  -1   0   0  -2  -3     0   0  -2   0  -1
HO new   -2                                +1  -1                  +3 Int, -1 Str
MD       -3  -1  -2  -2  -2  -3  -2  -1    +2  -2  -2  +2  -2

To train a weapon skill, you need to carry a weapon of the appropriate type, but you don’t have to wield it. For ranged weapons, carrying a launcher is enough, no need to have missiles.
For armour, you need to wear any armour with an evasion penalty (at least leather). For shields you need to be wearing one. If you can cast condensation shield or have the divine shield ability, that works too.
Spell schools can be trained as soon as you have a spell of the school memorised (whatever the success chance). You can train evocations if you carry any evocable item (no need to wear jewellery or wield rods). For Invocations you can train it if you have a divine ability that uses it.
Fighting, UC, throwing, dodging, stealth, stabbing, T&D and spellcasting can always be trained, there’s no restrictions on them.

Another recent change was made regarding skill levels. You now gain benefit from partial skill levels. This is why it is now displayed with a decimal in the skill screen. For example, casting a dual school spell with both skills at 2.5 is the same as having one skill at 2.0 and the other at 3.0, while it used to be the same as having both at 2.0. You gain a spell slot when spellcasting reaches 2.5, and another when it reaches 3.0.

For those not familiar with the 0.9 skill system, let me recap the changes that were made. XP pool has been removed. When you gain XP, it is immediately spread across the activated skills. The amount of XP attributed to each skill depends on the training percentage. In manual mode, your actions are ignored and XP is spread evenly across all activated skills. In automatic mode, the training percentages depend on which skills you have used recently.
You can also set a skill to focus (marked with *). Doing so will train the skill twice as fast (relative to others of course). In auto mode, if the skill has a very low training percentage, setting it to focus will raise it to around 20% instead of doubling.

Two options have been added:
default_manual_training: if you like to play in manual mode, set this to true and the skill training mode will default to manual instead of auto.
skill_focus: if you don’t want to set skills to focus, set this option to false. This will revert the behaviour to the simple disable/enable toggle, instead of the 3 states disable/enable/focus. If you want to change it in-game, set this option to toggle and you’ll be able to change it from within the skill screen.

As usual, please report any bug you run into on mantis. If you want to comment on the change, there’s a thread at the tavern.
Happy crawling!

Galehar

• Fix missing portals to Zot on D:27 with restart_after_game after Sprint.
• Fix most large special maps not being generated.
• Fix mad amounts of divine gifts in certain cases.
• Don’t duplicate monsters when exiting the Abyss.
• Fix a lock-up on selecting a random character.
• A number of crash fixes.
• Some documentation amendments.
• Don’t stop butchering on unimportant messages.
• Add a command “show runes” (‘}’) that was documented but not implemented.

Head over to the Downloads and enjoy! As all point releases, 0.9.1 is save-compatible with 0.9.0.

Note: Omg! All releases (Linux, Windows, OSX) uploaded in time! CAO/CDO/WebTiles are being upgraded while we speak!

Implementable voting

The Downloads page lists 0.9 builds of the Console and Tiles version now, and also we will be able to provide more regularly updated builds of the current Development Builds.

Thank you very much to GreatZebu, who volunteered to provide OSX builds for the foreseeable future!

The winning player is theglow with 4934 points, who won 15 games, including an 8 streak! Runner up is mikee with 4653 points, who won 11 out of 13 games, including an 10 streak (actually 11 games in a row, but two wizards in the list). The competition was close, mikee might have won if his level 16 Spriggan Enchanter would not have died to an orb guardian in Zot:5. The third player to get more than 4000 points is jeanjacques with 4333 points.

Another highlight: 78291 played the fastest game, both in real time (2:32 hours) and turn count (19460), winning a Deep Dwarf of Elyvilon. He only killed 64 creatures himself, thus proving the power of pacifism.

The most successful clans were: The Adorable Catlobes with 14201 points, followed by wucad mu-tang clan aint nuthin ta fuck wit with 9074 points and Zignacio with 8276 points.

The ubiquitous numbers (in parentheses for August 2010):

Days:                       16         (31)
Players:                  1337         (1091)
Players getting a rune:    264 = 20%   (229 = 21%)
Winning players:           116 = 8.7%  (109 = 10.0%)
All games:               37593         (58428)
Non-quit games:          27049         (44884)
Winning games:             232 = 0.9%   (321 = 0.7%)
Won race/class combos:     128         (101)

Most everyone agreed that the new rules encouraged diversification. This can be seen when comparing the most popular winning combinations (three or more wins):

2011:
 8xSpEn  7xMDFi  7xMiBe  6xDDNe  6xDEWz  6xKoBe  6xVpAE  5xCeWz  5xHOAr  5xHaVM
 5xKoSk  5xMfIE  5xOgCj  5xTrAs  4xDECj  3xDsVM  3xGhMo  3xHECj  3xHEWz  3xMfGl
 3xNaTm 3xSpDK

2010:
49xSpEn 23xDDNe 22xMfCr 18xGhFE 18xHaTm 17xSEAs  9xMfIE  7xHEWz  7xHaBe  6xHECr
 5xDDCK  4xDECj  4xDSNe  4xHEIE  4xMfTm  4xSpVM  3xDEWz  3xDSAs  3xDSBe  3xDSVM
 3xHEFE  3xKoCr  3xMDEn  3xSEIE  3xSpSt

Sorry for the delay – and happy crawling!

Update: The service shut itself down during the night but is up again now.

Gone are the days of pointlessly casting spells at walls, or pounding on a macro to evoke a crystal ball — usually with undesired results. The experience pool has been removed, and it is now not actually possible to “victory dance”. Instead, experience is spent as it is gained. The exact mechanics of this depend on two separate modes: in auto mode, experience is spent on skills recently used, while in manual mode, finer control is available via the skill screen (m).

As a final reminder, the August tournament has already started! You can visit the Tourney Website for more details, but succinctly: you can play with the console version either on CAO or CDO (“Trunk” on CDO, and “0.9″ on CAO, currently). Webtiles does not currently count towards the tournament, as it needs to be updated to run 0.9. This will be done Soon!

So, pull on your crawling shoes (and knee-cap covers), and get ready for a solid two weeks of frantic adventuring!

Eronarn has provided an excellent summary of major changes in 0.9, so here they are!

• Ashenzari changes. We’ve finally nailed down Ashenzari balance! Most importantly, his passive XP boost has been replaced with a passive skill boost. This boost is based on how bound you are and what types of equipment you have bound – for example, wield a cursed weapon to improve your weapon skills, or wear a cursed ring to improve your magic skills. Other changes are listed in the full changelog.
• Trog changes. The god of rage is also the god of antimagic, and his weapon gifts will now reflect this more prominently. He’ll also punish his followers for daring to even learn magic skills – and Trog forbid that they attempt to make use of them.
• Reduce Berserk speed bonus. Previously, being berserk let you take 2x as many actions. That speed boost has been reduced to 1.5x, bringing it in line with the Haste status effect.
• Implicit butchering. Characters are now assumed to bring a small knife into the dungeon with them. Cursed non-cutting weapons will still prevent them from butchering, but they no longer need to lose an inventory slot or risk throwing their butchery implements.
• Adjust HP rules. Starting characters are now beefier, getting +3 HP across the board. On the other hand, raising Fighting skill now gives less of a boost to HP.
• Rename Crusader to Skald. The Crusader starting book was hit hard by recent changes, and their flavor has always been problematic (as they have nothing to do with crusades or religion). Rather than scrap them completely, elliptic took this opportunity to give them a makeover. They are still focused on improving their fighting prowess with magic, but they have a different starting book and skill levels.
• New spells added. We have our first Hex/Fire spell in Inner Flame, which curses a target to explode upon death. Larger targets may make for better fireworks! Shroud of Golubria, which appears in the Skald and Warper books, provides a barrier that will completely protect against some melee attacks. Any attack has a chance to tear right through the barrier, which will end the spell, but stronger attacks are far more likely to do so.
• Major modifications to Tornado. The funnel cloud will take some time to spin up to its full size, and it cannot be cast multiple times in a row because of lingering turbulence. However, those caught in its winds will now be flung about wildly.
• Old spells removed. Teleport Self, Berserker Rage, Resist Poison are no longer player-castable spells.
• New monsters: The Lair is now home to basilisks, fearsome lizards that petrify with their gaze. They aren’t the only new beast to come out of the stonework, though. Thanks to Wensley, the deeper regions of the Lair may contain catoblepae. They are slow, but you’ll be slower than them soon if you can’t avoid their clouds of petrifying dust!
• New unique: Ignacio, a powerful Executioner who remembered to bring his axe.
• Many small balance changes. See the whole changelog for full details!
• Also of note is the experimental release of a new game mode, Zot Defence. Those of you who played it on CAO/CDO should note that it has received significant changes since its debut; however, it should still be regarded as a work in progress.

• Mini-Map is in!
• Permanent login via cookies!
• Browser sizes no longer matter!
• Browser versions don’t matter either anymore!
• Sprint and Tutorial available now, too!

The Mini-Map is shown and working now, alas it cannot be used yet to initiate a travel. During login you have the choice to stay logged in via cookies. Also, spectators no longer need to resize their browser when watching someone. The game always adjusts to the browser size of the player and spectator independently. Additionally, the websocket protocol was updated to support Firefox 4, 5 and 6.

And last but not least, the game-mode Sprint and the Tutorial are now playable via WebTiles, too!

I was told there are more features in the making – so stay tuned! Also, webtiles code has been merged into the official master branch.

Head over to its website and give it a try!

In other news, the tentative date for 0.9 release has been changed to the first week of August.

Also, Debian trunk builds have been automated, so you might see them updated regularly. This is not the case for Mac builds though, sorry for that.

• official builds of 0.8.0 didn’t work on Windows 2000
• a number of crasher bugs
• stair colouring on the “X” map was sometimes wrong
• spores produced by Jiyva’s wrath could be converted by Fedhas
• running could fail to notice items being found
• Ashenzari worshippers could change armour under cursed cloaks
• certain values of LC_CTYPE could cause display corruption
• felids resting could take lots of CPU
• power failures or system crashes were likely to cause save corruption on MacOS X
• Kikubaaqudgha’s torment invocation didn’t grant you xp

Head over to the Downloads and enjoy!
As all point releases, 0.8.1 is save-compatible with 0.8.0.

Note: Please bear with us while the builds are being uploaded (MacOS X is late).

USAGE AND WEBTILES:

Server usage jumped up (about 400 players/day), not least because tiles players were able to join in the fun – a feature that’s been long asked for: Webtiles, Usage

PLAYER HIGHLIGHTS:

Winner was mikee (4191 points), narrowly edging out elliptic (4107 points) by managing the last win in the tourney (which gives bonus points).

mikee started with a two streak (including the first 15-rune win of the tourney), followed by two duds and then a seven streak! (KeAr^A, TrCr^E, MiAr^O, SEIE^K, HuVM^V, HOHu^T, HECj^S)

theglow played just five games and won them all! (SEWz^V, HuSt^S, GhGl^M, CeTm^O, DEIE^A)

casmith789 had the most combo high scores (22).

Players could go for some additional goals (Pennants). Only two got them all: 78291 and mikee.

CLAN HIGHLIGHTS:

Winner was Zinja, who was also the only clan to win at least one game with each species.

Second place was narrowly won by catonkeyboard (the team with the most combo high scores) over killdudes (aptly enough, the team with the most uniques killed… only Tiamat escaped them).

INTERESTING STATISTICS:
(brackets are about last August’s tournament, which took a full month)

number of players: .......................... 1523 (1091)
number of players with at least one win: ..... 108 (109)
number of wins: .............................. 233 (321)
average number of wins per day: ............. 14.5 (10.3)
distinct winning combinations: ............... 149 (101)*
overall winrate, quits excluded: ........... 0.79% (0.72%)
* Rules have been changed to make niche combinations more attractive.


Thanks to everyone who helped with the infrastructure and cheers to participants!

We call it WebTiles for now and it serves version 0.8 of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. Right in time for the unofficial tournament!

Edlothiol announced his great idea with working code on the mailing-list a few weeks back, and even though it’s still beta-quality in the aspects of features (mini-map missing, inventory-tab, etc), it’s fully playable and there have even been the first 4 wins by players testing it!

There is a slight draw-back: It needs a fairly modern browser which supports a technology called WebSockets:

• Chrome 6 or higher
• Safari 5 or higher
• Opera 11 or higher (enable WebSockets in opera:config#Enable WebSockets)
• Firefox 4 or higher (disable network.websocket.override-security-block in about:config)

WebTiles are actively being developed! If you’d like to participate, head over to edlothiol’s git-repository and have a look. If you’d like to play, head over to the WebTiles now and either use your login from CDO or create a new login.

