Posts from ·gammafunk·

Tuesday, January 5th, 2021 19:59

0.26 Tournament Page

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Hello fellow Bogchamps! I have a quick update about the 0.26 tournament. Please bookmark the official 0.26 tournament page and use this page to track your progress throughout the tournament. As a reminder, the tournament is scheduled from 20:00 UTC Friday 8 January through 20:00 UTC Sunday 24 January. The 0.26 release will likely happen beforehand on January 7th.

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!

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Wednesday, December 30th, 2020 19:41

Dec 30 Trunk Update and 0.26 Tournament and Release Dates

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gammafunk gestures. gammafunk spews toxic sludge! The Trunk Update festers in the toxic bog!

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!

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Thursday, June 4th, 2020 09:17

0.25 Tournament Delayed But Tournament Page Now Available

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Hello crawlers. The ongoing protests in the United States and elsewhere have greatly limited the availability of some community members, including those working on the new tournament project, to do DCSS things. Although we’ve basically completed the tournament script changes and could run the tournament on time, it wouldn’t be fair to those people participating in protests or those just trying to deal with this difficult situation. To that end, we are delaying the start of the 0.25 tournament for one week until June 12th, 8pm UTC, and it will run for 16 days until June 28th, 8pm UTC. We’re sorry for the abrupt change of start date, but sometimes there are more important concerns.

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!

2 comments!
Thursday, May 28th, 2020 09:13

Last 0.25 Updates and Release/Tournament Date

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The 0.25 Updates mumble some strange words. The 0.25 Updates miscasts Dragon Form. The 0.25 Updates are flooded with distortional energies!

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!

5 comments!
Wednesday, April 1st, 2020 07:05

Trunk Updates – 31 March 2020

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You mumbles some strange words. You chill the trunk update to absolute zero! The trunk update is frozen into a solid block of ice!

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!

9 comments!
Saturday, February 22nd, 2020 04:13

Trunk Updates – 21 February 2020

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You quaff a potion. It was a potion of stabbing. You feel ready to backstab. You open the trunk update like a pillowcase!

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!

1 comment...
Tuesday, November 19th, 2019 04:15

0.24 Tournament Results

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The 0.24 tournament is over. On behalf of the Dev Team, many thanks to all the server admins, outside contributors, bug reporters, and to the many DCSS players who made the 0.24 release and tournament possible! For 16 days, players could compete for tournament points and banners by playing 0.24 games on the public servers. First let’s give a few highlights from the player and clan results. For comprehensive results with first through third place winners in all categories, please see the tournament overview page.

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!

3 comments!
Friday, October 18th, 2019 05:37

0.24 Release and tournament dates and CXC server info

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Hello digital vampires! I’m referring, of course, to those among you who are undead, capable of turning into an adorable flying mammal, and who have had their blood states recently simplified. Trunk players probably know what I’m talking about, and soon, the rest of you will as well. We’ve been bad, greedy devs, binging on our source code and commits and template metaprogramming and querying the current scissors, but not giving you any Trunk Updates during the 0.24 cycle. I’ll try to make amends with a big Trunk Update post for all of 0.24 soon. It might take us a bit longer to write up those changes, so let’s get some important dates out there right now.

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!

4 comments!
Friday, March 1st, 2019 06:32

0.23.1 Bugfix Release

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There’s a new bug fix release of the 0.23.1 stable version of DCSS. Source packages and binaries for Windows, OS X, and Linux are available now. We recommend all 0.23 users upgrade to this version. Major bug fixes and updates:

  • 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!

4 comments!
Friday, March 1st, 2019 05:09

0.23 Winter Tournament Results

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The 0.23 Winter tournament is over. On behalf of the Dev Team, many thanks to all the server admins, outside contributors, bug reporters, and to the many DCSS players who made the 0.23 release and tournament possible! For 16 days, players could compete for tournament points and banners by playing 0.23 games on the public servers. First let’s give  a short summary of player and clan results. To see first through third place winners in all categories, please see the tournament overview page.

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!

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Friday, February 1st, 2019 04:45

0.23 Release and Tournament Info

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Hello fellow Gauntlet runners! I have a quick update about the 0.23 release and tournament. Please bookmark the official 0.23 tournament page and use this page to track your progress throughout the tournament. The tournament is scheduled from 20:00 UTC Friday 8 February through 20:00 UTC Sunday 24 February. The 0.23 release will likely happen beforehand on February 6th or 7th.

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!

1 comment...
Tuesday, January 15th, 2019 00:45

Trunk Updates 14 January 2019

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The Killer Klown throws klown pie at you. Rhubarb! You feel that there is a Trunk Update!

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!

3 comments!
Wednesday, November 28th, 2018 02:05

New crawl server CKO and server CJR taken offline

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Thanks to floraline, we have a new WebTiles/console server running in New York, USA, with the official acronym CKO:

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!

1 comment...
Tuesday, September 18th, 2018 11:00

0.22.1 and 0.21.2 bug fix releases

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There’s a new bug fix release of the 0.22.1 stable version of DCSS. Source packages and binaries for Windows, OS X, and Linux are available now. We recommend all 0.22 users upgrade to this version. Major bug fixes and updates:

  • 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!

2 comments!
Thursday, August 30th, 2018 07:04

0.22 Summer Tournament Results

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The 0.22 Summer tournament is over. On behalf of the Dev Team, many thanks to all the server admins, outside contributors, bug reporters, and to the many DCSS players, new and centuryplayer alike, who made the 0.22 release and tournament possible! For 16 days, players could compete for tournament points and banners by playing 0.22 games on the public servers. First let’s give  a short summary of player and clan results. To see first through third place winners in all categories, please see the tournament overview page.

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!

2 comments!
Friday, August 10th, 2018 16:56

Crawl 0.22 “Ghost in a Cell”

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We’re pleased to announce the release of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup 0.22: “Ghost in a Cell”

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!

4 comments!
Saturday, July 14th, 2018 02:58

0.22 Release and Tournament Info

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Hello fellow player-ghost purgers, I have a quick update about the 0.22 release and tournament. Please bookmark the official 0.22 tournament page and use this page to track your progress throughout the tournament. The tournament is scheduled from 20:00 UTC Friday 10 August through 20:00 UTC Sunday 26 August. The 0.22 release will likely happen beforehand on August 9th or 8th.

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!

1 comment...
Sunday, July 8th, 2018 01:01

Trunk Updates and 0.22 Release and Tournament Info

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The iron giant points at the changelog and mumbles some strange words. The harpoon shot hits the changelog! The changelog is yanked forward by the harpoon shot.

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!

2 comments!
Saturday, February 3rd, 2018 10:04

0.21.1 Bugfix Release

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There’s a new bugfix release of the stable version of DCSS. Source packages and binaries for Windows and Linux are available now, and OS X packages will be uploaded as soon as those are available. We recommend all 0.21 users upgrade to this version. Major bugfixes and updates:

  • 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!

3 comments!
Thursday, January 25th, 2018 11:56

0.21 Tournament Results

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The 0.21 tournament has concluded! Many thanks to everyone for coming together and participating in our community. And thanks especially to all our server administrators, developers, organizers, and contributors for putting in their work, time, and passion to make this tournament possible.

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!

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