Below we give an extremely abridged report. For an in-depth treatment, read the full report (pdf, 37 pages).

There have been 5735 meaningful replies, arriving between 16/02/2012 and 29/12/2012, a period which included the 0.10 and 0.11 releases and tournaments.

The average participant is male (92%), 24 years old, and lives in the USA (46%). He strongly prefers the Tiles version (76%) because he feels that tiles are less confusing and easier to understand than ASCII glyphs. He is playing Crawl offline (72%) and would like to use the online game if it was as same comfortable.

The average Crawler has started playing Crawl within the last three years (74%), and hasn’t won the game (76%) or even found a rune yet (66%), but has made it as deep as the Orcish Mines and Lair. He doesn’t use spoilers or only in moderation to read up on the most deadly of enemies. He’s quite likely to have played Diablo for a while (57%) and may also have tried NetHack (63%) or Dwarf Fortress’ adventure mode (51%) at some point, but otherwise has little experience with roguelikes or comparable games. The survey was his first interaction with the devteam in any shape or form (85%).

Among the 1224 participants who did snatch a win, some have achieved additional feats of even greater difficulty: 430 won allruners, 375 have won more than five games, 197 have completed Ziggurats and 72 obtained streaks of at least three wins in succession.

About 15% of all participants consider themselves thoroughly spoiled by the time they won their first character whereas 36% consider themselves completely or mostly unspoiled, at least when it comes to monster properties. This has actually informed on-going Crawl development, as 0.13 will disclose monster spells to players, something that was regarded as the most pertinent spoily monster information.

The recent changes include the incorporation of the unicode branch, which fixes a number of issues with non-ASCII path names etc., bringing Ashenzari up to speed, and the aforementioned gazillions of bug fixes. In a concerted effort of several developers, we’ve managed to close 100+ bug reports on our bug tracker over the last couple of weeks, which is quite a feat, let me tell you. Of course, we wouldn’t have been able to do that if they hadn’t been reported in the first place. So, here’s a large thank you to our diligent reporters! :)

What follows is the list of changes in the 0.8 pre-release branch currently available on CDO (a206725), meaning they’ll be included in the stable release.

Player

Bug fixes

• Fix #3676: crashes when butcher delay tries to switch back to empty hands.
• Fix #3748: crash when viewing aptitude with CK or Wa selected.
• Fix a crash when an aptitude was improved between saves.
• Fix #3156, #3709: cloud safety checks getting randomized AC reductions.
• Fix #3598: if necessary, update perma-mutation if you gain a mutation.
• Fix #2395: Disallow ending forms/levitation if it would cause drowning.
• Fix antitraining when opposite skill is nil.
• Stop quick actions from letting you search faster.
• Don’t avoid glow by cancelling semicontrolled blinks with enter instead of escape.
• Fix trying to climb when overloaded taking a turn.
• Fix #3801: Don’t consume a turn when trying to go downstairs while levitating.
• Fix #3660: canceling DD recharging ability still costing max MP.
• Fix #3781: wall clinging not triggering traps.
• No stealth bonus from boots if you’re flying or in water.
• Fix clinging status not updated properly when switching out of spider form.
• Fix #3444: off-by-one error in autopickup_no_burden checks.
• Fix #3334: boot of levitation message when melding and not levitating.
• Message fix for levitation while clinging.

Other changes for player characters

• Disable Arcane Marksmen.
• All sources of berserk are blocked at “Very Hungry”. Berserk automatically stops when you hit “Starving”.
• Remove experience pool limit; abbreviate the XP pool above 100K.
• Replace scroll reading penalty while brainless with 80% failure chance.
• A wielded ranged weapon will only “clumsily bash” monsters, no matter its enchantment.
• Prompt the player before moving to a deadly cell with an expiring status.
• Remove the satiation requirements from evokable invis.
• Disable ghost creation/loading in wizard non-debug mode.
• Better warning messages for form and levitation expiration.
• Special Airstrike message if struck while flying.
• Don’t auto-attack toadstools when wielding the Wrath of Trog.
• Reduce the spam when butchering with artefacts.
• Consistently abort teleportation attempts when wearing stasis or -TELE.
• Nerf Felid aptitudes: Fighting/UC: 0 -> -2, Ice/Earth: -1 -> -2, improve Cj: -2 -> -1.
• Decrease Felid’s factor for getting hp from Fighting from 1/5 -> 1/8.
• Reduce Felid exp modifier from 15 to 16.
• Don’t let Felids (auto)quiver anything, hide the Qv line.
• Obey no_tele_into when bringing you a new fresh kitty.
• Give Ogres an extra +1 hp per level, and +3 apts in Fighting and M&F.
• Let Kenku use beak+talons for butchering, like birds they are.
• Mention dietary and drinkary habits of mummies on the ‘A’ screen.
• Meld all weapons unless you’re in a form that allows wielding.
• Don’t consider melding a distortion weapon to be unwielding.
• Don’t check inscriptions on melding stuff — you’re not removing them.
• Don’t show “it sticks to your hand” on cursed unmeld.
• Prevent ice form from picking items at the bottom of deep water.
• Disallow wearing hats in spider or ice form.
• Allow wearing shields in statue form.
• Don’t give Green Dracs poison spit in spider form.
• Don’t cling to the wall when levitating.
• Clear clinging status when taking stairs.
• Don’t drown when transforming into a flying form while clinging.
• Allow spider form to scramble out of deep water by clinging to a wall. (#2967)
• Allow extending spider form while clinging over dangerous terrain
• Set clinging status colour according to the current feature.
• Allow wall clinging on closed doors (#3778).
• Don’t give Halfling hunters a buckler for free.
• Save weapon selection for quarterstaves with new games.
• Let player elves have elven gear.

Gods

Ashenzari

• Fix #3344: Don’t crash if you.transfer_to_skill somehow is SK_NONE.
• Fix #3735: some dropped and useless items being autopickuped.
• Don’t crash on old saves in Ashenzari penance.
• New Ashenzari passive ability: identify monster equipment with chance boundedness/3.
• Ashenzari also warns about monsters’ wands.
• Nerf Ashenzari transfer knowledge: double XP penalty (20%), greatly increase piety cost 10 -> 25.
• Lower piety gain.
• Forbid reskilling from or into Fighting.
• Make scrying fail proof and instantaneous.
• Ashenzari: scale passive mapping density with piety.
• Ashenzari on-sight item identification.
• Reskilling: keep the same letters between the from and to menu.
• Wrath: Reduces xp gain by 50%.
• Allow Ashenzarites to cancel scrolls of remove curse.
• Allow Ashenzarites to choose which piece of armour/jewellery to curse.

The good gods: Elyvilon, The Shining One, Zin

• Shorten and tweak Elyvilon’s ^! description to fit in an 80×24 screen.
• Don’t consume food/mp/piety when trying to pacify invalid targets.
• Make TSO non-holy summon extension at most double the current duration.
• Zin forbids shapeshifting spells and protects against Kirke’s pig spell.
• Fix recite working through walls and squarelosish.
• Make recite train more often.
• Add a message when you switch from a good god to another good god.

Other gods

• No stat boosts during Cheibriados penance.
• Fedhas: Don’t blame the player for trees felled by monster-cast tornado.
• Reduce the number of corpses from Kiku’s invocation.
• Makhleb: Fix Lesser Servant summoning chaos spawn instead of hellwings.
• Increase piety cost of Makhleb’s greater servant, since 1s were improved.
• Fix Okawaru not accepting kills of holy beings.
• Repair Xom’s potion of experience.
• When Xom lifesaves you, clear stat_zero penalty.
• Let His Xomminess grant you extra xp at level 27 (xp pool).
• Don’t let Yred gift Eidolons anymore.

General

• No instant divine retribution — many gods are abusable.
• Don’t give experience or items for killing monsters from god wrath
• Reduce the amount of unrands among god gifts.

Monsters

Bug fixes

• Don’t crash on banishing dancing weapons; don’t abyss any kinds of summons.
• Fix a crash when the player thinks the monster has a wand but it doesn’t.
• Fix #2404: Disallow polymorphing monsters taking the stairs.
• Fix #2927: crash when looking up ghosts in the db search.
• Fix non-ghost spells not getting loaded.
• Fix silence working on demons, orbs of fire, etc.
• Fix #3750: coming into view messages ignoring mislead.
• Fix shouting monsters not being announced.
• Fix resurrected shedu being placed in bad places.
• Fix #3718: grey draconians not floundering in deep water.
• Don’t give a chance to hit rock worms in walls except in Zotdef.
• Fix #3689: dual wielding monsters’ descriptions.

Mimics

• Remove trap mimics.
• Disable portal mimic generation for 0.8.
• Prevent stair mimics from posing as branch stairs.
• Don’t place downstairs mimic on branch bottom, and vice versa.
• Make door mimics replace actual doors.
• Make item mimics appear earlier, reduce both types’ rarity.
• Don’t include unknown mimics in beam targetting.
• Include item type in item mimics’ names.

Uniques

• Disable Terpsichore, she’s not ready for 0.8.
• Give Asmodeus a permanent ring of flames, replace greater demon with fire summon, remove bolt of draining.
• Dispater: give LCS instead of lightning bolt, remove common demon summon.
• Mnoleg: + AF_BLINK/AF_MUTATE attacks, -greater demon, -invis, +summon eyeballs, more hp.
• Lom Lobon: give AF_ANTIMAGIC attacks.
• Make Antaeus amphibious again.
• Make the royal jelly stay on Slime:6.
• Give Grinder AF_PAIN attacks instead of a weapon.
• Give Pikel a whip of elec instead of pain.
• Remove rF+ and rC+ from Nergalle.
• Allow Ijyb to get high-tier wands in normal game.
• Give Jory Mesmerise (new spell) instead of Cause Fear.
• Adjust Roxanne’s casting messages, since she can’t move.

Other monster-related changes

• Don’t give experience or items for killing monsters from god wrath or miscasts.
• Revert monsters avoiding walking into clouds — the new behaviour was abusable.
• Don’t cancel monster travels when player goes out of LoS.
• Don’t make a monster at the edge of LOS leave a trail.
• No elephants in D and Vaults, slightly reduce their frequency in Lair.
• Announce all monsters “coming into view” at once.
• Give the non-spellcasting random pan lords (10% chance) a guaranteed melee brand, and a chance of greater speed.
• Restore monster speeds for Orb Guardian, Royal Jelly, Fiends, Storm/Golden dragon, Grater Mummy.
• Tweak holy monster speeds: phoenix/blessed toe: 10, pearl dragon/shedu: 12.
• Improve Cacodemons: -Dig, -Call Imp, +Energy Bolt, +Slow, +Confuse, + 3 levels rPois/Elec, extra attack, more health.
• Green Death, Blue Death: remove call imp.
• Give Eidola spells: Cause Fear and Pain.
• Give giant orange brains Cause Fear instead of Polymorph Other.
• Hunger attack takes 25% of your nutrition.
• Give clinging to geckos, giant mites, cockroaches and demonic crawlers.
• Allow fake rakshasa to use weapons and armour like real ones; don’t hide equipment of Mara and rakshasa.
• Rework monster rElec levels.
• Set the xp for vanilla orcs to 3.
• Remove bears, replace with grizzly or black bears where appropriate.
• Boost monster ghouls’ health and damage.
• Reduce electric eel accuracy slightly.
• Make Fiends and Pit Fiends use regular spells rather than abilities.
• Give vampires blood.
• Give Ophan high intelligence.
• Convert shedu’s main attack to kick instead of claw.
• Allow raising trapdoor spider zombies.
• Always remove the mold when fungal colony is destroyed.
• Add a message for monsters casting Trog’s Hand.

