It’s that time of year again! The Stone Soup development team are extremely pleased to announce the latest release of Dungeon Crawl: 0.8, “Frantic Frenzied Felines”. As usual, there have been some massive changes, which, if you’ve been playing any of the development builds hosted on CDO for download and online play or CAO for online play, you’re possibly already familiar with. A big thanks to all of our play-testers!

What’s changed? Here’s an excerpt of some major changes:

  • New god: Ashenzari: the god of curses and divination, who gifts a number of passive and active abilities in return for wearing cursed equipment, gaining knowledge, and exploring the dungeon extensively. The most significant of these passive abilities includes magic mapping, see invisible, clarity, and the active abilities of scrying, which allows the player to see through walls (though not to perform smite-based attacks), and transfer knowledge, which allows the player to improve one skill by sacrificing experience invested in another skill.
  • New race: Felids. These sentient furry felines are incapable of using rods, armour, wands or weapons, nor are they able to throw things, but are granted extra lives as they gain levels. These extra lives allow the player to escape death! As one might expect, felids are fast and come with claws and fangs, making them excellent at unarmed combat, and have excellent eyesight — the ability to see invisible creatures.
  • The Enchantments school has been split into Charms and Hexes. While a significant and drastic change, it has certainly been long in the making: the Enchantments school contained a large percentage of the game’s spells, and was certainly a no-brainer in terms of experience usage.
  • Character backgrounds have been improved: the Stalker background now focusses on transmutation for the purposes of stabbing. Makhleb and The Shining One are no longer accessible as starting gods as Paladins have been removed, and Chaos Knights are now worshippers of Xom, while the new class of Abyssal Knights provides access to Lugonu.
  • Heavy armour has been improved. Guaranteed damage reduction has returned! The formula has been tweaked since the great armour nerf in version 0.6, making it more efficient again.

As always, you can check out the full changelog in our stone_soup-0.8 branch on Gitorious, or find it in whichever package you decide to download!

In server news: CAO is now running up-to-date development builds of upcoming 0.9 alongside the latest stable releases, as well as a number of experimental branches (currently consisting of Lava Orcs and Octopodes, based on a branch by Eronarn). CDO is back to development builds as well.

As always, you can find all of our releases on SourceForge. Alternately, you can check out the our Downloads page.

We just started hosting a Ubuntu/Debian repositories of our own! Simply add the following to your /etc/apt/sources.list file:

deb http://crawl.develz.org/debian crawl 0.8

To get the public key, please do: (on Ubuntu, you need to insert “sudo” before apt-key)

wget http://crawl.develz.org/debian/pubkey -O - | apt-key add -

Further information can be found on the Downloads page soon!

Happy crawling!

Unfortunately, we are still awaiting builds for Mac OS X! These will be added to this post as soon as they’re available!

Edit: Binaries for Mac OS X have arrived and are now linked on the Downloads page!