Many thanks to tarballqc for generously hosting our newest official server! Check out his other projects at roguelikes.gg…just be sure that your system has the latest Pentium processor, at least 4MB of memory, and plug-and-play compatible peripherals! Until next time, happy crawling!

DCSS 0.34.1 features the following fixes:

• Fix the Lua error handler causing slowdowns seen in vaults like Pan’s Disco Hall.
• Properly mark unidentified talismans evil/chaotic as appropriate.
• Allow deconstructing forgecraft allies while wielding a ranged weapon.
• Fix Freezing Cloud not having a self-damage warning prompt.
• Fix the force_more prompts for dancing weapons of distortion.
• Fix banished Orb Guardians not activating the Boundless Tesseracts.
• Fix Duel/Banishment on top of a portal entrance expiring that entrance.
• Prompt for wearing any talisman that would lower max HP by more than 10%.
• Fix randart Bane scarves having hidden AC (Back-form)
• Fix Revenant spells being free and boosted by Enkindle if cast via Sif Muna’s Divine Exegesis.
• Fix removing Fragile equipment not triggering unequip effects before being destroyed.
• Don’t have Dithmenos’ Marionette treat monsters it charms as hostile for subsequent actions.
• Fix Dominate Undead not working properly for friendly casters.
• Fix the force_scroll_targeter option interfering with ability targeters.
• Fix anacondas taking no damage from cactus giant spines.
• A new clua function you.zot_orb_monster() to see the type of orb monster the player will face in Zot, if known.
• New clua functions for checking visibility between cells: view.cell_see_cell_no_trans(), view.cell_see_cell_solid(), and view.cell_see_cell_solid_see().
• 36 other bug fixes, interface improvements, and documentation updates.

Packages of DCSS 0.34.1 for Windows, macOS, and Linux are all available from the download page. Our online servers will be updated with 0.34.1 throughout next week. Happy crawling!

Congratulations to FlugKiller for taking first place in the individual competition, with 125,695 points and 21 wins! FlugKiller tied sekai for longest streak of the tournament (14 wins), had the 2nd fastest realtime win (a MiFi won in 25:47), and the 3rd lowest turncount win (a TrMo won in 15,785 turns). Additionally, FlugKiller had species high scores for Mi and Dj, class high scores for FE and Sh, and 4 combo high scores. Finally, and although this isn’t in a tournament category, it’s still impressive: FlugKiller had the first win of the tournament, a MiFi of Gozag won 48 minutes after tournament start. It’s interesting that the 0.33 tournament winner, EnegeticOcto, also had the first win of the tournament, which was also a MiFi of Gozag. Even more amazing is that FlugKiller’s MiFi of Gozag realtime win from this tournament had the exact same time as EnegeticOcto’s MiFi of Gozag realtime win in the 0.33 tournament.

Other big winners:

• EnegeticOcto (aka Lici the Crawler): 2nd place overall with  116,222 points and 23 wins. Lici had the highest scoring run of the tournament, an AtCj worth 78M points. Lici was also the only player to win all tier 3 banners, and the only person to win Elyvilon’s tier 3 banner, which he achieved via a SpEn that killed just 933 monsters. He was 2nd in the Combo High Scores category, with 2 species high scores (At and MD), 2 class high scores (Cj and HW), and 6 combos high scores. Finally, he had the 3rd fastest realtime win of the tournament, a MiFi won in 29:50.
• sekai: 3rd place overall with 108,465 and 24 wins, including a 14 win streak that tied FlugKiller for best in tournament. Sekai also got 2nd in the Nemelex’ Choice category by winning 16 Nemelex’ Choice combos. Finally, sekai had the En class high score and 8 combo high scores.
• Sergey: Won the Winrate category with a perfect performance over ten games. Before this tournament, Sergey already had an ongoing world record win streak of 92 wins with non-repeating combos. During the tournament, he extended this streak to triple digits with 102 wins. Congratulations, Sergey!
• p0werm0de: Won the Realtime category with a MiFi of Cheibriados that ascended in 23:30.
• sentinel: Won the Low Turncount category with a TrGl of Wu Jian that ascended in 12,904 turns.
• bookman: Won the Nemelex’ choice category by winning 24 Nemelex’ Choice combos.
• Turgon: Won the Combo High Scores category with just 4 wins that were both the species and class high score for that combo: OpHs, TrFw, OnGl, and BaWn.

The clan competition was won by Bane of Ogre (captained by EnegeticOcto) with 136,467 points and 1st in the clan Streak Length, Best High Score, Combo High Scores, Low Turncount Win, and Banner Collection categories. They also took 2nd in the Fastest Realtime category, and 3rd in the Nemelex’ Choice category. In 2nd place was The 27 Club (captained by particleface) with 116,047 points, 2nd place in the Best High Score, Nemelex’ Choice, and Combo High Scores categories, and 3rd place in the Streak Length and Low Turncount Win categories. In 3rd place was Doomed To Win – Cosplay (captained by TheMeInTeam) with 114,599 points, 1st place in the Nemelex’ Choice category, 2nd place in Streak Length category, and 3rd place in the Combo High Scores category.

To close out, here are some overall tournament statistics (with the 0.33 numbers in brackets for comparison). 3278 non-bot players started a game at some point during the tournament; of those 3194 completed a game without quitting or leaving the dungeon sadly orbless. This definition of “player” (players who completed a non-boring game) is used for subsequent calculations and was used for the 0.33 statistics.

• Players: 3,194 (0.33: 2,870). This is a record high for tournaments since version 0.23, over 7 years ago!
• Total player time: 34,962 hrs (0.33: 32,484 hrs)
• Average player time: 10.95 hrs (0.33: 11.32 hrs)
• Games played: 90,631 (0.33: 89,582)
• Players who got a rune: 985 (0.33: 890)
• 412 winners and 1,326 wins (0.33: 421 winners and 1,428 wins)
• Win rate: 1.46% (0.33: 1.59%)
• WebTiles win rate: 1.42% (0.33: 1.52%) / Console win rate: 3.17% (0.33: 4.06%)

Thanks to you all for playing! Many thanks as well to server admins, developers, and contributors who made the 0.34 release and tournament possible! The 0.35 development season has begun, with the new Anemocentaur species having already landed in trunk. There are other tweaks and bug fixes you can read in the commit list, and stay tuned for many more changes to come this version. Also look for an important 0.34.1 bugfix release to made soon. That’s all for now, and until next time, happy crawling!

DCSS 0.34 features:

• Many new egos for weapons, armour, amulets, and orbs.
• Big overhauls to strategic damage with a new doom system and a reduction of player mutation.
• Unlimited player inventory for consumables.
• Major updates to Troves, the Slime Pits, and the Halls of Zot.
• Dozens of new monsters spread throughout the dungeon!

For the complete list of these and the many other changes included in this version, see the release page here.

Packages of DCSS 0.34 for Windows, OS X, and Linux are all available from the download page. You can also play it online on one of many servers across the world!

The tournament starts today on Friday Feb 6th, 8pm UTC and runs through Sunday Feb 22nd, 8pm UTC, with all online 0.34 games counting towards your score. See the tournament page for more details, including how to join or setup a clan. Clans membership can be changed until Friday Feb 13th, 8pm UTC.

Many thanks to all those who have contributed to DCSS over the years. Thanks especially to the DCSS development team, whose contributions made 0.34 possible, and to the admins who run and maintain the official servers. A special thanks to the following community members who contributed to 0.34 and a warm welcome to the first-time contributors.

Aliscans, Andrew, antimachina, Brian Power, brianfaires, Claus Mouse, code2828, coraxioU9, CrawlOdds, croikle, fslottner, geekosaur, guillaume, Jared Miller, LiciTheCrawler, Lulu, mainiacjoe, Matt Smith, MikeJHeg, Nicholas Wilson, NormalPerson7, Perry Fraser, person50605, riverfiend, RypoFalem, Steinar Darri Þorgilsson, tianmaster, unutbu, Vaskritaya, Vincent Cheng, Vsevolod Kozlov, Weston Odom, yrdzrfxndfvh, Zhang Haocheng

Speaking of 0.34, here’s one last Trunk Update for 0.34 with a small batch of changes that sneaked in after the last post:

• New talismans:
• Spore talismans, tier 2 talismans providing Spore Form. This meld one’s offhand and feet into sporulating fungi, allowing attacks to weaken enemies and creating rows of burstshrooms behind them. These burstshrooms explode after a short delay and sometimes daze those hit.
• Eel talismans, tier 3 talismans providing Eel Hands Form. This melds one’s gloves, weapon, and offhand slots into twin eels, which provide rElec, and also make one’s melee attacks sometimes produce short-range electric jolts. When one falls below 50%, a stronger jolt will trigger immediately.
• Further talisman changes:
• Blade Form has been reworked. It is now tier 4, melds nothing, and provides two melee auxiliary attacks instead of an unarmed combat bonus. In addition, it provides SH while attacking based on your Slaying.
• Fortress Crab Form now doubles most egos and artifact properties on the body armour equipped. It also provides a slightly higher multiplier to body armour AC (from +135% at max skill to +150%) and Breathe Rust costs slightly less HP.
• Maw Form is now tier 3. Its bite attack triggers less often with fast weapons, but gets additional bonus damage from strength. Kills now heal more in total (especially at high skill), but over several turns. It can now briefly mesmerise the player when an edible monster is first encountered.
• Protean talismans can no longer become maw talismans, but can become spore talismans instead.
• Sphinx Form and Vampire Form now see invisible.
• Vampire Form has a high chance to briefly daze living / demonic / holy monsters when they first notice the player, preventing them from shouting. The Bat Swarm ability can now be manually cancelled, and its cooldown is now shortened by Shapeshifting skill.
• Werewolf Form now can wear helmets and cloaks.
• Fire dragon scales encumbrance rating has decreased, from 11 to 9.
• Amulets of Alchemy are now called amulets of Chemistry, but are otherwise unchanged from the last Trunk Update.
• Fortress Blast’s explosion radius has been increased from 5×5 to 7×7.
• Hellfire Mortar can no longer be recast until the lava from a previous cast has expired, but this lava now disappears more quickly.
• Sphinx Sisters’ summons are now slightly weaker and have a shorter duration.

The 0.34 release will be made and announced Thursday Feb 5th. In the meantime, the 0.34 branch will be installed on servers. Once the 0.34 branch is installed on your favorite server, you can configure your tournament clan in your RC files right now. Good luck in the tournament!

Note: The DCSS scoring pages probably won’t have 0.34 games added until after the tournament. During the tournament, scoring updates will be disabled to conserve resources on CAO. After the tournament, scoring will resume and all games not yet counted will be included. Game records are always permanently stored on each server where the game was played, so no data is lost.

Once again, we haven’t had the time to post any trunk updates during the 0.34 development cycle, but there’s plenty of new content! It would take a long time to go into detail on the past eight months of changes. For easy reading, below you’ll find the contents of the current changelog plus some recent updates:

Highlights

• Players can now carry an unlimited number of consumables.
• Big overhauls to strategic damage, adding new types and reducing mutation.
• Dozens more new monsters have been spread throughout the Dungeon.
• Many new egos have been added for weapons, armour, amulets, and orbs.
• Troves, the Slime Pits, and the Halls of Zot have received major updates.

Artefacts

• The faerie dragon scales now has a higher average enchantment, can sometimes come with evokable invisibility, and is a Hexes enhancer.
• The Mask of the Dragon loses its Will+ and Slay+3 modifiers to gain +2 enchantment and the ability to rarely summon dragons when using invocations,
  with dragon choices scaling to one’s XL.
• The Orb of Wucad Mu is no longer twice as likely to trigger as other orbs of energy, but now has a chance to apply antimagic to monsters after channelling mp for successful spells casts.
• The Scales of the Dragon King no longer has Will+, and instead has the new Command ego.
• The Sword of the Doom Knight has been renamed to the Sword of the Dread Knight.
• Randarts can now come with a Bane property, which inflicts a Bane on the player when equipped. Randarts with this property have higher enchantment.
• Armour egos that are not otherwise in the regular randart property pool can now occasionally appear once per randart as the randart’s base ego.
• Removed unrands: the Sword of Power.

Branches, Environment

• The Lair of Beasts now contains more decorative vaults as well as increased chances to see decorative vaults each game.
• The staircases to and from Vaults:5 now have unique tiles and descriptions.
• The Crypt end vault’s old thematic item rewards have been moved into a unique, guaranteed shop containing a larger quantity of the prior options at high prices.
• Slime Pits now has slimy stairs and other layout changes:
• Staircases in the Slime Pits are slimy and can no longer be climbed back up until The Royal Jelly is dead (or the player worships Jiyva).
• Going down on a slimy staircase confers a status that greatly increases HP and MP regen for a while.
• All floors are now fully connected, and up and down stairs are placed further apart.
• Altars to Jiyva are guaranteed on Slime:2-4 with a 50% chance for one on Slime:1.
• The Depths now more consistently contains threatening minivaults.
• The Halls of Zot will now contain one of three types of orb monster each game, each wielding a different element and form of strategic damage. The orb type one will encounter that game is indicated via statues placed by the Temple entrance in the Dungeon and the Zot entrance in Depths. This can also be viewed from the the Dungeon overview screen (ctrl+O) once seen.
• The last floor of Zot contains now contains two Boundless Tesseracts, immobile enemy spawners with fast regeneration.
• Tesseracts wake up the first time one kills an Orb Guardian. Once a tesseract wakes up, both are automatically detected, and 4 to 7 new monsters will appear outside of the Orb vault.
• Tesseracts spawn further monsters at random locations across the entire floor an average of once every 50 turns. These will always be outside of the player’s sight until at least 50 monsters have been created this way.
• Tesseract spawns are specially marked as such, reward no XP, are capped to 60 on the floor at a time, and will continue to spawn in a limited capacity when on other floors.
• Destroying one tesseract will destroy both, dismiss all tesseract-created monsters, and daze all other monsters in sight of the tesseract for ~9 turns.
• The Orb status from being in Zot or having picked up the Orb of Zot now also fuzzes the destination of scrolls of blinking by up to two spaces.
• The depth at which the player enters the Abyss is now based upon their XL, regardless of whether they arrive by banishment or entering a gateway themselves.
• Abyss shifts can no longer pull the player deeper than they otherwise would have entered it (unless they spend a while there at max XL), and the Abyss will no longer ‘remember’ the deepest depth a player previously reached.
• Finding the rune on Abyss:4-5 takes longer on average than before.
• Hell effects can now inflict a small amount of Doom instead of inflicting transient mutations.
• Troves’ prices and contents have been heavily revised:
• Troves will no longer ask for any consumables besides scrolls of acquirement and will no longer ask for specific named items from shops.
• Equipment costs are less common. Demon weapons are all interchangeable and and heavier dragon scales are rarer.
• The Slimy / Abyssal rune troves and Horn of Geryon troves are more common.
• Piety troves now use a new debuff that temporarily caps one’s piety at 0 until XP is gained instead of permanently draining it, allowing them to function with more gods than before.
• New trove costs include accepting pre-announced Banes and being extremely drained.
• Trove contents are no longer grouped by item category, and contain a slightly lower amount of higher-quality items themed after spell namesakes or unrand items. These items are also far less likely to be useless according to god restrictions or species limits.
• Potential troves to discover include The Dread Knight’s Derelict Chapel, Eringya’s Secret Bog, The First Justicar’s Armoury, Leda’s Sunken Stockpile, The Lost Hoard of Erebora, The Name-Rending Infernalists’ Reservoir, The Octopus King’s Forgotten Garden, Ozocubu’s Refrigerator, Rutra’s Hidden Sanctum, The Storm Queen’s Palace Crash Site, a devouring Rift, and an orange crystal hatchery.
• Dispersal traps now have a short cooldown after triggering before they can trigger again.
• Harlequin’s traps’ chaos lace buff now stacks on top of any other attack brands a monster previously had.

Character

• Players can now accumulate Doom from enemies and other hostile effects, a new form of medium-term damage displayed as a percentage. Doom has no effect on its own and disappears with gaining experience, but at 100% causes one to gain a random Bane, which itself only disappears with gaining significantly
  more experience differing between Bane types. Banes include:
• Bane of Claustrophobia, which lowers melee damage and accuracy for each wall the player is adjacent to.
• Bane of the Dilettante, which reduces the player’s highest weapon skill as well as their two highest magic / invocation / evocation skills.
• Bane of Electrospasm, which makes suffering electric damage sometimes inflict the -Move status.
• Bane of Heatstroke, which makes suffering fire damage sometimes Slow you.
• Bane of the Hunted, which makes any creatures summoned by enemy appear next to the player, last longer, and be better at tracking you.
• Bane of Lethargy, which slows the player’s movement speed.
• Bane of Mortality, which gives a chance for reapers to appear near wounded players when no other enemies are around.
• Bane of Multiplicity, which gives a chance for any monster you fight to create fragile clones of itself.
• Bane of Paradox, which gives a small chance for each new monster you encounter to learn Manifold Assault with a chance to blink after casting it.
• Bane of Snow-blindness, which makes suffering cold damage something inflict Blind and Weak.
• Bane of Stumbling, which inflicts -25 EV when moving or standing still.
• Bane of Succour, which makes killing enemies heal other nearby enemies based on the slain foe’s max HP.
• Bane of Warding, which gives a small chance to give groups of monster the Warding buff when first seen, which grants damage immunity from non-adjacent sources of damage.
• Undead species and forms lose Doom and Banes half as quickly as other species.
• Player contamination has been heavily adjusted.
• The exact amount one is contaminated is now indicated as a percentage in the sidebar. Harmful effects begin at 100% and cap at 300%.
• Crossing the 100% threshold is more likely to result in a bad mutation than before (but very high amounts are less dangerous). Mutations gained this
  way no longer ignore rMut.
• Explosions from contamination are now possible at a lower threshold, ignore AC, and are more damaging. Their potential damage can be seen on the %
  screen.
• Many existing effects have been rescaled to be similarly dangerous as before this change.
• New mutations:
• Booming Voice, which makes reading scrolls in sight of enemies incredibly loud.
• Efficient Metabolism, which doubles the duration of potion status effects.
• Feed Off Suffering, which restores HP and MP after killing poisoned or drained foes.
• Initially attractive, which sometimes pulls monsters close to the player when first seen (and then sometimes wakes them up).
• Lucky, which gives a small chance for floor items the player encounters to be randarts.
• Meek, which provides negative Slaying.
• Potion Fungus, which sometimes spreads the beneficial effects of potions the player drinks to random enemies and allies in sight.
• Protean Grace, which gives +Slay and +EV based on how mutated you are.
• Reckless, which cuts your SH in half but gives +15% damage with two-handed weapons.
• Spatial Entanglement, which gives a chance of dragging along another hostile monster whenever the player translocates.
• Spiteful Blood, which may spawn hostile XL-scaling erythrospites when the player is injured below 50% of their max HP.
• Other individual mutation changes:
• Electricity Vulnerability is now in the normal mutation pool.
• Screaming now gives a small chance to shout loudly whenever the player is damaged, rather than when first seeing monsters.
• Sense Surroundings is now stronger and only has two levels.
• Teleportitis now gives the player a few turns of a cancellable !Tele! status before they will be teleported towards monsters.
• Thick Fur can now only be mutated by Trolls and Felids.
• Weak, Dopey, and Clumsy mutations lower their respective stats by one more (from -2 to -3.)
• The unsafe potion and scroll mutations are no longer in the regular bad mutation pool.
• Removed mutations: Berserkitis.
• Transient mutations are now only removed by slaying a sufficient number of non-trivial monsters, and can no longer roll the three stat loss mutations.
• Players can no longer instantly become Petrified after being affected with another source of petrification while mid-petrifying. (Petrification and calcifying clouds have become more difficult to resist in kind.)
• Players have a longer stun immunity after being Vexed, and attack as quickly as their default attack speed would be.
• Players can now negate intrinsic rPois- with two sources of rPois.
• Players can stack up to 3 sources of rampage.
• Performing an attack while rampaging no longer affects the time that movement took. Instead, rampage attacks inflict a half-turn ministun on the target and inflict reduced damage if the player’s attack speed is slower than their movement speed.
• Players succeeding at certain optional challenges can now obtain unique titles proclaiming their triumph (or madness).

Gods

• Dithmenos’s shadow mimic no longer fully heals every time it acts while Shadowslip is active. Shadowslip costs more piety, but gives the shadow
  slightly more max HP.
• Gozag’s Gold Lust passive now properly displays when monsters are affected by it (instead of regularly losing its visual indication before its effects
  ended).
• Jiyva’s jellies can no longer eat spellbooks.
• Nemelex’s Orb card now consistently provides more orbs with spellpower, always aims one orb to the aimed target, and home into targets with fairly
  higher precision than previously.
• Ru’s Draw Out Power now also cures mesmerism and fear.
• Ru’s Sacrifice Drink and Sacrifice Words passives have been revised: they now both prevent using potions or scrolls with monsters in sight while your HP is high (and have no effect when badly injured).
• Vehumet’s first level 1 spell gift is now given immediately upon worship.
• Vehumet’s spell gift choices now account for Conjurations and Alchemy skill, and skew more to average spell skill levels instead of their sums.
• Wu Jian martial attacks can no longer fail if the player’s attack speed is slower than their movement speed, but will perform a lower damage attack instead.
• Xom has a new action: slightly Dooming the player.
• All gods besides the good gods no longer allow rejoining them if one is undergoing their wrath.
• Several wrath adjustments:
• Fedhas and Jiyva wraths have been simplified.
• Ignis’s Fire Champion effect now gives a monster rF+, 7 AC, adds fire damage to their attacks (rather than overwriting their normal effect). It can be applied to a wider range of monsters and sometimes multiple at once.
• Kiku wrath applies the Sign of Ruin instead of tormenting, has a hard cap on draining for lower amounts that can no longer be resisted by rN+, and also now applies Doom.
• Okawaru wrath summons are more varied and scale more smoothly to player xl.
• Qazlal wrath now applies the Banes of Heatstroke, Snow-blindness, and Electrospasm instead of transient mutations of rF-, rC-, or rElec-.

