Posts from ·gammafunk·

Saturday, January 6th, 2018 01:05

Crawl 0.21 “Gnoll Country for Old Jian”

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We’re pleased to announce the release of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup 0.21: “Gnoll Country for Old Jian”! 0.21 features a new species, a new god, a new spell, and many significant updates and general improvements to the game.

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!

8 comments!
Saturday, November 25th, 2017 11:48

Trunk Updates and 0.21 Tournament & Release Info

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Casting: Borgnjor’s Revivification. Your Trunk Update is healed in an amazingly painful way!

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!”

6 comments!
Sunday, July 2nd, 2017 08:30

0.20.1 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 (Update: OS X packages are now on the download page). We recommend all 0.20 users upgrade to this version. Major bugfixes:

  • 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

4 comments!
Wednesday, June 14th, 2017 05:36

0.20 Tournament Results

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The 0.20 tournament has concluded! A hearty thanks to everyone for coming together and participating in our community. And especial thanks to all our server administrators, developers, organizers, and contributors for putting in their work, time, and passion to make this tournament possible.

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!

4 comments!
Thursday, May 25th, 2017 14:27

Crawl 0.20: “Scarf Our Wanderful Fried Frogs”

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We’re toadally pleased to announce the release of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup 0.20: “Scarf Our Wanderful Fried Frogs”! 0.20 features a new species, some new items and spells, dungeon updates, and many other additions, streamlinings, and general improvements to the game.

Download DCSS 0.20 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 release tournament begins on May 26 2017, at 20:00 UTC, with all online 0.20 games counting towards your score. See the tournament website for more details, including how to set up or join a clan.

0.20′s highlights include:

  • Characters: Barachim have been added, a new species that moves slowly but has good aptitudes, a powerful Hop ability, and can see one tile more than other species. Ogres have had their aptitudes and stats reworked, allowing them to be more proficient spell-casters and not just melee brutes, and mummies have a much higher spell-casting aptitude.
  • Spells: Two new spells have been added: Ignition, a high level Fire Magic spell that drops a weakened Fireball on every monster in view, leaving the player and their allies unaffected, and Poisonous Vapours, a Poison/Air spell in the Venom Mage starting book the creates a very short-lived poisonous cloud on a single monster.
  • Items: Scarves have been added, which are auxiliary armour for the cloak slot that has 0 AC and can’t be enchanted, but have special powerful egos like Repel Missiles, Cloud Immunity, Resistance (rF+ & rC+), and Spirit Shield. Mutation potions are now the only mutation-changing potion, and each quaff cures multiple existing mutations and grants several new ones. Additionally, spells formerly found on rods have been moved to wands of clouds and scattershot and the new rod of lightning XP evocable, and other wands have had their ranges and effects adjusted.
  • Dungeon: Many new dangerous vaults have been added, including an epic level-wide Depths vault as well as tricky loot vaults using the new one-way transporter dungeon feature. The Tomb of Ancients now features more dangerous one-way stairs that don’t allow easy, immediate return, and the treasure walls of the Slime Pits now always breach when the Royal Jelly dies.
  • Interface: A new noise meter now shows the relative loudness of each action, and in console mode this can be replaced by a bar showing the glyph of each equipped item. Stash searches now exclude distant duplicate matches of vanilla weapons, armour and ammo by default. Finally, the mouse can now be used in WebTiles by default and the species selection menu is reworked to have groupings in “simple”, “intermediate”, and “advanced” categories.

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 0.20!

12 comments!
Tuesday, May 23rd, 2017 13:47

0.20 Tournament Page is Online

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For all the warriors, adventurers, zealots, mages, and warrior-mages out there, I’m here with a quick update about the 0.20 tournament. Please bookmark the official 0.20 tournament page and use this page to track your progress throughout the tournament. Remember, the tournament is scheduled from 20:00 UTC Friday 26 May through 20:00 UTC Sunday 11 June.

There are currently no rule changes relative to the 0.19 tournament, but check the tournament page for any final rule changes before the tournament begins. Once the tournament has started, the tournament leaderboard will display the current standings. For now this page has test data from servers with 0.20 available, but this data will be wiped from the tournament database before friday.

Clans can be formed and changed until one week into the tournament. See the Clans section of the tournament page for details, and you can get a head-start on configuring RC on any server that already has 0.20 available. Currently that list is: CAO, CBRO, CJR, CPO, CXC, LLD; the remaining servers will have 0.20 available soon. 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:1, holding the Orb of Zot!

