Quiver which trunk update?

Ho ho ho hello! Santaeus has rolled up from the North Pole with a box of beastly trunk changes for all you good crawlers out there on the net.

The major highlight is the new quiver system, written primarily by advil. A quick overview:

Any ranged attack, spell, ability, or evokable action can be quivered! This change change lets a wide range of things appear in the quiver slot for quick access via firing, autofiring (p and shift-tab) and cycling (( and )); use Q to select an action. At the same time it introduces a number of UI improvements and new options.

For the gory details, check out the updated documentation or read the pull request summary and discussion.

Here’s what else is new in trunk:

• Net traps are now permanent, but the nets always mulch (no more net farming!).
• Translocations miscasts now prevent movement altogether for a short time (like Tree form!).
• Player spell damage and spell accuracy are now displayed in the UI in various easy to find places.
• Hailstorm now hits automatically (instead of having a very small chance to miss).
• Several ghost vaults have been revamped to have better loot and better theme.
• Palentonga can now mutate longer rolls.
• Skills can now be trained at any time, without item or spell restrictions.
• The revamped Swamp has seen various balance tweaks and adjustments after play testing, including:
• Goliath frogs are now a bit slower,
• Will-o-the-wisps cast marshlight more often.
• The chance for the distortion brand to banish has been reduced.
• The ancient pharoahs have asserted their right to title, greater mummies are now royal mummies.
• Evocable invisibility now drains skills, whether or not you successfully vanish!
• Magic Resistance has been renamed to Willpower (with the abbreviation changing from MR to Will).

You feel the power of the Orb delaying this trunk update!

Hello crawlers, and welcome to another update from the fires of Geh:7. This stretch has seen a mix of gameplay and infrastructure changes, both with contributions from the community, as well as bug fixes and tweaks from Goratrix, chequers, and Implojin. If you’d like to help out in the effort of developing crawl come by ##crawl-dev or check out our GitHub for how to contribute!

On the gameplay side:

• Palentonga’s HP aptitude has been increased to +1
• staves of earth now deal higher damage, but with the shrapnel effect of being affected 3 times by AC.
• staves of conjuration now deal irresistible damage that checks AC (taking Earth’s old effect).
• staves of summoning and wizardry are removed.
• The Controlled Blink spell has blinked right out of the game, and is removed.
• Blink scrolls no longer cause Contam.
• The Orb’s translocations interference is reduced: blink scrolls can be used in Zot and on the Orb run, as can Passage of Golubria. However, passages are shorter lived and less accurate under the Orb’s influence.
• The various plants and fungi of the dungeon are now much weaker, once hit they begin to wither and die in 3-5 turns. The exceptions are bushes and briars, made of stouter stuff.

On the infrastructure side:

• wjchen sent us a community contribution to improve WebTiles glyphs mode font handling. This introduces two new options for customization, glyph_mode_font and glyph_mode_font_size, for all you WebTiles glyphs players.
• The window drawing loop has seen some optimizations.

The trunk update comes into view, it is surrounded by clouds of flame!

Hello crawlers, and welcome to another round of trunk updates from the frigid winter wastes of Falls Creek Coc:7.

This week has seen a fair share of bug fixing, including from community members Goratrix and Naruni. If you’d like to help out in the effort of developing crawl come by ##crawl-dev or check out our GitHub for how to contribute!

Let’s take a look at what else has been woven into the next illusion version:

• Gauntlet monsters now generate awake
• A new round of unrand revisions has begun in earnest:
• Wucad Mu no longer provides evocable channeling. Instead, with a chance depending on evocations, it refunds the MP cost of the spell. There is a chance of confusion or intelligence drain (which scales on spell cost and evocations skill) when a spell is refunded.
• The cloak of the Thief is changed from +Fog to *Fog, creating fog when the player is hit.
• The Majin-Bo loses Archmagi, and instead gives a chance for any cast spell to be vampiric, healing the caster for damage done to living creatures.
• The shield of Resistance is now a +2 kite shield {rF++ rC++ MR++}.
• Rampaging can now appear as an artefact property on all armour types. Enjoy your rampaging octopodes, courtesy of Implojin!
• Staves of energy are removed.
• chequers has finished his project to add cloud rings to Pandemonium lords. There’s now a chance that pan lords will come with a ring of one of the following clouds: flame, ice, thunder, chaos, mutation, draining, acid, or miasma. The chance is much higher for melee pan lords, and the cloud will often flavorfully match the pan lord’s melee brand. Watch out for Faroclos, armed with a chaotic touch and surrounded by clouds of chaos!
• Not content to let chequers have all the fun, first-time contributor amcnicky sent in some new Pandemonium lord tiles.

