Hi, crawlers. If you want to know about the latest changes in trunk, you’re in the right place! If not, well, uh… leave a comment and I’ll see what I can do.
- New temple god: the Wu Jian Council.
- An order of militant monks that have ascended to divinity, the Wu Jian Council offer worshippers powerful new combat moves.
- 1*: Martial Attack – Whirlwind. When moving between two tiles adjacent to the same enemy or enemies, automatically attack them, potentially Slowing those hit.
- 2*: Martial Attack – Wall Jump. When moving directly into a solid obstacle, instead move two tiles backward, attacking all enemies adjacent to your destination and potentially distracting them.
- 3*: Martial Attack – Lunge. When moving directly toward a foe, automatically attack them, dealing extra damage to slowed and/or distracted enemies.
- 4*: Serpent’s Lash. When activated, gain two instant movement actions.
- 5*: Heaven On Earth. When activated, you are surrounded by opaque clouds, and your combat abilities are enhanced for so long as you continue performing Martial Attacks.
- All martial attacks scale with movement and attack speed such that fast-movement races aren’t penalized for attacking normally, and slow races aren’t penalized for using martial attacks.
- Piety is gained through defeating foes.
- A more verbose writeup (with an old name for the god) is here.
- Noise from the last turn is displayed as a meter in the top-right of the screen, replacing the gold display. (Gold is still visible in % and $, or replacing the piety display for Gozagites.) Noise is an important part of crawl, and even though this display doesn’t communicate the full complexity of it, it’s a big step forward that I’m very excited about – please thank ‘advil’ for implementing it! Here’s a fuller writeup.
- Barachians have been rethemed and reworked; instead of being barbarians from the frigid south, they’re creations of the gods who rebelled against their masters long ago. In memory of their maker, shadows still flee at Barachians’ approach, giving them +1 LOS. (Increasing both the range of their attacks, and the range & number of enemies that can attack them!) In compensation for this, their attributes have been raised to human levels, their skills aptitudes have increased by +1 across the board (except for a few flavour-based exceptions), and their Hop’s range now increases even further at XL 13.
- Potions of mutation, cure mutation, and beneficial mutation have been blended together into one big slurry! They (potions of mutation) now removes 2-6 mutations, adds 1-3 random mutations, and then adds another 1 ‘good’ mutation, which is essentially similar to drinking all three old potions in a row. This is intended to encourage more players to interact with the mutation mechanics in 3-rune games, and to create more interesting decisions: a fuller explanation is here.
- New unrand: Maxwell’s thermic engine, replacing the Dagger of Freezing Death and the Scimitar of Flaming Death. The Thermal Engine is a freezing/flaming double sword that temporarily increases in enchantment with each blow. Trivia: in development, it once had the ability to summon demons. :)
- The Ratskin Cloak is somewhat rattier, insofar it can now be evoked to summon rats. Yum!
- Warper/Arcane Marksperson shakeup: Gell’s Gravitas loses Hexes (it’s now purely Translocations) and moves into the Wr starting book, while Portal Projectile goes from pure Translocations to Hex/Tloc and moves into the AM starting book. This should, hopefully make both spells and both backgrounds more useful.
- Portal Projectile is now manually cancellable.
- Transmutations no longer have special-case added damage from str/dex; their base damage has been raised to compensate.
- During character selection, species are now ordered by ‘complexity’, e.g. appropriateness for new players. This is intended to guide said new players toward species that will be more fun for them, and away from HuFi. The categories are, of course, fuzzy and somewhat arbitrary; there will probably be more tinkering with them over time.
- The auto_butcher option defaults to ‘Very Hungry’, meaning that auto-travel will go to & butcher corpses once the player is ‘Very Hungry’ or hungrier. This is a compromise between the most convenient behavior for most characters and for necromancers/Fedhasites; the latter would rather not automatically butcher every corpse they encounter!
- Slow Regeneration is now a 1-level mut, with the effect of the old level 2 of the mut (no natural regeneration while monsters are in LOS). The old Slow Regeneration 3 (no natural regeneration) is now DD-exclusive, and cannot be gained during play.
- Deep trolls and iron trolls drop exciting new colours of hides.
- Casting Ignition with tentacles on-screen is considerably less dramatic.
- Xom is significantly less prone to electrocuting the player.
- It should no longer be possible, even in rare circumstances, to be 101% of the way to the next level.
Happy crawling!
Edit: removed marriage, and other errors.
1. Comment by Baconkid
26/Feb/2017 at 06:03
LOLed at 2*: Marital Attack
2. Comment by PleasingFungus
26/Feb/2017 at 06:04
I have no idea what you could be talking about.
3. Comment by John Simmons
26/Feb/2017 at 19:06
Time to give Barachians another try!
4. Comment by Greg
26/Feb/2017 at 20:52
heh, “Marital Attack”… in GTA San Andreas they intentionally put “Marital Arts” on a gym :D
5. Comment by alf
28/Feb/2017 at 01:01
what is this game anymore
6. Comment by PleasingFungus
28/Feb/2017 at 01:02
I think it’s a roguelike, though I’m not sure what that means.
7. Comment by Vil-hatarn
28/Feb/2017 at 07:58
Maybe I can finally get a HEAM into the late game now. Oh wait…
8. Comment by pratamawirya
28/Feb/2017 at 14:53
Did the devs just give that +1 LOS that was originally proposed for HE to barachians for no reason? I mean, what does +1 LOS have to do with frog people?
9. Comment by NeedDev?
28/Feb/2017 at 23:33
To be honest, I will NEVER play Barachian spieces. The reason being me imagining a f’ing frog hurting my aestethics every time I try and delve deeper into the game, which brought me to roguelikes in the first place. I wonder how many of you played roguelike for the first time in your teens, when your conciousness is uncorrupted by daily chore of troubleshooting your life. That would make for a hell of an survey, don’t you think?
10. Comment by needdevquestionmark
28/Feb/2017 at 23:45
Second thought.
If you take a while imagining your potential playerbase, would this make sense?: “In my opinion, any potential roguelike players are flocked into that specific genre by a finite plethora of factors. Let’s tap into that. Let’s try and guess what the major attractors are. Basing on my experience, all the people i knew playing RG’s were such and such, how about we ask a meaningful sample of the community and try to create a nice and precise vectors into which we are going to tap. So whatdya guys? Let’s do it!1!”
11. Comment by kitchen_ace
1/Mar/2017 at 13:55
>Deep trolls and iron trolls drop exciting new colours of hides.
Cosmetic only?
12. Comment by PleasingFungus
1/Mar/2017 at 16:49
@kitchen_ace Yep, purely visual.
13. Comment by gail gurman
3/Mar/2017 at 09:38
The new mutation potion is interesting, however I don’t think the complete removal of cure mutation is well thought out. Forcing players to keep and (reroll) mutation potions isn’t about choice its removing the abilty of a player to keep or not keep them; you have to have them, now you can RNG roll for a less-bad set. Limiting player choices = bad.
14. Comment by tv1990
3/Mar/2017 at 16:49
it’s a fine addition , so that mutations be a part of the gameplay instead of the “quaff curmut whenever i have a bad mut” thinking
15. Comment by Michael Spire
4/Mar/2017 at 13:24
Good work. Now please bring back the Enchanted Forest branch. It deserves to be in the game. It was an awesome addition that got trashed because of politics.