Interface and Options

• Inventory revamp related changes:
• The (d)rop menu is now split into 4 different pages for each inventory category: gear, potions, scrolls, and evocable items. The current page can be changed using either left and right arrow keys or Tab and Shift-Tab.
• New show_paged_inventory option: disables this page behaviour for the (i)nventory screen.
• Talismans are now considered gear and are (p)ut on instead of e(v)oked.
• Jewellery autopick-up no longer picks up extra copies of non-artifact jewellery past the max amount one can wear at a time.
• Dropping consumables now disables them from autopickup by default.
• The item_slot option has been replaced with gear_slot and consumable_shortcut options.
• Scrolls of fear, silence, vulnerability, immolation, torment, and all sources of invisibility now have targetting prompts that highlight which monsters will be affected (as well as the chance of affecting them).
• New force_scroll_targeter option: allows disabling these prompts from scrolls (or adding them for several others).
• New show_invis_targeter option: disables the prompt for sources of invisibility.
• Resting now waits by default for all negative effects and transformations, all time-based cooldowns, and all magical contamination to wear off. A new explore_auto_rest_status option allows adding or changing this list.
• The character overview screen (%) now displays how much damage is prevented by each pip of resistance the player has. A new show_resist_percent option can be used to hide these numbers.
• Temporary maluses to player AC / EV / SH now always consistently colour those values in the status bar as red.
• Sighting monsters is now described as “You encounter an X” rather than “An X comes into view.”
• All uniques now cause a –More– when first encountered.
• New monster_alert option: allows setting specific monsters or monster threat tiers to make a –More– appear when encountered.
• When monsters move out of the player’s sight to a known location, the direction they left will be indicated.
• Monsters with any status effects now list the mechanics of those status effects on a new tab when examined (xv).
• Sleeping and wandering monsters now display their chance of noticing the player each turn when examined (xv).
• The “Trivial” monster threat level threshold is now a little higher.
• Monsters with holy wrath weapons are highlighted by default as having unusual items if one is vulnerable to them by being undead or demonic.
• The unusual_monster_items option now has new “vulnerable” syntax that allows marking a brand as unusual as long as one has no matching resistance to that brand, and can also stop displaying this at a selected XL.
• Vault randarts with specified armour egos rolling randarts will no longer show redundant inscriptions (e.g. plate armour of {rF+, rF+}).
• Examining throwable missiles now displays their mulch chance in-game.
• New warn_contam_cost option: warns the player before casting Irradiate if it could potentially result in going over 100% contamination.

Items

• Players now have four separate inventories: 52 pieces of gear (including throwing weapons, and unlimited potions, scrolls, and evokable items. Each inventory uses a separate 52 letters (ie: both a scroll and a potion may be mapped to the same letter at the same time), and most consumables now have default letter assignments when identified.
• Parchments now replace the majority of spellbooks found in game, each granting knowledge of a single spell.
• Parchments are much more common than spellbooks used to be, making the total number of spells found in the game roughly equal to previous versions.
• Floors with shops past the Dungeon and Lair have increasing likelihood to contain an additional parchment shop.
• Randbooks now only appear in select vaults or via acquirement and Sif Muna gifts.
• Higher-spell-level are now somewhat rarer early in the game and more common later.
• New amulets:
• Amulets of Alchemy, which give an Alchemy enhancer and also grant players a small amount of mp whenever they drink non-useless potions.
• Amulets of Dissipation, which cause time-based negative status effects to expire twice as quickly.
• Amulets of Wildshape, which gives +5 Shapeshifting skill.
• New orbs:
• Orbs of attunement, which double the enhancers provided by wielded magical staves and also makes melee attacks performed with them restore a small amount of MP.
• Orbs of glass, which may inflict Fragility on nearby enemies whenever they’re injured, scaling with Evocations skill.
• Orbs of mesmerism, which inflict Daze on nearby enemies when one is injured by melee attacks, are recharged by not moving, and scaled heavily with Evocations skill.
• Orbs of pyromania, which give a Fire enhancer and also produces explosions around the wielder whenever they directly kill a monster without using attacks, scaling with Evocations skill.
• Orbs of stardust, which conjure fast-moving shooting star projectiles whenever the player first spends MP each combat, scaling with Evocations, MP spent, and the number of visible monsters.
• New weapon egos, each exclusive to a given weapon class:
• Axes of Sundering, which make every sixth consecutive attack strike for triple damage and cleave with +1 range.
• Long blades of Valour, which fire short-ranged penetrating beams of energy while their wielders is above 80% of their max hp.
• Maces of Concussion, which allow their wielders to trample forward whenever they hit, briefly stunning pushed foes and dealing +25% damage if the foe’s back is to a wall.
• Polearms of Entangling, which may constrict foes they strike.
• Short blades of Deviousness, which provide temporary Slay and EV after stabbing an enemy and make it easier to do so.
• Staves of Rebuke, which give +10 SH while attacking and redirect blocked melee attacks to other adjacent foes.
• New heavy armour egos:
• Armour of archery, which have halved armour encumbrance penalties for ranged weapons.
• Armour of command, which gives Summoning spells a success chance and spellpower bonuses based on one’s Armour skill.
• Armour of death, which gives Necromancy spells a success chance and spellpower bonus, but make all non-Necromancy spells cost as much HP as they cost MP.
• Armour of resonance, which gives Forgecraft spells a success rate bonus and also increase the damage of the wearer’s melee attacks based on their Forgecraft skill.
• New other armour egos:
• Hats of sniping, which increase ranged weapon and thrown item damage against incapacitated foes.
• Hats and helmets of ice, which give Ice Magic enhancers.
• Cloaks of air, which give an Air Magic enhancer.
• Gloves of fire, which give a Fire Magic enhancer.
• Gloves of parrying, which give SH when using melee attacks, doubled if wielding a two-handed weapon.
• Boots of earth, which give an Earth Magic enhancer.
• Hats are now more likely to get egos.
• Helmets can now get the Light ego, which was previously exclusive to orbs.
• Shields can now get the corrosion resistance ego, and Tower Shields may be Ponderous.
• Cloaks of preservation are now renamed to be of corrosion resistance.
• Further general orb changes:
• Orbs of energy and orbs of guile now scale their effects with the wielder’s Evocations skill.
• Orbs of light no longer spawn naturally, but are still given to Monks on starting the game.
• Orbs are now more common.
• Talismans are cheaper in shops.
• Stones are now much less common.
• Removed items: rings of fire, rings of ice, orbs of wrath.

Monsters

• Monster staircase behaviour has been heavily adjusted:
• All monsters now instantly return to the floor they spawned on if they are lured more than three floors away from their floor of origin.
• Monsters left behind on other floors are now more consistent about approaching and encircling the last staircase they saw the player use.
• After travelling through any stairs, known or not, monsters the player hasn’t seen before will always skip their first turn.
• Wandering monsters no longer automatically notice the player whenever you perform attacks, cast spells, or zap wands. In exchange, they are somewhat more likely to notice the player each turn (especially strong monsters).
• The Slime Pits have many new and returning monsters:
• Colossal amoebae, which create copies of themselves when they hit foes.
• Creeping plasmodia, which launch explosive acid spores that can spread weaker plasmodia to other walls.
• Eyes of draining, rare sights that rapidly drain the player’s maximum HP
• Morphogenic oozes, whose melee attacks can temporarily turn players into jellies.
• Slymdras, lethally acidic combinations of hydras and slime creatures.
• Star jellies, which launch shooting stars when seriously injured.
• Two new orb types rotate with orbs of fire in Zot each game:
• Orbs of Winter, which cast Flash Freeze, Ozocubu’s Refrigeration, and inflict a new Ostracism debuff that temporarily reduces one’s piety.
• Orbs of Entropy, which cast Bolt of Draining, Acid Ball, and inflict Doom upon their foes.
• New unique: Cassandra, an oracle of Ashenzari who foresees great Doom in your future.
• Other new and returning monsters:
• Bes kemwar, magic-weakening maggot spirits for D.
• Chonchon, chaotic flying heads for Depths.
• Clockroaches, time-bending warded insects for D.
• Cognitogaunts, antimagic starghouls for Crypt and Abyss.
• Crawling flesh cages, augmented ugly things for Vaults.
• Drudes, new weak Doom-inflicting tier-5 demons for D and the Abyss.
• Kobold fleshcrafters, abomination makers for Depths.
• Kobold geomancers, deconstructing earth mages for D.
• Mountainshells, warded earthshaking tortoises for Lair.
• Ravens, Doom-inflicting birds for Lair.
• Rock fish, wall-swimming fish for D.
• Screaming refractions, crystal injury-mirroring undead for the Abyss.
• Undertakers, wall-swimming constructs for Tartarus.
• Zykzyls, the new malmutating tier-2 demon, now focused on hexes.
• Antaeus trades Flash Freeze for Sleetstrike, a variant of Airstrike that inflicts the Frozen status and deals more damage partially resistible with rC.
• Blizzard demons trade out Airstrike and Bolt of Cold for Sleetstrike and Deflect Missiles.
• Bone dragons now breathe clouds of excruciating misery, and now have less health. They no longer appear in Tartarus, and are now more common in Crypt.
• Cacodemons no longer know Malmutate or Bolt of Devastation, but can cut willpower in half with their melee and cast Doom Bolt: a penetrating bolt that inflicts Doom on hit.
• Dancing weapons are now explicitly referred to as dancing weapons in-game.
• Death knights trade Injury Mirror for higher stats, an umbra, and Hurl Torchlight (like the Yred ability), and now place in the Vaults with draugr instead of in late D.
• Doom hounds have been renamed to oblivion hounds.
• Draugr replace skeletons as derived undead monsters, losing health for more AC, no speed penalty, an ability to wield weapons regardless of their original form, and Doom-inflicting melee. They are rarer than the previous skeletons.
• Earth elementals can now move through walls and statues (which grants no innate additional protection beyond cloud immunity), are somewhat faster, and hit slightly less hard.
• Eyes of devastation are stronger and can come with a single golden eye.
• Fire bats can no longer rarely spawn over Depths lava and can now rarely spawn over late D lava instead.
• Glowing orange brains no longer have Brain Bite.
• Mara now dual-wields demon weapons and has somewhat better body armour.
• The moon troll now is warded from damage from non-adjacent foes, and loses Dazzling Flash in exchange for Lee’s Rapid Deconstruction.
• Nekomata no longer have Repel Missiles.
• Neqoxecs no longer can inflict permanent mutations, but have a new Warp Body spell that deals minor damage and inflicts transient mutations (or Vitrify, if the player has already been repeatedly Warped).
• Orb Guardians no longer follow stair-using players off of Zot:5 until the Orb of Zot is picked up.
• Oni incarcerators deal less damage and cast Manifold Assault less often.
• Purple very / ugly things now have extra Will and antimagic attacks.
• Reapers have a new non-skeletal flavour and now fly.
• The Royal Jelly can no longer be banished and can produce star jellies when injured (in addition to the other types of monsters it could already create).
• Shining eyes trade Malmutate for Mutagenic Gaze, which inflicts contamination over time (but is usable anywhere in line of sight).
• Sphinx marauders do less damage on average with their airstrike attacks.
• Sojobo and spriggan air mages now have less EV.
• Vampire bloodprinces now fly.
• Void oozes lose their antimagic attack brand for a new Diminish Spells brand, which ignores AC.
• Void ooze and water elemental Engulfing has been revised entirely. They now inflict a few turns of Flooded status on hit, which deals a low amount of asphyxiation damage each turn and Silences anything that needs to breathe air.
• Monster purple draconians have slightly less Willpower, and classed draconians have more Willpower.
• Monster allies should no longer be able to injure the player with explosion spells.
• Mummy death curses now inflict more Draining, less Torment and Slow, and have a chance to inflict Doom.
• Monster miniparalysis now consistently lasts 15 aut and is no longer affected by how fast or slow one’s pre-paralysis action was.
• Monsters with necromancy spells deal more damage with pain brand weapons.
• Monsters that know Blink and its variations will more consistently cast it to escape nets.
• Monster Corrosive Bolt now has a higher chance to corrode for higher amounts and does slightly more damage.
• Monster Bolts of Draining are more accurate.
• Monster Flash Freeze accuracy is greatly reduced and damage somewhat reduced.
• Monster Injury Bond’s damage redistribution now removes some damage entirely – those protected still take 50% of the original damage, but the caster now only takes 25%.
• Monster Lee’s Rapid Deconstruction now more consistently targets brittle players directly (i.e. gargoyles, revenants, and all species in statue-form) and is smarter about using more damaging wall types, when available.
• Monster mesmerisation effects (including merfolk siren and merfolk avatar songs) now also daze all opposing monsters.
• Monster Repel Missiles has been replaced with Deflect Missiles, which increases their effective EV against missiles by 24 (previously 15).
• Monsters’ blindness resistance has been refactored: all sources of Blind outside of light effects, Enfeeble, and divine powers are limited to
  natural / demonic / holy monsters, while light can also work on undead and Enfeeble / most divine Blind effects ignore Blind resistance entirely.
• Daze now makes monsters skip their actions until they take any damage, instead of giving them a 1-in-4 chance to skip each action (but last less time).
• Removed monsters: giant cockroaches, Psyche.

Spells

• Dazzling Flash has been renamed Gloom and moved from Hexes / Fire to Hexes / Necromancy. It is now silent.
• Enfeeble now inflicts a new Diminished Spells debuff that lowers the target’s spellpower rather than inflicting antimagic.
• Martyr’s Knell’s shade now has lower max HP and regeneration (to account for the improvement to Injury Bond), but higher AC and EV.
• Both players and monsters failing to resist Petrification while already petrifying no longer instantly completes the Petrification, but Petrification is slightly more difficult to resist in exchange.
• Silence no longer has an innate Stealth penalty.
• Summon Horrible Things now increases the caster’s Doom rather than sometimes inflicting temporary Will- mutations.

Tiles and Other Art

• New tiles for existing game elements:
• Monsters: juggernaut simulacra, Maggie, Mara, Polyphemus, sky beast zombies.
• Sprint specialties: flame-cult kobolds, witches, orb golems.
• Spells: Confusion Gaze, Mass Regeneration, Vitrifying Gaze, Weakening Gaze.
• Icons: light egos, frenzied, magnetized, sentinel’s mark.
• Traps: Archmage’s trap, devourer’s trap, tyrant’s trap.
• Features: exits out of Sewers + Bailies + the Desolation of Salt + the Crucible of Flesh, stairs to and from Zot:5.
• Walls: Lair + Gloorx Vloq’s rock walls, Lair + Orc + Elf + Depths entry + Zot:5 + Ossuary + Zonguldrok’s Shrine stone walls, Vaults + Maxwell’s Workshop metal walls, Vaults + Depths crystal walls.
• Floors: Lair, Elf’s Hall of Blades, Vaults hard vaults, Vaults:$, Zot entry vaults, Cerebov’s fortress, grassy vaults, crystal vaults.
• GUI: exclusions.
• New wall and floor tiles for vaults: stone magic shelves, magic crackling stone, vine-coated stone and tile floor, mystic pit floors.
• New Formicid and caustic shrikes splash screen by YLam.
• New Gozag and Vaults splash screen by LemurRobot.

We still have a couple weeks left of development for this release. So check out the commit list if you want to see new content and changes that make it in 0.34. Until next time, happy crawling!

DCSS 0.33.1 features the following fixes:

• Fix vampire form not having torment resistance.
• Fix bat swarm form having torment immunity instead of torment resistance.
• Fix breaking cursed items without a prompt when leaving slot-granting forms.
• Fix sphinx and serpent forms having slot items fall off when changing temporarily to another form via lignification or polymorph.
• Fix Dithmenos’ player shadow not having the same reach as the player when in aqua form.
• Fix inconsistencies in handling of beam types:
• The spells Chain Lightning and Stunning Bolt are now properly 33% resistable with rElec instead of only 25% resistable.
• Mercury Arrow is now properly 25% resistable with rPois.
• Stunning Bolt now checks half of AC like other elecriticy-themed spells.
• Qazlal’s adaptive rElec is now properly triggered by Stunning Bolt.
• Qazlal’s adaptive AC is now properly triggered by all ‘physical’ spell projectiles.
• The Slick Slippers now prevent being bound by an ironbound beastmaster’s bolas.
• Fix not being able to use Yredelemnul’s Light the Black Torch on a portal level like Necropolis if it had been used in a previous instance of that portal.
• Don’t allow orbrun spawns in Okawaru’s Arena.
• Remove erroneous extra placements of alderkings in Sprint IV.
• 37 other bug fixes, interface improvements, and documentation updates.

Packages of DCSS 0.33.1 for Windows, OS X, and Linux are all available from the download page. You can also play it online on one of many servers across the world!

Congratulations to EnegeticOcto (aka Lici the Crawler) for taking first place in the individual competition, with 112,658 points and 17 wins! Lici won the lowest turncount win (AtCj won in 11,106 turns), the fastest realtime win (a MiFi won in 25:47), had the second highest scoring game in the tournament (a GrEE with 84M points), and had the second most pacific run of the tournament (a SpEn with just 570 kills). Additionally, Lici took 2nd in the Combo Score category with species high scores for Gr and Dj, class high scores for EE, Ne, and Wn, and 8 combo high scores. Finally, and although this isn’t in a tournament category, it’s still impressive: Lici had the first win of the tournament, a MiFi of Gozag won 54 minutes, 17 seconds after tournament start.

Other big winners:

• Flugkiller: 2nd place overall with 98,012 points and 15 wins. Flugkiller had the second fastest realtime win of the tournament (a MiFi won in 26:12) and the third highest scoring game of the tournament (a HuAl with 69M points).
• tswn: 3rd place overall with 97,898 and 16 wins. tswn was first in the combo high score category with 4 species high scores (At, Mi, Ko, Tr), 5 class high scores (Br, CA, CK, Fi, Wr), and 13 combo high scores. They also had the 3rd lowest turncount win, a MiFi won in 12,013 turns, and got the second win of the tournament, a MiFi won 59 minutes, 46 seconds after tournament start.
• questionabletactics: The longest win streak with 17 wins.
• Sapher: Highest scoring win at 89M points with an ReSu that also set the all-time Revenant species high score.
• Draconius: The player with the highest adjusted winrate of 91.67% and a true winrate of 100% with 11 GnIE wins.
• WizardIke: The only player to collect all 24 tier 3 banners.
• bookman: 1st place in the Nemelex’ choice category by winning 36 Nemelex’ Choice combos.
• shadowrider38: Most pacific win, a SpEn with only 454 kills.

The clan competition was won by The Knights of B O (captained by EnegeticOcto) with 130,028 points and 1st in the clan high score, banner collection, fastest realtime win, and low turncount win categories. They also took 2nd in the clan combo high scores, win streak, and the most pacific win categories. In 2nd place was Cigotuvi’s Clown Car (captained by TheMeInTeam) with 127,455 points, 1st place in the Nemelex’ choice, win streak, and most pacific win categories, 2nd place in the banner collection, fastest realtime win, and low turncount win categories, and 3rd place in the combo high scores category. In 3rd place was The 27 Club (captained by particleface) with 116,732 points, 1st place in the combo high scores category, 2nd place in the Nemelex’ choice category, and 3rd place in the low turncount win and banner collection categories.

To close out, here are some overall tournament statistics (with the 0.32 numbers in brackets for comparison). 2944 non-bot players started a game at some point during the tournament; of those 2870 completed a game without quitting or leaving the dungeon sadly orbless. This definition of “player” (players who completed a non-boring game) is used for subsequent calculations and was used for the 0.32 statistics.

• Players: 2,870 (0.32: 2,838)
• Total player time: 32,484 hrs (0.32: 29,114 hrs)
• Average player time: 11.32 hrs (0.32: 10.26 hrs)
• Games played: 89,582 (0.32: 76,121)
• Players who got a rune: 890 (0.32: 871)
• 421 winners and 1428 wins (0.32: 421 winners and 1319 wins)
• Win rate: 1.59% (0.32: 1.73%)
• WebTiles win rate: 1.52% (0.32: 1.63%) / Console win rate: 4.06% (0.32: 5.43%)

Thanks to you all for playing! Many thanks as well to server admins, developers, and contributors who made the 0.33 release and tournament possible! The 0.34 season has begun, and a trickle of tweaks and bugfixes have already landed in trunk, with many more changes to come for this version. Also look for an important 0.33.1 bugfix release to made soon. That’s all for now, and until next time, happy crawling!

DCSS 0.33 features a new magic school, two new playable species, twelve new talisman items, a new portal level, and many new and revamped monsters! For the complete list of these and the many other changes included in this version, see the release page here.

Packages of DCSS 0.33 for Windows, OS X, and Linux are all available from the download page. You can also play it online on one of many servers across the world!

The tournament starts today on Friday May 2nd, 8pm UTC and runs through Sunday May 18th, 8pm UTC, with all online 0.33 games counting towards your score. See the tournament page for more details, including how to join or setup a clan. Clans membership can be changed until Friday May 9th, 8pm UTC.

Many thanks to all those who have contributed to DCSS over the years. Thanks especially to the DCSS development team, whose contributions made 0.33 possible, and to the admins who run and maintain the official servers. A special thanks to the following community members who contributed to 0.33 and a warm welcome to the first-time contributors.

Alejandro Ramirez, Alex Beloi, Alex Jurkiewicz, Aliscans, Antern, bobross419, Brian Faires, Brian Power, cadi, Charlie Gettys, CipHuK, croikle, Flugkiller, geekosaur, guillaume, Heinrich Ody, jjjingleheimer, Lexi Hattaway, LiciTheCrawler, Matthew Granstrom, mgdelmonte, MikeJHeg, Monkooky, NormalPerson7, Paperbell, perci, person50605, pyy156941, radio-gra, Robert J. Redelmeier, RypoFalem, Samantha Tobias, sdynet, Sean Dewar, SentientSupper, tianmaster, tuohy, William S., WizardIke, Yi Yang, yrdzrfxndfvh, Zen Liu

The 0.33 release will be made and announced either this Thursday or Friday. In the meantime, the 0.33 branch has been installed on most online servers. On these servers, you can configure your tournament clan in your RC files right now. Good luck in the tournament!

Note: The DCSS scoring pages probably won’t have 0.33 games added until after the tournament. During the tournament, scoring updates will be disabled to conserve resources on CAO. After the tournament, scoring will resume and all games not yet counted will be included. Game records are always permanently stored on each server where the game was played, so no data is lost.

We haven’t had the time to post any trunk updates during the 0.33 development cycle, but that’s certainly not due to a lack of content! It would take a long time to go into detail on the past eight months of changes. Hence I’ve put the contents of the current changelog below for easier reading:

Highlights

• New magic school + background: Forgewrights, building explosive constructs.
• Two new species: poltergeists and revenants.
• Twelve new talismans have been added, and Shapeshifters have been reworked.
• Ghost vaults are moved into a game-long repeating portal, the Necropolis.
• Yet more new monsters, decorations, and traps spread throughout the Dungeon.

Artefacts

• New unrands:
• The Crown of Vainglory, a +3 hat that grants two extra ring slots, but also makes entering floors wake up nearby enemies and temporarily prohibits stair use.
• The fungal fisticloak, a +3 cloak that also takes up the hat slot, provides another gloves slot, and grants a confusion-branded auxiliary fungus attack.
• The Justicar’s Regalia, a +5 scale mail that grants an extra amulet slot and gives allies summoned or created by the player the regeneration status.
• The Skull of Zonguldrok, a talkative off-hand item that grants Reaping brand to one’s attacks and another hat slot (on the skull).
• The macabre finger necklace now also grants +7 HP.
• Randart weapons can now be Reaping branded, which now creates spectres.
• -Cast on the Sword of the Doom Knight, Maxwell’s Patent Armour, and general randarts is replaced with *Silence, which inflicts a short-term silence on 1% of hits on the wielder.
• +Invis, Harm, and Rampage artefact properties can now be found on talisman randarts.
• Removed unrands: the Sword of Zonguldrok.