There’s much more planned before we arrive at 0.26, so stay tuned for the latest and don’t hesitate to get involved yourself. Until next time, happy crawling!

The trunk update sneers, “Beg for mercy, thou defiled idle-headed gnoll-tail!”

Clouds of trunk updates condense around you!

Hello crawlers, and welcome to another round of trunk updates, fresh from the Citadel in the Iron City.

The biggest change this week is the introduction of the malevolent chronology of Zot. One of food’s many (badly executed) purposes was a forward progress clock; in the absence of any such clock tedious optimal strategies crept in, of the kind that we on the devteam categorically prefer to prevent (check out the philosophy section of the manual for an elaboration). The Zot clock is a rather loose clock, but should you tarry too long Zot will find you, and rapidly end you. The hope is that this clock is sufficiently loose that only the most egregious behavior gets caught by it. Since this is trunk there will be further tuning.

Read on for the remainder of the tweaks, shifts, and ever seething chaos of trunk

• Contamination now decays three times faster.
• Scarves of shadows now only reduce LOS by 1, instead of a multiplicative factor.
• The rat skin cloak is changed from evocable +Rats to a passive *Rats, summoning rats when the wearer is hit.
• Ripostes no longer trigger hydra-head chopping, *Rage, or Minotaur headbutts.
• Phantom Mirrors and Boxes of Beasts now recharge on XP, mirrors have a single charge and boxes have three charges.
• A new misc evoker condenser vanes replace wands of clouds. Condenser Vanes have 4 charges and create clouds on and around monsters in view, with the clouds scaling in power similar to the old wand of clouds.
• Wanderers now have a chance to start with any of the XP charged misc evokers.

You rampage towards the trunk updates!

Hello crawlers, and welcome to the last trunk updates post of July 2020.

The past month saw some giant changes to crawl; in the past week things have slowed down a little bit, and some of the devteam’s focus has shifted to interface and polish while the dust settles. For our visually impaired players, this means some new accessibility improvements:

• A new boot ego: rampaging comes to us from Implojin. Boots of rampaging cause the wearer to take an extra step whenever they move in the direction of a foe (whether they want to or not!).
• Thanks to rjcrjc, Kobolds now have the Nightstalker 3 mutation from the start, while Demonspawn no longer have the Nightstalker facet as an available mutation.

• Artificers no longer start with a spectral club; farewell to the brief experiment.
• Item stacks are now fully visible from anywhere in LOS, and no longer require visiting.
• The Cloud Mage has learned to fly.
• Beastly Appendage now merges only helmets and boots, not the full set of aux armour.
• Formicids can no longer use Wu Jian martial moves while digging (sorry twelwe).

You start singing a song of trunk updates…

Hello Crawlers, and welcome to a charming round of trunk updates fresh from the ever churning chaos of the changelog abyss!

The big news this update is that the long awaited Charms overhaul has arrived. For many years the devteam has tossed around different ideas for what to do with charms, and the school had become quite thin and unfocussed because of a fundamental tension: pure buff spells don’t fit well with crawl’s MP and tactical systems. Some forks experimented with various “permabuff” systems that reserved max-MP, but to us these felt more like items. The result of all this is that the Charms school and skill are no more. The remaining spells in the school have either moved to other schools of magic or to item effects. Without any charms to cast, Skalds have sung their last and are removed. Here are the spell changes:

• Ozocubu’s Armour is now Ice only.
• Swiftness is now Air only.
• Death’s Door is now Necromancy only and Level 9.
• Excruciating Wounds is now Necromancy only, prevents unwielding your weapon for the duration, and applies a Wizardry penalty as well as noise.
• Battlesphere is now Conjurations only and its targeting has been adjusted to work with all Conjurations school spells other than Servitor.
• Song of Slaying is now Transmutations and renamed Wereblood; the noise is reduced somewhat.
• Infusion, Shroud of Golubria, Spectral Weapon, Darkness, and Ring of Flames are removed.