1 comment...
Tuesday, May 16th, 2017 14:02

Upcoming 0.20 Release and Tournament

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Fellow crawlers, I’m here to let you know that DCSS 0.20 will be officially released on the 24th of May! Two days later, from 20:00 UTC Friday 26 May through 20:00 UTC Sunday 11 June we’ll be running the 0.20 tournament. More details along with a 0.20 tournament rules page will be given in an upcoming post. Note that we’re not quite at feature freeze and that the 0.20 version doesn’t yet have its own game branch listed on official servers, but those things will happen soon!

There aren’t many new features since our last update, since we’re so close to feature freeze, but here’s a teeny tiny trunk update all the same:

  • Gnolls, the new species that senses items and have a short attention span, have been disabled for the next release. This commit talks about some of the issues with the current species, and this commit is a preview of Gnolls 2.0, which may get merged soon. Although Gnolls won’t be in the 0.20 release, don’t worry, you’ll still be able to play these puppers in trunk.
  • Wu Jian has also been disabled for the 0.20 release. We’re examining a few different options for Wu, which may involve reworking an ability or two or even merging some of the god’s abilities into Uskayaw (!). This work won’t take place until after the tournament finishes, but until then, you can continue to worship Wu in your trunk games.
  • New cloud ego for scarves that grants immunity to all clouds, replacing the ultra boring rC+ scarf ego. Cast conjure flame and stand in the flames! Stand in miasma clouds, breathing in deeply! Laugh in Xom’s face when he dumps chaos clouds all over you!
  • Coming soon: more transporter loot vaults, featuring steamed eels, bookish nerds, Jiyva/Lucy/Beogh altar ambushes, and more.

See you all in the Hall of Zot!
5 comments!
Tuesday, April 25th, 2017 05:15

Trunk Updates, 24 April 2017

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My fellow warriors, adventurers, zealots, mages, BATTLEMAGES, and sword-and-board melee toons, it’s time for another Trunk Update. We’ll hopefully be at feature freeze in the next few weeks to prepare for the upcoming release and tournament. More info on those last two will be posted when things are finalized. Until then, here’s what’s changed in the two months (!) since our last update:

  • New experimental Gnoll species:
    • They have a short attention span mutation. This means they have +4 in all aptitudes, but starting at skill level 7, their aptitude drops by 2 for each full skill level trained, until reaching skill level 12 where the aptitude remains at -6 from then on. You’re probably gonna wanna train a few different skills, pupper!
    • They have a strong nose mutation that allows them to sense nearby items up to 7 tiles away.
    • Fangs 1 mutation.
    • Only get +2 MR/level compared to the usual +3.
    • Gain one point of Str/Int/Dex randomly per 5 levels (in addition to the usual stat choice every 3 levels)
    • Normal XP/HP/MP values.
    • The design of this species is not yet finalized, and it could get major changes or be disabled for the 0.20 release while we work out the details.
  • Changes to Wu Jian:
    • Whirlwind no longer has a chance to slow the monsters it affects. It’s no longer favorable to use this over your normal melee on nearly every monster.
    • Wall Jump can only be used when it would hit a monster adjacent to the landing site. Sorry, no more weird endless tunnel jumping; this isn’t (yet) a Megaman game!
    • Heaven On Earth has been renamed to Heavenly Storm to give a bit more clarity to what the ability does.
    • The god itself is going through some design overhaul, and may be disabled for the 0.20 release or otherwise get some big subsequent changes. Rest assured that we’re interested in getting some of Wu’s core concepts to work!
  • Tomb now uses one-way staircases, like escape hatches, but with pre-determined destinations. You’ll land at the familiar destinations in the various levels of Tomb, but with no immediate return staircase. Should you need to escape, you’ll have to find another one-way stair somewhere nearby. See this commit for some further details. The age of ><><>< in the Tomb of Ancients has come to an end, mortal!
  • Ijyb and Maurice now always have wands, instead of just having a higher chance of getting one. Ijyb now starts placement from D:3 instead of D:2. Watch out for those wands of acid, they hurt!
  • Giant Spiked Club base delay lowered from 1.9 to 1.8, allowing them to reach min delay at skill 22 instead of skill 24.
  • Transporters are a new dungeon feature that act like stairs sending you somewhere else on the current level, taking adjacent followers and foes along with you. Currently a few new vaults and some existing ones like the Golubria WizLab use this feature, but look out for more transporter shenanigans to come!
  • New Vaults: 
    • An epic expansion of the_grid, a series of vaults that arrange a randomly chosen group of subvaults (taken from a varied and dangerous set) into a giant geometric arrangement, including one that can encompass an entire Depths level!
    • Also new is an elven bladeworks, a witch-hunting guild (watch out for anti-magic!), an orcish arena of gladiators, and an overgrown Lair chateau, among others.
    • For the new transporter feature, a set of loot vaults that show you the awaiting prizes should you transport in and survive the monster onslaught on the other side. Also a Zot-themed Abyssal rune vault that has you transport into a mini hall of Zot:5, but where you run through the vault in reverse to get to the Abyssal rune and reach the exit.
  • Captain’s Cutlass no longer chops off hydra heads.
  • Manuals are now always pre-identified. No sense delaying that wonderful feeling when your Dg finds a manual in a loot pile only to discover that it’s for Invocations.
  • Alligators move even faster when using their Sprint ability. Australians, please don’t try to wrestle these! Also applies to Maurice and Gastronok.
  • Secret moon lore updated.
  • Stash Searches now by default hide distant items that are duplicate matches of weapons, armor, and ammo.
  • An Equip Bar can enabled (currently for console only) via the equip_bar RC option, which displays a row of the console glyphs of your currently equipped items in place of the new noise bar. If you’ve already got a good sense of what makes loud noise AND you like to show off your artifact bling, this may be the option for you!
  • Unrand renames: The Ring of Shaolin is now the Ring of Phasing, and the bow of Krishna “Shargna” is now the longbow “Zephyr”. No changes to the unrands’ properties, just to the names. The old names were direct references to a real-world place and to a religious figure, respectively, something we’d like to avoid. And no, Blork the Orc and Killer Klowns don’t count!

