Gone are the days of pointlessly casting spells at walls, or pounding on a macro to evoke a crystal ball — usually with undesired results. The experience pool has been removed, and it is now not actually possible to “victory dance”. Instead, experience is spent as it is gained. The exact mechanics of this depend on two separate modes: in auto mode, experience is spent on skills recently used, while in manual mode, finer control is available via the skill screen (m).

As a final reminder, the August tournament has already started! You can visit the Tourney Website for more details, but succinctly: you can play with the console version either on CAO or CDO (“Trunk” on CDO, and “0.9″ on CAO, currently). Webtiles does not currently count towards the tournament, as it needs to be updated to run 0.9. This will be done Soon!

So, pull on your crawling shoes (and knee-cap covers), and get ready for a solid two weeks of frantic adventuring!

Eronarn has provided an excellent summary of major changes in 0.9, so here they are!

• Ashenzari changes. We’ve finally nailed down Ashenzari balance! Most importantly, his passive XP boost has been replaced with a passive skill boost. This boost is based on how bound you are and what types of equipment you have bound – for example, wield a cursed weapon to improve your weapon skills, or wear a cursed ring to improve your magic skills. Other changes are listed in the full changelog.
• Trog changes. The god of rage is also the god of antimagic, and his weapon gifts will now reflect this more prominently. He’ll also punish his followers for daring to even learn magic skills – and Trog forbid that they attempt to make use of them.
• Reduce Berserk speed bonus. Previously, being berserk let you take 2x as many actions. That speed boost has been reduced to 1.5x, bringing it in line with the Haste status effect.
• Implicit butchering. Characters are now assumed to bring a small knife into the dungeon with them. Cursed non-cutting weapons will still prevent them from butchering, but they no longer need to lose an inventory slot or risk throwing their butchery implements.
• Adjust HP rules. Starting characters are now beefier, getting +3 HP across the board. On the other hand, raising Fighting skill now gives less of a boost to HP.
• Rename Crusader to Skald. The Crusader starting book was hit hard by recent changes, and their flavor has always been problematic (as they have nothing to do with crusades or religion). Rather than scrap them completely, elliptic took this opportunity to give them a makeover. They are still focused on improving their fighting prowess with magic, but they have a different starting book and skill levels.
• New spells added. We have our first Hex/Fire spell in Inner Flame, which curses a target to explode upon death. Larger targets may make for better fireworks! Shroud of Golubria, which appears in the Skald and Warper books, provides a barrier that will completely protect against some melee attacks. Any attack has a chance to tear right through the barrier, which will end the spell, but stronger attacks are far more likely to do so.
• Major modifications to Tornado. The funnel cloud will take some time to spin up to its full size, and it cannot be cast multiple times in a row because of lingering turbulence. However, those caught in its winds will now be flung about wildly.
• Old spells removed. Teleport Self, Berserker Rage, Resist Poison are no longer player-castable spells.
• New monsters: The Lair is now home to basilisks, fearsome lizards that petrify with their gaze. They aren’t the only new beast to come out of the stonework, though. Thanks to Wensley, the deeper regions of the Lair may contain catoblepae. They are slow, but you’ll be slower than them soon if you can’t avoid their clouds of petrifying dust!
• New unique: Ignacio, a powerful Executioner who remembered to bring his axe.
• Many small balance changes. See the whole changelog for full details!
• Also of note is the experimental release of a new game mode, Zot Defence. Those of you who played it on CAO/CDO should note that it has received significant changes since its debut; however, it should still be regarded as a work in progress.

From May 14th (midnight UTC) through May 30 (midnight UTC), 2011, any version 0.8 game played on CDO or CAO will count towards the tournament.

As with the official tournament, one can join a team, gain banners (or pennants) for various accomplishments, and, most importantly, accrue points for various activities.

All of the details for the tournament can be found here (http://crawl.develz.org/tournament).

Good luck, and good crawling!

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!

You can find the main page for the Crawl code on Gitorious at: <http://gitorious.org/crawl>.

From there, you can see all of the contained repository, begin watching any of them, and see all of the changes represented as a stream; from the repositories, you can clone and begin tracking and pushing changes to these clones.

Therefore, if you’ve been following Crawl development via Git on SourceForge, you’ll need to make some changes in order to switch to tracking Gitorious instead.

For newer versions of Git, you can execute the following command to update your “origin” remote — replacing “origin” with whichever name you use for Crawl’s main remote:

git remote set-url origin git://gitorious.org/crawl/crawl.git

For all other versions of Git, including newer ones, you can use the following command:

git config remote.origin.url git://gitorious.org/crawl/crawl.git

If you have commit access to Gitorious, you should replace git://gitorious.org/crawl/crawl.git with ssh://git@gitorious.org:crawl/crawl.git in all of the above statements.

Our suite of submodules (specifically including Lua, Luajit, sqlite, and so-on) currently still point to SourceForge, however I intend to properly update them to point to the relevant repository on Gitorious.

So, how does this impact Crawl’s external or contributed development procedure?

For simple patches: Currently, our process for submitting patches remains the same: you can still upload them as an attachment to an issue on our Mantis tracker, and these patches will be applied and merged back into the upstream code base as per our previous records.

For larger changes, it is now possible to register for Gitorious and clone our repository there. We currently have no procedures for dealing with merge requests from Gitorious, however, I would recommend that you still open a ticket on Mantis, and provide a link to the merge request on Gitorious along with the ticket.

As usual, if you have any issues, please leave a comment here, or alternately, drop by ##crawl-dev and hopefully someone there can help. Happy crawling!

As a reminder, crawl.akrasiac.org’s official tourney page is here.

We look forward to see you die regularly!

-DCSS Tourney Team, ’10

The calendar rolls once more towards August, and August means the annual Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup Tournament! It will begin at midnight, August 1st (UTC), and continue through until midnight, September 1st (UTC). All Stone Soup version 0.7.0 games started during this period of time, on both crawl.akrasiac.org and crawl.develz.org, will count towards the tournament.

We have several changes from last year’s tournament, including new banners, changes to the scoring system, and much more! You can read all about it on the official tourney page on crawl.akrasiac.org.

This year also introduces the Dungeon Sprint mini-game into the Tournament. Dungeon Sprint, or Sprint, is a variant of Stone Soup created by Chapayev, consisting of a dungeon dramatically reduced in size but increased in difficulty. Sprint games will be counted for the tournament from the 15th of August at midnight (UTC) on both CAO and CDO, and points will be awarded for wins! For more information, check out the tourney page linked above.

As usual, the Tournament will be a fast-paced month of Stone Soup action! Tune in for the blood-shed, tears and the enraged screams of those killed by Sigmund, as well as the joy of snatching the orb, and your first win, from beneath the pulsations of an orb of fire!

The best of luck to you all, we hope you have a great time playing this year.

-The Crawl Development & Tournament 2010 Teams

While there has been a lot of public development on Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, resulting in the massive upsurge of new features in the recent release of 0.6, our Tiles developers, as well as the public server administrators, have been working day and night behind closed doors on a huge wish-list item: the ability to play crawl online, at servers such as crawl.akrasiac.org and crawl.develz.org, but using the Tiles interface instead of ASCII. This is something that a lot of people have been waiting on, and we’re really excited that it’s finally happened!

Public binaries will be released shortly, as we co-ordinate with server administrators for the change-over, and this post will be updated with links as soon as they’re live. For now, here’s a few screenshots of what it looks like, as well as a list of exciting new social media interactions that we hope you’ll enjoy.

Some new features:

• Link your character’s status to your Facebook page, transmit milestones to your Twitter!
• Clickable character images: each click gives you a character point, and for a thousand character points, you can resurrect that character when it dies.
• You can now sell your unwanted or unused items, armour and weapons on eBay and etsy! You can also purchase from other players and import it into your game.

We hope you enjoy this month’s new release, Happy Crawling!

As some devoted players may have noted already, the Divinations school is gone: vanished, disappeared, no traces left. Actually, that’s not quit true, some traces are still there.

But one thing after the other — why did the developers, blessed with their insight and wisdom, remove a whole spell school? The main reason is that some effects are interesting and useful, but should never have been spells. Most former divination spells belong in this category, including: Identify, Detect Curse, Remove Curse, Detect Creatures, Detect Items, Detect Secret Doors, Detect Traps and Magic Mapping.

Here is why:

1. All of these effects are not tactical. That’s the strongest indicator something is wrong with these spells. For example, use outside of battle means that the usual approaches for balancing spells won’t work: the MP cost is irrelevant and, for a slightly contrived example, one could go about casting Magic Mapping by taking off armour and using two rings and a staff of Wizardry.
2. Magic Mapping and Detect Traps are easy to pick up, even for otherwise strict non-casters and extremely useful. Ideal play would demand to get these spells and use them on every level. So not only are these spells inherently unbalancable, they break the game. What’s worse is…
3. Magic Mapping, Identify, Detect Curse, Remove Curse are copies of scroll effects. In other words, the accused spells remove interesting choices. Whereas the scrolls are valuable resources, the spells render them obsolete.
4. Most of the spells were never used; they were only added to provide some flesh for an otherwise barren school.

To be fair, there are other spells that suffer from this affliction: Alter Self is a spell never used tactically and many Conjuration spells have doubles among wands or abilities. Nevertheless, the Divination spells in the dock stand out like sore thumbs, and the verdict was unanimous: eradication.

Luckily, a few spells from the rotten school proved to be better, and they escaped extinction: See Invisible (now Enchantments) is a good way to increase dedicated casters’ flexibility. Forescry (now Phase Shift, a Translocation spell) is the EV counterpart of the various AC boosting spells. These are both of tactical value.

What does that mean for your 0.6 characters?

First, trap detection is now only done by the Traps & Doors skill. Second, scrolls of magic mapping and detect/remove curse are more valuable; although the latter two could still stand to appear less often. There have been some related changes which are worthy of mention: active abilities like levitate, sense surroundings, teleport are no longer potential properties of random artefacts. The reason is similar to 1 above: players should not be encouraged to carry around weapons for purposes which are outside of combat. While the mapping mutation still exists, it now works in a passive manner. Most players will find this to be more convenient. Finally, no form of magic mapping will find secret rooms.

The future

Scrying into the more distant future, there will be a god centered around a divination theme. In a curious deviation from the normal design process, the name is already fixed: Ashenzari, and this god’s powers allow us to fix the bad effects incriminated above. Also, there may come additional consumables to provide ways to Detect Something. The most natural candidates are scrolls and miscellaneous items. However, play-testing with the Divinations school removed, it was quite obvious that the need for such items is not as pressing as one may have thought.

So, stash your crystal balls and rods of divination, and let’s get onto the Great Big List!

A note by the editor: many thanks to David Ploog for providing this piece on the removal of Divinations. Tune in next week for something (hopefully!) on the new Portal Vaults feature in 0.6.

We’ll start at commit 290637fc2afa3, where we left off last week.

Bugs fixed

1. Some mouse slow-down has been resolved by reducing screen redraws.
2. Shaft trails are no longer generated on non-shaft levels.
3. Shopping list toggles now properly clear in-shops, while gold messages fit 80 columns when prices exceed thousands of gold.
4. Melee noise no longer wakes hibernated monsters on the turn that they have been hibernated on.
5. The shopping list symbol is now shown in the stash tracker shop inventories.
6. The screen is updated before delayed god gifts, meaning that messages no longer appear before gifts are actually granted.
7. Yellow draconians no longer have inherit resist corrosion.
8. Trog no longer appreciates kills of non-spellcasting ghosts.
9. Saint Roka now uses his special Messiah speech.
10. Some vaults have been repaired.
11. Tiles: mousing over areas out of sight no longer gives away undetected traps, needle tiles are now transparent instead of white background.
12. Brilliance’s spelling in Troves has been corrected.
13. Merfolk no longer enter water twice while in ice form.
14. Monsters flying over unknown traps and related detection has been fixed.
15. EV is redrawn after wielding weapons of evasion.
16. Weapon inscriptions will now appear in the proper region of the screen in tiles mode, and should no longer cause crashes.
17. The dungeon Lua item wrapper for egos has been fixed, “holy wrath” is now represented as such, instead of “hlywrath”.
18. Ctrl-X should now display Unicode items properly, while Unicode book glyphs are properly encoded in command help.
19. Ziggurat milestones are now generated through epilogue in post-generation hooks; this means that when a Ziggurat level fails to build for whatever reason, it will not generate upward of 35,000 milestones.
20. Shift-targeting Evaporate no longer increases its reduced range, while you are always prompted if you target yourself with it.
21. Bad line-break in the e’x'amine documentation has been fixed.
22. The non-existent Lair branch is properly hidden in the overview, while D:1 is properly reported as being explored fully.
23. The travel cache is now properly initialised before the ‘X’ map is viewed for the first time.
24. Crashes no longer occur if you die to a beam whose thrower is already dead.
25. Tiles no longer redraws as often while resting; this option is configurable using the tile_runrest_rate, and has reduced slowdown in resting.
26. Nessos will now properly fire his bow at people; likewise other spellcasters now have a chance of starting with a range weapon which they will then use.
27. An occasional crash when updating the monster pane with zombies in view has been fixed.
28. Excessive Jiyva piety gain has been improved.
29. Non-ego ponderous armour now uses the ponderous brand tile.
30. An off-by-one error fix for background colouring has been reverted as it caused other weird background colouring issues.
31. Tiles targeting mode performance issues have been fixed.
32. Tiles not running with umlauts in the game path has been resolved.
33. Killer klowns are properly treated as chaotic.
34. Map knowledge is no longer inappropriately filled in the Abyss.
35. Tiles no longer causes a delay on the last step of auto-travel, and beams targeting the player function correctly.
36. Mummy death curses should no longer cause crashes when they kill a moving animal.
37. Jiyva piety gain has been greatly improved.
38. Tiles: it is no longer possible to scum Fulsome Distillation for endless amounts of water potions.
39. Tiles: secret doors should now function properly both for vault-selected tiles as well as normal wall types.

Features changed

1. Pandemonium levels now generate milestones.
2. Current status and full fee are now displayed in relevant places for Trove portals, while the locking message is more explicit.
3. Tiles: new (preliminary) tiles for teleporter vaults, rusted sewer portal.
4. Monster-used shafts are now destroyed, while known shafts are safe for monsters.
5. Butterflies no longer generate corpses.
6. Shopping-listed items are no longer coloured cyan.
7. Necromantic spells are no longer marked as empowered by Kikubaaqudgha.
8. “Wandering” stationary monsters are described as “unaware”.
9. Transmuter ghosts retain Evaporate as Mephitic Cloud.
10. Overview display has been tweaked slightly.
11. Tutorial spacing has been made consistent, and a description has been noted for monsters that do not have any resistances, while information on chunks making you sick has been included.
12. Descriptions are no longer shown if pointing at floor/walls in targeting mode.
13. Friendly monsters will no longer animate corpses that you are butchering, nor will they animate corpses while you are less than satiated.
14. Animate dead now uses specific verbs instead of defaulting to “walking” when animating monsters that do not walk.
15. Tiles: in-flight tiles for the new sling bullet types.
16. Player ghosts speak properly now, instead of using default ghost speech, and they now optionally use speech dependent on their best skill.
17. Smart monsters and natives will walk over unknown shafts without triggering, while stupid monsters will always trigger them, regardless of nativity; low weight monsters have a chance of escaping a shaft.
18. Tiles defaults to using CSET_ASCII instead of IBM.
19. Kraken tentacles are now water-only, and the speed of both kraken and their tentacles have been increased.
20. Scrolls of detect curse now automatically identify, unless you have no items in your inventory.
21. You are now prompted for saving macros when exiting the game, if you have actually changed them; this also applies to dying, quitting or escaping.
22. Milestones are now generated for Labyrinths as well as Bazaars, meaning that all portal vaults generate milestones.
23. Milestones now report the parent level that you entered from properly, thus, “FOO entered BAR (D:1)”, instead of “FOO entered BAR (BAR)”.
24. All efreeti, including Azrael, now have flame trails.
25. slouch no longer affects sleeping monsters.
26. Island and atoll creation algorithms for Shoals have been improved.
27. Tiles: demon pentagrams use a smaller icon in design.
28. Skill training has been improved.
29. Donald is no longer missing speech for Vehumet worshippers.
30. Chaotic, like mindless, is mentioned when examining monsters.
31. Experimentally, demon pentagrams are now coloured differently.
32. Improved tile: hexagonal wall tile.
33. The default low hit-points warning is now 30%, instead of the previous value of 10%.
34. Alter Self now aborts, instead of failing, when your hit-points are too low to cast it.
35. Terrain is now stored in map knowledge, meaning that it is possible to view what terrain is under a current cloud, while clouds are no longer copied to map knowledge; the key ‘|’ can be used to show just the terrain in e’x'amine mode.
36. The credits have been expanded to specifically list some major contributions by past and current community members.
37. New tiles: hive-shaped walls instead of rock walls for the Hive.