Additionally, Wensley practiced his awesome AJAX skills and practically over night created an Online Player Status website. It gives a detailed list about who is playing online – in both, the Console/DGL version and the WebTiles version, on CAO and CDO.

Both, WebTiles and the Online Player Status page, are now linked from the front-page of our website for your convenience.

I’d also like to pay thankful credit to the Tornado Web Server, the open-source python library used to create and manage the websocket for WebTiles, and especially Ben Darnell, who helped edlothiol and me very quickly when we ran into trouble.

Note: CAO games are still missing from the status page, but should show up sometime during the weekend.

From May 14th (midnight UTC) through May 30 (midnight UTC), 2011, any version 0.8 game played on CDO or CAO will count towards the tournament.

As with the official tournament, one can join a team, gain banners (or pennants) for various accomplishments, and, most importantly, accrue points for various activities.

All of the details for the tournament can be found here (http://crawl.develz.org/tournament).

Good luck, and good crawling!

He’s planning to keep this list updated regularly. Make sure you let him know what you think and give feedback.

Head over to his site and feel free to giggle:

• https://sites.google.com/site/cherrypickedbadideas/

For the record: Good ideas are also very welcome in our Wiki! :-)

Add one of the lines from below to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

Stable release:        deb http://crawl.develz.org/debian crawl 0.8
Development version:   deb http://crawl.develz.org/debian crawl trunk

Additionally you should download and install our signing key to prevent warnings and to verify the packages:

wget http://crawl.develz.org/debian/pubkey -O - | apt-key add -

The available packages to apt-get are named: crawl, crawl-tiles

We’re working on getting the packages of the development version updated as regularly as the Windows binaries that we’ve been offering for a while already.

What’s changed? Here’s an excerpt of some major changes:

• New god: Ashenzari: the god of curses and divination, who gifts a number of passive and active abilities in return for wearing cursed equipment, gaining knowledge, and exploring the dungeon extensively. The most significant of these passive abilities includes magic mapping, see invisible, clarity, and the active abilities of scrying, which allows the player to see through walls (though not to perform smite-based attacks), and transfer knowledge, which allows the player to improve one skill by sacrificing experience invested in another skill.
• New race: Felids. These sentient furry felines are incapable of using rods, armour, wands or weapons, nor are they able to throw things, but are granted extra lives as they gain levels. These extra lives allow the player to escape death! As one might expect, felids are fast and come with claws and fangs, making them excellent at unarmed combat, and have excellent eyesight — the ability to see invisible creatures.
• The Enchantments school has been split into Charms and Hexes. While a significant and drastic change, it has certainly been long in the making: the Enchantments school contained a large percentage of the game’s spells, and was certainly a no-brainer in terms of experience usage.
• Character backgrounds have been improved: the Stalker background now focusses on transmutation for the purposes of stabbing. Makhleb and The Shining One are no longer accessible as starting gods as Paladins have been removed, and Chaos Knights are now worshippers of Xom, while the new class of Abyssal Knights provides access to Lugonu.
• Heavy armour has been improved. Guaranteed damage reduction has returned! The formula has been tweaked since the great armour nerf in version 0.6, making it more efficient again.

As always, you can check out the full changelog in our stone_soup-0.8 branch on Gitorious, or find it in whichever package you decide to download!

In server news: CAO is now running up-to-date development builds of upcoming 0.9 alongside the latest stable releases, as well as a number of experimental branches (currently consisting of Lava Orcs and Octopodes, based on a branch by Eronarn). CDO is back to development builds as well.

As always, you can find all of our releases on SourceForge. Alternately, you can check out the our Downloads page.

We just started hosting a Ubuntu/Debian repositories of our own! Simply add the following to your /etc/apt/sources.list file:

deb http://crawl.develz.org/debian crawl 0.8

To get the public key, please do: (on Ubuntu, you need to insert “sudo” before apt-key)

wget http://crawl.develz.org/debian/pubkey -O - | apt-key add -

Further information can be found on the Downloads page soon!

Happy crawling!

Unfortunately, we are still awaiting builds for Mac OS X! These will be added to this post as soon as they’re available!

Edit: Binaries for Mac OS X have arrived and are now linked on the Downloads page!

CAO, located in North America, now also allows to play the unstable development version of Stone Soup – with all the additional features like save-game backups for reporting, removing save-games, resetting config-files. With CDO being located in Europe, this should make playing the development version much smoother for Crawlers living in the Americas. While Greensnark was at it, he also installed a new branch called EroCrawl, maintained by Eronarn, presenting two new races called Lava Orcs & Octopodes and square LOS, which he would like to have included in the main branch of Stone Soup one day.

A week ago the server hosting CDO & its services has moved to a new Server Hosting Company (within Germany again). The website and all services were down for 3 days while I moved everything. It’s a much stronger & bigger machine now and should withstand future incidents much easier. Additionally crawl.develz.org is now fully reachable via IPv6.

Due to the upcoming release CDO and the Windows builds will now focus on providing the pre-release version of Stone Soup 0.8 for a while by updating daily. Please, help us iron out as many bugs as possible!

Thank you very much, Greensnark, for all the work you did to upgrade CAO!

The recent changes include the incorporation of the unicode branch, which fixes a number of issues with non-ASCII path names etc., bringing Ashenzari up to speed, and the aforementioned gazillions of bug fixes. In a concerted effort of several developers, we’ve managed to close 100+ bug reports on our bug tracker over the last couple of weeks, which is quite a feat, let me tell you. Of course, we wouldn’t have been able to do that if they hadn’t been reported in the first place. So, here’s a large thank you to our diligent reporters! :)

What follows is the list of changes in the 0.8 pre-release branch currently available on CDO (a206725), meaning they’ll be included in the stable release.

Player

Bug fixes

• Fix #3676: crashes when butcher delay tries to switch back to empty hands.
• Fix #3748: crash when viewing aptitude with CK or Wa selected.
• Fix a crash when an aptitude was improved between saves.
• Fix #3156, #3709: cloud safety checks getting randomized AC reductions.
• Fix #3598: if necessary, update perma-mutation if you gain a mutation.
• Fix #2395: Disallow ending forms/levitation if it would cause drowning.
• Fix antitraining when opposite skill is nil.
• Stop quick actions from letting you search faster.
• Don’t avoid glow by cancelling semicontrolled blinks with enter instead of escape.
• Fix trying to climb when overloaded taking a turn.
• Fix #3801: Don’t consume a turn when trying to go downstairs while levitating.
• Fix #3660: canceling DD recharging ability still costing max MP.
• Fix #3781: wall clinging not triggering traps.
• No stealth bonus from boots if you’re flying or in water.
• Fix clinging status not updated properly when switching out of spider form.
• Fix #3444: off-by-one error in autopickup_no_burden checks.
• Fix #3334: boot of levitation message when melding and not levitating.
• Message fix for levitation while clinging.

Other changes for player characters

• Disable Arcane Marksmen.
• All sources of berserk are blocked at “Very Hungry”. Berserk automatically stops when you hit “Starving”.
• Remove experience pool limit; abbreviate the XP pool above 100K.
• Replace scroll reading penalty while brainless with 80% failure chance.
• A wielded ranged weapon will only “clumsily bash” monsters, no matter its enchantment.
• Prompt the player before moving to a deadly cell with an expiring status.
• Remove the satiation requirements from evokable invis.
• Disable ghost creation/loading in wizard non-debug mode.
• Better warning messages for form and levitation expiration.
• Special Airstrike message if struck while flying.
• Don’t auto-attack toadstools when wielding the Wrath of Trog.
• Reduce the spam when butchering with artefacts.
• Consistently abort teleportation attempts when wearing stasis or -TELE.
• Nerf Felid aptitudes: Fighting/UC: 0 -> -2, Ice/Earth: -1 -> -2, improve Cj: -2 -> -1.
• Decrease Felid’s factor for getting hp from Fighting from 1/5 -> 1/8.
• Reduce Felid exp modifier from 15 to 16.
• Don’t let Felids (auto)quiver anything, hide the Qv line.
• Obey no_tele_into when bringing you a new fresh kitty.
• Give Ogres an extra +1 hp per level, and +3 apts in Fighting and M&F.
• Let Kenku use beak+talons for butchering, like birds they are.
• Mention dietary and drinkary habits of mummies on the ‘A’ screen.
• Meld all weapons unless you’re in a form that allows wielding.
• Don’t consider melding a distortion weapon to be unwielding.
• Don’t check inscriptions on melding stuff — you’re not removing them.
• Don’t show “it sticks to your hand” on cursed unmeld.
• Prevent ice form from picking items at the bottom of deep water.
• Disallow wearing hats in spider or ice form.
• Allow wearing shields in statue form.
• Don’t give Green Dracs poison spit in spider form.
• Don’t cling to the wall when levitating.
• Clear clinging status when taking stairs.
• Don’t drown when transforming into a flying form while clinging.
• Allow spider form to scramble out of deep water by clinging to a wall. (#2967)
• Allow extending spider form while clinging over dangerous terrain
• Set clinging status colour according to the current feature.
• Allow wall clinging on closed doors (#3778).
• Don’t give Halfling hunters a buckler for free.
• Save weapon selection for quarterstaves with new games.
• Let player elves have elven gear.

Gods

Ashenzari

• Fix #3344: Don’t crash if you.transfer_to_skill somehow is SK_NONE.
• Fix #3735: some dropped and useless items being autopickuped.
• Don’t crash on old saves in Ashenzari penance.
• New Ashenzari passive ability: identify monster equipment with chance boundedness/3.
• Ashenzari also warns about monsters’ wands.
• Nerf Ashenzari transfer knowledge: double XP penalty (20%), greatly increase piety cost 10 -> 25.
• Lower piety gain.
• Forbid reskilling from or into Fighting.
• Make scrying fail proof and instantaneous.
• Ashenzari: scale passive mapping density with piety.
• Ashenzari on-sight item identification.
• Reskilling: keep the same letters between the from and to menu.
• Wrath: Reduces xp gain by 50%.
• Allow Ashenzarites to cancel scrolls of remove curse.
• Allow Ashenzarites to choose which piece of armour/jewellery to curse.

The good gods: Elyvilon, The Shining One, Zin

• Shorten and tweak Elyvilon’s ^! description to fit in an 80×24 screen.
• Don’t consume food/mp/piety when trying to pacify invalid targets.
• Make TSO non-holy summon extension at most double the current duration.
• Zin forbids shapeshifting spells and protects against Kirke’s pig spell.
• Fix recite working through walls and squarelosish.
• Make recite train more often.
• Add a message when you switch from a good god to another good god.

Other gods

• No stat boosts during Cheibriados penance.
• Fedhas: Don’t blame the player for trees felled by monster-cast tornado.
• Reduce the number of corpses from Kiku’s invocation.
• Makhleb: Fix Lesser Servant summoning chaos spawn instead of hellwings.
• Increase piety cost of Makhleb’s greater servant, since 1s were improved.
• Fix Okawaru not accepting kills of holy beings.
• Repair Xom’s potion of experience.
• When Xom lifesaves you, clear stat_zero penalty.
• Let His Xomminess grant you extra xp at level 27 (xp pool).
• Don’t let Yred gift Eidolons anymore.

General

• No instant divine retribution — many gods are abusable.
• Don’t give experience or items for killing monsters from god wrath
• Reduce the amount of unrands among god gifts.

Monsters

Bug fixes

• Don’t crash on banishing dancing weapons; don’t abyss any kinds of summons.
• Fix a crash when the player thinks the monster has a wand but it doesn’t.
• Fix #2404: Disallow polymorphing monsters taking the stairs.
• Fix #2927: crash when looking up ghosts in the db search.
• Fix non-ghost spells not getting loaded.
• Fix silence working on demons, orbs of fire, etc.
• Fix #3750: coming into view messages ignoring mislead.
• Fix shouting monsters not being announced.
• Fix resurrected shedu being placed in bad places.
• Fix #3718: grey draconians not floundering in deep water.
• Don’t give a chance to hit rock worms in walls except in Zotdef.
• Fix #3689: dual wielding monsters’ descriptions.

Mimics

• Remove trap mimics.
• Disable portal mimic generation for 0.8.
• Prevent stair mimics from posing as branch stairs.
• Don’t place downstairs mimic on branch bottom, and vice versa.
• Make door mimics replace actual doors.
• Make item mimics appear earlier, reduce both types’ rarity.
• Don’t include unknown mimics in beam targetting.
• Include item type in item mimics’ names.