Branches, Environment

• Ghost vaults have been moved into their own portal, the Necropolis.
• Portals to the Necropolis can be found up to three times each game: once in D:5-15, Lair, or Orc; once in Swamp, Snake, Shoals, Spider, or Vaults; and once in Elf, Crypt, or Depths.
• Each Necropolis contains three separate ghost vaults, which are still flavoured and tailored towards the branch a portal entrance is found in.
• Another 10 ghost vaults have been added.
• Pre-Lair ghost vaults have been somewhat nerfed, while rewards for many ghost vaults have been increased.
• New traps, all of which activate when monsters or players step on them:
• Archmage’s traps, which drain player mp and grant monsters empowered spells.
• Devourer’s traps, which corrode players.
• Harlequin’s traps, which grant monsters chaotic attacks.
• Tyrant’s traps, which weaken players and grant monsters might.
• New decorations:
• Walkable: caches of baked goods, floral vases (sometimes broken), flower and garden patches, fountains of eyes, fur piles, infernal standards, mops and buckets (sometimes bloodied), mourning vases, and orcish standards.
• Solid: enigmatic dynamos and nascence circuits.
• Destructible: petrified flowers.
• Walking over fountains now has a chance to produce flavour messages, varying based on the fountain, one’s god, and the absence of hostile enemies in sight.
• Zot traps now can inflict blindness.
• The last floor of Crypt now has a 30% chance to contain a sanguine talisman.
• The clouds of degeneration in Alistair’s Party Mansion are now alcoholic mist, inflicting Vertigo.
• The orb chamber on Zot:5 no longer has a chance to be completely blocked off by traps, and instead will deploy several of the above newer traps.
• Frail pillars of rime can be found in Cocytus.
• Ziggurats have even more exponential scaling for those doing multiple ziggurats.
• Sprint VII (“The Pits”) has gotten major updates to balance and monster options, while Sprint V (“Ziggurat Sprint”) has had minor updates to the same.

Character

• Stat drain has been removed.
• Reaching 0 in any stat (through e.g. items or mutations) now solely makes the player permanently slow until their stats are raised again.
• Undead players being malmutated now have their HP drained instead.
• New skill: Forgecraft, used for Forgecraft spells. Most species have Forgecraft apts that are the same as their Summoning apts. Exceptions to this are Mountain Dwarves, Coglins, Yellow Draconians (all +2), Barachi (+1), Demonspawn, Felids, Poltergeists (all -1), Revenants, Minotaurs, and Tengu (all -2).
• New background: Forgewright, which starts with a +0 hammer (a reskinned mace), a potion of magic, and a variety of Forgecraft spells.
• Fighters now start with a second potion of might.
• Shapeshifters now start with a quill talisman, three flux baubles, and a protean talisman, which can be used with 6 or more Shapeshifting skill to randomly transform it into a scarab, rimehorn, medusa or maw talisman. They keep their potion of lignification and start with 1 more Fighting skill.
• Wanderers can now start with quill talismans, inkwell talismans, flux baubles, protean talismans, or any protean-tier talisman.
• Reavers now start with knowledge of Rending Blade.
• Summoners start with knowledge of Eringya’s Surprising Crocodile and Summon Seismosaurus Egg instead of Summon Blazeheart Golem or Lightning Spire.
• New mutations:
• efficient magic, making spells cost 1 less (to a minimum of 1 MP).
• ephemeral shield, granting +7 SH briefly after spells and invocations.
• poor constitution, inflicting Weak and then Slow on taking damage.
• time-warped blood, hasting some of your allies when you fall below 50% health, and can only activate again after returning to full health.
• Berserk players are now immune to fear.
• Constructs the player makes with their own Forgecraft spells can be nonviolently deconstructed by pressing ctrl+[direction] while adjacent.
• Fungus Form and Tree Form are both immune to sleep.
• Paralysis, sleep, petrification, and vex status inflicted on the player all now share the same temporary immunity cooldown.
• Penalties to body armour AC from talismans and the Deformed Body mutation are now also applied to the AC bonus from training Armour skill. To compensate, the AC penalties of Deformed Body and blade talismans have been reduced, and Naga and Armataurs have their Armour aptitudes increase by 1.
• Removed mutations: deterioration.

Gods

• Ashenzari’s curse of Companions now supports Forgecraft as well as its prior skills of Summoning and Necromancy.
• Cheibriados worshippers are never hasted by potions of haste, and can’t enter penance by deliberately drinking potions of haste.
• The wraths of Cheibriados and Trog have been simplified.
• Dithmenos’s shadow mimic also works for Forgecraft spells, creating a shadow turret that can fire through allies.
• Xom has received more adjustments:
• Xom’s bazaars have more variety and are less common.
• Polymorph and draining effects are less dangerous early on.
• New actions: hyperbuff weak ally, burn webs.
• All three good gods that care about injuring allies now consistently don’t care about injuring mindless non-living allies (like Forgecraft’s).

Interface and Options

• Examining equipment and talismans now can show the changes to the player’s spell success chances for each spell if they switched to using that item.
• Examining spellbooks in webtiles now colours spells according to their usability and whether or not one has the spell in their library.
• Examining talismans now displays their upsides, downsides, and skill scaling in a more compressed format with additional details.
• Spell range is now indicated with numbers instead of diagrams.
• Default target-picking behaviour for spells, abilities, and items has been improved: it is now more consistent at avoiding the player or their allies when aiming harmful area effects and choose more sensible default aims for some utility effects.
• Ranged autofight should no longer sometimes cast spells at invalid targets (such as Dispel Undead against living monsters in melee).
• Casting ally-creating spells when there is no nearby room is now automatically cancelled, rather than wasting a turn and one’s MP.
• Equipping an item that would require unequipping multiple other items (such as with going from a 1-handed weapon + shield to a 2-hander) no longer needs manual unequipping to work.
• Players can no longer wield non-weapon items.
• Equipment slots a player species doesn’t have access to no longer show up on the ‘%’ screen.
• The autopickup menu no longer groups together rings and amulets.
• The screen is now tinted blue during paralysis and grey during petrification.
• Examining monsters shows if they can open doors.
• Confusion on monsters no longer shares an icon with monsters being distracted.
• Non-monster UI now darkens quote text and can rarely contain flavour text instead of just quotes.

Items

• New weapon: partisans, uncommon one-handed polearms with higher base damage than demon tridents and the longest swing delay of any one-handed weapon.
• Talisman skill thresholds have been reworked, with older talismans adjusted upwards in baseline stats for higher thresholds. The new tier summary is now:
• Tier 1 talismans (old beast talisman): 0 skill minimum, 7 skill maximum
• Tier 2 talismans (old flux talisman): 8 skill minimum, 14 skill maximum
• Tier 3 talismans (blade talisman): 12 skill minimum, 20 skill maximum
• Tier 4 talismans (granite talisman): 17 skill minimum, 25 skill maximum
• Tier 5 talismans (storm talisman): 23 skill minimum, 27 skill maximum
• New talismans:
• Tier 1:
• quill talismans, providing Quill Form. This melds all auxiliary equipment, but grants retaliatory quills damaging those who attack the player in melee.
• inkwell talismans, providing Walking Scroll Form. This melds all equipment, increases all magic school skills scaling to one’s Shapeshifting, grants extra max mp, disables casting spells above level 4, and cuts one’s melee damage in half in exchange for a 50% to gain 1 MP on every hit.
• Tier 2:
• scarab talismans, providing Sun Scarab Form. This small form melds weapons and armour, carts around a solar ember that cleaves with fire attacks when scarabs attack, and grants Fire-exclusive spellcasting success bonuses.
• rimehorn talismans, providing Rime Yak Form. This large form melds weapons and armour, makes adjacent walls deal cold damage over a short while on attacks, and grants Ice-exclusive spellcasting success bonuses.
• medusa talismans, providing Medusa Form. This melds one’s head and cloak slots into a jellyfish, which inflicts poison on random nearby enemies on attacks and which petrifies poisoned enemies when falling to 60% health.
• Tier 3:
• spider talismans, providing Jumping Spider Form. This tiny form melds all armour and weapons, but gains Rampage, a small chance for melee to ensnare enemies, short-blade quality stabs, and a special un-aimed jump ability.
• lupine talismans, providing Werewolf Form. This melds all auxiliary armour, grants a stacking slaying bonus on kills, gives a chance to howl on kills to lock enemies in immobile fear, and grants jumping attacks on afraid foes.
• wellspring talismans, providing Aqua Form. This melds body armour, provides two extra squares of melee range (stacking with polearms and working with auxes), and granting an ability to waterstrike + waterlog nearby enemies.
• fortress talismans, providing Fortress Crab Form. This melds all auxiliary armour, multiplies AC from body armour, and can breathe clouds of minorly-damaging, corroding and weakening rust.
• Tier 4:
• riddle talismans, providing Sphinx Form. These sphinxes can still wear cloaks and bardings (except for Felids), but meld all other armour and can’t wield weapons. Their unarmed strikes Airstrike their targets, they get major Hexes-exclusive spellcasting success bonuses, and their Hexes apply more easily to all susceptible foes.
• hive talismans, providing Living Hive Form. This melds body armour and helm slots into a hive with high health + magic regeneration that also releases berserk curare-branded killer bees when the user is sufficiently wounded.
• sanguine talismans, providing the living-undead Vampire Form. These vampires don’t regenerate with enemies visible, get vampiric attacks at 50% health, can raise a vampiric thrall when killing monsters with stabs, can transform into a swarm of bats that leave sleep-inducing clouds of bats, and have partial torment resistance.
• Many other talismans have been adjusted:
• Flux talismans have become stacks of flux baubles, which require less skill and deal more damage but each transformation lasts for only a finite amount of attacks instead of indefinitely.
• Maw talismans have been lowered down a tier, with the maw dealing less damage and healing on kills for less HP, but can now break through body armour to reduce base AC by 75% instead of melding such entirely.
• Serpent talismans now transform the user into a two-headed snake that can wear two hats (but no other equipment).
• Granite talismans now apply a percentage EV penalty and provide additional strength in exchange for less unarmed base damage.
• Dragon-blood talismans (now dragon-coil talismans) now transform non-draconians into golden dragons instead of fire dragons, changing the corresponding resists; they also get Draconian-style breath charges for a new tri-element breath, but deal less melee damage. Draconians also recharge their breath much faster in dragon form.
• Talismans of death now uniquely require 26 Shapeshifting at minimum.
• Talisman / randarts are notably more common throughout the game, with stones made less common in exchange.
• Talismans no longer meld Gargoyle AC and resists unless they change substances entirely, and never meld away Spriggan move speed.
• Beast talismans have been removed.
• Acquirement now gives more out more talismans.
• Acquirement gives less magical staves overall, but makes more randart staves.
• Potions of degeneration are now of moonshine and solely inflict Vertigo.
• Darts of dispersal are now darts of disjunction, which now repeatedly blink a target each turn for several turns and deal damage with each blink.
• Experience-gated evokers now appear multiple times per game, stack up to a max of +5, and decrease the experience needed to gain charges with each stack.
• Rings of slaying are no longer rarer than other rings.

Monsters

• New monsters:
• Alderkings, fae trees and necromantic masters of Depths.
• Goblin riders, wvyern-taming cavalry for Bailies.
• Fravashi, mid-tier warrior-summoning angels.
• Ironbound Mechanists, dual-wielding forgewright coglins for Vaults.
• Nekomata, self-cloning ranged cat demons for Pan.
• Oni incarcerators, Manifold Assault users for Gehenna.
• Sphinx marauders, masters of winds and minds for Shoals and Vaults.
• Vampire bloodprinces, sleep-inducing lords of Crypt.
• Wyrmholes, terrifying relocations drakes for Depths and rarely Zot.
• Returning monsters:
• hippogriffs, now nearly exclusive to bailies, now with both Warning Cry and a new damaging wind spell that slowly pulls enemies in.
• ironbound beastmasters, now with a passive animal and slime hasting aura plus the ability to throw bolas to bind foes in place.
• New uniques:
• Nobody, a revenant made from countless forgotten souls, who can burn the memories of their deaths to both heal and change spellsets.
• Sprozz, an early-game coglin forgewright who casts Clockwork Bee and Nazja’s Percussive Tempering and sometimes drops a Forgecraft spellbook.
• Apises now have a passive aura that doubles the health of other monsters.
• Arcanists now have more health and EV.
• Ball pythons deal less damage.
• Bennu deal more holy damage.
• Blood saint and Mnoleg Call of Chaos now can temporarily double monster hp.
• Monster deep elves and orc high priests now more consistently wear body armour, mostly gaining robes.
• Creeping infernos now have a fairly large amount of health, move normally towards the player, and deal more damage when they explode.
• Crystal echidnas deal more damage and are now speed 13.
• Crystal guardians deal more damage.
• Elementals in general now have animal intelligence instead of being mindless.
• Endoplasms no longer have rPois.
• Glowing orange brains are now unblindable.
• Iron golems now have less health and EV.
• Mummy death curses now more frequently drain hp, and the flat damage effects no longer check rTorment.
• Mutant beasts count as chaotic.
• Occultists now have more health and EV.
• Player ghosts now respect the movement speed of their original species.
• Quicksilver oozes have been renamed, rethemed, and retiled to void oozes.
• Searing wretches can now swim across lava.
• Simulacra can now always swim, regardless of their base type.
• Sin beasts now come in duos in Pan.
• Plain sphinxes are now “guardian sphinxes”, are stronger overall, and no longer appear in D or in Shoals.
• Sky beasts lose electric damage and random invisibility to instead deal damage depending on the number of open spaces next to what they hit in melee.
• Thermic dynamos and undying armouries reward more experience.
• Water elementals and elemental wellsprings are now amorphous, gaining the same immunity to nets, constriction, and webs jellies have.
• Mindless non-living monster allies consistently don’t get angry at the player for being hit, and do not disappear if they were summoned or constructed.
• Removed monsters: quasits.

Species

• New species: Poltergeists, ghostly trickster whirlwinds. Features:
• They have the resists and immunities of being both undead and insubstantial.
• They have six slots that can interchangeably wield auxiliary armour (hats, helmets, cloaks, scarves, gloves, or boots), but cannot wear body armour.
• Whenever enemies are debuffed, they gain AC scaling to their XL.
• At XL 13, they gain the ability to expand into a whirling cacophony, noisily animating each piece of armour worn into allies that try to stay close to the player and which can inflict random debuffs.
• New species: Revenants, memory-burning mystic skeletons. Features:
• Whenever they cast damage-dealing spells, they automatically attack a nearby monster with the highest health.
• At XL 3, they start gathering memories from slain foes, charges they may burn away all at once to make that many damage-dealing spells cost 0 mp, be easier to cast while ignoring encumbrance penalties, and get extra power. Spell-activated automatic attacks during this also heal the player.
• At XL 3, they also gain knowledge of a random level 1 destructive spell.
• Formicids now may wield an additional pair of gloves.
• Merfolk Long Blades apt is lowered from +2 to +1, and their Polearms apt is increased from +3 to +4.
• Mountain Dwarf Summoning apt is lowered from 0 to -2.
• Enhancer staves are now one-handed instead of two-handed for spriggans and kobolds.
• Vampires and ghouls have been removed.

Spells

• New spell school of Forgecraft: thematically a school of constructing bombs, cannons, and limited automata, mechanically a mostly-ally school more focused on direct damage and blasting than Summoning, and design-wise a new means of providing more cross-school spells and pivoting options.
• New Forgecraft spells:
• Kinetic Grapnel (L1 FC): A weak physical projectile connected to one’s weapon that guarantees the next melee attack hits and deals extra damage.
• Construct Spike Launcher (L2 FC): Builds a spike launcher in a random adjacent wall, which launches spikes at random adjacent targets.
• Launch Clockwork Bee (L3 FC): Targets a monster to wind up and ready a clockwork bee over several turns, which can be rewound up when it collapses.
• Rending Blade (L4 FC / Conj): Temporarily transforms all of the caster’s mp into a blade that pierces through enemies whenever the caster attacks.
• Nazja’s Percussive Tempering (L5 FC): A healing and buffing spell for Forgecraft summons that also produces an ally-avoiding physical explosion.
• Alistair’s Walking Alembic (L5 FC / Alch): A summon that vents poisonous fumes as it attacks to brew various beneficial potion effects.
• Fortress Blast (L6 FC): A highly-damaging blast that takes several turns to charge up and pins the caster in place, but which solely scales off of AC.
• Forge Phalanx Beetle (L6 FC): A summon that always tries to stay by the caster’s side and protects them with an AC boost if adjacent.
• Forge Monarch Bomb (L6 FC / Fire): Creates a bomb factory that launches bomblets on top of enemies, both of which only detonate on recast.
• Diamond Sawblades (L7 FC): Places up to four sawblades on diagonals around the caster that shred everything around them each turn.
• Splinterfrost Shell (L7 FC / Ice): Raises up several sturdy walls around the player that fire off as heavily damaging icicle salvos if broken.
• Platinum Paragon (L9 FC): A metallic apotheosis of a single ally that replicates a given artefact weapon, blocks attacks for the caster, does extra attacks with player attacks, and can hit large areas by recasting the spell when charged-up.
• The following spells have moved to Forgecraft:
• Summon Lightning Spire: now “Forge Lightning Spire”, Summ/Air -> FC/Air.
• Summon Blazeheart Golem: now “Forge Blazeheart Golem”, Summ/Fire -> FC/Fire.
• Animate Armour: now “Awaken Armour”, Summ/Earth -> FC/Earth.
• Iskenderun’s Battlesphere: L5 Conj -> L4 FC/Conj.
• Hoarfrost Cannonade: Alch/Ice -> FC/Ice.
• Spellforged Servitor: now “Spellspark Servitor”, Summ/Conj -> FC/Conj.
• Hellfire Mortar: Fire/Earth -> FC/Fire/Earth.
• New other spells:
• Eringya’s Surprising Crocodile (L4 Summ): Creates temporary shallow water and a lunging crocodile all at once to drag an enemy and the caster back.
• Summon Seismosaurus Egg (L4 Summ / Earth): Creates an egg that will hatch into a mighty dinosaur if the caster stays next to it with visible enemies.
• Detonation Catalyst (L5 Fire / Alch): Gain a buff that makes non-cleaving melee attacks explode for damage scaled to damage dealt, avoiding allies, and which lasts for very little time if the user stops attacking.
• Sphinx Sisters (L7 Summ / Hexes) that summons a pair of riddling sphinxes, one guardian and one maurader, to debilitate the enemies with hexes and batter them with violent winds.
• Spell changes:
• Awakened Armours now equip a replica of the body armour they’re echoing.
• Battlespheres last longer at lower spell power, are better at pathing towards their target, and will target the most proportionally damaged foe if possible.
• Ensorcelled Hibernation’s sleep no longer can be interrupted by noise or failing stealth checks, and has a slightly higher minimum duration.
• Hellfire Mortar now scales heavily with spellpower, deals more damage, has longer mortar range, and pushes back singular flying foes.
• Lightning Spires now target the furtherest-away foe, if possible.
• Maxwell’s Capacitive Coupling can no longer be started without a visible monster in sight of the caster.
• Maxwell’s Portable Piledriver can now be aimed and can push a connected line of lined-up enemies all at once.
• Mephitic Cloud is now flavoured as throwing a non-damaging flask of fumes.
• Mercury Vapours is now Poisonous Vapours, moved to level 1, no longer inflicts Weak, inflicts less poison status, and deals a small amount of flat
• AC-ignoring damage against targets without rPois.
• Permafrost Eruption’s damage has been lowered.
• Rimeblight now chains to two other targets on cast and now reliably spreads on death instead of also spreading through its explosions.
• Sculpt Simulacrum’s simulacra now attack the turn they finish forming.
• Sting is now Mercury Arrow, moved to level 2, no longer inflicts the poison status (but still partially checks rPois), and gains Mercury Vapours’ previous HD-check area-of-effect Weak status.
• Summon Horrible Things now has a chance to inflict a Will-lowering temporary mutation with each cast.
• Teleport Other is now smite targeted.
• Spells that can’t miss are no longer affected by player blindness debuffs.
• Monstrous Menagerie is removed as a player spell, but is still used by Kirke.

Tiles and Other Art

• New tiles for existing game elements:
• Abilities: Accepting Makhleb’s infernal marks.
• Features: altars to Fedhas, altars to Xom, caches of meat, granite statues in Depths and Zot.
• Items: all forms of leather armour.
• Monsters: apises, boggarts, brain worms, creeping infernos, culicivora, great orbs of eyes, living spells, ophanim, rakshasa, scrub nettles, shapeshifters and glowing shapeshifters, sky beasts, all tengu types.
• Mutation icons: big wings, demonspawn demonic touch, mp-powered wands, screaming, subdued magic, tendrils, pseudopods, wild magic.
• Plants, both regular and withered.
• Player dolls: Coglins.
• The prune curse from the glaive of Prune.
• Ru sacrifices: sacrificed eye, sacrificed hand.
• Species passives: barachi hops, demigod divine attributes, djinn flat hp, human explore regen, mertails.
• Spell components: Hoarfrost Cannonade, Hellfire Mortar.
• Spell icons: Blazeheart Golem, Dazzling Flash, Fulsome Fusillade, Hellfire Mortar, Hoarfrost Cannonade, Lightning Spire, Magnavolt, Permafrost Eruption, Spellspark Servitor, all remaining monster-only spells.
• Starting screen icons: high scores.
• Unrands: the robe of Augmentation, Brilliance and its brand, Firestarter, Punk’s acid brand, the robe of Folly, the sword of the Doom Knight, and the toga “Victory”.
• Visual effects: airstrike, draining gaze, doom howl, entropic weave, fire storm, fulsome fusillade, ice blasts, magma, manifold assault, mephitic cloud, mystic blast, potion petition, sap magic, sentinel’s mark, wand of warping.
• Walls: Vaults and Trove rock.
• Pandemonium now has unique stone wall tiles for regular floors and unique wall tiles for each of the unrand Pan lord vaults.
• Gehenna now has unique stone wall tiles.
• Depths and Zot now have unique metal wall tiles.
• Webtiles now has the banishment animation offline tiles uses.
• New oni splash screen by benadryl.

That’s all for now, so until the next update, happy crawling!

Congratulations to Flugkiller for taking first place in the individual competition, with 114,782 points and 27 wins! Flugkiller won the most Nemelex Choice combos (19), got all tier 3 banners, one of only two players to do this, and took 1st in the Piety category. He also got the second-fastest real-time win, a MiFi won in 00:24:58, and won the second-highest scoring game, an AtCj with 74M points.