Spells

Bug fixes

• Fix #3650: Don’t spend turn/MP when aborting the berserk spell.
• Fix placing Fire Storm on a wall.
• Don’t allow cancelling out of chain lightning with ally prompts.
• Guarantee IOOD placement on tiny levels.
• Correct the colour of LRDed glass.
• Don’t display a success message when aborting sublimation of blood at full mp.

Books

• Remove Summon Hydra from the Book of Summonings.
• New spellbook, book of zoology: summon butterflies, sticks to snakes, call canine familiar, ice form, summon ice beast, summon hydra.
• Move Silence from the book of Maledictions to War Chants (replaces Haste).
• Add IOOD to the book of Power.

Other spell-related changes

• Tornado changes for 0.8: pure Air, 80% damage, negative spell enhancer.
• Disable Tukima’s Ball as a player spell.
• Remove the Stonemail spell.
• Allow Sticks to Snakes on javelins, disallow on steel/silver stuff.
• Death channel spectral monsters are not abjurable.
• Invisibility becomes pure Hex.
• Silence becomes Charms/Air.
• Brand spells go back to being Charms.
• Simplify low spell success adjectives: Merge Cruddy and Bad into Very Poor (now 5-30%).
• Make poison clouds all lightgreen.
• Apportation targetting: allow cycling with +/-.
• Don’t destroy the rest when apporting part of a stack.
• Don’t destroy items apported if at the item limit.
• Don’t rot while under Death’s Door.
• Fix spells being unaffected by antimagic in some cases.

Items

Bug fixes

• Fix #2722: crash when accessing a buggy deck’s description.
• Fix 2535: “stasis identification check.
• Fix scroll of fear not being use-IDed properly.
• Fix placeholders in Xom’s book gift names.
• Remove nutrition from kills with vampiric weapons.
• Fix #3614: wizmode creating “cards” not working.
• Fix an out-of-bounds assertion with unknown rings of sustain ability.
• Fix #3441: inventory actions occasionally affecting the wrong item.
• Fix #3319: Don’t prevent butcher swap with temporary distortion brand.
• Fix #3217: equipping sInv artefact not reactivating autopickup.
• Fix #3682: Identify brand of vampiric and holy artefact weapons when wielding fail.
• Fix throwing nets becoming “stuck” after a monster pushed past another monster trapped in a net.
• Prohibit flame-branded missiles from entering trees and wax.
• Filter scrolls of (old) paper out of the item knowledge screen.

Cards

• New card for decks of Wonder: the Alchemist, transmuting some of your gold into health and magic.
• Don’t let high-power common/rare Experience card be better than legendary.
• Fill the Potion card effect list with potions that are useful in battle.
• Make the Torment and Experience cards a little rarer.
• Improve the Hammer card at low power.
• Reduce the maximum duration of Pentagram, Dance, Foxfire and Bones cards.
• Tweak the weapons created by the Dance card at low power.

Other item-related changes

• Remove crystal balls of fixation.
• Nerf the speed brand. Damage reduced to 90%.
• Reintroduce item stat loss prompts.
• Prompt before wearing or wielding a known-cursed item.
• Remove misleading messages about weapon str/dex weighting.
• Warn when equipping armour with a penalty caused by low strength.
• Don’t let the vorpalise weapon effect destroy potions or scrolls.
• Correctly mark amulets of controlled flight useless for Kenku above xl5.
• Identify rings of sustain ability if they block stat loss completely.
• Don’t allow using crystal balls if they are guaranteed to fail.
• Don’t corrode ammo by clumsily bashing jellies with it.
• Don’t let antimagic work on priests.
• Don’t acquire manuals or sage to utterly useless skills.
• Make acquiring rods of striking less likely.
• Obsidian axe bug fixes. Add +Lev to get across obstacles.
• Improve rods of striking: 1d5 -> 1d8.
• Make default books ‘:’ again, use different glyphs for detected items on Windows.

The Dungeon

Bug fixes

• Fix #218: Place upwards and downwards escape hatches in all isolated Orc bubbles.
• Fix returning from portals to Pan clobbering the level.
• Don’t place steam near fire out of bounds.
• Fix door restrictions being ignored when calculating travel paths.
• Make troves handle manuals correctly.
• Fix the portal short timeout messages for unnannounced portals.
• Fix wizmode-blinking (xm, &b) asserting in the Abyss.

Other level-related changes

• No banishment from hell effects.
• Don’t enable cTele by quaffing Elf fountains.
• Shrink the hall of blades, guarantee a single rare weapon with a brand.
• No potion troves for mummies.
• Increase the chance of bleeding on walls.
• Give troves more loot items again.
• Add a note when entering a Pan Lord level.
• Let Zot vaults spawn more often.
• Don’t block off branches with grates.
• A wizmode command (& ^R) to recreate the current level.
• ZotDef: no Abyss with Lugonu.
• Malign Gateway as a hell effect.
• If the Abyss has been wizmode-mapped, update the map on Abyss shifts.
• Various glyph changes for features.
• Give a message when a Golubria portal on the level closes.
• Disable _many_pools in Crypt.
• No more darkgrey walls/floors in Geh:7 or Gloorx.
• Let Abyss and Pan entrances overwrite vaults to make them truly guaranteed.
• Add two new Spider portal vault maps by 7hm.
• An awesome Crypt end by evilmike.
• Replace Wiglaf with Norris in Sprint 1.

Interface

Bug fixes

• Fix a crash when reloading a game after restart_after_game.
• Fix #3535: Buggy movement keys for Windows consoles.
• Fix #3609: autoexplore stopping with no monster in sight.
• Fix multidrop with monsters in sight.
• Fix #3709: travel failing to start if standing right next to a cloud.
• Fix items not being announced when revealed by opening a door.
• Fix #2930: stash search results not being coloured correctly when matching item heaps.
• Fix #1184: Limit tagged block display’s lines to screen size.
• Fix #3700: sprint map menu offering you to replay tutorial.

Options

• Change the explore_stop option to use greedy_pickup_smart by default.
• New travel_key_stop option for whether keypresses should interrupt travel/resting.
• Default easy_exit_menu to false.
• Make all keyhelp menus respect the easy_exit_menu option.
• Mantis #1282: Make autopickup_no_burden default to true.

Other interface changes

• Stop autoexplore when sensing a previously undetected monster nearby.
• New background choice layout, grouped by category.
• Autofight: fire at nearest enemy if wielding a ranged weapon.
• Don’t ranged autofight through walls/glass/scryed walls.
• Don’t start the game if terminal is smaller than 80×24.
• Don’t print wielding effect when switching back from butchering.
• Display “-) Unavailable” if you cannot wield/quiver anything.
• Better error messages for (M)emorisation. (#3665)
• Mantis #1839: Treat clearing annotation prompt as “safe”.
• Mantis #3727: When placing a single exclusion on part of a gate, exclude all of it.
• Mantis #3112: Mention any skeleton vampiric feeding leaves behind.

Tiles

Bug fixes

• Fix #3730: inventory crash at some resolutions.
• Fix #3772: Don’t crash when pressing odd key combinations.
• Fix #3643: kraken simulacra causing crashes in Tiles.
• Fix #3764: crash when drawing disconnected tentacle segment tiles.
• Fix #3596: Don’t fire at friendly monsters when clicking on them.
• Fix #3596: “Unknown command” when mouseclick-travelling.
• Fix #3703: pickup by mouseclick on player icon not taking a turn.
• Fix #3810: mouseclick movement working during the stat prompt.
• Fix manuals being mouseclick-readable while “brainless”.
• Fix mouseclick travel internally using the vi keys.
• Fix #3255: real staff tiles displayed in the undiscovered items list.
• Fix #3356: clearing the map having no effect in Tiles.
• Fix #3516: LRD exploding in odd tiles in the Elven Halls.
• Partially fix #3358: re-init tile flavour on Abyss shifts.
• Make wyvern zombies use the dragon zombie tile.
• Upgrade weapon tile when fixing a temp. brand with ?vorpalise weapon.
• Fix #3639: Slight tweaks to the player naga tiles.

New/improved tiles

• Curio: Ilsuiw, necromancer, wingless Grinder.
• Denzi: silver star, pillar of salt, Ashenzari altar, fire bat, Darkness spell, Leda’s Liquefaction spell tile, chardump command tile, arena icon, wingless shadow imp, pressure plate trap.
• dolphin: jumping spider, shark.
• Omndra: wall blood spatter.
• Porkchop: phoenix.
• purge: eye of devastation.
• XuaXua: glowing mold, death ooze.
• Add a tile for liquefied floor.
• Use !heal wounds icon (rather than !healing) for the wand of healing.
• Apply Tornado’s colour scheme to Tiles, as well.
• Remove omndra’s cauldron title screen, not fitting with the rest of them.

Also various documentation updates and description fixes that I won’t bother listing in detail.

As always, bug reports are highly welcome. After all, the stable version 0.8 is at stake. Thanks in advance!

You see, one of the first things I did when I started coding for Stonesoup was to create an in-game tutorial with situational triggers. Last year’s UP team created a new tutorial from scratch, so the old one was renamed to Hints mode. The idea was to use a fixed map with fixed puzzles and explanations. We had been planning to do something like that anyway, so we were glad when someone took up the task.

Sometime around new year, I had another look at the new tutorial and found a couple of things that made me unhappy. It was much better at its task (a gentle introduction to the game) than the old one had been, but there was still much room for improvement.

As a result and with the students’ project on the horizon, I recreated the tutorial yet again, drawing on both the UP team’s work with some of the puzzles, map definitions and underlying code, and the Hints mode with its situational triggers. The new tutorial divides the explanations into separate “lessons”, each taking about 5-8 minutes, and should be more interesting and helpful than either of the previous versions. So, if you’re new to Crawl or are still unclear about some of the basics of combat, spellcasting or gods, check out the Tutorial! :)

I’d been meaning to talk about the tile panels, too, but I’d probably need some good resolution screenshots for that. So… on with the big changes: The Shining One and Makhleb have been removed – from the list of starting gods. The Alter Self and Extension spells are no more, but there are a couple of new additions. The Elven Halls have been shortened to 5 levels. Oh, and the Enchantment skill and spell school has been split into two smaller ones called Hexes, described as spells that “affect things and monsters (usually negatively)”, and Charms (defined as “things that positively affect yourself”). The latter change brought a version change with it, so the current version is no longer compatible with saves from early January.