Uniques

• Disable Terpsichore, she’s not ready for 0.8.
• Give Asmodeus a permanent ring of flames, replace greater demon with fire summon, remove bolt of draining.
• Dispater: give LCS instead of lightning bolt, remove common demon summon.
• Mnoleg: + AF_BLINK/AF_MUTATE attacks, -greater demon, -invis, +summon eyeballs, more hp.
• Lom Lobon: give AF_ANTIMAGIC attacks.
• Make Antaeus amphibious again.
• Make the royal jelly stay on Slime:6.
• Give Grinder AF_PAIN attacks instead of a weapon.
• Give Pikel a whip of elec instead of pain.
• Remove rF+ and rC+ from Nergalle.
• Allow Ijyb to get high-tier wands in normal game.
• Give Jory Mesmerise (new spell) instead of Cause Fear.
• Adjust Roxanne’s casting messages, since she can’t move.

Other monster-related changes

• Don’t give experience or items for killing monsters from god wrath or miscasts.
• Revert monsters avoiding walking into clouds — the new behaviour was abusable.
• Don’t cancel monster travels when player goes out of LoS.
• Don’t make a monster at the edge of LOS leave a trail.
• No elephants in D and Vaults, slightly reduce their frequency in Lair.
• Announce all monsters “coming into view” at once.
• Give the non-spellcasting random pan lords (10% chance) a guaranteed melee brand, and a chance of greater speed.
• Restore monster speeds for Orb Guardian, Royal Jelly, Fiends, Storm/Golden dragon, Grater Mummy.
• Tweak holy monster speeds: phoenix/blessed toe: 10, pearl dragon/shedu: 12.
• Improve Cacodemons: -Dig, -Call Imp, +Energy Bolt, +Slow, +Confuse, + 3 levels rPois/Elec, extra attack, more health.
• Green Death, Blue Death: remove call imp.
• Give Eidola spells: Cause Fear and Pain.
• Give giant orange brains Cause Fear instead of Polymorph Other.
• Hunger attack takes 25% of your nutrition.
• Give clinging to geckos, giant mites, cockroaches and demonic crawlers.
• Allow fake rakshasa to use weapons and armour like real ones; don’t hide equipment of Mara and rakshasa.
• Rework monster rElec levels.
• Set the xp for vanilla orcs to 3.
• Remove bears, replace with grizzly or black bears where appropriate.
• Boost monster ghouls’ health and damage.
• Reduce electric eel accuracy slightly.
• Make Fiends and Pit Fiends use regular spells rather than abilities.
• Give vampires blood.
• Give Ophan high intelligence.
• Convert shedu’s main attack to kick instead of claw.
• Allow raising trapdoor spider zombies.
• Always remove the mold when fungal colony is destroyed.
• Add a message for monsters casting Trog’s Hand.

Spells

Bug fixes

• Fix #3650: Don’t spend turn/MP when aborting the berserk spell.
• Fix placing Fire Storm on a wall.
• Don’t allow cancelling out of chain lightning with ally prompts.
• Guarantee IOOD placement on tiny levels.
• Correct the colour of LRDed glass.
• Don’t display a success message when aborting sublimation of blood at full mp.

Books

• Remove Summon Hydra from the Book of Summonings.
• New spellbook, book of zoology: summon butterflies, sticks to snakes, call canine familiar, ice form, summon ice beast, summon hydra.
• Move Silence from the book of Maledictions to War Chants (replaces Haste).
• Add IOOD to the book of Power.

Other spell-related changes

• Tornado changes for 0.8: pure Air, 80% damage, negative spell enhancer.
• Disable Tukima’s Ball as a player spell.
• Remove the Stonemail spell.
• Allow Sticks to Snakes on javelins, disallow on steel/silver stuff.
• Death channel spectral monsters are not abjurable.
• Invisibility becomes pure Hex.
• Silence becomes Charms/Air.
• Brand spells go back to being Charms.
• Simplify low spell success adjectives: Merge Cruddy and Bad into Very Poor (now 5-30%).
• Make poison clouds all lightgreen.
• Apportation targetting: allow cycling with +/-.
• Don’t destroy the rest when apporting part of a stack.
• Don’t destroy items apported if at the item limit.
• Don’t rot while under Death’s Door.
• Fix spells being unaffected by antimagic in some cases.

Items

Bug fixes

• Fix #2722: crash when accessing a buggy deck’s description.
• Fix 2535: “stasis identification check.
• Fix scroll of fear not being use-IDed properly.
• Fix placeholders in Xom’s book gift names.
• Remove nutrition from kills with vampiric weapons.
• Fix #3614: wizmode creating “cards” not working.
• Fix an out-of-bounds assertion with unknown rings of sustain ability.
• Fix #3441: inventory actions occasionally affecting the wrong item.
• Fix #3319: Don’t prevent butcher swap with temporary distortion brand.
• Fix #3217: equipping sInv artefact not reactivating autopickup.
• Fix #3682: Identify brand of vampiric and holy artefact weapons when wielding fail.
• Fix throwing nets becoming “stuck” after a monster pushed past another monster trapped in a net.
• Prohibit flame-branded missiles from entering trees and wax.
• Filter scrolls of (old) paper out of the item knowledge screen.

Cards

• New card for decks of Wonder: the Alchemist, transmuting some of your gold into health and magic.
• Don’t let high-power common/rare Experience card be better than legendary.
• Fill the Potion card effect list with potions that are useful in battle.
• Make the Torment and Experience cards a little rarer.
• Improve the Hammer card at low power.
• Reduce the maximum duration of Pentagram, Dance, Foxfire and Bones cards.
• Tweak the weapons created by the Dance card at low power.

Other item-related changes

• Remove crystal balls of fixation.
• Nerf the speed brand. Damage reduced to 90%.
• Reintroduce item stat loss prompts.
• Prompt before wearing or wielding a known-cursed item.
• Remove misleading messages about weapon str/dex weighting.
• Warn when equipping armour with a penalty caused by low strength.
• Don’t let the vorpalise weapon effect destroy potions or scrolls.
• Correctly mark amulets of controlled flight useless for Kenku above xl5.
• Identify rings of sustain ability if they block stat loss completely.
• Don’t allow using crystal balls if they are guaranteed to fail.
• Don’t corrode ammo by clumsily bashing jellies with it.
• Don’t let antimagic work on priests.
• Don’t acquire manuals or sage to utterly useless skills.
• Make acquiring rods of striking less likely.
• Obsidian axe bug fixes. Add +Lev to get across obstacles.
• Improve rods of striking: 1d5 -> 1d8.
• Make default books ‘:’ again, use different glyphs for detected items on Windows.

The Dungeon

Bug fixes

• Fix #218: Place upwards and downwards escape hatches in all isolated Orc bubbles.
• Fix returning from portals to Pan clobbering the level.
• Don’t place steam near fire out of bounds.
• Fix door restrictions being ignored when calculating travel paths.
• Make troves handle manuals correctly.
• Fix the portal short timeout messages for unnannounced portals.
• Fix wizmode-blinking (xm, &b) asserting in the Abyss.

Other level-related changes

• No banishment from hell effects.
• Don’t enable cTele by quaffing Elf fountains.
• Shrink the hall of blades, guarantee a single rare weapon with a brand.
• No potion troves for mummies.
• Increase the chance of bleeding on walls.
• Give troves more loot items again.
• Add a note when entering a Pan Lord level.
• Let Zot vaults spawn more often.
• Don’t block off branches with grates.
• A wizmode command (& ^R) to recreate the current level.
• ZotDef: no Abyss with Lugonu.
• Malign Gateway as a hell effect.
• If the Abyss has been wizmode-mapped, update the map on Abyss shifts.
• Various glyph changes for features.
• Give a message when a Golubria portal on the level closes.
• Disable _many_pools in Crypt.
• No more darkgrey walls/floors in Geh:7 or Gloorx.
• Let Abyss and Pan entrances overwrite vaults to make them truly guaranteed.
• Add two new Spider portal vault maps by 7hm.
• An awesome Crypt end by evilmike.
• Replace Wiglaf with Norris in Sprint 1.

Interface

Bug fixes

• Fix a crash when reloading a game after restart_after_game.
• Fix #3535: Buggy movement keys for Windows consoles.
• Fix #3609: autoexplore stopping with no monster in sight.
• Fix multidrop with monsters in sight.
• Fix #3709: travel failing to start if standing right next to a cloud.
• Fix items not being announced when revealed by opening a door.
• Fix #2930: stash search results not being coloured correctly when matching item heaps.
• Fix #1184: Limit tagged block display’s lines to screen size.
• Fix #3700: sprint map menu offering you to replay tutorial.

Options

• Change the explore_stop option to use greedy_pickup_smart by default.
• New travel_key_stop option for whether keypresses should interrupt travel/resting.
• Default easy_exit_menu to false.
• Make all keyhelp menus respect the easy_exit_menu option.
• Mantis #1282: Make autopickup_no_burden default to true.

Other interface changes

• Stop autoexplore when sensing a previously undetected monster nearby.
• New background choice layout, grouped by category.
• Autofight: fire at nearest enemy if wielding a ranged weapon.
• Don’t ranged autofight through walls/glass/scryed walls.
• Don’t start the game if terminal is smaller than 80×24.
• Don’t print wielding effect when switching back from butchering.
• Display “-) Unavailable” if you cannot wield/quiver anything.
• Better error messages for (M)emorisation. (#3665)
• Mantis #1839: Treat clearing annotation prompt as “safe”.
• Mantis #3727: When placing a single exclusion on part of a gate, exclude all of it.
• Mantis #3112: Mention any skeleton vampiric feeding leaves behind.

Tiles

Bug fixes

• Fix #3730: inventory crash at some resolutions.
• Fix #3772: Don’t crash when pressing odd key combinations.
• Fix #3643: kraken simulacra causing crashes in Tiles.
• Fix #3764: crash when drawing disconnected tentacle segment tiles.
• Fix #3596: Don’t fire at friendly monsters when clicking on them.
• Fix #3596: “Unknown command” when mouseclick-travelling.
• Fix #3703: pickup by mouseclick on player icon not taking a turn.
• Fix #3810: mouseclick movement working during the stat prompt.
• Fix manuals being mouseclick-readable while “brainless”.
• Fix mouseclick travel internally using the vi keys.
• Fix #3255: real staff tiles displayed in the undiscovered items list.
• Fix #3356: clearing the map having no effect in Tiles.
• Fix #3516: LRD exploding in odd tiles in the Elven Halls.
• Partially fix #3358: re-init tile flavour on Abyss shifts.
• Make wyvern zombies use the dragon zombie tile.
• Upgrade weapon tile when fixing a temp. brand with ?vorpalise weapon.
• Fix #3639: Slight tweaks to the player naga tiles.

New/improved tiles

• Curio: Ilsuiw, necromancer, wingless Grinder.
• Denzi: silver star, pillar of salt, Ashenzari altar, fire bat, Darkness spell, Leda’s Liquefaction spell tile, chardump command tile, arena icon, wingless shadow imp, pressure plate trap.
• dolphin: jumping spider, shark.
• Omndra: wall blood spatter.
• Porkchop: phoenix.
• purge: eye of devastation.
• XuaXua: glowing mold, death ooze.
• Add a tile for liquefied floor.
• Use !heal wounds icon (rather than !healing) for the wand of healing.
• Apply Tornado’s colour scheme to Tiles, as well.
• Remove omndra’s cauldron title screen, not fitting with the rest of them.

Also various documentation updates and description fixes that I won’t bother listing in detail.

As always, bug reports are highly welcome. After all, the stable version 0.8 is at stake. Thanks in advance!

You see, one of the first things I did when I started coding for Stonesoup was to create an in-game tutorial with situational triggers. Last year’s UP team created a new tutorial from scratch, so the old one was renamed to Hints mode. The idea was to use a fixed map with fixed puzzles and explanations. We had been planning to do something like that anyway, so we were glad when someone took up the task.

Sometime around new year, I had another look at the new tutorial and found a couple of things that made me unhappy. It was much better at its task (a gentle introduction to the game) than the old one had been, but there was still much room for improvement.

As a result and with the students’ project on the horizon, I recreated the tutorial yet again, drawing on both the UP team’s work with some of the puzzles, map definitions and underlying code, and the Hints mode with its situational triggers. The new tutorial divides the explanations into separate “lessons”, each taking about 5-8 minutes, and should be more interesting and helpful than either of the previous versions. So, if you’re new to Crawl or are still unclear about some of the basics of combat, spellcasting or gods, check out the Tutorial! :)

I’d been meaning to talk about the tile panels, too, but I’d probably need some good resolution screenshots for that. So… on with the big changes: The Shining One and Makhleb have been removed – from the list of starting gods. The Alter Self and Extension spells are no more, but there are a couple of new additions. The Elven Halls have been shortened to 5 levels. Oh, and the Enchantment skill and spell school has been split into two smaller ones called Hexes, described as spells that “affect things and monsters (usually negatively)”, and Charms (defined as “things that positively affect yourself”). The latter change brought a version change with it, so the current version is no longer compatible with saves from early January.

