Hi, crawlers! It’s set to be a spooky week. Get ready for some fresh changes… and maybe drop by on the 31st, for a slightly different experience :)

• Clouds of draining now work like other sources of draining; they’re reduced by each pip of rN & negated at rN+++, rather than being completely negated by a single pip of rN.
• Clouds of miasma now apply the ‘rot’ status, rather than causing rotting directly & immediately.
• New tomb monsters!
  • Ushabti, fearsome funerary statues, which breathe a heady mix of draining clouds & miasma, and rumble resoundingly to alert enemies from a great distance.
  • Death scarabs, fast-moving swarming insects. They trail miasma and bite to drain life, speed, and skill, in addition to applying rN-.
  • Anubis guards, living foes that have been conditioned immunity to all forms of pain and torment. They breathe draining, dispel undead, confuse, and howl to reveal your location to other anubis guards.
• Chunk changes:
  • All chunks of an edibility type (clean, poisonous, mutagenic…) now merge together, into an undifferentiated meaty slurry. (Also, a single inventory stack.)
  • Rotten chunks are gone; chunks rot away directly.
  • Rotten corpses are likewise gone; corpses rot directly into skeletons.
  • Blood no longer coagulates, but rots away directly.
  • Ghouls now gain as much healing from clean chunks as they previously gained from rotten chunks. (There was surprisingly little difference.)
  • Ghouls now always heal rot when eating chunks. (There was a 75% per-chunk chance, before.)
  • Gods that forbade the player from eating certain types of creatures (that is, the good gods and Beogh) now forbid them from butchering those creatures, instead. Penalties are much steeper. (The old ones were surprisingly trivial!)
  • Effects that spectacularly disintegrate creatures (Orb of Destruction, Disintegrate, etc) do not create any chunks if eating those creatures is forbidden by your god.
• Spell miscast effects have been hugely revamped. The summary is as long as the rest of this post, just… read the commit. I’m sorry.
• All short blades (except for the Captain’s Cutlass) now do piercing damage; this is relevant to short swords and cutlasses. The latter have been renamed to rapiers, being as they no longer cut.
• Sense invisibility has been simplified; the range limit has been dropped, and monsters with it now have strict immunity to the ‘blind’ effect (from dazzle, zin, ru), rather than being partially affected. A number of other niche special effects (e.g. better detection of sneaking characters) have also been dropped.
• Xtahua’s breath now creates a cloud of flames, like red draconians’.
• Tiamat can now be any colour of draconian, except grey.
• Mnoleg’s tentacles, so briefly with us, have departed for another realm. Mnoleg now has Malign Gateway again, as well as a new set of excitingly branded melee attacks.
• Ashenzari’s clear vision perk now also grants immunity to the negative effects of blurry vision mutations.
• All food other than rations, chunks, and royal jellies now takes one turn to eat.
• Corrosion is now displayed in the weapon bar as a temporary penalty to weapon enchantment; e.g., with one level of corrosion, a +1 mace would show up as -2 (and red).
• Branch tiles have been widely adjusted; in particular, Spider has been recolored significantly.
• A wide variety of missing ‘emergency’ spell flags have been reinstated; liches should be significantly less likely to Banish players on sight.
• Entering a piety-sacrifice trove while wearing an amulet of faith no longer causes the player to be excommunicated.
• Hell beasts no longer slow down when hasted.

Happy crawling!

Hi, crawlers!

First, fair warning: a very large rewrite of monster spellcasting & special abilities landed in trunk this morning. This lets us do some very cool things (some of which are already in!), but it’s also a large amount of new code, which is going to have a corresponding number of new bugs. For the next day or two, trunk will be a little more unstable than usual.

One thing you can do to help, as always, is to report any bugs you find on the official bugtracker. We get notified whenever a new bug is filed, and while we can’t promise we’ll fix everything immediately, we do our best!

With all that said, let’s get to the week’s new features!

• Mennas can now occasionally be found wandering through Pandemonium. His Confusion ‘recitation’ has been replaced with Mass Confusion.
• The Great Lords of Pandemonium – that is, Cerebov, Lom Lobon, etc – will reappear on later floors of Pandemonium once their rune is stolen, unless and until the player kills them.
• Lom Lobon (and, to a lesser extent, Gloorx Vloq) are much more likely to spend their time casting spells rather than attacking in melee.
• Player ghosts and spellforged servitors can now know more than six spells.
• New items:
  • Shadow dragon armour. 10 AC and 15 ER, the same as Storm Dragon Armour, but instead of rElec, shadow dragon armour gives Stlth++++. (The weight of the armour naturally subtracts exactly Stlth+++, leaving players wearing this armour at Stlth+ above what they would have with no armour at all.)
  • Quicksilver dragon armour. 10 AC, 6 ER, and MR+; however, it cannot be enchanted with scrolls of enchant armour, and is always +0.
• Scale Mail now only has 10 ER, down from 11.
• Dithmenos now specifically hates fire (owing to a very old divine grudge), rather than ‘fire and illuminating effects’. The glimmering light of a Corona will no longer bring down the dread wrath of Dithmenos upon worshippers.
• A new malmutation: “MP-powered wands”, which increases the power of your wands, but makes them cost MP with every zap.
• New tiles: Irradiate, Hydra Form, Octopode & Felid Blade Hands (if that’s the right word?), triple swords, and more.
• Various skill titles have been rearranged or replaced; notably, Cheibriados’s invocations titles have been completely rewritten from scratch.
• Hydra Form, like most forms, now has a special message when praying at altars.
• The legendary serpent Jörmungandr is now selectable by tiles players. (“tile_player_tile=tile:mons_jormungandr”.) Beware his ophidian wrath!
• Wumpuses can occasionally be heard roaring in the distance.