Other big winners:

• TheMeInTeam: 2nd place overall with 97,543 points and 22 wins. TheMeInTeam tied for the longest win streak of the tournament with 10 wins, and was 2nd in Nemelex Choice combos (18 wins) and Piety categories. He was also 2nd in the Combo High Scores category, with species high scores for Coglin (CoWn) and Kobold (KoCa), the Hexslinger class high score (MDHs), and high scores for 8 combos in total.
• BerryKnight: 3rd place overall with 93,883 points and 11 wins. They won the 2nd most pacific game of the tournament, a MiFi with just 1044 kills, and took 3rd in the Combo High Scores category with a DgSh that took the Dg species and Sh class high scores and the Na species high score.
• TallOdds (aka CarefulOdds): Tied with TheMeInTeam for the longest win streak with 10 wins.
• Sapher: Highest scoring win at 98M points with an FoEE that also set the all-time Formicid species high score!
• p0werm0de: Fastest realtime win with a 0:24:57 MiFi.
• acrobatsimulacrum: The only other player along with Flugkiller to collect all 24 tier 3 banners.
• RepoMan: 1st place in the Combo High Scores category with 6 species and 6 class high scores. Legends say that RepoMan won all these games using Wu Jian and a certain wiki guide.
• zran (aka narz): Lowest turncount win, a GnEE won in 11,445 turns.
• sentinel: Most pacific win, a TrDe with only 964 kills.
• qw (bot): The third win of the tournament, a GrFi of Okawaru won in only 8 attempts. A 12.5% winrate is very good for qw and represents a combination of good luck and recent improvements to its code.
• The first three wins of the tournament were by EnegeticOcto (a MiFi in 0:54:59), tempest (a MiBe in 1:37:22), and qw (a GrFi in 1:50:46).

The clan competition was won by XOMS CoCKtail Party (captained by EnegeticOcto) with 131,548 points. They bested the 2nd place clan in the Combo High Scores (1st overall), Best High Score (1st overall), Fastest Realtime Win (2nd overall), Lowest Turncount win (1st overall), Most Pacific win (1st overall), Banner Collection (tied for 1st overall), and Piety (1st overall) categories. In 2nd place was Artifact Hats Only – Cosplay (captained by TheMeInTeam) with 117,174 points, 1st place in the Streak Length and Nemelex Choice categories, 2nd place in the Piety and Banner Collection categories, and 3rd place in the Fastest Realtime Win category. In 3rd place was TeamSplat (captained by Mandevil) with 98,358 points and 2nd place in the Most Pacific Win category.

To close out, here are some overall tournament statistics (with the 0.31 numbers in brackets for comparison). 2,904 non-bot players started a game at some point during the tournament; of those 2,838 completed a game without quitting or leaving the dungeon sadly orbless. This definition of “player” (players who completed a non-boring game) is used for subsequent calculations and was used for the 0.31 statistics.

• Players: 2,838 (0.31: 2,728)
• Total player time: 29,114 hrs (0.31: 30,498 hrs)
• Average player time: 10.26 hrs (0.31: 11.18 hrs)
• Games played: 76,121 (0.31: 71,851)
• Players who got a rune: 871 (0.31: 861)
• 421 winners and 1319 wins (0.31: 454 winners and 1367 wins)
• Win rate: 1.73% (0.31: 1.90%)
• WebTiles win rate: 1.63% (0.31: 1.85%) / Console win rate: 5.43% (0.31: 3.59%)

Thanks to you all for playing! Many thanks as well to server admins, developers, and contributors who made the 0.32 release and tournament possible! The 0.33 season has begun, and changes are already commit storming in. In the development branch, you can already try out several new player mutations, experience new and reworked Pandemonium monsters (both holy and demonic), and see some awesome new tile art! Also look for an important 0.32.1 bugfix release to made this week. That’s all for now, and until next time, happy crawling!

DCSS 0.32 features redesigns of four gods, two new playable species, eleven new spells, many new and revamped monsters, as well as new decorations throughout the Dungeon! For the complete list of these and the many other changes included in this version, see the release page here.

Packages of DCSS 0.32 for Windows, OS X, and Linux are all available from the download page. You can also play it online on one of many servers across the world!

The tournament starts on Friday August 30th, 8pm UTC and runs through Sunday September 15th, 8pm UTC, with all online 0.32 games counting towards your score. See the tournament page for more details, including how to join or setup a clan. Clans membership can be changed until Friday September 6th, 8pm UTC.

Many thanks to all those who have contributed to DCSS over the years. Thanks especially to the DCSS development team, whose contributions made 0.32 possible, and to the admins who run and maintain the official servers. A special thanks to the following community members who contributed to 0.32 and a warm welcome to the first-time contributors.

910rd, Alex Jurkiewicz, Aliscans, Andrew O’Neill, bjiorn, caryoscelus, Christopher Partin, Chuck Sellick, CipHuK, DevJac, elliottbernstein, geekosaur, grumposus, Isaac Clancy, Lexi Hattaway, mainiacjoe, mgdelmonte, michaelhunter27, Monkooky, NormalPerson7, orjb1, Quinten Konyn, RypoFalem, Rytis Petronis, Sean Dewar, SentientSupper, Wizard Ike, yrdzrfxndfvh, Zhang Kai

The 0.32 release will happen a day or two before August 30th. Also stay tuned for a forthcoming Trunk Update covering all the changes in 0.32. This post will mostly be a summary of the now up-to-date changelog, so take a look there if you’re dying to know what spells Xom has taught rats to cast. Best of luck to you all in the tournament!

We have a new server hosted in South Korea at crawl.nemelex.cards, known officially as CNC. This server is owned by ASCIIPhilia, who has worked with us to make addition of a new server as painless as possible. This server uses a snapshot of the CPO user database from June 19th, 2024 as its starting user database, which means users already registered on CPO at that time won’t have to re-register on CNC. Please see the the drop-down instructions at the top of the CNC lobby for detailed instructions on dealing with any account conflicts. On the CNC lobby page you’ll also find a link to the CNC chat Discord as well info on an improved version of the famous multi-purpose WebTiles extension module that ASCIPhilia developed for CWZ. Many thanks for ASCIIPhilia for generously hosting our newest official server!

Speaking of CWZ, unfortunately it suffered an SSD failure and is offline until further notice. Although the CWZ owner and admin, hong, is trying to have the server’s data recovered, it’s not clear if or when that will be completed. In any case, many thanks to hong for hosting CWZ, which has supported the South Korean DCSS community for over nine years! If CWZ does ever make a triumphant return, we’ll be sure to let you know. Regardless of this, CNC will continue to exist as its own independent server.

Next, XTAHUA IS REJOICING because CXC has a new owner and admin that has migrated all data to a new host! Many thanks to melvinkitnick for providing the new server long-term and for working with Namanix, the previous owner and admin, to migrate the data. This transition should be seamless for CXC users, since the user database, morgues, ttyrecs, etc were all copied over from the old host. And of course, many thanks to Namanix for providing a host for CXC for almost 5 years!

Unfortunately, the CPO server may be going offline in October unless a new owner can come forward and provide a replacement server. The CPO owner and admin, chequers, is able to provide the current server as-is as well as transfer the hostname to a new admin who’s willing provide the funding and has the necessary technical expertise. See the CPO Lobby Page for further details. Many thanks to chequers for hosting CPO and supporting the Australian and Oceania DCSS community for 10 years!

Finally, a quick note that all games from CDI and CNC are now finally integrated into CAO Scoring. If you have games on any official server that aren’t showing up in the score pages, please let us know in #crawl-dev on Libera or in the Roguelikes Discord. That’s all I have for now, so until next time, happy crawling!

Speaking of official servers, I’m upgrading the development server crawl.dcss.io aka CDI to become official! We’re using the cbro.berotato.org aka CBR2 account db as the starting db for CDI’s accounts. Players who were already registered on CBR2 as of Friday March 30 can log into CDI with their CBR2 credentials, otherwise please register a new account on CDI. Users migrating from CKO should see very similar latency, since CDI is hosted in the same New York City data center where CKO was located.

Finally, I’ve set up a Patreon to help cover hosting costs for CDI. Head over there for more details, and thanks for any support you can provide! Observant gizmo inventors might notice qw trying out the new Coglin species in trunk on CDI at some point soon. And who knows what kind of memes one might eventually find on our newest server? As always, happy crawling!

For 16 days, players could compete for tournament points and banners by playing 0.31 games on the public servers. The only major rule changes compared to the 0.30 tournament were the addition of a Gem Collection category, making Uskayaw’s banner be based on gems, and allowing Felids to win the Ruthless Efficiency banner.

Congratulations to Sergey,  for once again taking first place in the individual competition, with 115,521 points and 16 wins! Sergey got the most points for combos won, with species high scores for HO and Hu, and class scores for Hu and Wn, won the most pacific game (a SpEn with only 421 kills), achieved an 8 win streak (3rd best overall), a 64M HuEE high score (3rd best overall), collected 17 tier 3 banners, and won 6 Nemelex’s Choice combos.

Other big winners:

• Wizard1ke: 2nd place overall with 106,191 points and 28 wins. Wizard1ke was the only player to collect all 24 tier 3 banners, and had the most points in the piety category, reaching max piety with 21 gods and winning with 21 gods. They also got the second most points for combos won, including the Te, Dj, and On species high scores, and won 13 Nemelex Choice combos.
• Flugkiller: 3rd place overall with 99,209 points and 13 wins. He got a 0:25:20 realtime MiFi win (2nd overall), collected 19 tier 3 banners (2nd overall), won a TrFi in only 14,063 turns (3rd overall), got a 7 win streak, and won 6 Nemelex Choice combos.
• TheMeInTeam: Longest win streak with 19 wins and highest in the winrate category (won 22 of 23 games played).
• Sapher: Highest scoring win at 91M points with an OpEE.
• EnegeticOcto: Fastest realtime win with a 0:22:48 MiFi.
• qw: Fastest realtime win by a bot with a 0:10:50 DjHu. qw won 3 games this tournament, including first ever wins of Dj and Dg (with DgHu). It also got 3 runes twice this tournament with SpHu.
• zran: Lowest turncount win with an AtCj winning in 10,274 turns.
• bookman: 23 Nemelex’s Choice wins, the most in the tournament.
• The first three wins of the tournament were by FlugKiller (a MiFi in 0:46:25), ShadowRider38 (a MiFi in 0:41:59), and p0werm0de (a MiFi in 0:27:52; 3rd fastest realtime win overall!).
• The last win of the tournament was by sewnkin, an OnEE that ascended 14 seconds before the end of tournament.

The clan competition was won by Retired Ogres Bocce Club (captained by EnegeticOcto) with 132,494 points. They bested the 2nd place clan in the Combo High Scores (1st overall), Best High Score (1st overall), Fastest Realtime Win (1st overall), Most Pacific Win (1st overall), Fastest Realtime (1st overall), Low Turncount (1st overall), Banner Collection (tied for 1st overall), and Piety (1st overall) categories. In 2nd place was The TeAM in MeEE-Cosplay(captained by TheMeInTeam) with 102,015 points, and first place in the Streak Length category, and 2nd place in the Piety and Nemelex Choice categories. Not far behind in 3rd place was Harold and a Few Mara Go to Wight Castle (captained by Wizard1ke) with 98,358 points, and 2nd place in the Combo High Scores, Best High Score, Low Turncount Win, and Most Pacific Win categories.

To close out, here are some overall tournament statistics (with the 0.30 numbers in brackets for comparison). 2,817 non-bot players started a game at some point during the tournament; of those 2,728 completed a game without quitting or leaving the dungeon sadly orbless. This definition of “player” (players who completed a non-boring game) is used for subsequent calculations and was used for the 0.30 statistics.

• Players: 2,728 (0.30: 2,708)
• Total player time: 30,498 hrs (0.30: 30,426 hrs)
• Average player time: 11.18 hrs (0.30: 11.24 hrs)
• Games played: 71,851 (0.30: 69,571)
• Players who got a rune: 861 (0.30: 926)
• 454 winners and 1367 wins (0.30: 454 winners and 1433 wins)
• Win rate: 1.90% (0.30: 2.06%)
• WebTiles win rate: 1.85% (0.30: 1.94%). Console win rate: 3.59% (0.30: 6.18%)

Thanks to you all for playing! Many thanks as well to server admins, developers, and contributors who made the 0.31 release and tournament possible!

The 0.32 season has begun, and changes are already in motion. We have two online experimental branches that implement a new Steel Elf species and redesigns the gods Beogh and Yredelemnul. The Legends Say that Watch this space for further information as the 0.32 trunk update posts begin to flow. Until next time, happy crawling!

DCSS 0.31 features some major spell school and starting background changes, a variety of new spells, many dangerous new monsters, and some major species changes.

The Transmutations forms spells have been moved into talisman items, which allow permanently shifting into forms based on the new Shapeshifting skill. The remaining Transmutations spells and the Poison Magic spells have been merged into a new Alchemy school. The Shapeshifter and Alchemist starting backgrounds replace Transmuter and Venom Mage, respectively. To support these changes, this release adds 4 new spells, sees 7 spells reworked into improved replacements, and has many tweaks to the levels and schools. In fact it’s a bit too much for me to write up as we’re getting ready for tournament! So please check out the “Spells” section of the release for full details.

The new Oni species replaces Ogres. Oni love a good drunken brawl, gaining double effect when drinking any potion that restore HP or MP, and also perform an immediate cleaving melee attack. They are otherwise similar to Ogres, but also have horns and some increased apts. Starting at XL 7, Armataurs now regenerate HP and MP while rampaging. They also lose their double potion effect, and no longer read scrolls slowly. Felids now have an extra life at XL 1 and don’t lose XLs when dying. Tengu have an inherent acrobat effect (like the amulet) at XL 1, and gain 4 EV at XL 7 instead of gaining an EV bonus and fast movement. Humans gain the exploration healing effect formerly found on Meteorans, which are no more. Instead, players of any species can now rush to find gems stashed at the end of many branches as achievement items.

Download DCSS 0.31 here or play it online on one of many servers across the world! Packages for Windows, OS X, and Linux are available now. See the full list of changes on the release page here.

The tournament starts on Friday January 19th 8pm UTC and runs through Sunday February 4th 8pm UTC, with all online 0.31 games counting towards your score. See the tournament page for more details, including how to join or setup a clan. Clans membership can be changed until Friday January 26th 8pm UTC.

Many thanks to all those who have contributed to DCSS over the years. Thanks especially to the DCSS development team, whose contributions made 0.31 possible, and to the admins who run and maintain the official servers. A special thanks to the following community members who contributed to 0.31 and a warm welcome to the first-time contributors. (Let us know if someone is missing, this data is tricky to collect in bulk!)

910rd, aedyr, AlexanderPosch, Aliscans, Alvin, Anabel, Antal Spector-Zabusky, CipHuK, cureja, DevJac, geekosaur, Jared Miller, kippig, laserbat, MainiacJoe, mgdelmonte, Monkooky, Nephila Hirsch Oliveira, NormalPerson7, orjb1, Perren Yang, Quinten Konyn, Roadster Tracker, Rosstin Murphy, RypoFalem, Rytis Petronis, sandertyu, sdynet, Sean Dewar, Sebastian Zivota, Skrybe, yrdzrfxndfvh, Zhang Kai

The 0.31 release which will be made and announced either this Thursday or Friday. In the meantime, the 0.31 branch is being rolled out to our online servers. Servers CBR2, CKO, and LLD all have it available, with more to come soon! You can configure your tournament clan in your RC files right now on one of those three servers, or simply wait until your favorite official server has 0.31 installed. Finally, we’re finishing up one last belated Trunk Update to fill you in on the torrent of changes we had in December. So stay tuned, and good luck in the tournament!

For 16 days, players could compete for tournament points and banners by playing 0.30 games on the public servers. This was the fourth tournament held after the major revision of the tournament rules done for 0.25. There were changes based on previous input, and once again we’ve collected the feedback posted on tavern and reddit.

Congratulations to Sergey (aka yegreS),  for once again taking first place in the individual competition, with 87,793 points! Over the course of the tournament, Sergey won all 11 games he played (!), the 3rd longest win streak overall. He also achieved an 86M MeIE high score (5th highest overall), a 0:30:53 realtime win (6th best overall), collected 14 tier 3 banners, got a species and a background high score (from a 45M score GnEE), won 4 Nemelex’s Choice combos, got 4 combo high scores, and completed 27 ziggurats.

This is the first time someone has won the tournament with 100% winrate since theglow won all 18 of their games in the 0.11 tournament in 2012. elliptic (27th(!) overall) notes that there have been 24 tournaments with the 16-day format, and in the first 12 of them there were 15 distinct players who won at least 18 games in a single tournament, while in the second 12 of them there were 66 such players. Despite this trend, Sergey, who also took 1st place in the previous 0.29 tournament, took 1st place in this tournament with 14 fewer wins (11 vs 25 in 0.29) and played over 3 hours less per day on average (4:43:25 vs 7:58:28 in 0.29)!

Other big winners:

• kuniqs: 2nd place overall (82,079 points, 19 wins), with a 96M MeEE high score (2nd overall), a 0:29:35 realtime win (4th overall), 18 tier 3 banners (4th most overall), a 5 win streak, 7 Nemelex’s Choice wins, two combo high scores, and 28 Ziggurats cleared.
• ShadowRider38: 3rd place overall (77,239 points, 21 wins), with a 0:35:02 realtime win (7th overall), a 17,829 turns MeFi win (8th lowest overall), 15 tier 3 banners (5th most overall), 8 Nemelex’s Choice wins (9th overall), 11 combo high scores, a 5 win streak, and 27 Ziggurats cleared.
• narz: Highest scoring win at 132M with MeEE and the most pacific win with a SpEn that killed only 186 monsters.
• FlugKiller: Fastest realtime win at 00:21:48 with a MiFi.
• TheMeInTeam: Longest win streak with 15 wins.
• Wizard1ke: The only person to collect all 24 tier 3 banners.
• removed: 30 Nemelex’s Choice wins.
• FizzleGong: Lowest turncount win with a MeEE winning in 5,881 turns.
• SnakkuSnakku7: 3 species (At, Gh, HO) and 3 background (Ar, CK, Hs) high scores, and 1st in the Combo High Scores category.
• The first three wins of the tournament were by EnegeticOcto (a MiFi in 0:56:35), ShadowRider38 (a MiFi in 1:08:58), and hihot (a MiFi in 1:31:43).
• The last win of the tournament was by RailBird80, a HuFE that ascended 16 minutes before the end of tournament yet took over 4 days to win.

The clan competition was won by Heavy Weight Lifting Club (captained by EnegeticOcto) with 112,811 points. They sealed their victory by besting the 2nd place clan in the Combo High Scores (1st overall), Most Pacific Win (1st overall), Fastest Realtime (1st overall), Piety, Nemelex’s Choice, and Streak categories. In a close 2nd place was Uncle Xoms Tabbin (captained by themargong) with 104,283 points, and first place in the High Score and Lowest Turncount Win categories. They tied for 1st place with Heavy Weight Lifting Club in the banners category, together collecting all 24 tier 3 banners. 3rd place was held by My Boolean is Binary (captained by TheMeInTeam) with 93,023 points, and 1st place in the Nemelex’s Choice and Streak categories.

To close out, here are some overall tournament statistics (with the 0.29 numbers in brackets for comparison). 2,765 players started a game at some point during the tournament; of those 2,711 completed a game without quitting or leaving the dungeon sadly orbless. This definition of “player” (players who completed a non-boring game) is used for subsequent calculations and was used for the 0.29 statistics.

• Players: 2,711 (0.29: 2,573)
• Total player time: 30,408 hrs (0.29: 27,360 hrs)
• Average player time: 11.2 hrs (0.29: 10.6 hrs)
• Games played: 69,601 (0.29: 64,339)
• Players who got a rune: 926 (0.29: 759)
• 454 winners and 1433 wins (0.29: 368 winners and 1183 wins)
• Win rate: 2.06% (0.29: 1.84%)
• Proportion of players using WebTiles: 97.1% (0.29: 96.9%)

Thanks to you all for playing! Many thanks as well to server admins, developers, and contributors who made the 0.30 release and tournament possible!

The 0.31 season has begun, and changes are already in motion. Watch this space for further information as the 0.31 trunk update posts begin to flow. Until next time, happy crawling!

DCSS 0.30 features the return of the legendary Reaver background. These warrior-mages start with two new powerful yet situational spells: Kiss of Death and Momentum Strike. They also start with the Hailstorm spell, which has been moved down to level 3 yet can sometimes miss.

The new Armataur species replaces Palentongas, who have rolled peacefully off into the sunset. Armataurs are large, scaly mammals that wear bardings, but instead of rolling and curling, they have innate rampage and a long tongue mutation that doubles potion effects and slows down scroll reading.

A grand total of 7 new spells have been added! Two we’ve already mentioned for Reaver, with two more being likewise new designs and three replacing existing spells:

- Kiss of Death (L1 Conj/Necro): does high draining damage to an adjacent enemy, at the cost of significant max HP drain to the caster.
- Momentum Strike (L2 Conj/Tloc). Redirects the caster’s momentum for a damaging attack that doesn’t require line of fire, but locks the caster in place for some turns after a hit (and cannot be recast until this expires).
- Cigotuvi’s Dreadful Rot (L2 Necro/Air/Pois). Rots away the caster’s flesh to create a cloud of deadly miasma on their tile. Replaces Corpse Rot.
- Volatile Blastmotes (L3 Fire/Tloc). Creates an explosive cloud on the caster’s tile, usable as a land mine or tricky tool. Replaces Conjure Flame.
- Vhi’s Electric Charge (L3 Tloc/Air). Launches the caster at a nearby foe and launches a crackling melee attack, phasing through creatures en route.
- Arcjolt (L5 Air/Conj). Electrocutes everything adjacent to the caster, everything adjacent to those creatures, etc, etc, in a chain. Replaces Lightning Bolt.
- Plasma Beam (L6 Fire/Air): Fires a bolt of lightning and another bolt of fire, both at the most distant foe.

We’ve added 6 new unrands and made changes to 11 existing ones. Additionally you can now find randart orbs, scarves, and magical staves!

Finally, Lugonu has been mutated into a new form. Banishment is available at 2* piety (instead of 3*) and mutates foes that resist getting banished. To encourage adventurers to abandon their current god, Lugonu helpfully banishes some hostile monsters whenever other gods act with their wrath. There are also now more Lugonu altars in the Abyss, and more piety is awarded for conversions in the Abyss.

Download DCSS 0.30 here or play it online on one of many servers across the world! Packages for Windows and OS X are available now. Linux debs are coming soon. See the full list of changes on the release page here.

The tournament starts on Friday May 5th 8pm UTC and runs through Sunday May 21st 8pm UTC, with all online 0.30 games counting towards your score. See the tournament page for more details, including how to join or setup a clan. Clans membership can be changed until Friday May 12th 8pm UTC.