And now for our customary megalist of changes:

Spells

• Split Enchantments skill and spell school into Charms and Hexes.
• Remove Alter Self and Extension.
• Make Symbol of Torment and Banishment monster-only spells (plus Kiku/Lugonu).
• Implement a crude spell quiver. Store last spell cast.
• New spell: Summon Dragon (Summ 9), also eligible to pan lords.
• New spell: Summon Hydra (Summ 7), summons short-lived 4-12 headed hydra (depending on power).
• New spell: Tukima’s Ball (Hex 9), animates weapons in view.
• New spell: Darkness (Hex 7), decreases LOS radius by 2.
• Fix #3105: Lee’s Rapid Deconstruction not obeying some checks when destroying walls.
• Fix #2695: casting cloud spells on (and through) walls.
• Fix #2069: casting cloud spells out of range.
• Fix #3413: Don’t let Conjure Flame be used for free reveal of mimics.
• Fix Tukima’s Dance ignoring spell power.
• Fix #3458: silenced spells making noise in crypt.
• Fix #2481, #3460: Don’t let Mummies/Lichform cast Sublimation on themselves, do let them cast Passwall.
• Fix #3067: Don’t waste a turn/MP when failing to cast Sublimation of Blood.
• Cancel Leda’s Liquefaction if player isn’t standing on solid ground.
• Make Tornado Air -> Conj/Air.
• Don’t make Tornado drop as sharply in non-open areas.
• Tornado+Leda -> no flying.
• Make Tornado noisy.
• Make Silence Hex/Air.
• Make Summon Butterflies require spell power for effectiveness.
• Heavily nerf orb apportation. Chance and distance depends on spell power and total distance.
• Make Death Channel spectrals temporary, let ally kills work too. Reduce to level 7.
• Make semi-controlled blink random if it fails to find a location.
• Don’t cancel Condensation Shield when blinking/teleporting.
• Don’t hurt rC- players with condensation shield.
• Don’t allow immediate recasting of Death’s Door.
• Evaporate no longer uses Throwing skill.
• Summon Swarm monsters are always friendly; lower it to level 5.
• When using the Swarm spells, disallow summoning monsters that would anger your god.
• While Ring of Flame is active, flame clouds are removed when you step on them.
• Make LOS-affecting spells work through transparent walls.
• Boost LRD damage.
• Mention glow in Haste/Invis spell descriptions.
• Sticks to Snakes is now a pure transmutation spell.
• Revert the move of branding spells to Charms; they’re Hexes again.
• Sandblast, Shatter, Lee’s and Maxwell’s are no longer Transmutations.
• Leda’s Liquefaction gains Transmutations; lowered 6 -> 4.
• Reduce Passage of Golubria 5 -> 4.
• Reduce Slow 3 -> 2.
• Consolidate the books of Minor Magic into a single book, containing: Magic Dart, Blink, Call Imp, Repel Missiles, Slow, Conjure Flame, Mephitic Cloud.
• book of Changes: -Dig
• book of Conjurations [ice]: -Freezing Cloud, +Lightning Bolt
• book of Fire: -Evaporate, -Summon Elemental, +Fireball, +Dragon Form
• book of Geomancy: -Summon Elemental, +Petrify
• book of Hinderance: +Leda’s Liquefaction
• book of Morphology: -Shatter, -LRD, +Sticks to Snakes, +Petrify, +Ignite Poison
• book of the Sky: -Summon Elemental
• book of Summonings: +Summon Elemental
• book of Transfigurations: -Sandblast, -Polymorph Other, +Stoneskin, +Condensation Shield, +Ice Form
• book of Wizardry: +Agony, +Lightning Bolt
• Greatly simplify randart book generation.

The Player

• Prevent chain paralysis: When coming out of a paralysis, you’re immune for 1d3 turns.
• Assign xp from monster kills proportional to the damage dealt by player/allies out of total damage.
• Remove Paladins and Reavers.
• Remove Chaos Knight of Makhleb.
• Fix crash when a corpse is raised from under a Vampire drinking from it.
• Fix #3311: crash when subliming your last blood potion.
• Fix #2958: crash with Naga poison breath.
• Fix #2329: Don’t count melded slots when calculating stat modifiers.
• Fix Dowsing not updating until the next turn.
• Fix antennae/Ashenzari overriding Dowsing (which gives more data).
• Fix #3245: Defer call to level_change() to prevent SIGHUP abuse.
• Fix #3234: Make gain stat work for satiated Vampires.
• Split out CK/Lugonu -> Abyssal Knight, Pr/Yredelemnul -> Death Knight.
• Overhaul combo recommendations (elliptic).
• Allow starting with a falchion for Fi and Gl, also restrict trident to these backgrounds.
• Add quarterstaff as an option for monks.
• Differentiate Ha/Ko aptitudes: Kobolds are good at Summ/Necro/Hex, Halflings at Charm/Tloc.
• KoHu and KoAM get a crossbow instead of sling + buckler.
• Halflings gain innate mutation resistance 1.
• Give DD a couple more charges in their starting wand but no potions.
• Give DK enough MP and piety to use Animate Remains on D:1, reduce their weapon to +1,+1.
• Give Pr a little more HP and MP (as their healing potion was removed).
• Give He one extra dodging and a +1 robe.
• Give Stalkers a bit more Tmut skill. Don’t pre-ID potions of poison.
• Artificers always start with scroll of recharging identified.
• Lower Felid Conjurations aptitude -1 to -2.
• Bump grey draconians back up to +1 fighting apt.
• Boost Mummy base MR 3 -> 5.
• Nerf Gladiator’s shield to a buckler.
• Give small Gladiators darts instead of stones.
• Make LOS reducers multiplicative rather than additive.
• Potions/cards of experience give you a full level; similarly drain costs a full level.
• Reduce xp loss from draining, (over)compensating for the recent increase.
• Don’t allow any headgear with Horns 3 or Antennae 3.
• Remove map-forgetting and spell-forgetting Divination miscast effects.
• Don’t prevent blink from putting you in dangerous clouds.
• Add a note when paralysed by a monster.
• Add paralysis status to the death message.
• Allow kenku to land/lift off while in lich form.
• Allow to Tomb over unknown traps.
• Show stat zero disability on the HUD and in a few other places.
• Modify the “Nothing wielded” message for forms and clawed chars.
• Include the killing cloud’s source in obituaries.
• Remove Demonspawn breath mutations.
• DS rN+++ and Fire tier 3 facets show up a little earlier, as does Mapping.
• Adapt exclusion radius to the Nightstalker mutation.
• Wider choice of demonic guardians.
• New DS mutation Powered by Pain: restores MP when sufficient damage is taken.
• Double the dex bonus from thin skeletal structure.
• Give freezing cloud immunity to Icemail instead of Passive Freeze.

The Dungeon

• Shorten Elven Halls from 7 -> 5 floors.
• Fix #3258: travel infinite-oscillating when Ashenzari/antennae detect+wipe mimic memory.
• Fix #3182: Don’t attempt to set autoexclusions in unmappable areas.
• Fix inverted logic in in_damaging_cloud.
• Fix rain considered one of the harmless clouds.
• Fix Felids getting unusable items in troves.
• In Lair level generation, don’t ruin the map boundary.
• Don’t place unneeded downstairs on branch ends.
• Fix #3320: make trove manual requests function properly.
• Fix #3257: trees being immune to fire and lightning.
• Fix #3324: travel/explore stopping when opening doors.
• Fix #3014: mispluralisation of staircases/gateways.
• Fix #3335: state that troves only accept identified items.
• Trove price changes.
• Every random Pan vault now has a 1/9 chance of having a demonic rune in it.
• Reduce ambient noise in Hive from 20->5; Orc, Lair 5->4.
• Implement #1960: Allow traveling across radius 1 excluded stairs.
• Implement #1962: Don’t generate cloud autoexclusions when immune.
• Implement #2374: Don’t prompt for cloud-excluded staircases.
• Don’t display cloud exclusions on the Ctrl-O screen.
• Disallow setting exclusions while targeting. xe still works.
• Describe level 1 upstairs as “staircase leading out of the dungeon.”
• Don’t mark level 1 upstairs and branch exits as unvisited.
• Great new vaults by, among others, evilmike (Abyss), minmay (Vaults) and st (Orc).
• Change temple_entry_steam to mist, which doesn’t block autotravel.
• Change the oklob temple entry to a sapling.
• Remove potions of slowing from Cheibriados altar vault.
• Reduce serial vault chances.
• Reduce Lair:8 loot.
• Nerf some loot-heavy minivaults.
• Add no_rtele_into to a number of altar vaults and Ziggurat entries.
• Don’t let early angels teleport out of altar vaults and early Zig portals.
• Allow vaults to specify shops: name, type name, items, greed, count.
• Allow specifying multiple spellbooks in monster specs, one of which is randomly chosen.
• Fix corpse placement not working well on levels with high wall density.
• Tweak randbook mapdef tags: predefined title, player name as owner.
• Allow predefining several spells for randart books in mapdefs.
• New mapdef item tag “mundane” => ego-less +0, +0 item.
• New mapdef item tag “charges” for defining wand charges.
• Allow Gretell to access vault-defined monster descriptions.

Monsters

• Get rid of mummy death curses turning potions into decay.
• Fix #3280: ghosts and Mara illusions not getting spells.
• Fix #3239: ‘x’ hiding monster shields.
• Fix #3102: Don’t spawn monster bands on stairs.
• Fix #3298: Enable door mimic generation.
• Fix #3436: los not updating when a door mimic is killed.
• Fix #3424: assertion when targeting beyond door mimic.
• Fix #3357: Make door mimics block LOS.
• Make detected mimics known.
• Fix #3222: Shedu don’t resurrect banished pairs.
• Fix #3223: Shedu wake when their partner is killed.
• Fix #424: Polymorphed uniques may only cast spells if they can speak.
• Fix monster halos not appearing immediately after save restore.
• Fix monsters not respecting no_rtele_into.
• Fix “2 ancient champions” showing as “2 skeletal warriors”.
• Fix #3218: “It turns to fight!” for invisible sky beasts.
• Better movement AI for ranged attackers, now try to regain line of fire.
• Make yaks, death yaks, ugly things and slime creatures stick together when wandering.
• Try to make wandering band members stick around the leader.
• Make wandering band members path back to the leader.
• Let band leaders displace their followers.
• Allow friendly monsters to path to you across the level.
• Friendlies start following you again after killing target instead of wandering.
• Smart monsters use pathfinding to go around shallow water.
• New unique: Terpsichore, casting Tukima’s Ball.
• Monsters floundering in shallow water move slowly and fumble attacks.
• Large monsters don’t flounder in shallow water.
• Giant monsters can walk through deep water as if it were shallow.
• Give Geryon a reaching attack, make beasts trample.
• Allow monster spiders to cling on walls.
• Tweak Grinder’s spells, weapon, and reduce depth (6-10 -> 3-6).
• Greatly reduce Eustachio’s depth from 8-13 -> 4-10.
• Beef DD (especially Be), sixfirhies and hairy devils.
• Make Murray somewhat more likely to spawn.
• Make skeletal warriors obey silence.
• Sometimes hint at the location of invisible monsters.
• Don’t give Grinder a high-tier wand, nor Ijyb in Sprint.
• Add paralysis and draining to the list of high tier wands.
• Rot-inducing corpses for vampire mosquito, poison+contam corpses for hell hound/hog.
• Make Flame Tongue a monster spell.
• Let player ghosts cast Agony.
• Boring beetles may now burrow along diagonals.
• Remove resistance flags from training dummy.
• Fix monster DDDKs almost never using Injury Mirror.
• Water elementals can now swim rather than fly.
• Apply the same limitation as the player to monsters for casting Leda’s.
• Highlight monsters with pain mirror active.
• Move oklob saplings from lightgreen ‘p’ to lightcyan ‘P’.
• Shiny new Serpent of Hell colours (elemental colours).
• Don’t generate laboratory rat zombies, skeletons, etc.
• Disable ophan corpses, enable generation in ZotDef.
• Wizard commands for banishing or killing a monster.
• Rename blowfly -> vampire mosquito, removed giant mosquito.
• Rename giant ant -> worker ant.
• Rename giant bat -> megabat.
• Rename giant beetle -> goliath beetle.