Other changes

1. Documentation update: milestones are now used in epilogues, rather than the main Lua code chunk.
2. Documentation for autofight.lua.
3. Documentation has been updated to explain the difference between “any good_item” and “|” symbols.
4. Combination of speech tags for Donald are no longer needed and have been removed.
5. Makefile, debug, and wizard and some code improvements.
6. Documentation: the new aptitudes system is explained further.
7. A variety of placeholders have been added to dngn.png to allow for additions to tiles in 0.6.
8. MONS_GHOST now exists and is the base type for ghosts, instead of MONS_PLAYER_GHOST being the base type for all ghostly creatures.
9. Dynamic monster casts from actor have been replaced by actor::as_monster.
10. New framework for portal debugging using x+”. This queries the “portal_debug” property of a marker, allowing the hooking in of specific debug functions, or simply returning relevant text values.
11. Considerable tweaks to autofight.lua and the mons_info Lua wrapper.
12. LuaJIT 2.x is now included as a submodule for testing purposes, though is currently not used by default.
13. The stash_filter option now only affects the stash searching; filtered items are still stored, but are merely filtered out.
14. There is now a maximum FPS rate limiter for tiles, and documentation about lag issues has been updated with possible solutions.
15. Skill exercise and cross-training checks have been cleaned up and simplified.
16. Casting spell source code has been improved.
17. Dungeon Sprint has now been merged into the main repository.
18. The tiles create guide has been updated.
19. Debug information can now be generated for random monster spawns.
20. Arena monster vetoing for Abyss monsters has been fixed.
21. Major version has been increased to avoid compatibility issues with 0.6 saves.
22. The identified/type check for dungeon Lua items has been improved.

That’s us up-to-date at commit 1696ef06816e705! Tune in next week for another big list, and, as mentioned above, hopefully something on recent additions to the realms of Portal Vaults.

Tune in next week for a piece discussing the recent removal of the Divinations school! We’ll start where we left off last week, at commit b11820d43d9!

Bugs fixed

1. Force shallow water for icy Swamp ending, as azure jellies are not amphibious.
2. Traps no longer trigger when leaving ice form.
3. Troves should now have correct descriptions.
4. Killing fleeing kraken or otherwise disturbing them should no longer cause random crashes.
5. Some relevant vaults have been tagged as no_monster_gen in order to prevent generation of electric eels and so on.
6. Some visibility checks have been simplified and fixed, hopefully fixing issues with monsters smiting through walls, etc.
7. The < and > symbols should now appear properly in the Portal spell prompt.
8. Fedhas’s shoot through neutral plants message now checks player’s line of sight.
9. Use of religion in speech should hopefully be fixed.
10. Shoals tide should be applied after post-processing vault heights, not during initial generation.
11. Runed ammunition now appears as such, and is displayed in the “Quiver” section of the HUD.
12. Acquirement no longer produces orcish animal skins, etc.
13. The tutorial screen will no longer appear when falling out of the characters election screen.
14. Tiles: the “no spells” message will no longer be displayed repeatedly when in the ememorisation tab.
15. The cursor is drawn immediately whene using direction in tiles, preventing instances where it is not actually printed until the cursor is moved.
16. Attacking friends previously did not trigger under some circumstances. This has been resolved.
17. Xom will never say “No, never mind” after a successful acquirement.
18. Memorisable spells will no longer be marked as invalid in Tiles, likewise the memorisation display will not be drawn without memorisable spells.
19. Autoexplore now works after leaving bat form.
20. Drowning checks for unequipping randarts are only run when actually levitating; this prevents merfolk from being unable to unwield randarts with the +Lev property while swimming in deep water.
21. Tiles: inventory mouseover descriptions will now be displayed properly.
22. ‘x’ and mouse-click travel are now usable in the Abyss.
23. Cheibriados will no longer permanently gift merfolk stats, nor permanently deduct them.
24. Several typos in Xom’s description were fixed.
25. Tiles: Messages are now flushed after examination of the level map prompts.
26. Tiles: the net tile is no longer drawn under the player while the player is trapped.
27. Spells can now target active ballistomycetes once more.
28. Firing with the direction keys will no longer give mephitic cloud extra range.
29. For Jiyva worshippers, neutral slimes (such as eyeballs) that previously did not eat items but were given the ENCH_EAT_ITEMS will now actually eat items.
30. Some actions that would kill merfolk due to -stat bonus are prevented.
31. An incorrect tile-name causing occasional crashes has been fixed.
32. The unrandart Vampire’s Tooth now functions halfway between old and new vampiricism brand.
33. Tile offsets are capped at 0 for clouds with negative decays; this prevents them from selecting strange tiles.
34. Known amulets of stasis will no longer allow you to waste blink and teleport scrolls.
35. The shield display value will be updated when the player is disabled, and the colour is changed if the player is actually wearing a shield.
36. Sewers will no longer generate large amounts of gold.
37. Randart amulet of inaccuracy descriptions should be fixed.
38. Thrown branded launcher ammunition no longer cause status effects when thrown at monsters (“hillbilly sting”).
39. Reconverting to Jiyva after abandonment will no longer cause an assert; a timeout is now used for Jiyva’s mutation gifts.
40. Being hit by a warrior statue will no longer cause a crash.
41. Autopickup now functions properly in the Abyss.
42. Sticky flame is no longer put out when hovering above water.
43. Some instances of Troves reporting “compare value to nil” have been fixed.
44. Tiles: Shift/Ctrl + L-Click now properly targets the selected moster, and mouse click targeting now works for Evaporate.
45. Further typo fixes.
46. Tiles: The map is redrawn staright away when setting exclusions with ‘xe’.
47. Tutorial: Sif Muna’s altar is special-cased for non-spellcasters.
48. The ‘%’ symbol is now properly printed and escaped when being displayed, instead of being assumed to be a printf token.
49. Tutorial: A hint to go berserk when low on hit-points is no longer given if the player is already berserk.
50. Experience halving for summon kills, etc, now gives the correct halved value for monsters with low XP values.
51. You will no longer be asked twice if you want to switch weapons when interrupted during butchering.
52. Death’s door no longer prevents winning.
53. Lugonu’s corruption no longer preserves “essential” features, such as altars, but destroys them instead.
54. Only positively enchanted needles are marked as “runed”, instead of all branded needles (and therefore, all needles).
55. Tiles: a segfault on the update of the tiledef files has been fixed.
56. Incorrect message for spells being unmemorisable due to Lichform has been fixed.
57. Long book descriptions should appear correctly in the console version, while ?/ will also display book descriptions.
58. Uniques that are zombifiable are no longer picked as random spawns.
59. Mummy self-restoration now works on rotted HP independent of rotted stats.
60. Stash brand is applied to stationary monsters, such as statues, who are standing on top of loot.
61. Corpse glyphs and corresponding messages are now correct in the tutorial.
62. Tiles: blood and mold are no longer displayed when out of sight, in order to prevent information leak.
63. Draconians and skeletal warriors, etc, now have correct tiles in the Abyss.
64. Clouds are now described when examining surroundings using the ‘x’ command.
65. Tiles tooltips no longer give away the presence of invisible monsters.
66. Distortion unwield effects do not apply to temporarily branded weapons.
67. “Bad” chunks from disintegrated monsters are marked as dropped and are not automatically picked up.
68. Elyvilon’s guaranteed protection from harm during prayer is now guaranteed.
69. Leaving the dungeon during the tutorial no longer prompts twice.
70. CMD_MAP_JUMP and related command keys are now properly and correctly documented.
71. Uniques with specific weapons (Psyche’s chaos branded dagger, Yiuf’s staff, Pikel’s whip, etc) will no longer ditch them for “better” weapons.
72. Duplicate punctuation has been fixed in some feature descriptions.

Features changed

1. Four new books: book of the Dragon, book of Burglary, book of Dreams and book of Chemistry.
2. Troves now report needed item in the overview and full description screens, as well as needed amounts.
3. Potions of magic are less rare, and now come in stacks.
4. Targets of Fedhas’s Evolution get a bonus to their HD propotional to invocations power; oklob plants’ chance of using their acid spit is a function of their HD.
5. Monsters can now use special abilities while out of line of sight of the player.
6. “Glowing” ammunition is now described as “runed” ammunition.
7. New tiles: rune ammunition, silenced grids.
8. Vampiric weapons no longer cause hunger over time.
9. Randart launchers no longer get the evasion brand.
10. Joseph now uses slings with enchanted ammunition.
11. Skeleton depths have been fixed, and OOD generation on Dungeon:2 has been reduced.
12. Bone shards has had a significant buff.
13. The summoning of hostile vapours with the Foxfire card generates a warning.
14. Silver only hurts corporeal undead, as opposed to incorporeal; it also affects highly mutated players, though it doesn’t take racial mutations into consideration unless the player in question is a demonspawn; silver no longer cares about monsters of players who worship chaotic gods, hwoever, Zin still does.
15. Frederick’s speech and description have been overhauled.
16. Tiles: new tab tiles and icons for spellcasting, etc.
17. Rock is more predominantly used in Shoals generation, using stone outcroppings merely for high points.
18. Tiles: while switching tabs, the name of the new mode is now displayed in the text tag.
19. Fedhash’s Growth ability now has a visualisation of what order plants will be placed in, including priority numbering for tiles.
20. Player ghosts no longer get bonus HP from transformations or berserk statuses they may have had when dying.
21. Dowan and Duvessa now pacify as a pair; they also have different speech for when one of them has been killed by the other (enslavement, confusion, etc).
22. Wayne’s flavour has been improved in both speech and description, using a Glaswegian accent instead of the previous faux Scots.
23. “There is nearby!” has been changed to ” is nearby!”. Appropriate for “there is a giant bat nearby”, but inappropriate for “there is edmund nearby”.
24. Tiles: new tooltip for disarming adjacent mechanical traps; altars, stairs and gates, shops and fountains, and known shaft traps are now no longer overlaid with blood or mold; mold now has tiles.
25. Tiles: Shift-L-Click on the minimap is now a shortcut for autoexplore.
26. Forbidden or dangerous spells are now marked as such in the description of the spell.
27. New tiles: chests, currently unused, the “wounded” HP bar is now coloured darkred instead of black.
28. Labyrinth entrance description now notes its shifting walls.
29. Message colourings are gone from food_colouring.txt, meaning that some unrelated messages will no longer be coloured as food.
30. Fedhas worshippers now have a message when their food is protected from spore destruction; likewise, the “evolves to an oklob” message has been improved”.
31. “You must be new here” no longer appears in the character choice menu.
32. Ctrl+L-click spellcasting behaviour now uses ‘Z’ (force) behaviour instead of ‘z’ (fail when no enemy present) behaviour.
33. Tiles: chunk brand tiles have been improved, new icon for rotten corpses, which will be displayed if the player is non-saprovorous.
34. Wielding a cursed weapon triggers the tutorial curse message.
35. Exclusions centred on doors are annotated as such.
36. Fedhas’s Growth method has been improved, and given more detailed messages when it doesn’t work; it also no longer reacts to invisible monsters.
37. For Fedhas worshippers, piety loss is no longer so great for fungal colonies dying; this is unlikely to occur in any event.
38. Hunger per turn is no longer proportional to time taken during that turn; this means that fast races no longer gain less hunger, and slow races no longer gain extra hunger.
39. Iskenderun’s Orb of Destruction’s damage has been reduced when at close range, and its accuracy is now tied to spell pwoer.
40. Clouds’ exclusion radii now depend on cloud type.
41. In inventory prompts, “?” and “Esc” commands are now listed for menu access and quitting.
42. Scrolls of enchant weapon now mention that they affect wielded weapon, rather than a weapon contained in the inventory.
43. Robe of the Archmagi description has been improved to reflect EXP loss.
44. New tile: stealth brand, “strange machine”, shark tile cleanup.
45. There are now safe-guards that make killing oneself with crystal balls harder.
46. Monsters now reveal Zot traps which they trigger.
47. Moderate OOD level fuzz has been reduced to +5 from +7.
48. Mara, as a demonic creature, is no longer silencable.
49. New tile: Wizard Laboratory portal vaults.
50. Vehumet’s altar is no longer described as “shining”, in order to avoid conflict with The Shining One’s.
51. New tile: the Abyss portal tile backgrond is now sky blue, making it more noticeable.
52. You can now set and remove travel exclusions with the e’x'amine option, using ‘e’.
53. New vaults: bazaars, Hive:2, bailey map, ossuary, and sewers.
54. Improved monster descriptions.
55. Improved speech in the Cigotuvi WizLab.
56. Fedhas’s Reproduction ability now indicates on the screen where spores will be placed before generating them.
57. Monster weights, sizes, zombie and corpses havebeen tweaked.
58. Pandemonium Lord level messages are now made following generation, rather than before.
59. Ilsuiw is no longer considered a natural leader of her party, nor are other boss merfolk.
60. Pathfinding has been cleaned up, meaning that monsters should no longer hide behind trees if there is no shorter route towards the player.
61. Artefact weapons now always have one other non-brand property.
62. Tiles: Ctrl+Shift is now a synonym for Alt in mouseclick combinations.
63. Tutorial now gives information on how to zap wands.
64. Shoals no longer places aquatic monsters, bringing its total experience up in line with that of the Snake Pit.
65. Portal vault milestones and welcome messages now use Lua epilogues, meaning that milestones will no longer be generated by the thousands every time a vault (such as a Ziggurat) fails to build.
66. Bazaars now generate milestones.
67. Players can now browse “risky” spell books, while power, range and food cost are shown when viewing descriptions.
68. Tiles: giant new tile is now a lighter shade of gray, making it stand out from the dungeon floor; crocodile shadow has been tweaked, new alligator and baby alligator tiles, Tukima’s strange machine, more variants for Makhleb’s altars, inky waves for kraken’s ink clouds, Cigotuvi’s Monster.
69. Tiles: Jiyva’s altar now jiggles, runed steel and silver ammunition.
70. Ossuary portals are now coloured brown to differentiate from shops.
71. Unseen altars are no longer displayed in character dumps or morgues.
72. Tile: new tile for lichform/necromutated players.
73. New messages mentioning the disappearance of the previous portal and the fact that the walls shift are now printed in Labyrinths.
74. Tile: new design for the Cheibriados altar, now with a clock as well as a turtle

Other changes

1. The Lua monster wrappers have been extended for debug purposes.
2. Wizard mode created items now properly gain cosmetic flags.
3. dgn.cloud_at wrapper, returning a string value for the relevant cloud, or none otherwise.
4. mons_is_insubstantial has been refactored into an actor function.
5. Monster death effects now exist in their own file.
6. Shop help is now printed on a separate line.
7. Alternate (system, shipped, etc) fonts are stipulated using #define.
8. Documentation updates (release, monster speech, etc.)
9. Crawl will kill itself within 10 seconds of seeing a SIGHUP, if it does not otherwise respond.
10. Lua maps now support “epilogue” Lua chunks, run after the generation of the Dungeon, allowing for messages to be displayed (and the more() command to be called) after the screen is updated with the new level, rather than before.
11. Use “sqldbm.h” instead of <sqldbm.h>, as it’s a local header file.
12. The tutoriial’s hardcoded options have been changed, and a lot of information in it has been updated; secret doors on the first level in the tutorial have also been made unsecret.
13. The MinGW rltiles makefile has been removed, rltiles now properly generates dependency files, and the tiledef files are only updated if changed.
14. The lua cache is regenerated whenever the executable is rebuilt.
15. test_lua_boolchunk now reports errors for the proper lua chunk.
16. player::{water,lava}_in_sigh functions have been removed.
17. Wizard-mode identify adds autoinscriptions for randarts, wizmode &o+ always turn mundane items into artefacts.
18. New manual section for autoinscription abbreviations.
19. Dependencies should now work for files in subdirectories.
20. The rltiles makefile has been improved.
21. The xcode project has been fixed.
22. Skill aptititudes are now on a logarithmic scale, where 0 is the default “average”, a positive integer is good, and a negative integer is bad.
23. For dgamelaunch builds, timestamps are recorded every 100 turns to a .ts file in the morgue directory.
24. Wizmode portal descriptions (&P) are now correct.
25. Large amounts of documentation updates.