Happy crawling!

Hi crawlers! Fresh trunk changes, coming your way. Look out!

• New spell: Irradiate (L5 Conj/Tmut). Blasts adjacent foes with pure magical radiation, doing heavy damage and frequently malmutating the unfortunate victims. Also, contaminates the caster; 2-4 casts of the spell will put you into yellow (dangerous) contamination. Found in the Book of Transfigurations and the Book of Alchemy.
• Monster malmutations are now temporary, but more significant. Good news for Beoghites…?
• Ice Form has been moved from the Book of Transfigurations to the Book of Ice.
• Ice, Dragon, Tree, and Fungus forms no longer meld octopode rings.
• Instead of starting with a level 1 spell memorized, wanderers get a randart spellbook with a couple of low-level spells in it.
• Wanderers can start with an elemental evoker or a box of beasts in place of a wand.
• Jump attack (and the boots of jumping) are no more.
• Magic immunity no longer confers confusion immunity to monsters.
• Frederick has realized his true potential; he is now a Demigod. Grovel at his boots, pitiful god-havers!
• Player ghosts now have their weapon brands displayed. Never again will you have to hunt down morgue files to check if that AK ghost has a distortion weapon!
• Ghosts of characters that died while paralyzed no longer have 0 EV.
• Corrosion resistance can now appear on randart armour.
• Cloaks of darkness have been renamed to cloaks of invisibility.
• Gold dragon armour has been reduced from 25 to 23 EVP, the same as crystal plate.
• Unarmed combat delay penalties from armour have been substantially de-randomized; they’re now consistently around the average of the old values.
• Monsters with drowning attacks (water nymphs, drowned souls, etc) can no longer kill players who are in Death’s Door. (However, falling into deep water still can.)
• Chain Lightning can no longer arc out of LOS.
• ‘Monster spells’ (e.g. Ghostly Fireball) can now be displayed in the spell finder. (?/S)
• New options for tiles players: tile_weapon_offsets and tile_shield_offsets, allowing players using custom tiles (with tile_player_tile) to precisely adjust the placement of their equipment.
• New tiles for double and triple swords, among other things.
• Players can no longer wear the Amulet of Vitality on their tentacles.
• Major balance change: Abandon God is now available even when the player is silenced.
• Octopode players are now properly informed when their tentacles begin to smoulder.

Happy crawling!

Hi crawlers! Ready to devour some fresh trunk changes? (Ha ha! It is a Hydra Form joke.) All joking aside – if you are not ready, please do not read the below. Thanks.

• New spell: Hydra Form. Attacks all adjacent enemies and devours the slain for nutrition and healing. Found in the Book of Transfigurations and a new book, the Fen Folio.
• Monster AC, EV, and MR are now displayed as bars in their description. (When examined, or through ?/M.)
• Wand changes:
  • Wand type (not charge count) is auto-ID’d on pickup.
  • Zapping wands that don’t have their charge charge count identifies wastes several charges.
  • Many weak wands have had their max charge count increased.
• Claymores have been renamed to triple swords; bastard swords have been renamed to double swords. Mega excite.
• Regeneration has been moved from rings to amulets; accordingly, the Ring of Vitality is now the Amulet of Vitality.
• The Hat of the Alchemist is now -2 (rElec rPois rF rC rN MR rMut rCorr). Beware the AC cost…
• Cleaving attacks (from axes and Hydra Form) try to hit all adjacent enemies, rather than being blocked by walls. (How many people reading this actually knew that axes cleaving could be blocked by walls…?)
• Demigod tweaks: They now gain 2x stats every third level, rather than one stat on 2/3 levels. They also now have innate Sustain Abilities.
• Iron devils have been upgraded to rust devils, which do less damage but corrode with their touch.
• Derived undead (zombies, skeletons, &c) now have their full names displayed. (E.g., “orc warrior zombie”.)
• More potion tiles & randart helmet & robe tiles should now show up in-game.
• Formicids can no longer move in treeform by tunneling through rock; nor, similarly, can they shaft themselves while in treeform.
• It is no longer possible to receive the message “you meow your recitation at the orc.”

Happy crawling!