Gods

• Fix #3405: crash when transfer knowledge brings skills to level 27.
• Fix an overflow error in transfer knowledge.
• Don’t allow negative card power under Nemelex penance.
• Fix #3522: Elyvilon’s weapon destruction not giving piety.
• Fix #3150: No instant retribution from Beogh. Fixes an XP exploit.
• Except for Jiyva, prayer is now only used for (piety-gaining) sacrifices. Other effects are abilities.
• Demand confirmation when butchering forbidden corpses.
• Gods ignore kills of dancing weapons, ball lightning and vortices.
• Mention what weapon is to be blessed in TSO/Kiku/Lugonu final prayer.
• For Ashenzari’s passive monster detection, differentiate by threat level.
• Don’t give piety for eating with Chei.
• Make Cheibriados warn you when putting on boots of running or “rage.
• Use Necromancy skill for Kikubaaqudgha’s invocations.
• Make corpses received from Kiku actually fit for reanimation.
• Okawaru: Might -> Heroism, increasing all weapon skills by 5, up to 27.
• Okawaru: Haste -> Finesse, doubled combat speed (melee and ranged).
• Don’t reduce Sif Muna’s penance for miscasts.
• Add Summon Hydra to Xom’s list of tension spells.
• Reinstate random Xom titles removed a couple of years ago.
• Let Yredelemnul gift eidolons, don’t gift hungry ghosts.
• Overhaul Zin’s Recite invocation: much more powerful and interesting.
• Adjust Zin’s ability piety costs.
• Make Zin hate monsters with mutagenic/rot corpses.

Items

• Remove scrolls of blank paper.
• New GDR formula (elliptic): 14 * (baseAC-2)^(1/2); this is a buff to the medium armours, and a slight nerf to the heavier ones.
• Identify staff types on wield, just like weapons and rods do.
• Give staves and rods a chance to be generate cursed.
• Auto-id gourmand for non-Mu non-full-herbivores (level 3).
• Fix #3468: scroll of fear being identified when read with plants in LOS.
• Allow cancelling some scrolls without consuming them.
• Mention butchery requirement for food in corpse description.
• Allow (M)emorising from books on the floor.
• When using an unidentified potion or scroll, display its name in the message.
• New Demon axe unrandart: obsidian axe, adds a siren-like pull to nearby monsters.
• All weapons have min 7 delay, or better.
• Limit bardings to +4 enchantment.
• Allow staves of poison to affect monsters with rPois.
• Give the staff of death rN+.
• Give the staff of summoning warding, sometimes abjure summons on hit.
• rod of demonology: -Recall.
• rod of summoning: -Abjuration, -Summon Elemental, +Call Canine Familiar.
• Restore part of the chances for unrand weapon/armour generation.
• Remove wizardry effect from Archmagi, boost Tmut/Tloc spells.
• Improve Maxwell’s Patent Armour: AC+15, +preservation ego, +MR.
• Improve Staff of Wucad Mu: remove miscast effects.
• Allow antimagic on lajatangs and demon weapons.
• Allow club unrandarts.
• Axe the ring of Charms.
• Make potions of experience give some xp for skills as well.
• Pearl dragons now leave pearl dragon armour.
• Nerf PDA to AC 10, EV -3.
• Foxfire cards summon a combination of friendly and hostile monsters.
• Disallow Foxfire summon vapours if you have no SInv, add vampire mosquitoes.
• Add elephants, hippogriffs, griffons to the Herd card.
• Make Pentagram and Foxfire a little rarer in decks of summoning.
• For scroll weapon acquirement, give a boost to quick blades.
• Mark scrolls of holy word as dangerous to undead/demonic players.
• Mark rings of hunger as bad for ghouls.

Interface

• New tutorial, split into different maps/lessons.
• Fix numpad being shown inverted in the command help.
• Fix #3263: unknown items toggle not working.
• Don’t prompt for partial stack pickup when travelling.
• Fix #3321: Don’t prompt for unarmed attacks if your “previous weapon” wasn’t a real weapon.
• Fix #3517: crash when binding CMD_AUTOFIGHT if autofight.lua is not included.
• Move partial stack pickup to ;
• Display piety in main screen.
• Use inventory colours for stats area and % screen.
• For local builds, mention morgue location after hiscore or when doing a chardump.
• Extend and rearrange tutorial/hints mode command help.
• Bind Tab to autofight, shift-Tab to autofight_nomove.
• Implement #2840: Clear stack autopickup flag when dropping an item on top of it.
• List prompt choices explicitly, i.e. “(y)es or (n)o” rather than “y/n”.
• Mention scrolling commands on message history screen.
• If you don’t recognise any items, make \ shown all unknown ones.
• Starting sub-menus: Escape brings back to main menu instead of exiting the game.
• Add a message on forgetting a spell by book destruction.
• Acknowledge several canceled prompts with “Okay then.”
• More feedback at the macro prompt.
• Make tutorial selectable from the command line: -tutorial option.
• After a tutorial or sprint map, go back to map screen instead of main screen.
• Mention in ‘@’ that you are inside an external halo.
• Allow ~/.crawl/init.txt as alias for ~/.crawlrc on unix.
• Split monster, feature quotes into another screen toggleable via ‘!’.
• Add several missing descriptions, improve some existing ones.
• Update the manual, FAQ, and options guide.

Tiles

• Fix #3332: crashes with kraken tentacles out of sight.
• Fix #3160: slowdown caused by the command tab.
• Fix #3313: crashes when searching the database for zombies and tentacles.
• Fix #3404: manuals being mouseclick-readable while berserk.
• For the message overlay, treat mouseclicks as relevant to the map (travel etc.) rather than the message history.
• Fix item/feature mouseover leaking mimic information.
• Fix #2914: click on the title screen making selection in the startup menu.
• Fix the startup menu layout.
• Fix #3195: Don’t set swamp_tree_water for water without trees.
• Fix #3284, #3285: click-travel stopping for mimics and toadstools.
• Fix #3485: lantern of shadow not being wieldable by mouseclick.
• Fix misinformation when clicking on rotten chunks as a non-saprovore.
• Move tile info during Abyss shifts.
• Fix #3408: weapon not showing on most of Tiamat’s tiles.
• Fix water walking Beoghite tile being drawn in water.
• Fix #2726: Wrong tooltip for evokable staves.
• Update tile tooltips to Felid item restrictions.
• Allow mouseclick movement through exclusions and stationary monsters.
• Clicking on an enemy while wielding a ranged weapon fire at it.
• Fix the need to click on an enemy twice to fire or cast at it.
• Casting with ctrl+click casts the last spell if appropriate.
• Suppress tree descriptions on mouseover.
• Make sure mouseover descriptions are only triggered by mouse movement.
• Use poison icon for player doll, if poisoned.
• A single mouseclick on the player is enough to pull up the pickup menu.
• Don’t require standing on altars or stairs to get the tooltip.
• Add single-turn waiting to the command tab.
• Add wielded weapon to the training dummy tile.
• Make the tiles quantity prompt pull up a single-item pickup menu.
• For Windows Tiles builds, also print asserts to STDERR.
• Shift the inventory tooltip to the right, so it doesn’t overlap with the messages.
• Automatically zoom the minimap to fill available space.
• Replace “Shift-L-Click” tooltips with “Shift + L-Click”, etc.
• Overhaul tiles_help.txt.
• New title logo by Denzi.
• Fix randart item tiles never actually being used.
• Actually use the zombie/spectral worm tiles in-game.
• Actually use the grate tile for DNGN_GRATE.
• Remove shield tiles from various shieldless monsters. (Done by co.)
• Add co‘s new lair floor tiles, appropriately weighted.
• Other new tiles by co: Killer Klown, giants (capable of weapon display) including Antaeus, vampires, Homunculus spell, lurking horror, Ashenzari’s sensed monsters.
• New tiles by coolio: deep dwarves, Maurice, ancient zyme, Joseph, Mennas, gnoll sergeant/shaman.
• New tiles by Curio: rat zombie, Frederick, lizard zombie, mangroves (Swamp trees), Donald, Kirke.
• New tiles by Denzi: air elemental, statue tiles (dungeon feature), statue form (capable of weapon display), Terpsichore, Charms skill tile, Passage of Golubria spell, raven, various command tiles, Summon Dragon/Hydra spell.
• New tiles by LoginError: dungeon exit, item knowledge and prayer command tiles.
• New tile by LordBistian: Leda’s Liquefaction spell.
• New tiles by psyshvl: eldritch tentacles.

Other stuff

• Increase internal version to 32.
• Don’t include lua chunks in save files.
• Fix #3177: crash when playing after arena.
• Reduce idle clock threshold, fix several bugs in measuring play time.

Lots of bug fixes, and 0.8 draws ever nearer…

And with that, we’re up-to-date with revision 81b92e8 which, as usual, can be downloaded here.
As always, bug reports are highly welcome!

Thank you for your valuable feedback!

You can find the main page for the Crawl code on Gitorious at: <http://gitorious.org/crawl>.

From there, you can see all of the contained repository, begin watching any of them, and see all of the changes represented as a stream; from the repositories, you can clone and begin tracking and pushing changes to these clones.

Therefore, if you’ve been following Crawl development via Git on SourceForge, you’ll need to make some changes in order to switch to tracking Gitorious instead.

For newer versions of Git, you can execute the following command to update your “origin” remote — replacing “origin” with whichever name you use for Crawl’s main remote:

git remote set-url origin git://gitorious.org/crawl/crawl.git

For all other versions of Git, including newer ones, you can use the following command:

git config remote.origin.url git://gitorious.org/crawl/crawl.git

If you have commit access to Gitorious, you should replace git://gitorious.org/crawl/crawl.git with ssh://git@gitorious.org:crawl/crawl.git in all of the above statements.

Our suite of submodules (specifically including Lua, Luajit, sqlite, and so-on) currently still point to SourceForge, however I intend to properly update them to point to the relevant repository on Gitorious.

So, how does this impact Crawl’s external or contributed development procedure?

For simple patches: Currently, our process for submitting patches remains the same: you can still upload them as an attachment to an issue on our Mantis tracker, and these patches will be applied and merged back into the upstream code base as per our previous records.

For larger changes, it is now possible to register for Gitorious and clone our repository there. We currently have no procedures for dealing with merge requests from Gitorious, however, I would recommend that you still open a ticket on Mantis, and provide a link to the merge request on Gitorious along with the ticket.

As usual, if you have any issues, please leave a comment here, or alternately, drop by ##crawl-dev and hopefully someone there can help. Happy crawling!

As always, you can find source code and binaries on our Downloads page. Unfortunately, we cannot currently provide Mac binaries.

The changelog is a bit rough around the edges, so here’s a more detailed list:

• Fix crashes on entering new levels with restart_after_game = true.
• Fix crash with off-level map viewing.
• Fix a crash when Jiyva worshippers spawn jellies for non-monster-damage.
• Fix crash when trying to throw a quivered dancing weapon.
• Fix problems with Unicode locales other than en_US.UTF-8.
• Fix near-uselessness on ARM.
• Fix save corruption for too long player names.
• Don’t trap teleporting merfolk in a couple of temples.
• Disallow targeting passwall at self.
• Fix stat boosting armour not losing bonus when melding.
• Fix weapon acquirement not considering some rare weapons.
• Disable Trowel card in portal vaults, labyrinths, Pan and the Abyss.
• A variety of other bug fixes.

Hopefully, 0.8 won’t be long in coming now, either.

As always, have fun playing!

• Windows Console
• Windows Tiles
• Windows Installer
• Mac OS X Console
• Mac OS X Tiles
• CDO Versions

Each feed entry will provide information about the 10 recent changes and a link to download and play the build.

Update: A summary of all RSS feeds can be found here.

You already know about the big Armour unnerfing, and also about the the new skill menu, so what else is new?

Well, for one, there have been so many updates to the Zot Defence minigame that, this time around, I had to put them into a subheading of their own. We’ve got a truckload of new tiles. Lots of crash bugs introduced, and even more resolved. Oh, and the noise propagation has been changed to produce pretty pictures. Well, that and to make it less likely to wake up monsters behind several layers of walls.

Now, without further ado, here’s the (probably woefully incomplete) list of changes within the last month:

Zot Defence

• Rename Zot Defense to Zot Defence.
• Start Zot Defence characters near the Orb.
• Start with the map mapped.
• In ZotDef, the “safest place” is near the orb, even with 20 pan lords there.
• Disable the Abyss.
• Greatly cheapen skill training.
• Don’t explode if hostile plant lands on Orb (such as from attacking a friendly plant). Enjoy the rot.
• Don’t rot people almost instantly when accidentally hitting a plant on the orb.
• Fix broken Bazaar ability.
• Don’t charge for Bazaar portal if the portal doesn’t show up for whatever reason.
• Make predefined waves in ZotDef actually work.
• Scale up the cost of plants and fungus when there’s hundreds of them.
• Introduce a hard cap of 350 allies.
• Fix #3051: Zot Defence create traps not identified.
• Don’t generate several problematic cards (Tomb, Warpwright, Water, Trowel, Minefield, Stairs).
• Fix friendly orange statues being completely useless.
• Fix an overflow for the cost of oklobs.
• Don’t spawn dummy monsters, orb guardians or test spawners.
• Don’t show “Go fetch the orb” messages for Zot Defence.
• Don’t claim there are 27 levels of the dungeon.
• Save the game every time a boss is spawned.
• Set zotdef rune types correctly.
• Dump the ZotDef waves’ table during a crash.