Many thanks to all those who have contributed to DCSS over the years. Thanks especially to the DCSS development team, whose contributions made 0.30 possible, and to the admins who run and maintain the official servers. A special thanks to the following community members who contributed to 0.30 and a warm welcome to the first-time contributors, listed in italics. (Let us know if someone is missing, this data is tricky to collect in bulk!)

Aliscans, Ernest Antanishin, Antern, bfaires, Josh Braendel, Marcelo Henrique Cerri, Perry Fraser, greenscarf, Duong Hoang, Alex Jurkiewicz, kippig, kd7uiy, mainiacjoe, Monkooky, Michael Del Monte, pdpol, Brian Power, Roadster Tracker, Rypofalem, Rytis Petronis, Aleksando Sansan, sdynet, Skrybe, Antal Spector-Zabusky, spiros, Sergio Thompson, Samantha Tobias, Benjamin S Wolf, yrdzrfxndfvh, Zhang Kai

DCSS 0.28 features a new Cinder Acolyte zealot background that begins the game worshiping a new god, Ignis, the Dying Flame. Cinder Acolytes start with the new Scorch spell, a -1 flaming branded weapon of choice, and five stars of piety. Ignis worshipers cannot gain piety, losing it only when using Ignis’ abilities. The abilities are Fiery Armour, which grants AC and retaliation flame damage, Foxfire Swarm, which summons many foxfires, and Rising Flame, a one-time ability sends the player one level above. Once all piety is spent, players will typically abandon for another god, and Ignis dies forever when wrath is over.

The Hell branches have been revised to offer substantially more challenge. Each branch features a distinct and persistent negative effects that applies while in the branch along with timed effects common to all Hells. The branches all have revised monster set with many new monsters and smaller layouts for the first six levels, each of which has only one downward staircase. The Spider branch has likewise been retooled with a roster of new creepy-crawlies, new and revised end maps, and updates to the existing layouts and vaults.

A new magical orb item type exists for the shield slot. Each orb type grants an ego with a powerful passive effect, such as a 3-radius halo or a reduction of monster willpower at the expense of your own. The god Yredelemnul has been completely redesigned, granting passive reaping and accepting the reaped zombies as payment for its dark abilities. Okawaru and Jiyva have also seen significant, though not quite as sweeping, changes.

A batch of new spells have been added, As always, there are dozens of new deadly vaults, and many more changes small and large alike!

Download DCSS 0.28 here or play it online on one of many servers across the world! Packages for Windows and OS X are available now. Linux debs are coming soon. See the full list of changes on the release page here.

The tournament starts on Friday February 4th 8pm UTC and runs through Sunday February 20th 8pm UTC, with all online 0.28 games counting towards your score. See the tournament page for more details, including how to join or setup a clan. Clans membership can be changed until Friday February 11th 8pm UTC.

Many thanks to all those who have contributed to DCSS over the years. Thanks especially to the DCSS development team, whose contributions made 0.28 possible, and to the admins who run and maintain the official servers. A special thanks to the following community members who contributed to 0.28 and a warm welcome to the first-time contributors, listed in italics. (Let us know if someone is missing, this data is tricky to collect in bulk!)

AdamPG, Alex Jurkiewicz, Aliscans, ArmiesAndCastles, Brian Power, Chris Landry, Justin Clark Ong, David Damerell, DreamDust, Ed Dewey, Elliott Bernstein, Gopall, Goratrix, Implojin, Jonathan Klabunde Tomer, Kiëd Llaentenn, MainiacJoe, Hurricos, Matthew Daley, Monkooky, Nikolai Lavsky, Oneirical, Perry Fraser, RojjaCebolla, Santiago Acosta, Zachary Chandler, Zhang Kai, amcnicky, dilly, floraline, John Stahara, Beargit, mgdelmonte, Nikolai Lavsky, Robert Gray, Paul Pollack, sdynet

Highlights (full commit list via github):

• The frequency of D:1 jackals is reduced.
• Sigmund and Robin are nerfed gently.
• Maxwell’s Capacitative Coupling now has LOS range.
• 80 other fixes, tweaks, copy-edits, and interface improvements.

Updating is recommended for all players. Happy crawling, and report more bugs here!

Congratulations to Yermak, perennial champion, for once again taking first place in the individual competition, with 105,402 points! Over the course of the tournament, Yermak won 48 games, including a streak of 24 games (best in tournament), an 86M high score run (also best in tournament), an XL 14 win (also tied for best in tournament!), 27 Nemelex’ Choice combos, 5 species high scores, 3 background high scores, and 19 tier 3 banners. In 2nd place was Sergey with 91,825 points and 34 wins, including a streak of 21 games, 3rd lowest turncount win, 2nd 15 win of the tournament, 4 species high scores, 3 background high scores, and 14 tier 3 banners. Rounding out the top 3 was dilly with 84,283 points points and 38 wins, including a streak of 7 wins, 28 Nemelex Choice wins (tied for most in tournament), and 18 tier 3 banners.

Our top three took several of the top spots in the individual category rankings, but they weren’t the only players on the leaderboard. Acrobat set the top standard in Win Rate once again, winning 37 out of 43 games over the tournament for an adjusted win rate of 84%. Third place finisher dilly tied with Prakerore in the Nemelex’ Choice competition, both winning 28 Nemelex combos for points over the course of the tournament. Yermak and Sergey took the number one and number two spots in the quest for Combo High Scores, with CryingNoob rounding out the top 3. The lowest turncount was 9,903 turns, shared in a tie by Caminho and DrMan. Seasoned speed runner p0werm0de took the fastest real-time win with a 22:37 victory. Spriggan Enchanter was the power-combo of the Low XL win category, with Acrobat, Yermak, and Prakerore in a three way tie at XL14. The tournament start was heralded by p0werm0de who posted the first win after 33 minutes, and dilly brought home the first 15 rune win in an hour and 20 minutes. The Ziggurat Dive was more restrained than the 0.26 tournaments’ 100 ziggurat fiesta, with Ge0ff clearing 60 Ziggurats. Finally, both poncheis and booing earned every banner, the only two players to complete this feat.

The clan competition was won by Gozag or Stay Home (captained by Ge0ff) with 105,343 points. In 2nd place was Team Splat (captained by shummie) with 78,267 points. Following close on their heels in 3rd place were ABCDEF (captained by fbynet) with 76,046.

Most of the clan categories take the best score of the member, so I won’t recap those. The Nemelex’ Choice competition was a collective effort, and and just as in 0.26 it was quite high scoring. Gozag or Stay Home came out on top, with a total of 49 clan nemelex points; closely following were ABCDEF with 47. The Combo High Scores competition was blown away by Gozag or Stay Home with 917 points in the category, a result of having both Yermak and Sergey on the team. This tournament only two clans collectively earned every banner: ABCDEF thanks to the ‘B’, booing; and chatdotcrawlBR, which had poncheis as a member.

Thank you to everyone for playing.

To close out, here are some overall tournament statistics (with the 0.26 numbers in brackets for comparison). 2,527 players started a game at some point during the tournament; of those 2,474 completed a game in a non-boring way. This definition of “player” (players who completed a non-boring game) is used for subsequent calculations and was used for the 0.27 statistics.

• Players: 2,474 (0.26: 2,333)
• Total player time: 27,502 hrs (0.26: 29,392 hrs)
• Average player time: 11.2 hrs (0.26: 12.6 hrs)
• Games played: 67,203 (0.26: 54,701)
• Players who got a rune: 734 (0.26: 886)
• 404 winners and 1571 wins (0.26: 476 winners and 1767 wins)
• Win rate: 2.34% (0.26: 3.23%)
• Proportion of players using WebTiles: 94.4% (0.25: 96.7%)

The 0.28 season has begun, and it again looks to be a very active trunk season. Watch this space for further information as the 0.28 trunk update posts begin to flow. Until next time, happy crawling!

DCSS 0.27 features a new Djinni species that cast spells using HP, can only learn new spells at random as they level up, and only use the spellcasting skill to train magic. We’ve redesigned Ashenzari, who now offers curses for your gear to gain piety and skill levels, at the cost of destroying the item when the curse is removed.

A batch of new spells have been added, including Manifold Assault, which attacks multiple foes at once with your melee, Storm Form, which transforms you into a tempest with electrified, cleaving melee and the ability to hurl yourself as lightning at foes, and Animate Armour, which draws out the spirit of your armor to fight by your side. Polar Vortex is a more damaging, ice-themed replacement for Tornado. Maxwell’s Capacitive Coupling is a level 8 air-themed replacement for Absolute Zero that vaporizes a nearby monster after a delay. Chain Lightning has been reworked into a more powerful level 9 spell.

Spell books have many new types and generate more often, but contain fewer spells. We’ve re-balanced branch monster sets and end maps, as well as made new end maps for Lair, Shoals, and Snake. As always, there are dozens of new deadly vaults, and many more changes small and large alike!

Download DCSS 0.27 here or play it online on one of many servers across the world! Packages for Windows and OS X are available now. Linux debs are coming soon. See the full list of changes on the release page here.

The tournament starts on Friday July 30th 8pm UTC and runs through Sunday August 15th 8pm UTC, with all online 0.27 games counting towards your score. See the tournament page for more details, including how to join or setup a clan. Clans membership can be changed until Friday August 6th 8pm UTC.

Many thanks to all those who have contributed to DCSS over the years. Thanks especially to the DCSS development team, whose contributions made 0.27 possible, and to the admins who run and maintain the official servers. A special thanks to the following community members who contributed to 0.27 and a warm welcome to the first-time contributors, listed in italics. (Let us know if someone is missing, this data is tricky to collect in bulk!)

4Hooves2Appendages, AdamPG, Aliscans, Alexei Barnes, Beargit, Elliott Bernstein, dicedlemming, dilly, DreamDust, Goratrix, hyperactiveChipmunk, Implojin, Alex Jurkiewicz,  Zhang Kai,  l33t-d00d, Nikolai Lavsky, Christopher Landry, MainiacJoe, mgdelmonte, Mintice, Andrew O’Neill, Alexander Posch, robertxgray, Sastreii, sdynet, WhiteShark, Shummie, Skrybe, Jeffery Stager, Cebolla Sunbeam, Wensley, Mara Williamson

Hello crawlers and welcome to the last trunk update of the 0.27 cycle. We’ve been under feature freeze since last Friday, so the remaining time before the 0.27 Release and Tournament will be devoted to bug fixes, balance tweaks, and polish. If you’ve been holding out and playing 0.26 due to concerns about stability, know that all major features are fixed in trunk, and only reasonable balance changes and bug fixes will be a thing from here until release. We’ve made the 0.27 beta branch, so servers will begin installing 0.27 soon. So please play-test trunk or the 0.27 branch when that’s available on your favorite server to help us find bugs! The 0.27 release will be either Thursday, July 29th, or Friday, July 30th, depending on timing. Look out for an official release post with download links to come.

The 0.27 tournament will run from Friday July 30th, 8pm UTC to Sunday August 15th, 8pm UTC. Please bookmark the official 0.27 tournament page and use this page to track your progress throughout the tournament. We’ll continue to update this page with any rules changes. In coming days you may see summaries of test data in the “Overview” page taken from recent 0.27 beta games. Don’t worry, we’ll reset everything before the tournament starts.

Now, onto the Trunk Update! Note that this is not the full set of 0.27 changes, just the ones since our last trunk update. For the full and official set of 0.27 changes, check out the changelog. Here are the changes since last time:

• The starting spell sets of some Mage and Warrior-Mage backgrounds are reduced by one spell. This together with the increase in book drops will give these classes more variety in how they proceed through middle portions of the game. We didn’t get to adjusting all classes this version, since for some, any spell removal would leave the class in a difficult spot. Further changes, including potentially new spells, will happen during 0.28 development, so stay tuned! The changes for 0.27:
• Air elementalists no longer start with Lightning Bolt.
• Arcane Marksmen no longer start with Leda’s Liquefaction.
• Earth Elementalists no longer start with Lee’s Rapid Deconstruction.
• Summoners and Ice Elementalists no longer start with Summon Ice beast.
• Venom Mages no longer start with Ignite Poison.
• New branch end maps and adjustments:
• New “Abyssal Woods” Lair ending featuring demonic trees and abyss-themed monsters. Beware the thrashing horrors!
• New “Lost City” Shoals ending featuring a ruined temple theme with minotaurs and sphinxes. Beware the satyrs too!
• New “Storm Temple” Shoals ending featuring electricity-themed monsters and many possible layouts. Beware the storm dragon! Or the titan!
• The “Ancient Temple”,  “Frog Pond”, and “Undead Jungle Book” Lair endings have been adjusted to lower monster counts significantly. And they say we never give players anything…
• Most Snake end maps have their monster counts significantly reduced. It’s tough work slogging through all those nagas, we know.
• All Ice Cave maps have been rebalanced to have more varied layouts, monsters, and loot. Gone are mysterious dead reapers! The changes are substantial, as detailed in this commit. You should find the cloud generator placement less arbitrary and less frequent, more possible shortcuts in many maps, and more varied monster sets at both easy and hard difficulty ice caves. Stay frosty, friends!
• The Robe of Folly is redesigned. It now gives you a permanent brilliance effect (spell enhancer and half spell MP costs), but sets your Will to 0. Additionally it grants +8 Int (from +4) and +4 enchant (from +3). It’d be folly indeed to not wear this robe while entering one of my lich-filled vaults!
• Dancing ranged weapons are now a thing that can kill you. Yes, of course they have infinite ammo, I’m glad you asked! But don’t worry because…
• …Tukima’s Dance now works on monsters wielding ranged weapons! It can make charmed dancing ranged weapons to fight by your side.
• The Elemental Staff is featured in one new and one reworked vault. Both vaults also feature a greatly improved master elementalist monster that always wields the staff, appearing when these vaults place in Elf or Depths. Watch out, it knows Ozo’s Refridge, Crystal Spear, Chain Lightning, and Firestorm!
• The new vault is the official “guarded unrand” vault, by first-time contributor dilly. Placing in Dungeon, Elf, and Depths, it features an elemental mage elf boss (for Dungeon) or the master elementalist (for Elf and Depths) and various elemental baddies.
• Mu’s “elemental laboratory” vault, the one that initially introduced the master elementalist, has been given a complete overhaul. It has more challenging and interesting elemental monster sets and features much more interesting terrain.
• Monster breath timeouts now reduce after their turn. So if you see that a monster is “catching its breath”, you know it won’t use a breath attack before your next turn unless it gets a double turn. That’s really nice!
• Many new vaults for Elf, including entries, decorative vaults, monster vaults with weird things like defective dancing weapons and cool things like double deep elf blademasters with double double swords, and new main vaults and entries for the Elf:2 Hall of Blades! Also new are a batch of ecumenical altar vaults. New even though the altars inside are very old.
• Eleionomae no longer land on and destroy trees when they travel next to you, instead picking a safe and comfy spot next to a tree. No more tree digging!
• Ossuaries no longer have spear and dart traps. The days of step-and-rest-then-repeat for clearing some areas of ossuaries are over! Don’t worry, alarm traps and net traps still make an appearance. And there’s talk of introducing some new types of traps or trap-like monsters in 0.28…
• The macro menu is greatly improved, with hotkeys Ctrl-D for an improved menu and Ctrl-E for a quick-add menu.
• We have a bona-fide game menu available from the F1 key. It’s almost like we’re a modern game! For now you can use it to access save, quit, macro, and help functions, but we’ll probably expand it in the future.
• The allow_extended_colors console option is now on by default. For console nerds only! We previously didn’t enable it because some major system terminals didn’t support more than 8 standard colors by default, but that’s no longer the case.
• Hints mode has been updated and corrected. But it still recommends Vehumet over Sif Muna! Wrong!
• The Desolation entrance is no longer ruined.

That wraps it up for this set of trunk updates. Until next time, happy crawling!

The damnation bolt hits the trunk update!!! The damnation bolt explodes! The damnation engulfs the trunk update! The trunk update dies…

The 0.26 branch is available and already installed on CBR2, CKO, CUE, and CXC. For other servers, you’ll see the 0.26 game links appear on the server lobby at some point before the tournament starts. Once 0.26 is available on your server, you can follow the instructions on the tournament page to define/join clans via your 0.26 RC file. Clans can be formed and changed until one week into the tournament on 20:00 UTC Friday 15 January. See the How to Play section of the tournament page for details.

We’ve made some rule changes relative to the 0.25 tournament, so see the Changes section of the tournament page for details. Once the tournament has started, the leaderboard will display the current standings. You may see the leaderboard, player, and clan pages populated with test data from 0.26 games. Don’t worry, the test pages and data will be wiped before the tournament begins. If you’re looking for people to play with, you can find them in the Tavern, reddit, or our IRC channel ##crawl on Freenode. Many thanks to Napkin for again letting us host the tournament on CDO, and to ebering for updating the tournament scripts for our rule changes.

See you all on Swamp:4, paralyzed by a fenstrider witch!

Hello crawlers and welcome to the last trunk update of the 0.26 cycle. We’ve been under feature freeze since last Friday, so the remaining time before the 0.26 Release and Tournament will be devoted to bug fixes, balance tweaks, and polish. If you’ve been holding out and playing 0.25 due to concerns about stability, know that all major features are fixed in trunk, and only reasonable balance changes and bug fixes will be a thing from here until release. We’ll be making the 0.26 beta branch soon, at which time servers will begin installing 0.26. So please play-test trunk or the 0.26 branch when that’s available on your favorite server to help us find bugs! The 0.26 release will be either Thursday, January 7th, or Friday, January 8th, depending on timing. Look out for an official release post with download links to come.

The 0.26 tournament will run from Friday Jan 8th, 8pm UTC to Sunday Jan 24th, 8pm UTC. We don’t don’t yet have a rules page installed on this server, but expect that link in a forthcoming post. Check out the pages for the previous tournament to get a sense of the rules and presentation. We’ll try to announce any rules changes in that subsequent post, but as always the final rules page will cover everything you need to know.

Now, onto the Trunk Update! Note that this is not the full set of 0.26 changes, just the ones since our last trunk update. For the full and official set of 0.26 changes, check out the changelog. Here are the changes since last time:

• Monster draining attacks now temporarily reduce player max HP instead of skills. The UI cost of skill drain was high…beware! See a more detailed discussion in this commit. Right now, the new drain effect is a bit weak, but I plan on making a couple balance changes to it during the freeze. Don’t worry, you’ll be afraid of bolts of drain, but it’ll be the good kind of afraid. Note that drain inflicted by the player is unchanged.
• Frozen Ramparts has its effect end upon movement. Yes, another nerf to your favorite new ice spell. That’s ok, kiting isn’t very fun, and now it works much better with Ozocubu’s Armour!
• Eringya’s Noxious Bog now places bogs on all squares within a range of 4 where there is no adjacent solid feature. A much-needed power increase for this spell, and hopefully an interesting positional trade-off. Kudos to hellmonk for the idea!
• Irradiate now checks monster AC but does slightly more damage. Ignoring AC was not part of the original PleasingFungus vision (which is all-powerful).
• The cloak of Starlight gains *Dazzle, which sometimes dazzles foes like the Dazzling Flash spell upon successful dodge. It no longer has rElec and rC+. This cloak wins you so many style points when you go swish that monsters are dumbfounded!
• The glaive of the Guard gains a spectral weapon brand in addition to electricity, and loses sInv and +Rage. That’s right, dual branding!
• The sword of Power is now +5, vorpal, and sometimes fires a powerful but low-accuracy beam with chance based on the player’s current HP. Have you played the lesser-known indie game The Legend of Zelda? It’s a bit like the sword from that game.
• New Vaults! Sadly I don’t have enough time to go into detail about most individual vaults, but here’s a quick summary.
• A big set of winding woodlands vaults from nikheizen that feature a forest/woodland theme with many variations.
• A new Swamp rune vault by nikheizen featuring a coven of 13 witches, mages, sorcerers, and wizards who want tell you all about demons.
• A ghost vault, two greek myth themed Shoals vaults, four Swamp vaults, and 7 altar vaults from nikheizen.
• A set of 11 arrival vaults, 4 minivaults, and 2 altar vaults from amcnicky.
• A Wu Jian altar vault from pdpol.
• Damage and accuracy for spells and damage for wands are now shown in the UI. No more looking up info on various pages and bots just to get an idea of how much damage you can do! Well, for the most part. Some spells like Tornado refuse to cooperate.
• Boulder beetles now stop rolling when they can’t move towards their target (that’s you) nor will they start rolling if this is the case. I know it was funny, but beetles rolling in place behind that poor little kobold in front of them was too traumatizing for the kobold.
• Gauntlet monsters now generate awake, and those other than the minotaur can’t pickup loot. Now characters in Gauntlets don’t have weird incentives to explore the map in certain ways to not wake up monsters or to see the loot before monsters do.
• Temporary allies all dismiss when you leave the level. Apparently there were corner cases where they didn’t do that right away!

That wraps it up for this set of trunk updates. Stay tuned for more tournament details, and until next time, happy crawling!

The Trunk Update looks as sick as possible!

That said, we do have a new tournament page populated with test data from online 0.25 games that you can take a look at now:

https://crawl.develz.org/tournament/0.25/

This will give you a chance to become better acquainted with the new rule set, but just as importantly you can help us find bugs and give suggestions for improvements! If you’re a UX expert with experience in the relevant technologies, check out the new-scoring branch in our repository of the tournament source code and consider making a pull request. Everyone can feel free to leave constructive feedback for the tournament pages in comments on this post or in your favorite venue for crawl discussion where you see devs lurking! We’ll continue finishing up the scripts and fixing bugs over the next week. Note that any games you see listed on the page above are just test data, and the database will be reset before start of tournament.

The 0.25 release will be made available for download at some point before June 12, and we’ll make an announcement when that happens. Thanks again for your understanding, and we hope you all are staying safe. Hopefully, in a week’s time, we’ll be ready to begin our quest to obtain a fabled artefact, the Orb of Zot!

Greetings fellow crawlers, it’s time for a quick 0.25 update with the last changes that snuck in before the 0.25 feature freeze. All changes since May 22 have been balance changes and fixes to existing content rather than the addition of significant new features. But before we get to those changes, let’s talk about the release and tournament dates.

The 0.25 release will be Friday, June 5th, with the 0.25 tournament starting at 8pm UTC that same day. We don’t don’t yet have a rules page installed on this server, seeing as how ebering, chequers, advil, and (eventually, I promise!) myself are at work on the new scoring scripts. Until then, check out the writeup ebering made that describes the new rules in detail. We’ll be sure to make a follow-up post once that page is available.