And now for our customary megalist of changes:

Spells

• Split Enchantments skill and spell school into Charms and Hexes.
• Remove Alter Self and Extension.
• Make Symbol of Torment and Banishment monster-only spells (plus Kiku/Lugonu).
• Implement a crude spell quiver. Store last spell cast.
• New spell: Summon Dragon (Summ 9), also eligible to pan lords.
• New spell: Summon Hydra (Summ 7), summons short-lived 4-12 headed hydra (depending on power).
• New spell: Tukima’s Ball (Hex 9), animates weapons in view.
• New spell: Darkness (Hex 7), decreases LOS radius by 2.
• Fix #3105: Lee’s Rapid Deconstruction not obeying some checks when destroying walls.
• Fix #2695: casting cloud spells on (and through) walls.
• Fix #2069: casting cloud spells out of range.
• Fix #3413: Don’t let Conjure Flame be used for free reveal of mimics.
• Fix Tukima’s Dance ignoring spell power.
• Fix #3458: silenced spells making noise in crypt.
• Fix #2481, #3460: Don’t let Mummies/Lichform cast Sublimation on themselves, do let them cast Passwall.
• Fix #3067: Don’t waste a turn/MP when failing to cast Sublimation of Blood.
• Cancel Leda’s Liquefaction if player isn’t standing on solid ground.
• Make Tornado Air -> Conj/Air.
• Don’t make Tornado drop as sharply in non-open areas.
• Tornado+Leda -> no flying.
• Make Tornado noisy.
• Make Silence Hex/Air.
• Make Summon Butterflies require spell power for effectiveness.
• Heavily nerf orb apportation. Chance and distance depends on spell power and total distance.
• Make Death Channel spectrals temporary, let ally kills work too. Reduce to level 7.
• Make semi-controlled blink random if it fails to find a location.
• Don’t cancel Condensation Shield when blinking/teleporting.
• Don’t hurt rC- players with condensation shield.
• Don’t allow immediate recasting of Death’s Door.
• Evaporate no longer uses Throwing skill.
• Summon Swarm monsters are always friendly; lower it to level 5.
• When using the Swarm spells, disallow summoning monsters that would anger your god.
• While Ring of Flame is active, flame clouds are removed when you step on them.
• Make LOS-affecting spells work through transparent walls.
• Boost LRD damage.
• Mention glow in Haste/Invis spell descriptions.
• Sticks to Snakes is now a pure transmutation spell.
• Revert the move of branding spells to Charms; they’re Hexes again.
• Sandblast, Shatter, Lee’s and Maxwell’s are no longer Transmutations.
• Leda’s Liquefaction gains Transmutations; lowered 6 -> 4.
• Reduce Passage of Golubria 5 -> 4.
• Reduce Slow 3 -> 2.
• Consolidate the books of Minor Magic into a single book, containing: Magic Dart, Blink, Call Imp, Repel Missiles, Slow, Conjure Flame, Mephitic Cloud.
• book of Changes: -Dig
• book of Conjurations [ice]: -Freezing Cloud, +Lightning Bolt
• book of Fire: -Evaporate, -Summon Elemental, +Fireball, +Dragon Form
• book of Geomancy: -Summon Elemental, +Petrify
• book of Hinderance: +Leda’s Liquefaction
• book of Morphology: -Shatter, -LRD, +Sticks to Snakes, +Petrify, +Ignite Poison
• book of the Sky: -Summon Elemental
• book of Summonings: +Summon Elemental
• book of Transfigurations: -Sandblast, -Polymorph Other, +Stoneskin, +Condensation Shield, +Ice Form
• book of Wizardry: +Agony, +Lightning Bolt
• Greatly simplify randart book generation.

The Player

• Prevent chain paralysis: When coming out of a paralysis, you’re immune for 1d3 turns.
• Assign xp from monster kills proportional to the damage dealt by player/allies out of total damage.
• Remove Paladins and Reavers.
• Remove Chaos Knight of Makhleb.
• Fix crash when a corpse is raised from under a Vampire drinking from it.
• Fix #3311: crash when subliming your last blood potion.
• Fix #2958: crash with Naga poison breath.
• Fix #2329: Don’t count melded slots when calculating stat modifiers.
• Fix Dowsing not updating until the next turn.
• Fix antennae/Ashenzari overriding Dowsing (which gives more data).
• Fix #3245: Defer call to level_change() to prevent SIGHUP abuse.
• Fix #3234: Make gain stat work for satiated Vampires.
• Split out CK/Lugonu -> Abyssal Knight, Pr/Yredelemnul -> Death Knight.
• Overhaul combo recommendations (elliptic).
• Allow starting with a falchion for Fi and Gl, also restrict trident to these backgrounds.
• Add quarterstaff as an option for monks.
• Differentiate Ha/Ko aptitudes: Kobolds are good at Summ/Necro/Hex, Halflings at Charm/Tloc.
• KoHu and KoAM get a crossbow instead of sling + buckler.
• Halflings gain innate mutation resistance 1.
• Give DD a couple more charges in their starting wand but no potions.
• Give DK enough MP and piety to use Animate Remains on D:1, reduce their weapon to +1,+1.
• Give Pr a little more HP and MP (as their healing potion was removed).
• Give He one extra dodging and a +1 robe.
• Give Stalkers a bit more Tmut skill. Don’t pre-ID potions of poison.
• Artificers always start with scroll of recharging identified.
• Lower Felid Conjurations aptitude -1 to -2.
• Bump grey draconians back up to +1 fighting apt.
• Boost Mummy base MR 3 -> 5.
• Nerf Gladiator’s shield to a buckler.
• Give small Gladiators darts instead of stones.
• Make LOS reducers multiplicative rather than additive.
• Potions/cards of experience give you a full level; similarly drain costs a full level.
• Reduce xp loss from draining, (over)compensating for the recent increase.
• Don’t allow any headgear with Horns 3 or Antennae 3.
• Remove map-forgetting and spell-forgetting Divination miscast effects.
• Don’t prevent blink from putting you in dangerous clouds.
• Add a note when paralysed by a monster.
• Add paralysis status to the death message.
• Allow kenku to land/lift off while in lich form.
• Allow to Tomb over unknown traps.
• Show stat zero disability on the HUD and in a few other places.
• Modify the “Nothing wielded” message for forms and clawed chars.
• Include the killing cloud’s source in obituaries.
• Remove Demonspawn breath mutations.
• DS rN+++ and Fire tier 3 facets show up a little earlier, as does Mapping.
• Adapt exclusion radius to the Nightstalker mutation.
• Wider choice of demonic guardians.
• New DS mutation Powered by Pain: restores MP when sufficient damage is taken.
• Double the dex bonus from thin skeletal structure.
• Give freezing cloud immunity to Icemail instead of Passive Freeze.

The Dungeon

• Shorten Elven Halls from 7 -> 5 floors.
• Fix #3258: travel infinite-oscillating when Ashenzari/antennae detect+wipe mimic memory.
• Fix #3182: Don’t attempt to set autoexclusions in unmappable areas.
• Fix inverted logic in in_damaging_cloud.
• Fix rain considered one of the harmless clouds.
• Fix Felids getting unusable items in troves.
• In Lair level generation, don’t ruin the map boundary.
• Don’t place unneeded downstairs on branch ends.
• Fix #3320: make trove manual requests function properly.
• Fix #3257: trees being immune to fire and lightning.
• Fix #3324: travel/explore stopping when opening doors.
• Fix #3014: mispluralisation of staircases/gateways.
• Fix #3335: state that troves only accept identified items.
• Trove price changes.
• Every random Pan vault now has a 1/9 chance of having a demonic rune in it.
• Reduce ambient noise in Hive from 20->5; Orc, Lair 5->4.
• Implement #1960: Allow traveling across radius 1 excluded stairs.
• Implement #1962: Don’t generate cloud autoexclusions when immune.
• Implement #2374: Don’t prompt for cloud-excluded staircases.
• Don’t display cloud exclusions on the Ctrl-O screen.
• Disallow setting exclusions while targeting. xe still works.
• Describe level 1 upstairs as “staircase leading out of the dungeon.”
• Don’t mark level 1 upstairs and branch exits as unvisited.
• Great new vaults by, among others, evilmike (Abyss), minmay (Vaults) and st (Orc).
• Change temple_entry_steam to mist, which doesn’t block autotravel.
• Change the oklob temple entry to a sapling.
• Remove potions of slowing from Cheibriados altar vault.
• Reduce serial vault chances.
• Reduce Lair:8 loot.
• Nerf some loot-heavy minivaults.
• Add no_rtele_into to a number of altar vaults and Ziggurat entries.
• Don’t let early angels teleport out of altar vaults and early Zig portals.
• Allow vaults to specify shops: name, type name, items, greed, count.
• Allow specifying multiple spellbooks in monster specs, one of which is randomly chosen.
• Fix corpse placement not working well on levels with high wall density.
• Tweak randbook mapdef tags: predefined title, player name as owner.
• Allow predefining several spells for randart books in mapdefs.
• New mapdef item tag “mundane” => ego-less +0, +0 item.
• New mapdef item tag “charges” for defining wand charges.
• Allow Gretell to access vault-defined monster descriptions.

Monsters

• Get rid of mummy death curses turning potions into decay.
• Fix #3280: ghosts and Mara illusions not getting spells.
• Fix #3239: ‘x’ hiding monster shields.
• Fix #3102: Don’t spawn monster bands on stairs.
• Fix #3298: Enable door mimic generation.
• Fix #3436: los not updating when a door mimic is killed.
• Fix #3424: assertion when targeting beyond door mimic.
• Fix #3357: Make door mimics block LOS.
• Make detected mimics known.
• Fix #3222: Shedu don’t resurrect banished pairs.
• Fix #3223: Shedu wake when their partner is killed.
• Fix #424: Polymorphed uniques may only cast spells if they can speak.
• Fix monster halos not appearing immediately after save restore.
• Fix monsters not respecting no_rtele_into.
• Fix “2 ancient champions” showing as “2 skeletal warriors”.
• Fix #3218: “It turns to fight!” for invisible sky beasts.
• Better movement AI for ranged attackers, now try to regain line of fire.
• Make yaks, death yaks, ugly things and slime creatures stick together when wandering.
• Try to make wandering band members stick around the leader.
• Make wandering band members path back to the leader.
• Let band leaders displace their followers.
• Allow friendly monsters to path to you across the level.
• Friendlies start following you again after killing target instead of wandering.
• Smart monsters use pathfinding to go around shallow water.
• New unique: Terpsichore, casting Tukima’s Ball.
• Monsters floundering in shallow water move slowly and fumble attacks.
• Large monsters don’t flounder in shallow water.
• Giant monsters can walk through deep water as if it were shallow.
• Give Geryon a reaching attack, make beasts trample.
• Allow monster spiders to cling on walls.
• Tweak Grinder’s spells, weapon, and reduce depth (6-10 -> 3-6).
• Greatly reduce Eustachio’s depth from 8-13 -> 4-10.
• Beef DD (especially Be), sixfirhies and hairy devils.
• Make Murray somewhat more likely to spawn.
• Make skeletal warriors obey silence.
• Sometimes hint at the location of invisible monsters.
• Don’t give Grinder a high-tier wand, nor Ijyb in Sprint.
• Add paralysis and draining to the list of high tier wands.
• Rot-inducing corpses for vampire mosquito, poison+contam corpses for hell hound/hog.
• Make Flame Tongue a monster spell.
• Let player ghosts cast Agony.
• Boring beetles may now burrow along diagonals.
• Remove resistance flags from training dummy.
• Fix monster DDDKs almost never using Injury Mirror.
• Water elementals can now swim rather than fly.
• Apply the same limitation as the player to monsters for casting Leda’s.
• Highlight monsters with pain mirror active.
• Move oklob saplings from lightgreen ‘p’ to lightcyan ‘P’.
• Shiny new Serpent of Hell colours (elemental colours).
• Don’t generate laboratory rat zombies, skeletons, etc.
• Disable ophan corpses, enable generation in ZotDef.
• Wizard commands for banishing or killing a monster.
• Rename blowfly -> vampire mosquito, removed giant mosquito.
• Rename giant ant -> worker ant.
• Rename giant bat -> megabat.
• Rename giant beetle -> goliath beetle.

