Hi, crawlers! We’re in feature freeze right now, so here’s the last batch of changes for 0.18 trunk:

• Gods:
  • Pakellas now gifts exactly one weak wand, one strong wand, one charge-based evoker, and one XP evoker as characters advance in piety, rather than gifting an endless succession of evocables.
  • Lugonu’s Banish no longer has a power cap; instead of reaching maximum power at 10.5 Invocations, it scales smoothly up to 27 Invocations. It’s also somewhat harder to invoke.
  • Ru’s sacrifice descriptions are somewhat more verbose and, hopefully, more useful.
  • Enemies buffed by Gozag’s wrath remain buffed until slain.
• Monsters:
  • Shadow fiends have been renamed and rethemed to Tzitzimitl, Aztec skeletal demon-gods which threatened to devour the sun. Their defenses are slightly better than before, and their attacks create a ring of miasma around (but not on) the player’s tile, similarly to the late, lamented salamander firebrands.
  • Giant eyeballs are back! They can show up in Depths and Slime, accompanied by tough allies. They’ve also gone from slow to normal speed, but need to charge up twice before being able to paralyse the player, similar to orb spiders or salamander stormcallers.
  • Lich & ancient liches have spellbooks again, instead of per-lich randomly-generated spell lists.
  • Salamander stormcallers have traded their Sticky Flame for a higher rate of Fire Storm casting.
  • Iron Giants have been slowed to 80% speed.
  • Hell Hogs now spit Fireballs. Beware, or your bacon may be cooked…
  • Demonic, angelic, and ‘magical’ spells have all been merged into one category. This primarily affects descriptions.
  • Monsters can no longer use vampiric drain on gargoyles, nor heal from draining summoned creatures.
  • Monsters can no longer zap or evoke equipment while confused or fleeing.
• Items:
  • Rods are no longer treated as weapons; hitting someone with a magic rod is no longer more effective than hitting them with a rolled-up scroll. (Previously, they functioned as… clubs.) They can no longer be cursed.
  • Scrolls of enchant weapon & enchant armour no longer remove curses.
  • Ziggurat figurines can be used even after having sacrificed Evocations through Ru.
  • The lantern of shadows has faded, mysteriously, into the shadows.
  • Sniper can no longer miss. Its enchantment has been correspondingly downgraded to +9, from +15.
  • Arrows, bolts & sling bullets no longer have brands.
  • Poison needles scale with skill; they reach their old effectiveness at 8 Throwing, and improve from there.
• Throwing speed scales like weapon skills, rather than being like unarmed combat; it’s floored at 0.7 turns per toss, up from 0.5, but scales faster with skill.
• Wild/subdued magic are both much less dramatic; each level of the mutation has been reduced in severity to about 60% of what they were before. (E.g., wild magic 1 increases spellpower by 30%, instead of 50%.) Subdued magic’s effects on spell failure were reduced even further, to reinforce its status as a bad mutation.
• If you would starve with food in your inventory, you will automatically eat that food instead.
• rElec reduces damage by 2/3rds, rather than 3/4ths.
• ‘Defensive actions’ (dodging, blocking, etc) can now be listed in morgues.
• Wind Blast no longer misleadingly claims to ‘summon’ wind; instead, it correctly conjures wind, in accordance with Dungeon Crawl lore.
• The Abyss has been decisively deanthropomorphised.
• High score entries featuring mountain dwarves that died of stupidity no longer crash the game.

Happy crawling!