Hi, crawlers. If you want to know about the latest changes in trunk, you’re in the right place! If not, well, uh… leave a comment and I’ll see what I can do.

• New temple god: the Wu Jian Council.
  • An order of militant monks that have ascended to divinity, the Wu Jian Council offer worshippers powerful new combat moves.
  • 1*: Martial Attack – Whirlwind. When moving between two tiles adjacent to the same enemy or enemies, automatically attack them, potentially Slowing those hit.
  • 2*: Martial Attack – Wall Jump. When moving directly into a solid obstacle, instead move two tiles backward, attacking all enemies adjacent to your destination and potentially distracting them.
  • 3*: Martial Attack – Lunge. When moving directly toward a foe, automatically attack them, dealing extra damage to slowed and/or distracted enemies.
  • 4*: Serpent’s Lash. When activated, gain two instant movement actions.
  • 5*: Heaven On Earth. When activated, you are surrounded by opaque clouds, and your combat abilities are enhanced for so long as you continue performing Martial Attacks.
  • All martial attacks scale with movement and attack speed such that fast-movement races aren’t penalized for attacking normally, and slow races aren’t penalized for using martial attacks.
  • Piety is gained through defeating foes.
  • A more verbose writeup (with an old name for the god) is here.
• Noise from the last turn is displayed as a meter in the top-right of the screen, replacing the gold display. (Gold is still visible in % and $, or replacing the piety display for Gozagites.) Noise is an important part of crawl, and even though this display doesn’t communicate the full complexity of it, it’s a big step forward that I’m very excited about – please thank ‘advil’ for implementing it! Here’s a fuller writeup.
• Barachians have been rethemed and reworked; instead of being barbarians from the frigid south, they’re creations of the gods who rebelled against their masters long ago. In memory of their maker, shadows still flee at Barachians’ approach, giving them +1 LOS. (Increasing both the range of their attacks, and the range & number of enemies that can attack them!) In compensation for this, their attributes have been raised to human levels, their skills aptitudes have increased by +1 across the board (except for a few flavour-based exceptions), and their Hop’s range now increases even further at XL 13.
• Potions of mutation, cure mutation, and beneficial mutation have been blended together into one big slurry! They (potions of mutation) now removes 2-6 mutations, adds 1-3 random mutations, and then adds another 1 ‘good’ mutation, which is essentially similar to drinking all three old potions in a row. This is intended to encourage more players to interact with the mutation mechanics in 3-rune games, and to create more interesting decisions: a fuller explanation is here.
• New unrand: Maxwell’s thermic engine, replacing the Dagger of Freezing Death and the Scimitar of Flaming Death. The Thermal Engine is a freezing/flaming double sword that temporarily increases in enchantment with each blow. Trivia: in development, it once had the ability to summon demons. :)
• The Ratskin Cloak is somewhat rattier, insofar it can now be evoked to summon rats. Yum!
• Warper/Arcane Marksperson shakeup: Gell’s Gravitas loses Hexes (it’s now purely Translocations) and moves into the Wr starting book, while Portal Projectile goes from pure Translocations to Hex/Tloc and moves into the AM starting book. This should, hopefully make both spells and both backgrounds more useful.
• Portal Projectile is now manually cancellable.
• Transmutations no longer have special-case added damage from str/dex; their base damage has been raised to compensate.
• During character selection, species are now ordered by ‘complexity’, e.g. appropriateness for new players. This is intended to guide said new players toward species that will be more fun for them, and away from HuFi. The categories are, of course, fuzzy and somewhat arbitrary; there will probably be more tinkering with them over time.
• The auto_butcher option defaults to ‘Very Hungry’, meaning that auto-travel will go to & butcher corpses once the player is ‘Very Hungry’ or hungrier. This is a compromise between the most convenient behavior for most characters and for necromancers/Fedhasites; the latter would rather not automatically butcher every corpse they encounter!
• Slow Regeneration is now a 1-level mut, with the effect of the old level 2 of the mut (no natural regeneration while monsters are in LOS). The old Slow Regeneration 3 (no natural regeneration) is now DD-exclusive, and cannot be gained during play.
• Deep trolls and iron trolls drop exciting new colours of hides.
• Casting Ignition with tentacles on-screen is considerably less dramatic.
• Xom is significantly less prone to electrocuting the player.
• It should no longer be possible, even in rare circumstances, to be 101% of the way to the next level.