Gods

• Fix #3405: crash when transfer knowledge brings skills to level 27.
• Fix an overflow error in transfer knowledge.
• Don’t allow negative card power under Nemelex penance.
• Fix #3522: Elyvilon’s weapon destruction not giving piety.
• Fix #3150: No instant retribution from Beogh. Fixes an XP exploit.
• Except for Jiyva, prayer is now only used for (piety-gaining) sacrifices. Other effects are abilities.
• Demand confirmation when butchering forbidden corpses.
• Gods ignore kills of dancing weapons, ball lightning and vortices.
• Mention what weapon is to be blessed in TSO/Kiku/Lugonu final prayer.
• For Ashenzari’s passive monster detection, differentiate by threat level.
• Don’t give piety for eating with Chei.
• Make Cheibriados warn you when putting on boots of running or “rage.
• Use Necromancy skill for Kikubaaqudgha’s invocations.
• Make corpses received from Kiku actually fit for reanimation.
• Okawaru: Might -> Heroism, increasing all weapon skills by 5, up to 27.
• Okawaru: Haste -> Finesse, doubled combat speed (melee and ranged).
• Don’t reduce Sif Muna’s penance for miscasts.
• Add Summon Hydra to Xom’s list of tension spells.
• Reinstate random Xom titles removed a couple of years ago.
• Let Yredelemnul gift eidolons, don’t gift hungry ghosts.
• Overhaul Zin’s Recite invocation: much more powerful and interesting.
• Adjust Zin’s ability piety costs.
• Make Zin hate monsters with mutagenic/rot corpses.

Items

• Remove scrolls of blank paper.
• New GDR formula (elliptic): 14 * (baseAC-2)^(1/2); this is a buff to the medium armours, and a slight nerf to the heavier ones.
• Identify staff types on wield, just like weapons and rods do.
• Give staves and rods a chance to be generate cursed.
• Auto-id gourmand for non-Mu non-full-herbivores (level 3).
• Fix #3468: scroll of fear being identified when read with plants in LOS.
• Allow cancelling some scrolls without consuming them.
• Mention butchery requirement for food in corpse description.
• Allow (M)emorising from books on the floor.
• When using an unidentified potion or scroll, display its name in the message.
• New Demon axe unrandart: obsidian axe, adds a siren-like pull to nearby monsters.
• All weapons have min 7 delay, or better.
• Limit bardings to +4 enchantment.
• Allow staves of poison to affect monsters with rPois.
• Give the staff of death rN+.
• Give the staff of summoning warding, sometimes abjure summons on hit.
• rod of demonology: -Recall.
• rod of summoning: -Abjuration, -Summon Elemental, +Call Canine Familiar.
• Restore part of the chances for unrand weapon/armour generation.
• Remove wizardry effect from Archmagi, boost Tmut/Tloc spells.
• Improve Maxwell’s Patent Armour: AC+15, +preservation ego, +MR.
• Improve Staff of Wucad Mu: remove miscast effects.
• Allow antimagic on lajatangs and demon weapons.
• Allow club unrandarts.
• Axe the ring of Charms.
• Make potions of experience give some xp for skills as well.
• Pearl dragons now leave pearl dragon armour.
• Nerf PDA to AC 10, EV -3.
• Foxfire cards summon a combination of friendly and hostile monsters.
• Disallow Foxfire summon vapours if you have no SInv, add vampire mosquitoes.
• Add elephants, hippogriffs, griffons to the Herd card.
• Make Pentagram and Foxfire a little rarer in decks of summoning.
• For scroll weapon acquirement, give a boost to quick blades.
• Mark scrolls of holy word as dangerous to undead/demonic players.
• Mark rings of hunger as bad for ghouls.

Interface

• New tutorial, split into different maps/lessons.
• Fix numpad being shown inverted in the command help.
• Fix #3263: unknown items toggle not working.
• Don’t prompt for partial stack pickup when travelling.
• Fix #3321: Don’t prompt for unarmed attacks if your “previous weapon” wasn’t a real weapon.
• Fix #3517: crash when binding CMD_AUTOFIGHT if autofight.lua is not included.
• Move partial stack pickup to ;
• Display piety in main screen.
• Use inventory colours for stats area and % screen.
• For local builds, mention morgue location after hiscore or when doing a chardump.
• Extend and rearrange tutorial/hints mode command help.
• Bind Tab to autofight, shift-Tab to autofight_nomove.
• Implement #2840: Clear stack autopickup flag when dropping an item on top of it.
• List prompt choices explicitly, i.e. “(y)es or (n)o” rather than “y/n”.
• Mention scrolling commands on message history screen.
• If you don’t recognise any items, make \ shown all unknown ones.
• Starting sub-menus: Escape brings back to main menu instead of exiting the game.
• Add a message on forgetting a spell by book destruction.
• Acknowledge several canceled prompts with “Okay then.”
• More feedback at the macro prompt.
• Make tutorial selectable from the command line: -tutorial option.
• After a tutorial or sprint map, go back to map screen instead of main screen.
• Mention in ‘@’ that you are inside an external halo.
• Allow ~/.crawl/init.txt as alias for ~/.crawlrc on unix.
• Split monster, feature quotes into another screen toggleable via ‘!’.
• Add several missing descriptions, improve some existing ones.
• Update the manual, FAQ, and options guide.

Tiles

• Fix #3332: crashes with kraken tentacles out of sight.
• Fix #3160: slowdown caused by the command tab.
• Fix #3313: crashes when searching the database for zombies and tentacles.
• Fix #3404: manuals being mouseclick-readable while berserk.
• For the message overlay, treat mouseclicks as relevant to the map (travel etc.) rather than the message history.
• Fix item/feature mouseover leaking mimic information.
• Fix #2914: click on the title screen making selection in the startup menu.
• Fix the startup menu layout.
• Fix #3195: Don’t set swamp_tree_water for water without trees.
• Fix #3284, #3285: click-travel stopping for mimics and toadstools.
• Fix #3485: lantern of shadow not being wieldable by mouseclick.
• Fix misinformation when clicking on rotten chunks as a non-saprovore.
• Move tile info during Abyss shifts.
• Fix #3408: weapon not showing on most of Tiamat’s tiles.
• Fix water walking Beoghite tile being drawn in water.
• Fix #2726: Wrong tooltip for evokable staves.
• Update tile tooltips to Felid item restrictions.
• Allow mouseclick movement through exclusions and stationary monsters.
• Clicking on an enemy while wielding a ranged weapon fire at it.
• Fix the need to click on an enemy twice to fire or cast at it.
• Casting with ctrl+click casts the last spell if appropriate.
• Suppress tree descriptions on mouseover.
• Make sure mouseover descriptions are only triggered by mouse movement.
• Use poison icon for player doll, if poisoned.
• A single mouseclick on the player is enough to pull up the pickup menu.
• Don’t require standing on altars or stairs to get the tooltip.
• Add single-turn waiting to the command tab.
• Add wielded weapon to the training dummy tile.
• Make the tiles quantity prompt pull up a single-item pickup menu.
• For Windows Tiles builds, also print asserts to STDERR.
• Shift the inventory tooltip to the right, so it doesn’t overlap with the messages.
• Automatically zoom the minimap to fill available space.
• Replace “Shift-L-Click” tooltips with “Shift + L-Click”, etc.
• Overhaul tiles_help.txt.
• New title logo by Denzi.
• Fix randart item tiles never actually being used.
• Actually use the zombie/spectral worm tiles in-game.
• Actually use the grate tile for DNGN_GRATE.
• Remove shield tiles from various shieldless monsters. (Done by co.)
• Add co‘s new lair floor tiles, appropriately weighted.
• Other new tiles by co: Killer Klown, giants (capable of weapon display) including Antaeus, vampires, Homunculus spell, lurking horror, Ashenzari’s sensed monsters.
• New tiles by coolio: deep dwarves, Maurice, ancient zyme, Joseph, Mennas, gnoll sergeant/shaman.
• New tiles by Curio: rat zombie, Frederick, lizard zombie, mangroves (Swamp trees), Donald, Kirke.
• New tiles by Denzi: air elemental, statue tiles (dungeon feature), statue form (capable of weapon display), Terpsichore, Charms skill tile, Passage of Golubria spell, raven, various command tiles, Summon Dragon/Hydra spell.
• New tiles by LoginError: dungeon exit, item knowledge and prayer command tiles.
• New tile by LordBistian: Leda’s Liquefaction spell.
• New tiles by psyshvl: eldritch tentacles.

Other stuff

• Increase internal version to 32.
• Don’t include lua chunks in save files.
• Fix #3177: crash when playing after arena.
• Reduce idle clock threshold, fix several bugs in measuring play time.

Lots of bug fixes, and 0.8 draws ever nearer…

And with that, we’re up-to-date with revision 81b92e8 which, as usual, can be downloaded here.
As always, bug reports are highly welcome!

Thank you for your valuable feedback!

As always, you can find source code and binaries on our Downloads page. Unfortunately, we cannot currently provide Mac binaries.

The changelog is a bit rough around the edges, so here’s a more detailed list:

• Fix crashes on entering new levels with restart_after_game = true.
• Fix crash with off-level map viewing.
• Fix a crash when Jiyva worshippers spawn jellies for non-monster-damage.
• Fix crash when trying to throw a quivered dancing weapon.
• Fix problems with Unicode locales other than en_US.UTF-8.
• Fix near-uselessness on ARM.
• Fix save corruption for too long player names.
• Don’t trap teleporting merfolk in a couple of temples.
• Disallow targeting passwall at self.
• Fix stat boosting armour not losing bonus when melding.
• Fix weapon acquirement not considering some rare weapons.
• Disable Trowel card in portal vaults, labyrinths, Pan and the Abyss.
• A variety of other bug fixes.