And that’s us mostly up-to-date at commit 290637fc2afa3! Please remember that this applies specifically to trunk. Not all of these changes have been cherry-picked into the 0.6 branch and are therefore not live on crawl.develz.org. You can find current builds of both trunk and the 0.6 branch on the trunk page and its archive.

Good luck and good play-testing!

This week we’re going to take a few minutes to discuss those things rather than focusing on a specific set of changes.

We’ll get the negatives over and done with first: crawl.develz.org will now be hosting 0.6 branch binaries and serving 0.6 via secure shell and telnet until 0.6 is officially released (hopefully, shortly). This means that you won’t be able to playing bleeding edge, up-to-date trunk at all the usual places.

That’s not much of a negative, is it? And there are so many more positives: this means that the next stable release of DCSS, namely 0.6, will be released relatively soon! Hooray! All of the things that you’ve been reading about on the blog will be in it, as will a large amount of the commits mentioned in the posts over the coming weeks. It does mean that we have a large amount of testing and balancing left to do and this is where you, the faithful reader, come in!

You can read about current 0.6 targets that we’ve been polishing and testing here. The easiest way to contribute to this process is simply to play the game and comment on any issues (bugs, balance and so on) that you might encounter.

The easiest way to comment would be to reply to this post. For bugs, however, please file an issue on our Mantis tracker; you can also post comments to the crawl-ref-discuss mailing list, open feature requests (also on the Mantis tracker) or tell us directly via IRC (##crawl-dev on freenode). Good play-testing and good luck!

And now, onto The Great Big List, starting at commit cf82e8e8ec.

Bugs fixed

1. The Lernaean Hydra’s multiheaded attack has been restored, as has its ability to target multiple foes in one round.
2. Further references to Shoal:X have been replaced by references to Shoals:X, hopefully removing the last of these strange bugs.
3. A bug with the Message Window clearing the screen after –more– prompts has been fixed, removing a crash in the Arena.
4. Trees and plants now block opacity, meaning that monsters will attempt to pathfind around them instead of just standing there watching you.
5. Unique maps are now tagged as “transparent”, meaning that these creatures can be placed in “encompass” maps (such as the pre-generated Vaults, Tomb, Vestibule of Hell and so-on).
6. Active armour training is now 1.5 per successful attempt, instead of the previous 1 per successful attempt as caused by the light/heavy distinction removal.
7. Shallow water transparency rendering on some platforms with improper OpenGL support now functions properly; the previous functionality (manually-drawn transparency, “player sliced in half with a laser”) is currently default, but the new functionality can be enabled with “tile_better_transparency”.
8. Merfolk aquamancers will no longer fire icicles through like-attitude monsters.
9. A rare crash in acquirement code (a misplaced parenthesis) has been fixed.
10. Large clusters of uniques should no longer be as common, as the chances of placing another unique reduce sharply after three have been placed.
11. Tiles: Crashes on secret doors with overridden tiles should no longer occur. Secret doors should also correctly take a variant tile from nearby neighbours; this removes the previous “last_tile” hack.
12. Artefact amulets of Stasis also prevent teleportation properly, while these artefacts will not come with properties involving teleportation or blinking.
13. Messages reported on the turn before death will properly show up in the morgue and character logs.
14. Tracers will no longer continue past features that their beams cannot destroy, meaning that monsters will no longer attempt to target the player through trees.
15. Hopefully, all of the INVALID BEAM messages have been resolved; instances of this happening in messages involving Smite have been removed, while ghosts should have proper spellcasting flags meaning that they no longer “throw energy” but actually cast spells; finally, vapours should no longer generated INVALID messages.
16. _finalise_tile calling feat_is_ for out-of-bounds cells should be fixed, no longer causing a crash at map edges.
17. Apportation and other beam spells no longer mentioned “transparent wall” (a holdover from when there were no trees).
18. Vampires of sufficient EXP now have the bottle blood ability displayed at all times in the Ability screen, not just when there are available corpses.
19. Macros maps will no longer expand exponentially until they contain all sequences and subsequences of keys entered by the player in a session.
20. Fedhas’s Evolution ability now prioritises low count stacks of food over high count stacks of fruit.
21. Blessed blades are no longer even considered for acquirement purposes, as they only way to get these is via the worship of the Shining One; this means that long blade acquirement (specifically, acquirement via Trog and Okawaru) should actually generate long blades.
22. If two Lair branches have already been discovered, the third (and not generated) will not be displayed on the overview; finally, Hell portals begin showing up on D:21, not D:20.
23. Friendly monsters will no longer cast Dig at the player, fixing messages such as “Your Cacodemon gestures at you.”.
24. Friendly monsters will no longer attempt to cast emergency spells that are targeted (such as teleport other, blink other) on the player when at low health.
25. Finally, friendly monsters will no longer cast self-enchantments on the player.
26. Gourmand is marked as useful for non-full saprovores, and is marked as useful for ghouls (as it provides “instant rotting” of chunks).
27. The aptitude table width has been increased, allowing proper highlighting of aptitudes to work.
28. Monster casting targets now default to “something” instead of “nothing”, preventing weird messages.
29. Tracers no longer give away unidentified exploding missiles.
30. Clouds in the Cloud Mage Wizard Laboratory no longer break rest.
31. Friendly monsters will now use the player’s genus for relation checks, instead of their foe.
32. Manually specified grid colours will be visible once returning to a targeting prompt.
33. Confused monsters will properly zap wands in random directions, instead of always at themselves or the player.
34. Kikubaquudgha’s Weapon Blessing is now properly noted on the ^ screen.
35. Monster speech now functions properly in the Dungeon; previously, “Dungeon” was not being considered a branch prefix, meaning that only monsters whose entries contained this prefix (currently none) would speak.
36. Creation of randart books no longer causes a crash due to increasing the maximum size of CrawlVector.
37. Identification of the Singing Sword now functions properly, giving the “Hi, I’m the Singing Sword!” message.
38. Erica no longer gives misleading statements about drinking potions; this line has been removed from her speech.
39. Unique vaults that are transparent will now be placed with regard for terrain; this prevents amphibious uniques from being placed in the middle of nowhere in levels such as the Shoals.
40. Cheibriados worshippers will no longer get permanent stat loss when having their equipment melded.
41. Cursed randart items should colour properly.
42. Unmemorisable spells are now properly grayed out in the memorisation screen.
43. A missing separator in the jewellery database meant that items could have names such as “jewellery appearance”. This is no longer the case.
44. Rod descriptions now indicate that they no longer require attachment to the player in order to recharge.
45. Clearing the map now properly clears tiles that have been overridden in vaults, as well as secret doors.

Changed features

1. Giant spores now leave trails of squares “mold covered”, while ballistomycetes now only give experience when you kill the last one on the level. The trails of spores will also lead to other ballistomycetes and giant spores, while the activation of a ballistomycte by killing another will temporarily highlight the section of spore trail that leads to the activated one in red.
2. New tiles: dead trees (used in the Zonguldrok WizLab), mirrored wall (used in the Tukima WizLab).
3. Shoals now uses better flood filling when deepening water, this should prevent rectangular shapes of water at low tide.
4. Out-of-depth monster generations that would normally result in a band now instead generate as a single monster, unless a large period of time has elapsed (1.4k – 117 * depth turns spent on a level); this means that instead of generating out of depth yak packs, you will get a single yak, and so on.
5. Tiles: the player doll hair tiles have been adjusted slightly.
6. Fulsome Distillation now aborts without cost if there are no available corpses for distillation, while menu colours are used for colouring corpses listed during Fulsome Distillation prompts.
7. Fedhas’s Reproduction ability now gives a message indicating why spore production failed, instead of “nothing happens”, while worshippers of Fedhas will be given a message indicating why they can’t walk through trees.
8. Some Liches (including Boris) now have the spell Iskenderun’s Orb of Destruction.
9. Xom is less likely to polymorph plants, as the generation of these has been increased in the Lair of the Beasts and Shoals branches.
10. Amulet of Stasis now functions consistently with ARTP_PREVENT_TELEPORTATION (-Tele artefacts).
11. Fedhas now uses the “circles” version of the Oklob retribution more often, allowing circles of oklobs to be created as small as radius four around the player.
12. Fedhas now appreciates your contribution to the ecosystem upon death.
13. Iskenderun’s Orb of Destruction initial move has been randomised, removing guaranteed range for instant damage, while it now causes noise upon hit.
14. Trapdoor spiders are now in line with other submergers, while functionality for kraken submerging has been removed, as these no longer submerge.
15. Khufu is now silenceable, meaning that monsters who are and are not affected by silence can now be determined by glyph.
16. Fedhas now only dislikes Necromantic magic that affects corpses and chunks. These include Sublimation of Blood, Animate Dead, and so-on.
17. Labyrinth outer walls are now permarock, helping to clear up the confusion with metal.
18. Player ghosts can now be marked as worshippers of Fedhas once more, as the necromantic conduct does not care about the incorporeal undead.
19. Depths for undiscovered branches are now indicated on the overview screen.
20. Exclusions are now annotated based on map knowledge, rather than the actual monsters present.
21. (Neutral) Ballistomycetes no longer activate for Fedhas worshippers, while friendly giant spores will create friendly ballistomycets; finally, hostile ballistomycetes will show up in the monster list and stop travel.
22. Ogre hunters start with a club instead of a hand-axe, but also have a knife for butchering purposes.
23. Vampires’ ability to bottle blood from corpses is now activated as an ‘a’bility instead of using the ‘c’ command, while corpses are now a valid choice for the ‘q’ menu (when accessing the entire inventory with *).
24. Xom’s Snakes to Sticks effect is more common.
25. Out of range squares are now marked as such during targeting.
26. Reflected Orbs of Destruction no longer have a free move, while they are no longer attacked by monsters and are immune to damage; it will currently start as being off-direction when launched, and will then attempt to correct itself and home in on the target; they will also steer when necessary, instead of just when badly off course.
27. Cheibriados now supports Ponderous armour by granting stat boosts as well as resistances.
28. Hellfire no longer respects AC, but the overall damage has been reduced as much as having 15 AC previously would have; this removes discrepancy between EV and AC in that regard.
29. Guardian Spirit documentation has been updated: it no longer prevents “internal damage”, such as poisons, casting cost of Pain.
30. Fedhas’ Evolution ability now grows ballistomycetes from mouldy squares, while a message is given if the user attempts to evolve trees; experience is also given if a player’s ally destroys the last ballistomycete on a level.
31. Spore creation chains (created by a giant spore (created by an active ballistomycete), and so on) have been removed.
32. Fedhas’ Decomposition ability will no longer cause a piety loss by causing toadstools to grow in squares that have harmful clouds on them; toadstools will no longer generate on these squares.
33. Amulet of Inaccuracy now affects the casting of Iskenderun’s Orb of Destruction.
34. With the introduction of Iskenderun’s Orb of Destruction into the Lich spellbook (IV), Frederick now has his own spell book, as does Boris.
35. Silver now hurts the player according to player_is_shapechanged, and how mutated they are.
36. The unrand Serpent Scourge is now made of the hides of black mambas, who are poisonous, instead of anacondas, who are not.
37. i_feel_safe now takes into consideration monsters that are exposed in deep water (“~”) and will no longer attempt to auto-explore you next to them.
38. You can no longer worship Sif Muna if you do not know any spells.
39. Lemuel’s fog machine vaults (involving dangerous clouds) now include auto-explore stoppers (statues repurposed for this), while the “rotting” minivault has a warning-inscribed door to prevent auto-opening.
40. Cheibriados’s Ponderousify ability will never failure, and no longer has an MP cost; it still retains the piety cost.
41. Troves now have two mechanisms of tolling the player: the first is the original fee, during which the portal may time out; the second is a two-part quest: you can “lock” the portal for a small fee, but then the portal will require a magical item (or items) to open properly. These items can include consumables (stacks of potions), randarts found in shops, and so-on.
42. Tide levels in the Shoals will be the same across multiple levels; if it is high tide on one level, it is high tide on all levels, and so-on.
43. Due to carrying capacity changes, the weight of large stones has been increased once more; this reverts the previous decrease in weight.
44. “was cursed” messages are no longer generated on items that the player saw being cursed, and are cleared when items are fully identified.
45. Cheibriados’s Ponderousify ability now converts items to randarts, and his ponderous property is now a randart property; the -2 EV penalty for each ponderous item worn has also been removed.
46. Spells are now coloured in the memorisation, ‘I’ and Z/z? screens; these colours are according to usefulness (darkgrey for useless), religious obligations (red for spells forbidden by your god), and so-on.
47. Kikubaquudgha’s necromancy miscast protection is now noted on the ^ screen.
48. Duane, Edmund and Frances have had their descriptions, speech and other flavour overhauled; Duane is now an experienced guard, Edmund is Sigmund’s jealous younger and less talented brother, while Frances is a warrior who defeated a Pandemonium Lord and took over its realm and demons.
49. Ice Cave entries have been improved.
50. Murray is now placed in 1 out of 8 Vestibules of Hell, and is directly placed using the vault syntax for that map, rather than using the unique placement system.
51. Wayne has been buffed and is now a dwarven priest of Okawaru, with the spells Might and Haste; he also comes with all-dwarven gear. His speech and flavour have been improved.
52. Tiles: tile_force_overlay option, allowing the message window to forcefully be overlayed over the play area, meaning that this can be larger.
53. Cheibriados gives extra piety in some instances. See commit 4507799433cbc6e1f2f.
54. Shoals tides occasionally washes blood off features.
55. If the player knows Evaporate, the list of clouds that the various potions can created are included in their descriptions.
56. Tiles: the inventory screen now has visual tabs, allowing you to switch between the inventory, spells, and memorisation screens.
57. New tiles: Fedhas altar, silver and steel darts.

Other tweaks

1. A confusing comment for the Lua absdepth wrapper has been changed.
2. Monsters are now removed from the mgrd before firing the death Lua event.
3. Place-population script now properly reports shapeshifters and hydrae; uniques can be grouped using the -groupuniques option.
4. FAQ2html.pl scripts converts the plaintext FAQ into a HTML version.
5. Further issues with stdarg(h) causing crashes on long messages with make_printf have been hopefully resolved for the last time.
6. Instances of “targetted” and “targetting” have been renamed to “targeted” and “targeting”, respectively.
7. The targeting help screen (x?) has been overhauled.
8. The message window system now supports “temporary” messages that will be removed from both the screen and the message history when scrolling away.
9. Indications of mimic and dancing weapon status for the dLua monster wrapper.
10. rltiles now has a tile_ _basetile function that returns the root tile of a variant (or non-variant) tile; for example, a tile passed that is TILE_WALL_NORMAL+3 will return TILE_WALL_NORMAL.
11. Place-population now groups mimics, dancing weapons and very ugly things.
12. mons_cast_noise has been split up, removing UNSEEN_BEAM.
13. Beams whose names were “0″ have been removed; the beam code has been cleaned up, meaning that demonics who cast smite no longer have it considered a “visible” beam. Visibility is instead tracked via the “visible” method of the bolt structure.
14. you.your_level has been renamed to you.absdepth0.
15. Auto-generated artefact files have been removed from the repository.
16. “base_type”, “ego_type”, “sub_type”, and “artefact_name” wrappers for dLua. For a “+0 short sword of Trog {flaming}” for example, they will respectively return “weapon”, “flaming”, “short sword”, “short sword of Trog”.
17. melee_attack has been split from fight.h, meaning that this no longer includes artefact.h and reduces dependencies.

And that’s us, up-to-date at commit b11820d43d9! Tune in next week for more!

Our current developmental release seeks to relieve some of the monotony with two of these packs: slime creatures and ugly things.

Slime creatures

Slime creatures, a common sight in multiple branches (you might find them camped out in the Swamp, or perhaps huddled in the corner of a room in the Vaults), now combined form larger and larger slime creatures. Two slime creatures combined form a “large slime creature”, three a “very large slime creature”, and so on^*. As their size increases, so also do their various statistics: damage is combined, as are hit-points. Thankfully, as these increase, so does the experience granted by them upon death.

So, when do slime creatures merge? If you’re fighting them in a corridor (a common trick for fighting multiple slime creatures in older versions of crawl), you can expect them to merge immediately. If you’re otherwise surrounded, or the closest position is already filled by a slime creature, they’ll merge. Occasionally, if you are positioned diagonally away from a group, they’ll merge.

There are also a few circumstances under which they’ll unmerge: if you leave them to wander around on their own, they’ll eventually become bored and split up. If the closest move to you is an empty space, there’s a chance that they’ll unmerge. In practice, if you’re fighting a merged slime creature and there is an adjacent space that is free, they will likely unmerge.

