A heads-up also that crawl.kelbi.org will be shutting down after the tournament. Many thanks to Floraline for their years of hard work maintaining the server! We’ll have news on a replacement server sometime in the coming few months.

Looks like we somehow have not even posted one trunk update since 0.30 released (!), so to fit all the major changes in, this post will be a little more condensed than usual. I’ll still try to sneak in one or two fun things, and the changelog has more details on some things.

• Shapeshifting and Transmuting:
  • Form spells have turned into a new type of item, ‘talismans’.
  • Talismans are very rare items that, when used, transform the user into a corresponding form until they choose to leave it.
  • A new skill, Shapeshifting, governs use of talismans. Like Spellcasting, the ‘default’ (human) aptitude for this is -1.
  • Form changes:
    • Beastly Appendage has been replaced by Beast Form, provides innate Slaying but melds all auxiliary armour.
    • Spider Form has been replaced by Flux Form, which causes melee attacks to magically contaminate and explode victims. It melds weapons, shields, and body armour.
    • Ice Form has been replaced by Serpent Form, which transforms the user into a massive, foe-crushing python.
    • New form: Maw, which opens a horrible, foe-devouring second mouth in the user’s chest. It grants an auxiliary bite attack and sometimes heals the user when they kill foes in melee, in exchange for melding body armour.
    • Lich Form has been replaced by Death Form, which severely debilitates foes struck in melee and grants an active ‘Siphon Essence’ ability that torments nearby foes to heal the player. It’s otherwise similar.
    • All forms have had their stats adjusted and scaling rebalanced.
  • A new background, Shapeshifter, replaces the Transmuter start. Shapeshifters start out with two talismans, Beast and Flux.
  • The Transmutations skill continues to support use of the ~ten remaining Transmutations spells. There are no current plans to remove it.
  • You can read more about the motivation for these changes here and here. Note that many of the implementation details have changed since those were written.
• Hexslingers:
  • Hexslingers have had their starting spell set vigorously reworked.
  • New L2 Hex spell: Jinxbite. Deals additional Will-checking damage to foes attacked while its duration lasts, but also halves the caster’s will. Lots of faerie laughter is involved.
  • New L3 Hex spell: Sigil of Binding. Creates two magical traps nearby, which temporarily bind hapless victims in place. Don’t step in these yourself!
  • New L4 Hex spell: Dimensional Bullseye (replacing Portal Projectile). Targets a foe and teleports all shots fired at other foes to also hit the chosen unfortunate.
  • Inner Flame and Cause Fear are still included. Slow is no longer in the starting spell set.
• Uniques:
  • New: Jeremiah, a peaceful barachi trapped between sleep and waking. Their dreams leak into reality in a stream of beautiful butterflies.
  • Returned and revamped: Norris, a death cultist who surfs into battle with a gang of skysharks.
  • Maurice is now a vine stalker, with high regen and antimagic bites.
  • Erica is now an octopode, with constriction and a more focused spell set.
  • Frederick has a new spell set.
• Other monsters:
  • New and returning:
    • Kobold blastminers, who blast enemies with alchemical cannons and get sent flying backwards by the recoil.
    • Brain worms, which eat magic and minds alike
    • Glass eyes (replacing floating eyes), which vitrify victims to make them fragile as glass.
    • Formless jellyfish, which constrict and sting for single-turn paralysis.
    • Arcanists, a kind of fairly dangerous vitrifying wizard.
    • Crocodiles, which drag victims backward.
  • Alligators and reapers are now somewhat weaker, but drag victims backward.
  • Ufetubi and tengu warriors now slip behind their foe before meleeing.
  • Tengu reavers now have rMsl.
  • ‘Wizard’ has been renamed to ‘occulist’ and is now somewhat stronger.
  • Great orbs of eyes have a new spell set, and are slightly stronger.
  • Deep Elf Elementalists now cast LRD instead of Awaken Earth.
  • Red very ugly things now do direct fire damage instead of sticky flame.
  • Abominations’ speed is no longer randomized. (Did you know it was..?)
  • Behavioral changes:
    • Attacks of opportunity have been reworked. Previously, whenever players moved away from a same-speed-or-faster monster, the monster had a 1/3 chance of launching a free melee attack. Now, they launch such attacks only if they move to follow the player, and there’s a chance for the attack to cost a small amount of their time (so they can fall behind). The old ‘random energy’ effect, causing monsters to have a chance of gaining or losing a small amount of time when moving, has returned specifically when monsters are pursuing the player. Some discussion of the reasoning for these changes: A, B, and C. The last of those describes an experimental ‘hot pursuit’ section which has since been removed, but ‘history’ section remains applicable.
    • Giant monsters can now be ensnared by webs and nets.
    • Jellies can no longer be netted or constricted.
    • Allied undead no longer become angry when damaged.
    • Monsters no longer use up charges when zapping wands.
    • Monsters can no longer use scrolls or potions.
    • Some monsters now have special dialogue after killing the player.
• Other species changes:
  • At XL 7, Armataurs now gain temporary regeneration when they roll (rampage) toward foes. Their base health has been decreased to compensate.
  • Felids now get an extra life at XL 1, don’t lose XLs on dying, and have somewhat more base health. They no longer have fast movement – see here.
  • Tengu now have inherent Acrobat (+15 EV after moving/waiting) at XL 1, and gain +4 EV at XL7 instead of a 20% EV bonus.
  • Mummies now get their first necromancy enhancer at XL 1, not 3.
  • Vine Stalkers now get regeneration at XL 1, not 4.
  • Djinn now use all magic skills, instead of only Spellcasting. Djinn can only choose to train all magic skills or none. This is pretty similar to how they worked before, but means that e.g. they can now use skill manuals, do elemental staff or pain brand damage, and care about other types of Ashenzari skill curses.
  • Ghouls start with an additional +4 Int, to encourage more variety in playstyles.
  • Formicids can no longer be involuntarily shafted.
• Items:
  • An old favorite returns: sack of spiders, an XP-charged evoker which webs foes and summons creepy-crawlies. Alternates with boxes of beasts.
  • Changes to ranged weapons:
    • New weapon: orcbow, between a shortbow and an arbalest in strength.
    • Hand crossbows are now hand cannons, alchemically belching smoke and death. (See here for why.)
    • New unrand: Mule, a +7 flaming hand cannon which sometimes knocks the user backwards when fired.
  • Potions of flight replaced with potions of enlightenment, which also give Will+.
  • Scrolls of magic mapping replaced with scrolls of revelation, which also give X-ray vision and sInv for one turn.
  • Quick blades now hit twice for every swing, with a higher attack delay. Gyre & Gimble hits four times.
  • Artefact staves can now enhance other schools of magic, even those which don’t have corresponding base enhancer staff types.
  • The dreamshard necklace now has Acrobat, but only restores the player to 1 HP when they’d otherwise die, rather than healing 50-100% of their max HP.
  • To simplify, shields no longer degrade in effectiveness with each hit taken per-turn. Instead, they now have a limit on per-turn blocks, based on shield type – bucklers give 2, kites give 3, towers give 4.
• Spells:
  • New: Brom’s Barrelling Boulder (L4 Earth/Conj). Creates a boulder, which crushed and knocks back foes until it’s broken or it hits a wall. (In the latter case, it explodes!)
  • Arcjolt now initially arcs to foes within two tiles of the caster.
  • Static Discharge now does more damage, but checks half AC instead of none.
  • Borgnjor’s Vile Clutch (and Fastroot) now work on invisible enemies, but the former now does less damage.
  • Hailstorm does more damage at low power and less at high power.
  • Swiftness now works in water. (Did you know it didn’t?)
• Other Notes:
  • The Slime Pits now have many possible endings, instead of one fixed pre-designed one. Many thanks to long-time contributor nicolae for his work on this one!
  • Monsters with unusual items (e.g. distortion) are now highlit in purple by default.
  • Okawaru now gives exactly one weapon gift and one armour gift as a capstone (chosen by the player), rather than giving many random gifts.
  • Nemelex’s Cloud, Elements and Swarm cards have been changed to scale more appropriately with power.
  • The Ecumenical Temple is now fully mapped on entry. This saves time for some of the really big temples, and also lets us add really silly stuff like a labyrinth-themed temple. Not that we’d ever actually add one of those, of course…

