Hi, crawlers! Here’s the latest changes in trunk:
- New feature: ecumenical altars, appearing in the early Dungeon & allowing you to convert to a random god… if you dare!
- Controlled Teleportation has been removed. Rings of control teleport, the spell Control Teleport, and the book of Control are no more. Levels no longer have -cTele (meaning that you can now cBlink your way straight to the Orb of Zot on Zot 5, if you like), but the Orb of Zot now renders blinks completely uncontrolled while carried (making it somewhat trickier to get out again).
- Monster descriptions now list spells’ chance of affecting the player on the main description page, rather than requiring that the player view the detailed spell descriptions.
- Potions quaffed by monsters are now always explicitly identified, instead of ‘almost all of the time’.
- Ravens will be seen in Crawl – nevermore! Mainly because they were removed.
- Ghostly flame clouds have been renamed to spectral mist clouds, to avoid confusion with the completely unrelated ‘ghostly fireball’ effect.
- Ghostly fireballs no longer partially ignore AC.
- Unarmed attacks no longer receive an extra, small attack speed penalty while using shields.
- Zin’s Vitalization no longer provides nutrition, and also has a very small MP cost.
- Jiyva’s Slime Prayer now paralyses slimes for longer, and also has a very small MP cost.
- Friendly monsters bribed by Gozag’s ability are now permanently bribed, but will not leave the branch from whence they came.
- Sif no longer requires worshippers to know any spells before entering Sif’s service.
- Wanderers should no longer start out with completely useless items (!cure for mummies, ?tele for formicids…)
- Ice Cave necromancers no longer have a special chance to spawn with wands of fire.
- Hell beasts no longer have randomized speeds. (Quiz for the comments section: how many people knew that their speeds *were* randomized? Also, can you name the other two types of monsters which still have randomized speeds?)
Happy crawling!
1. Comment by Somebody
21/Jun/2015 at 22:41
Uhmm, abominations maybe?
2. Comment by Quazifuji
21/Jun/2015 at 23:14
Small abominations, large abominations, and Pan Lords? Have one of those three had their speed fixed, do Pan Lords not count, or do both abominations count as one type?
3. Comment by PleasingFungus
22/Jun/2015 at 00:45
I was counting both abominations as one type, yep. Point to Quazi!
Bonus: until 2010, there was a fourth monster type with randomized speed, in addition to hell beasts and the others. (Using ‘type’ here loosely, as with abominations.) What was it?
4. Comment by TeshiAlair
22/Jun/2015 at 01:55
Didn’t Ugly Things have randomized speed? And also, if so, wait they don’t any more?
5. Comment by PleasingFungus
22/Jun/2015 at 03:34
Not since Jan 2, 2010!
6. Comment by Tristian
22/Jun/2015 at 03:53
“New feature: ecumenical altars, appearing in the early Dungeon & allowing you to convert to a random god… if you dare!”
Love it! Perfect choice for the random Wanderer.
7. Comment by osklington
22/Jun/2015 at 06:03
Love all the changes the team has been throwing our way! This game will keep me coming back for many years to come methinks…
8. Comment by roainrah
23/Jun/2015 at 10:08
First thought that came to mind were shapeshifters, not entirely sure if that’d count or not
9. Comment by Sven
23/Jun/2015 at 12:07
Is it true that the Mountain Dwarf will soon come back? .-)
10. Comment by Rast
25/Jun/2015 at 01:10
But I liked ravens :(
11. Comment by Crabhammer
25/Jun/2015 at 07:56
RIP, Singularity. You were way too good, but that’s why I loved you. It’s appropriate, because I was just about to start mixing it with Fire Storm, which would just ruin everything.
GOD I love this game.
12. Comment by Brickman
28/Jun/2015 at 16:35
I guess we can set our concerns about the game becoming too easy to rest, now that you’ve *removed controlled teleports*. I mean, yikes! (Probably a good idea as they were overpowered in places where they worked).
It’s sad to see ravens going away, but I guess they were bizarrely powerful for their apparent size. Makes early game tengus much less dangerous though.
13. Comment by Auflauf
29/Jun/2015 at 17:31
Quoth the raven…nevermore
14. Comment by Spidey
1/Jul/2015 at 00:43
Anyone else crashing whenever they try to make an Arcane Marksman?
15. Comment by neil
3/Jul/2015 at 05:15
The arcane marksman/hunter weapon selection crash should be fixed now.
16. Comment by plaintextman
3/Jul/2015 at 22:59
What! Ugly things and abominations had randomized speeds? Over more several years and a handful of ascensions I never even figured that out :(
17. Comment by Somebody
3/Jul/2015 at 23:40
Psst, Liferea gives the following error for this feed:
“This page contains the following errors: error on line 1166 at column 515: Failed to parse QName ‘https:’ Below is a rendering of the page up to the first error.”
Would you per chance happen to know anything about that? :)
18. Comment by Ryan
6/Jul/2015 at 03:19
add 1 cool thing, subtract 15 or 20 things. Are there any plans to make the game .. you know.. more complex? Instead of constantly taking cool things away? I haven’t played for a while now, because i’m annoyed at the continual dumbing down of everything. What is this World of Warcraft? Sorry to complain, but this game used to be fantastic. Quit ruining it, already. How about adding a couple cool things, instead of trimming it to the bare bones? That isn’t making it more fun. That’s making it braindead straightforward. Just an opinion.
19. Comment by plaintextman
6/Jul/2015 at 20:39
I’m generally a “cheer for devteam’s choices” kind of guy, but I’ve also been feeling that they might be too liberall with the feature axe (i’ll really miss goliath beetles). However “subtract 15 or 20″ things is a gross overstatement. How about someone start a list of arguably interesting features that have been chopped, side-by-side with a list of improvements or new interesting stuff that have been added? (heck, this idea might make for a great web app or something) We should evaluate this “balance” and player opinion of it more systematically; rage in the comments doesn’t usually make for a very controlled analysis.
20. Comment by mummy
7/Jul/2015 at 03:20
you shoudl add romance options to the game, like when you find jessica you can choose to make a check based on int and skills, and if it works she becomes friendly but if you do it again on anohter unique then she turns hostile again. also you should add lucario from pokemon
21. Comment by zipadoo
8/Jul/2015 at 03:12
@mummy
You jest, but having some options for NPC interaction for folks other than Half Orcs of Beough would be pretty cool.
22. Comment by NinetaledFox
9/Jul/2015 at 07:39
i want the mobile version’s control to come back like a past one… it’s not good to control that i can’t play dcss.
23. Comment by FizalphaR
17/Jul/2015 at 22:48
Any chance of an auto-updater to the latest trunk version any time in the future? I haven’t been able to build dcss for over a year now for some reason, even though I’ve had all the requirements, contrib-lib error 2 or something along those lines no matter what I do… so have to redownload from trunk every couple days.