Now for those last 0.25 updates. Please note that these are only the changes since that last Trunk Update. Please see the changelog for the full set of 0.25 changes:

• Transmutations miscasts have been reworked to remove the bad form polymorphs, given the player more contamination instead. Given how often I see you all quaffing lignification before death, I’m surprised more of you didn’t enjoy becoming a tree!
• Allies no longer stay out of the player’s line of fire. The ranged AI was updated previously to have monsters give ranged allies a clear path to hit their foes, but having them do this for the player’s line of fire proved annoying for the most common scenarios. This functionality might return in some way in the future, if we can work out a good method and UI.
• Xom is now stimulated when you worship from a faded altar. Just a little gift to the people crazy enough to use those contraptions. Xom, of course, thinks you’re all hilarious.
• Trove fees have been adjusted to not ask for potions of stabbing and to add possible fees for scrolls of fear and fog.
• Formicids can no longer cast the Swiftness spell. Look, we don’t want you crawling away that easily. Try a shaft instead!
• Paralysis, sleep, and confusion status icons are now shown for allies.
• Many new random artefact description words have been added. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, you name it!
• Tiles have finally been added for Cigotuvi’s Embrace, Hood of the Assassin, and Tins of Tremorstones. What, you didn’t like those fancy TO/DO icons?

The stone_soup-0.25 branch is available in the repository, but hasn’t been installed on servers yet. This will change in coming days, and at that point you can help us test the 0.25 beta. Until then, please report any bugs you notice in trunk (now 0.26 alpha!) on github or mantis. As always, and until next time, happy crawling!

Greetings fellow crawlers, it’s time for another Trunk Update. The 0.25 development cycle is slowly winding to a close, but we have some changes for you to try out, with more to come! Expect a release and tournament in the next month or two, barring any unforeseen delays. As always, we’ll make an announcement once we have a date in mind. This update features a couple larger changes we’ll give some extra detail about, along with some smaller updates described further below.

First up is the new L9 Ice spell Absolute Zero, which replaces the L9 Ice/Conj Glaciate spell. Level 9 spells are tricky to get right since they cost so much XP, yet we want to give players a reason to learn them. We also want these spells to be both distinct from the other L9 spells and relevant to their school; the latter is especially a focus with our spell changes this version. Glaciate fits reasonably into the Ice theme we’ve established, being a “diffuse” AOE spell, but it has too many similarities with Fire Storm yet functions like a worse version of that spell! Where Fire Storm is one of the best ways to kill monsters safely, Glaciate requires close proximity to be effective, and is far less good at blocking monster movement and line-of-fire.

Instead of reworking Glaciate and likely ending up with something similar to Fire Storm, so we went for more distinctiveness with Absolute Zero. This spell kills the closest target, leaving behind an ice block. It chooses randomly among the closest monsters if there’s a tie by distance. This kill is unconditional, so it works on everything from orbs of fire to Cerebov! The positional aspect comes getting the right monsters close enough when multiple monsters are involved, which is usually the case for dangerous fights late in the game. Absolute Zero might feel too cheesy at its max range, which scales with spellpower up to 7. We may reduce the range to a fixed lower value of, say, 5, and have noise scale down with spellpower instead. The latter aspect was in fact part of hellmonk’s original implementation of this spell. Thanks to him for that patch as well as other Discord regulars for discussing the idea.

Next we have a round of item removals; that’s right, the dreaded r-word! On the chopping block are: lamp of fire, sack of spiders, fan of gales, crystal ball of energy, and staff of power. See the links for kate’s brief description of why each item was removed. The crystal ball and staff of power removals won’t surprise many long time crawl players. The former is notoriously useless in most situations and the latter is an annoying swap with an effect duplicated by other equipment. As an aside, we’d like all magical staves to have a good melee effect; see below regarding staves of poison and Olgreb, and look out for similar changes (or removals!) in the future.

Regarding the other removed items, we want the set of evocables be relevant reasonably often, as distinct as possible, and not too numerous. The fan of gales was an escape item you’d use very infrequently, and this game already provides so many escape consumables, spells, abilities, and god powers. The lamp was a strong item, yet its design was underwhelming, as kate says. Its notorious targeter was awful to use in open spaces, and while it was very good in corridors, we already have an evocable that makes clouds and which is good in both open and closed areas. The sack was a very strong item, like all summoning consumables, but the summons it created aren’t memorable, at least not until getting ghost moths at high evocations. We have a bunch of other consumable items that create interesting summons and that everyone has to carry around as things are. The sack’s net effect might show up on some future item or ability, but not attached to summons.

These removals make the remaining evocables feel more distinct, free up a lot of item slots, and reduce the cognitive load in a game with such a large number of items. Speaking of loadstones, if you’ve been using the new tin of tremorstones and found it underwhelming, have no fear. We’ll be taking a look at these and seeing how they can be improved before release. Now, for the rest of the changes:

• Phial of floods now applies a silencing “waterlogged” debuff to all monsters in the flooded area and no longer summons water elementals. So you can still get those cool silencing debuff on monsters, just without so much accompanying summoning cheese.
• D:1 level spawns can no longer generate within LOS distance of the player’s starting position. A surprising nerf to tiny arrival vaults, to be sure, but a welcome one.
• Potions of Brilliance now only provide a stronger universal spell enhancer and remove spell hunger. They no longer provide an Int bonus nor wizardry.
• Staves of poison now do resistable poison damage on hit like other staves instead of just having a chance to poison.
• The Staff of Olgreb now has a chance to deal poison-arrow flavored damage on hit, based on evocations skill. It no longer has an additional chance to cast Venom Bolt on top of casting OTR when evoked. Once again, I await kills from the Gauntlet minotaur wielding this.
• Potions of Might no longer provide a bonus to strength. Don’t worry, the 1d10 bonus damage remains, and that’s the really good part.
• The Dragonskin Cloak now provides rCorr instead of sticky flame resistance. Waiting for the complaints to roll in from the die-hard rSticky fans.
• The -Tele property no longer appears on artefact weapons and jewellery. Sorry, no more cheesing those Zot traps with your -Tele stick!
• Ziggurats now have a level set featuring many player ghosts. Zig ghosts are back! Accompanying them are a variety of undead assistants. This set replaces the “draining” monster set, since that idea is well covered by this new set and the existing ones.
• Frozen Ramparts has its radius of effect reduced to 2 and its damage was slightly reduced. Even with the removal of the monster slow movement debuff, I found this spell to be too strong, doing lots of damage over huge areas in many situations. With these nerfs, Ramparts feels like it has damage more appropriate to a level 3 spell.
• Many arrival vaults have been reworked to allow better player tactics. After all, tactics are important, or so the wiki guides say.
• All Evocable items can no longer be used by the player while confused. Target fuzzing, be gone!
• Trog now hates use of all magical staves and pain weapons. On the upside, Troglodytes won’t get offered these by scrolls of acquirement!
• Nemelex abilities can no longer be used while silenced. This was a loophole from when decks used to be items. Remember those long gone days?
• Call Imp no longer bases the type of imp summoned on spellpower. Don’t worry, this spell is still really good, crimson imps included!
• The WebTiles server has seen a major overhaul and now supports python 3 as well as Tornado 5+. Thanks to advil, aidanh, and chequers for all their work on this development and testing. More WebTiles updates will be rolled out after testing, with work to come from aidanh on making it easier for us to upgrade server chroots. That way we can have a modern development toolchain on every server.

Play-testing trunk is always appreciated, especially as the release gets closer. Please report any bugs you find on mantis or on the github issues page. I myself had great fun ascending a merfolk ice elementalist to experience all the changes to ice magic; looking forward to trying a fire elementalist or venom mage next. Look out for more trunk changes and likely another Trunk Updates before next release. So until next time, Happy Crawling!

Greetings fellow crawlers. The 0.25 development cycle has proved to be a busy one, so we’re back with another Trunk Update. Many of us usual suspects have been hard at work bringing you some new toys to play with. I’m also happy to note that PleasingFungus has recently returned to drop some new crawl creations of his own. How he managed to escape from the dreaded Tower of Lemuel, we’ll never know!

Now, on with the update:

• Frozen Ramparts, a new L3 Ice spell that makes all walls within radius 3 become covered in icicles that release when a monster walks nearby. The icicles do light damage that checks AC but is only partly resistable. Affected monsters additionally receive a “frozen” debuff that slows their movement by 4 aut for a few turns. Available now for any Ice Elementalist in their starting book!
• Tin of Tremorstones, a new multi-use evocable. When used, it creates two radius 2 explosions at range 3 that are triple-affected by AC (like LRD), but the explosions are randomly skewed and may hit the user. Most useful for players with good armour. It has a 33% chance to fall apart with each use. It’s a tin of angry earth elementals waiting to explode!
• New Potion of Stabbing that gives a 50% chance to upgrade weak stabs (e.g.distracted monsters) to strong ones (e.g. sleeping monsters). I wonder what this potion would taste like?
• New unrand: Cigotuvi’s Embrace, a +4 leather armour with rN+, rRot and *Drain that automatically gathers corpses to increase AC. The AC decays slowly over time but decays more quickly as more corpses are added. That’s right, the former Cigotuvi’s Embrace spell has returned, but as an unrand!
• Ledas’ Liquefaction gets a boost: the player is now immune to the effects of liquefied ground made by casting it. With this spell, we can all pretend to be a centaur.
• Scrolls of Magic Mapping now reveal any floor traps on the level. Now you can feel the pain of finding of a double-zot-trapped Hall of Zot:5 right after you enter the level!
• The vorpal weapon ego no longer has distinct adjectives for each weapon class. Now all such weapons are described as ‘vorpal’. Vorpality is the new reality.
• Shields have gotten a reskin. Ordinary shields are renamed to kite shields and large shields have been renamed to tower shields. Sword-and-tower sounds cooler than sword-and-board, in my humble opinion.
• Confusing Touch is now level 3 and checks MR instead of monster HD. Additionally, the Confuse spell has been removed. Now there’s exactly one “confuse exactly one thing” spell and it’s not so overpowered.
• Boots of the Assassin are now called the hood of the Assassin and use the headgear slot. Imagine wearing this while quaffing a potion of stabbing and standing next to a distracted Rupert. Nothing personnel, kid.
• The demon blade Leech gains *Rage/+Rage and loses its AC-3 and EV-3 properties. Bloodbane has been removed, having been merged into Leech.
• Warlock’s Mirror can now reflect piercing ranged weapons. Is there anything this little gadget can’t do?!
• God conducts for harming allies now apply to spells and items that place harmful clouds. But don’t worry, demonspawn, your ignite blood mutation won’t anger Oka.
• The Staff of Olgreb now grants poison immunity to monsters wielding it. The gauntlet minotaur can’t wait to try this out when he next finds Olgreb in his loot pile.
• Potions of Agility have been removed. Among the less interesting of the many buff potions that fill our inventories, agility potions have been replaced with the more specialized potions of stabbing.
• Monsters such as spiders can no longer cling. Rest in peace, a myriad of clinging code bugs.

Some of the above items will continue to receive balance adjustments and tweaks over coming weeks. And we’re not done adding new stuff for 0.25, so stay tuned. Until next time, Happy Crawling!

The winning player was Yermak, with 8149 points. Yermak won 50 games during the tournament, including a streak of 22 wins, and won 18 tier-three banners. In second place was JiyvaJigglypuff, with 7979 points and 36 wins, including a streak of 18 wins and 19 tier-three banners. In third place was cosmonaut, with 7717 points, a streak of 24 wins (!), and 14 tier-three banners. MeekVeins was the only player to win all 24 tier-three tournament banners.

The fastest win by turncount was achieved by JiyvaJigglypuff (10299 turns with a DDFi of Makhleb). p0werm0de had the highest scoring game of the tournament, a 15 rune VSWr of Chei won in 28978 turns for 50M points. Caminho had the lowest level win with an XL 14 MiFi of Okawaru. The first victory of the tournament was claimed by p0werm0de, winning a DDFi of Makhleb in just 43 minutes (52 minutes after tournament start). The first 15 rune win of the tournament was by Mintice, winning a MiBe of The Shining One in 1h 47m (2h 11m after tournament start).

The clan competition was won by Grow Some Ballistomycetes (26661 points), followed by Gozag or Go Home (26172 points), and XTAHUA RAWR (22185 points). There were 143 clans in all with points scored in the tournament.

Here are some basic statistics on the players in this tournament compared with the 0.23 tournament (in parentheses):

• Players: 2880 (0.23: 3100)
• Total player time: 35422 hrs (0.23: 36643 hrs)
• Avg player time:  12.3 hrs (0.23: 11.8 hrs)
• Games played: 63048 (0.23: 65857)
• People who got a rune: 1046 (0.23: 1046)
• 540 winners and 1930 wins (0.23: 531 winners and 1770 wins)
• Winrate: 3.06% (0.23: 2.69%)
• Proportion of players using WebTiles: 95.5% (0.23: 95.4%)

Looks like winrate keeps on slowly creeping up, so we’ll have to bring on more nerfs (mostly kidding). After a relatively slow development cycle, it was neat to see this release come together towards the end as some large changes landed. I had great fun working on the Sif and Fedhas redesigns, myself. The next 0.25 release looks like it will be a big one. I’m particularly excited to see where ebering’s positional attack magic project goes in 0.25. It’s playable now as an experimental branch on CKO! Stay tuned for future posts about this and other things we’ll be adding in the next version.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the 0.24 tournament! Note that we are still interested in a tournament format revamp, and will hopefully make that more of a priority for 0.25 after we nail down some of the CAO score page issues. We’ll put up a wiki page and everything, I swear! But if Xom just replaces it with a recipe for rock worm and boulder beetle soup, well that’s on Xom! Until next time, fellow Ziggurat Zaggers, happy crawling!

The 0.24 release will (tentatively) happen on Wednesday 23 October, and that the 0.24 tournament will (definitely) happen on 20:00 UTC Friday 25 October through 20:00 UTC Sunday 10 November. We’ll be getting a tournament page up and running very soon as this tournament date is only a week away! Watch out for a future post with the new tournament URL.

We’ve been in the feature freeze since 9 October, and the 0.24 stable branch is already available, soon to be hosted on servers. We’ll be making balance tweaks and bugfixes until release next Wednesday. Online players, please help us test the 0.24 beta by playing the 0.24 branch when that’s available or trunk until then.

Finally, let’s talk about a red dragon THAT TALKS LIKE THIS. As many of you know, the CXC server in France recently went offline after a recent server issue. Medar and Zkyp had graciously hosted CXC for many years, but no longer have time to do so. Thankfully, an admin who goes by Namanix has stepped up to host a new server using the current CXC domain. Namanix tells me that the replacement server is ready and the domain transfer should be complete by 8PM CET on 18 October. All data for logins, current and past games, morgues, ttyrecs, etc should eventually be transferred over to the new server, and games will be played at the same CXC Webtiles URL and SSH host as before. Once again, thanks to Medar and Zkyp for hosting CXC all those years, and thanks to Namanix for taking over the (dragon) reins.

See you all around the lava pit, tossing your blood potions into the fire!

• Vampiric attacks by the player against allies created from Sticks to Snakes and the Ratskin Cloak no longer restore HP or give vampires satiation.
• Damage from Ozocubu’s Refrigeration has been increased to the correct amount.
• Placement for the uniques Aizul, Bai Suzhen, Donald, Jorgrun, and Mara has been fixed so they can place throughout their intended level ranges.
• The chance of Boris to respawn has been lowered to match previous rates.
• Yellow draconians now correctly receive their rCorr mutation at XL 7.
• 45 bugfixes, adjustments, and cleanups in total.

You may have noticed during the tournament that certain uniques were a bit hard to find. Sif Muna intones: ”And with gammafunk’s fateful decision to wrap unique placement statements to an aesthetically pleasing 80 character limit, thus triggering a hitherto unknown vault definition bug, the fates of countless adventurers were altered forever…” Oops! We fixed that, so the uniques listed above should show up more often now. You may also have noticed that old Boris had a bit more life in him than he used to. Due to changing his method of placement to better support the new seeded play mode, Boris was respawning roughly twice as often as he did in previous versions. Congrats to the player Volrath on setting a new record for the number of Boris kills in one game, 10 times! This has also been fixed, so Boris should return to haunt you about as often as he did in 0.22.

Aside from the major fixes listed above, there are scores of smaller bug fixes, vault tweaks, description updates, and the like, so be sure to upgrade!

Happy Crawling!

The winning player was Yermak, with 8721 points. Yermak won 35 games during the tournament, including the longest streak at 22 games, and won 21 tier-three banners. In second place was MrMan, with 8092 points and 31 wins, including the second-longest streak for 20 wins and 17 tier-three banners. In third place was JiyvaJigglypuff, with 6631 points and 36 wins and 16 tier-three banners. The players ethniccake and watermold were the only ones to win all 24 tier-three tournament banners.

The fastest win by turncount was achieved by Yermak (13586 turns with a DDFi of Makhleb). Yermak also had the highest scoring game of the tournament, a 15 rune GnEE of Chei won in 19994 turns for 71M points. p0werm0de had the fastest realtime win in 25 minutes with a DDFi of Uskayaw, and Yermak had the lowest level win with an XL 15 FeEn of Ashenzari. The first victory of the tournament was claimed by JiyvaJigglypuff, winning a MiFi of Makhleb in just 33 minutes (38 minutes after tournament start). The first 15 rune win of the tournament was by YTcomUltraviolent4, winning a GrGl of The Shining One in 2h 29m (2h 31m after tournament start).

The clan competition was won by Tab and Dab (26578 points), followed by Gozag or Go Home (22637 points), and Big Dispersal (19276 points). There were 126 clans in all with points scored in the tournament.

Here are some basic statistics on the players in this tournament compared with the 0.22 Summer and 0.21 Winter tournaments (in parentheses):

• Players: 3440 (0.22: 3130, 0.21: 3153)
• Total player time: 38876 hrs (0.22: 41988 hrs, 0.21: 41283)
• Avg player time:  11.3 hrs (0.22: 13.41 hrs, 0.21: 13.09)
• Proportion of players using WebTiles: 95.88% (0.22: 95.39%, 0.21: 94.48%)

It’s nice to see that this tournament had the most players of any we’ve run so far. It looks like the winrate decreased from the high of 2.82% in version 0.22 down to 2.46%, which is similar to version 0.21. We buff players by locking up ghosts, then we nerf players by giving them new traps and Klown pies to the face. Yet you all keep coming back for more! It must be the shiny loot…

We had a lot of fun bringing the 0.23 release together, with multiple devs individually putting in hundreds of commits. We also had lots of great outside contributions ranging from vaults to artwork to bugfixes, including some important feature implementations. Thanks to all those taking the time to contribute to the project! A 0.23.1 bugfix release is imminent, so be on the lookout and be sure to update if you’re playing offline.

In the meantime, we on the Dev Team are excited to start work on the next version. Thanks again, everyone, and happy crawling!

The 0.23 branch is available and already installed on CKO, CUE, CXC, and LLD. For other servers, you’ll see the 0.23 game links appear on the server lobby at some point before the tournament starts. Once 0.23 is available on your server, you can follow the instructions on the tournament page to define/join clans via your 0.23 RC file. Clans can be formed and changed until one week into the tournament on 20:00 UTC Friday 15 February. See the Clans section of the tournament page for details.

There are currently no rule changes relative to the 0.22 tournament, but check the tournament page for any final rule changes before the tournament begins. Once the tournament has started, the leaderboard will display the current standings. You may see the leaderboard, player, and clan pages populated with test data from 0.23 games. Don’t worry, the test pages and data will be wiped before the tournament begins. If you’re looking for people to play with, you can find them in the Tavern, reddit, or our IRC channel ##crawl on Freenode.

As you may have noticed, we’re now hosting the tournament on crawl.develz.org, also known as CDO. Special thanks to Napkin for making CDO available to run the tournament scripts and database! Due to this change, there may be some issues with scoring updates early on this tournament. So please bear with us; we’ll try minimize any interruptions as best we can. Also many thanks to |amethyst for making dobrazupa.org available for every tournament from versions 0.12 to 0.22!

See you all on Lair:3, making away with the Minotaur’s loot!

Hello fellow Klowns and Krawlers, it’s time for another Trunk Update. First let me mention that the tentative date for the 0.23 Release Tournament is February 8th 2019 at 8pm UTC. We’ll make another post if that changes and also when we have a tournament page available.

Now, on to the update:

• WebTiles display artifacts reported by many of you have been fixed. The issue was a subtle message ordering bug in our client that became relevant due to recent Chrome changes. Thanks for tracking that down, advil!
• A few Nemelex Xobeh changes:
• The Deal Four Ability no longer clears your deck, but now has a piety cost.
• The Deck of Destruction now has a card limit of 26 instead of 13, and Nemelex gifts Destruction cards more frequently relative to the others.
• New icons for Nemelex’s abilities, courtesy of ontoclasm!
• Killer Klowns have been reworked:
•  They now have a Throw Klown Pie LOS-range ability that deals 3d20 damage and afflicts the player with a temporary debuff.
• The klown pie debuffs are: -Potions, Silence, Vertigo, Stat Drain, rF-, or (less common) polymorph into bat, pig, or wisp form. Better bring those cancellation and resist potions (if you can still quaff them, LOL)!
• Klowns now have highly enchanted and branded clubs instead of af_klown melee, and no longer have fast regen.
• Klowns are a bit more common in the Hall of Zot on Zot:5.
• Translucent doors have been introduced. You can see through these even when they’re closed! Currently used in Elf and some runed door vaults, but you’ll see more of these in the future. Tiles courtesy of the faerie known as minmay.
• Net traps have been Zotified. They now try to net the player whenever anything in LOS steps on one.
• All mechanical traps except net traps have been removed from Tomb and the Hall of Zot on Zot:5. Many such traps have been removed from certain Ossuary vaults as well.
• A new ghost vault featuring moths of wrath and wrathful warriors that have nice Trog weapon gifts.
• New axe and polearm statue tiles for Baileys. They commemorate the removal of mostly unreachable decorative Bailey weapons. I say ‘mostly’ because of course Yermak figured out a way to reach them!
• Unspeakable pet dragon cruelty in an Elf vault has been rectified. The dragons now have a clear runed door, allowing their owners access for feeding and play time.
• Dispersal traps have a new tile, courtesy of CanOfWorms.
• You can no longer win by tripping up stairs with the Orb while confused. Nice try, cheaters, but CBRO admin johnstein caught you red-handed!

Thanks for tuning in! Feature freeze will likely happen shortly before the end of the month, so we may have another trunk update before the release.

The trunk update flogs you with a +12 club of flaming!

crawl.kelbi.org

This server supports crawl 0.21, 0.22, and trunk for both WebTiles and console over SSH with daily trunk updates.

Important Note: The CKO hasn’t yet been added to the CAO scoring pages. Don’t worry, games you play now will retroactively show up on the scoring pages after we’ve added CKO to the CAO database. CKO has been added to the Sequell bot, so game history commands like !lg and !lm already work for CKO. Update: CKO is now in the CAO scoring pages!

