The trunk updates feel delightfully devilish…

Hello crawlers, and welcome to another installment of the 0.27 trunk updates!

A big thanks to nicolae for another big batch of vaults, this time for Spider; to Dilly, ShaperMC, and hellmonk for new ecumenical altar vaults; and to Sastreii for a continued stream of new tiles! Additionally a big thanks to hellmonk for the overhaul to Demonspawn Tier 3 facets:

• The Black mark facet gives the following benefits. At level 1 hex enhancer, level 2 black mark, and at level 3 a radius 1 silence donut around the player (the player isn’t silenced).
• The Damnation facet is adjusted to feel more like becoming a Brimstone fiend. At level 1 the facet grants Will+ and passive retaliation to hex attempts, at level 2 gives 50% torment resistance, and at level 3 hurl damnation (which has some tweaks to its damage scaling).
• A new Chaos facet which gives at level 1 a chance to corrode enemies when you damage them, at level 2 a chance to malmutate enemies when you damage them, and at level 3 an active ability to forcibly blink away and apply negative statuses to enemies in line of sight.
• The Robust and Augmentation facets are unchanged; Passive freeze is removed, and the passive freeze mutation moves into the general pool.

Read on for the rest of the trunk changes:

• New Unrand: the seven-league boots, which grant a full-LOS rampaging effect
• Yredelemnul again permits statue form
• Nemelex’ Foxfire card is renamed “the Swarm” and summons a swarm of bees with size varying on power.
• More salamanders have been placed in Snake rune vaults
• Draconian Knights and Fannar no longer cast Ozocubu’s Armour and have higher base AC.
• Ice elementalists now start with Metabolic Englaciation instead of Summon Ice Beast
• Hailstorm now affects icy creatures
• Wands of random effects are removed, replaced with the XP-charged pieces from Xom’s chessboard, which apply a random effect to a random target in LOS.
• The diversity of early dungeon books is increased.
• Static Discharge is lowered to level 2, and Swiftness increased to level 3.
• Mnoleg loses Random Bolt, to better focus on summoning eyeballs.
• The demonic rune is announced when a vault that is guaranteed to place it is generated.
• The player and their Hepliaklqana ancestor can now fire through one another.
• Major Destruction is buffed and has the list of zap adjusted. Makhleb’s passive heal on kill is reduced in strength.
• Vehumet now supports Poisonous Vapours.

That’s all for now! As always, the future is hazy; there are some big changes proposed by community contributors that are under discussion, as well as some big UI projects under way. One of those projects, by long time contributor nlavsky is nearing completion: it will bring an inventory panel to WebTiles! Until next time, happy crawling!

You make a move on the chessboard. The trunk updates cackle and vanish!

You pray at the faded altar. The Trunk Updates accept your prayer!

Hello crawlers, trunk is currently as hot as Geh:7 on a hot day with lots of commits coming fast. Since we last wrote over 150 changes have landed in trunk, a mix of tweaks, shifts, new features, community contributions, and bugfixes. As with last time, I want to again highlight our non-code contributors:

• New vaults by beargit, nicolae, and ShaperMC, appearing in various places in the dungeon. If you’re interested in making vaults (prefabricated bits of the map), read an introduction to editing vaults here and consider setting up a development environment to test your vaults.
• New tiles by Sastreii. If you’re interested in making tiles, read our tiles guideline here.

Both kinds of contribution can be submitted on our GitHub repository, either as an issue or a pull request, if you don’t have a mantis account. If the documents seem a little old, they’ll be getting updates in the coming month.

Work on spicing up the early dungeon experience has continued with significant changes to the overflow altar system:

• Each floor from D:1-3 has a 50% chance of placing a faded altar. We need more faded altar vaults! If you’re interested in making vaults this is a good place to start (as are arrival vaults).
• There is a 20% chance of an identified `altar to a random Temple god on D:2.
• Except for the previous two chances, no other altars appear on D:1 or D:2.
• Every “Temple god” receives exactly one guaranteed altar, appearing either in the Ecumenical Temple or in an overflow temple between D:3 and D:10. We also need more overflow temple vaults!

In addition to the changes to altar placement, further adjustments continue:

• Oozes are renamed endoplasms
• Dungeon spawn tables are adjusted to produce more depth appropriate monsters
  and less chaff.
• Ogres and Two headed ogres again attack slowly and hit harder.
• Scorpions are now fast.
• Gnolls on D:1 no longer get halberds.
• Worker ants, soldier ants, and queen ants are removed.

The new Djinni species continues to be tweaked in response to play testing:

• Weapon aptitudes have been lowered by one.
• The scholarly gods now all reject Djinn worship (that’s Sif Muna, Vehumet, and Kikubaaqudgha)
• Spells are guaranteed on level-up: if a starting book spell is rolled the spell gets re-rolled until an available spell is found.

Some changes to the mutation pool:

• All scales except Iridescent scales are now Demonspawn only.
• Iridescent scales, bone plates, thin skeletal structure, and sturdy frame are no longer incompatible.
• Blurry vision is removed, replaced by allowing Ru’s -Scroll while threatened mutation in the random mutation pool.
• Shoutitis and No potion heal are reduced to 2 levels, with the maximum level effect at the top level, and half the effect at the first level.
• A new Jiyva mutation gives player melee an engulf effect, engulfing foes in ooze (gross).
• The blink mutation is removed.

And of course, a grab bag of other changes:

• Manifold Assault is raised to level 5.
• Depths vaults have their monster lists updated to match the spawn table.
• The Vestibule of Hell has its monster list updated to remove chaff monsters.
• Flying equipment, species, and forms cause you to fly at all times.
• Sif Muna’s book gifting rate has been reduced, to make it more feasible to reach 6* piety.
• Blade Hands is now level 6 and appears only in the book of Transfigurations
• Hydra Form is now level 5 and appears in the book of Changes and the Fen Folio
• Heavenly Storm grants bonus EV and is a bit quieter.
• Scrolls of random effects are removed.

That’s all for now. On the horizon: new demonspawn tier 3 facets have come into focus. The winds of freshening continue to blow through branches but just where they’ll go remains mysterious. Until next time, happy crawling!

You feel threatened and lose the ability to read!