A few tips: don’t fight them in corridors and try not to fight them once they’ve merged, as they’ll most probably be doing much more damage than multiple single slime creatures would. Thankfully, merged slime creatures are easy to spot: they’re coloured a light green, as opposed to the dark green of the unmerged.

Ugly and very ugly things

Another “boring” feature of the Dungeon are packs of ugly things. No longer a boring variety of brown ‘u’ – these now come in a rainbow of colours. Indeed, the colour of each one defines its flavour. Their type of attack is also randomised: some ugly things may bite you, others may headbutt and others still may slap you with tentacles!

Let’s take a quick look at the various colours and the “flavour” associated with them:

Very ugly things are similarly coloured, though their colour is visually the lighter version (light red instead of red; yellow instead of brown; etc). Some of their attacks are likewise “upgraded”:

However, their colours aren’t the only thing that makes them interesting – and they are not static! Packs of ugly things work off each other in interesting ways and if you allow several to follow you around, you’ll notice a variety of messages like “The ugly thing basks in the mutagenic glow of its kin!”. One of the most visually unique change is that of an entire band slowly changes colour, until all are the same. It’s like being chased by a rainbow!

Finally, there are a few minor things to note: Ugly things are no longer polymorphable. Instead, trying to do so will cause its colour to change. Also, their corpses are no longer “contaminated” but guaranteed to be “mutagenic”. Be careful with lunch or you might find yourself changing into an ugly thing!

And now, onto the Big List! We’ll start at commit 891a5325e8, where we left off last week:

Bugs fixed

1. Mara will no longer clone hostile clones of himself.
2. Some instances of items being visible in deep water or lava for non-merfolk have been fixed; gods will no longer gift items while over deep water or lava, and they will no longer accept sacrifices from items in lava, or under deep water (unless you are a merfolk).
3. Auto-explore no longer causes the player to travel into deep water while in ice form; this is similar to auto-explore not taking the player over deep water while levitating, and so on.
4. Bogus “your shield/armour blocks your attack” messages should be gone.
5. Shop items are no longer examinable via ‘x’ look around and auto-explore.
6. Fedhas’s Evolution ability no longer continues even if the player cancels, and targets correctly (instead of targeting a previously-targeted monster, it will always target plants).
7. Potion of Blood acquirement now uses the correct quantity, instead of having it overwritten by another part of the function.
8. Monsters killed using Cheibriados’s Slouch ability are now attributed to the player.
9. Tiles: unknown mimics are now displayed properly, while known mimics are now described as such; health bars are no longer displayed for unknown mimics.
10. Non-adjacent mimics are now safe for resting and travel.
11. Multiple mimics are no longer grouped together as “piles of gold”.
12. Unknown mimics are no longer stabbable during auto-explore and auto-pickup.
13. Missiles are now identified before the first throw, instead of after; this means that monsters will no longer throw a “glowing” missile one turn, and then a “” missile the next turn; the “glowing” status remains until pluses are identified.
14. Monster’s LOS is now initialised and updated correctly, hopefully resolving issues where giant eyes can paralyse even when they cannot see the player, priests being able to smite the player without line of sight, etc.
15. Ziggurats now generate properly. An error where an instance of “Shoal” had not been corrected to “Shoals” that prevented the proper generation of a Ziggurat level also created some thirty-eight thousand Ziggurat entry milestones.
16. Travel issues, slow-down and information leak caused by recent changes to mimics has been resolved.
17. Feature list glyphs on the X map are now coloured correctly: this means that monsters standing on stairs (in map knowledge) will no longer mark them as grey, and so on.
18. Melded armour and shields will no longer block attacks.
19. Permanent bazaars now have a long description that can be viewed using the “xv” combination.
20. Extraneous periods have been removed from the monster description prompt; monsters exposed via water and clouds are now represented properly.
21. Amphibious monsters will no longer submerge themselves under the floor.
22. For players with claws or claw mutations that are wearing gloves, butchery will prefer to swap to a weapon instead of removing the gloves and then wearing them again.
23. Crashes when attempting to examine Ziggurats on shopping lists should hopefully no longer occur.

Features changed

1. Only unidentified items are marked as “was cursed” when reading Remove Curse or casting the spell.
2. Only 1/3 of plain merfolk are given throwing spears, instead of 2/3.
3. Merfolk aquamancers will no longer push the player back into hostile terrain: this will prevent them from drowning the player in deep water, or incinerating them in lava.
4. Armour and dodging training are no longer linked to “heavy” or “light” armour. Please see this commit for more information.
5. Tiles: the old giant lizard (and current crocodile) tile has been recoloured to better match its current purpose.
6. Ozocubu’s Armour no longer works with elven heavy armours; light armour is now considered to be evasion penalty of less than two.
7. Yredelemnul’s gifts now follow down stair cases even if they aren’t adjacent. This means that micromanaging zombies is no longer required in order to let stair-using allies follow.
8. Tiles: new slime creature tiles (titanic and very large), meaning that there are now tiles for each level of slime creature merge status.
9. Tiles: a variety of new and adjusted tiles for the Wizard Laboratories, and a variety of changes made to these maps.
10. Tiles: temporary fix for overridden door tiles causing a segfault when opened.
11. Vault depths have been updated to reflect the fact that the Lair of the Beasts no longer has ten levels, but eight.
12. Tiles: new tiles for entrances to Ice Cave, Sewer.
13. Glyphs in the feature list of the ‘X’ map are now sorted: this means that shaft traps will no longer be included with stairs.
14. Tiles: demons now have pentagram indicators instead of numerical indicators of tier.
15. Gates to Pandemonium no longer occur in the Abyss.
16. Further tweaks to the message window changes: more shortcutting works properly now.
17. Tiles: new tile for Fedhas’s altar (may change).
18. The “Control Teleport” spell now reports “CTele” as a status, similar to Invisibility and Confusing Touch.
19. Tiles: coloured variations now exist for glass, metal walls.
20. Creatures now submerge differently; trapdoor spiders use the same submerging rules as before, but other monsters will only submerge if there isn’t a nearby attack target; crocodiles and sea snakes now submerge.
21. The message window leading dashes have been replaced by leading underscores; one type of more prompt (the simplified “+”, for example) will no longer cause another type of more prompt (such as “-more-”).
22. The Orb of Zot, various runes, and the unused Horn of Geryon are no longer sacrificeable.
23. Tiles: there’s now a loading screen that indicates that things are actually happening, instead of the splash screen just “locking up” while the game parses maps and databases, etc.
24. Tiles: new tiles for potions of agility and potions of brilliance.
25. Wayne is now dwarven, and therefore now has dwarven equipment.
26. Gaining levels no longer generates a variety of “-more-” prompts via code, but instead via the “force_more_message” option in the main settings file.
27. Draconians’ scale colour changes are now caught properly by the “force_more_message”s.
28. For testing purposes, a Jiyva altar is now guaranteed at the Slime entrance.
29. The help screen (“?”) is now identified in a message when starting the game; this will hopefully make it more accessible.
30. The “small more” (“+”) is now an option: setting small_more=false will use “-more-” instead. This defaults to true.
31. Short messages are now optionally joined together to form one long line. This is toggled using the option “msg_condense_short”, which currently defaults to true; joining punctuation is always light grey.
32. The spell controlled blink is now only slightly louder than uncontrolled blink.
33. Vaults: new vaults by Minmay (minivaults, temple entrances and actual temple maps).
34. Targeting now describes monster status, enchantments, and so-on.
35. Tile: new orb guardian tile, replacing the old jelly baby-esque orb guardian tile.
36. Experimentally, Jiyva and Ely now use the piety pool instead of directly giving piety to the player for large piety gains. This piety is then handed to the player slowly over a period of time.
37. Silence has been nerfed: it now has a variable range that decreases with duration.
38. Monster EXP has been tweaked again to better reflect difficulty.

Other changes

1. Subvaults now validate with everything else when using the validate Lua prelude.
2. The Microsoft Visual C++ project has been updated and should function properly for compilation.
3. Features converted to floor no longer re-use the existing feature override tile as provided by Lua.
4. New auto-pickup check hook: ch_deny_autopickup, and autopick_exceptions.txt now uses it.
5. Tiles: tweaks have been made to how the doll files work, new tiles have been added, etc.
6. New “veto” type for vault features: “veto_fire” prevents fire from melting wax and from setting trees on fire. It also prevents fire from spreading to these cells.
7. Vaults can mark areas as “no_submerge” using the relevant KPROP. This prevents submerging monsters from submerging in this area.
8. There is now a hard cap of 200 million turns in the game. This prevents time-wrapping.
9. The stash tracker no longer uses a separate versioning system to the rest of the game.
10. New Lua wrapper for monster_info that provides a description; ch_mons_is_safe now passes and receives monster_info objects, instead of actual monsters.
11. mini.des has been split into three files: mini.des, mini_monsters.des, mini_features.des.
12. SAFE_EXPLORE is no longer a compile-time option, but the default.
13. The information for updating the website when making a release is now included in the release documentation file.

And that’s us up-to-date at commit cf82e8e8ec! Tune in next week for more!

If you’ve played an ASCII build of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup recently, you might’ve noticed that some monsters have had a makeover recently. If you play tiles, then you might also have noticed a new addition to the tiles of imps, devils and other demons. We’re going to take a short moment to discuss some of the changes.

Insects and spiders

The most noticeable change is that the two large insect families of bees and ants have been standardised. Instead of using multiple glyphs, one for larvae, one for normal monsters, and one for “queen” monsters, we now use the same glyph and scale colour instead.

For bees:

For ants:

In order to remove confusion with ants and cockroaches, we’ve also moved giant cockroaches from the a glyph, onto the s glyph, where they join spiders, giant centipedes, scorpions, and giant mites. This means that ants are purely on a, and bees purely on k. To compensate for the fact that this move (without a colour change for giant cockroaches) would result in three “brown” s monsters, the following changes have been made:

Minotaurs and demonic creatures

Part of our glyph changes have been aimed towards consolidating monsters that are alone on a glyph onto another, more suitable glyph. This means that we have space for expansion, the creation of new types of monsters, etc, without having to pout them on a glyph that doesn’t necessary suit them. As such, we’ve moved minotaurs off t and onto H, to reflect their hybrid state, and efreets from E and onto R, with Rakshasas, another type of demonic creature.

Another part of our glyph changes are to resolve confusion with some demonic creatures. These mostly inhabit the glyphs 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1, the difficulty increasing as the number in question decreases. Part of a recent set of changes have been to give demonic creatures in tiles a numerical overlay, reflecting the tier that they belong to. This isn’t a permanent change, but it should hopefully give tiles players access to the same instantaneous threat indicator as ASCII players.

Slimes

With the new pack changes to slime creatures (the subject of a future post), and the fact that merged slime creatures are now a considerably bigger threat than normal slime creatures, their colour has been upgraded; as this would clash with acid blobs, these have also had a colour change:

Insubstantial monsters, etc

Insubstantial monsters have been spread out across a variety of glyphs. Insubstantial monsters include insubstantial wisps (out of place on p due to the fact that all other p are undead), vapours (on #, which clashes with walls), and shadows (on _, which is bad for a variety of reasons, including accessibility).

Therefore, the following changes have been made:

Elementals

Finally, we come to elementals. These monsters were spread across a variety of glyphs, including three which matched up with features. This is confusing from an accessibility standpoint, but also from a visual standpoint: it’s difficult to work out if that brown # is actually a wall, or an earth elemental.

Therefore, the following changes have been made:

^* denotes that the colour in question is actually an elemental one, which can’t be indicated via static colouring. Please check them out in-game to see what the colours actually are.

And that’s our summary of glyph changes done! It turned out a bit longer than I had expected. We’ll start the Big List Summary where we left off last week, at commit 629a7ff!

Bugs fixed

1. “Triggerable already removed” messages should be gone from the Trog burning book altar vault.
2. Vampiric draining no longer aborts when there are no monsters on the screen. This allowed for easy identification of present but invisible threats.
3. “of Pain” no longer generates as a randart name.
4. Tiles: Flying creatures (including the player) no longer appear submerged.
5. Fix a bad pluralisation on database lookup.
6. Tiles: won’t attempt to unpack a non-existent doll file.
7. flush_prev_message is no longer called when fetching a character from the keyboard in tiles and Windows builds, hopefully fixing random crashes in Windows.
8. Messages are cleared before the tutorial begins to tweak options.
9. Explosions will be drawn properly when messages_at_top option has been enabled.
10. Some instances of calls to sqrt() have been cast into double to prevent compile errors on Microsoft Visual C++ platforms; also provided an implementation of round() for these platforms.
11. “Stairs” are now being pluralised properly in exclusion messages.
12. Armour/shield penalty is never negative, therefore never turning into an actual bonus.
13. Tiles: some issues with the player minibar for health and mana points have been fixed.
14. Long message will be line-broken properly in message history.
15. Monsters no longer auto-target “firewood” creatures, meaning that allies will no longer automatically attack plants, over other monsters.
16. Glowing ammunition that stacked with non-glowing ammunition should no longer happen, meaning that brands are neither lost nor suddenly gained; this was caused by the stacking code not checking item brands.
17. Poisoned poison arrow of flame of flame, and other permutations of this error, should now be completely resolved.
18. Your wielded weapon is no longer auto-quivered if it is similar to the currently quivered weapon.
19. Vampires’ cold resistances at near bloodless state are now reported correctly.
20. Item pickup Triggerables now function properly, meaning that picking up Runes or the Orb of Zot will adjust the branch flags as per normal; these runes and the Orb have also been masked as no_item_gen so that nothing will generate on top of them and cause issues (“too many items for Triggerable”, etc).
21. player::equip now uses a signed char instead of assuming that char is signed. char is unsigned on some platforms, including PowerPC.
22. Volcano exits are now “rocky tunnel(s) leading out of here”, which should hopefully clear up confusion.
23. Monsters that are sleeping no longer attempt to gain a foe; this should help with some performance issues.
24. Spirit shield (such as Guardian Spirit) should now function properly on shields.
25. Friendly monsters that sense invisible can sense adjacent invisible monsters, instead of not being able to see them at all; in reverse, hostile monsters that sense invisible can only sense the player if they are within radius 4.
26. Cause Fear no longer generates a large number of “is unaffected” messages for toadstools, etc.
27. AUTOMATIC_HIT (needles, some spells) will work properly even with deflect missiles.
28. Missing down-stairs in the Iron City of Dis have been fixed.
29. Large rocks shattering in sight will generate a message properly instead of nothing.
30. Fulsome distillation no longer prompts if there is only one corpse available.
31. Zin’s gold donation has been fixed.
32. Actor line of sight should be initialised properly, preventing monsters from smiting targets they cannot see, giant eyeballs paralysing you even while out of sight, and so on.
33. Pacification of monsters obeys MF_NO_REWARD, and half of these monsters’ base EXP will no longer be granted to the player. This fixes Pikel’s EXP being inflated by 325, and removes any incitement to keep the slaves alive.