Hopefully, 0.8 won’t be long in coming now, either.

As always, have fun playing!

You already know about the big Armour unnerfing, and also about the the new skill menu, so what else is new?

Well, for one, there have been so many updates to the Zot Defence minigame that, this time around, I had to put them into a subheading of their own. We’ve got a truckload of new tiles. Lots of crash bugs introduced, and even more resolved. Oh, and the noise propagation has been changed to produce pretty pictures. Well, that and to make it less likely to wake up monsters behind several layers of walls.

Now, without further ado, here’s the (probably woefully incomplete) list of changes within the last month:

Zot Defence

• Rename Zot Defense to Zot Defence.
• Start Zot Defence characters near the Orb.
• Start with the map mapped.
• In ZotDef, the “safest place” is near the orb, even with 20 pan lords there.
• Disable the Abyss.
• Greatly cheapen skill training.
• Don’t explode if hostile plant lands on Orb (such as from attacking a friendly plant). Enjoy the rot.
• Don’t rot people almost instantly when accidentally hitting a plant on the orb.
• Fix broken Bazaar ability.
• Don’t charge for Bazaar portal if the portal doesn’t show up for whatever reason.
• Make predefined waves in ZotDef actually work.
• Scale up the cost of plants and fungus when there’s hundreds of them.
• Introduce a hard cap of 350 allies.
• Fix #3051: Zot Defence create traps not identified.
• Don’t generate several problematic cards (Tomb, Warpwright, Water, Trowel, Minefield, Stairs).
• Fix friendly orange statues being completely useless.
• Fix an overflow for the cost of oklobs.
• Don’t spawn dummy monsters, orb guardians or test spawners.
• Don’t show “Go fetch the orb” messages for Zot Defence.
• Don’t claim there are 27 levels of the dungeon.
• Save the game every time a boss is spawned.
• Set zotdef rune types correctly.
• Dump the ZotDef waves’ table during a crash.

Tiles

• Fix #2884: crash with the monster tab.
• Fix #3092: Update monster tab before drawing it.
• Fix #3117: tile save file data sometimes being read incorrectly.
• Fix #3149: Silently ignore invalid tile_names indices instead of asserting.
• Fix #3145: Clear env.tile_names before loading/creating a level.
• Add temporary option tile_force_regenerate_levels to fix corrupted tile saves.
• Fix #3081: Properly create and destroy detached tabs when needed.
• Fix #3033: crashes when drawing tentacle tiles for kraken zombies.
• Fix #3056: crash on restarting the game with restart_after_game.
• Fix #2815: Re-add the old ghoul tiles.
• Fix a crash with small resolution.
• Reinitialise dungeon tiles if TILE_WALL_MAX changed between versions.
• Fix #2754: switching from console to tiles now displays map properly.
• Fix #3061: Restore minimap after redoing layout.
• Fix #2981, #3001: Items and player being drawn on top of large monster tiles.
• Don’t check i_feel_safe and abilities for drawing the command tab.
• Add a tile_layout_priority option for fully customizable detached tabs.
• New tile tab for common commands.
• Space allowing, detach monster, spell and command tabs.
• Generate a Windows Alert dialog on assertions (Tiles).
• Ctrl-mouseclick asks for quantity for drop/pickup.
• Add an outline to the skill level numbers on the the skill tab.
• Add aptitude icons to the skill tab.
• New title screens (Denzi, Omndra).
• Replace the tile_title_screen option by tile_skip_title.
• Add tiles to the startup menu (Denzi).
• Add kraken tentacle tiles.
• Awesome new giant tiles (co).
• Felid tiles (Denzi).
• Add Centaur/Naga/Felid lich-form tiles. (psyshvl, Denzi)
• Zombie hound and toad tiles (Curio), also kraken.
• New Zz icon for sleeping (stabbable) monsters, question mark for confused ones.
• Add Denzi’s 32×48 Lernaean hydra tiles.
• New swamp tree tiles (Curio), displayed as based in water.
• Desaturate red of Swamp floor tiles.
• Add withdrawn turtle/agate snail variant tiles (coolio).
• Add some deep dwarf monster tiles (coolio).
• Steal the inappropriate air elemental tile for twisters.
• Suppress blood overlay for the torch wall variants.
• Draw blood overlay beneath non-wall dungeon feature tiles.
• Reinit feature tiles for wizmode-created features.
• Update gate tiles when changing features in wizard mode.
• Store tile name for vault-defined monsters.
• Store vault-defined tile names in the save.
• Use rusty sewer tile when a sewer times out.
• Don’t treat pressing and releasing the mouse button as the same event.

Monsters

• Fix #2975: crash on loading save after monster cast Malign Gateway.
• Fix #3114: remembered feature mimic crash.
• Fix #2941: a crash involving kraken heads killing themselves.
• Fix ghosts not getting mids.
• Fix an arena crash with monster indices.
• Fix arena crashes with monster berserkers.
• Fix #3111: Make monster operator= copy mid so that monsters placed from the transit list don’t lose their mid.
• Fix #3043: feature mimic glyph changes.
• Fix #3146: branch stair mimics breaking overview, ^G travel.
• Fix several bugs with respect to monster Brothers in Arms.
• Don’t give more xp for killing berserk monsters.
• Fix monsters losing maxhp on berserk.
• Fix #2975: eldritch tentacle attitude change affecting all monsters.
• Allies animating dead is ok for hungry herb3.
• Don’t mislead into dummy monsters.
• Disallow polymorphing plants into oklob saplings, at least for now.
• Fix #2480: Recolour greater nagas to light magenta. Yellow made them not stand out from Snake walls.
• Fix plants getting Xom-polymorphed into burning bushes.
• Make monster tracers round up average expected damage so that monsters like oklob plants will use ranged attacks on high-AC targets.
• Fix helpless fake enchantment not removed when aux hit does no damage.
• Fix mon.number being 32 bit in memory but only 16 in saves.
• Fix message leak for unseen Spriggan riders.
• Fix unseen returning weapon message leak.
• Fix monsters not being disturbed by clouds unless damaged by the cloud.
• Fix monsters getting not the same bonuses from dragon hides as players.
• Give every monster a globally unique id for proper attribution of clouds, poisoning etc.
• New unique: Jory, unique vampire in the Tower of Silence vault.
• New monsters: fire crab, raven, porcupine, bog mummy.
• Replace grey rats with porcupines in most instances.
• Fix bog mummies being capable of “withdrawing into their shells”.
• Shedu are now fully implemented (paired holy monsters, capable of resurrecting one another).
• Implement laboratory rats, using coolio’s tiles as base.
• Non-stupid monsters try to avoid slime walls.
• Make monsters consider resistances along with AC for armour pickup.
• Only allow allies to pick up weapons, armour and ammunition.
• Boost ettins to hit as hard as dual-wielding stone giants. Move them deeper.
• Sheep can catch fire and spread it to other sheep.
• Fix mermaid/siren mesmerise not attracting Shoals merfolk as intended.
• If a wandering monster fails to move, try a new wander target.
• Delay monsters’ Brothers in Arms until after first berserk.
• Tweak sets of monsters’ acceptable “Brothers in Arms”.
• Convert corpse rot into a monster-castable spell.
• Allow adding monster enchantments from Lua.
• Add ENCH_PERM_TORNADO for monsters, with the appropriate effect and immunity to Tornado spell.
• Add new wizmode targeting command to heal monsters (Ctrl-H).
• Unnerf friendly orange crystal statue out of ZotDef.
• Casting messages for all holy monster spells.
• Rename holy dragon to pearl dragon.

Spells

• Fix beam tracer assert when casting mephitic cloud.
• Fix a double miscast crash.
• Fix silence only taking effect 1 turn after loading a save.
• Fix igniting poison clouds not giving xp.
• Remove spells: Bone Shards, Tame Beasts, Portal.
• Remove the Book of Beasts.
• New spell: Leda’s Liquefaction (area slowing effect).
• Nerf sticky flame range to 1.
• Fix Sticky Flame having range 2 under Vehumet.
• Reduce Haunt duration
• Make Tornado respect wind corridors.
• Allow other clouds to overwrite tornado.
• Buff Static Discharge: Higher damage and slightly higher chance of arcing.
• Increase Sandblast to range 2 without stones, range 3 with.
• Boost Stone Arrow damage from 2d12 at 50 power to 3d11.
• Change Necromancy spell levels: Control Undead: 6 -> 5, Borgnjor’s: 5 -> 7, Death Channel: 9 -> 8.
• Move spells around among the Necromancy books.
• Cheapen Translocation spells: Teleport Other: 4 -> 3, Warp Weapon: 7 -> 5, Dispersal: 7 -> 6.
• Reduce Ring of Flames level 8 -> 7.
• Fix #2991: Allow immediate re-casting of Malign Gateway.
• Fix #2865: mupltiple malign gateways.
• Make IOOD’s caster suffer from Injury Mirror.
• Fix #2400: Shadow Creatures summoning feature mimics.
• Add Freeze to Vehumet’s list, it’s unquestionably direct physical damage.
• Shift Air miscasts by one level, adjust level 1 miscasts.
• New level 3 Air miscasts.
• Ensure Death’s Door leaves you at least 1 hp.
• Ignore DDoor if maxhp goes to 0 or below.
• Don’t take notes or cancel tornado when restoring the game.

The dungeon

• Fix #3055: Don’t use KILL_NONE for unknown killers.
• Fix crashes when wizmode teleporting between branches.
• Fix #2772: Refactor volcano_caves to prevent trapping.
• Fix #3021: Kiku or Yredelemnul sometimes missing from the dungeon.
• Fix Shoals open-sea background and inappropriate wall types in portals.
• Troves: don’t ask for +5 robes of resistance, +2 is the max.
• Fix #3107: Trove portals shouldn’t inspect the ground.
• Fix #2940: Shoals plants being placed before minivaults.
• Don’t overdo vitrification in labyrinths, but still make glass more common.
• Replace labyrinths’ stone wall minotaur vaults with green crystal ones.
• Generate at most one labyrinth per game (~70% chance), at depth 10-20, never in Slime or Orc.
• Prevent randomly teleporting into the Slime:6 loot chambers.
• New noise propagation system, taking into account walls and doors.
• Nerf troves: increased entry fees, reduced loot.
• Reduce sewer loot.
• Store the blame when clouds are placed.
• Limit MAX_SHOPS to 64.
• Introduce serial vaults consisting of several mini vaults.
• Only one serial vault per level, with reduced chances of generation.
• New sprint map by 78291.
• New Lair and Snake endings by minmay.
• Many new minivaults.
• Dump extra vaults properly.
• Allow maps to specify different CHANCE and WEIGHT for different depth ranges.
• Don’t randomly generate shops within minivaults already on the level.
• Give different welcome spam for different game types.
• Dungeon builder code clean-up.

