Hello, crawlers! It’s been a bit, but here’s the latest from Trunk:

  • The Swamp branch has been drastically reworked:
    • New monster: will-o-the-wisp, an unearthly gas that spits out powerful Foxfires.
    • New monster: goliath frog, capable of licking players from afar with its acidic tongue.
    • New monster: eleionoma, a spirit of the swamp akin to water nymphs. It flows with the woods and shoots shrapnel at nearby enemies. It’s quite difficult to kill while it’s next to trees.
    • New monster: bloated husk, a shambling abomination that explodes with a powerful burst of putrescent gas.
    • New monster: bunyip, an Australian cryptid that hits with enormous force but a slow recovery. (Did you know DCSS is Australian?)
    • New monster: fenstrider witch, a rare top-tier threat casting Paralyse, melee-range Agony, and Throw Sludge, a new spell that splatters Eringya’s Noxious Bog all over the victim.
    • Bog bodies cast much more powerfully, and their freezing touch attack has been merged in with their normal attack so that it actually does something.
    • Many weak and irrelevant enemies no longer appear in Swamp.
    • Swamp levels are, on average, about 20-25% smaller.
    • For a limited testing period, Swamp will appear in every game of Dungeon Crawl, even sometimes alongside Shoals. Enjoy!
  • Further monster changes:
    • Boulder beetles are back! This time, their trademark rolling attack uses standard monster movement rules, rather than Orb of Destruction projectile movement. That means they can follow you as you move and around corners. They can also blink. On the plus side, they’re worth more XP!
    • Crocodiles (but not alligators), porcupines, and hippogrives have departed this mortal plane. None of them did anything particularly interesting. A service will be held on Sunday from 4 to 6.
    • To follow up porcupines’ passage, hell sentinels and torturous demonspawn no longer have spines. They weren’t scaled high enough to do anything against late-game players, and it wouldn’t be particularly fun if they had.
    • Batty monsters, such as bats or harpies, used to re-focus on their target once per player turn. That meant that players taking fast actions (swinging with short blades) would make them attack more often, and taking slow actions (using the Dark Maul) would make them attack less. No longer! Batty monsters now act of their own free will, unconstrained by players.
    • Again in celebration of boulder beetles’ return, insect glyphs have been reorganized. Ants, beetles, and other non-flying insects now live on ‘B’, with ‘s’ reserved for arachnids.
    • Monsters’ spells’ damage is now shown when examining them with ‘xv’.
  • Player species changes:
    • New Demonspawn mutation: sharp scales, giving 1/2/3 AC and slaying.
    • New Demonspawn mutation: big brain, giving 2/4/6 int, along with wizardry (spell failure reduction) at level 3.
    • Demonspawns’ thin skeletal structure mutation has its stealth bonus doubled.
    • At XL 7 and higher, Palentonga now curl defensively when hit, getting an AC bonus against subsequent hits before their next action. Useful when in big fights, against hydras, etc.
    • Wheals made a large number of improvements to the Palentonga charge targeter. Thanks, wheals!
    • Palentonga can now mutate poisonous tails.
  • Item changes:
    • Potions of stabbing have been replaced with potions of attraction, which pull nearby monsters toward the player while active. See if you can come up with some fun ways to use this!
    • Potions of brilliance now halve spell MP costs while active.
    • When targeting the polymorph wand, you’ll now see a set of three random monsters that the wand can turn the target into. Less guessing!
    • Wand noise is now shown in the UI.
    • Many XP-charged evocable items have had their charges reduced, their recharge time increased, and their shop prices raised. They’re still extremely strong.
    • The condensation vane now has a lovely new set of tiles. Credit, as ever, to canofworms.
    • Broad axe delay has increased from 1.6 to 1.7.
    • The black knight’s barding is back! Now naga and palentonga can wear it.
  • Miscellaneous changes:
    • There’s now a selection menu when x-ving to examine spaces with multiple interesting things. (Monsters, items, features…)
    • Gozag no longer gives a free potion petition on worship, to pull his power a bit back towards other gods.
    • Similarly, Nemelex Xobeh now starts gifting decks only at higher piety.
    • Now that you can see the amount of gold you get from a scroll of acquirement before you pick it, the huge variance that made for exciting gambles before just makes for really boring ‘take the massive pile of gold over the cool item’ decisions. As such, gold acquirement now produces much smaller and more consistent amounts, to encourage more fun decisions.
    • Some Lair and Snake level layouts have been tweaked for increased fun.
    • Many new vaults have been added, including several exciting boulder beetle vaults and several transporter vaults.
    • Zot clock changes: the maximum ‘bank’ is much larger (27k turns per branch, not 15k), all Hells share a single clock, and the clock is now deterministic and displayed numerically. If this means nothing to you, don’t worry about it. You can now enable always_show_zot if you really want to, though.
    • Vampiric Draining’s damage is no longer limited by the amount that it heals the player.
  • Bugfixes:
    • Searing Ray no longer tracks invisible monsters.
    • Withered plants no longer wither. (Now they crumble.).
    • You can’t crash the game by trying to (P)ut a non-jewellery item on.
    • Dungeon Crawl will no longer claim that non-lifesaving gods will save lives.
    • Cunning players can no longer use Yredmenul’s Enslave Soul targeter to deduce which illusory clones are fake and which are real.
    • Donald now deigns to talk to followers of the Wu Jian Council.
    • While in the Slime Pits, you can no longer be shafted next to slimy walls and die instantly.

Have a lovely weekend, all! Happy crawling.