Many thanks also to Sastreii and CanOfWorms for contributing many new tiles over this period, including spell icons, artefact art, cat dragons, and more. In particular, thanks to CanOfWorms for commissioning this lovely new splash screen.

Thanks also to all the community members who’ve contributed over the last year, who I am too tired to credit in full. Crawl wouldn’t be Stone Soup without you.

Happy crawling, and happy holidays!

We’d also like to celebrate the addition of two (!) new devs to the team. Félix Medrano (née robertxgray) and Implojin have both more than proven themselves by their work so far, with Félix specializing on the Crawl Android port and Implojin contributing great designs like Rampage and the toga of Victory. We’re very happy to have them onboard!

Anyway, let’s get some very real and serious changes headed your way.

• Branches and Environments:
  • You can now enter the Vaults without holding a rune. However… you can never leave! Unless you get a rune while you’re inside.
  • Slime walls now corrode instead of dealing damage. Unless you use Oozemancy, in which case they still do damage. Also, they don’t corrode monsters. Unless the monsters take Oozemancy damage. It’s all pretty straightforward.
  • Thunderstorms now do much more damage. If you were in the habit of standing in the middle of thunderstorms before… this might be a good time to break the habit.
  • Zigsprint now lets you start with orbs of guile or mayhem. But why would you not use Gong? It’s Gong!
  • By overwhelming popular demand, you can now place up to 100 waypoints. We know you, the players, were suffocating under the previous 10 waypoint limit. Now you are freed. Go forth!
• Characters:
  • Harm now stacks. This is a game changer.
  • Channeling effects (from Wucad Mu or orbs of energy) no longer backlash and no longer scale with Evocations. They just give -Wiz and have a flat chance of refunding spell costs. We’ve reworked this mechanic about four times this year and I’m sure it’s going to stick at some point.
  • The acidic bite mutation works again, for the first time since 2016. Oops.
  • Armataurs no longer claim to drink ten potions at once. Their tongues are long, but they aren’t actually that long.
• Gods:
  • Piety costs are now shown more clearly for invocations. Did you know that Enter the Abyss costs Piety——-? Sort of unclear what that means, but it seems like an awful lot of -s, huh?
  • Kikubaaqudgha’s second gift is now a little less predictable. It could be anything. It’s probably about four Necromancy spells… but what if it’s not?
  • Good gods will no longer get mad when you generate negative energy clouds with a condenser vane. Instead, they’ll get even. They put their metaphysical foot down and squash the evil clouds – just like that!
  • Hepliaklqana’s Knights are now as good at attacking as ogres, or at least as slow as them.
  • Xom is no longer fixated on giving you a few different mutations.
  • Ashenzari’s trap detection ability is now only available at 4* of piety. Except that traps are always revealed these days, so this is more of a malevolence suppression ability. The world is so cruel…
  • Ashenzari’s skill boost is a little less boosted.
  • For Gozag’s gold distraction aura duration, size really doesn’t matter. (Anymore.)
  • Ru can no longer redirect butterflies’ attacks.
  • Flame Tongue is removed.
• Unrands:
  • New unrand: the toga ‘Victory’. Gives +AC, Int, and Slay if you kill scary stuff while wearing a toga. If you drink or read anything while foes are in sight, though, you are a coward and a fool, and the toga will revert to its primal state. Victory!
  • New unrand: the Consecrated Labrys. It’s like the obsidian axe, but it’s good instead of evil, and it gets more enchanted the more scary enemies are in sight. As with the obsidian axe, we strongly recommend charging headfirst at every group of enemies while holding this.
  • New unrand: the Storm Queen’s Shield. You have probably never in your life thought “I would like to be a shock serpent”, but that’s how powerful this shield is: it will grant a wish you didn’t even know you had.
  • The Staff of Dispater is now an orb. It has +AC and *Corrode. Much to ponder…
  • The Slick Slippers are even slicker and slipperier than before. Also, they’ll no longer hustle you around when your feet are already occupied climbing stairs.
  • Majin-Bo’s spell-vamprisim now can suck up blood from a Polar Vortex. It all just flies right into the middle, it’s kinda gross.
  • Many unrands now have helpful inscriptions for their special effects, like EVERVAMP, MEGAVAMP, and probably some other things that don’t involve VAMP.
  • Morg has been removed. Actually, for all you know, it might have been removed years ago. Would you have even noticed?
• Items:
  • Orbs, scarfs, and even magical staffs can now all generate as random artefacts. Finally, you can find the orb of “Zot” of rage!
  • Randarts are very slightly, ever so imperceptibly, worse. Yes, that is why your best character splatted the other day. How did you know?
  • Hyperinflation has hit throwing weapons, causing javelins, boomerangs, darts, and even large rocks to skyrocket in price.
  • Tremorstones and condenser vanes are now in a set: you only get one of the two per game. Star-crossed lovers…
  • When throwing weapons break, they now deal extra damage. It’s a considerate thing. They’re very sorry that you can’t throw them around anymore and they’d like to offer you a little parting gift as they go.
  • Spectral weapons now deal damage as if you were launching an extra attack, rather than using a secret and inscrutable set of spectral weapon monster stats. They’re also not allowed to attack themselves anymore, since that was really creeping us out.
  • Longbows, arbalests, and hand crossbows have all had their stats shuffled around a little.
• Spells:
  • New spell: Plasma Beam (L5 Fire/Air), which shoots a bolt of lightning AND a bolt of fire at the most distant foe around. My first email address involved both “fire” and “plasma” so I’m very excited about this.
  • Lesser Beckoning is now level 2 (was level 3). This gives more potential design space for Greater Beckoning, to say nothing of the long-awaited Greatest Beckoning.
  • Battlespheres now fire when you cast any destructive spell, matching Vehumet. Vehumet says that a god can’t be matched by a mere L5 spell, but I’m unconvinced.
  • Arcjolt can now hit any monster in sight, as long as there are a continuous chain of other monsters between you and that monster.
  • Irradiate now only malmutates monsters sometimes. Try saying ‘pretty please’ before casting it for best effects.
  • Lightning Bolt is gone. Amazing it lasted this long, really. Not really famous for their longevity, lightning bolts.
• Monsters:
  • New monster: sleepcaps. If they hit you, their spores might put you to sleep. If they put you to sleep, the next thing that hits you will get a big stabbing damage multiplier. And if you lose all your hit points? That’s right: you die in real life.
  • New monster: skysharks, cutting through the air (as sharks are known to). If they bite you and draw blood, somehow they’re the ones that get mad about it? And that makes them bite even harder? Seems very unfair, frankly.
  • Smitten monsters now wake up, but they’re not happy about it.
  • Giant fish zombies have been removed.
  • Endotherms have been removed.
• Webtiles:
  • You can now enter explore mode online! Hit + to explore freely… without any fear of death. You are immortal. You are a god!
  • You can now block trolls. They cannot regenerate from this. (Not yet enabled on every server: this will roll out to servers next time they restart webtiles.)
• Crawl has, somehow, become even more Australian.
• We fixed a typo in which we wrote “entire the” instead of “the entire”. Not really a big deal, honestly… except that this text has been in every single morgue since 2007! Shouldn’t someone have told us? We’re so embarrassed right now.
• Last but not least, we rewrote maybe_bool to be, arguably, better. See below for
  motivation, but here are the practical notes up front:

  * `maybe_bool` becomes a class rather than an enum.
  * After this commit, nearly anywhere you would write MB_FALSE or
    MB_TRUE you would simply write `false` or `true`.
  * Where you would write MB_MAYBE you now should write
    `maybe_bool::maybe`.
  * Comparison to `true` or `false` is safe and will do exact
    comparison. (The latter may appear surprising, but it is because
    comparison will cause a bool to be cast to maybe_bool, rather than a
    maybe_bool to be cast down to bool.)
  * Semantics change: `maybe_bool::maybe` does not convert to true by
    default under any circumstance.
  * In cases where you would have previously written `mb == MB_TRUE` you
    can just rely on a bool cast (`maybe` does not convert to `true`). In
    cases where you would write `mb == MB_FALSE` you can write `!mb`.
  * frombool and tobool are replaced respectively by constructors and
    the class method maybe_bool::to_bool (as well as an explicit bool
    cast).
  * While bool explicit operators have weird rules and can be used
    implicitly in some cases, there are still times when you'll need
    to do the cast. In particular, if a function returns a bool, to
    return a maybe_bool you'll need to explicitly cast.
  * Mixing bools and maybe_bools in logical expressions generally requires
    an explicit cast. (If you write a condition that just uses !, that
    doesn't need one.)
  
  Old `maybe_bool` had the advantage of simplicity: it was just an enum
  and as long as these enum values are used consistently, it is pretty
  simple to use and as efficient as any integer-based type, with
  effectively no implementation code.
  
  However, there are a few complaints about it. First, the naming scheme
  was quite ad hoc across the enum values and various functions that used
  them.  Second, and more importantly in my mind, the enum-based
  implementation led in a very non-clean way to implicit int and bool
  casts, and a very ad hoc semantics for this type, especially in its
  interaction with boolean expressions. Taken as a three-valued logic, it
  is very weird. The law of the excluded middle *is* valid (in the sense
  that `p || !p` is always true), but double negation elimination is *not*
  valid (i.e. `!!p != p`); the weaker double negation inference `!!!p ==
  !p` does hold conceivably classing it with some paraconsistent logics,
  though I haven't found an exact analogue (see [1], though this logic
  doesn't much resemble L8 there, which has the same double negation
  pattern). At a practical level this ad hoc nature made mixing with bools
  in both directions weird and somewhat error prone; aside from the above
  concerns (which essentially result from MB_MAYBE implicitly casting to
  `true`), `true` would cast to the enum value MB_MAYBE, leading to clunky
  conversion code in a lot of places, needing to always use MB
  constants, and error-prone comparison with regular bools.
  
  This commit tries to systematize things more cleanly, albeit with a much
  more complicated implementation. The underlying data type does still
  amount to a fancy enum (now an enum class), but it's wrapped with a more
  clearly defined class, largely inspired by boost's logic::tribool.  (I
  considered whether importing one of the various "`optional` but for
  c++11" packages out there might be a solution, but ultimately rejected
  this, because these classes tend to have an even weirder, for a
  bool-based type, set of implicit conversions to bool). A `bool`
  constructor is provided making it generally safe to use `true` and
  `false` as e.g. return values, and an explicit cast to bool is provided
  that has a better default than MB_MAYBE->true. (In some cases, this may
  be the desired semantics, of course, but this is still doable via
  `to_bool` or direct checks against false.) The operator semantics is
  based on the standard "Strong Kleene" three-valued logic operators,
  which provide a (imo) very sensible set of defaults for a three-valued
  logic. Note that because of the existence of the bool operator, this
  won't let you mix `maybe_bool`s in logical expressions together with
  bools without some explicit casting one way or the other.  The
  implementation is nearly (but not quite) purely header-based.
  
  As part of this commit, I have implemented everything as a
  back-compatibility layer and purely just tried to clarify the semantics
  of various instances of maybe_bool in cases where it did get an implicit
  conversion. The bulk of this is around `can_wear_item` which does tend
  to treat its maybe return as truth-y.  A future commit will convert
  MB_TRUE etc into their `maybe_bool::t` etc equivalents.
  
  [1] Kamide 2013, A Hierarchy of Weak Double Negations, Studia Logica 101.6

Many thanks also to Sastreii and CanOfWorms for contributing many new tiles over this period, including spell icons, artefact art, Shrek, and more.

Thanks also to all the community members who’ve contributed over the last few months, who I am too tired to credit in full. In particular, check out what SpinningBird sent us!

Happy crawling! Stay serious out there.

And off we go!