Happy crawling!

Edit: removed marriage, and other errors.

Hi, crawlers! Welcome – to the second changelog of 2017! Even better than the first!

• New item type: scarves!
  • Scarves occupy the cloak slot. They give 0 AC and cannot be enchanted, but always generate with an ego.
  • Scarf egos: rC+, Spirit Shield, Resistance, and rMsl.
  • Scarves replace about 1/6 cloaks.
• Spells:
  • Replaced Delayed Fireball with a new spell: Ignition (L8 Fire). Ignition drops a fireball on every single enemy in line of sight. The player and their allies are immune. Have fun :)
  • Repel Missiles is gone. It didn’t work especially well as a spell: rather than being an effect that required investment (an interesting strategic choice), it was essentially a permanent buff that applied to any non-Trog character that found it. As a spell that’s mainly cast out-of-combat, it didn’t work with the spell failure system, either; players were encouraged to take off armour, swap in wizardry items, etc to cast it. Everyone liked it, of course, since it had good lootfeel, but it’s better to provide that lootfeel without the accompanying annoyances. It’s an effect that works better as an item (e.g. the new scarf ego, or the Amulet of Air) than as a spell.
  • Airstrike replaces Repel Missiles in the Book of Air. This should give AE a high-accuracy, lowish-damage spell to complement their other tools.
  • Similarly, Force Lance replaces Battlesphere in the Book of Conjurations. This is an experiment to encourage use of e.g. Fulminant Prism, with which Force Lance has considerable synergy.
• Unrands:
  • Amulet of Bloodlust: MR++ (was MR+), Slay+6 (was +3). Encourage use of an exciting *Rage item.
  • Sceptre of Torment: only has a chance of tormenting on-hit, rather than randomly over time. Simpler, and doesn’t encourage annoying swapping while out of combat.
  • Shield of Ignorance: changed from +6 {AC+4, *Curse, rN+, Int-6} to +10 {rN+, Int-4}. Int-6 was too harsh for almost all potential users to consider it, and *Curse really didn’t accomplish anything.
  • Sword of Cerebov: works on rDamnation monsters.
  • Sword of Jihad: now the Zealot’s Sword. Replace a good but loaded word with a very good and non-loaded word.
• Food:
  • All food takes one turn to eat, including rations and royal jellies. Chunks only taking one turn to eat meant that the already-limited tactical implications of slow food were very limited, and the annoyances of getting interrupted while eating outweighed those.
  • Removed: pizza and beef jerky, since they no longer had much purpose. The loss of pizza in particular is very sad… some day it will return in cheesy glory.
  • The auto_butcher option now takes an optional hunger threshold parameter; check options_guide.txt for details.
• Webs generated over the course of play (by e.g. jumping spiders or sacks of spiders) are no longer permanent. Once the monster or player they’re webbing escapes or dies, the web vanishes. This is to discourage certain degenerate behaviors involving luring jumping spiders around the game and using their webs to trivialize tough enemies; I realized it was theoretically possible when we first implemented permanent webs, but credit to Ultraviolent for actually putting it into practice and forcing me to get off my rump and fix it!
• Elyvilon’s wrath is simpler. Instead of various irrelevant effects (e.g. minor poison miscasts), Ely just has a chance of applying lifesaving to enemies, healing those that were about to die.
• Wands are now ID’d when you step on them, instead of on pickup.
• Fixed a longstanding mouse cursor bug in local tiles, which annoyed quite a lot of people. Performance should be much better now!
• Temple entrance vaults can spawn again. (Broken since last June… oops!)
• The legendary titan, Antaeus, is no longer terrified of the level 3 spell ‘Conjure Flame’.
• Monster Upheaval no longer increases in power with the player’s Invocations skill.
• Frogs can now ribbit, croak, or, under very special circumstances, bellow.
• Mushrooms caps have been banned.
• Vampire mages now have ghost hands.