Welcome to Tudoco Ucre’s Tempting Trunk Update!

Hello crawlers, it has been a while since a post has appeared in this space. While your author has been inactive the rest of the team and the community have been working away in the depths of Gehenna to sift the most lethal ideas from the hellish magma.

First of all, a warm welcome to the two newest players for the Devil’s team: hellmonk–a long time community contributor, fork developer, and notorious memelord. nicolae–another long time community vaultsmith, with a special talent for shop vaults, whimsey, and good quotations. We’re happy to have both of them aboard the team.

Speaking of community contributors, since I last wrote from among the 285 commits to trunk we’ve seen

• A new splash screen by ArbitUHHH
• New tiles from Sastreii, including for demonic trees which inspired a new dungeon feature
• Tweaks and fixes from Goratrix, dilly, nlavsky, and DreamDust
• Specific mechanical input from engine and pubby

New and Improved Vaults and Environment

• Everyone’s favorite lair ending, the Jungle Book, has been overhauled to no longer be a Lua-trigger spoiler. There are still plenty of appearing monsters, brought back from the dead by necromancers that now appear.
• hellmonk has been on fire, adding three new Volcanoes: a smoke and steam themed map, a tribute to the Zot hot tub (beware the orb of fire), and an elven volcano full of pryromancers.
• To cool off, he then added a slime themed new Ice Cave.
• Both hellmonk and nicolae have been at work improving Snake vaults; the first with a new rune vault, and the second with a wide variety of thematic vaults.
• Many old guarded unrand vaults have been tweaked and adjusted, as well as a slew of new ones.
• While not exactly a vault: demonic trees now appear in the Abyss, Pan, and themed vaults. They can be awakened like normal trees but when burned produce a cloud of chaos instead of a forest fire.
• Early out of depth monsters have a shallower maximum depth.

Gods

• Hepliaklqana waits until you have shown enough devotion to earn 1* of piety to bring your ancestor out of the mists of memory (and kindly also waits to impose the HP penalty).
• Sacrifice Experience costs more XP now: the experience cost of skills is calculated with your old XL value, which will have a much longer effect. The sacrifice can now be repeated up to three times.
• Sacrifice words and sacrifice drink grant bonus piety when both are taken (Mummies get the bonus just for sacrificing words.)
• Other sacrifice piety values have been tweaked and rebalanced in various directions.
• Okawaru no longer cares if you slaughter your allies.
• Kikubaaqudgha now gifts spells directly into your library; the capstone grants all of the spells of the Necronomicon and also Haunt once more.

Character

• Djinni aptitudes are adjusted (XP is increased from 0 to +1 and spellcasting reduced from -2 to -3).
• Unbreathing is no longer a mechanic distinct from rPois or holiness type (this applies also to monsters).
• Palentonga can now silence their rolls.
• Wisp form no longer has blinkitis.
• The guaranteed damage reduction mechanic is changed. Instead of being a secret percentage associated with particular armour items, it is an internal calculation derived from AC from any source. For the curious you can read the details, but to quote the LearnDB “If you’re making equipment decisions based on this, please reconsider.”

Spells

• The amulet of the Air loses EV+5 and becomes an Air magic enhancer.
• Monster Bind Souls now always creates a simulacrum when the targeted monster dies.
• Air Elementals lose their twisters, and gain Stunning Burst which inflicts 1 turn of paralysis and is resistible with rElec, stasis, or by dodging the attack (but not Will).
• Ice form‘s AC scaling with power is buffed.
• New spell: Storm Form Level 7 Air/Transmutations. Transforms the caster into a storm, melding all non-jewellery, and granting power-scaling electric cleaving melee, power-scaling defenses, and an activated blinkbolt ability.
• Wereblood grants a small amount of healing on each kill.
• Blade Hands is again level 5.
• Freezing Cloud is now level 5.
• Tornado is re-named and re-flavoured to Polar Vortex Level 9 Ice; the damage flavour is changed to icicle damage and increased.
• Chain Lightning is increased to Level 9 Conjurations/Air, and has its mechanics simplified to be easier to reason about (but still a bit more complicated than a bullet point).
• Poisonous Vapours no longer creates a cloud as part of its mechanical function.
• Absolute Zero and Hydra Form are removed.