The player

• Fix crash on creating FeRe, FeCr, or HEAM.
• Fix a few cases of LOS distortion.
• Double GDR from body armour.
• Re-balance Demonspawn’s Fire Facet, Nightstalker, Iridiscent scales.
• Fix #2943: Don’t prompt for actions if item isn’t in inventory.
• Fix Deep Dwarves not dying to rot.
• Prevent grey draconians from drowning if they fall in deep water when transformed.
• Fix #3010: Unify cloud damage routines for player and monsters.
• Fix wasted turn when attempting to quaff berserk rage whilst exhausted
• Fix an off-by-one bug with torment resistance.
• Fix #2937: Apply terrain change to player when banished.
• Add evil items to default autopickup exceptions
• Kill the player instantly if drained below 0 maxhp (possible with Borgnjor’s).
• Someone who’s flying won’t be “waist-deep” in water.
• Felids: make corpses and zombies named after you.

Gods

• Give the player better control over what items to sac to Nemelex.
• Fix #2995: reskilling from fighting reducing your maxHP to 0 or below.
• Fix #3116: End transfer knowledge when destination skill is trained to level 27.
• Fix spells working through walls via Scrying.
• Give monsters pathfinding AI boosts when you’re under Ashenzari penance.
• Fix #2642: Zin warns for initial yellow glow, penance for deliberate additional glow.
• Make high-powered Recite try to find an effect that applies to the monster.
• Recite resistance tweaking; there are less bad effects early on, and it is still useful later.
• Stop TSO from considering monsters with a Heal Other spell to be holies.
• Allow recasting of Injury Mirror.
• Cancel Injury Mirror on abandoning Yred.
• Make rage-inducing missiles considered to be potentially hasty.
• Tweaks to tgw_lugonu_bribe.

Items

• Cap armour’s enchantments to its base AC.
• Scrolls of enchant armour no longer have a chance of failing.
• Boost staves of venom. Olgreb becomes 1/4 irresistible.
• Fix staff of Olgreb on demons with no rPois.
• Buff Mace of Variability, Bloodbane, Jihad, plutonium sword, crystal spear, Eos.
• Fix acquirement hardly ever generating “plain” crystal plates and dragon armour.
• Make acquirement’s “redundant armour” check consider things seen rather than worn.
• Don’t consider over-expensive shop items as “seen” for acquirement purposes.
• Allow acquirement of non-regular shields, weighted by skills.
• Adjust plate acquirement (scrolls/genie) to 0.6 dodging changes.
• For non-divine armour acquirement, prefer not yet seen base types as well.

Other

• New, more informative and mouse-operable skill menu.
• Reduce spam of ‘foo comes into view’ messages
• Inform the user if travel/explore cuts off because the PC is in an excluded area.
• For single items of quantity > 1 ‘g’ now prompts for an amount. Use the bindkey option to change this behaviour.
• Don’t prompt for quantity when picking up a pile of gold.
• autofight.lua is now loaded by default.
• Update the FAQ on questions of Mantis, Tavern, etc.
• Update INSTALL.txt.
• Don’t try to use curses in print_error_screen if curses hasn’t been initialised yet.
• Don’t spam about tile data not being present in console builds.
• Simplify tag minor version handling.
• Fix a memory leak and potential crash on browsing corrupted saves.

My, we have been busy!

And with that, we’re up-to-date with version c2f102f0 which, as usual, can be downloaded here, including Mac builds even!

So here’s the gargantuan listing of what’s been going on in 0.8 development. Enjoy!

Bug fixes

Critical bugs

1. Fix #2289: crashes on entering new levels with restart_after_game = true.
2. Fix Jiyva off-level eating crash.
3. Fix a crash when Jiyva worshippers spawn jellies for non-monster-damage.
4. Fix #2628: Don’t treat rods as throwable. Fixes crashes.
5. Fix a crash when autoinscribing items no longer in the inventory.
6. Fix ?/M crashing; monster_info won’t have a real monster.
7. Fix a demonspawn mutation loop.
8. Fix #2909: Prevent save file corruption for overly long player names.
9. Fix #537: wizard mode spellcasting crash.
10. Fix #2879: gods missing from the game due to corrupted_temple.

Non-critical bugs are listed under the corresponding category.

The big stuff

New god:

• Ashenzari, god of divinations

New species:

• Felids, sentient cats

New spells:

• Passage of Golubria (level 5 Translocations)
• Malign Gateway (level 7 Summonings/Translocations)
• Tornado (level 9 Air)

New monster sets:

• holy monsters
• deep dwarves
• feature mimics

The former two may be encountered in Ziggurats.

Everything else

Gods

Yredelemnul

• Turn Yred’s prayer (Injury Mirror) into an ability.
• Reduce Injury Mirror spam when getting hit by multiple attacks.
• Remove Yred’s twisted enslaved souls, they’re all intact now.
• Let torment damage be reflected by Yred.
• Take kills of artificial beings (golems, gargoyles).

Kikubaaqudgha

• Tone down Kiku’s mummy death curse protection.
• Kiku protects followers from ordinary mummy curses.
• Make Kiku properly accept your undead slaves’ kills of demons.

Elyvilon

• Allow Ely’s Destroy Weapons ability to work on staves.
• Improve Elyvilon’s healing descriptions.
• Improve Ely’s in-game pacification messaging.

Zin

• Allow Zin to protect from Hell effects, dependent on piety.
• Make spell failure glow anger Zin.
• Distinguish costly glow in Zin’s messages.

The Shining One

• Remove item sacrifices.
• Fix #2784: Properly remove halo on TSO penance.

All good gods

• Extending (card/Xom) Necromutation results in excommunication.

Xom

• Fix #2903: Disallow starvation by Xom swapping you to a vampiric weapon.
• Harmless new Xom effect: coloured smoke trail behind player.
• Tiles: Xom altar animations (by coolio).

Cheibriados

• Beefed up Chei wrath to be interesting and dangerous.
• Make armour keep its ponderousness when melded.

Jiyva

• Followers of Jiyva gain food, hp and mp on jellies slurping items.
• Jiyva no longer provides the “amulet of conservation” effect.

Trog

• Extended rage doesn’t cause glow.
• Fix #411: Properly handle igniting spellbooks under clouds or features.

Fedhas

• Fix #2457: Make Fedhas care about trees burned down in forest fires.

Sif Muna

• Sif Muna punishes destruction of spellbooks.

General

• Add some penance welcome messages.
• New wizmode command &W to force god wrath.

The player character

Bugs fixed

1. Fix doubled berserk penalties
2. Fix mutators and glowing occasionally giving good mutations.
3. Fix clarity being ignored in some cases when it’s supposed to be heeded.
4. Fix Merfolk in water having functional talons.
5. Fix #873: Make hellfire ignore monster AC.
6. Fix #2727: Handle passive freeze mutation properly handle in clouds of cold.
7. Fix #2186: Demonspawn Fire and Ice facets are now mutually exclusive.
8. Fix #2758: Blade Hands being better for STR and DEX of multiplies of 4.
9. Fix #2901: Player undead and Demonspawn can now be mutated properly again.
10. Fix some body slot mutations not taking effect immediately.
11. Fix #2205: Ghouls being unable to use food-cost abilities while starving.
12. Fix #2294: Let bloodless Vampires and starving Ghouls evoke invisibility.
13. Fix #2380: Scale Vampire hunger for poisonous blood with duration.
14. Fix #2136: Don’t train stealth for unaware pacified monsters.
15. Fix Empathy not working in portal vaults and Pan.
16. Always display ability upgrade messages in the proper sequence.
17. Fix skill points rescaling when changing race in wizmode.
18. Fix #2506: Update Draconians’ glyph on maturing (show_player_species).

Other player character changes

• More interesting Draconians.
• Dragon form changes for Draconians according to colour.
• Allow Merfolk transformations even in water.
• Retain talons, fangs and tail in appropriate transformations.
• Stalkers as transmutations-based Stabbers.
• Balanced demonic guardian timeout, minimum time of existence at 4 turns.
• Don’t treat contaminated chunks as clean for Ghouls.
• Allow Merfolk/Kenku to blink over deep water/lava.
• Allow Kenku to stop flying.
• Change Kenku aptitudes to air +3 and earth -3.
• Boost yellow scales acid resistance.
• Auxilary unarmed attacks have additional effects, according to type.
• Character selection: highlight recommended species in aptitudes table (%).
• Show cross/anti training as aptitude bonus/malus on the m-screen.
• Potions of berserk rage are useful for Vampires when full or above.
• Let fur help against acid, but only for naked slots.
• Healers gain 1 extra starting mp, but no Unarmed Combat.
• Allow redefining the spider form’s glyph (“spider”).
• Tiles fix: Fix Merfolk keeping the fishtail tile when levitating out of water.
• Tiles: Many new player doll tiles (by coolio).

Interface improvement

Bugs fixed

1. Fix #2513: exclusion LOS not being updated properly.
2. Fix #1983: Don’t waste a turn for not renouncing religion.
3. Fix cursor placement with messages_at_top.
4. Fix #2399: Tab not working correctly in startup menus.
5. Fix #2595: default god choice not being read correctly.
6. Fix #2228: Reinitialize the message window and the notes for new games.

Other interface changes

• Allow item interaction from the inventory.
• Messages for things coming into view even when not exploring.
• More status lights: transformation, post-berserk exhaustion, temporary resistances.
• Timeout information for temporary resists and See Invisible.
• Don’t consider places next to slime walls as “safe”.
• Make i_feel_safe smarter about stuff behind lava/statues/etc.
• Explicitly name inventory items that are getting destroyed.
• Display ghosts’ xl rank, species and background when they come into view and in the notes.
• ASCII: Don’t override monster colour when berserk.
• Stop shift-running for exclusions.
• Allow ‘ to auto-switch from unarmed to slot (b).
• Misc. items don’t require wielding (except decks, lantern of shadow).
• Don’t waste turns attempting known prevented scroll teleports/blinks.
• Abort scrolls used on items if none are available.
• Inscribe item modification scrolls with “tried on foo”.
• Disallow accidentally blinking to dangerous places.
• Disallow autoexploring while berserking.
• Colours for output of Ctrl-F.
• Re-enable highlighting of notes.
• Colour annotations in Overview.
• Colouring labyrinth messages.
• Add force_more_messages for bazaar and labyrinth announcements.
• Don’t prompt for which ring to swap if one of them is cursed.
• When enchanting an unknown piece of armour, mark it as uncursed.
• Make the . drop/pickup selector respect quantity input.
• ‘*’ inverts selection instead of selecting drop_filter, and ‘,’ selects all instead of inverting.
• More information when missing.
• More information when MR is effective.
• Display on the HUD if you’re both hasted and slowed.
• Add a toggle to the discoveries screen to display _un_known items.
• Check terrain before clouds for moveto check.
• Don’t warn about entering excluded portals.
• Force a -more- on death.
• Autoinscribe randarts after death.
• Allow easyexit on the overview screen.
• Add “You are wearing:” message when amulet of stasis autoIDs.
• Taskbar overlap is now automatically detected, and the window is placed just above it.
• Allow setting of the window size relative to the screen size.
• Tiles: Add a skill management tab. (Tiles by Denzi.)
• Tiles: Disturbance tiles for invisible monsters in clouds.
• Tiles: More helpful and less obnoxious exclusion tiles.