Features, new and changed

1. The direction code has been completely rewritten, reworking the entire interface. There are still some issues with this, so please report any that you might have on the Mantis tracker.
2. Beam spells no longer affect submerged monsters, targeting never selects them directly, you cannot freeze nor vampiric drain them.
3. Giant lizards have been renamed to crocodiles; giant iguanas have been renamed to iguanas.
4. New monsters: alligator and baby alligator. Alligators are normal speed, but can put on bursts of speed to attack you; baby alligators are fast, but do not have the same attacks as their adult forms. Baby alligators “level up” into alligators; these new threats spawn with regularity in the Swamp, where they always generate as patrolling (unless they are part of a band of baby alligators)
5. Kraken no longer submerge when fleeing, but shoot out clouds of ink (a line of sight blocking cloud that can exist only in water). They will also remove all their tentacles from play, removing the option of attacking the tentacles as they flee with the head.
6. AC and EV have been changed dramatically, as have 1.5-handed weapons. Please see this commit for a full explanation.
7. A variety of changes to how Cheibriados works; please see last night’s play-testing post regarding gods for a full explanation of current mechanics.
8. New tile: burning bush, centaur paladin (currently unused).
9. Players get a hand-and-a-half bonus even if the player qualifies for an unarmed auxiliary attack.
10. The Lernaean Hydra can now knock down trees, and is SIZE_HUGE.
11. Dangling transparent pixels have been removed from the Maurice and Angel tiles.
12. Xom’s opening and closing of doors is now noisy, and issues involving large gates have been resolved.
13. Fedhas worshipers now acquire fruit instead of food from scrolls of acquirement.
14. New tiles: ego and randart tiles for banded and plate mails, penetration brand, adjusted tree tiles, holy scourge doll tile.
15. The XP cap for hundreds of kills has been removed in favour of the recent changes to out-of-depth monster generation.
16. Trees in Swamp are 25% brown, 75% dark green.
17. Monsters given a random colour on generation will never be given BLACK or DARKGREY.
18. Pikel’s slaves now turn neutral when left behind, if he leaves the level; they will not currently turn neutral if they follow you off the level (still a bug).
19. You can now stab friendly monsters, as though they were confused.
20. Donald’s speech has had some contentious lines removed.
21. Hasting other monsters is now a hasty act for Cheibriados purposes.
22. Returning from stepping out of time will attempt to move monsters that were at our old position.
23. Shadows and phantoms, in line with other p glyphs, now levitate.
24. Liches are no longer resistant to electricity.
25. ossuary_due_mausoleum is now harder.
26. Alligator snapping turtles are different to snapping turtles, so the latter no longer level up into them.
27. Tiles: you can now leave the doll editor screen without actually saving your changes to it.
28. Stacks of poisoned needles have been increased again; these were not affected by the recent buff to poisoned ammunition, and therefore should be unaffected by the nerf to stack sizes of poisoned ammunition.
29. slime_altar_2 has been tweaked to longer cause instant death when opening the door.
30. You are no longer prompted when entering teleport traps if you have a -TELE or amulet of Stasis item worn. This also no longer affects autoexplore (with teleport traps blocking sections of the map). Likewise, known shaft traps no longer block sections of the map.
31. Leading dashes are now included in the message history, as are repeated messages.
32. Large WizLab overhauls and clean-ups.
33. Some –more– prompts are converting to a “+” instead of the full “–more–”, as well as a variety of other changes to the new messagewindow. Please file any bugs found with it on the Mantis tracker.
34. Poison arrow’s irresistible damage has been reduced from 60% to 30%.
35. The blue “Invis” status message is greyed out when you aren’t actually invisible; the @ and % screens show “invisible (but backlit and still visible)” when they are.
36. Stacks of gold now list how much gold is in them in the ‘x’ over screen.
37. Orbs of destruction are no longer warped during Time Step and Abyss moving, and are immune to some effects.
38. Apportation now works properly in the Abyss, and other areas that have no map knowledge.
39. Monster haloes as well as some aspects of monster line of sight have been disabled for performance reasons.
40. Sunlight auto-targets disturbances in deep and shallow water.
41. Some instances of “magic resistance” have been converted to “hostile enchantments”.
42. Giant spores have been moved to * and are no longer native spawns in the Pits of Slime.
43. Jiyva’s jelly shield has been replaced by jelly paralysis during prayer.
44. Fedhas’s evolution ability is now a smite-targeted one.
45. Friendly wandering mushrooms will now follow you as a normal monster would, unless there are other monsters in sight, in which case they will be stationary.
46. Items which were previously cursed and have been uncursed are marked as “was cursed”. This option can be triggered by “autoinscribe_cursed”.
47. Monster energy is now randomised slightly; this means that instead of getting 10 energy per turn, there is a chance of only getting 9 energy, or possibly getting 11 energy. This means that monster actions (movement, etc) is randomised slightly, and there is a chance of a monster acting twice on the same turn (when they have a surplus of energy). This is an experiment, and may (and likely will) be adjusted slightly.
48. Top-tier merfolk are now rarer in the Shoals; all merfolk now speak.
49. The tide no longer submerges runes, but instead pushes them about; the Shoals huts have been split up again (rune and non-rune); the rune Shoals hut now has a bigger “honour guard”.
50. Tiles: demons are now overlaid with the relevant tier number.
51. New tiles: dispersal and exploding brands, icons for armour brands.
52. Mara has been nerfed (HD 20 reduced to HD 18) and buffed (bolt of fire instead of bolt of lightning, which does more damage), and nerfed again (as bolt of fire no longer bounces, and people who run into Mara are more likely to have fire resistance than electricity resistance).
53. The overmap has been completely overhauled.
54. New Xom effect: snakes to sticks, having the reverse effect of sticks to snakes.
55. Portal vaults can now use tiles for entrances, as well as a tile for when the portal has timed out.
56. Shoal:X has been replaced with Shoals:X: there are many shoals, not an individual shoal.
57. Armour and shield are no longer combined when reporting what made the player miss a melee attack.
58. Mara’s illusion can now clone any monster, not just the player.
59. Joseph’s placement is now depth seven to twelve, instead of ten to thirteen.

Other changes

1. godprayer.(cc/h) has been split out of religion.cc.
2. The clua item library (l_items.cc) has been converted from using the former items.name(userdata_item object) to using a Lua items metatable, meaning that the syntax is now item_object.name(). This has caused some issues with autopickup, wielding of reagents for spells, etc. Hopefully they have all been resolved, please file if you come across any.
3. God is no longer consulted about butchery when picking up knives and other bladed weapons.
4. The WizMode piety adjustment function (&^) now prompts for a piety level instead of merely increasing it by a set amount; the WixMode god gift function has been cleaned up and documented.
5. dgn.stash_items now works properly with the new lua items table, as do several other function calls that use items.
6. Lua wrapper for travel stoppers, and portal vault messages are automatically added to this.
7. Code readability: EQ_MIN_ARMOUR and EQ_MAX_ARMOUR are aliases for EQ_CLOAK and EQ_BODY_ARMOUR.
8. Place-population script can now generate unique statistics, as well as combined stats for all levels in a branch.
9. The manpage has been updated.
10. There’s a new (dlua) wrapper identification status for the items metatable.

And that brings us up-to-date at the latest commit, 891a5325e8! Tune in next week for more play-testing posts, and please feel free to comment if you spot any issues or have any questions!

We thought we’d take a bit of time out of our busy lives to reflect on the religious aspects of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup: if you’ve played a recent version of trunk, you may have noticed two new temple Gods¹, and if you’ve ventured into the Pits of Slime, you may have a third new God!

These three new Gods are Fedhas Madash, the Plant God; Cheibriados, the Slow God; and Jiyva, the Slime God. This article is going to give a quick run down of each of them, their flavours, their gifts, and the abilities they grant. Please keep in mind that these Gods are still being developed, and that the abilities listed in this post may not be in their final form.

¹ A “temple God” is defined as one that is found specifically in the Ecumenical Temple (or in overflow altars, as discussed in last week’s post). Non-temple Gods include Lugonu and Beogh, as well as the newly-introduced Jiyva.

Fedhas Madash

We’ll start by looking at Fedhas Madash, God of plant and fungal life. The most noticeable, and indeed the first, gift gained is that all plant life in the dungeon (including Oklob plants, hooray!) turn neutral, and you gain the ability to walk and fire through all neutral and allied plants.

Fedhas likes it when you speed up decomposition (more on this shortly), and dislikes it when you (or your allies) destroy plants, when allied (though not neutral) plants die, or if you use Necromancy (including Necromantic spells, abilities, wands and weapons). Most of Fedhas’s abilities are linked to plant growth and natural life, and some require fruit to use properly.

Something you may have noticed in recent builds of trunk (and new since our last stable release) is that corpses have a tendency to grow fungi while decomposing. These toadstools are short-lived, and will die after a few turns. These toadstools are also linked in to Fedhas’s first ability, Decomposition.

This ability allows you to speed up this natural process, causing all corpses in line of sight to instantly decompose. This sped-up process also has the effect of generating a large number of neutral toadstools, which can provide interesting (albeit fragile) cover for escaping large mobs of monsters.

Here’s a quick run-down of the rest of Fedhas’s abilities and gifts:

• Evolution allows you to “upgrade” a plant (using a smite-based targeting interface). You can upgrade toadstools and fungi into wandering mushrooms, and plants and bushes into Oklob plants. Evolving a neutral plant will cause it to become friendly.
• Sunlight allows you to call sunlight over an area of the dungeon; monsters touched by this will be easier to hit, while deep water will evaporate to shallow water, and shallow water will evaporate to floor. Plants have a chance of growing when water is evaporated.
• Growth uses fruit to grow a ring of friendly plants around the player. The hit-points of the plants will be increased dependent on your Invocations skill.
• Reproduction creates friendly giant spores from corpses in line of sight.
• Rain creates shallow water around you, or deepens shallow water to deep water. At high invocations skill, it can also create rain clouds, which have a similar effect over a longer duration of time.

The ability to shoot through plants, and the ability to grow “cover”, marks Fedhas as the premier god for all users of ranged combat (including spells as well as missiles). Fedhas has three types of retribution:

1. Corpses in line of sight will produce hostiles spores, which will then attack you.
2. The elements will be invoked against you, the equivalent of an ice, earth, fire and air miscast.
3. Hostile plants (biased towards oklobs) will grow around you; this effect will only happen when abandoning Fedhas, never when simply under penance.

All previously neutral or allied plants will also turn hostile upon abandonment or excommunication.

Cheibriados the Contemplative

Cheibriados is the God of the Slow and Contemplative. Cheibriados likes it when you move slowly, kill monsters that are fast, eat when you are already full, and dislikes it when you hasten yourself or others, or use items that make you unnaturally quick. The first ability that you gain when joining the worship of Cheibriados is the ability to give your armour the “ponderous” brand.

The “ponderous” ego is quite rare, and usually only found on body armour. Cheibriados’s “Make Ponderous” ability can apply this ego to any piece of armour, however, and grants a +2 movement delay. You can use “Make Ponderous” to fine-tune your speed against that of monsters, which is useful for some of Cheibriados’s other abilities.

Cheibriados will support the wearing of ponderous armour. This grants a resistance and +1 to your stats for each of the first three items that you wear; the resistances are, respectively, life protection, cold resistance, and fire resistance; he will support one item for each of the piety stars that you have.

Here’s a quick run-down of the rest of Cheibriados’s abilities:

• Your metabolism is slowed considerably (similar to that of the first level of the slow metabolism mutation).
• Bend Time allows you to slow down monsters that are adjacent to you.
• Slouch causes damage to monsters in sight that are faster than you; it may cause extra damage to monsters in sight who are hasted or otherwise magically moving fast.
• Step From Time removes you completely from the “flow” of time. Monsters will move about and forget you, plants will grow and die, corpses will rot and decay, until you are returned to the normal flow of time.

Cheibriados’s wrath consists of:

• Putting you to sleep for a period of time. This is unresistible.
• Slows and exhausts you (similar to post-berserk exhaustion). This is also unresistible.

Jiyva the Shapeless

Jiyva is the most different of our new Gods, the ancient and chaotic god of all Slimes. The first thing that you’ll notice upon converting is the gift of a new jelly (a “fellow slime”). The second is that your method of gaining piety is similar to that of Nemelex Xobeh’s, in that you sacrifice items to Jiyva, but the method by which you do this is very, very different.

Instead of directly sacrificing items, you can summon jellies or lead them over items for them to eat. All slimes (eyeballs on the G glyph, and slimes on the J glyph) will eat items, regardless of their previous item-eating state. Similarly to Xom, Jiyva will randomly mutate you; Jiyva will also shuffle your stats randomly.

Praying will temporary halt the progress of nearby slimes, preventing them from moving and also from eating items.

Jiyva’s other abilities are:

• Request a jelly, allows you to summon a hungry follower.
• Slimify coats your weapon in slime, allowing you to use this to turn some foes into slimes.
• Remove a bad mutation at will, at a cost to both MP and piety.
• While at “royal jelly” status (maximum piety), hits that take 25% or more of your maximum HP will generate neutral, high-end jellies, similar to the effect of the unique royal jelly.

Upon abandonment, all friendly and neutral slimes will turn hostile, and some of the following may occur:

• Gives you a random, bad mutation.
• Slimifies a hostile monster nearby.
• Floods you with mutagenic radiation, and has a chance of transforming you into a bat, a spider, or a statue, and locking you in that transformation until it ends.
• Summons hostile eyeballs of all types.

And that’s it for gods! Tune in tomorrow for this week’s blow-by-blow write-up, and a short piece of glyphs!

This week, we’re going to talk about the Ecumenical Temple: with all the new gods (who you can read about here), it’s started to feel a little bit cramped. In order to solve this issue, we’ve devised a new system of “overflow” altars.

As normal, the Temple will show up between levels four and seven in the main Dungeon. It will have a large percentage of the altars representing each of the “temple” gods (excluding Beogh, Jiyva and Lugonu), but it may lack the one that you’re looking for.

Don’t panic! The altar that you’re looking for will appear as an “overflow” altar. These are small vaults that are placed throughout the dungeon, between levels two and nine, and which are dedicated to the god in question. Some of these overflow altars may prove to be a challenge, and you might not be able to get the god that you want when you want it. Rest assured, the altar to that god will always show up.

What else does this mean for you? Well, the positive side of this is that the altar that you’re looking for could show up as early as D:2. It also could be that the altar shows up as late as D:9, and that you might have to decide whether or not you wait, or pick another god.

Hopefully, the changes will not only aid us, as developers, in the addition of new gods (preventing the necessity for constantly changing the size and layout of the temple), but it will also provide interesting tactical decisions for you, the player! Good luck, and good religion.

And now, on to the great list of changes! We’ll start where we left off, at commit cd1279820c.

Bug fixes

1. Tiles: Drawing the Dance card (or any form of Dancing weapons, as well as summoning mimics) would cause a crash in initialisation. This has been fixed.
2. Tiles: Beam paths should now be displayed properly in Tiles.
3. Pandemonium Lords are no longer silenceable.
4. Loot in bailey_polearm_2 is now always accessible.
5. Amulet of Stasis now has a cost similar to that of the Amulet of Rage.
6. A variety of minivaults and floating vaults that no longer work with the current Swamp layout have been disabled.
7. Swamp drake mephitic cloud breath now functions properly, instead of having absolutely no effect.
8. Decomposed skeletons and corpses now get speed and HP maluses.
9. Toadstools can now be placed on the same grid as the player for Fedhas worshipers: this means that using the decomposition ability while standing on a corpse has the proper effect.
10. Allies no longer head for the map origin when the player is out of sight. This was caused by the code setting their target grid to 0,0.
11. Statues in dis_mu should now all come to life when Dispater is destroyed.
12. Fixed a bug that was causing monsters to never speak at all.
13. Iskenderun’s Orb of Destruction now tries multiple times to place the orb, instead of just “fizzling” the first time that it fails.
14. Monsters will now pathfind and target through toadstools if it means that they can get to the player quicker; friendly monsters will not destroy likewise friendly toadstools, meaning that there will be no piety loss for Fedhas worshipers.
15. A variety of typos and doubled words in descriptions have been fixed.
16. Hand axes of reaching will no longer appear in or around Bailey entrances.
17. &M-created player ghosts without a specified background no longer causes crashes when viewing their full description. They were not being initialised properly.
18. Overly long quiver names will no longer clear the following line.
19. Call Tide now ends properly, meaning that you can never become stuck in a Shoals level at high tide.
20. Attempting to draw a holy scourge on holy monsters no longer causes a strange and confusing assert.
21. Using ^C to clear the map no longer clears monster memory, therefore no longer causing issues with autotravel.
22. Autopickup will turn back on once a backlit (whether by halo, sticky flame, or corona) monster has been killed.
23. Post-mortem inventory screen is once more browsable.
24. Save selection screen now appears properly at the start of the game.
25. Torment scrolls are no longer marked as useless for the torment-immune, while multiple copies of the new amulets are.
26. Searching for “artefact” now lists all artefacts, instead of just identified ones; searching for “stick” also returns all objects that are suitable targets for Sticks to Snakes.
27. Travel exclusions can no longer be placed in Labyrinths.
28. Shield value is now redrawn when the player’s strength changes.
29. Snapping turtles now get their tile picked properly.

