Hi crawlers! It’s been a while, but now that the tournament is over, the 0.16 season has kicked off with a bang. Here’s what’s new so far in trunk!

  • New god: Ru the Awakened, a new temple god, lord of sacrifice and power!
    • Periodically offers the player a choice of three permanent sacrifices in exchange for piety. All abilities scale with piety; piety never decreases.
    • Leaving Ru incurs no wrath, but leaves all your sacrifices in place (permanently).
    • 1*: Enemies may fail to attack you, or even attack each other or themselves instead.
    • 2*: Enemies that hurt you may be punished with status effects.
    • 3*: Draw Out Power: restore health and mana to yourself, break free of webs and constriction, and cure confusion and petrification. Inflicts minor self-drain and exhaustion.
    • 4*: Power Leap: Blinks you three tiles and deals high AOE damage at your destination. Costs exhaustion.
    • 5*: Apocalypse: Deals very high damage to all monsters in LOS and inflicts statuses. Costs heavy drain and exhaustion.
  • Monster changes:
    • Mermaids have been renamed to sirens; sirens have been renamed to merfolk avatars.
    • Mimics now cackle and vanish (forever) when discovered. This optimizes their psychological damage potential (PDP).
    • The Serpent of Hell is considerably tougher; it now has three heads which can attack and/or breathe separately, and can also summon (dragon-shaped) backup.
    • Mnoleg now has a pair of tentacles, acting similarly to eldritch tentacles.
    • New monster: elemental wellsprings, appearing in Cocytus. They fire powerful waves of water which produce hostile water elementals – but deplete their own ‘health’ in the process.
    • New monster: bennu, the divine phoenix, appearing in Tomb. Attacks with fire, draining, and holy; when killed, explodes into ghostly flame and instantly returns to life (once).
    • Curse skulls now move – fast!
  • Completing a ziggurat (by exiting from the top floor, zig:27) makes all subsequent zigs harder. Dare you face the terror of the Megazig?
  • Ziggurats now only require two runes to enter, instead of three.
  • A Hall of Blades area (not branch) is now guaranteed on Elf:2.
  • Demigods now gain one stat of their choice on 2/3 levels (2,3,5,6…26,27), instead of gaining one stat of their choice on every third level and one random stat on every other level.
  • All species can now choose ‘unarmed’ when playing backgrounds that allow a weapon choice.
  • Necromutated characters can now memorize spells normally, even ones that undead characters are unable to cast.
  • Dragon Form now provides a spell power & success chance enhancer for Dragon’s Call.
  • The captain’s cutlass is now +5 (was +10) and can disarm enemies.
  • TSO’s Divine Shield no longer benefits from Shields skill.
  • Zin’s Hell effect protection has been halved; it now caps out at a 50% chance to block the terrors of Hell at max piety, down from 100%.
  • Zin’s Recite is now more effective at very low Invocations.
  • A third page has been added to the god description (^) screen, listing causes and effects of divine wrath.
  • Some effects (Shatter, banishment, etc.) now display animations.
  • Stealth is now displayed as a bar in the % screen. (The old ‘stealth words’) are still visible with @.)
  • Monsters no longer appear on the minimap.
  • The init file now allows you to specify an arbitrary monster tile for your character to be displayed as. Play as the Royal Jelly you always knew you were!
  • Porcupine-shaped players now have blood.

Happy crawling!