Tiles

• Fix #2884: crash with the monster tab.
• Fix #3092: Update monster tab before drawing it.
• Fix #3117: tile save file data sometimes being read incorrectly.
• Fix #3149: Silently ignore invalid tile_names indices instead of asserting.
• Fix #3145: Clear env.tile_names before loading/creating a level.
• Add temporary option tile_force_regenerate_levels to fix corrupted tile saves.
• Fix #3081: Properly create and destroy detached tabs when needed.
• Fix #3033: crashes when drawing tentacle tiles for kraken zombies.
• Fix #3056: crash on restarting the game with restart_after_game.
• Fix #2815: Re-add the old ghoul tiles.
• Fix a crash with small resolution.
• Reinitialise dungeon tiles if TILE_WALL_MAX changed between versions.
• Fix #2754: switching from console to tiles now displays map properly.
• Fix #3061: Restore minimap after redoing layout.
• Fix #2981, #3001: Items and player being drawn on top of large monster tiles.
• Don’t check i_feel_safe and abilities for drawing the command tab.
• Add a tile_layout_priority option for fully customizable detached tabs.
• New tile tab for common commands.
• Space allowing, detach monster, spell and command tabs.
• Generate a Windows Alert dialog on assertions (Tiles).
• Ctrl-mouseclick asks for quantity for drop/pickup.
• Add an outline to the skill level numbers on the the skill tab.
• Add aptitude icons to the skill tab.
• New title screens (Denzi, Omndra).
• Replace the tile_title_screen option by tile_skip_title.
• Add tiles to the startup menu (Denzi).
• Add kraken tentacle tiles.
• Awesome new giant tiles (co).
• Felid tiles (Denzi).
• Add Centaur/Naga/Felid lich-form tiles. (psyshvl, Denzi)
• Zombie hound and toad tiles (Curio), also kraken.
• New Zz icon for sleeping (stabbable) monsters, question mark for confused ones.
• Add Denzi’s 32×48 Lernaean hydra tiles.
• New swamp tree tiles (Curio), displayed as based in water.
• Desaturate red of Swamp floor tiles.
• Add withdrawn turtle/agate snail variant tiles (coolio).
• Add some deep dwarf monster tiles (coolio).
• Steal the inappropriate air elemental tile for twisters.
• Suppress blood overlay for the torch wall variants.
• Draw blood overlay beneath non-wall dungeon feature tiles.
• Reinit feature tiles for wizmode-created features.
• Update gate tiles when changing features in wizard mode.
• Store tile name for vault-defined monsters.
• Store vault-defined tile names in the save.
• Use rusty sewer tile when a sewer times out.
• Don’t treat pressing and releasing the mouse button as the same event.

Monsters

• Fix #2975: crash on loading save after monster cast Malign Gateway.
• Fix #3114: remembered feature mimic crash.
• Fix #2941: a crash involving kraken heads killing themselves.
• Fix ghosts not getting mids.
• Fix an arena crash with monster indices.
• Fix arena crashes with monster berserkers.
• Fix #3111: Make monster operator= copy mid so that monsters placed from the transit list don’t lose their mid.
• Fix #3043: feature mimic glyph changes.
• Fix #3146: branch stair mimics breaking overview, ^G travel.
• Fix several bugs with respect to monster Brothers in Arms.
• Don’t give more xp for killing berserk monsters.
• Fix monsters losing maxhp on berserk.
• Fix #2975: eldritch tentacle attitude change affecting all monsters.
• Allies animating dead is ok for hungry herb3.
• Don’t mislead into dummy monsters.
• Disallow polymorphing plants into oklob saplings, at least for now.
• Fix #2480: Recolour greater nagas to light magenta. Yellow made them not stand out from Snake walls.
• Fix plants getting Xom-polymorphed into burning bushes.
• Make monster tracers round up average expected damage so that monsters like oklob plants will use ranged attacks on high-AC targets.
• Fix helpless fake enchantment not removed when aux hit does no damage.
• Fix mon.number being 32 bit in memory but only 16 in saves.
• Fix message leak for unseen Spriggan riders.
• Fix unseen returning weapon message leak.
• Fix monsters not being disturbed by clouds unless damaged by the cloud.
• Fix monsters getting not the same bonuses from dragon hides as players.
• Give every monster a globally unique id for proper attribution of clouds, poisoning etc.
• New unique: Jory, unique vampire in the Tower of Silence vault.
• New monsters: fire crab, raven, porcupine, bog mummy.
• Replace grey rats with porcupines in most instances.
• Fix bog mummies being capable of “withdrawing into their shells”.
• Shedu are now fully implemented (paired holy monsters, capable of resurrecting one another).
• Implement laboratory rats, using coolio’s tiles as base.
• Non-stupid monsters try to avoid slime walls.
• Make monsters consider resistances along with AC for armour pickup.
• Only allow allies to pick up weapons, armour and ammunition.
• Boost ettins to hit as hard as dual-wielding stone giants. Move them deeper.
• Sheep can catch fire and spread it to other sheep.
• Fix mermaid/siren mesmerise not attracting Shoals merfolk as intended.
• If a wandering monster fails to move, try a new wander target.
• Delay monsters’ Brothers in Arms until after first berserk.
• Tweak sets of monsters’ acceptable “Brothers in Arms”.
• Convert corpse rot into a monster-castable spell.
• Allow adding monster enchantments from Lua.
• Add ENCH_PERM_TORNADO for monsters, with the appropriate effect and immunity to Tornado spell.
• Add new wizmode targeting command to heal monsters (Ctrl-H).
• Unnerf friendly orange crystal statue out of ZotDef.
• Casting messages for all holy monster spells.
• Rename holy dragon to pearl dragon.

Spells

• Fix beam tracer assert when casting mephitic cloud.
• Fix a double miscast crash.
• Fix silence only taking effect 1 turn after loading a save.
• Fix igniting poison clouds not giving xp.
• Remove spells: Bone Shards, Tame Beasts, Portal.
• Remove the Book of Beasts.
• New spell: Leda’s Liquefaction (area slowing effect).
• Nerf sticky flame range to 1.
• Fix Sticky Flame having range 2 under Vehumet.
• Reduce Haunt duration
• Make Tornado respect wind corridors.
• Allow other clouds to overwrite tornado.
• Buff Static Discharge: Higher damage and slightly higher chance of arcing.
• Increase Sandblast to range 2 without stones, range 3 with.
• Boost Stone Arrow damage from 2d12 at 50 power to 3d11.
• Change Necromancy spell levels: Control Undead: 6 -> 5, Borgnjor’s: 5 -> 7, Death Channel: 9 -> 8.
• Move spells around among the Necromancy books.
• Cheapen Translocation spells: Teleport Other: 4 -> 3, Warp Weapon: 7 -> 5, Dispersal: 7 -> 6.
• Reduce Ring of Flames level 8 -> 7.
• Fix #2991: Allow immediate re-casting of Malign Gateway.
• Fix #2865: mupltiple malign gateways.
• Make IOOD’s caster suffer from Injury Mirror.
• Fix #2400: Shadow Creatures summoning feature mimics.
• Add Freeze to Vehumet’s list, it’s unquestionably direct physical damage.
• Shift Air miscasts by one level, adjust level 1 miscasts.
• New level 3 Air miscasts.
• Ensure Death’s Door leaves you at least 1 hp.
• Ignore DDoor if maxhp goes to 0 or below.
• Don’t take notes or cancel tornado when restoring the game.

The dungeon

• Fix #3055: Don’t use KILL_NONE for unknown killers.
• Fix crashes when wizmode teleporting between branches.
• Fix #2772: Refactor volcano_caves to prevent trapping.
• Fix #3021: Kiku or Yredelemnul sometimes missing from the dungeon.
• Fix Shoals open-sea background and inappropriate wall types in portals.
• Troves: don’t ask for +5 robes of resistance, +2 is the max.
• Fix #3107: Trove portals shouldn’t inspect the ground.
• Fix #2940: Shoals plants being placed before minivaults.
• Don’t overdo vitrification in labyrinths, but still make glass more common.
• Replace labyrinths’ stone wall minotaur vaults with green crystal ones.
• Generate at most one labyrinth per game (~70% chance), at depth 10-20, never in Slime or Orc.
• Prevent randomly teleporting into the Slime:6 loot chambers.
• New noise propagation system, taking into account walls and doors.
• Nerf troves: increased entry fees, reduced loot.
• Reduce sewer loot.
• Store the blame when clouds are placed.
• Limit MAX_SHOPS to 64.
• Introduce serial vaults consisting of several mini vaults.
• Only one serial vault per level, with reduced chances of generation.
• New sprint map by 78291.
• New Lair and Snake endings by minmay.
• Many new minivaults.
• Dump extra vaults properly.
• Allow maps to specify different CHANCE and WEIGHT for different depth ranges.
• Don’t randomly generate shops within minivaults already on the level.
• Give different welcome spam for different game types.
• Dungeon builder code clean-up.

The player

• Fix crash on creating FeRe, FeCr, or HEAM.
• Fix a few cases of LOS distortion.
• Double GDR from body armour.
• Re-balance Demonspawn’s Fire Facet, Nightstalker, Iridiscent scales.
• Fix #2943: Don’t prompt for actions if item isn’t in inventory.
• Fix Deep Dwarves not dying to rot.
• Prevent grey draconians from drowning if they fall in deep water when transformed.
• Fix #3010: Unify cloud damage routines for player and monsters.
• Fix wasted turn when attempting to quaff berserk rage whilst exhausted
• Fix an off-by-one bug with torment resistance.
• Fix #2937: Apply terrain change to player when banished.
• Add evil items to default autopickup exceptions
• Kill the player instantly if drained below 0 maxhp (possible with Borgnjor’s).
• Someone who’s flying won’t be “waist-deep” in water.
• Felids: make corpses and zombies named after you.

Gods

• Give the player better control over what items to sac to Nemelex.
• Fix #2995: reskilling from fighting reducing your maxHP to 0 or below.
• Fix #3116: End transfer knowledge when destination skill is trained to level 27.
• Fix spells working through walls via Scrying.
• Give monsters pathfinding AI boosts when you’re under Ashenzari penance.
• Fix #2642: Zin warns for initial yellow glow, penance for deliberate additional glow.
• Make high-powered Recite try to find an effect that applies to the monster.
• Recite resistance tweaking; there are less bad effects early on, and it is still useful later.
• Stop TSO from considering monsters with a Heal Other spell to be holies.
• Allow recasting of Injury Mirror.
• Cancel Injury Mirror on abandoning Yred.
• Make rage-inducing missiles considered to be potentially hasty.
• Tweaks to tgw_lugonu_bribe.

Items

• Cap armour’s enchantments to its base AC.
• Scrolls of enchant armour no longer have a chance of failing.
• Boost staves of venom. Olgreb becomes 1/4 irresistible.
• Fix staff of Olgreb on demons with no rPois.
• Buff Mace of Variability, Bloodbane, Jihad, plutonium sword, crystal spear, Eos.
• Fix acquirement hardly ever generating “plain” crystal plates and dragon armour.
• Make acquirement’s “redundant armour” check consider things seen rather than worn.
• Don’t consider over-expensive shop items as “seen” for acquirement purposes.
• Allow acquirement of non-regular shields, weighted by skills.
• Adjust plate acquirement (scrolls/genie) to 0.6 dodging changes.
• For non-divine armour acquirement, prefer not yet seen base types as well.

Other

• New, more informative and mouse-operable skill menu.
• Reduce spam of ‘foo comes into view’ messages
• Inform the user if travel/explore cuts off because the PC is in an excluded area.
• For single items of quantity > 1 ‘g’ now prompts for an amount. Use the bindkey option to change this behaviour.
• Don’t prompt for quantity when picking up a pile of gold.
• autofight.lua is now loaded by default.
• Update the FAQ on questions of Mantis, Tavern, etc.
• Update INSTALL.txt.
• Don’t try to use curses in print_error_screen if curses hasn’t been initialised yet.
• Don’t spam about tile data not being present in console builds.
• Simplify tag minor version handling.
• Fix a memory leak and potential crash on browsing corrupted saves.

My, we have been busy!

And with that, we’re up-to-date with version c2f102f0 which, as usual, can be downloaded here, including Mac builds even!

