We are pleased to announce the release of Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup 0.24 “Plants vs. Vampires”!

DCSS 0.24 features an overhaul of gods Fedhas and Sif Muna, a new and improved version of Vampires, and a streamlined throwing system, not to mention UI improvements, many smaller changes, and all sorts of bugfixes. For players interested in seeding, you’ll be pleased to hear that stable seeding no longer requires full generation of the dungeon in advance, hopefully paving the way to seeded games online. For a full list of significant changes, please see the changelog for the 0.24 branch.

Download DCSS 0.24 here, or play it online on one of many servers across the world! Packages for Windows, OS X, and Linux are all available now. (Debs coming very soon.)

The tournament starts tomorrow, 20:00 UTC Friday 25 October with all online 0.24 games counting towards your score. See the tournament page for more details, including how to join or set-up a clan. Clan membership changes remain open until 20:00 UTC Friday 1 November.

Many thanks to all those who have contributed to DCSS over the years. A special thanks to the following community members who contributed to DCSS 0.24 and a warm welcome to the first-time contributors, listed in italics. (Let us know if someone is missing, this data is tricky to collect in bulk!)

G. Bailey, Josh Braden, achuah, argonaut, CollinJ, cut1less, Doesnt, dplusplus, Higor Eurípedes, Joshua Gelbard, Koen De Groote, Quinten Konyn, Nikolai Lavsky, Gabriel Marks, mgdelmonte, Byrel Mitchell, mwvdev, neofelis, NormalPerson7, Michael Nowack, Andrew O’Neill, s.panicho, Ashley Elizabeth Raine, Chris Rendle-Short, rmcneive, runrin, shelmazad, sdynet, Umer Shaikh, John Stilley, Sean VanMeter, Richard Wardin, wjchen

Happy Crawling!

P.S. by gammafunk. Sorry we couldn’t get that Trunk Update for 0.24! I’ll try to make it up to you all with a more detailed write-up of 0.24 changes in the style of a Trunk Update, along with some details about future directions for 0.25. Best of luck to you all in the tournament!

Hello digital vampires! I’m referring, of course, to those among you who are undead, capable of turning into an adorable flying mammal, and who have had their blood states recently simplified. Trunk players probably know what I’m talking about, and soon, the rest of you will as well. We’ve been bad, greedy devs, binging on our source code and commits and template metaprogramming and querying the current scissors, but not giving you any Trunk Updates during the 0.24 cycle. I’ll try to make amends with a big Trunk Update post for all of 0.24 soon. It might take us a bit longer to write up those changes, so let’s get some important dates out there right now.

The 0.24 release will (tentatively) happen on Wednesday 23 October, and that the 0.24 tournament will (definitely) happen on 20:00 UTC Friday 25 October through 20:00 UTC Sunday 10 November. We’ll be getting a tournament page up and running very soon as this tournament date is only a week away! Watch out for a future post with the new tournament URL.

We’ve been in the feature freeze since 9 October, and the 0.24 stable branch is already available, soon to be hosted on servers. We’ll be making balance tweaks and bugfixes until release next Wednesday. Online players, please help us test the 0.24 beta by playing the 0.24 branch when that’s available or trunk until then.

Finally, let’s talk about a red dragon THAT TALKS LIKE THIS. As many of you know, the CXC server in France recently went offline after a recent server issue. Medar and Zkyp had graciously hosted CXC for many years, but no longer have time to do so. Thankfully, an admin who goes by Namanix has stepped up to host a new server using the current CXC domain. Namanix tells me that the replacement server is ready and the domain transfer should be complete by 8PM CET on 18 October. All data for logins, current and past games, morgues, ttyrecs, etc should eventually be transferred over to the new server, and games will be played at the same CXC Webtiles URL and SSH host as before. Once again, thanks to Medar and Zkyp for hosting CXC all those years, and thanks to Namanix for taking over the (dragon) reins.

See you all around the lava pit, tossing your blood potions into the fire!