Archive for May, 2017:

Crawl 0.20: “Scarf Our Wanderful Fried Frogs”

We’re toadally pleased to announce the release of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup 0.20: “Scarf Our Wanderful Fried Frogs”! 0.20 features a new species, some new items and spells, dungeon updates, and many other additions, streamlinings, and general improvements to the game.

Download DCSS 0.20 here, or play it online on one of many servers across the world! Packages for Windows, OS X, and Linux are all available now.

The release tournament begins on May 26 2017, at 20:00 UTC, with all online 0.20 games counting towards your score. See the tournament website for more details, including how to set up or join a clan.

0.20′s highlights include:

  • Characters: Barachim have been added, a new species that moves slowly but has good aptitudes, a powerful Hop ability, and can see one tile more than other species. Ogres have had their aptitudes and stats reworked, allowing them to be more proficient spell-casters and not just melee brutes, and mummies have a much higher spell-casting aptitude.
  • Spells: Two new spells have been added: Ignition, a high level Fire Magic spell that drops a weakened Fireball on every monster in view, leaving the player and their allies unaffected, and Poisonous Vapours, a Poison/Air spell in the Venom Mage starting book the creates a very short-lived poisonous cloud on a single monster.
  • Items: Scarves have been added, which are auxiliary armour for the cloak slot that has 0 AC and can’t be enchanted, but have special powerful egos like Repel Missiles, Cloud Immunity, Resistance (rF+ & rC+), and Spirit Shield. Mutation potions are now the only mutation-changing potion, and each quaff cures multiple existing mutations and grants several new ones. Additionally, spells formerly found on rods have been moved to wands of clouds and scattershot and the new rod of lightning XP evocable, and other wands have had their ranges and effects adjusted.
  • Dungeon: Many new dangerous vaults have been added, including an epic level-wide Depths vault as well as tricky loot vaults using the new one-way transporter dungeon feature. The Tomb of Ancients now features more dangerous one-way stairs that don’t allow easy, immediate return, and the treasure walls of the Slime Pits now always breach when the Royal Jelly dies.
  • Interface: A new noise meter now shows the relative loudness of each action, and in console mode this can be replaced by a bar showing the glyph of each equipped item. Stash searches now exclude distant duplicate matches of vanilla weapons, armour and ammo by default. Finally, the mouse can now be used in WebTiles by default and the species selection menu is reworked to have groupings in “simple”, “intermediate”, and “advanced” categories.

For a list of other major changes, see the changelog. Many thanks to all those who have contributed to Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. We hope you enjoy playing 0.20!

0.20 Tournament Page is Online

For all the warriors, adventurers, zealots, mages, and warrior-mages out there, I’m here with a quick update about the 0.20 tournament. Please bookmark the official 0.20 tournament page and use this page to track your progress throughout the tournament. Remember, the tournament is scheduled from 20:00 UTC Friday 26 May through 20:00 UTC Sunday 11 June.

There are currently no rule changes relative to the 0.19 tournament, but check the tournament page for any final rule changes before the tournament begins. Once the tournament has started, the tournament leaderboard will display the current standings. For now this page has test data from servers with 0.20 available, but this data will be wiped from the tournament database before friday.

Clans can be formed and changed until one week into the tournament. See the Clans section of the tournament page for details, and you can get a head-start on configuring RC on any server that already has 0.20 available. Currently that list is: CAO, CBRO, CJR, CPO, CXC, LLD; the remaining servers will have 0.20 available soon. If you’re looking for people to play with, you can find them in the Tavernreddit, or our IRC channel ##crawl on Freenode.

See you all on D:1, holding the Orb of Zot!

Upcoming 0.20 Release and Tournament

Fellow crawlers, I’m here to let you know that DCSS 0.20 will be officially released on the 24th of May! Two days later, from 20:00 UTC Friday 26 May through 20:00 UTC Sunday 11 June we’ll be running the 0.20 tournament. More details along with a 0.20 tournament rules page will be given in an upcoming post. Note that we’re not quite at feature freeze and that the 0.20 version doesn’t yet have its own game branch listed on official servers, but those things will happen soon!

There aren’t many new features since our last update, since we’re so close to feature freeze, but here’s a teeny tiny trunk update all the same:

  • Gnolls, the new species that senses items and have a short attention span, have been disabled for the next release. This commit talks about some of the issues with the current species, and this commit is a preview of Gnolls 2.0, which may get merged soon. Although Gnolls won’t be in the 0.20 release, don’t worry, you’ll still be able to play these puppers in trunk.
  • Wu Jian has also been disabled for the 0.20 release. We’re examining a few different options for Wu, which may involve reworking an ability or two or even merging some of the god’s abilities into Uskayaw (!). This work won’t take place until after the tournament finishes, but until then, you can continue to worship Wu in your trunk games.
  • New cloud ego for scarves that grants immunity to all clouds, replacing the ultra boring rC+ scarf ego. Cast conjure flame and stand in the flames! Stand in miasma clouds, breathing in deeply! Laugh in Xom’s face when he dumps chaos clouds all over you!
  • Coming soon: more transporter loot vaults, featuring steamed eels, bookish nerds, Jiyva/Lucy/Beogh altar ambushes, and more.

See you all in the Hall of Zot!