Our second play testing post for the year! You can see the previous play-testing posts in the play-testing category, conveniently located here! (Thanks Napkin.)

We’re also going to try something new this week. I’m going to highlight some of the recent major changes and reflect on them, instead of just including them in the Great Big List(tm).

Starting last week, though triggered by the addition of the new Arcane Marksman class, we’ve been overhauling Ranged Combat. There have been a variety of changes, and most of these relate to the compatibility of the new brands and the various types of ammunition.

Also introduced were a variety of new needle brands (more to come), the removal of the Darts skill and the subsuming of these and blowguns into the Throwing skill. In combination with the recent changes to slings (they no longer have a penalty for being used with shields), Hunters that start with slings also now start with bucklers. As a result of this, and to differentiate them more from other small races, Halfling have been given a better Shields aptitude (reduced from 130 to 90), and had their HP increased to the same range as Sludge Elves. Finally, sling bullet generation has been increased to be similar to that of crossbow quarrels.

As the new needle brands (paralysis, slowing, sleep, sickness, frenzy, and confusion) have been found to be overpowered, we introduced a saving throw for monsters: if 2 + 1d(3 + your throwing skill + your blowgun’s to-hit enchantment) is greater than the monster’s hit dice, the effect will be applied. You also have a straight 2% chance of succeeding for monsters with a hit dice of 13 or below.

Some statistics: with no skill you’re still at 100% to succeed on HD1 or HD2 (gnoll, D1 monsters), 75% on HD3 (Sigmund), 50% on HD4 (Duvessa), and 25% on HD5 (ogre). With 4 skill as an early Assassin, you’re up to 56% on an Ogre, or 33% on a Yak. Hopefully this will make the new needle brands interesting and fun, rather than utterly overpowered!

And now, we’ll start from where we finished off last week, at commit 0c8fe019dd!

Bug Fixes

1. Chaos beams now do not generate “software bugs nibbling at your feet” messages; this was caused by BEAM_MIGHT and BEAM_BERSERK not being handled properly.
2. The Sage effect no longer attempts to use the Darts skill, and the bugs that resulted from this being fixed have also been fixed.
3. Duplicate letters in the Ctrl-X menu have been fixed.
4. Exclusions are once more listed in the overmap screen.
5. Beholder information is no longer broken by monsters with large monster IDs.
6. Throwing needles no longer incurs status effects.
7. Fractured grammar in miscast death messages has been fixed, as have missing punctuation in door open and close messages, an incorrect plural in spell memorisation, and a few minor typos.
8. Crawl will no longer crash on SIGTTIN and SIGTTOU signals.
9. Temporarily banded bows of Venom will no longer permanently brand ammunition as poisoned.
10. Fixed a bug wherein the Snake:5 rune vaults caused validation problems without actually vetoing the generation of the level 25 times, thus generating the level without a rune vault and therefore no rune.
11. “Bad” food will never be coloured as edible or good with carnivore or saprovore mutations for those who would be affected by it.
12. As slings do not use the Throwing skill in any of their calculations, they no longer exercise it.
13. An odd bug with vaults and acquirement specifications that was causing a hang was also fixed.
14. Throw Icicle is no longer treated as a beam spell for monsters.
15. Multiple player ghosts in line of sight are no longer treated as being ghosts of the same person when represented in the monster panel.
16. BEAM_WATER is no longer included in BEAM_RANDOM, preventing a crash.
17. Halos no longer affect the evasion of the monster (or player) who casts them; this removes the issue of worshipers of the The Shining One who focus on evasion being badly affected.
18. Monsters will no longer attempt to suicide when casting Fireball.
19. Auto-travel will no longer attempt to kill monsters while wielding a *Rage-artefact weapon, or if the player has any levels of the Berserkitis mutation.
20. Monsters will no longer wield stacks of throwing weapons; “Foo hits you with 5 hand axes!” should no longer occur.
21. Items matching the subtype of Geryon’s Horn, but which are not miscellaneous objects, will not be prompted for confirmation of sacrifice with Nemelex Xobeh.
22. Monsters killed (specifically, aquatic monsters) with Fedhas’s Sunlight ability will be correctly attributed to the player.
23. The Memorisation screen will no longer present more than 52 options to the player per view, instead forcing the player to scroll instead of repeating letters.