• New background: Reaver.
  • Reavers are warrior-mages, primarily focused on melee combat but with
    situational Conjurations for tough situations.
  • New starting spell: Kiss of Death (L1 Conj/Necro). Does high draining damage to an adjacent enemy, at the cost of significant max HP drain to the caster.
  • New starting spell: Momentum Strike (L2 Conj/Tloc). Redirects the caster’s momentum for a damaging attack that doesn’t require line of fire, but locks the caster in place for some turns after a hit. (It cannot be recast until this effect expires.)
  • Reavers also start with Hailstorm, which is now L3 (formerly L4) and can now miss. Ice Elementalists lose Hailstorm, but get Summon Ice Beast in exchange.
• Species rework: Palentongas have become Armataurs.
  • Like Palentongas, Armataurs are large, scaled mammals, wearing bardings
    instead of boots.
  • New species innate: Long Tongue, which doubles the effects of drinking potions, but makes reading scrolls take 50% longer.
  • New species innate: Rolling (innate Rampage – extra movement when moving toward enemies).
  • Rolling Charge is now a spell, Vhi’s Electric Charge (L3 Tloc/Air). It sends the caster charging toward a nearby foe to deliver an electrified strike, phasing through targets in the way. Warpers now start with Vhi’s Electric Charge instead of Gell’s Gravitas.
  • Armataurs lose the Rolling Charge and Curl abilities.
  • Armataurs’ aptitude have been adjusted across the board.
  • See these commits for more explanation of the reasoning behind the changes.
• God rework: Lugonu has been substantially revised, with the goal of being a much more tempting pick for players unlucky enough to have been banished to the Abyss.
  • The Banishment ability is now available at ** piety (was ***). It fails less often, and when it is resisted, the victim will be malmutated instead, making them more vulnerable in future. (This does not apply to other sources of banishment, such as the monster spell or weapons of distortion.)
  • When another god’s wrath descends upon a worshipper, Lugonu now scornfully responds by banishing several nearby foes.
  • Altars to Lugonu are more than three times as common in the Abyss.
  • Converting to Lugonu in the Abyss now gives even more bonus piety.
  • The Abyssal Knight background and the Bend Space ability have been removed. (For more explanation of why, see these commits.)
• New brand: Heavy.
  • Heavy weapons have +80% base damage and +50% attack delay. (This has proven to be pretty strong, so don’t be surprised if this gets toned down slightly before release.)
  • Both melee and ranged weapons can be Heavy.
  • The Vorpal brand has been removed. It simply wasn’t very exciting. Flaming and Freezing remain as very simple damage multiplier brands.
  • The Dark Maul and Sniper are both now Heavy instead of Vorpal, and have had various stat adjustments. (Sniper is now +27.) Other formerly Vorpal unrands have changed or lost brands and gained enchantment as needed.
• New unrands:
  • The Hermit’s Pendant, an amulet of faith that sets the wearer’s Invocations skill to 14 and their Evocations skill to 0. (Only for as long as you continue wearing the amulet, of course.)
  • The Force Lance, a Heavy +5 lance (a spear with +2 base damage, like Wyrmbane). When it lands a damaging hit, there’s a 1/3 chance of the target being knocked back, suffering extra damage if it collides with anything.
  • The Slick Slippers, which make all damaging melee attacks trample their wearer backward. They also provide immunity to constriction, engulfing, webbing and netting!
• New spells:
  • Cigotuvi’s Dreadful Rot (L2 Necro/Air/Pois). Rots away the caster’s flesh to create a cloud of deadly miasma on their tile. Great for escapes, but also very fun with effects like Lesser Beckoning and potions of attraction! Replaces Conjure Flame in the Hedge Wizard starting spell set.
  • Kindle Blastsparks (L3 Fire/Air/Tloc). Creates a cloud of ‘blastsparks’ on the caster’s tile, which explode when any creature moves into them or when they are hit by fire damage. Usable as a land mine, as a way to create distance from enemies, or for other fun tricks. Replaces Conjure Flame in the Fire Elementalist starting spell set.
  • Arcjolt (L5 Conj/Air). Electrocutes everything adjacent to the caster, everything adjacent to those creatures, etc, etc, in a chain.
  • (And of course Reavers’ Kiss of Death and Momentum Strike are both new, too – see above!)
• Further item-related changes:
  • The Mad Mage’s Maulers have been reworked. They lose Int-3 and RegenMP and gain -Cast and MPVamp, causing the wearer to gain MP when they strike foes in melee. They now add as much damage when spending MP in melee, matching the normal infusion ego’s ratio of MP to bonus damage.
  • Rings of evasion are now +5 instead of +4, to be closer in value to other rings (eg AC/Dexterity). The Ring of the Hare, accordingly, goes from +8 to +10.
  • Majin-Bo is now a one-handed staff instead of a two-handed quarterstaff. (The HP vamp and not being able to wield an enhancer staff is plenty of drawback.)
  • Scrolls of butterflies now create dramatically more butterflies. They now alternate with scrolls of summoning instead of scrolls of fog, since the latter have a more unique and irreplacable effect. Watch this space!
  • All ranged weapons can now generate with electrocution, antimagic, and draining brands. Venom ranged weapons no longer appear.
  • Short sword attack delay reduced.
  • Evocable invisibilty and blink no longer have an MP cost.
  • Spells have been reshuffled between books, and a new Maxwell’s Memoranda book has been added.
  • Hand crossbows are very slightly weaker and slower.
  • The Lochaber Axe now causes temporary HP drain on unequip.
• Further character-related changes:
  • Arcane Marksmen (Markspersons?) have been renamed to Hexslingers, for stylistic and pun reasons.
  • Base regeneration increased by 0.2 HP/turn, to make resting faster in the early game.
  • Mummies have innate Faith, giving extra piety gain.
  • Reaching the end of the Zot clock now causes a smaller amount of permanent max HP loss (similar to Borgnjor’s Revivication), rather than temp HP drain. The Zot clock can no longer directly kill the player. (This change is intended to simplify the mechanic and to move away from a weird/nonstandard use of HP draining.)
  • Large species move at normal speed through shallow water.
  • rF- and rC- are added to the ‘bad mutations’ pool.
  • Will is now capped at +++++. (When affected by the Will/2 status, the cap is applied before halving.)
  • Pale draconians’ breath is no longer usable twice as often as others’.
  • Formicids can now shaft themselves in the Tomb of the Ancients.
• Further god-related changes:
  • When worshipping at a faded altar, the player is given a preview of three gods the altar might belong to. (Then you can back out if you don’t like the options, without suffering wrath.) Care to take a gamble on that altar to Sif Muna, Vehumet, or Trog?
  • Gozag’s corpse-to-gold effect now blocks enemies from creating simulacra.
  • Fedhas protects trees from being set on fire by the player.
  • Okawaru’s Heroism and Finesse abilities cost more piety.
  • Removed Ashenzari’s Astral Vision (automatically seeing through walls). It was very annoying for autotravel/resting/etc, had a surprising number of bugs, and Ashenzari was quite strong enough without it. Maybe we’ll try to add a fixed version back in someday as a potion or such.
• Further monster-related changes:
  • Demonic Crawlers lose their Warning Cry ability, their omni-elemental resistances, and some Willpower. In exchange, they get higher damage and very fast regeneration. This is intended to make Spider overall easier (by making it easier to sneak around), to reduce overlap with Swamp’s Bunyips (and their Warning Cry), and to experiment more with fast regenerating monsters.
  • Doom Hounds’ Howl is now resistable by Will.
  • Many monsters (boulder beetles, two-headed ogres, various orcs…) do less damage.
  • Walking Tomes are now unable to cast while silenced.
  • Ironbound Frosthearts’ Creeping Frost spell is now fully resistable by rC.

Many thanks also to Sastreii for contributing many new tiles over this period, including spell icons, artefact art, new draconian sprites, and more.

Thanks to all the community members who’ve contributed over the last 6 months: robertxgray, Zhang Kai, Monkooky, 张凯, pdpol, Roadster Tracker, Rytis Petronis, Perry Fraser, scarf, bfaires, Aliscans, mainiacjoe, Benjamin S Wolf, Ernest Antanishinm, yrdzrfxndfvh, Alex, RypoFalem, Samantha Tobias, Michael Del Monte, Marcelo Henrique Cerri, Josh Braendel, Duong Hoang, and kd7uiy.

To send you off, here’s another new splash screen, this one from Micah C:

Happy crawling!

DCSS 0.29 features a sweeping rework of Necromancy, streamlining and upgrading many of its spells, along with similar improvements to the necromantic god Kikubaaqudgha. Ranged weapons have likewise been streamlined and reworked to be more satisfying to use.

For those seeking a special challenge, we’ve also added a new Meteoran species that heals when seeing new terrain and has great skills and attributes. However, Meteorans have to move fast, with only one-tenth the normal time per floor before they suffer heavy draining.