Thanks for reading, and as Dithmenos likes to say, “Spread the eternal night!”

7 comments!
Wednesday, March 1st, 2017 22:32

0.19.5 Bugfix Release

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There’s a new bugfix release of the stable version of DCSS. Source packages and binaries for Windows, OS X, and Linux are all available. We recommend all 0.19 users upgrade to this version. Major bugfixes:

  • Fix save compatibility when loading games from version 0.18.
  • Macros now work in map mode in Tiles.
  • Autopickup is now smarter about whether items are permanently or temporarily useless.
  • 22 other bug-fixes and cleanups.

Users upgrading their saves from a version 0.18 game should be able to do so properly.

Some dance to remember, some dance to forget.
-Eagles, “Hotel California”. 1976.

1 comment...
Tuesday, January 31st, 2017 06:38

0.19.4 Bugfix Release

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There’s a new bugfix release of the stable version of DCSS. Source packages and binaries for Windows, OS X, and Linux are all available. We recommend all 0.19 users upgrade to this version. There are two major bugfixes:

  • Fix mouse lag experienced by trackpad users on Mac OS X systems.
  • Fix to allow the Temple entrance to place as part of a vault instead of always by itself.

This release fixes heavy lag reported by Mac OS X trackpad users in version 0.19.3. If you continue to experience any mouse-related woes, please file a bug report on Mantis.

The release also contains an important fix to Temple vault placement. Since 0.19, Temple entrances had been placing only as ordinary stairs and never as part of a vault. I know you’ve been missing that special feeling you get when those Oklob saplings kill you before you ever see the altars. What are you waiting for, download right away!

Some dance to remember, some dance to forget.
-Eagles, “Hotel California”. 1976.

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Sunday, January 22nd, 2017 06:43

0.19.3 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, with OS X binaries coming soon. We recommend all 0.19 users upgrade to this version. There are four major bugfixes, along with 25 other bugfixes and cleanups:

  • Fix a long-standing Tiles mouse lag bug. Now there is no lag when updating cursor information upon mouse movement to a new tile.
  • Work around an AMD driver bug where the game crashes when loading 512×512 images.
  • Demon tridents are two-handed for small races, as intended.
  • Fix to allow helmets as armour acquirement gifts.
  • Fix to prevent Infestation death scarabs becoming hostile when killing their host in an explosion.

Note that there was no 0.19.2 bugfix release. We tagged that release, but the AMD driver issue was reported and fixed shortly afterwards, so we made 0.19.3 to include that crash fix for the affected users.