Then there are the new or revised items that take up some of the old charm effects:

• Gozag no longer offers flight potions in petition and occasionally offers lignification.
• Viewing a monster with xv now shows to-hit chance with your current weapon.
• The “view stack/pickup key” ; can be pressed twice to force autopickup even in unsafe situations.
• Beastly Appendage now melds auxilliary armour slots, weapons, and shields, and gives two levels of both Horns and Talons (octopodes keep their tentacle spike) instead of randomly choosing.
• Alistair’s Intoxication prompts when nothing in view can be affected, always applies Vertigo when successful, and has a higher power cap.
• Sticks to Snakes is removed.
• Palentonga charge now provides a to-hit bonus as well as the damage bonus.

That’s all for now. Still on the horizon is a look at Kobolds; for a preview look out for the kobold-nightstalker experimental on CPO and possibly coming soon to CKO. Beyond that who knows what might emerge from the seething chaos! Until next time, happy crawling!

As the wereblood boils in your veins your song becomes a howl!!! 

The trunk updates roll forward with a clatter of scales!

Hello crawlers, and welcome to the first trunk update of the 0.26 cycle. There’s been a flurry of activity in trunk since the end of the tournament, and I’m excited to bring you the latest from Geh:7. Before diving into the details, I want to highlight two major changes that arrived just as this post was going to press, as well as something that’s unfolded over the past week.

The first is a new species: Palentonga. Palentongas are a two-armed, four-legged, scaled mammal species the size of a horse. Their special power is the ability to curl into a ball and launch a rolling charge at enemies, dealing extra damage proportionate to the distance traveled. Palentongas have flat melee apts, slightly weak spell apts and fairly weak ranged apts. They have +3 base AC and extra HP, along with an aux attack – an upgraded tail slap. They wear bardings (which have been merged into a single item type, shared with nagas). Stats skew towards strength and away from dex, to give the ‘large race’ feeling. Palentonga have deformed body and bad armour/dodging apts. In the Lore, Palentonga are an up-and-coming power, displacing the orcs, trolls, and ogres of the eastern wastes. Their generals ride elephants into battle, goading them forward with spiked ankuses.

The second is a new background: Delver. Shaft traps are fun. What if you had a background that started shafted all the way to D:5, and needed to find their way back up to survive? To make it fair, you start with a nice set of consumables: a wand of digging, scrolls of mapping, fear, and fog, and a potion of haste.

Finally, several aspects of the game have been touched with the long-hungered for removal of food and hunger mechanics. That’s right, no more eating, no more butchering, no more spell or ability hunger, and no more rations.

What happened to Ghouls with the removal of chunks? Well, read on gentle crawler, read on…

• Crimson Imps no longer spawn in D, and Shadow Imps less often (not at all after D:10); in their place White Imps and Ufetubi chase adventurers.
• Shadows and Wights no longer spawn in Crypt; replaced with flying skulls, necromancers, and wraiths.
• Spider is now ambiently quiet, apart from the unsettling clatter of chitin.
• Evocations skill no longer grants max MP.
• Banishment (from Lugonu or distortion) grants full XP.
• Wizards have been renamed Hedge Wizards; they now start with a dagger and 2/6/4 stat modifiers.
• Conjurers start with -1/10/3 stat modifiers that Wizards used to have.
• Assassins have been renamed Brigands.
• Ghouls, no longer able to eat chunks, now heal when they kill the living.
• Centaurs have galloped out of the game and are removed.
• Deep Elves‘ bow aptitude is increased to +3 for all you longbow enthusiasts.
• Nemelex has removed the shaft card from their decks, and the self-banishment chance from the exile card.
• Amulets are now slow to equip; guardian spirit, acrobat, and reflection no longer need to attune to the wearer.
• Pikel’s minions are now lemures, demons that depart this plane if you free them from Pikel.
• Spiny Frogs have been renamed Cane Toads for the authentic Australian experience™.
• Pandemonium lords’ spells and melee flavours have been adjusted; melee focused lords have now learned a few position-altering spells so watch out!
• Hungry ghosts hunger no more, because they’re removed.
• Conjure Ball Lightning now summons a fixed number of balls, with damage scaling with spellpower.
• Necromancy ally spells have been adjusted:
• Animate Skeleton and Animate Dead animated remains have a reduced duration. The durability of skeletons and zombies produced by these spells scales with spellpower. Animate Skeleton now animates the nearest skeleton, without requiring the caster to stand on it.
• Death Channel spectral things have a reduced duration, and all spectral things vanish when Death Channel expires.
• Infestation scarabs have a reduced duration.
• Aura of Abjuration, Recall, and Summon Butterflies are removed.

You miscast the trunk update. You are blasted with magical energy!!!!!!!