This new server has come online at a good time, since ZiBuDo has taken CJR (crawl.jorgrun.rocks) offline. We recommend that any current CJR users register on the new CKO server. Sorry, we can’t transfer any current saved games you have on CJR over to another server.

Don’t worry about scoring data and morgue files of your past CJR games, as we have those backed up to another long-term location. Your old CJR games will continue to be recorded in Sequell and on the CAO pages. If you need to access your CJR RC files, for now you can find them here, but you’ll need to copy them soon. The server will go completely offline in the next couple of days.

Thanks so much to ZiBuDo for hosting CJR these last few years! Jorgrun will continue to carry the dwarven_lang banner through the great hall of memes!

• Support for distributing player ghosts files with releases. Now local games will have a starting set of ghosts available for ghost vaults.
• New tiles for Azrael, shock serpents, dream sheep, mana vipers, and the Robe of Vines.
• An additional set of Gnoll player doll tiles (male and female).
• Fix WebTiles menus for older versions of Firefox.
• 81 bug fixes, adjustments, and cleanups in total.

The biggest game-play change in this release is the incorporation of ghost data taken from 0.22 games played on the CAO and CBRO servers for use in offline games. 0.22 introduced “permastore” bones files so that ghost vaults always have an available ghost definition to draw from. If a level has no recently made ghost in the normal bones file, the permastore file provides more long-term data that can be repeatedly drawn upon. The problem was that offline games previously had no initial ghost data, forcing ghost vaults to fall back on making clone ghosts of the player. Thanks to work by advil, crawl can look for pre-existing permastore bones files we ship in the game data, copying these over to use as a player’s starting permastore. advil has curated this ghost data to remove excessive numbers of ghosts from the most popular combos and to filter out any offensive usernames. In the future, we’ll be able to make this release ghost data using more servers and will be improving the way the ghost data is handled and stored in general. If you have previously installed 0.22.0, we recommend that you remove any files named `*.store.*` from the bones subdirectory of your saves folder, in order to get the full effect of this change.

As usual, there are scores of smaller bug fixes, vault tweaks, description updates, and the like, so be sure to upgrade! In the bullet list above, I’ve linked a few new tiles we received for trunk that I’ve also added to 0.22.1. Also, a certain worm tells me that we may have a couple new splash screens coming our way. One will depict the exploits of a Deep Dwarf Artificer and the other the antics of uniques like Asterion and Louise (PlogChamp)! No ETA on these new splash images, but look for them to arrive in trunk when they’re ready.

Finally, we’ve also made a 0.21.2 bug fix release. Many of the bug fixes here are ones that have already been made in 0.22, but see the 0.21 changelog for a more detailed summary. The source packages as well as binary packages for Windows and OS X can be found in the 0.21 release folder. The Linux 0.21 component of the debian repository has also been updated. To install the Linux packages, just follow the Linux instructions on the download page, replacing 0.22 by 0.21 in the instructions.

Happy Crawling!

The winning player was Yermak, with 8200 points. Yermak won 36 games during the tournament, including the longest streak at 16 games, and won 22 tier-three banners. In second place was ManMan, with 7686 points and 31 wins, including the second-longest streak for 14 wins and 15 tier-three banners. In third place was justnoob, with 6559 points and 30 wins and 16 tier-three banners. igoo was the only player to win all 24 tier-three tournament banners.

The fastest win by turncount was achieved by Yermak (10243 turns with a DDFi of Makhleb). Yermak also had the highest scoring game of the tournament, a 15 rune GnTm of Chei won in 25904 turns for 55M points. p0werm0de had the fastest realtime win at 23m 13s with a DDFi of Makhleb, and Yermak had the lowest level win with an XL 15 SpEn of Ashenzari. The first victory of the tournament was claimed by Dynast, playing a MiFi of Makhleb, just 41 minutes after tournament start. The first 15 rune win of the tournament was by ManMan, playing a GrFi of The Shining One, won in 1 hour and 19 minutes (at 2 hours and 21 minutes after tournament start).

The clan competition was won by ManMan’s clan (27039 points), followed by Dowan’s clan (25073 points), and Ge0ff’s clan (21144 points). There were 141 clans in all with points scored in the tournament.

Here are some basic statistics on the players in this tournament compared with the 0.21 Winter and 0.20 Summer tournaments (in parentheses):

• Players: 3130 (0.21: 3153, 0.20: 2997)
• Total player time: 41988 hrs (0.21: 41283 hrs, 0.20: 39530)
• Avg player time:  13.41 hrs (0.21: 13.09 hrs, 0.20: 13.19)
• Proportion of players using webtiles: 95.39% (0.21: 94.48%, 0.20: 94.15%)

A graph made by johnstein shows how various statistics progressed over the course of the tournament. Additional graphs show comparisons of these stats to the 0.21 and 0.20 tournaments.

We hope you all enjoyed playing in the tournament! We had a lot of fun bringing the 0.22 release together, and have 0.22.1 and 0.21.2 point releases planned. We also hope to rework the tournament format so that players won’t be required to put in so many hours in order to be competitive. Details on this aren’t finalized, but of course we’ll communicate those changes before the next tournament. In the meantime, we on the Dev Team are excited to start work on the next version. Thanks again, everyone, and happy crawling!

DCSS 0.22 features ghosts being sealed in thematic vaults, a new spell library for managing spells, a major UI rework that paves the way for future UI improvements, and many updates and general improvements. For a full list of significant changes, please see the changelog.

Download DCSS 0.22 here, or play it online on one of many servers across the world! Packages for Windows, OS X, and Linux are all available now.

The tournament starts today at 20:00 UTC, with all online 0.22 games counting towards your score. See the tournament website for more details, including how to set up or join a clan.

Many thanks to all those who have contributed to Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. We hope you enjoy playing DCSS 0.22!

The 0.22 branch won’t be available on official servers for two or three weeks, so you can’t define your clans just yet. You’ll see the 0.22 game links appear on your server’s lobby at some point a week or two before the tournament starts. At that point, you can follow the instructions on the tournament page to define/join clans by editing your 0.22 RC file. Clans can be formed and changed until one week into the tournament on 20:00 UTC Friday 17 August. See the Clans section of the tournament page for details.

There are currently no rule changes relative to the 0.21 tournament, but check the tournament page for any final rule changes before the tournament begins. Once the tournament has started, the leaderboard will display the current standings. At some point before Aug 10th, you may see the leaderboard, player, and clan pages populated with test data from trunk games. Don’t worry, the test pages and data will be wiped before the tournament begins.

If you’re looking for people to play with, you can find them in the Tavern, reddit, or our IRC channel ##crawl on Freenode.

See you all on D:3, opening a runed door to 5 ghosts!

Dungeon spelunkers, I’m back from Dis:7 with another Trunk Update. It’s looking like the 0.22 Release and Tournament will be during mid August. We’ll have a specific date and a preliminary tournament page in a future post, so stay tuned. Also, please try out trunk on your favorite server or play a downloadable trunk build in order to help us find bugs and play-test recent changes.

Let’s first talk about a couple major changes this release, starting with player ghost vaults. Player ghosts are a beloved yet infamous community feature. It’s amusing to run into a friend’s ghost, but sometimes you’re just not in the mood to fight another one of xXx420BlazeItxXx’s unkillable MiBe ghosts, you know? To help make fighting ghost monsters more of a fun risk/reward decision rather than a constant chore, all player ghosts have been locked up behind special loot vaults:

• Ghosts are always sealed in vaults that have runed doors or transporters.
• The ghost is always visible from outside the vault through clear walls. You can x-v the ghost beforehand to see what you’ll be going up against.
• Each level from Dungeon:3 onward has a fixed chance of placing a ghost vault in most connected branches. This chance is only 10% for each level, and you’ll only ever get one ghost vault per level. But beware that some vaults place multiple ghosts; one vault can even place up to 5 of them!
• Ghosts can now follow you through stairs. You knew we couldn’t resist buffing ghosts, right? Sorry, but if you open that runed door, the old ghost stair dance routine won’t save you any more.
• Dozens of new ghost vaults with a variety of themes. All contain loot, and many place other monsters with extra loot. We have a large and growing list of these made by devs and contributors alike. Here’s a sample of the more thematic ones:
• Gozag Ghost: A Gozag-themed vault that places heaps of gold, possibly some shops or potions, and some nasty monsters to help the ghost prevent anyone from making a heist.
• Hydra Chop: A vault showing what happens when you fight hydra with edged weapons. You’ll find a ghost and a nice, non-flaming edged weapon next to some hydra with more heads than usual. Kill the ghost and any 11(or 16)-headed hydra, and you might get that treasure the player was after.
• Orc Armoury: A vault that lets you try to raid an orc armory that’s filled with well-armed and determined orcs. The player ghost you’ll find inside apparently didn’t employ a good strategy. Beware, this vault is the top killer in trunk right now!
• Fury of Okawaru: A vault showing what happens when you abandon Oka but aren’t good enough to handle the fury of Okawaru’s wrath. Oka’s warrior monsters and a player ghost will do their utmost to keep you away from that pile of treasure.
• Potion Laboratory: A vault filled with eldritch and shapeshifting horrors made from a now-ghostly player’s failed experiments with potions. You’ll find some nice potions and equipment, but the mutagenic stuff inside might leave you a little…changed.
• Labyrinth Escape: A vault depicting a scene where a player tried to loot a labyrinth and escaped with the minotaur close behind. Sadly they ran right back into a bunch of monsters they juked to get into the lab in the first place. Now you get to fight the player’s ghost, those monsters, and the minotaur if you want any of that loot.

There are lots more ghost vaults for you to die to that I haven’t described here, and we’ll be adding more in coming weeks. We’ll also be tweaking the vault balance and possibly changing the way ghost stores are seeded for offline players.

Next up is the new spell library interface, a nice UI feature that also has some game-play ramifications. Tired of lugging around spell books or returning to a stash just to memorize a spell? Well, we’ve got some good news for you:

• Players have a global spell library. Spells from books are automatically added to the library when you pick up the book. The book is destroyed after you pick it up. Don’t worry, you got what you needed from it!
• Library spells can be memorized from anywhere through the ‘M’ screen. You can also use search filters on this screen, since those spell lists can get pretty long.
• Vehumet won’t offer you a spell you already have in your library. Seems obvious, but it’s nice when you consider how Veh was previously happy to waste those precious gifts on spells you already had lying around in a book somewhere.
• Trog no longer has a Burn Spellbook ability. It’s not really viable to make spellbooks as items for one god with this UI and….you know what, I’m going to drop a book bomb here….Trog is strong enough to take a nerf!
• Morgue and char dump files now show your entire spell library. Now you don’t have to guess what spells you had available when looking at those.

The spell library is part of a larger set of UI improvements that we’ve been rolling out over recent releases; there’s also an update for WebTiles chat described below. We have a revamp of the UI internals as well as some visual updates planned to roll out partly in this release and partly in 0.23. The UI revamp is mostly the work of our newest dev and UI guru, aidanholm. There’s a playable branch you can try out on CBRO if you’d like to help find any bugs.

Now let’s talk about the rest of the changes large and small that we’ve been hoarding like a pile of gozag gold:

• Dithmenos revamp:
• The Shadow Step ability no longer requires the target monster to be ‘still’ and has an HP cost of 8% max HP. Now you don’t have to be a stabber to appreciate shadow steppin’, but you do have to watch that HP.
• The anti-fire conduct is no more. Dith now allows use of fire-themed spells, items, and abilities. We didn’t enjoy that arbitrary fire restriction, and besides, Dith understands that your fires will go out eventually.
• Dithmenos is now an evil god, hence is hated by the good gods and holy monsters.
• New Amulet: the Amulet of the Acrobat, which boosts the wearer’s EV by 15 for non-attacking movement and rest actions. It lets you tumble and roll your way to a successful retreat.
• The Mace of Variability is reworked to sometimes create arcs of chaos that harm nearby monsters, but not the wielder. The enchantment is now a fixed +7. I could just say “blame ebering” here, but sadly I’m also responsible. Xom is also responsible, of course.
• Harpoon Shot, a range 6 ability for swamp worms and iron giants that fires a shot which pulls the player adjacent. If something like deep water or lava blocks your path to the monster, we throw in free collision damage! And for the love of Xom do not shout any Mortal Kombat references when you see monsters using this!
• The Abyss pulls you a level deeper sometimes upon level shift on Abyss:1-4. The chance increases based on XL and decreases based on current depth. Don’t worry, low XL characters have a quite small chance of this happening. If you want to see some numbers, check out this commit.
• Borgnjor’s Vile Clutch constriction damage is reduced by 25% and the spell is no longer in the Necromancer starting book (the Book of Necromancy). The spell’s damage was a bit high in 0.21, since I went for a higher value to avoid people passing up a weird new spell in two formerly unrelated schools. For the Ne book it was a really general damage spell in a book that already has Animate Dead spell. Monsters have terrible levels zombie resistance! We like the idea that Necromancers don’t have things quite so straightforward early on, so you’ll have to find BVC on your own.
• Lee’s Rapid Deconstruction can no longer destroy walls. If there’s three things crawl devs don’t like, it’s infinite digging, damage spells with too many interactions, and easily breaking level layouts. There are more than three things crawl devs don’t like, but this spell had all of those! It’s still a pretty complex spell, and now it’s more fun to use for actually killing monsters. Plus there’s always Shatter if you need to get that spell-based dungeon destruction going on.
• Ozocubu’s Armour now expires immediately upon movement. You have to position more carefully if you want to use this spell now, and no more encouragement to slow-walk around with it always up.
• All fog types spread the same way from Scrolls of Fog. Hopefully that fog scroll will save you now…
• Minotaur monsters have increased health, defenses, and HD. They also spawn with armour and either tomahawks or javelins. Additionally Labs have slightly reduced loot to make the risk vs reward decision a little less obvious. You’ll probably keep going in nearly every lab because you players make poor decisions. I know, I’ve watched the ttyrecs!
• Ilsuiw spawns on Shoals:2-4 with chances similar to other branch-specific uniques instead of nearly always spawning on Shoals:4. We all got tired of fighting Ilsuiw every. single. time. on Shoals:4, didn’t we?
• The Hall of the Hellbinder WizLab has fewer higher-tier demons. Look, i’ll be honest: I put too many demons in there. I blame the demons for encouraging me. Hopefully you don’t get so much damnation and torment now.
• The MP-powered wand mutation allows use of wands at 0 MP and is now considered a good mutation.
• Makhleb’s Major Destruction has its range increased to 7 and Minor Destruction has its range reduced to 5. Hopefully Major Destruction gets a bit more love now. And don’t worry, Minor Destruction is still really good.
• Yredelemnul’s Enslave Soul ability is now smite-targeted. Smite targeted soul enslavement? Sign me up.
• Engulf status from Water Elementals now blocks god abilities but no longer slows movement.
• The Barb status from manticore barbs now counts any non-movement actions towards removing the status.
• Sojobo, air elementals, ball lightnings, and twisters have resistance to Tornado instead of resistance to all wind attacks. Now you can airstrike Sojobo, air elementals, and your ball lightnings (boom). You could airstrike a twister, but if you ever have one in range of airstrike, you probably messed up real good. Oh, and it has over 9000 HP, so good luck.
• Shock serpent retaliation now properly checks rElec. Oops! Our mistake, tee hee!
• Passwall now has better range scaling, a lower max spellpower, and a targeter to show its range.
• Wands of digging now have a targeter showing the dig range.
• The exploration horizon In the Tiles minimap now has a distinct color. This is cool: you can more easily see where you haven’t explored by a glance at the minimap.
• WebTiles chat improvements:
• The player can use `/mute’ and `/unmute’ commands on chatters. Be silent, trolls!
• The `/mutelist’ command shows the current mute list.
• The chat window has a minimize button that removes message notification.
• The `/hide’ and `/hide forever` commands minimize/remove the chat window.

There have been lots of smaller bugfixes and tweaks that don’t get a changelog entry or a mention here, and there will undoubtedly be more significant changes in the next month. You can check out the commit list to see the most recent updates, and please file a bug report if you see any bugs in your trunk games.

Until next time, fellow crawlers, Dithmenos kindly asks you to Spread the eternal night!

• Dith shadow mimic of launcher attacks no longer copies the enchant and ego of the launcher.
• Monsters lose constriction by Borgnjor’s Vile Clutch when they are moved by any means.
• Formicids can now manually cancel Dig status, allowing them to use Wu Jian’s Wall Jump ability after digging.
• Wu Jian’s Wall Jump ability now works under silence.
• New splash screen art by froggy.
• Numlock on Windows systems no longer causes unpredictable repeating movement.
• Alt-F4 no longer causes freezing in Tiles on Windows systems.
• Resizing the local Tiles window during prompts no longer causes crashes.
• SDL 2 contrib updated to 2.0.7, which fixes compilation under Msys2.

Dith shadow mimics of launcher attacks were giving you all free enchantment and ego damage. That’s simply unfair to those poor dungeon monsters, so we had to fix it! The numlock key causing repeating movement was reported by users far and wide, so many thanks to advil for tracking down and fixing that rather difficult bug. Hopefully you enjoy the new splash art by South Korean artist froggy, whose inspirational depiction of Boris and Natasha is a personal favorite.

Happy Crawling!

Despite a longer release cycle and later tournament start date, participation this tournament was high and competition among players and clans continued to be fierce. Read on for a chronicle of the many and amazing achievements players managed in this competition.

Individual Winners

The champion this year is Yermak with 7751 tournament points, 36 wins, and a 51% win-rate. Yermak is widely known for his tournament victories, having won the 0.19 and 0.18 tournaments, and was solidly in first place nearly the entire time. In typical Yermak style, he pulled off the lowest turncount victory in 12323 turns and had the highest scoring victory, a 15-rune win in 22898 turns. He additionally had an 11 win streak (ended when his Demonspawn Abyssal Knight failed to pillar dance a kobold with a short sword on D:1) held 11 combo high scores, and won 21 out of 23 possible Tier 3 banners! In other categories, Yermak had the 3rd 15-rune win of the tournament, a GrFi won 3 and a half hours in, and was the 3rd player to kill all 76 uniques. An unstoppable force this time, Yermak put in over 7 and a half days of play-time with 71 games played, averaging 10 hours 42 minutes per day!

The silver medalist is Manman with 6862 points, 22 wins, and a 39% win-rate. Manman is the previous 0.20 tournament champion and won a closely fought battle for 2nd place this time around. He was the first player to get a 15-rune victory a mere 2 hours and 20 minutes in and most notably was tied with 3rd-place finisher mibe for the longest streak of the tournament. Their 20-win streaks broke the 18-win tournament streak record set by theglow all the way back in the 0.11 tournament of November 2012! Manman’s streak was ended by a lowly rat on D:1 as his Human Wizard tried to shout from the arrival vault and lure monsters over one at a time. The monsters refused to cooperate, as monsters often do. As mentioned, the battle for 2nd place with mibe was pitched, and Manman didn’t take the lead until the final days of the tournament, with the 200 points from that first 15-rune victory proving decisive. In the non-point-awarding categories, Manman’s GrFi had the second-highest AC+EV of the tournament with 82/46 AC/EV, aided by the Cloak of Starlight, the Ring of Robustness, and a +6 protection ring.

Third place goes to mibe with 6785 points, 25 wins, and a 28% win-rate. mibe has played in many previous tournaments, including an 8th place finish in the 0.20 tournament. This time his aims were to captain the winning clan, which he did, and to break the tournament streak record with a 20 game or higher streak, which he also did! His 20 streak was the first ever to break theglow’s record, with the streak ending with the death of his Formicid Wizard to a sixfirhy summoned by an obsidian statue in a Volcano. Dying to a stationary monster on a record-breaking streak is almost unforgivable, but you helped the Dev Team find bugs in 0.21, so we forgive you, mibe. mibe also made a strong attempt for last win of the tournament, playing what we must assume is his signature combo of MiBe, getting the third-to-last win in one hour 17 minutes, just 5 minutes before the end.

Clan Winners

The first place clan was Knee Deep In The Bread, with mibe (captain, #3), Charly (#6), hellmonk (playing as dying5ever, #7), Sharkman1231 (#20), RBrandon, and Surr, scoring 22873 points and 83 wins. This clan had 3 top 10 players, 22 high scores (3rd most among clans), and maintained a solid lead from early into the tournament. They had a lock on streak points with both mibe’s aforementioned 20-win streak as well as hellmonk’s 15-win streak. Hellmonk’s streak was 3rd longest, is still ongoing, and had a different skill title for every win! Finally hellmonk had the 3rd-lowest XL win of the tournament, a SpAE won at XL 18. Clan member Charly contributed a 7-win streak, had the third-fastest turncount win, a DDCK of Makhleb won in 15497 turns, and was the second player with a 15-rune victory just 3 hours in.

Coming in at second place was Gozag or Go Home, with Ge0ff (captain), Beargit (#4), Faldahar, Chobophobe, ranchugoldfish, and ToastedZergling, scoring 21509 points and 80 wins, and had 30 combo high scores, the most of any clan. This clan continued from the previous tournament, where it took 3rd place, with 4 of its 6 players returning. Beargit snagged the final win of the tournament for 100 points with a speedy 56 minute MiBe that ascended only 35 seconds before the end of the tournament! Beargit also got a 12-win streak (ended when his Merfolk Abyssal Knight took a Crystal Spear from an Ogre Mage in Vaults) and ranchugoldfish contributed a 9-win streak.

Third place is awarded to Make Aus Servers pls, with Demise (captain), Manman (#2), Ultraviolent4 (#5), gorglomux (#12), Alcopop, and Doesnt scoring 19584 points and 70 wins. The Australian CPO server owner and admin Alex was away on extended travel at the start of tournament, but was able to set up 0.21 on that server by the second day, so many thanks to him for doing this. The initial lack of CPO meant some loss of points at the start of tournament for this clan, but they made a strong showing in the end. Ultraviolent4 had the second-fastest turncount win, a GnNe won in 14682 turns, as well as a 13-win streak (ended when his Naga Berserker got outdone by a D:1 Kobold armed with a mere short sword). gorglomux had the fastest real-time win of the tournament, a Deep Dwarf Fighter won in about 37 minutes (about 4 minutes off WR), and was the second tournament player to finish a Ziggurat.