Some dance to remember, some dance to forget.
-Eagles, “Hotel California”. 1976.

Update: OS X zips for 0.19.3 are now on the download page.

3 comments!
Thursday, November 24th, 2016 08:55

0.19.1 Bugfix Release

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There’s a new bugfix release of the stable version of DCSS. Source packages and binaries for Windows, OS X, and Linux are all available now. We recommend all 0.19 users upgrade to this version. There are two major bugfixes, along with numerous smaller bugfixes and cleanups:

  • Demon tridents are two-handed for small races, as intended.
  • Allow Dith shadow to attack diagonally and to reach.

Keep dancing right on through those memories!

Update: Windows builds on the download page are now 32-bit so we can support all the Windows devices in the wild. 64-bit builds may return in the future if we get a better setup to build and distribute them, but the 32-bit ones will run fine on both architectures.

5 comments!
Wednesday, November 23rd, 2016 11:38

Please Take The New DCSS Player Survey!

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Wednesday, September 28th, 2016 09:32

New Online Score World Record by PurpleRed

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The player PurpleRed has set a new overall high score with an amazing Deep Elf Conjurer of Vehumet won with 15 runes in a mere 19,065 turns!

The previous record, a Deep Dwarf Warper of Makhleb won by the legendary Sapher in version 0.17-a, was the culmination of a resurgence of heavy melee characters that has dominated high scoring games for many versions using gods like Makhleb, Cheibriados, and The Shining One together with species good at melee. Although the best “pure magic” Deep Elf won in recent version before PurpleRed returned to speedrunning was still quite fast at 28,416 turns, this is today only good enough for 47th place in the rankings.

Since version 0.17, the removal of controlled teleport and evokable teleport from the ring of teleportation were seen as limitations that might prevent a new score world record from ever being achieved. However not long after winning a 15-rune DECj in an impressive 26,112 turns, PurpleRed ascended this new high scoring game for an incredible 75,249,848 points! Congrats!

8 comments!
Friday, May 6th, 2016 03:53

New Server CJR is Online and CAO Updated for 0.18 Tournament

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Thanks to ZiBuDo, in time for the 0.18 tournament we have a new WebTiles/console server running in Montreal, Canada, with the official acronym CJR:

crawl.jorgrun.rocks

Yes, everything you see on that page was done intentionally, and we sincerely beg you not to encourage ZiBuDo to add more memes…

This server supports 0.17, 0.18, and trunk for both WebTiles and console over SSH with hourly automatic trunk updates. CJR also has an IRC bot, Jorgrell, available in ##crawl to announce milestones and list versions. The server has been added to the CAO scoring pages, and your games played there should show up on your score page soon. ZiBuDo has additionally made a leader board tracking various records for games played on CJR.

Thanks to the efforts of neil, CAO is now updated for 0.18 and will be ready for the 0.18 tournament! We were previously unsure if we’d be able to get the server updated in time, but now your v0.18 games played and clan memberships defined on CAO will indeed count for this tournament.

At this time, CWZ, the South Korean server, is the only server we’ve been unable to get updated with 0.18 for the tournament. If anyone can reach the admin of this server, who plays under the account Hong, please do so. Developers in the ##crawl-dev channel can help answer questions about updating the server.
CWZ was updated shortly before the tournament started.

5 comments!
Thursday, December 10th, 2015 15:59

Crawl 0.17.1: 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 binaries will be uploaded as soon as they’re available. We recommend all 0.17 users upgrade to this version. Here’s a list of changes from the changelog:

  • Fix insect monsters never berserking. This bug prevented queen bees from berserking their hive bees and moths of wrath berserking insects in Spider.
  • Prevent the Gell’s Gravitas spell from moving monsters into deep water or lava.
  • Fix resting to stop properly when MP don’t regenerate.
  • Properly warn when a beam might poison a monster while worshiping the Shining One.
  • Put hunter’s swords in slot ‘a’ or ‘b’ at game start to allow easier switching between ranged and melee weapons.
  • Put Earth Elementalists’ starting stones on the ‘b’ slot.
  • Update the manual for 0.17.
  • Many other bug fixes for game crashes, to vaults, and to in-game text.

Keep on squaring those circles!

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Tuesday, November 24th, 2015 12:45

0.17 Tournament Results

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The 0.17 tournament is over. For 16 days, players could compete for tournament points and banners by playing 0.17 games on the public servers.