Many backgrounds now start with extra scrolls, potions, or other consumables, allowing more tactical options when faced with a sticky situation. Speaking of sticky situations, characters cast into the Abyss will find that monsters there once again give experience and piety, and an ultra-dangerous ‘deep abyss’ is now accessible…

Many new item types have been added, like scrolls of poison and wands of quicksilver. Some of these ‘alternate’, with only one type of item from a set being generated in any given game. We’ve also added many exciting new unique monsters, from Amaemon the Diabolical Poisoner to the alt-timeline troll Parghit the Mighty.

Launchers, long blades and short blades all now use dexterity instead of strength when calculating damage, allowing new evasive playstyles. Monsters no longer gain and lose ‘random energy’, and can instead launch opportunistic attacks on fleeing players. As always, there are many more changes small and large alike!

Download DCSS 0.29 here or play it online on one of many servers across the world! Packages for Windows and OS X are available now. Linux debs are coming soon. See the full list of changes on the release page here.

The tournament starts on Friday August 26th 8pm UTC and runs through Sunday September 11th 8pm UTC, with all online 0.29 games counting towards your score. See the tournament page for more details, including how to join or setup a clan. Clans membership can be changed until Friday September 2nd 8pm UTC.

Many thanks to all those who have contributed to DCSS over the years. Thanks especially to the DCSS development team, whose contributions made 0.29 possible, and to the admins who run and maintain the official servers. A special thanks to the following community members who contributed to 0.29 and a warm welcome to the first-time contributors, listed in italics. (Let us know if someone is missing, this data is tricky to collect in bulk!)

4Hooves2Appendages, Aliscans, Ernest Antanishin, Spencer Baugh, Elliott Bernstein, David Damerell, DreamDust, dilly, Diego Essaya, Perry Fraser, Goratrix, Implojin, Alex Jurkiewicz,  Nikolai Lavsky, neo-bop, Oleksiy Pavlikovsky, Rytris Petronis, Brian Power, Reono, riverfiend, robertxgray, Rosstin Murphy, ruxi, sdynet, Jeffery Stager, Cebolla Sunbeam

For 16 days, players could compete for tournament points and banners by playing 0.28 games on the public servers. This was the fourth tournament held after the major revision of the tournament rules done for 0.25. There were changes based on previous input, and once again we’ve collected the feedback posted on tavern and reddit.

Congratulations to Yermak, perennial champion, for once again taking first place in the individual competition, with a spectacular 111,412 points! Over the course of the tournament, Yermak won 43 games, including a streak of 13 games (second-best in tournament), an 76M high score run (first in tournament), 30 Nemelex’ Choice combos, 4 species high scores, 3 background high scores, and 19 tier 3 banners.

Other big winners:

• Acrobat2: 2nd place overall (101,150 points, 34 wins), longest streak (18 games), 4 species high scores & 1 background high score, tied for lowest XL win at 16, all level 3 banners completed.
• Fagentul: 3rd place overall (89,909 points, 21 wins), 5 species and background high scores, tied for lowest XL win at 16, 16 level 3 banners completed, 8-win streak.
• p0werm0de: Fastest realtime win (an auspicious 27 minutes 44 seconds), 2nd place low turncount, 8th place overall.
• Caminho: Lowest turncount win in a scanty 8,492 turns.
• sweetandcool: A third tie for lowest XL win at XL 16; 14th place overall.
• Lici The Crawler (alias Borgnjor’s Vile Crotch): First win of the tournament.
• Ge0ff, RubberyChicken and NoScrollMutBadDesign all tied for most ziggurats completed at 27 apiece.

The clan competition was won by Gozig or Gozag (captained by Ge0ff) with 105,656 points, sealing their victory by winning 40 Nemelex Choice combos to second place’s 30. In a close 2nd place was That felt unstrangely rewarding (captained by acrobat2) with 98,434 points, and first place in the Clan Combo Highscores and Streak Length leaderboards. 3rd place was held by Team Splat (captained by shummie) with 85,513, following up on last year’s 2nd place ranking by maxing out the Clan Low Turncount Win leaderboard.

Thank you to everyone for playing! I hope you all had fun.

To close out, here are some overall tournament statistics (with the 0.27 numbers in brackets for comparison). 2,559 players started a game at some point during the tournament; of those 2,504 completed a game without quitting or leaving the dungeon sadly orbless. This definition of “player” (players who completed a non-boring game) is used for subsequent calculations and was used for the 0.27 statistics.

• Players: 2,504 (0.27: 2,474)
• Total player time: 28,008 hrs (0.27: 27,502 hrs)
• Average player time: 11.2 hrs (0.27: 11.2 hrs)
• Games played: 69,201 (0.27: 67,203)
• Players who got a rune: 742 (0.27: 734)
• 357 winners and 1160 wins (0.27: 404 winners and 1571 wins)
• Win rate: 1.68% (0.27: 2.34%)
• Proportion of players using WebTiles: 96.6% (0.27: 94.4%)

The 0.29 season has begun, and changes are already in motion. Watch this space for further information as the 0.29 trunk update posts begin to flow. Until next time, happy crawling!