Features, new and changed

1. Ilsuiw’s Call Tide peak has been adjusted upwards, meaning that this spell has a much more interesting visual effect.
2. There have been many further changes to key-bindings, making the system much more flexible for re-keying. This includes changes to allow re-binding of vi-keys, as well as a rebinding for the Dvorak keyboard.
3. CDO: Swamp has been re-enabled for testing purposes.
4. Instead of occasionally replacing Swamp with Shoals, pick two of Shoals, Swamp and Snake.
5. There’s a new Swamp layout generator: this uses trees and mixture of shallow and deep water in more natural looking layouts. Gone are the weird corridors! Hooray!
6. New tiles: sixfirhy, improved Angel tile considerably, Dowan and Duvessa.
7. Burning trees in Swamp now produce clouds of steam (as do all sources of flame near water), and once destroyed, are left behind by shallow water, rather than dry land.
8. New Swamp ending: old school. This ending also contains the Lernaean Hydra, good luck!
9. Swamp now gets a variety of “pool” vaults: these are deep water pools surrounded by trees, which are either randomised, or contain patrolling Swamp drakes.
10. The alternative Swamp ending now has a higher number of hydras and swamp dragons than before.
11. Giant leeches now generate with more regularity in the Swamp than they did before.
12. New tiles: Nessos tile has been adjusted, the human tile is now used for detected Dwarves; flowered grass tiles now exist, and existing grass tiles have been recoloured to be slightly darker.
13. Fedhas tweaks: Rain is now more difficult to use, the Evolution ability has had its cost display updated, and the descriptions of Growth and Evolution have been tweaked to reflect the current mechanism, the player can now target themselves with Sunlight, but are prompted to do so.
14. Water transparency in tiles is no longer dependent on overlays.
15. Ilsuiw now no longer appears on Shoals:1-2.
16. Berserk maxhp also scales by 1.5x, rather than the previous 2x.
17. Sticks to snakes no longer converts artefact weapons into snakes.
18. Needle brands have been adjusted: paralysis and frenzy are now the rarest, with sleep and slow the most common, and sickenss and confusion common. Stack sizes for poisoned needles and poisoned darts have also been reduced.
19. Mara’s summons are now “wove by” him, rather than “summoned by” him.
20. New unique (kinda): Donald. He is utterly different than before, now having speech that is dependent on both the player’s current religion, as well as the branch you find him in. He has similar stats to an orc warlord (though not quite as heavy), generates with nice equipment, and always comes with a shield.
21. Tile: Shift-click running is now replaced by mouse-click running in Tiles, Angels now use dynamic weapon placement in their tiles.
22. Ice form is now amphibious, matching with the changes to monster ice form: they do not see items in deep water, however, nor are they able to pick them up.
23. ossuary_due_mausolem now uses door restriction on the central chamber, meaning that the guardian mummy will not exit via the secret doors to attack the player if disturbed.
24. MessageWindow branch has been merged into master: this has involved quite a lot of new changes, which fix a variety of issues involving the ‘–more–’ prompt overlaying text, and a huge subset of other bugs. There may still be issues with the new code that haven’t been ironed out yet, so please, file a bug if you see them!
25. delay_message_clear has been renamed to clear_messages.
26. New tile: Donald, replacing the previous tile. This tile looks more like the player, and always is created with a shield.
27. Silver no longer affects the demonic, unless they are chaotic as well as demonic; Crazy Yiuf, Psyche and Gastronok are now considered unclean creatures for Zin purposes; Cigotuvi’s Degeneration, Summon Horrible Things, Twisted Resurrection and Banishment are marked as chaotic spells; abominations are now chaotic, as are scrolls of summoning.
28. Tiles: the player character now gets a health and magic bar similar to that of monsters, the display of which is controllable via an option, Frances’ tile has been improved to look more feminine; new Polyphemus tile.
29. Tile cleanup: Menkaure, Purgy, Roxanne.
30. Current HP is now conserved when merging and splitting slimes, instead of just the maximum HP, and slimes now use grid distance instead of actual distance when determining whether or not to split.
31. Monster attitudes (charmed, friendly, peaceful) are now listed correctly in the ^X window; the default behaviour for it is also now defaulting to ACT_EXECUTE, or examining the monster in question.
32. Instances of “job” and “class” in the game are now referred to as “background”: Hunter, Arcane Marksmen, Conjurer, etc, are now backgrounds instead of classes. This is a semantic change, but reflects the fact that the background is merely what you have (skill and equipment) when you come into the dungeon, not what you must be, as nothing prevents a conjurer from picking up a sword and becoming a fighter, or a fighter picking up a spell book and becoming a conjurer.
33. New tiles: holy scourge, orb of destruction and the cloud that it creates.
34. david_glass_crypt now works properly (hopefully) when walking over the loot. Unfortunately, linking this in to item_pickup is currently unfeasible.
35. Tiamat is now considered a chaotic creature; just because a spellcaster has chaotic spells does not make them inherently chaotic. If they have spells that are considered “innate” abilities, they are. This does not affect how Zin deals with these creatures.
36. Massive Mummy changes: they now get a +5 stat bonus for starting, getting diminishing EXP gains for hundreds of kills. Affecting everyone, monster spawns have been dramatically reduced, while out-of-depth spawns have been increased: monster spawn rate reduces after 3,000 turns on a level, and is stopped completely after 15,000 turns on a level.
37. Gourmand no longer gives piety with Cheibriados.
38. Tentacled monstrosities are no longer as rare as they were before in Swamp.
39. HT_AMPHIBIOUS_LAND and HT_AMPHIBIOUS_WATER have been merged. Amphibious monsters no longer get an automatic speed bonus in water. This is instead defined per-monster. Slime creatures and jellies, as well as ice beasts and a small selection of other amphibious monsters, no longer get this bonus; slugs and snails are no longer amphibious.
40. Submerging is no longer linked to habitat, but is instead controlled per-monster by using the M_SUBMERGES flag.
41. Attackers that are swimming no longer get an attack bonus against defenders that are floundering; this affects both aquatic monsters damaging the player, as well as player merfolk attacking floundering monsters while swimming.
42. The many pools layout (and modifier) now occasionally place clusters of trees instead of pools of deep water or lava.
43. Unidentified artefacts also get marked as artefacts in their description.
44. New tile: hog-form player, Robe of Clouds (on the floor).
45. Steam cloud generation near shallow water has been reduced.
46. Cheibriados worshipers can cause any armour slot to be ponderous, allowing for fine-tuning of their speed; removing ponderous armour causes a piety loss.
47. “You hear a splashing noise!” only occurs within short distances, or if you can see the monster that is floundering.

Other changes

1. Mara’s Mislead, Summon Fake Mara and Summon Player Ghost spells now have waste_of_time checks, meaning that they’ll only be cast when they’re needed.
2. .des files for branches have now be split absolutely: each file contains only the vaults required for itself, and none of its sub-branches.
3. fprops are now accessible and modifiable by vaults using dgn.fprop_at, dgn.fprop_changed.
4. The height map is now accessible via vaults by using the FHEIGHT specifier. Tides can be seeded from a starting position by using a marker (see documentation).
5. New Lua marker: RestrictDoor. This prevents monsters from opening a door that has never been previously opened by the player.
6. Door opened and door closed now generate dungeon events.
7. Branch and the player’s religion are now included in speech prefixes.
8. Fixed a typo in Purgy’s entry of the mon-speak.txt file.
9. New Wizard-mode command for adjusting the tides: ).
10. New Lua accessors for monster: get_prop and has_prop, for interfacing with monster props. monster_dies triggerer now also checks for these props, looking for monster->props[target]==target.
11. .des vault files are now found in the dat/des/ folder, and in subfolders: branches/ contain all branch files, portals/ for portal vaults, variable/ for floating vaults, etc.
12. Lua slave iterator now generates an error message when not finding any markers, rather than generating a weird error further down the line in the point iterator.
13. Monster casts (as_player, as_monster) are now found in the actor interface, returning NULL if the actor isn’t the relevant player/monster.
14. mon-util has been split up into a variety of files, and the functions have been split between these.

And that’s us–up-to-date at commit 629a7ffc5d! Tune in throughout the week, as we’ll hopefully have further play-testing posts before next weekend’s update!

This week, we’re going to talk about amulets: there have been a lot of changes to them recently, and while they aren’t finished, I thought we could highlight some of the major changes and how they’ll affect you!

The most noticeable of the amulet changes is that the Amulet of Resist Slowing has been removed. The effect of resisting the slow enchantment has been merged into the new Amulet of Stasis (more on this later), but the ability to resisting the slowing and fatigue effects of berserk have been removed from the game.

The Amulet of Resist Slowing could previously be used to bypass all the negative effects involved in berserk, which made the ability, be it god-given, spell-given, or from potions or other sources, extremely unbalanced. We hope that this removal (read: nerf) will help to balance berserk once more.

The two additional amulets introduced recently are the amulets of Stasis and Faith. Stasis, as already mentioned, prevents the slow enchantment, as well as other enchantments that affect the player’s speed or movement. This includes teleportation and blink of any form, hasting, paralysis and petrification, as well as berserker rage. Wearing it will not affect current effects, such as pre-existing haste, or pre-existing post-berserk slowing.

The Amulet of Faith provides several interesting effects: piety gain is increased by one third; Gods which protect from harm have a higher chance of doing so, as piety in this check is increased by one third before performing the check; Xom’s “piety” is also one third faster when changing, and he has a higher chance of acting. Finally, removing the amulet will affect the player’s current piety, though it will never reduce it to the point of (or near the point of) excommunication.

Of course, these effects are not necessarily the final effects, and may be subject to change at a later date. Further amulets are also planned, so expect more changes in the future! And with that, let’s move on to the list of this week’s changes:

We’ll start from where we left off last week, at commit 26707f530e!

Bug fixes

1. Thieves get Throwing instead of Crossbow skills.
2. Lair ruination will no longer affect walls of special rooms or vaults; this means no jelly rooms without walls.
3. Intrinsic reaching attacks can no longer do so at full diagonals.
4. Okawaru’s wrath monsters are now marked as summoned, instead of being permanent.
5. Weird blink messages involving confused monsters timing out and being moved have been solved; this still causes a message regarding monsters being “less confused” before being redrawn elsewhere.
6. trog_book vault no longer allows you to bypass the burning of the book by throwing an item on top of it; you can still retrieve the book if you have Apportation.
7. Weapons of pain are no longer marked as useless with no Necromancy skill: they can still be used as well as an unbranded weapon of the same stats.
8. Missile acquirement should no longer gift stones to slings users.
9. Poison is no longer combined with other brands randomly, instead of just flaming; the only exception to this is Nessos, who still has “poisoned arrows of flame”.
10. Holy wrath weapons are now marked useless in the right circumstances.
11. Silver statues are now marked as unholy.
12. Tiles: skeletons no longer have chunk effect icons applied to them.
13. The stash tracker is now initialised at the start of the game: this prevents the errors of not being able to search for items that are in line of sight upon entry to the dungeon, as well as the upstairs on D:1 not being marked as visited.
14. An instance of Ruinous Time in Cheibriados’s god abilities has been correcting to Slouch.
15. Tiles: The splash screen is now displayed before beginning to parse the relevant databases: this means that you are no longer greeted with a black screen that can last for thirty or so seconds when first starting the game in tiles mode.
16. Mimics’ glyphs are now displayed properly if the item in question has had its glyph altered by a player setting.
17. Exclusions set in areas that are not accessible (bubbles, using the [ and ] options in the X map, and for non-fully explored levels) will actually be displayed in red when setting the exclusion.
18. Certain prompts (particularly &P portal map choices) no longer crash when text is typed.
19. Spellcasters no longer throw their weapons at you (this includes enemy priests).
20. Books being displayed with the incorrect glyphs in stacks due to size restrictions have been fixed.
21. Poison Weapon (and indeed, any venom-branded launcher) now works with ammunition properly; duplicate messages (“poisoned poison”, “of flame of flame”) have also been fixed.
22. Inverted logic regarding monsters that are berserk and harmful clouds has been fixed; monsters will now ignore harmful clouds when they are in a berserk rage, even if it may kill them.

New and changed features

1. Mara and Rakshasas are now immune to silence, like all other demonic beings.
2. The Lair ruination procedure now places plants and bushes as well as allowing for the occasional door to be left instead of “ruined”.
3. New cloud type: thick gloom. It obscures line of sight and recolours features magenta, instead of using the ‘#’ glyph. It is currently unused, but will be used in portal vaults.
4. Berserk HP scale has been reduced to 1.5x, instead of 2.0x.
5. The amulet of Resist Slowing has been removed.
6. New amulets: Amulet of Faith, Amulet of Stasis (discussed above).
7. Fedhas’s Growth ability now prompts for a number of fruit to use, instead of using a specific slot and its total number of fruit; plants created by this skill also receive a HP bonus based on the player’s invocations skill. Nothing will happen if the ability cannot be used.
8. Fedhas’s Piety has also been tweaked: Growth no longer uses as much, and the loss of piety for allies dying has also been reduced.
9. The glass_crypt Crypt:5 liches will now be set free when you walk over the loot.
10. Fedhas’s Evolution ability now only uses piety, and only affects plants, etc, that are adjacent to the player; its activation cost has been reduced, and Fedhas’s overall abilities have been reorganised to: decomposition, evolution, sunlight, growth, spores, rain (from first to last in scale of piety gain).
11. Tiles: tool tips are now drawn at the mouse pointer, rather than above it. This prevents them from covering up the inventory header line. Names are also drawn in the inventory header line, instead of one line above the item.
12. Shoals are now limited to 180 plants per level, and the density of the plant clusters has been reduced.
13. Slime creatures will now randomly split in open spaces, unless they have a chance of moving closer to their foe.
14. Trees no longer reflect electricity like a normal wall, but instead have a chance of igniting as though hit with a bolt of fire, and are also disintegratable.
15. Tiles: deep water now has similar wave overlays and effects to shallow water.
16. Flamethrower exclusions are now updated for descriptions if they do not have one; auto-exclusions placed on stairs are also annotated with a relevant up/down notice.
17. Miscast-created (including Xom and Zot trap effects) clouds no longer generate an auto-exclusion.
18. Slime Pits now generate between levels 6 and 8 of the Lair of the Beasts, changed from the original 5 to 8; this used to be 8 to 10 before the length of Lair was reduced.
19. Tiles: left-clicking on books with no spellcasting ability now calls read_book instead.
20. Tiles: new tile for Pikel, Sonja’s tile has been cleaned up and recoloured, and the deformed tiles from the WizLab branch have also been cleaned up.
21. Merged slime creatures are now lightgreen, and acid blobs are now lightcyan.
22. Tiles: New snapping turtle and alligator snapping turtle tiles. The latter also now has spikes; Dissolution has been recoloured; Ilsuiw, siren and mermaid tiles now have shadows; turtle corpse tiles are also fixed.
23. Shoals monster set changes: merfolk impalers now have less damage output and evasion, alligator snapping turtles now have an action cost of 10 (but slow movement), sea snakes are now speed 12 instead of speed 14, and harpies are now more common; alligator snapping turtles are also rarer.
24. Generic overflow vault will no longer generate electric eels or lava snakes.
25. Call canine familiar no longer generates a message, as there is no chance of these being hostile.
26. Tiles: variant tiles for slaves, this introduces a smaller one that isn’t quite as burly as the current one. These are randomly assigned to slaves when they are placed.
27. Tiles: new tile for normal humans. The previous tile has been moved into the “UNUSED” folder; the player hog tile has also been recoloured to differentiate it from a normal hog.
28. Chaos spawn and giant spores are no longer insubstantial; phantoms, flayed ghosts, spectral things, wraiths, freezing wraiths, and spectral warriors now are.
29. Aizul now appears between depths fourteen and twenty, and his spells have been tweaked slightly: he has one less poison arrow (replaced with venom bolt), one more sleep (replacing blink other), and minor healing is replaced by blink other for his escape spell.
30. Wayne is now a dwarf again.
31. New key bindings specifically for Dvorak; vi-keys can now be set to do nothing, preventing harmful typos for players who use the num-pad; the key binding system is also more flexible now.
32. Tiles: new tiles for all new merfolk monsters; new tiles specifically for toadstools.
33. Tiles: new tiles for the sleeping brand of needles, and new tiles for bushes.

Other

1. The skills layout in the ‘m’ screen has been changed: Stealth is now found in the right-hand column, above Traps and Doors.
2. rltiles now supports a “%weight” command, that allows for weighting of tile variations. This means that highly ornate version of tiles (face and eyes for flesh walls, crumbled brick, etc) will not appear as often.
3. A variety of new Lua wrappers for dungeon-building: util.range, is_valid_coord, find_in_area, is_passable_glyph, make_box and make_box_doors.
4. New “force God gift” Wizard mode function.
5. Also re-implemented the _city_level layout in not-quite-identical Lua (“layout_city”).
6. Island-building code designed for Shoals branch has been moved from dgn-shoals.cc to dgn-height.cc.
7. The credits Perl script now updates CREDITS.txt instead of outputting to stdout.
8. The last remnants of code relating to butchery have been finally removed.
9. Tiles: New monster prop “tile_num”, the offset that should be applied to their default tile if they have variants. This is currently used for toadstools and Pikel’s slaves.

And that’s us up-to-date at commit cd1279820c, and that’s us for this week. Expect further posts regarding recent changes to Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup that have yet to be covered in an individual post or highlighted in a play testing post. As always, you can report any bugs to our Mantis tracker or by comment here!

We’ll start our list in order of addition, with the most recently added last.

