You quaff a potion. It was a potion of stabbing. You feel ready to backstab. You open the trunk update like a pillowcase!

Greetings fellow crawlers. The 0.25 development cycle has proved to be a busy one, so we’re back with another Trunk Update. Many of us usual suspects have been hard at work bringing you some new toys to play with. I’m also happy to note that PleasingFungus has recently returned to drop some new crawl creations of his own. How he managed to escape from the dreaded Tower of Lemuel, we’ll never know!

Now, on with the update:

  • Frozen Ramparts, a new L3 Ice spell that makes all walls within radius 3 become covered in icicles that release when a monster walks nearby. The icicles do light damage that checks AC but is only partly resistable. Affected monsters additionally receive a “frozen” debuff that slows their movement by 4 aut for a few turns. Available now for any Ice Elementalist in their starting book!
  • Tin of Tremorstones, a new multi-use evocable. When used, it creates two radius 2 explosions at range 3 that are triple-affected by AC (like LRD), but the explosions are randomly skewed and may hit the user. Most useful for players with good armour. It has a 33% chance to fall apart with each use. It’s a tin of angry earth elementals waiting to explode!
  • New Potion of Stabbing that gives a 50% chance to upgrade weak stabs (e.g.distracted monsters) to strong ones (e.g. sleeping monsters). I wonder what this potion would taste like?
  • New unrand: Cigotuvi’s Embrace, a +4 leather armour with rN+, rRot and *Drain that automatically gathers corpses to increase AC. The AC decays slowly over time but decays more quickly as more corpses are added. That’s right, the former Cigotuvi’s Embrace spell has returned, but as an unrand!
  • Ledas’ Liquefaction gets a boost: the player is now immune to the effects of liquefied ground made by casting it. With this spell, we can all pretend to be a centaur.
  • Scrolls of Magic Mapping now reveal any floor traps on the level. Now you can feel the pain of finding of a double-zot-trapped Hall of Zot:5 right after you enter the level!
  • The vorpal weapon ego no longer has distinct adjectives for each weapon class. Now all such weapons are described as ‘vorpal’. Vorpality is the new reality.
  • Shields have gotten a reskin. Ordinary shields are renamed to kite shields and large shields have been renamed to tower shields. Sword-and-tower sounds cooler than sword-and-board, in my humble opinion.
  • Confusing Touch is now level 3 and checks MR instead of monster HD. Additionally, the Confuse spell has been removed. Now there’s exactly one “confuse exactly one thing” spell and it’s not so overpowered.
  • Boots of the Assassin are now called the hood of the Assassin and use the headgear slot. Imagine wearing this while quaffing a potion of stabbing and standing next to a distracted Rupert. Nothing personnel, kid.
  • The demon blade Leech gains *Rage/+Rage and loses its AC-3 and EV-3 properties. Bloodbane has been removed, having been merged into Leech.
  • Warlock’s Mirror can now reflect piercing ranged weapons. Is there anything this little gadget can’t do?!
  • God conducts for harming allies now apply to spells and items that place harmful clouds. But don’t worry, demonspawn, your ignite blood mutation won’t anger Oka.
  • The Staff of Olgreb now grants poison immunity to monsters wielding it. The gauntlet minotaur can’t wait to try this out when he next finds Olgreb in his loot pile.
  • Potions of Agility have been removed. Among the less interesting of the many buff potions that fill our inventories, agility potions have been replaced with the more specialized potions of stabbing.
  • Monsters such as spiders can no longer cling. Rest in peace, a myriad of clinging code bugs.

Some of the above items will continue to receive balance adjustments and tweaks over coming weeks. And we’re not done adding new stuff for 0.25, so stay tuned. Until next time, Happy Crawling!