• The Swamp branch has been drastically reworked:
  • New monster: will-o-the-wisp, an unearthly gas that spits out powerful Foxfires.
  • New monster: goliath frog, capable of licking players from afar with its acidic tongue.
  • New monster: eleionoma, a spirit of the swamp akin to water nymphs. It flows with the woods and shoots shrapnel at nearby enemies. It’s quite difficult to kill while it’s next to trees.
  • New monster: bloated husk, a shambling abomination that explodes with a powerful burst of putrescent gas.
  • New monster: bunyip, an Australian cryptid that hits with enormous force but a slow recovery. (Did you know DCSS is Australian?)
  • New monster: fenstrider witch, a rare top-tier threat casting Paralyse, melee-range Agony, and Throw Sludge, a new spell that splatters Eringya’s Noxious Bog all over the victim.
  • Bog bodies cast much more powerfully, and their freezing touch attack has been merged in with their normal attack so that it actually does something.
  • Many weak and irrelevant enemies no longer appear in Swamp.
  • Swamp levels are, on average, about 20-25% smaller.
  • For a limited testing period, Swamp will appear in every game of Dungeon Crawl, even sometimes alongside Shoals. Enjoy!
• Further monster changes:
  • Boulder beetles are back! This time, their trademark rolling attack uses standard monster movement rules, rather than Orb of Destruction projectile movement. That means they can follow you as you move and around corners. They can also blink. On the plus side, they’re worth more XP!
  • Crocodiles (but not alligators), porcupines, and hippogrives have departed this mortal plane. None of them did anything particularly interesting. A service will be held on Sunday from 4 to 6.
  • To follow up porcupines’ passage, hell sentinels and torturous demonspawn no longer have spines. They weren’t scaled high enough to do anything against late-game players, and it wouldn’t be particularly fun if they had.
  • Batty monsters, such as bats or harpies, used to re-focus on their target once per player turn. That meant that players taking fast actions (swinging with short blades) would make them attack more often, and taking slow actions (using the Dark Maul) would make them attack less. No longer! Batty monsters now act of their own free will, unconstrained by players.
  • Again in celebration of boulder beetles’ return, insect glyphs have been reorganized. Ants, beetles, and other non-flying insects now live on ‘B’, with ‘s’ reserved for arachnids.
  • Monsters’ spells’ damage is now shown when examining them with ‘xv’.
• Player species changes:
  • New Demonspawn mutation: sharp scales, giving 1/2/3 AC and slaying.
  • New Demonspawn mutation: big brain, giving 2/4/6 int, along with wizardry (spell failure reduction) at level 3.
  • Demonspawns’ thin skeletal structure mutation has its stealth bonus doubled.
  • At XL 7 and higher, Palentonga now curl defensively when hit, getting an AC bonus against subsequent hits before their next action. Useful when in big fights, against hydras, etc.
  • Wheals made a large number of improvements to the Palentonga charge targeter. Thanks, wheals!
  • Palentonga can now mutate poisonous tails.
• Item changes:
  • Potions of stabbing have been replaced with potions of attraction, which pull nearby monsters toward the player while active. See if you can come up with some fun ways to use this!
  • Potions of brilliance now halve spell MP costs while active.
  • When targeting the polymorph wand, you’ll now see a set of three random monsters that the wand can turn the target into. Less guessing!
  • Wand noise is now shown in the UI.
  • Many XP-charged evocable items have had their charges reduced, their recharge time increased, and their shop prices raised. They’re still extremely strong.
  • The condensation vane now has a lovely new set of tiles. Credit, as ever, to canofworms.
  • Broad axe delay has increased from 1.6 to 1.7.
  • The black knight’s barding is back! Now naga and palentonga can wear it.
• Miscellaneous changes:
  • There’s now a selection menu when x-ving to examine spaces with multiple interesting things. (Monsters, items, features…)
  • Gozag no longer gives a free potion petition on worship, to pull his power a bit back towards other gods.
  • Similarly, Nemelex Xobeh now starts gifting decks only at higher piety.
  • Now that you can see the amount of gold you get from a scroll of acquirement before you pick it, the huge variance that made for exciting gambles before just makes for really boring ‘take the massive pile of gold over the cool item’ decisions. As such, gold acquirement now produces much smaller and more consistent amounts, to encourage more fun decisions.
  • Some Lair and Snake level layouts have been tweaked for increased fun.
  • Many new vaults have been added, including several exciting boulder beetle vaults and several transporter vaults.
  • Zot clock changes: the maximum ‘bank’ is much larger (27k turns per branch, not 15k), all Hells share a single clock, and the clock is now deterministic and displayed numerically. If this means nothing to you, don’t worry about it. You can now enable always_show_zot if you really want to, though.
  • Vampiric Draining’s damage is no longer limited by the amount that it heals the player.
• Bugfixes:
  • Searing Ray no longer tracks invisible monsters.
  • Withered plants no longer wither. (Now they crumble.).
  • You can’t crash the game by trying to (P)ut a non-jewellery item on.
  • Dungeon Crawl will no longer claim that non-lifesaving gods will save lives.
  • Cunning players can no longer use Yredmenul’s Enslave Soul targeter to deduce which illusory clones are fake and which are real.
  • Donald now deigns to talk to followers of the Wu Jian Council.
  • While in the Slime Pits, you can no longer be shafted next to slimy walls and die instantly.

Have a lovely weekend, all! Happy crawling.

• New temple god: the Wu Jian Council.
  • An order of militant monks that have ascended to divinity, the Wu Jian Council offer worshippers powerful new combat moves.
  • 1*: Martial Attack – Whirlwind. When moving between two tiles adjacent to the same enemy or enemies, automatically attack them, potentially Slowing those hit.
  • 2*: Martial Attack – Wall Jump. When moving directly into a solid obstacle, instead move two tiles backward, attacking all enemies adjacent to your destination and potentially distracting them.
  • 3*: Martial Attack – Lunge. When moving directly toward a foe, automatically attack them, dealing extra damage to slowed and/or distracted enemies.
  • 4*: Serpent’s Lash. When activated, gain two instant movement actions.
  • 5*: Heaven On Earth. When activated, you are surrounded by opaque clouds, and your combat abilities are enhanced for so long as you continue performing Martial Attacks.
  • All martial attacks scale with movement and attack speed such that fast-movement races aren’t penalized for attacking normally, and slow races aren’t penalized for using martial attacks.
  • Piety is gained through defeating foes.
  • A more verbose writeup (with an old name for the god) is here.
• Noise from the last turn is displayed as a meter in the top-right of the screen, replacing the gold display. (Gold is still visible in % and $, or replacing the piety display for Gozagites.) Noise is an important part of crawl, and even though this display doesn’t communicate the full complexity of it, it’s a big step forward that I’m very excited about – please thank ‘advil’ for implementing it! Here’s a fuller writeup.
• Barachians have been rethemed and reworked; instead of being barbarians from the frigid south, they’re creations of the gods who rebelled against their masters long ago. In memory of their maker, shadows still flee at Barachians’ approach, giving them +1 LOS. (Increasing both the range of their attacks, and the range & number of enemies that can attack them!) In compensation for this, their attributes have been raised to human levels, their skills aptitudes have increased by +1 across the board (except for a few flavour-based exceptions), and their Hop’s range now increases even further at XL 13.
• Potions of mutation, cure mutation, and beneficial mutation have been blended together into one big slurry! They (potions of mutation) now removes 2-6 mutations, adds 1-3 random mutations, and then adds another 1 ‘good’ mutation, which is essentially similar to drinking all three old potions in a row. This is intended to encourage more players to interact with the mutation mechanics in 3-rune games, and to create more interesting decisions: a fuller explanation is here.
• New unrand: Maxwell’s thermic engine, replacing the Dagger of Freezing Death and the Scimitar of Flaming Death. The Thermal Engine is a freezing/flaming double sword that temporarily increases in enchantment with each blow. Trivia: in development, it once had the ability to summon demons. :)
• The Ratskin Cloak is somewhat rattier, insofar it can now be evoked to summon rats. Yum!
• Warper/Arcane Marksperson shakeup: Gell’s Gravitas loses Hexes (it’s now purely Translocations) and moves into the Wr starting book, while Portal Projectile goes from pure Translocations to Hex/Tloc and moves into the AM starting book. This should, hopefully make both spells and both backgrounds more useful.
• Portal Projectile is now manually cancellable.
• Transmutations no longer have special-case added damage from str/dex; their base damage has been raised to compensate.
• During character selection, species are now ordered by ‘complexity’, e.g. appropriateness for new players. This is intended to guide said new players toward species that will be more fun for them, and away from HuFi. The categories are, of course, fuzzy and somewhat arbitrary; there will probably be more tinkering with them over time.
• The auto_butcher option defaults to ‘Very Hungry’, meaning that auto-travel will go to & butcher corpses once the player is ‘Very Hungry’ or hungrier. This is a compromise between the most convenient behavior for most characters and for necromancers/Fedhasites; the latter would rather not automatically butcher every corpse they encounter!
• Slow Regeneration is now a 1-level mut, with the effect of the old level 2 of the mut (no natural regeneration while monsters are in LOS). The old Slow Regeneration 3 (no natural regeneration) is now DD-exclusive, and cannot be gained during play.
• Deep trolls and iron trolls drop exciting new colours of hides.
• Casting Ignition with tentacles on-screen is considerably less dramatic.
• Xom is significantly less prone to electrocuting the player.
• It should no longer be possible, even in rare circumstances, to be 101% of the way to the next level.

Happy crawling!

Edit: removed marriage, and other errors.