• Kirke, named for the minor Greek Demigoddess, can be found in the Dungeon between levels fourteen and nineteen (and equivalent depths). She comes with a band of hogs, and would very much like for you to join them! Don’t run into her without a stash of holy moly, or, if that is not forthcoming, a good source of magic resistance, unless you enjoy spending the rest of your short life as a swine.
• Seasoned adventurers may recognised that the animal pelt worn by Grum originates from a war dog. Non-seasoned adventurers need not fear, as they’ll shortly run into Grum and his friendly pack of war dogs! Grum is found in the early dungeon, between levels eight and thirteen (and equivalent depths), and comes with a band of war dogs, as well as a polearm with a guaranteed reaching brand! If you want it you’ll have to survive to take it off his corpse.
• Purgy, an unusually thin and nervous troll. He was bullied by the bigger trolls for being so small, and took refuge in the sewer. As a result of this, you are more likely to find him camped out there, where he can appear in two maps, though he does occasionally visit the dungeon, between depths three and four. But be warned! Just because he’s skinny doesn’t mean he’s an easy fight.
• Priests sought to mummify the remains of Menkaure, a benevolent ruler, and in so doing grant him eternal life. In the process, his soul was twisted and, like many undead, he gained an intimate knowledge of pain and torment. He now seeks vengeance on the wandering adventure who woke him from his long sleep. He can be found wandering the Dungeon between depths four and seven, as well as in one Ossuary map.
• Duvessa and Dowan, Elf twins who are inextricably (and, indeed, psychically) linked, both in life, as well as in death. If one of them is spotted, surely the other one is not far behind. Dowan is a capable but vain magician, while his sister, Duvessa, is slightly more plain, though an expert with swords. They appear between depths four and nine, but beware: the death of one will trigger an emotional breakdown in the other, with sometimes surprising results.
• Greedy Gastronok is an elephant slug who just so happened to eat a valiant Wizard for lunch one day. It wasn’t until spells came unbidden to his mind that he realised something was amiss. Indeed, he hadn’t even realised he’d had a mind before, but now he had absorbed the Wizard’s intelligence as well as his magic. Despite this fact he remains as greedy as ever, and happy to use his new-found skills to charge down his next meal. He often appears in the Lair of the Beasts, between levels four and eight, but also in the general Dungeon, between depths eight and thirteen.
• Maurice is a sly and conniving thief, who is perfectly happy to separate you from your hard-earned loot. He likes nothing more than sneaking up on you while he’s invisible to pick your pockets, and then leave before being noticed! Thankfully, you can get your gear back–if you can find him again, which could be between depths of eight and thirteen in the Dungeon.
• Khufu was an incredibly powerful emperor. His people built him a great pyramid, in which they stored his mummified remains, in hopes of sending him to early godhood. A follower of the Polar star, he can be found lurking in the Tomb and the Crypt, and has a rather unique way of recuperating during battle.
• Nikola is a brilliant scientist with a predilection for electricity. After a terrible accident involving an electric golem he found himself constantly phasing in and out of reality. Don’t forget your rubber boots and gloves when facing him! He can be found between the depths fourteen and nineteen.
• The sleepy Aizul, a guardian serpent, was once the head guard of a great vault of treasure. Late one night, however, he fell asleep on the watch and the vault was raided. He was humiliated, stripped of his position, and replaced by his subordinate. Now aimless, he can be found wandering the dungeon between depths fourteen and twenty. Be careful, because perhaps his yawn really is contagious!
• The slaver Pikel is bringing a group of humans to sell in the Orcish Mines. He hopes they’ll bring him a good price, and set him on the road to being a wealthy kobold. The only snag to his problem is that he can’t work out where the stairs to the mines are. You can find him and his slaves between four and nine, but definitely not in the Orcish Mines!
• Crazy Yiuf is, to put it simply, crazy. As he would say, “You leg down broken song, no?” He hangs out in his cottage between depths two and seven in the Dungeon, and is always found with a chaos-branded quarterstaff, the effects of which are almost as crazy as he is!
• Lord Mara‘s illusions are capable of misleading even the greatest spell-casters, and far surpass those of even the strongest of the Rakshasas which he rules over. Those who are willing to face Mara can find him between depths eighteen and twenty-five, and should be ready not only to fight Mara, but also the horrors that he can dredge up from their minds.

And for now, this is it! Good luck in your valiant fights and victories (or defeats, as the case often is).

]]> https://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/have-you-met-mr-mara/feed 2 https://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/play-testing-january-10th-2010 https://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/play-testing-january-10th-2010#comments Sun, 10 Jan 2010 06:38:13 +0000 due http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/?p=210 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.

]]> https://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/play-testing-january-10th-2010/feed 4 https://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/play-testing-january-4th-2010 https://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/play-testing-january-4th-2010#comments Mon, 04 Jan 2010 10:28:43 +0000 due http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/?p=189 Please see the previous play-testing posts.

Bugs fixed

1. Kikubaaqudgha is no longer described as “appreciating the sacrifice of corpses”.
2. Map masks now check for collisions properly.
3. Ilsuiw no longer has superfluous resistances which other merfolk recently lost.
4. Clarity no longer affects intentional berserk.
5. Ghosts should no longer show up in large clumps on early levels.
6. Levels should no longer be broken up by some vaults.
7. Demonspawn will not gain multiple breath weapons.
8. Monster-cast Airstrike no longer has a massive damage variance.
9. Neutral monsters no longer give you experience for kills.
10. Door-blocked messages for invisible monsters will no longer generate random phrases under some circumstances.
11. MP+X unrands (Hat of Pondering) now work as intended.
12. Monsters will now use non-returning throwing weapons properly.
13. Prompts in tiles will no longer cause the screen to go black.

New and changed features

1. Shoals have been dramatically improved. They now include tidal water, new classes of merfolk (javelineers, aquamancers and impalers), and other awesome things.
2. Tiles: Maurice’s tile has been improved.
3. Books have a new symbol in Unicode and IBM character sets.
4. The Shining One’s Wrath effects (specifically, cleansing flame) have had their power reduced.
5. New spell: Iskenderun’s Orb of Destruction (name subject to change). It creates a fast-moving “monster” projectile (such as ball lightning), which homes in on a target, penetrates them, and then explodes (using disintegration). Found in the Book of Annihilations.
6. Iskenderun’s Mystic Blast is now found in the Book of Power.
7. New portal vault: Wizard Laboratory. Consists of a large variety of different maps, each themed around a “named Wizard”. Currently incomplete and still in the testing stages, so comments are welcome.
8. Fulsome Distillation now works in a manner that seems more sane.
9. Transformations and other forms will no longer reduce the weight cap.
10. New tiles: ballistomycetes now have tiles for active and inactive states, placeholder tiles for trees, bases for animated statues: light and dark vine-covered.
11. One-handed polearms (spears and tridents) now gain the same stabbing bonus as do long blades.
12. Ilsuiw now has the ability to control the Shoal’s tides, and is guaranteed on or before Shoals:5.
13. Ettin and sheep no longer spawn in Shoals.
14. Scorpions are now coloured yellow.
15. Deep water and lava no longer automatically destroy items; items can be dropped in deep water and are visible and retrievable if merfolk, but not in other ways. Apportation will not work from deep water.
16. Shoals tides either wash some items away, or wash over items.
17. Aquatic monsters now come with corpses (fish, kraken, etc), and therefore zombies.
18. Ice beasts are now amphibious.
19. Shoals tides will not drown the player or monsters.
20. Tiles: shallow water in shoals now has waves, causing a smoother look.
21. New monster spell: Primal Wave, also causes the player to be pushed back and water to be generated. Found on merfolk aquamancers.
22. Hand crossbows have been removed from the game.
23. Only certain egos can be applied to certain ammunition types. Full list.
24. Deep elf crossbow aptitude has been increased to 130.
25. The Darts skill has been removed and uses of it merged into the Throwing skill.
26. Speed no longer appears on ranged launchers randomly, except on unrands and randarts.
27. Non-player merfolk no longer submerge.
28. Ammunition branding spells have been removed, and are replaced by the currently existent weapon branding spells. These apply to launchers, rather than to ammunition; the effects can be made permanent to launchers by using the vorpalise weapon scroll. Currently usable on launchers is: Fire Brand, Freezing Aura, Poison Weapon.
29. Arcane Marksmen no longer get a choice of two books; instead, they get the Book of Brands, and a launcher (sling, crossbow or bow) and ammunition.
30. Corruption is now usable in the Hells and Pandemonium.
31. Gold acquirement now uses a new formula (Min=220, Max=5520, Mean=1218, Std=911).
32. Recharging of rods is no longer linked to the player’s MP, nor to them being wielded; they will recharge in your inventory, or even on the floor.
33. Shield leakage for rods has been removed.
34. Ugly things now have a fixed speed.
35. Rods can be used as a weapon, using the Maces and Flails skill, and can be magically enchanted (and disenchanted).
36. New needle brands: sleep, slow, paralysis, confusion, rage and sickness.
37. Ego but unidentified ammunition will be described as “glowing”.
38. Protection brands on launchers has been replaced with the evasion brand, providing +5 to EV.
39. Sling bullets are now as common as bolts in generation.
40. Hunters based on slings (kobolds and halflings) now generate with bucklers; halflings’ shields aptitude has been change to 90 to emphasise and take advantage of this face.
41. New tiles: slime creatures, varying in size.

Other

1. Clouds are now customizable in colour, description and tile.
2. Further Wizard mode code cleanup has been made.
3. Trap disarm requests have been untied from the auto-travel code.
4. Wizard-mode teleports no longer show controlled teleport messages.
5. mpr and mprf no longer have message length limits.
6. mspec monsters marked as summoned will have their equipment also marked as such.
7. For testing purposes, Swamp does not appear in DGL builds; this is most noticeable on the CDO server.

That’s up-to-date at commit 0c8fe019dd!

As always, we welcome your comments, suggestions and bug reports. Details on how to submit these can be found in the first play testing post. I hope everyone enjoys the holiday season and their relevant festivities!

]]> https://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/play-testing-january-4th-2010/feed 3 https://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/play-testing-december-27th-2009 https://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/play-testing-december-27th-2009#comments Sun, 27 Dec 2009 09:57:54 +0000 due http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/?p=181 Please see the previous play-testing posts.

Bugs fixed

1. Sticky flame now negates invisibility.
2. Slouch no longer damages the immobile (statues, toadstools) or sleeping or paralyzed/petrified monsters.
3. Mummies and ghouls can now properly wield vampiric weapons.
4. Mimics should no longer cause crashes, caused by various reasons.
5. Merfolk no longer have superfluous cold and poison resistance.
6. Power-of-two issue with tile loading was fixed, preventing swapping of R and B.
7. Random vaults now spawn in Pandemonium once more.
8. Known items listing should now sort properly.
9. The player is now credited for reflected (caused by shield of reflection) kills.
10. Summoned ghosts and uniques are now properly dealt with, with regards to milestones and tracked kills.
11. Beams are no longer drawn on top of the caster, and cloud spells can be cast while on the same tile as a toadstool (for Fedhas worshipers).
12. Monsters which start as BLACK now use the proper colour during the Misled status effect.
13. Monster kills should now be credited properly during the Misled status effect; this prevents “shot with an orcish bolt by a yellow wasp”, and similar death messages.

New and changed features

1. New monster tiles: Khufu, Nikola.
2. Monsters can now cast summon butterflies.
3. New tiles: wielded demon blade now has an aura, reaping brand tile, Cheibriados altar.
4. Clarity now prevents berserk, which only Trog can override.
5. New tiles: bases for altars and statues.
6. Tile improvements: Kirke, shaft tile.
7. New unique rakshasa: Mara, Lord of Illusions.
8. New spell and status effect: Mislead. Grants the Misled status to the player, and causes monsters to appear as other glyphs, names, and tiles.
9. Elyvilon no longer abhors butchery during prayer.
10. The memorisation screen can now be accessed, even if you do not have the experience levels or spell levels necessary to learn any spells.
11. Auto-explore’s killing of toadstools no longer causes “Really attack with your +0 bow?” prompts, and obeys attack-preventing inscriptions.
12. New tiles for various armed statues, Crazy Yiuf’s tile now display his wielded weapon.
13. Rods now identify upon wielding.
14. Agnes now appears from 12-18.
15. Labyrinth vaults have been randomized slightly.
16. Three new Vaults:8 subvaults were added.
17. Steel ammo is now rarer before D:10.
18. Queen bees are now yellow ‘k’.
19. Killer bees are now brown ‘k’.
20. Queen ants are now light-red ‘a’.
21. Minotaurs are now light-red ‘H’.
22. Trapdoor spiders are now light-cyan ‘s’.
23. Wolf spiders are now white ‘s’.
24. Giant cockroaches are now brown ‘s’.
25. Berserk monsters now ignore dangerous clouds.
26. New tile: slave.

Other

1. Vaults can now specify custom tile sets for doors and gateways.
2. The “no_wall_fixup” can now be applied using the KMASK specifier in vaults.
3. Further tweaks to Xom’s tension and XP cap on activity.
4. Tiles can now be recoloured dynamically.
5. Unique placement levels were increased, hopefully increasing the visibility of uniques in the early dungeon.
6. A start at a spells library for lua: rudimentary wrappers for Ozocubu’s Refrigeration and Olgreb’s Toxic Radiance.
7. The prebuilt level compiler files have been updated; this should prevent issues where ‘TILE:’ specifiers were causing unknown character errors for systems that do not have flex and bison installed.

And that’s us up-to-date at commit e19066eb!

As always, we welcome your comments, suggestions and bug reports. Details on how to submit these can be found in the first play testing post. I hope everyone enjoys the holiday season and their relevant festivities!

]]> https://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/play-testing-december-27th-2009/feed 2 https://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/play-testing-december-19th-2009 https://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/play-testing-december-19th-2009#comments Sat, 19 Dec 2009 01:11:25 +0000 due http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/?p=177 A continuation of the previous play-testing posts!

A lot has changed in the past two weeks! We’ll start from commit de685cf.

Bugs fixed

1. An off-by-one error with Passwall depth calculation was fixed.
2. Undiscovered traps shouldn’t show up around coloured vaults any more.
3. A bug in updated env.tile_* was causing items and monsters to occasionally not be drawn. This has been fixed.
4. Stair colours will update even when out of line of sight.
5. Incorrect line wrapping in shop listings was fixed.
6. Extra monster flags are applied earlier in the process, meaning that monsters who are generated in LOS by Lua and have been renamed will generate with correct names for initial sighting.
7. Uniques will no longer spawn multiple times!
8. Clearing the map no longer clears walls as well.
9. Tile settings for portal vaults should now work as intended.
10. Vampiric attacks now drain max-HP as was originally intended.
11. Various misleading randart names were removed: Preservation, Conservation and Protection, as these do not confer the assumed brands.
12. Pacified mermaids and other beholders will stop mesmerising the player.
13. (Very) ugly things will no longer heal when changing colour.
14. Randomly generated monsters will no longer automatically know where the player is.
15. Unique placement algorithm was improved; this means that uniques should no longer regularly be placed in clumps, but there is still a very small chance of this actually occurring.
16. Berserked beholders are too distract to behold you, likewise they cannot behold you through Zin’s sanctuary.
17. Walkability colours show up on the viewmap once more.
18. Mindless monsters no longer go berserk.
19. Maurice no longer steals while confused.
20. Vampire’s inactive mutations are always coloured darkgrey.
21. RNG pushing and popping occurs properly with SHA256 (DGL) builds.
22. Randart armour can have brand (egos), and branded unrands are no longer created cursed by default.
23. Shaft milestones should function correctly.
24. Dragon armours no longer get extra ego resistances of their own or opposite type.
25. Acquired books are no longer marked as “seen”.
26. The EXP pool adjustable cap was reverted; it is now a hard cap of 20,000 again.
27. Vault definition file specifiers are no longer length limited to 400 characters.
28. Lua marker property errors are reported properly, instead of being silently ignored.
29. Cheibriados’s wrath no longer uses hibernation, and is therefore not easily bypassed with resist cold.
30. Killing polymorphed uniques will now generate a milestone.
31. Shop inventories are no longer apport-accessible in Shoals or via digging.
32. Spell casting and miscasting noises have been adjusted.
33. Killing krakens by hacking away at tentacles no longer causes a crash.