Spells

Bugs fixed

1. Fix #2018: Prevent passwalling into deep water and lava if it would kill you.
2. Fix #2581: Teleportation and trampling interrupt Passwall.
3. Fix #2274: Disallow targeting Passwall at self, thereby wasting a turn.
4. Fix weapon grinding via Shadow Creatures in the Hall of Blades.
5. Fix #801: Animate Dead no longer animates through walls.
6. Fix #2265: Don’t prompt for casting auto-hit spells “in direction” of allies.
7. Fix #2291: More accurate Conjure Flame error messages.
8. Fix #2598: bugginess in Confusing Touch status display.

Other spell changes

• Haste now makes you go at x1.5 speed, not x2 as before. Similarly, Slow makes you only
  1.5 times slower, not 2.
• Replace Selective Amnesia with scroll of amnesia.
• Allow forgetting spell from book, destroying the book in question.
• Removed slower training for magic schools, doubled exp cost for opposing schools.
• Add a toggle to the memorisation screen for the spell descriptions.
• Remove the restriction for cursed gear blocking transformations.
• Auto-id items of wizardry if you have spellcasting skills.
• Enable autotargeting for Vampiric Draining and Freeze.
• Make Borgnor’s Revivification cost 2-11 *percent* of maxhp.
• Restore casting noise for target spells.
• Add noise level to spell description.
• Increased claw damage for Dragon Form, also allows trampling.
• Animate Skeleton works on unskeletalized corpses and leaves chunks behind.
• Shadow Creatures summons only mobile monsters.
• Slightly bump Orb of Destruction (IOOD) damage.
• Mention the damage reduction for short range in IOODs’ description.
• Allow Sticks to Snakes on staves.
• Allow Tukimizing staves.
• Move Horrible Things and Haunt from Summonings into Demonology.
• Remove Call Imp, Abjuration and Recall from the book of Demonology.
• Move around spells between books of Summonings and Demonology.
• Reduce the chance of any book to be replaced by Power/Wizardry from 10% to 4%.
• Don’t prompt for targeting self with clouds if you’ve got the matching resistance.
• Make trying to cast Death’s Door when ineligible cost no time nor MP.
• Make only heavy armour remove Ozocubu’s Armour on wearing.
• Make large rocks do extra damage with Sandblast.
• Allow swapping to large rocks when Sandblast is memorised.
• Offer wielding coagulated blood for Sublimation of Blood.
• Make transformations affect stealth.
• Don’t prompt for unwielding weapons branded with Warp Weapon.
• Don’t incorrectly mark Levitation/Flight as useless.
• More sensible spell sorting in the memorisation list.
• Include spell hunger in the chardump.

Monsters

Bugs fixed

1. Fix #2450: Disallow monsters casting emergency spells while berserk.
2. Fix #2497: Disallow various attacks on submerged monsters.
3. Fix #33: sleeping trapdoor spiders submerging.
4. Fix #2862: silence message from off-screen monster.
5. Fix #2566: undead krakens’ tentacles regenerating health.
6. Fix #2280: Aizul casting sleep through allies, same for Mara’s bolts.
7. Fix #2547: rock worms aimlessly moving around instead of attacking.
8. Fix information leaks for misled monsters in monster_info.
9. Fix Pikel’s freed slaves following the player.
10. Fix #2434: Fix dispersal and Lugonu’s bend space blinking monsters more than once.
11. Fix monsters throwing unthrowable weapons.
12. Fix #2746: Prevent monsters from bleeding when no damage was dealt.
13. Fix #2452: Make jumping spiders leap rather than blink.
14. Fix #2609: buggy description of monster missile deflection.
15. Fix buggy monster names involving prefixes or adjectives.
16. Fix #2853: buggy messages for helpless monsters.

Other monster changes

• New monsters: silent spectre, sky beast.
• New monster spells: Cause Fear, Drain Life, Agony, Summon Elemental, Noxious Cloud.
• New unique: Mennas, unique angel.
• Compensate for the haste nerf by slowing monsters that most people fight hasted.
• Huge monsters (dragons, elephants) can trample smaller ones, moving them around.
• Krakens have multi-segment tentacles.
• Spiders can cling to walls which allows them to effectively bypass water and other obstacles.
• Limit number of summons from lamp of fire and fan of air.
• Get rid of chain paralysis.
• Prevent confused giant eyeballs from paralyzing.
• Make aquatic monsters chase instead of submerging if they can.
• Friendly monsters told to “wait here” don’t follow through stairs.
• Merged slimes split on polymorph.
• Ghost moth no longer hits like a bulldozer.
• Porkelated monsters can’t cast spells either.
• Enable elephant generation in Dungeon and Lair.
• Implement snail/turtle shells; withdrawing into such a shell adds extra protection.
• Replace monster spriggan warpers with berserkers.
• Monster draconians may upgrade their weapons/armour.
• Revert “more descriptive size names”.
• Print “zot!” sound when a friendly monster triggers a zot trap outside LOS.
• Make zombified monsters retain their stats (at least HD and HP).
• Monsters respect glowing when deciding whether to cast Invisibility.
• Ugly things may mutate if adjacent to a monster glowing with radiation.
• Make good and strict neutral monsters not choose nearby foes.
• Disallow armour mimics from taking the forms of hides.
• Naga/serpent glyph changes.
• Refactor monster vamp draining.
• Remove Duane, Francis, Norbert; rename Wayne to Wiglaf.
• Experimentally increase iron imps’ AC from 5 to 6.
• Experimentally decrease bushes’ AC from 30 to 15.
• Don’t consider plants/fungi “interesting”, no matter their rarity.
• Tiles: New mimic overlay (by coolio).
• Tiles: Different-coloured variant tiles for Tiamat (by minmay).
• New tiles for Geryon and the water elemental (by coolio).
• Tiles fix: Burning bushes now actually use their tile.

Level/Map changes

Bugs fixed

1. Fix #2493: portal vault levels not getting deleted.
2. Fix #1542: duplicate baileys in dungeon due to trowel card.
3. Fix #1870, #2651: beach-front portal vaults.
4. Fix #2641: entering portal vaults from Hell.
5. Fix #2837: Travelling to/from the Vestibule of Hell works now.
6. Fix #2576: Handle missing portal vault levels more gracefully.
7. Fix no-ctele announcements being affected by Tloc skills.
8. Fix vetoed levels messing up previous level’s connectivity data.
9. Don’t generate outright useless troves.
10. Fix #2394: Shoals incremental tide updates to guarantee a shallow water intermediate step.
11. Fix #1417: Don’t open transparent secret doors with warnings.
12. Fix #2583: Update stair emphasis on level load.
13. Fix good_item gold giving ludicrous amounts.
14. Fix traps on Zot:5 not being generated.

Other level changes

• Ambient noise levels for dungeon branches (affecting stealth).
• Add Spider levels to Zigs, with bonus ghost moths and tarantellas.
• Include 2010 tournament Dungeon Sprint map, slightly tweaked.
• Plain water fountains give no nutrition.
• Reveal teletraps triggered by a monster in sight.
• Replace hell exit stairs with portals.
• New temple maps, many with < 12 altars.
• Overflow altars for Xom.
• New orb chamber vaults.
• Boost alarm trap noise to 25.
• A custom trap: basket of spiders.
• A custom trap: falling grate.
• Many new entry vaults and mini vaults.
• Allow specifying monster gods in vaults.
• Add a KPROP “no_jiyva” that renders items safe. Used in slime end.
• Add explicit KFEAT: O = enter_branch, instead of relying on rune_subst.
• Add a wizard command (^E) that dumps level generation information.
• Tiles: New statue tiles (by coolio and LoginError).

Items

Bugs fixed

1. Fix #2435: stacks of blood potions breaking when eaten by jellies and coagulating.
2. Fix #2670: Autopickup weapons subjected to Tukima’s Dance.
3. Fix #2441: Disallow blowing Geryon’s horn when silenced.
4. Fix randarts with unknown base type sometimes not being eligible for identification.
5. Fix #2188: AutoID’d “clarity not identifying item type.
6. Fix #2224: rod pluses not being considered for ?identify.
7. Fix #1880, #2626: misleading spell descriptions on rods; display average power.
8. Fix #1998: unknown scrolls listing themselves in the item menu.
9. Fix #2807: wrong items showing up in the wield screen.
10. Fix #1791: Inscribe “was cursed” for items uncursed using enchant foo.
11. Fix #2597: incorrect “comes into view” message for Xom animated weapons.
12. Disallow creation of randart demonic weapons with the holy wrath brand.
13. Fix #2714: permafood being coloured brown like contaminated chunks.
14. Fix an information leak about magic resistance from unidentified items.

Other item changes

• Remove the robe of the Archmagi’s exp penalty, without any compensation.
• Fix the robe of the Archmagi doubly enhancing Haunt and Regen.
• New items: scroll of curse jewellery, scroll of amnesia.
• Antimagic weapon brand.
• New artefact: ring of Charms. (May enslave creatures of your species.)
• Disable equipment corrosion from slime walls.
• Asphyxiation resistance blocks curare damage, but not slowing.
• Poison resistance protects against curare entirely.
• Add new chunk type that is both poisonous and contaminated.
• Remove +AC/+EV from randarts. Fixedarts still keep them.
• Do proper foe checking for rod spells that are direct effects.
• ?EWII may uncurse blowguns.
• Remove nutrition on hit for vampiric weapons.
• Make Evocations skill help with ball of seeing radius.
• Disallow use of staff of channeling when starving.
• Give missiles of flame / frost some bonus damage.
• Add noise to missiles.
• Make wield mass check apply to all items.
• Make torment rarer in plain/ornate decks.
• Allow staves and rods to become cursed.
• Special and non-special unrandarts use the same generation code.
• More detailed corrosion resistance reporting.
• Tweak blood potion descriptions to mention nutrition for non-herbivores.
• Hide pluses for rings and rods in the \ menu.
• Tiles fix #2590: randomized animation of unidentified wand/missile.
• Tiles: New runed armour/weapon tiles (by LoginError).

Other Tiles-related changes

• Add Omndra’s cool new title screen.
• Reinstate the red haze during berserk.
• Improve default tiles layout for high resolutions.
• New blood tiles.
• Run pngcrush in non-debug builds if installed, shaving 700KB per download.

Some of the changes (especially for Tiles) can be admired on the updated Screenshot page.

Coding changes

• New save file format (safer, more convenient and *much* smaller).
• Autosave at game start and in Sprint, to keep crashes from losing the game.
• Internal changes to handling monsters/LOS/map/UI, merged from NetTiles.
• Merge “Zot Defense” code into trunk.
• Plug security holes: multiuser, chmod, …
• Except for public servers, ensure robustness against filesystem crashes.
• Reorder spell code by school and functionality.
• Simplify ghost I/O.
• Cleanup the level generation code.
• New option: show_real_turns (default off).

And with that, we’re up-to-date with version 0.8.0-a0-3582-g199d915.