• New item type: scarves!
  • Scarves occupy the cloak slot. They give 0 AC and cannot be enchanted, but always generate with an ego.
  • Scarf egos: rC+, Spirit Shield, Resistance, and rMsl.
  • Scarves replace about 1/6 cloaks.
• Spells:
  • Replaced Delayed Fireball with a new spell: Ignition (L8 Fire). Ignition drops a fireball on every single enemy in line of sight. The player and their allies are immune. Have fun :)
  • Repel Missiles is gone. It didn’t work especially well as a spell: rather than being an effect that required investment (an interesting strategic choice), it was essentially a permanent buff that applied to any non-Trog character that found it. As a spell that’s mainly cast out-of-combat, it didn’t work with the spell failure system, either; players were encouraged to take off armour, swap in wizardry items, etc to cast it. Everyone liked it, of course, since it had good lootfeel, but it’s better to provide that lootfeel without the accompanying annoyances. It’s an effect that works better as an item (e.g. the new scarf ego, or the Amulet of Air) than as a spell.
  • Airstrike replaces Repel Missiles in the Book of Air. This should give AE a high-accuracy, lowish-damage spell to complement their other tools.
  • Similarly, Force Lance replaces Battlesphere in the Book of Conjurations. This is an experiment to encourage use of e.g. Fulminant Prism, with which Force Lance has considerable synergy.
• Unrands:
  • Amulet of Bloodlust: MR++ (was MR+), Slay+6 (was +3). Encourage use of an exciting *Rage item.
  • Sceptre of Torment: only has a chance of tormenting on-hit, rather than randomly over time. Simpler, and doesn’t encourage annoying swapping while out of combat.
  • Shield of Ignorance: changed from +6 {AC+4, *Curse, rN+, Int-6} to +10 {rN+, Int-4}. Int-6 was too harsh for almost all potential users to consider it, and *Curse really didn’t accomplish anything.
  • Sword of Cerebov: works on rDamnation monsters.
  • Sword of Jihad: now the Zealot’s Sword. Replace a good but loaded word with a very good and non-loaded word.
• Food:
  • All food takes one turn to eat, including rations and royal jellies. Chunks only taking one turn to eat meant that the already-limited tactical implications of slow food were very limited, and the annoyances of getting interrupted while eating outweighed those.
  • Removed: pizza and beef jerky, since they no longer had much purpose. The loss of pizza in particular is very sad… some day it will return in cheesy glory.
  • The auto_butcher option now takes an optional hunger threshold parameter; check options_guide.txt for details.
• Webs generated over the course of play (by e.g. jumping spiders or sacks of spiders) are no longer permanent. Once the monster or player they’re webbing escapes or dies, the web vanishes. This is to discourage certain degenerate behaviors involving luring jumping spiders around the game and using their webs to trivialize tough enemies; I realized it was theoretically possible when we first implemented permanent webs, but credit to Ultraviolent for actually putting it into practice and forcing me to get off my rump and fix it!
• Elyvilon’s wrath is simpler. Instead of various irrelevant effects (e.g. minor poison miscasts), Ely just has a chance of applying lifesaving to enemies, healing those that were about to die.
• Wands are now ID’d when you step on them, instead of on pickup.
• Fixed a longstanding mouse cursor bug in local tiles, which annoyed quite a lot of people. Performance should be much better now!
• Temple entrance vaults can spawn again. (Broken since last June… oops!)
• The legendary titan, Antaeus, is no longer terrified of the level 3 spell ‘Conjure Flame’.
• Monster Upheaval no longer increases in power with the player’s Invocations skill.
• Frogs can now ribbit, croak, or, under very special circumstances, bellow.
• Mushrooms caps have been banned.
• Vampire mages now have ghost hands.

• Evocations:
  • Rods of scattershot & rods of clouds have both been turned into rare, high-power wand types. Wands of Clouds, unlike their rod predecessors, always create harmful clouds.
  • Discs of storms have been replaced with lightning rods, a new xp-charged misc evocable with a remarkable resemblance to the old ‘lightning’ type of rod.
  • Wand power scales significantly better with Evocations skill.
  • Some wands have sub-LOS range.
  • Wands cannot be evoked while confused.
  • Wands of disintegration no longer destroy terrain; wands of digging can now destroy statues.
  • Wands of slowing have, belatedly, followed their hasting friends into oblivion; they’re gone.
  • Rods have been removed.
• New race: Barachians, a species of frog-men with a great hatred of the letter t. They have a powerful innate Hop ability, a partially-controllable Blink effect that requires several turns of motionlessness to recover before re-use. To balance this, they also have slow movement 1 (1.2 turns/move; nagas move at 1.4) and ghoul-tier attributes.
• New spell: Poisonous Vapours, L2 Poison/Air. Smite-targeted; creates an extremely short-lived poison cloud on a targeted creature. Appears in the VM starting book.
• Removed: Poisonous Cloud.
• Apportation scales more significantly with spellpower. Its targeter is also hopefully a little better.
• Your current regeneration rate is shown in %.
• Deep dwarves can now benefit from the special effects of Kryia’s armour.
• The displayed resistance chance for Siren/Avatar song is shown correctly in monster descriptions; it formerly miscalculated (underestimated) their power.
• Clearing multiple ziggurats will make the figurines you find within glow in new and exciting colours. Note that clearing multiple ziggurats is, quote, “silly and should not be encouraged”.
• In addition to summoning golden dragons (see trunk update post #219, true believers!), fortunate TSO worshippers can also use poison stingers.
• Iron giants can no longer throw your orbs of destruction back at you. (It didn’t work properly anyway.)
• It’s no longer possible to ?acquire an item directly into lava or deep water. Sploosh no more…
• Cerebov scumming has been removed.
• Wizards can now rest inside walls.
• Sandblast blasts sand.

Happy crawling, and happy new year, and if you haven’t yet taken the survey, hey! What better time for a fresh start (on taking the survey) than now?)

• Characters:
  • Whisper ‘Farewell’ when you leave, Legolas: High Elves are no more. (This is, of course, part of the crawl dev team’s newly “straight edge” lifestyle.)
  • Ogres’ apts have been adjusted: their Maces and Flails apt has been lowered, and in compensation, their spellcasting skills have been increased to -1 across the board.
  • Deep Dwarves’ wand recharge ability has been replaced with a self-healing ability that has a chance of decreasing their max MP whenever it’s used.
  • Mummies’ Spellcasting apts are now +2; formerly -1.
  • The demonspawn Augmentation effect is 25% less dramatic.
• Items:
  • To avoid miskeys, the letter keys can no longer be used to wield or throw useless items unless the * key (‘display all’) has been pressed first. Breadswingers can rest easy, as other selection techniques, e.g. {@w1}, are unchanged.
  • Wands of heal wounds, teleportation, and hasting have discharged their last zap. They’re removed. We removed them. Hence: no more zapping.
  • Wand and misc acquirement have been merged into one category, ‘evocables’.
  • Nemelex wrath reclaims all decks, instead of merely sabotaging them.
• Monsters:
  • Hill giants and two-headed ogres have merged into one big two-headed monster. (I’m not sure what happened to the third head.) ‘Hill giants’ will be seen no more, and two-headed ogres take their place, becoming significantly nastier in the process.
  • Monsters should no longer, very rarely, appear to be random strange colours in console. This bug was first reported at least three years ago; thanks to johnny0 for finally figuring it out and creating a fix!
  • Monster white draconian breath can now be resisted by AC.
• Per popular demand, Sandblast now consumes stones directly from the inventory. As part of the change, it no longer functions without ammo, and large rocks can’t be used at all. (Earth Elementalists get more stones to compensate.)
• Slime:$’s walls no longer collapse entirely when TRJ is slain; instead, only newly-added transparent sections will be destroyed. It seemed a bit too mean to take out the entire thing, even for us.
• In the spirit of helping new players, the autofight_stop default is now 50, up from 30.
• For the first time in nearly two years, acquirement and god gifts can now produce helmets. Oops.
• Followers of the Shining One can now summon golden dragons.
• Trees will appear angry, when appropriate.
• You can no longer rest while on fire.
• You can no longer learn spells that no longer exist.