New and changed features

1. Two new Swamp endings: Fire and lava themed (dragons, mottled dragons and fire drakes on top of the usual fare of swamp dragons, hydras and swamp drakes), and ice themed (hydra simulacra and ice dragons).
2. Monster extended description and display now gives a brief explanation of the monster’s magic resistance.
3. New vault: temple of Zin, an early, lecturing Angel in a cage next to a Zin altar.
4. New Hive endings by R1!
5. New Sewer map: sewage spilling out into the ocean, by st.
6. Butterflies are no M_NO_EXP_GAIN and have no attacks; this means that Summon Butterflies is no longer the best level 1 summoning spell in the game, and it also means that butterfly zombies are not super-fast killers.
7. Deep Elves no longer generate with maces and flails.
8. When spawning in the Lair of the Beasts, Prince Ribbit comes with a pack of blink frogs.
9. Only natural and magical traps are placed in Slime.
10. Uniques can now spawn in the Orcish Mines.
11. New tile for berserk monsters, by purge.
12. More “adventurous” uniques now show up in the Pits of Slime and Lair of the Beasts.
13. Mulched large rocks become piles of stones instead of being completely destroyed.
14. Xom now has a small chance of reviving the player after death.
15. Guardian nagas have now become guardian serpents, intelligent snake creatures that speak and cast spells, but do not have any human features (such as hands).
16. Spawned-demons while exiting the dungeon with the Orb of Zot will seek out the player.
17. New tiles: mutagenic fog and rain clouds.
18. New tiles: Aizul, Crazy Yiuf.
19. Various adjustments to trap disarming mechanism.
20. Remove “peering into shadows” message.
21. Non-god pacified monsters are good neutral (Pikel’s slaves, Kirke’s hogs), while Elyvilon’s are hostile neutral.
22. Xom will only banish above XL8, or XL5 if bored, hostile demons summoned by Xom will be limited by your experience level (though not if you are under penance), and Xom won’t animate your weapon below XL4.
23. Gastronok’s Wizard Hat can be a good item, or randomly, an unrandart: The Hat of Pondering.
24. Grey snakes have been renamed to anacondas and have been given a (purely flavour) constriction attack.
25. Pan Lord warning messages have been adjusted.
26. Summon Horrible Things’ INT drain now generates a message.
27. New tiles: Maurice.
28. Nessos now appears earlier in the Dungeon.
29. Manual acquirement has been adjusted: Demigods no longer get invocations manuals, and skills unusable with your current god are also less likely.
30. Occasionally, depending on tension, Xom won’t act at all; this should make tension effects more noticeable.

Other

1. MSG_MIN_HEIGHT was changed from 7 to 6.
2. Teleport code was refactored, and a new “teleport_to” function for the player was implemented; also has a dlua-wrapper
3. A new “function_at_spot” triggerable, counterpart to “message_at_spot”.
4. Monsters can be specified as summoned when used in vault definitions, and can also be marked as “previously seen”.
5. you.level_type_origin is used instead of you.level_type_name in several instances; this allows for portal vaults to override entire location descriptions, but doesn’t prevent any original behaviour
6. Wizard-mode placed vaults will no longer cause assertion errors if they use MonPropsMarker.
7. The level map uses place_name instead of the previously, place_name-duplicating _level_description_string. This is also much cleaner visually.
8. Extra “door_” properties for opening, closing, in various states. Usage of these can be seen in the wizlab_cigotuvi map in the WizLab branch.
9. Added a –more– prompt after immolation scroll effect, and removed the superfluous and annoying –more– prompt after purchasing items in shops.
10. Chance of TSO’s wrath was reduced again, though the actual wrath effect has not been reduced and is still overpowered.
11. Trap-making code now works as previously intended.
12. Monster props: speech_func and shout_func are consulted as though they were the database when looking up monster speech.
13. Vaults can now create specifically themed or named randart books.
14. Vaults can now specify, explicitly, what tile should be used for what feature.
15. Vaults can also now specify, explicitly, what tile should be used for a monster.
16. A blank “statue” monster was added, to be over-written by vault definitions.
17. A –save-version option has been added for checking player save versions.
18. Vaults can now specify a monster’s friendliness.
19. The relevant tile files are included properly now, meaning that adding a new tile no longer requires a complete recompile.
20. Abyss tension rate was increased.
21. Mimics hold the item that they’re mimicking, preventing the randart mimic changing description regularly, without using RNG seeding.
22. Debug acquirement reports and functionality have been updated considerably, including wands and themed randart books.
23. Spell hunger documentation is now updated.

This brings us up-to-date with commit 7a77115! As usual, please comment if you have any feedback, either for the game, or for this post.

]]> https://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/play-testing-december-19th-2009/feed 0 https://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/play-testing-december-3-2009 https://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/play-testing-december-3-2009#comments Thu, 03 Dec 2009 05:58:16 +0000 due http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/?p=163 A continuation of this previous play-testing post.

Well, it seems like a lot has changed in the past week! There are a lot of advancements in code, bug fixes and features. I’ll attempt to summarise them in this post.

Again, if you have any comments, criticisms or suggestions, please reply in a comment either here, on IRC, or one of the media mentioned in the previous play testing post (linked above).

Bugs fixed

1. Rods should now function correctly once more, as an off-by-one error was recently fixed.
2. “Triggerer already activated” bugs (most noticeably off-level auto-travel) have hopefully been exorcised completely
3. Wandering monsters no longer automatically attack the player
4. Invalid save files are now named.
5. Wizard-mode Ziggurats (&P) are now accessible.
6. Ziggurats should now spawn more than once monster per level.
7. Bailey maps were fixed.
8. Monster clouds should no longer generate auto-exclusions.
9. Harold and Executioners now have their own spell books; this means that Harold no longer casts Pain, and Executioners no longer cast Throw Flame.
10. Messages that scroll should no longer scroll the entire window; this is noticeable in the Wizard mode prompts, as well as the Wizard-mode Lua interpreter.
11. Removing Guardian Spirit amulet no longer generates misplaced Deep Dwarf message.
12. Disappeared Portals will also disappear from the shopping list.
13. Unique placement should no longer clobber stairs, thus preventing this bug.
14. Using ’8′ and ’9′ glyphs in vaults to specify a random monster no longer causes a crash in debug mode, not “dead monster program bug” in other builds.
15. You are now prompted for walking into miasma clouds.
16. rF- messages for steam, lava and fire are now clarified.
17. Banishment for female-pronouned monsters (uniques) now generates a grammatically correct message.
18. Scroll of silence now has a tile.
19. Cloud exclusion updates should now be faster.

New features, changed features

1. Scroll of Silence is now exceedingly rare
2. The Ecumenical Temple now uses an “overflow” system: the Temple now contains a fixed number of altars, to which gods are assigned when the game starts; if there are Gods left over, these are assigned “overflow” vaults. These vaults are guaranteed to show up, meaning that if you have not run into a God by the time you have reached the temple, you can be guaranteed to find the relevant altar soon after (or you may have missed it). As always, Beogh, Jiyva and Lugonu are exempt from this.
3. Evil Gods now give piety for killing freed slaves and other friendlies.
4. Ballistomycetes have had timers and spawn rates adjusted recently.
5. Reaping is now a viable melee brand; it appears on sycthes.
6. Changes to EXP pool and skills were reverted.
7. Food and potions are never assigned, respectively, to ‘e’ and ‘y’ unless absolutely necessary.
8. New monster (demon): sixfirhy, an electric-themed ’4′ glyph monster.
9. Beasts were promoted from ’4′ to ’2′.
10. delay_message_clear now defaults to true.
11. Dumb monsters no longer path-find through secret doors.
12. Level features are now displayed in the “X” map: there is a list of up stairs, down stairs, shafts, escape hatches and altars.
13. New unrand: +3 Robe of Clouds {rElec, +Lev}. Generates a trail of thin mist and occasionally rain.
14. Unique death effects (Pikel, Dowan and Duvessa) should no longer be affected by polymorph.
15. Shafts now generate a milestone.
16. Dowan and Duvessa banishment now has flavour.
17. Passwall is now silent.
18. Messages generated with delay_message_clear now start at the bottom of the window.
19. Firedrakes have been renamed to fire drakes.
20. New monster: giant leech, a red ‘w’ glyph monster with a vampiric draining attack.
21. Crazy Yiuf’s is now chaotic, meaning that Zin will give piety for his death.

Other

1. ZIP and TAR are now usable on FreeBSD platforms.
2. There is a new dLua library: “feat”, that wraps most of the feat_is_XXX functions found in terrain.cc.
3. Vaults can now specify ‘hd’ and ‘hp’ of a monster (using those tags), and using MonPropsMarker, can specify its speech.
4. Purple smoke is now a valid smoke type for fog machines.
5. Using subvaults, it’s now possible to place a vault within another vault; please see the documentation.
6. New monster-flavour Lua iterators.
7. ‘star_item’ and ‘superb_item’ are now syntactically equivalent to ‘*’ and ‘|’ in vaults.
8. mapgrd and mapbld functions are zero-indexed now.
9. As mentioned in the previous post to this, there is now a specific, details ‘process’ document in the repository.
10. In Wizard and debug builds, Ctrl+B now enters Wizard-mode teleport: this bypasses beholders, -TELE checks, is always controlled, and never randomises your destination, while never causing magical contamination.
11. Also in Wizard mode, &z and &Z are now identical; both accept either a number or a monster name.
12. FPROP_FORCE_EXCLUDE and the related ‘force_exclude’ KPROP have been removed.

That’s us up-to-date with git master, at commit de685cf. All comments and corrections welcomed and appreciated. See you next week!

]]> https://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/play-testing-december-3-2009/feed 3 https://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/play-testing-how-you-can-help https://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/play-testing-how-you-can-help#comments Wed, 25 Nov 2009 10:32:28 +0000 due http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/?p=116 There have been a lot of new and exciting changes in the unstable (master) tree of Stone Soup. We desperately need people to play through and give us feedback on them – are the changes good, bad, mediocre? Could things be improved in some manner? What shiny new features have already been implemented?

You can give us feedback in the following ways:

1. You can subscribe and email them to crawl-ref-discuss@lists.sourceforge.net.
2. You can file an issue in our bug tracker, Mantis (requires easy registration).
3. You can catch us on IRC! ##crawl-dev on irc.freenode.org.
   We are also in ##crawl, though feature reports may get lost in there, as it is also the reporting channel for Henzell and Gretell, the reporting bots for our two public servers.
4. You can leave a comment on this post!

On to the changes:




Gods

We’ve three new Gods in trunk!

• Jiyva – god of slime.
• Fedhas – god of plants.
• Cheibriados – god of all things slow.

We’d appreciate all comments on abilities, playing styles, piety gain and loss, and so on.

Two of our current gods have also had some rather radical changes:

• Kikubaaqudgha now has a new invocation: “receive corpses”, which summons corpses in line of sight (depending on invocations skill), for use in necromantic magic; he will protect you from torment at the cost of piety; you can also cause torment by butchering corpses during prayer; he will still gift the necromancy books, but instead of gifting the Necronomicon by default, you now have the option of permanently branding a weapon with pain instead (similar to Lugonu’s final gift).
• Vehumet additionally extends the range of conjurations, as well as reduces the MP cost of certain spells.

Monsters

There are new monsters in trunk. Specific to the Shoals branch (see the “Branches and Portal Vaults” section) are kraken, multi-tentacled monsters.

Slime creatures will now merge together to form larger (and more powerful, threatening monsters), while ugly things now come in a variety of flavours defined by colour, each colour having an individual attack (ranging from freezing, flaming to acid).

Giant spores can now also produce ballistomycetes, which again produce giant spores. A new feature in the Slime Pits are golden eyes, fast, pack creatures which blink and cause (resistible) confusion.

Dancing weapons, both as a monster and as an ally (created by Tukima’s Dance) have been adjusted. See the “Spells” section.

There are also a variety of new uniques:

• Kirke, coming with a band of hogs, found in the late mid-game area.
• Grum, coming with a band of war dogs, found in the mid-game area.
• Purgy, a timid troll (found mainly in the Sewer portal vault), found in the early game.
• Menkaure, an ancient mummy spell caster (also found in the Ossuary portal vault), found in the early game.
• Duvessa and Dowan, elven twins who spawn together. Duvessa is a fighter, while her brother, Dowan, is a spell caster. They are found in the early game.
• Gastronok, a greedy elephant slug who feasted upon a wizard and somehow gained its spells and intelligence. Found in the late mid-game.
• Maurice, a thief who wants to steal your equipment!
• Khufu, an ancient mummy who comes with a group of other mummies, found in the late game.
• Nikola, a lightning-obsessed man.
• Aizul, a disgraced guardian naga who has taken on the role of a warrior, found in the mid game.
• Pikel, a big kobold slaver taking his wares (a selection of four slaves) to the Orcish Mines, found in the early game
• Crazy Yiuf, a crazy old (maybe not so old) gnoll with a guaranteed quarterstaff of chaos.

A unique has also recently been removed from the game: Michael.

Branches and Portal Vaults

The Shoals are once more enabled in trunk. The layout and the kraken currently need to be tested, as well as the XP balance in contrast to the Swamp branch, which it will sometimes replace (randomly decided per-game).

There are several new portal vaults, however:

• Minitomb has been renamed to Ossuary, and features several new maps.
• Treasure Troves, a timed-and-tolled entry portal vault which provides loot in return for money, though entry mechanisms are currently being adjusted
• Baileys, polearm and axe “castle” themed portal vaults.
• Volcanoes, lava and fire-themed portal vaults.
• Soon: Wizard Laboratories, “named Wizard” (such as Tukima, Lehudib, etc) themed portal vaults.
• Soon: Gamits, gambling and Nemelex Xobeh themed portal vaults.

Spells

There is a variety of new spells introduced, though most of these relate to ranged combat (see the “Ranged Combat” section). Most noticeably, the Tukima’s Dance spell has been more properly balanced. It now depends both on spell power and the weight of the weapon, meaning that smaller weapons are now less powerful than larger weapons.

Summon Small Mammals now has a hard limit of monsters-summoned per spell (2), and will only summon up to grey rats (green rats and orange rats are no longer included).

Summon Wraiths has been re-implemented as Haunt, a smite-targetted undead summoning spell.

Mechanics

Shafts and Escape Hatches have changed recently. Shafts may generate more regularly in the dungeon, though this may need to be adjusted if the generation level is too high.

Shields have a new ego: Reflection, and shield representation numbers (“SH”) have been adjusted to fit more in line with current numeric representations of AC and EV.

Auto-exclusions are now created for harmful clouds; these may be generated quite slowly. Initial stat generation is now deterministic.

We’ve changed to a new unique placement system; this may result in more or even less uniques being placed, however, this may also be an affect of the increased number of new uniques.

Carrying capacity has recently been adjusted; this may affect Spriggans, as well as hunters who use large rocks.

We have also switched to a new line of sight system, which has quite a few improvements on the old one.

Finally, it is now possible to view previous levels in the “X” overmap by using the keys “[" and "]“. You can view more information by pressing “?” while in the overmap screen.

The skill pool is now coloured yellow (15k+) and then red (unsure) at various stages of “fullness”.

Jobs and Species

Demonspawn have recently had an overhaul that makes their mutation system more deterministic (though not fully). There is also a variety of new and fun mutations.

Wanderers have also been changed dramatically recently.

Finally, there is a new class: Arcane Marksmen! this is an overhaul of the Warper class, though it does not replace that class. It places heavy emphasis on the enchantment of ammunition, and introduces new spells that correspond to the new ammunition brands. See “Ranged Combat” for a fuller explanation of the new brands.

Ranged Combat

There are a variety of new missile brands:

1. Penetrating (similar to Bolt-esque spells such as Bolt of Fire, etc)
2. Reaping (raises slain monsters as undead allies)
3. Dispersal (causes hit enemies to blink away)
4. Exploding (causes a 3×3 explosion upon impact)
5. Electric (causes effects similar to weapons of electrocution)

There are also two new types of ammunition material: steel and silver. Steel have less chance of mulching, while silver have an affect upon chaotic beings.

As a buff to the Hunter class, their starting ammunition now has a +1 enchantment.

Items

A new type of amulet was introduced: Amulet of the Guardian Spirit. (This “spirit shield” can also be found as a brand on some caps, as well as on the unrandart hat of the Bear Spirit). Upon wearing, it will reduce your current MP to 0, and after it has regenerated, damage will be subtracted from your MP until it reaches zero again, in which case it will be subtracted from your HP.

Deep Dwarves will not regenerate an MP while wearing this amulet, though they can still do so by an act of a god (channeling), or consumables and other items.

As noted above, there are now a variety of new brands for missiles: see the “Ranged Combat” section.

Stealth-based jobs (such as Enchanter) for the Ogre and Troll races now start with a club instead of a dagger. Small clubs also provide a bonus to backstabbing (or back-coshing).

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And that’s it! Please do give us your comments, we appreciate them greatly.

-Jude

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