Hello crawlers. The 0.25 development cycle continues apace. Expect an announcement about a forthcoming release and tournament within the month.

This round of updates comes with an overhaul of the spell miscast system, to couple with the magic overhaul of this version. Miscasts have been thoroughly simplified, to the point that the effect of miscasting a spell can be included in its description! Read on for details and the scoop on the latest from the Iron City.

• Zot traps have had their effect flowchart replaced with an effect table with a more focused list of awful terrible things to do to the player.
• The Wu Jian Council met in executive session and tweaked some of their martial arts. Wall jumps move only to the ‘a’bility menu, movement triggering is no more. Whirlwind attacks no longer pin. Heavenly Storm has had its slaying mechanics simplified.
• With miscasts simplified Xom now finds them boring and has turned their attention to summoning more demons on low level players.
• As a prelude to the miscast changes several gods no longer use miscasts in their retribution. The new wraths are:
• Trog replaces fire miscasts with pure fireballs in her fiery rage.
• Lugonu exchanges translocations miscasts with a chance to banish, summon Abyssal things, or teleport the penitent to nearby monsters.
• Cheibriados replaces miscasts with a chime on their clock before putting the player to sleep at high tension, and stat damage at low tension.
• Fedhas’ elemental damage is now more focused: a corrosive bolt, a primal wave, or a thorn volley await those who would trample the flowers.
• Yredelemnul prefers the simplicity of a bolt of draining to necromancy miscasts.
• Kikubaaqudgha will still impose necromancy miscasts on those who attempt to use necromancy while under penance; for outright retribution they now apply the same ancient and terrible death curses used by mummies.
• The scythe of Curses also replaces necromancy miscasts with death curses.
• The distortion brand no longer teleports on hit; unwielding a distortion weapon has a chance to teleport the unwieldier to nearby monsters, contaminate, or banish.
• Regeneration items (troll armour, artifacts) must attune to a player before granting their effect. No more carrying TLA to swap while resting!
• Mummies have consulted the book of death and determined that necromancy miscasts no longer suit their vengeful needs. Death curses are now their own effect table, separate from miscasts. Kikubaaqudgha was involved as well, and still protects loyal followers from curses.
• New monster: nameless horror. Nameless horrors are brought into the world by summoning miscasts, have an antimagic attack and abjure other summons as a natural ability.
• Absolute Zero has been reduced to a fixed range of 5 (up to 6 with Vehumet), the noise now scales with power down to 0 at maximum power.
• Leda’s Liquefaction regains its slow movement penalty, but the caster remains immune to its effects on melee combat.
• Deflect Missiles has been removed. The tedious-but-optimal armour-wizardy-int dance has danced its last!
• Lesser Beckoning and Teleport Other now turn allies hostile.
• Tukima’s Dance cannot be used by Ru followers who have sacrificed Love.
• Two new Gauntlet maps are live: one presents a sequence of arenas, after each you can chose to press your luck or turn and face the minotaur. The other has a choke point in the sequence: there is only one middle arena in the three-arena-sequence to the minotaur.
• Miscast effects have been simplified. When miscasting a spell, the player receives magical contamination, and if the miscast is bad enough an additional effect that scales with the spell’s current failure chance. These effects vary by school as follows (compare to the old miscast effects, which could you even correctly lists all of them without a source dive?). For damaging effects the damage message is punctuated like other damage messages.
• Charms and Hexes: debuff and slow
• Summoning: durably summon a nameless horror
• Translocation: dimension anchor
• Transmutation: polymorph
• Conjuration: irresistible AC-ignoring damage
• Elemental schools: school flavored damage (Earth magic does fragmentation damage like Lee’s Rapid Destruction).
• Monsters on D:1 are now back asleep, after briefly getting into the coffee.

Hello crawlers, and welcome to the first batch of trunk updates of 2020. The teams’ celebrations raised quite a bit of Pandemonium, but in the fray several trunk changes appeared. Here’s the latest!