As always, you can play trunk online or download a fairly recent build for Windows/Mac.
Please submit bug reports to our fabulous bug tracker and give feedback on the wiki. Thank you!

This is really new, so there may be kinks to be ironed out. If you have any ideas for improvement, you can also speak up on the corresponding Mantis thread.

Have fun discussing all things Crawlific and more!

Update: Due various reasons the forum has moved.

Around the 0.5.0 release in early August 2009, an innocuous discussion on IRC turned into an impromptu poll about Stonesoup’s player base. The survey was subsequently ported to various forums, hosted on CAO and pointed out in the mailing list.

Between August 17 and some time in early November, we received a total of 274 replies to the following 12 questions:

1. What is your age?
2. What is your country?
3. Do you play locally, on a server, or both?
4. Do you play Tiles, ASCII, or both?
5. OS(es) at home?
6. Roguelikes played before? (NetHack, ADOM, etc.?)
7. Where did you learn about Crawl?
8. And when?
9. How many Crawl wins? (If none, you may specify your best game.)
10. If you take part in the tournament, where did you hear about it?
11. Ever recommend Crawl?
12. Which computer game have you played most in the last month (July)?

The results, as posted once we had 250 replies, can be found here.
In November, I presented the complete results at the International Roguelike Development Conference in Geneva.

In the rest of this post, I will attempt to summarize the most interesting findings, but leave the more detailed numbers and in-depth discussion to the two files linked above.

The average Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup player at the time of the survey (or at least the average survey participant) can be described as follows: He (94% likelihood of being male) is between 25-29 years old (31%, average age: 27.3; most common age: 25) and lives in the USA (54%). Even if he doesn’t, he’s very likely to speak English as a primary language (75%). He uses Windows XP (52% Windows, of these 63% Win XP) at home, and only plays Crawl locally (54%) because he prefers Tiles to ASCII (60% if playing locally, 38% total). This also means that he did not take part in the tournament (39% participants total, 23% Tiles players).

He’d probably never even heard of the original Dungeon Crawl and only started playing after Stone Soup came out (65%). Crawl is not his first roguelike (91%) and he’s very likely to have at least tried NetHack before (73%) and maybe also ADOM (40%), Angband (28%) or one of the smaller roguelikes (e.g. Rogue, DoomRL, Dwarf Fortress, POWDER, various Angband variants, etc.)

At the time of taking the poll, he hadn’t won Crawl yet (62%) and probably hadn’t even found his first rune yet (79% of non-winners), but he nonetheless claims to have recommended the game at least once (83%) and also lists Crawl as the game played most “within the last month” (53% total, 27% if discounting tournament participants). Though, to be fair, hardcore players are more likely to take part in such a survey, so we should take all results with a grain of salt. Still, thank you! :)

There’s an interesting rift between ASCII players and Tiles players when it comes to percentage of winners (49% ASCII, 25% Tiles). However, interpreting this finding to mean that “ASCII players are better players” would be overly hasty. For one, Tiles players tend to be relatively new to the game (Tiles: 72% joined since Stonesoup, 34% in 2009; ASCII: 61% joined since Stonesoup, 20% in 2009) if not the genre, whereas players who knew Crawl from before tiles were introduced were already used to the console “graphics” and might have seen little reason to switch. Second, and more importantly, there’s a much stronger correlation when comparing local vs. server play (25% local winners, 68% online), possibly because players on the server are more likely to use the ##crawl channel to ask for playing tips and can receive advice from more experienced players watching them. The survey also showed that many players felt they “weren’t good enough” for online play or the tournament, so it might be that the more experienced Tiles players eventually switch to online (ASCII) play, even though they would prefer a way to continue playing the Tiles version online.

In general, Crawl’s popularity has increased significantly once tiles had been added. Downloads jumped from 2,472 and 4,321 in total (source and various platforms included) for 0.1.7 and 0.2.7, respectively, to 10,374 downloads of the Windows Tiles version alone in 0.3.4. (All numbers taken from SourceForge on March 31, 2010.)

A few conclusions

The impact of language is much stronger than we expected. It would be interesting to compare this effect with other games which rely a lot on text (e.g. MMORPGs which have not been translated or text adventures, i.e. interactive fiction).

A good many players have known the game for years, yet have never won. This is important for design purposes: adding features for the early game (e.g. new gods, shallow vaults, etc.) will be appreciated by those players.

The Crawl tournament would benefit immensely from tiles play over the internet. While some players oppose Tiles on principle, we also got a lot of praise for the quality of Crawl’s tiles and interface; for example by players who said that they play other roguelikes in ASCII, yet Crawl with Tiles. As developers, we plan to keep supporting both modes. Each of them has advantages of its own and we will continue to improve their interfaces.

As you might or might not know, the overall Shoals development happened with the speed of a glacier. First started during the development of 0.3.x, the beginning of the Shoals implementation, then codenamed Islands, roughly coincided with Enne Walker’s integration of tiles into Stone Soup. To me, it thus makes perfect sense to have a look at the relationship between Tiles and Shoals development.

Actually, the very first effect of the Shoals on the game had nothing to do with tiles and was quite indirect:
With the unexpectedly slow development of our first attempt at creating a new dungeon branch and the huge success of portal vaults, both of which were introduced around the same time, level designers were encouraged to implement their branch ideas in the form of portal vaults. One could say that indirectly, the Shoals’ repeated postponement resulted in a larger number of portal vaults than might otherwise have been the case.

Shoals screenshot in DCSS 0.5.2 wizard mode

When I had my first look at the tiled version of Dungeon Crawl, around the release of 0.3.2, I believe it already had Denzi’s beautiful sandy floor tiles, but the Shoals didn’t have a unique monster set yet, instead drawing on centaurs, cyclopes and fish. During 0.4 development, Haran Pilpel changed the Shoals’ level generation to create a number of islands, the size of which decreased as their number increased the deeper you delved into the branch. We also added merfolk fighters and mermaids as well as the Shoals-only unique cyclops Polyphemus, but little else happened. 0.5 saw the addition of sirens, harpies, sharks and the unique merfolk sorceress Ilsuiw, but that was still by far not enough to declare the branch “ready for shipping”.

Sure, we were dreaming of plants and rocky island shapes, a greater merfolk variety, krakens and tides, but it all seemed so very far away.

Shoals screenshot in the 0.6 development version, showing new water and kraken tiles

Then, in 0.6, suddenly things picked up speed, as many developers chimed in so as to, this time, finally get the Shoals out of the door. First, the rock border was changed to “open sea”, both to slam down on the cheap trick of digging out the level border and for greater flavour. A while later, Denzi’s new water tiles were added, their wave like look considered perfect for a sea-based dungeon branch. Next came Adam Borowski’s implementation of the fearsome kraken, and, of course, the addition of the corresponding tiles, again courtesy of Denzi. The idea of krakens inhabiting the Shoals was actually a very old one, but it took a long time for us to work out how to handle its tentacles, now treated similarly to summoned monsters that disappear when they stray too far away from the kraken’s main body.

A few months later, Darshan Shaligram stepped in, and in a series of baffling commits greatly overhauled the Shoals’ level generation — and introduced tides! Without the islands’ previous strongly elliptic shape, the levels now look much more natural and the tides’ rising water gives a sense of urgency to exploring the branch, especially as the merfolk monsters, now of greater variety and more dangerous than ever before, feel very much at home there and don’t mind high tide in the least.

When I had a look at the new and improved Shoals, I couldn’t help thinking that the water tiles’ clearcut edges, while working okay for stagnant bodies of water, looked out of place with the rise and fall of the sea. Thus, the introduction of the tides prompted me to add transitional wave tiles between water and floor, something that incidentally would have been much harder to do without Denzi’s new tiles.

0.6 Shoals screenshot, featuring Ilsuiw and entourage, as well as a snapping turtle

Unfortunately, the overlays for monsters standing in water couldn’t cope with the new dynamically constructed water tiles, which is why Enne Walker rewrote the Tiles’ transparency calculations – twice! – so the overlays are displayed correctly for everyone. You see, one of the methods doesn’t work well for some systems, so we had to implement another, simpler way of doing overlays. The former method is nicer and can be enabled by setting the option tile_better_transparency = true. As it’s not entirely reliable we unfortunately can’t make it the default one.

Independently from that, we also modified the code to allow developers to assign weights to tile variants in a tileset, so they can have different probabilities of being used when chosen at random. Again, I mostly had the Shoals in mind when I did that because I felt that the more eyecatching “large rock” floor tiles shouldn’t be as common as the ones featuring pebbles or only sand, though it also came in handy for the animated water tiles as well as for a variety of wall types. The animations, incidentally, were not spawned by the Shoals but were originally supposed to be a mere debugging tool in tracking down the infamous Tiles’ lag. Then I liked the effect so much that I applied it whereever I could. :)

After December’s introduction of merfolk aquamancers, javelineers and impalers, in January, we got snapping turtles and alligators. While I was happy to see the Shoals becoming more and more interesting, the tiles developer in me grumbled quite a bit about the sudden demand for more and more new tiles. It was a similar frustration, actually, in response to the great number of tileless new uniques, which led me to create some public lists on the wiki covering missing tiles for 0.6 and elsewhere, which in turn resulted in us getting more tile submissions from players than we’d ever bargained for, including redesigns of old uniques and, of course, many tiles for new monsters and dungeon features. At the same time, my working method has always been to add tiles in two phases: first, a preliminary version that is workable and hopefully not too shabby, and later, an improved version thereof. This is why, all the while the other development took place, already existing tiles (and not only for monsters) were getting tidied up, modified to some degree, or replaced with new designs, some of them contributed by non-devteam members. Today, of the Shoals monsters, only the alligators are still lacking tiles.

0.5.2 Shoals monster tiles, plus first turtle version

0.6 Shoals monster tiles, now improved

Development of the Shoals continues, and overhauls of level generation have branched out to other sections of the Dungeon, such as the Lair, the Swamp, the Vaults. Meanwhile, the tile developers of the team like the transitional water tiles much more than we had anticipated and are by now planning to apply the new water tiles and wave transitions to the rest of the Dungeon as well. In the long run, we’d like to make levels look less grid-like, less “tiled” for lack of a better word, in general by also smoothening the transitions among other tile types, most prominently floor, and maybe also some of the more natural wall types. For 0.6, we regard the Shoals as some kind of testing ground where we can experiment with the goal of a smoother level layout.

0.6 Shoals screenshot, between ruins and the open sea

Just imagine the whole of the dungeon looking like that! I certainly like what I’m seeing and I hope you do, too.

Yes, I know this makes four releases in three weeks – it’s not something to be proud of. At least we’re fast in fixing the bugs. :)

In other news, the first Crawl Stone Soup tournament has begun and will continue throughout August. To join you have to register on CAO or CDO, both reachable via ssh. For a guide on how to use ssh and play online, click here.

Once you’ve got an account you can use it to play Crawl online and compete against other players in a number of different categories.

Good luck everybody!

For more information click here.

In other news, Stone Soup now has a FreeBSD port.