New and changed features

1. Chunks of similar age and status will now stack together.
2. Monsters now get the same boni as players when in the berserk state.
3. Poisoned missiles have been returned to their previous state, and are no longer nerfed.
4. Merfolk javelineers are slightly weaker now.
5. Seen weapons and items are tracked, and this data is now taken into consideration with non-God acquirements.
6. Holy scourges have the same handedness as demon whips.
7. Rings of Regeneration automatically identify when worn.
8. New needles no longer appear in such large stacks.
9. Branded (specifically, flame, frost and chaos) missiles no longer get called “bolt of “, but instead ” of “; this prevents confusion of the base type of the missile, as bolts are the ammunition type for crossbows, but arrows and sling bullets could be described as “bolts”.
10. Tile cleanups: sharks, Nikola.
11. New(ish) tiles: potion brands have been reused for new needle brands, and the evasion ring brand has been reused for evasion-branded weapons.
12. You are now prompted before offering the Horn of Geryon to Nemelex Xobeh.
13. Dowan is now buffed when Duvessa dies, instead of being debuffed: his spells are upgraded (Throw Icicle, Stone Arrow, and Haste), while he is also hasted.
14. Tiles: the Hat of Pondering has been improved, and Agnes is now represented with her actual weapon, rather than a short sword; Kirke is now represented with a staff, a common way of presenting spellcasters.
15. Tiles for Ilsuiw, harpies, and other merfolk have been greatly improved.
16. New monster trio for Shoals: snapping turtles, alligator snapping turtles (each with a reaching attack), and amphibious sea snakes with a poisonous bite.
17. Centaur, centaur warrior, yaktaur, and yaktaur captain packs have been removed from Shoals (replaced with the above trio); instead, single centaurs can be rarely generated (in keeping with the Greek theme).
18. The weight of (small) stones has been increased.
19. Merfolk aquamancers now receive ball of steam instead of bolt of cold.
20. Halfling get the same HP gains as Sludge Elves.
21. Mara’s summoned ghosts are marked as “illusions” rather than ghosts; this will hopefully prevent confusion.
22. Harpies will also steal food from the ground at the player’s feet, preventing the trick of dropping one’s food before fighting them.
23. Chaos-branded ammunition no longer generates randomly.
24. Tiles: corpses are now marked as contaminated, mutagenic, etc, in the actual tile, rather than just in the text.
25. Shoals:5 stairs are no longer clumped together.
26. Lugonu’s weapon blessing is now referred to as a more fitting corruption.
27. Auto-exclusions based around mosters, fog machines, and their exclusions are now reported in a more sane manner; this includes actual lists of what caused the exclusion. Auto-exclusions from fog machines are also no longer treated as being placed by a monster.
28. Fedhas’s Sunlight ability now always costs MP and trains Invocations; it also now only creates plants when it evaporates water.
29. Fedhas’s “Shoot through plants” ability now allows the player to shoot through neutral plants, and also allows explosive beams to pass through without causing them to explode. They are still affected by the actual explosion, however.

Other changes

1. Tiles have been divided between more subfolders, such as for the undead monsters, and so on, thus making the directory structure much cleaner.
2. New Lua wrappers: item pluses (cLua accessible) and noisy (dLua accessible).
3. Using the -script parameter, you can now run a Lua script from the command line.
4. Monster EXP has been greatly improved, after close analysis of threats. This involves increases for some, and decreases for others.
5. Lair now uses the “ruined” level layout type, instead of the “spotty” level: this involves random removal of walls and replacement with plants and fungi, creating a more “ruined jungle castle” feel to the branch.

And that’s us up-to-date with commit 26707f530e! As always, comments are appreciated, and if you have found any bugs, please let us know! Details on how to submit bug reports can be found in the first ever play testing post, linked above.