• A new swamp worm tunnel vault offering a transporter puzzle for your death enjoyment
• A new Fedhas vs Yredelemnul themed swamp rune vault with a cameo by an undead Lernean Hydra
• On the back-end we’ve added catch2 testing to the build process
• Foxfire no longer damage the player when swapping, just dissipate
• A new abyss-escape themed ghost vault
• Regeneration has regenerated for the last time, and is removed. Agony replaces it in the book of Necromancy, and Ozocubu’s Armour in the Book of Battle
• A new unique Maggie enters the dungeon. Maggie is a younger version of Margery, and is a test of reaverb’s new multiple-unique-encounter storytelling approach. Maggie knows Bolt of Fire and Mesmerise, and comes equipped with a light dragon skin and a good weapon. Margery’s dragon armour is upgraded. Both Maggie and Margery have a chance of carrying Wyrmbane, which comes already slightly leveled up!
• dtsund can send us an “I told you so!”. Scrolls of acquirement now offer a choice of 4-5 items: food (if you eat), gold, and three random choices from the old acquirement categories. These items are fully identified, and you can inspect them before making your choice.
• However, the miscellaneous category of acquirement has been removed, so you won’t be seeing evocables on the list ever again!

That’s all for now! On the horizon, there are rumors of an upcoming crawl sudden death challenges “soon”, more magic changes, and who knows what manner of twisted sinister changes from the mind of Xom. Happy crawling!

Hello Crawlers, and welcome to a new batch of trunk updates. This sometimes-regular blog feature has seen the dark of Kikubaaqudgha and risen from the grave. There’s no telling whether or not it will survive the whole 0.25 development cycle. But while it’s here lets get the latest from Tar:7.

• Various bug fixes from the 0.24 tournament. The 0.24.1 bug fix release is coming soon.
• Monster clinging has finally lost its grip and is now removed
• Boris will now pursue you on the orb run
• While hostile guardian golems were great ways to make the game harder, summons now dismiss when attacked instead of becoming hostile. The exception is Greater Demons, who are none to pleased to be bothered with your mortal issues.
• Local tiles gains monster threat level indicators which can also be enabled in WebTiles with the tile_show_threat_levels option.
• Fedhas now protects your plants from collision damage.
• On the back end,
• aidanh’s long running ui overhaul has made significant strides
• Monster pathing code has received some optimizations, which should reduce lag when stepped from time. (Cheibriados regrets the need for haste).
• Carrying corpses has been removed again.

Looking to the future, my positional attack magic experiment has grown and twisted. It’s just been merged, details will appear in the next trunk updates post!

Hello crawlers! A new version is fast approaching, and the team is getting ready to feature-freeze, as mentioned in the last trunk update. With the freeze comes a focus on fixing bugs and polishing the game to a release state, and that is where you come in. As we’ve mentioned before, crawl can’t be what it is without community contributions. If you’ve been curious about crawl development and want to get your feet wet, fixing bugs is a great place to start. To guide you, here is a list of 23 bugs that seem (to this dev) approachable entry points that would be nice to fix before the 0.23 release and tournament.

If you can fix one of these bugs send us a pull request on GitHub, be sure to follow our coding conventions and be aware of the process described in the contribution guide. Happy hacking!

1. 11706 Little-known and misleading behaviour with polymorph on ugly things,
   shapeshifters, undead
2. 11782 i_feel_safe despite having monsters in view
3. 11833 Wand of Digging targeter on Barachi is too short.
4. 11839 Potion Petition ignores “no potion heal”
5. 11836 No warning for Demonspawn when reading scroll of Holy Word
6. 11831 Transmutation spells can show max duration
7. 11806 Weird interaction between Shadow Step, Nightstalker (?) and dispersal trap
8. 11792 Issues when initially worshipping Jiyva
9. 11825 Passwall/Nemelex gifting messaging
10. 11758 If a mummy is killed by Grand Finale, the wrong character location is passed to death curse handler
11. 3734 Fast travel down on bottom level gives wrong message
12. 11705 Monsters who are immune to nets do not display that, when the net is thrown with ‘F’
13. 11701 Guardian Golem clouds don’t dissipate when leaving LOS
14. 11649 Put bazaar items on top of shopping list.
15. 11522 Autoexplore ignores enemies behind traps
16. 11310 False warning when trying to use lightning rod through mushroom.
17. 11463 Tengu flight EV bonus is applied after equipment EV bonuses.
18. 11381 Yellow draconians in forms have rCorr according to % screen but not A screen.
19. 11374 Petrify should show on death messages in the same way as paralysis.
20. 11315 No friendly fire warning is displayed while using Damnation with portal projectile
21. 11306 Trying to put on incompatible armour in forms results in unhelpful message of wrong item type.
22. 11814 Pain’s message inconsistent against invisible creatures
23. 11738 Setting a confirm_action for an ability generates a Y/N prompt every time the ability menu is opened