The winning player was cosmonaut, with 5787 points. cosmonaut won 22 games during the tournament, including a 5-game streak, and won 15 tier-three banners. In second place was johnnyzero, with 5644 points and 17 wins, including the longest streak for 10 games. In third place was iafm, with 5432 points and 27 wins, the most wins of any player, and 16 tier-three banners. EnterQ won the most tier-three banners of the tournament, getting 20 of 22 possible. The only unwon banner was Ruthless Efficiency III.

The fastest win by turncount was achieved by 4thArraOfDagon (19225 turns with a VSMo of Cheibriados). This game was also the highest scoring win of the tournament at 74M points, and incredibly is the second-highest-scoring game among all online games ever played! Demise had the fastest realtime win at 57m 37s with a HOBe, and johnnyzero had the lowest level win with an XL 19 FeAE of Dithmenos. The first victory of the tournament was claimed by CcS, playing a MiMo of Cheibriados, just 86 minutes after tournament start, followed by lessens a mere 32 seconds later, playing a MiBe.

The clan competition was won by tasonir’s clan (17151 points), followed by Vidiiot’s clan (16340 points), and MorganLeah’s clan (14161 points). There were 167 clans in all with points scored in the tournament.

Here are some basic statistics on the players in this tournament compared with the 0.16 tournament (in parentheses):

  • Players: 2836 (2773)
  • Total player time: 40866 hrs (43008 hrs)
  • Avg player time:  14.4 hrs (15.5 hrs)
  • Proportion of players using webtiles: 89.8% (88.9%)

A graph made by johnstein shows how various statistics progressed over the course of the tournament. See here for additional comparison graphs. 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 0.17 release and tournament possible!

6 comments!
Friday, November 6th, 2015 15:55

Crawl 0.17: “Squaring the Circle”

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We’re proud to announce the release of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup 0.17: “Squaring the Circle”! 0.17 features a square line of sight, shorter Lair rune branches, new rune vaults for many branches, and many, many additions and improvements to the game.

Download DCSS 0.17 here, or play it online on one of many servers across the world! The source and Windows packages are available now, and our deep build annihilator elves are hard at work on the OS X binaries. We’ll update the website as soon as those files are ready!
Update: The linux debian 0.17 packages are now in the repository!
Update 2: The OS X packages are now on the download page. Many thanks to geekosaur for making these and troubleshooting signing issues! If you have problems running this on OS X, please tell us in ##crawl-dev or file a bug report on Mantis.

The release tournament begins today, Nov 6 2015, at 20:00 UTC, with all online 0.17 games counting towards your score. See the tournament website for more details, including how to set up or join a clan.

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 0.17!

25 comments!
Tuesday, November 3rd, 2015 10:58

The 0.17 Tournament Page is Online

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We have now have the official page for the 0.17 Tournament online! Bookmark that URL, since it will eventually have a nice leader-board with links to all tournament results for players, clans, and banners, as well as a table of ongoing tournament games. The page currently shows the 0.17 tournament rules, included the rule changes from the 0.16 tournament.

This biggest change is that Beogh’s Saint banner has been reworked and is now called Heretic. This banner rewards players for abandoning and mollifying one, three, or nine gods, excluding Beogh, Ely, Ru, TSO, and Zin. There’s no longer a clan-based banner, but clans are still tracked with clan points awarded in all the various ways. Gone are the days when Saint I was either a trivial banner or perhaps the most difficult one if you were in a high scoring clan! Hopefully enduring epic god wrath will also make for some memorable games. Lugonu’s Heretic banner has been renamed to Spiteful, which has the same rules but no longer rewards tournament points for the tier 3 banner.

The other changes:

  • Nemelex’ Choice bonus points are now awarded to the first eight winning players instead of the first seven.
  • Lord of Darkness III allows you to enter Temple. No more altar grinding required!
  • Angel of Justice III requires that you kill the Serpent of Hell at least once.
  • No more clan points from winning with the highest AC+EV. Cigotuvi’s Embrace certainly spelled the end of that one…

Remember, the tournament will take place from 20:00 UTC Friday 6th November to 20:00 UTC Sunday 22nd November. If you’re participating in a clan, don’t forget to edit your RC file per the instructions. Clan memberships can be changed during the tournament (with changes detected automatically) until 19:00 UTC Saturday 14 November, after which time clans are effectively frozen.