1. Aptitudes are always displayed.
2. You can press * to view all skills.
3. Crosstrain bonus and antitrain malus are displayed as aptitude bonus/malus.
4. You can navigate the menu with a cursor. It is disabled by default. Just press enter or a directional key (arrow or numpad) to enable it.
5. When toggling a skill with enter, the cursor automatically move to the next skill. This allows you to quicky toggle several consecutive skills.

Tiles

1. Mouse support for selecting skills and pushing the buttons at the bottom.
2. Skill icons (thanks to Denzi for drawing them!). You need a window height of at least 702 pixels. You can disable them by setting the tile_menu_icons option to false.

Transfer knowledge. This is the last ability of Ashenzari, the new cursed god. It allows you to transfer skill points from one skill to another. The interface is integrated in the new skill menu. The transfer isn’t instantaneous, points are transferred each time you gain XP.

1. Preview: when selecting a skill as the source or destination of the transfer, the new level at which it will be raised or lowered is displayed.
2. Transfer progress: During the transfer, the skill menu will show the transfer progress by default. You can change view with “!”.

Come to the Tavern if you have any comments about it.

Galehar

Danr contacted me and, due to the heavy snow keeping me away from work, I just finished to set up a truly free forum on CDO. Danr will do all the administrative work and I will deal with code changes and updates.

Proud to present: The Tavern

The feature I’m especially fond of is the fact that the user database is taken from our Mantis Bug Tracking System.

- If you have an existing account in Mantis the Tavern account will be automatically created on your first login to the forum. There you can update your profile with additional information if you like.
- If you don’t have an account in Mantis yet, create one, confirm the link in the email and you can set your password then. Once that’s done, click on the Tavern link and log into the forum.

One important thing: If you ever need to reset your password, you need to do that in Mantis, too.

Enough of this techno-babble…

The Doors to The Tavern are open! Join and have a pleasant stay!

So, here are some recent changes:

• Guaranteed damage reduction (GDR) from body armour is doubled
• Body armours are now enchantable up to a bonus equal to their base AC
• AC/EV bonuses are no longer generated on randarts

GDR is based on base AC of the armour. You now get 5% of GDR for each base AC over 2. So, a robe gives 0%, a leather armour gives 5%, a scale mail gives 15%, plate gives 40% and the rare crystal plate mail gives 60%. This means that armour is especially good against fast enemies with many not-so-strong attacks (such as executioners).

Enchanting armour: robes have base AC of 2, so they can be enchanted up to +2. Chain has 6 AC, so +6 is possible. Plate can go up to 10, and CPM up to +14! This might well be too much, capping to +9 is a possibility (to match weapons). Enchant armour scrolls now no longer have that chance of failing when you try to enchant a piece with high pluses. Randart armour can be generated with a plus of higher than the base AC (e.g. you’ll still find +6 randart robes). Heavier randart armour with very high pluses isn’t currently generated.

Finally, AC/EV bonuses from randarts were often as big as skill investment. These are now gone, so getting high AC on an EV character, and vice versa, is now harder. edit: the base type of the randart can still be one that gives AC or EV, such as rings of evasion or weapons of protection.

This should provide plenty of testing material for heavy armour characters. The builds are available on the Windows test build page, and playable online on CDO. All the player feedback and testing has been very important. Big thanks to ledtim for providing some dodging/armour statistics in the wiki. Automatic statistics from morgue files is on the TODO/wishlist. Happy crawling!

–Eino

• Provide (some) divinations, as the spell school got axed in 0.7.
• An introverted/laidback god: many deities ask for a lot attention by the player, e.g. praying, sacrificing, training Invocations. There was demand for a god who is not like that.

The current incarnation meets both goals. Here is a list of properties:

• Piety is gained by exploration. Piety gain is considerably faster if you wear some cursed items. (Remove Curse scrolls can be turned into Curse Foo scrolls. There are now also Curse Jewellery scrolls.) Piety drops over time.
• All abilities but two are passive and focus on detection. You will map your surroundings, see presence of nearby items and monsters, and identify items.
• One active ability is scrying: this turns all walls into glass to look though, but only for you! So you can have a look into some vault before deciding whether it is worth or reasonable to storm it.
• The other active ability is about reskilling. You can sacrifice one skill in order to boost another. The interface for this should be very straightforward, thanks to a completely reworked skills screen. Needless to say, neither ability can be abused (e.g. you cannot smite through scryed walls, and you won’t produce virtual xp by reskilling cross-trained skills.)

What is the theme of such a god? The question is not at all rhetorical, there have been many complaints in advance about the concept.

• Ashenzari seems very unflexible when it comes to the actual world. Presumably the deity is cursed in some way as well. Hence, followers can demonstrate dedication by donning cursed garb and gear.
• On the other hand, the god is one of knowledge. Pious followers can tap some of this power so as to see more than their neighbours will.
• The pinnacle of outward torpor yet inward flexibility is reskilling. While Ashenzari cannot change items or threaten monsters for you, there is help to change your way of life to accomodate to new situations.

What does it boil down to in actual play? I am happy to have won a SpAs of Ashenzari. Here are my impressions:

• There is a curse mini-game. Scrolls of Remove Curse and Curse Foo are valuable, throughout the game. I found this interesting in all of my testing games. An unfortunate Demonspawn happened to have only two rings early on, Hunger and Sustenance; so I cursed both.
• My winning Spriggan used only cursed jewellery. This was enough to get all the piety I needed — an indication that the piety boosts are too good at the moment.
• Whatever you curse, it will make you more inflexible. This is also interesting in practise.
• Seeing the presence of monsters is often very useful, when stabbing, fleeing, etc.
• You will use the two active abilities not very often but Scrying can be of high tactical value. It is not very expensive, too. Reskilling gives great strategical flexibility. If you are a caster, you don’t need to sweat about choosing schools to specialise. It would be possible to turn all your skills into Fighting and Spellcasting (something that was mentioned as an argument against the mechanic). I believe that this is a shortcut to kill off your character.

So the god is perfect then? Of course not. I think the current state is playable and (naturally) diverse enough, but there are rough edges:

• In order to gain the curses bonus for piety gain, you want more than half of your potential armour items cursed. Or at least two jewellery pieces. Or your weapon. In any case, there is no benefit for cursing more than that. But there should be. One solution would be to give a little piety boost for cursedness as now, and a higher boost for full cursedness (armour and jewellery only).
• Item and monster detection only tells you that something’s there. While there is Scrying, it would be much better to give slightly better feedback, e.g. to announce monsters in three levels (puny, approximately in depth, OOD) and to distinguish between plain and rare items.

As ever, you can play Ashenzari on CDO and, as usual, feedback is welcome. We are finetuning the god, so don’t expect your “This is a dumb god” to have a far-reaching effect.

So here’s the gargantuan listing of what’s been going on in 0.8 development. Enjoy!

Bug fixes

Critical bugs

1. Fix #2289: crashes on entering new levels with restart_after_game = true.
2. Fix Jiyva off-level eating crash.
3. Fix a crash when Jiyva worshippers spawn jellies for non-monster-damage.
4. Fix #2628: Don’t treat rods as throwable. Fixes crashes.
5. Fix a crash when autoinscribing items no longer in the inventory.
6. Fix ?/M crashing; monster_info won’t have a real monster.
7. Fix a demonspawn mutation loop.
8. Fix #2909: Prevent save file corruption for overly long player names.
9. Fix #537: wizard mode spellcasting crash.
10. Fix #2879: gods missing from the game due to corrupted_temple.

Non-critical bugs are listed under the corresponding category.

The big stuff

New god:

• Ashenzari, god of divinations

New species:

• Felids, sentient cats

New spells:

• Passage of Golubria (level 5 Translocations)
• Malign Gateway (level 7 Summonings/Translocations)
• Tornado (level 9 Air)

New monster sets:

• holy monsters
• deep dwarves
• feature mimics

The former two may be encountered in Ziggurats.

Everything else

Gods

Yredelemnul

• Turn Yred’s prayer (Injury Mirror) into an ability.
• Reduce Injury Mirror spam when getting hit by multiple attacks.
• Remove Yred’s twisted enslaved souls, they’re all intact now.
• Let torment damage be reflected by Yred.
• Take kills of artificial beings (golems, gargoyles).

Kikubaaqudgha

• Tone down Kiku’s mummy death curse protection.
• Kiku protects followers from ordinary mummy curses.
• Make Kiku properly accept your undead slaves’ kills of demons.

Elyvilon

• Allow Ely’s Destroy Weapons ability to work on staves.
• Improve Elyvilon’s healing descriptions.
• Improve Ely’s in-game pacification messaging.

Zin

• Allow Zin to protect from Hell effects, dependent on piety.
• Make spell failure glow anger Zin.
• Distinguish costly glow in Zin’s messages.

The Shining One

• Remove item sacrifices.
• Fix #2784: Properly remove halo on TSO penance.

All good gods

• Extending (card/Xom) Necromutation results in excommunication.

Xom

• Fix #2903: Disallow starvation by Xom swapping you to a vampiric weapon.
• Harmless new Xom effect: coloured smoke trail behind player.
• Tiles: Xom altar animations (by coolio).

Cheibriados

• Beefed up Chei wrath to be interesting and dangerous.
• Make armour keep its ponderousness when melded.

Jiyva

• Followers of Jiyva gain food, hp and mp on jellies slurping items.
• Jiyva no longer provides the “amulet of conservation” effect.

Trog

• Extended rage doesn’t cause glow.
• Fix #411: Properly handle igniting spellbooks under clouds or features.

Fedhas

• Fix #2457: Make Fedhas care about trees burned down in forest fires.

Sif Muna

• Sif Muna punishes destruction of spellbooks.

General

• Add some penance welcome messages.
• New wizmode command &W to force god wrath.

The player character

Bugs fixed

1. Fix doubled berserk penalties
2. Fix mutators and glowing occasionally giving good mutations.
3. Fix clarity being ignored in some cases when it’s supposed to be heeded.
4. Fix Merfolk in water having functional talons.
5. Fix #873: Make hellfire ignore monster AC.
6. Fix #2727: Handle passive freeze mutation properly handle in clouds of cold.
7. Fix #2186: Demonspawn Fire and Ice facets are now mutually exclusive.
8. Fix #2758: Blade Hands being better for STR and DEX of multiplies of 4.
9. Fix #2901: Player undead and Demonspawn can now be mutated properly again.
10. Fix some body slot mutations not taking effect immediately.
11. Fix #2205: Ghouls being unable to use food-cost abilities while starving.
12. Fix #2294: Let bloodless Vampires and starving Ghouls evoke invisibility.
13. Fix #2380: Scale Vampire hunger for poisonous blood with duration.
14. Fix #2136: Don’t train stealth for unaware pacified monsters.
15. Fix Empathy not working in portal vaults and Pan.
16. Always display ability upgrade messages in the proper sequence.
17. Fix skill points rescaling when changing race in wizmode.
18. Fix #2506: Update Draconians’ glyph on maturing (show_player_species).

Other player character changes

• More interesting Draconians.
• Dragon form changes for Draconians according to colour.
• Allow Merfolk transformations even in water.
• Retain talons, fangs and tail in appropriate transformations.
• Stalkers as transmutations-based Stabbers.
• Balanced demonic guardian timeout, minimum time of existence at 4 turns.
• Don’t treat contaminated chunks as clean for Ghouls.
• Allow Merfolk/Kenku to blink over deep water/lava.
• Allow Kenku to stop flying.
• Change Kenku aptitudes to air +3 and earth -3.
• Boost yellow scales acid resistance.
• Auxilary unarmed attacks have additional effects, according to type.
• Character selection: highlight recommended species in aptitudes table (%).
• Show cross/anti training as aptitude bonus/malus on the m-screen.
• Potions of berserk rage are useful for Vampires when full or above.
• Let fur help against acid, but only for naked slots.
• Healers gain 1 extra starting mp, but no Unarmed Combat.
• Allow redefining the spider form’s glyph (“spider”).
• Tiles fix: Fix Merfolk keeping the fishtail tile when levitating out of water.
• Tiles: Many new player doll tiles (by coolio).

Interface improvement

Bugs fixed

1. Fix #2513: exclusion LOS not being updated properly.
2. Fix #1983: Don’t waste a turn for not renouncing religion.
3. Fix cursor placement with messages_at_top.
4. Fix #2399: Tab not working correctly in startup menus.
5. Fix #2595: default god choice not being read correctly.
6. Fix #2228: Reinitialize the message window and the notes for new games.

