Hi, crawlers! The newest changes, organized by a completely arbitrary and arguably meaningless set of priorities:

• Major:
  • Shoals tides have been reworked: they now shift only between shallow water & land, never creating or destroying deep water tiles. They also move fifteen times faster.
  • New fake language: ‘butt’. To quote the purpose statement of the original:

    Buttbot is a social experiment in humour and interaction, it
    playfully mocks those around it. Almost deconstructionist in
    nature by manipulating the context of the text it parodies,
    it forces people to reexamine what has been said in a new light.

    It builds on the tradition of mechanising surrealist techniques,
    such as example Dadadodo by Jwz implementing the cut-up technique
    made famous by William S. Burroughs (and used by Radiohead).
    However instead of merely rearranging the content, buttbot aims
    to augment it with the simplistic low brow humour.

    The use of puerile humour is mainly to bring the conversation
    back down to earth, to remind us that in our intellectual pursuits
    that childish references to anatomy can bring a smile to our
    faces…

  • Fake languages are now stackable. Try adding “fake_lang = dwarven,!!!” to your rcfile, or see the options guide for more languages and options.
  • New rcfile option: “easy_door”, which toggles whether or not to ask for a prompt when (C)losing doors if only one open door is adjacent. (For consistency.) Defaults to true.
  • add_autopickup_func() rcfile functionality has changed; returning false now signifies that corresponding items should never be picked up. I am told that if your autopickup is broken by this, you should do the following: “in the function passed to add_autopickup_func, change return false to return nil and change return a and b or c and d to return (a and b or c and d) or nil”. If you don’t understand that (I’m not super confident on it myself), maybe just delete the relevant functions and hope for the best.
  • Evocables now charge & discharge per-type, rather than individually. (That is, whenever you use a lamp of fire, all lamps of fire are unuseable until you gain enough xp to recharge it.) The elemental spirits are whimsical beings…
• Moderate:
  • Light armour now has a small penalty to spellcasting success chance, and heavy armour’s penalties to spellcasting are slightly reduced.
  • Bucklers now have a very slightly smaller encumbrance penalty.
  • Shields’ evasion penalties, & the skill required to completely mitigate them, are now displayed in their descriptions.
  • Caustic shrikes, after being nerfed, buffed, nerfed, and nerfed, have been buffed. Specifically, they’re now somewhat buffer, and less likely to appear when polymorphing earlier, weaker creatures. Celebrate!
  • Natasha has traded her Mephitic Cloud for Conjure Flame, which she’ll use to try to block off the player’s avenues of manuever. (She had a bad habit of walking into her own mephitic clouds. Ridiculous cat…)
  • All book tiles have been completely replaced.
  • New tiles for several uniques. Check out Nikola’s new look, just before the next time he electrocutes you to death!
  • Gargoyles, being statues, can no longer cast Statue Form.
  • Exploration piety no longer scales by the size of the level; it now is based solely on the number of tiles explored. (Early Ziggurat levels no longer give enormous amounts of Ash/Nemelex piety.)
  • Throwing net range no longer varies by the size of the player; all races can now throw them to the edge of LOS, up from 5 squares for most races, 6 squares for ogres, 4 for halflings & kobolds, & a mere 3 squares for spriggans.
  • The Tome of Destruction has been utterly destroyed.
  • All non-permanent summoned monsters are now unable to use stairs.
  • Trog’s wrath summons are now permanent.
  • rPois- items now prevent the player from reaching rPois+.
• Minor:
  • Item descriptions no longer claim that rPois- “protects against poison”.
  • It is no longer possible to instantly die from putting on a -hp item, or from having your last maximum hit point rotted away, or by being tormented at 1 hp while at rN-.
  • You can no longer drink !poison, !decay or !degeneration if you know what they are and are not immune to them. Crawl does not encourage self-destructive drinking among its players.
  • Hell rats no longer appear in the Sewers.
  • Hexes with a 100% success chance should no longer fail.
  • +Twstr and +-HP have been removed from randart generation.
  • Artefacts can no longer spawn with both “cause random teleportation” and “prevent all teleportation” properties.
  • Mummies can no longer be trapped in an infinite loop when calling for merchants.

  Happy crawling!

Hi, crawlers! Your changes for today:

• Random artefact generation has been reworked.
  • Artefact property distribution is now considerably more structured, and there’s now a weak correlation between bad & good properties (an artefact with a few good properties is now less to have bad ones, and vice versa).
  • New, rare property: +Twstr, which, when evoked, summons a hostile twister nearby. Its winds shred everything nearby – including you, if you’re not light on your feet!
  • Other new properties: Regen+, HP+-, MP+-, rPois-, rN-, and probably a few others I’m forgetting.
  • Artefact stats now range +-2-6, up from +-1-5.
• Acid walls now display the ‘acid floor tile’ all around themselves, even when outside Slime. Should help discourage a few accidental acid deaths…
• Irradiate now has an animation – console-only for now, until I make some decent tiles for it.
• When following Ashenzari, (p) now sacrifices one scroll at a time, and tells you which scrolls were created.
• Gozag food shops are now 2/3rds as pricey.
• Cigotuvi’s Embrace no longer hurls hundreds of corpses across the floor (visually). Maximum five animated corpse movements per casting. Sorry (?), zig-spammers. (The actual functionality of the spell is unchanged; this is just visual.)
• Applying Excruciating Wounds and Warp Weapon in succession (in either order) no longer permanently changes weapons’ brands.
• Good news – &^Ib works again!
• Invisible giant eyeball messages have been disambiguated.
• Confused terrified fungi stumble around.

Happy crawling!

Hi, crawlers! First changes of the new year:

• Blurry vision’s effect has been reduced; it now adds a delay of 0.5/1/2 turns (by mutation level), down from 1/2/3.
• It should now be possible to safely cancel controlled & semicontrolled blink in most situations.
• New rcfile option, fail_severity_to_confirm, allowing you to set a threshold of spell failure rates above which the game will warn & prompt you before casting. The default is to prompt at dark red failure (very high to guaranteed).
• Hydra form now only gives +30% HP (down from +50%), and gives half as much healing when devouring enemies.
• Gargoyles no longer get 4 less AC from Statue Form than every other race.
• Various new tiles, mainly for uniques: check out Eustachio’s sweet ‘stache the next time you see him!
• The demonic rune now has a random tile.
• Baileys have had their oriflamme replaced with a portcullis.
• ?/I now lists the contents of decks.
• The deck of oddities is now documented in-game.
• The deck of summonings has been renamed; it is now the deck of summoning.
• Yaktaurs are now slightly more dangerous.
• Wasp monsters have been renamed: red wasps are now known as ‘hornets’, and yellow wasps are now just ‘wasps’.
• Boring beetles can no longer teleport onto the player in D:1.
• There’s a commit here which uses the word “retrogdorise”, and I’m gonna be honest, I don’t care about what the commit does. I’m not even gonna read it. I just wanted to share that with you.
• Held weapons no longer apply their brands to thrown weapons.
• rElec now protects against lightning.

Happy crawling!