OK... what did I miss?

[joellercoaster]

Right.

I've been away a few months. My computer died and sourcing a replacement has been a long painful story; I wasn't in a position to play Crawl at work (I also resigned from my job and started somewhere new), so I kinda went cold turkey. I stayed away from the forum because reading it and not being able to play drove me nuts.

So now I have a new laptop. After the obligatory Linux install and tire-kicking, pretty much the first thing I've done is cloned the Stone Soup source and built trunk. My one remaining savegame (thankyou Dropbox!) from the old 0.10 days appears to load in 0.11, so that's a good start.

What have I missed? Which threads do I need to sift from the many (many, many) and pay attention to? What should I go look at, in-game?

(Also: I heard elsewhere, tangentially, that dpeg resigned. That really, really sucks. Did he come back?)

[cerebovssquire]

We have a new Lair branch called the Spider's Nest and it's full of poison of all kinds and webs and ghost moths and Orb of Destruction-spitting spiders! It also has a unique which is basically Aizul 2 who spits webs but isn't very different from him otherwise.
There have been some cool games in the last few months too, maybe reading the last 3 YAVP pages could be interesting.
dpeg isn't developing right now AFAIK.

Minotaurs are all the rage right now (I approve).

[Blade]

The coolest recent game imo was elliptic's "8 runes before d:14" madness.

In addition to what cerebovssquire mentioned...
Constriction was given to nagas, octopodes, and some monsters; not sure if you were there for that. Basically they trap you next to them and deal increasing damage per turn.

...that's about it, really. Spider's the big thing right now.

[mageykun]

Pretty much anything can be a mimic now. And you can't test for them with throwing or casting. And they can actually chase you now, meaning they're actually a threat to some characters. Although, honestly, this leads to more hilarious situations than threatening ones.

TONS of new tiles. The runes have been redone, entire branches have been repainted and retiled. It's totally worth running a 15 rune-er just to see all the improvements.

Constriction's in. Hive's out. Lots of new vaults, including some amusing food themed ones to make up for the loss of the hive. Orb now inflicts -ctele. Slaying has been nerfed (acts like enchantment, not base damage).

...and I have no idea when you disappeared, or how much of that is new to you. Basically that's a dump of everything new I can think of off the top of my head since I came back. Threads worth catching up on? I'd recommended skimming the important lesson thread for new coolness, and I second reading YAS/VPs. There's been a lot of cool builds winning recently. Oh, also check out free hugs for some cool fanart that happened.

It's apparently your birthday! ...and my sister's birthday. ...and Easter. So I get to say happy Easter birthday for the second time today!

[cerebovssquire]

The biggest change in .11 was speed 10 tentacled monstrosities to be honest (these things are THE WORST now)

The coolest recent game imo was elliptic's "8 runes before d:14" madness.

So this has to be 3 lair runes AND abyss AND 4 hell runes? My god... log please? I missed it

[Blade]

The log:
http://crawl.develz.org/morgues/trunk/h ... 091402.txt

The best part was when he cast shadow creatures at 20% fail for 4000 turns to get abyssed.

[joellercoaster]

...and I have no idea when you disappeared, or how much of that is new to you.

Uhh... quite a while ago because, all of it

It's apparently your birthday!

It certainly is. I feel old but that's OK, I am. For my birthday I competed in an indoor skydiving competition (complete with hilarious team name), ate rillettes and drank Scotch, and started playing Crawl again. It's been a good day!

[Grimm]

Also of note are cerebovssquire's 5 (five) victories within twenty four hours, his fastest 15 runer in the history of the universe, and his revelation unto the people that ranged combat is overdue to be nerfed.

[MyOtheHedgeFox]

Some work on translating Crawl has started. You can still find some screenshots and quotes of the April Fools' Dwarven Translation designed to test the sprouts of the matter. Look for more information in the Contributions forum section!

[evilmike]

We have a new Lair branch called the Spider's Nest

It's actually called the Spider Nest.

[Grimm]

I propose it be renamed the Insect Nest.

[Jeremiah]

Arthropod Nest.

[Jabberwocky]

General critter nest.

[Blade]

If you set "language = dwarven" in your rcfile, you can still witness the true majesty of the one true language.

(there are other options too, but who needs other languages when you have dwarven?)

[mattlistener]

ranged combat is overdue to be nerfed.

Ranged combat in general, or Bows specifically? Slings feel weak.

[Grimm]

ranged combat is overdue to be nerfed.

Ranged combat in general, or Bows specifically? Slings feel weak.

I was making humorous reference to cerebovssquire's thread in which he describes how powerful bows are. I don't know what he thinks of slings. I have no opinion on the matter, as I play only crossbows.

General critter nest.

Nest Best Thing