Other interface changes

• Allow item interaction from the inventory.
• Messages for things coming into view even when not exploring.
• More status lights: transformation, post-berserk exhaustion, temporary resistances.
• Timeout information for temporary resists and See Invisible.
• Don’t consider places next to slime walls as “safe”.
• Make i_feel_safe smarter about stuff behind lava/statues/etc.
• Explicitly name inventory items that are getting destroyed.
• Display ghosts’ xl rank, species and background when they come into view and in the notes.
• ASCII: Don’t override monster colour when berserk.
• Stop shift-running for exclusions.
• Allow ‘ to auto-switch from unarmed to slot (b).
• Misc. items don’t require wielding (except decks, lantern of shadow).
• Don’t waste turns attempting known prevented scroll teleports/blinks.
• Abort scrolls used on items if none are available.
• Inscribe item modification scrolls with “tried on foo”.
• Disallow accidentally blinking to dangerous places.
• Disallow autoexploring while berserking.
• Colours for output of Ctrl-F.
• Re-enable highlighting of notes.
• Colour annotations in Overview.
• Colouring labyrinth messages.
• Add force_more_messages for bazaar and labyrinth announcements.
• Don’t prompt for which ring to swap if one of them is cursed.
• When enchanting an unknown piece of armour, mark it as uncursed.
• Make the . drop/pickup selector respect quantity input.
• ‘*’ inverts selection instead of selecting drop_filter, and ‘,’ selects all instead of inverting.
• More information when missing.
• More information when MR is effective.
• Display on the HUD if you’re both hasted and slowed.
• Add a toggle to the discoveries screen to display _un_known items.
• Check terrain before clouds for moveto check.
• Don’t warn about entering excluded portals.
• Force a -more- on death.
• Autoinscribe randarts after death.
• Allow easyexit on the overview screen.
• Add “You are wearing:” message when amulet of stasis autoIDs.
• Taskbar overlap is now automatically detected, and the window is placed just above it.
• Allow setting of the window size relative to the screen size.
• Tiles: Add a skill management tab. (Tiles by Denzi.)
• Tiles: Disturbance tiles for invisible monsters in clouds.
• Tiles: More helpful and less obnoxious exclusion tiles.

Spells

Bugs fixed

1. Fix #2018: Prevent passwalling into deep water and lava if it would kill you.
2. Fix #2581: Teleportation and trampling interrupt Passwall.
3. Fix #2274: Disallow targeting Passwall at self, thereby wasting a turn.
4. Fix weapon grinding via Shadow Creatures in the Hall of Blades.
5. Fix #801: Animate Dead no longer animates through walls.
6. Fix #2265: Don’t prompt for casting auto-hit spells “in direction” of allies.
7. Fix #2291: More accurate Conjure Flame error messages.
8. Fix #2598: bugginess in Confusing Touch status display.

Other spell changes

• Haste now makes you go at x1.5 speed, not x2 as before. Similarly, Slow makes you only
  1.5 times slower, not 2.
• Replace Selective Amnesia with scroll of amnesia.
• Allow forgetting spell from book, destroying the book in question.
• Removed slower training for magic schools, doubled exp cost for opposing schools.
• Add a toggle to the memorisation screen for the spell descriptions.
• Remove the restriction for cursed gear blocking transformations.
• Auto-id items of wizardry if you have spellcasting skills.
• Enable autotargeting for Vampiric Draining and Freeze.
• Make Borgnor’s Revivification cost 2-11 *percent* of maxhp.
• Restore casting noise for target spells.
• Add noise level to spell description.
• Increased claw damage for Dragon Form, also allows trampling.
• Animate Skeleton works on unskeletalized corpses and leaves chunks behind.
• Shadow Creatures summons only mobile monsters.
• Slightly bump Orb of Destruction (IOOD) damage.
• Mention the damage reduction for short range in IOODs’ description.
• Allow Sticks to Snakes on staves.
• Allow Tukimizing staves.
• Move Horrible Things and Haunt from Summonings into Demonology.
• Remove Call Imp, Abjuration and Recall from the book of Demonology.
• Move around spells between books of Summonings and Demonology.
• Reduce the chance of any book to be replaced by Power/Wizardry from 10% to 4%.
• Don’t prompt for targeting self with clouds if you’ve got the matching resistance.
• Make trying to cast Death’s Door when ineligible cost no time nor MP.
• Make only heavy armour remove Ozocubu’s Armour on wearing.
• Make large rocks do extra damage with Sandblast.
• Allow swapping to large rocks when Sandblast is memorised.
• Offer wielding coagulated blood for Sublimation of Blood.
• Make transformations affect stealth.
• Don’t prompt for unwielding weapons branded with Warp Weapon.
• Don’t incorrectly mark Levitation/Flight as useless.
• More sensible spell sorting in the memorisation list.
• Include spell hunger in the chardump.

Monsters

Bugs fixed

1. Fix #2450: Disallow monsters casting emergency spells while berserk.
2. Fix #2497: Disallow various attacks on submerged monsters.
3. Fix #33: sleeping trapdoor spiders submerging.
4. Fix #2862: silence message from off-screen monster.
5. Fix #2566: undead krakens’ tentacles regenerating health.
6. Fix #2280: Aizul casting sleep through allies, same for Mara’s bolts.
7. Fix #2547: rock worms aimlessly moving around instead of attacking.
8. Fix information leaks for misled monsters in monster_info.
9. Fix Pikel’s freed slaves following the player.
10. Fix #2434: Fix dispersal and Lugonu’s bend space blinking monsters more than once.
11. Fix monsters throwing unthrowable weapons.
12. Fix #2746: Prevent monsters from bleeding when no damage was dealt.
13. Fix #2452: Make jumping spiders leap rather than blink.
14. Fix #2609: buggy description of monster missile deflection.
15. Fix buggy monster names involving prefixes or adjectives.
16. Fix #2853: buggy messages for helpless monsters.

Other monster changes

• New monsters: silent spectre, sky beast.
• New monster spells: Cause Fear, Drain Life, Agony, Summon Elemental, Noxious Cloud.
• New unique: Mennas, unique angel.
• Compensate for the haste nerf by slowing monsters that most people fight hasted.
• Huge monsters (dragons, elephants) can trample smaller ones, moving them around.
• Krakens have multi-segment tentacles.
• Spiders can cling to walls which allows them to effectively bypass water and other obstacles.
• Limit number of summons from lamp of fire and fan of air.
• Get rid of chain paralysis.
• Prevent confused giant eyeballs from paralyzing.
• Make aquatic monsters chase instead of submerging if they can.
• Friendly monsters told to “wait here” don’t follow through stairs.
• Merged slimes split on polymorph.
• Ghost moth no longer hits like a bulldozer.
• Porkelated monsters can’t cast spells either.
• Enable elephant generation in Dungeon and Lair.
• Implement snail/turtle shells; withdrawing into such a shell adds extra protection.
• Replace monster spriggan warpers with berserkers.
• Monster draconians may upgrade their weapons/armour.
• Revert “more descriptive size names”.
• Print “zot!” sound when a friendly monster triggers a zot trap outside LOS.
• Make zombified monsters retain their stats (at least HD and HP).
• Monsters respect glowing when deciding whether to cast Invisibility.
• Ugly things may mutate if adjacent to a monster glowing with radiation.
• Make good and strict neutral monsters not choose nearby foes.
• Disallow armour mimics from taking the forms of hides.
• Naga/serpent glyph changes.
• Refactor monster vamp draining.
• Remove Duane, Francis, Norbert; rename Wayne to Wiglaf.
• Experimentally increase iron imps’ AC from 5 to 6.
• Experimentally decrease bushes’ AC from 30 to 15.
• Don’t consider plants/fungi “interesting”, no matter their rarity.
• Tiles: New mimic overlay (by coolio).
• Tiles: Different-coloured variant tiles for Tiamat (by minmay).
• New tiles for Geryon and the water elemental (by coolio).
• Tiles fix: Burning bushes now actually use their tile.

Level/Map changes

Bugs fixed

1. Fix #2493: portal vault levels not getting deleted.
2. Fix #1542: duplicate baileys in dungeon due to trowel card.
3. Fix #1870, #2651: beach-front portal vaults.
4. Fix #2641: entering portal vaults from Hell.
5. Fix #2837: Travelling to/from the Vestibule of Hell works now.
6. Fix #2576: Handle missing portal vault levels more gracefully.
7. Fix no-ctele announcements being affected by Tloc skills.
8. Fix vetoed levels messing up previous level’s connectivity data.
9. Don’t generate outright useless troves.
10. Fix #2394: Shoals incremental tide updates to guarantee a shallow water intermediate step.
11. Fix #1417: Don’t open transparent secret doors with warnings.
12. Fix #2583: Update stair emphasis on level load.
13. Fix good_item gold giving ludicrous amounts.
14. Fix traps on Zot:5 not being generated.

Other level changes

• Ambient noise levels for dungeon branches (affecting stealth).
• Add Spider levels to Zigs, with bonus ghost moths and tarantellas.
• Include 2010 tournament Dungeon Sprint map, slightly tweaked.
• Plain water fountains give no nutrition.
• Reveal teletraps triggered by a monster in sight.
• Replace hell exit stairs with portals.
• New temple maps, many with < 12 altars.
• Overflow altars for Xom.
• New orb chamber vaults.
• Boost alarm trap noise to 25.
• A custom trap: basket of spiders.
• A custom trap: falling grate.
• Many new entry vaults and mini vaults.
• Allow specifying monster gods in vaults.
• Add a KPROP “no_jiyva” that renders items safe. Used in slime end.
• Add explicit KFEAT: O = enter_branch, instead of relying on rune_subst.
• Add a wizard command (^E) that dumps level generation information.
• Tiles: New statue tiles (by coolio and LoginError).

Items

Bugs fixed

1. Fix #2435: stacks of blood potions breaking when eaten by jellies and coagulating.
2. Fix #2670: Autopickup weapons subjected to Tukima’s Dance.
3. Fix #2441: Disallow blowing Geryon’s horn when silenced.
4. Fix randarts with unknown base type sometimes not being eligible for identification.
5. Fix #2188: AutoID’d “clarity not identifying item type.
6. Fix #2224: rod pluses not being considered for ?identify.
7. Fix #1880, #2626: misleading spell descriptions on rods; display average power.
8. Fix #1998: unknown scrolls listing themselves in the item menu.
9. Fix #2807: wrong items showing up in the wield screen.
10. Fix #1791: Inscribe “was cursed” for items uncursed using enchant foo.
11. Fix #2597: incorrect “comes into view” message for Xom animated weapons.
12. Disallow creation of randart demonic weapons with the holy wrath brand.
13. Fix #2714: permafood being coloured brown like contaminated chunks.
14. Fix an information leak about magic resistance from unidentified items.

Other item changes

• Remove the robe of the Archmagi’s exp penalty, without any compensation.
• Fix the robe of the Archmagi doubly enhancing Haunt and Regen.
• New items: scroll of curse jewellery, scroll of amnesia.
• Antimagic weapon brand.
• New artefact: ring of Charms. (May enslave creatures of your species.)
• Disable equipment corrosion from slime walls.
• Asphyxiation resistance blocks curare damage, but not slowing.
• Poison resistance protects against curare entirely.
• Add new chunk type that is both poisonous and contaminated.
• Remove +AC/+EV from randarts. Fixedarts still keep them.
• Do proper foe checking for rod spells that are direct effects.
• ?EWII may uncurse blowguns.
• Remove nutrition on hit for vampiric weapons.
• Make Evocations skill help with ball of seeing radius.
• Disallow use of staff of channeling when starving.
• Give missiles of flame / frost some bonus damage.
• Add noise to missiles.
• Make wield mass check apply to all items.
• Make torment rarer in plain/ornate decks.
• Allow staves and rods to become cursed.
• Special and non-special unrandarts use the same generation code.
• More detailed corrosion resistance reporting.
• Tweak blood potion descriptions to mention nutrition for non-herbivores.
• Hide pluses for rings and rods in the \ menu.
• Tiles fix #2590: randomized animation of unidentified wand/missile.
• Tiles: New runed armour/weapon tiles (by LoginError).

Other Tiles-related changes

• Add Omndra’s cool new title screen.
• Reinstate the red haze during berserk.
• Improve default tiles layout for high resolutions.
• New blood tiles.
• Run pngcrush in non-debug builds if installed, shaving 700KB per download.

Some of the changes (especially for Tiles) can be admired on the updated Screenshot page.

Coding changes

• New save file format (safer, more convenient and *much* smaller).
• Autosave at game start and in Sprint, to keep crashes from losing the game.
• Internal changes to handling monsters/LOS/map/UI, merged from NetTiles.
• Merge “Zot Defense” code into trunk.
• Plug security holes: multiuser, chmod, …
• Except for public servers, ensure robustness against filesystem crashes.
• Reorder spell code by school and functionality.
• Simplify ghost I/O.
• Cleanup the level generation code.
• New option: show_real_turns (default off).

And with that, we’re up-to-date with version 0.8.0-a0-3582-g199d915.

As always, you can play trunk online or download a fairly recent build for Windows/Mac.
Please submit bug reports to our fabulous bug tracker and give feedback on the wiki. Thank you!