Note that for testing purposes, the tournament page is currently tracking all games played in November. Don’t worry about any tournament results you see listed now, since the database and pages will be reset before the start of the actual tournament. Finally, the tournament page may get a visual overhaul thanks to work being done by chequers, the CPO admin who also helped overhaul the crawl.develz.org homepage. If we get these changes incorporated in time for this tournament, you’ll see them automatically when you visit the tournament page.

Best of luck to all participants!

2 comments!
Sunday, November 1st, 2015 01:20

October Trunk Update and the 0.17 Release and Tournament Date

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Hello fearless yet terribly naive dungeon adventurers! Last time I said we’d update more frequently than once every two months, yet here we are again nearly two months later. It’s because of all the torpor snails, they’re everywhere! In addition to the usual round of updates, we want to announce the date of the upcoming 0.17 release and tournament.

Break out your best clan name puns, because the 0.17 Tournament will take place from 20:00 UTC Friday 6th November to 20:00 UTC Sunday 22nd November. We’ll make a follow-up post in a few days with the tournament home page when we have that ready for you. The release itself will happen on or before the start of tournament. If 0.17 is available on your server, please play that version to help us track down bugs before the release!

  • Gods
    • Gozag’s Call Merchant now places all shops at the player’s location. Customer service is our motto!
  • Monsters
    • Orange crystal statues now have Shadow Creatures and both they and obsidian statues cast their spells much faster. Don’t be surprised to find a lot of brainless MiFi stumbling around the next time you visit the dungeon.
    • Derived undead now have damage that’s 80% of their monster’s base damage instead of losing a fixed amount.
  • Player
    • The demonic guardian from the demonspawn mutation now has Fedhas-style protection from ranged attacks. Could this spell the end of complaints about demonic guardian? Tune in next time to find out!
    • The player blink mutation now only has one level and increases its success rate more rapidly as you gain levels.
    • Some species now have lower Throwing skill aptitudes (you’re welcome):
      • Centaur, Halfling, and Kobold go from +3 to +1.
      • Ogre, Spriggan, Tengu, High Elf, and Deep Elf go from +1 to 0
      • Hill Orc and Gargoyle go from 0 to -1.
  • Dungeon
    • New Lair branch end vaults:
      • A Shoals winter wonderland featuring frosty the kraken simulacrum.
      • A Shoals garden with plants that the satyrs lovingly tend to when they’re not shooting you to death.
      • A scaly new Snake ending, brought to you by the letter V, for Vashnia.
      • A Spider ending in one of three delicious spider flavors, brought to you by the letter A, for Arachne.
      • A Swamp ending with three possible rune locations for hydra to devour delicious players. Brought to you by the letter L, for Lerny.
    • Four new baileys:
      • A flooded polearm bailey that throws you right into the middle of things.
      • A gnoll polearm bailey with a chance to meet the incredibly glamorous and popular crystal plate armour gnoll sergeant.
      • An axe bailey castle that Rodney himself would recognize. Don’t worry, mortals, you don’t need the passtune to enter.
      • An axe bailey with an orc warlord boss you’ll only see if you survive the mobs outside its chamber…
    • Giant-themed zig levels now have juggernauts, and Earth-themed zig levels now have entropy weavers, octopode crushers, juggernauts, and caustic shrikes! Remember, you can always do Just One More Zig Level!
  • Spells
    • Controlled Blink is now level 8. They say that with -cTele gone controlled blinks are even stronger these days…
    • Gell’s Gravitas has been reworked to allow targeting empty squares and to have stronger power initially, scaling more slowly to max power. Hopefully these changes make the spell more usable.
  • Items
    • New unrand artefacts:
      • The Robe of Vines: a +5 robe with massive regeneration but which renders the wearer unable to heal by external means.
      • Kryia’s mail coat +7 scale mail which amplifies the effect of healing items (and grants rC+ to boot).
    • Hammers are gone. Head over to CYC to reminisce about the good times we used to have with hammers…also go there if you just want to get maced.
  • Interface
    • Fix a long-standing bug related to player messages that caused lag in WebTiles games over time. Hopefully refreshing WebTiles due to lag will be a thing of the past!
    • The skill menu now shows the relative XP cost of gaining skill levels.
    • A fancy new rune menu that shows the runes you have and all the ones you’ll never ever be good enough to get.
    • An ability_slot rc option that lets you map abilities to specific letters.

Check out the home page for follow-up posts about the tournament pages and release. After all, I know many secrets…

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