Other Notables

tidbits had the 2nd-highest scoring win of the tournament, a 15-rune GnAE won in only 23820 turns. p0werm0de followed close behind in 3rd place with a 15-rune VSNe won in 25781 turns. p0werm0de also had the 2nd and 3rd fastest wins of the tournaments, both Deep Dwarf Fighters, with his best won in 40 minutes. Additionally p0werm0de had the game with the 2nd-lowest XL for fetching a rune that wasn’t Abyssal or Slimy with an XL 14 OpTm of Jiyva that nabbed the Decaying Rune and later ascended. First place in that category was Sukerboh, who’s XL 12 SpEn picked up the Serpentine Rune with 1 HP and lived only 26 turns before being taken down by a Naga Sharpshooter. Third place in this category was SriBri whose XL 14 MiBe picked up the Barnacled Rune only to be sniped by a Satyr less than 500 turns later. Finally, p0werm0de was the first player to complete all 27 levels of a Ziggurat just 3 hours into the tournament, followed by gorglomux and Anonymous1 the next day.

tself55 had the first win of the tournament, a MiBe won just 1 hour, 24 minutes in, followed less than 4 minutes later by Likado‘s DDFi and a minute after that by NormalPerson7‘s MiBe. For combo high scores, Monsterracer had the most with 15 (only one of which was a victory!), followed by stickyfingers and Rubinko, who both had twelve. Rubinko was also the second player to kill all 76 unique monsters, followed by Yermak. Lasty was the first to achieving this milestone 7 days into the tournament. Finally, inmateoo had the game with highest AC+EV of the tournament, a GrFi with 82/49 AC, aided by +12 crystal plate armour, the ring of Phasing, and even a molten scales mutation.

The most commonly achieved banner was once again The Shining One’s Vow of Courage I, to kill Sigmund before entering the Depths, earned by a whopping 1747 players! The most rarely achieved banner was Beogh’s Heretic III, earned by no one (it was earned by two players in the previous 0.20 tournament).

The most dangerous ghost was isock, who claimed the lives of 52 players, easily eclipsing slep in 2nd place with 28 kills. isock was also competitive in the “most deaths to uniques” category. Both isock and p0werm0de died to 23 distinct uniques, behind komo4ek, who managed to die to 26.

The most lethal monster in this tournament was again the unstoppable gnoll, ending the hopes and dreams of 4104 characters and taking over 5% of all kills. The most lethal unique was again Sigmund, reaping 1640 characters with a kill ratio of 15.6%.

Statistics and Final Thoughts

Over 3,100 players participated this year! See here for a comparison of this tournament to the 0.20 summer tournament, here for a comparison to the previous winter tournament for 0.19, and here for an album of all past tournament stats images made by johnstein. The win-rate increased to 2.41% from 2.3% last year, which is in-line with the typical win-rate increases we tend to see every release as the player-base gets better at the game. We were a bit worried that tournament participation would be down due to the far later start time, but participation was instead very strong. Over 16 days, you all played nearly 78,000 games, collected over 17,700 runes, won 1,877 games and racked up 4 years, 261 days of total play-time!

We on the Dev Team had fun making all the new content and quality-of-life improvements in 0.21, and I personally have enjoyed making the most commits I’ve done in a release so far. Additionally we’ve had some major features merged after collaboration between Dev Team members and outside contributors. We’ve also had lots of good feedback and bug reports from play-testers. Once again, thanks to everyone participating in the tournament! We hope to post a bugfix 0.21.1 release soon that contains all the fixes we made after the release.

Happy crawling!

Download DCSS 0.21 here, or play it online on one of many servers across the world! Packages for Windows and Linux are all available now. Packages for OS X will be available soon, and we’ll upload this post and the download page when they’re ready. Update: OS X packages are now on the download page.

The release tournament has already started today at 20:00 UTC, with all online 0.21 games counting towards your score. See the tournament website for more details, including how to set up or join a clan.

0.21′s highlights include:

• Characters: Gnolls have been added, a new species that always trains all skills at once, without any of the usual item/spell restrictions, and can’t select specific skills to train. To help overcome this limitation, Gnolls have very high apts (+6 in magic schools, +9 invocations, and +8 for the other schools) as well as higher stats. They can also sense the location of nearby items. Additionally, Ogres now have better aptitudes in shortblades, longblades, and axes.
• Gods: Wu Jian Council has been added, a new god that grants martial attacks from movement actions, including a powerful lunge attack, a cleave-like whirlwind attack, and a multi-hitting wall-jump attack that lets you leap off walls. Wu also has two powerful active abilities that cost piety. The first is a Serpent’s Lash ability granting two free movement actions that allows any resulting martial attacks to never miss. The second is Heavenly Storm, which creates opaque clouds and increases your prowess as you continue to use martial attacks. Finally, Zin now grants 100% mutation immunity at 6* piety, allowing you to use potions of mutation solely to cure mutations at this piety level.
• Spell: A new spell has been added: Borgnjor’s Vile Clutch, a level five Necromancy/Earth spell that calls forth undead hands from the earth over a smite-targeted area to constrict hostile monsters. It appears in the Necromancer starting book, the book of Unlife, and the book of Dreams.
• Items: Permanent food has been simplified, and now rations are the only type of food, replacing bread and meat rations, fruit, and royal jelly. Food item generation and the herbivore/carnivore mutations have been balanced to keep overall nutrition about the same. Additionally, wands of the same type merge charges upon pickup, and there’s no cap on wand charges. Wands also identify their charges upon pickup and are destroyed when the last charge is used.
• Dungeon: Items in doorways no longer prevent closing doors in most cases and get pushed out of the doorway if the items wouldn’t land in deep water or lava. The rate at which unique Pandemonium lord levels appear in Pandemonium has been increased. Several new dangerous vaults have been added, and the Hellbinder and Cloud Mage WizLabs have been revamped to provide greater and more varied challenge, as well as better loot.
• Monsters: Monsters no longer spawn after level-generation in most places, which includes the nasty out-of-depth monsters that formerly spawned after many turns. Instead a few more monsters generate on each level, and monsters have a small chance to generate awake, although never near stairs. Air elementals have a short-range, short-duration Tornado-like Vortex ability. Player ghosts now are all speed 10 and never spawn with chaos melee. Finally, random Pandemonium Lords no longer can have the Shatter spell.
• Interface: Players can now set training targets for skills. Press ‘=’ on the skill screen, select a skill, and enter a skill level to have training of that skill disabled when the specified level is reached. Many monsters and artefact item tiles have been updated, and Draconian player tiles now show their hats!

For a list of other major changes, see the changelog. Many thanks to all those who have contributed to Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. We hope you enjoy playing 0.21!

Fellow adventurers, we’re back with another Trunk Update after a long rest in the Tomb; be careful about those one-way hatches! Development has been slower than usual over the months since the 0.20 release, but we’ve built up some nice changes and have settled on the date for the 0.21 Release and Tournament: January 5, 2018.

This is longer than our usual 6 month release/tournament cycle, but this date will give developers and tournament organizers alike time to get trunk code and tournament setup in order. We’ll eventually make a follow-up post with more details, but for now please mark your calendars for 8pm UTC Friday January 5 2018 through 8pm UTC Sunday January 21 2018 as the 0.21 tournament. Also, please try out the trunk version on your favorite server to help us find bugs and play-test recent changes.

Speaking of trunk changes, let’s see what Horrible Things the Abyss has to offer! First we cover two features that were in 0.20 trunk but didn’t make that release.

The Gnoll species has a new design we like to call “reverse-skillrobin”:

• Gnolls always train all skills at once, without any of the usual item/spell restrictions, and can’t select specific skills.
• They have very high apts: +6 in magic schools, +9 invocations, and +8 for the other schools.
• They have above-average base stats, two more in each base state compared to humans.
• They don’t have skill cross-training, nor can they use Ashenzari’s skill transfer.
• They can worship Trog, who thankfully forgives their training magic, but still doesn’t let them cast or memorize spells.
• Compared to the last Trunk Update, gnolls no longer have “locked” low stats, they have normal stat choice per 3 XL, they gain one random stat point per 4 XL, and they have normal magic resistance gain per XL.

Gnolls have an easier time early on due to high starting skill levels and better-than-average stats, but only manage to reach about level 7 in all skills at XL 13 and about level 16 in all skills at XL 27. Since you can’t max out a key set of skills like other species, you’d better be ready to use what the dungeon makes available. This design has been in trunk for a couple months now, and has been well-received by both players and D:1 monster gnolls wielding halberds. Aside from possible balance tweaks, expect to see Gnolls in 0.21 in close to their present form.

Next up is the Wu Jian Council god. For a while, we weren’t certain this god would make the cut, but thanks to some recent discussions and patches from SteelNeuron, the original designer and implementer, there’s a new version of the god. This version emphasizes movement-as-combat but hopefully presents better decisions as to when to use those fancy martial attacks. Here’s the current set of abilities:

• Upon worship, you get the Lunge martial attack. Moving directly towards and adjacent to an enemy triggers an attack that does 20% more damage.
• At 1* piety, you get the Whirlwind martial attack:
• This triggers when moving between tiles adjacent to a monster, attacking all adjacent foes for 80% damage.
• These attacks ‘pin’ any affected monsters, prevent one turn of movement, but allowing monsters to perform other actions.
• At 2* piety, you get the Wall Jump martial attack:
•  Moving against solid obstacles triggers a two-turn jump, moving two squares in the opposite direction and attacking any enemies adjacent to the landing site.
• This number of attacks performed is doubled, in accord with the movement taking two turns.
• Compared to the last Trunk Update, this ability has lost the monster target requirement and does not distract monsters.
• At 3* piety, you get the Serpent’s Lash ability:
• This costs piety and grants two free movement actions.
• Any movements that are martial attacks will never miss and do 40% more damage.
• Compared to the last Trunk Update, this ability has reduced piety cost, a reduced exhaustion timeout, and slightly reduced bonus damage (50% -> 40%)
• At 5* piety, you get the Heavenly Storm ability, which creates opaque clouds and gives an increasing slaying bonus as you use martial attacks. This ability is unchanged from the the last update.

This version of Wu Jian brings the focus back to frequent movement attacks, making them more beneficial and trying to make their effects on monster movement more predictable. Hence the loss of the distraction mechanic and the addition of the pin effect. We’ll be trying out these changes, getting player feedback, and making further adjustments in the weeks to come. The hope is to have Wu Jian ready for 0.21, but as always with trunk features, keep in mind that the god could change significantly between now and release.

Finally, let’s get to the other changes that have landed in trunk:

• Training targets can be set on the skill screen:
• Press ‘=’ on, select a skill, and enter a target skill level.
• Training of that skill is disabled when you reach the target level.
• You can set a target skill for a weapon’s minimum delay right from the weapon description!
• Wand charges merge:
• Wands of the same type merge charges upon pickup and have no cap on charges.
• Wand charges are identified when the wand type is identified; no more losing charges based on identification.
• Wands are destroyed when their last charge is used.
• No more monster spawns over time in most places:
• Also gone is the super out-of-depth monster timer, which generated very difficult monsters after a long time.
• The number of monsters created during level generation is slightly increased to compensate.
• Pandemonium and Abyss still generate spawns as before.
• Now a fraction of level monsters generate awake, so you can still have that wonderful feeling when a monster wanders over at the most inconvenient time.
• Ogres have better weapon aptitudes in short blades, long blades, and axes, giving them more weapon choices. Not that they don’t love giant clubs, because they do.
• Air Elementals  have a new Vortex ability, which is a short-duration, short range Tornado effect. If one of these moves you off of your comfy stairs, remember to say: “Thank you, gammafunk!”
• Unique Pan Lords now appear more frequently in Pandemonium. It turns out people didn’t like trudging through 27 Pan levels to get all the runes, so we reduced that average number by quite a bit.
• Rods of Lightning recharge based on XP even when only partially used, and give you a power bonus only for consecutive charges.
• Fan of Gales now disperses clouds at the players feet.
• Scrolls of Recharging are no more. The wand charge merging and identification changes give you more charges available in inventory. And let’s be honest, there are a lotta wand charges out there in the dungeon.
• Wands of Confusion and Lightning are no more. We’ve given the generation weight of these spell-duplicating wands to the more interesting remaining wands of comparable effect.
• Draconians player tiles now show hats. Has dungeon science gone too far?
• New vaults in circulation:
• A crab-themed runed door vault where clawed critters creep in crafty corridors, hoping to catch you in a cloud. The crabs even have friends that try to hit you from afar. Hope you don’t end up as the main course in a crab dinner!
• A Trog-themed transporter vault that has you shrouded in the field of a silent specter. Imprisoned moths of wrath awaiting you at every turn, hoping to berserk nearby trolls, ogres, and ettins….or even a juggernaut! I hope the loot is worth it…
• A digging-themed transporter vault where deep troll earth mages or cacodemons wait for you to move close enough so they can dig out hoards of monsters. Use the supplied wand of digging to release smaller groups on your own terms. Dig for victory!
• A cloud-themed transporter vault where you’re given a potion of resistance to go up against some elemental critters surrounded by clouds. You’d better kill all the things before your resistance wears off, since you have to walk through clouds to reach the exit!
• A transporter Zot vault containing the legendary Mask of the Dragon. Formerly a runed door vault, now a deadlier transporter vault with moths of wrath ready to berserk a hoard of dragons!
• A highly randomized concentric ring vault that may contains stairs, loot, traps, and of course some nasty monsters.
• A “motion control” stair vault that pits you against movement-restricting monsters like manticores, catoblepas, and merfolk avatars, all of which attack you from multiple directions.
• That one elephant statue in the Lair “Junglebook” ending is diggable. You know, the one near that place that leads to the thing? Yeah, that’s the one (hint: it’s grey).
• The Chambers of the Cloud Mage WizLab has been reworked. It features the new vortex-enabled air elementals and a host of cloud-spitting crabs, death drakes, and blizzard demons, as well as some shockingly fast snake and insect friends. Loot is updated to include more consumables early on in the map and to give some better-quality finds in the main treasure pile at the end.
• The Hall of the Hellbinder WizLab has also been reworked. It features a less player-friendly layout with a deadlier assortment of demons, a demonspawn mage, and a Hellbinder with an updated spell set. Loot has been updated to feature some nice consumables as well as a better treasure hoard.
• The Nemelex gamble transporter vault is now actually a gamble. You were cheating. Oh yeah, we found out.
• Extra contamination is your reward when un-equiping items currently granting you invisibility. Sorry min-maxers, no more avoiding contam by un-equipping your cloak of invis early.
• Water species that aren’t merfolk now properly autoexplore and travel through shallow water.
• Transporters have a ‘landing site’ that indicates their destination. Now you can better determine the location of your future untimely death.

There are more changes to trunk planned before the release, and we’ll be sure to talk about those in a future post. Until then fellow crawlers, as the Wu Jian Council tells you, “Follow the Path!”

• Restore 5 base damage to kick aux attacks, which had been missing since 0.16.0.
• Don’t let equipped weapon accuracy affect throwing accuracy.
• Ignore negative relative window sizes in full-screen mode. Not ignoring these settings caused full-screen issues on Windows platforms in particular.
• 41 other bugfixes and cleanups.

As mentioned in the changelog entry, kick aux attacks have had nerfed damage for some time. Hopefully now your poor Tengus won’t get their bird brains bashed in quite so easily in early Dungeon! Getting a boost to throwing accuracy based on the weapon you have equipped is probably too subtle for most players to notice, but at least you can sleep at night knowing that you aren’t cheating with your ranged to-hit. Lots of crash fixes and cleanups, as well as a few vault balance tweaks, so please update!

So, hookbill, your frogs did well! But let us see how they do against my birds of prey – pray the birds don’t get them! Ha-ha-ha-ha…!
-Dark Queen, “Battletoads”, 1991

Both the individual player competition and the clan competition were very close this year, with lots of lead changes. Read on for details of the amazing achievements players made this tournament. We’ll also discuss some tournament statistics and even an unsolved win rate mystery!

Individual Winners

The champion this year is ManMan with 7291 tournament points and 31 wins. This is ManMan’s first tournament championship, although he made a strong showing in the 0.19 tournament as well, coming in at #9, and has participated in many past tournaments. To maintain his lead ManMan pulled off a number of outstanding games, including the first all-rune win, a speedy 47 minute win, a third place low-turncount win in 17728 turns, and an incredible streak of 15 wins, the longest of the tournament! His 15-streak was ended on Swamp:4 when his Barachian Transmuter got paralyzed by a wasp from shambling mangrove. Respect the forest!

The silver medalist is Yermak with 7052 points and 33 wins. Yermak is no stranger to this competition, being the previous winner of the 0.19 and 0.18 tournaments. Yermak pulled off an incredible 10406 turn win (less than 1k behind WR; third fastest all-time), got the highest scoring run of the tournament, got the second all-rune victory, got third most combo high scores (10), and won 19 Tier-III banners! His best hope for retaking first place with a streak late in the tournament was hindered by an unfortunate crawl bug. Item slot key mappings can be ignored when purchasing previously unidentified items from shops, thus leading Yermak to read the wrong scroll and die to a berserked ettin. Sorry Yermak, we’ll try to get that bug fixed soon!

Third place goes to Ultraviolent4 (playing as YTcomUltraviolent4) with 6155 points and 18 wins. Ultraviolent4 also had the fastest and third fastest real-time runs of the tournament, his best being an incredibly fast Deep Dwarf Fighter won in 38 minutes, 17 seconds (4th-fastest all-time), a win that he improved from his third place DDFi won in 44 minutes. Additionally Ultraviolent4 had the second win of the tournament and the third longest streak at 12 wins, which was ended abruptly when his Troll Conjurer became a snack for the Dis Serpent of Hell. Streak snacks are its favorite!

Clan Winners

The first place clan was Who Left the Gnolls Out, with Demise (captain, #4), ManMan (#1), Ultraviolent4 (#3), Alcopop, gammafunk, and Pekkekk, scoring 22933 points and 93 wins. Fielding a majority of the top 5 players, it’s no surprise that this clan was so competitive. They gained an edge with 46 streak wins (compared to 40 for the second-place clan), having the aforementioned 15 streak by ManMan and 12 streak by Ultraviolent4, but also a 12 streak from team captain Demise. Demise also got the first win of the tournament and had the second-fastest real-time win, a MiBe won in 38:12, a mere 4 seconds behind his teammate Ultraviolent4.

Coming in at second place was Tolkien Minorities, with dying5ever (captain, #10), mibe (#8), koboldina (#11), araganzar (#20), minmay, and Doesnt, scoring 22018 points and 74 wins. This clan had the second most combo high scores of any clan at 33 high scores. Mibe’s streak of 13 games was the second-best of the tournament, and team captain dying5ever (also known as Hellmonk) was no slouch himself with a 12 streak. Minmay was the first player to reach the end of a Ziggurat as well as the third person to kill all 76 uniques, helping to make her clan the first to harvest them all. Finally, Doesnt had the second fastest turncount win, a DDFi won in 13912 turns.

Third place is awarded to Gozag or Go Home, with Ge0ff, Beargit (#5), Faldahar, Kenran, sage1234, and toastedzergling, scoring 19584 points and 70 wins. This clan had the most high scores of any in the tournament with 41 in total, aided by Beargit who had the most combo high scores of any player at 14. Beargit also got the third win of tournament, and team captain Ge0ff was the third fastest in the tournament to reach the end of a Ziggurat.

Other Notables

murphy had the lowest XL win with a level 14 FeEn of Dith in addition to having second and third place for rune fetched at lowest XL. First place in that category goes to KoreanRuneSaw, who was the first to fetch a (gossamer) rune at XL 9 with a SpEn that died strengthless from a ghost moth’s bite a mere 17 turns later. murphy also fetched a (barnacled) rune at XL 9, this time with a different FeEn of Dith that would lose a felid life a mere 13 turns later to a merfolk aquamancer.

inmateoo was the first player to harvest all 76 uniques, doing so less than 6 days into the tournament, and Tegga21 has the distinction of winning with the highest combined AC+EV. Their GrFi of Zin ascended with 99 AC and 49 EV, aided by gold dragon scales, rings of Robustness and Phasing, and quite a few status high jinks. Finally, Dowan snuck in the last win of the tournament, their GrBe winning in 1:48:26 just 40 seconds before the end of the tournament!

The most commonly achieved banner was The Shining One’s Vow of Courage I, to kill Sigmund before entering the Depths, earned by a whopping 1624 players! The most rarely achieved banner was Beogh’s Heretic III, earned only by kuniqs and Rocknlol.

The most dangerous ghost was everyone’s favorite Crawl lua bot, qw, who claimed an incredible 150 kills, over three times as many as SirKenneth in second place, who had 44 kills. Playing over 21 hours a day on average during the tournament no doubt gave qw the edge here, and this also resulted in 25 wins and an overall player ranking of 23! Not surprisingly, qw and SirKenneth also respectively held first and second place in the most deaths to uniques ranking.

The most lethal monster in this tournament was again the gnoll, ending the hopes and dreams of 4306 characters. The most lethal unique was again Sigmund, reaping 1733 characters; that’s 1.07 kills per Vow of Courage I banner. You may be wondering how Ijyb is doing in the rankings now that she always has a wand but places a bit deeper. She’s moved up 7 ranks and killed 281 more players compared to the 0.19 tournament, with over 8 times as many wand kills compared to melee kills.

Statistics and Final Thoughts

Just under three thousand players participated this year! See here for a comparison of this tournament to the 0.19 winter tournament, here for a comparison to the previous summer tournament for 0.18, and here for an album of all past tournament stats images made by johnstein. Summer tournaments like this one tend to have a bit less participation than winter tournaments, but our total play time was still slightly higher compared to 0.19. That’s over 4 years and 187 days of cumulative playtime for 2997 tournament players! It looks slightly more reasonable when you consider it’s just over 49 minutes per day for each player on-average.

One statistic was significantly higher this tournament than we expected: the win rate. Win rate does tend to increase with each new tournament, since we don’t increase the game’s difficulty drastically with each new version, yet our player base keeps growing in experience. You players always get better at winning! However some versions have significant increases in win rate due to major changes or bugs. In 0.15 we removed item destruction and player burden, and increased the benefit of shield enchantment, which saw a 33% increase in win rate (1.34% -> 1.78% from 0.14 to 0.15). In 0.16 we had a the infamous melee bug that doubled melee damage and was fixed well after the tournament began, resulting in a 72% increase in win rate (1.78% -> 3.06% from 0.15 to 0.16). See here for a graph of tournament win rates for all past tournaments for which we have data, excluding games that were quit or played by bots.

This year win rate increased by 29%, which is a bit surprising to us here on the dev team, because on paper this doesn’t look like a version that would make winning significantly easier. New high-level wands, new scarf items, and slightly increased potions of hasting/heal wounds are offset by removal of rods, removal of the Repel Missiles spell, and removal of wands of hasting/heal wounds/teleport. Even though Ijyb was moved deeper and we removed hill giants (and their infamous nets), Ijyb always gets a wand now (and has gotten more kills), and two-headed ogres place earlier than hill giants did and are pretty nasty monsters!

The win rate for players with fewer than 10 wins before the respective starts of this tournament and last is also up 37% (0.7% -> 0.96% from 0.19 to 0.20). This higher than usual win rate increase may be due to a subtle bug we haven’t found yet, but it might also be that the cumulative changes have actually made the game a bit easier. We’ll keep an eye out for explanations and will continue looking at balance issues in 0.21 like we do for every version.

Once again, thanks for participating in the 0.20 tournament! We hope to post a bugfix 0.20.1 release soon that contains fixes made after the release.

Happy crawling!