You draw a card… it is Trunk Update!

Hello Crawlers, and welcome to the last batch of Trunk Updates for the year.

• Nemelex Xobeh has removed decks from your inventory, placing them into three abstract piles.
• Deck rarities are removed also. Card power is determined entirely from piety and invocations skill.
• In the place of deck items Nemelex provides three abilities “Draw Escape”, “Draw Destruction”, and “Draw Summoning”, which pull from abstract decks that Nemelex occasionally adds cards to.
• Triple Draw works as before, though the piety cost is increased.
• Deal Four deals four cards from a chosen deck (or all remaining if fewer than four remain), discarding the remainder of the deck, and costs no piety.
• Stack Five constructs a stack from five cards drawn from a choice of decks, which are then put in order. The stack can then be drawn from later, like a fourth deck. Stacking again discards an existing stack.
• The Velocity card no longer hastes enemies at low power.
• Ashenzari now protects followers from exploration-based trap effects
• Qazlal has extended cloud immunity to the elementals created with Elemental Force
• Console players can now see cloud duration provided by new display character types; see options_guide.txt for the exact values to customize.
• The skin of Zhor gains See Invisible and a passive Metabolic Englaciation effect. Chilly!
• Giant size creatures (monsters and players in dragon form) no longer tear through webs
• The require function in crawl Lua has been renamed crawl_require to allow local builds to include the Lua package library without conflict.
• Several spooky new ghost vaults are haunting the dungeon
• Cozy new 7×7 Gauntlet arenas are available to die in.

The trunk updates glow with a rainbow of weird colours and disappear!

You hear the creaking of ancient gears, and the crawl code shifts around you!

Hello crawlers, it’s my pleasure to bring you another edition of trunk updates. It’s been a busy two weeks in Coc:7 and there are a host of new changes.

• The ancient gears shift one last time and the Labyrinth transforms into the Gauntlet
• Gauntlets have the player choose a path through several combat arenas, each of which contains (sometimes exotic) monsters and loot.
• Arena access is one-way using transporters, and teleports are disabled.
• All paths lead to the minotaur who guards the exit and a pile of treasure.
• Gauntlets are found where Labyrinths previously generated.
• Traps have been overhauled
• Traps on the floor are always revealed
• A new trap: the dispersal trap blinks everything in sight when triggered
• Alarms are now like Zot traps, and always mark the player when triggered
• The powers of Zot have gained the ability to trap you as you explore: every tile revealed has a chance of causing you to fall down a shaft, set off the alarm, or be teleported to nearby monsters.
• Elyvilon’s Heal Other targeter now shows the chance of pacification.
• Blowguns display a chance to affect the target in the targeter.
• The robe of Clouds has been upgraded, and is now +3 {+Thunder rCloud rElec}, providing evocable thunder clouds.
• Confused monsters now get a 1 in 3 chance to move normally, just like players.
• Deep water, lava, and the Temple no longer trigger exploration based effects (piety gain and explore traps).

You fall through a shaft! The trunk updates crumble behind you.

Hello Crawlers. Since I last wrote for this blog (a long long time ago indeed)
I’ve joined the development team, and I’m happy to be back with a write up of
what’s been popping and shaking over the past few months of trunk development.

Let’s start off with some miscellaneous changes that come from categories that aren’t big enough to merit a separate heading.

• Wanderers’ starting spell libraries are listed in the
  message log on game start, and logged to the character log. They also
  start with a level 1 spell memorized if they start with exactly one
  such spell.
• New tiles: monster spell icons, shock serpent, dream sheep,
  mana viper, Azrael, Dispater, Robe of Vines; plus a new splash
  screen.
• Confusing touch can now be used with a weapon.

Levels

• A vast and terrible array of new vaults (over two hundred) has been
  added, touching most branches of the dungeon, including new ghost
  vaults, new transporters, vaults that place early manuals, and much more.
• Many old vaults have been adjusted to prevent unnecessary vetoing,
  allowing them to place with greater frequency.
• The concentric octagons layout has been added to Snake and Lair,
  and the cave pools layout (with some parameter changes) has been added
  to D.

Monsters

• Grasping Roots is now a smite-targeted constriction
  effect.
• Jorgrun has learned this new Grasping Roots spell, and can
  spawn in Swamp. Watch out for the Roots/Iron Shot wombo-combo.
• Orb run spawns are more frequently near the player and more
  dangerous.
• Pandemonium lords’ spell sets and attack brands are revealed
  when you meet them.
• Monster equipment is identified when you see the monster (including wands).

Items

• Stash search can now search by handedness.
• Butchering always leaves a skeleton.
• Wand charges have been reduced, according to the following
  schedule of average charges per wand:

  Wand	Before	After
  digging	12.5	5
  enslavement	12.5	8
  paralysis	12.5	8
  polymorph	12.5	8
  flame	24.5	16.5
  random effects	24.5	16.5

• The following fixed artefacts have been changed:
  • The Singing Sword is now a vorpal double sword, its sonic damage effect triggers on 50% of hits (including ripostes) and is considerably higher.
  • The Spriggan’s Knife now carves into the realm of dreams, and all backstabs are as if the target were asleep.
  • The Robe of Misfortune is no longer an item identification trap, and is now a +5 robe with *Drain *Corrode *Contam Harm *Slow and EV+5.
  • The Sceptre of Torment is now a pain branded eveningstar that torments on 1 in 5 hits but does not torment the wielder. It gains a new tile too!
  • The Arc Blade’s static discharge effect now casts the spell once (instead of using a special custom version) and has had its enchantment bumped to +8.
  • Finisher trades Str+3 for a chance (based on monster toughness) to instantly kill and explode the target.

Technical

• MS Visual Studio can build crawl again.
• Crawl’s Lua API has been documented, at least the portions available from your options file. Read the docs here.

That’s all for right now, so until next time: happy crawling!