Happy crawling, and a happy new year in advance! Here’s to many more.

(P.S.: take the survey!)

• Monsters:
  • Draconian callers are now draconian stormcallers; they smite, summon drakes, and also invoke Upheaval, the Qazlal ability. Boom!
  • Snorg, Xtahua, and Bai Suzhen’s hides now have an inherent bonus enchantment.
  • Polymorphed uniques no longer keep their spells in certain obscure cases.
  • Ushabti breathe significantly less often.
  • Monsters’ melee attacks are now included in their descriptions.
  • Monster MR is reduced by lowered HD, from e.g. draining or malmutation.
  • The last great renaming of 2016? Sirens are now, excitingly, Merfolk Sirens.
• Gods:
  • The Shining One’s conduct has been simplified: all stabs are now automatically prevented (no bonus damage), and poison damage is no longer specially forbidden. Cleansing Flame also does somewhat more damage to non-evil enemies.
  • Jiyva pacifies all slimes, even those that are actually shapeshifters.
  • Nemelex’s Pain card is now roughly twice as powerful.
  • Abyssal gold no longer counts toward Gozag’s entrance cost.
  • Qazlal no longer spawns damaging clouds on plants, e.g. while you’re trying to rest.
  • The Xom Cleave status will no longer last up to 2000 turns.
  • Dithmenos’s shadow can once again mimic diagonal and reaching attacks. (Broken as part of a bugfix two years ago.)
• Spells:
  • Invisibility and Haste no longer cause extra hunger over time.
  • Confusing Touch is less effective, especially against high-HD enemies.
  • Poisonous Cloud is level 5 (was 6).
• Odds of confusing enemies with a melee attack (with Confusing Touch or fungus form) are displayed while examining enemies with those statuses active.
• Various badforms (e.g. wispform, fungus form) have been simplified, and porcupine form has been removed.
• Console colours have been reworked to avoid invisible colours for certain low-capability consoles. Review options_guide.txt for new options, e.g. best_effort_brighten_background and _foreground.
• Max charges for wands are always displayed: e.g. “a wand of confusion (?/48)”.
• The Hat of the High Council has ascended to a higher plane.
• Lair’s vaults have been exhaustively reviewed and revised. Please thank regret-index for all of the hard work!
• Demonic guardians expire over time, not based on tension.
• Vampire feeding, like chunk eating, now always takes a single turn. All the blood has oozed out of our corpses for the last time…
• Fire clouds no longer expire faster over water (and likewise cold clouds over lava). Fire clouds on water also produce less steam.
• Noise no longer breaks mesmerization and fear.
• Mottled draconians (both player and monster) and draconian zealots are no more.
• Simplified chaos effects.
• Screaming at tentacles is forbidden.
• Removed off-brand knock-offs of the Captain’s Cutlass.
• The player can no longer crash the game by attempting to eat their hat.

Happy crawling, and don’t forget to take the survey if you haven’t already!

Download DCSS 0.19 here, or play it online on one of many servers across the world! The Windows and Linux packages are available now, as well as the source; the OS X binaries should be online within a few days.
OS X binaries are now available, many thanks to agolden for building them!

The release tournament begins on Nov 4 2016, at 20:00 UTC, with all online 0.19 games counting towards your score. See the tournament website for more details, including how to set up or join a clan.

0.19′s highlights include:

• Branches: Lair and its sub-branches have been made shorter but deadlier, Zot offers new perils to the unwary adventurer, and the Desolation of Salt, a new timed portal vault, offers hoards of ancient artefacts to those strong enough to face down the unique threats hidden in its blinding saltstorms.
• Spells: Two new spells have been added: Lesser Beckoning, which pulls enemies straight to your feet, and Infestation, a high-level Necromancy spell that spawns death scarabs from the remains of slain foes.
• Items: All Long Blades now offer a ‘riposte’ effect, giving a chance for an automatic counterattack whenever an enemy misses the player. The Fencer’s Gloves let you riposte with any weapon.
• Characters: Halflings and Kobolds have had their aptitudes and stats reworked, pushing the former to be powerful heavy-armour fighters, and the latter toward stabbing and spellcasting.
• Gods: Uskayaw the Reveler offers remarkable combat powers to acolytes, peaking at the ability to instantly kill any targeted foe, but the piety that powers those abilities drops back to nothing after every battle. Hepliaklqana the Forgotten gives followers a single, permanent ally, which grows in strength alongside the player. Plus, Nemelex Xobeh’s decks have been streamlined and reworked, and Sif Muna’s abilities have been overhauled to be much more fun to use.

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 0.19!

• Gods:
  • Beogh can now enchant, upgrade, and uncurse followers’ ranged weapons.
  • Fedhas appreciates all corpse decay, and automatically rots all corpses when the player leaves a level. The ‘fungal bloom’ toadstool-generating effect is now an (a)bility, rather than a (p)rayer effect.
  • Qazlal’s cloud immunity applies to all clouds, not just the player’s.
  • Qazlal’s Elemental Wrath no longer generates neutral or hostile elementals from neutral or hostile clouds.
  • Jiyva’s Jelly Paralyse ability seems to have mysteriously vanished. In the distance, you hear a contented gurgling.
  • Uskayaw ignores damage-over-time effects (sticky flame, poison, and clouds), instead of only allowing piety gain after turns on which the player performed an attack-like action.
  • The (p)rayer action is gone. Altars are now used with < or >, as with shops and portals.
• Items:
  • Monsters that could be butchered for their hides (trolls and most dragons) now, instead, have a chance of leaving behind the armour equivalents instead on death. Dragon armour has been correspondingly renamed to ‘dragon scales’.
  • Spellbook rarity is fixed! For the first time since 0.4. some spellbooks will be less common on earlier dungeon levels; this was intended throughout, but the code was broken. Such an exciting feature that no one noticed it was missing for eight years…
  • Scimitars and great swords are slightly buffed.
  • The Plutonium Sword no longer turns plants into free xp.
  • Manuals of stealth & unarmed combat are no longer twice as common as other types. (That behaviour was added as a hack years ago, when stabbing/traps & doors skills were removed.)
  • Artefact weapons can now generate with Protection or Chaos brands.
  • Amulets of dismissal suddenly vibrated and disappeared – forever.
• Monsters:
  • Ushabti Death Rattle now fires miasma, instead of negative energy clouds.
  • Weaker Zot dragons have been replaced with nastier ones.
  • River rats and iguanas have been almost entirely removed from Lair.
  • Hornets and wasps have merged into one monster, roughly averaging their strengths. To avoid confusion, the new monster is called a ‘hornet’. Also it’s yellow.
  • Putrid demonspawn and Chaos Champions have bitten the dust. Blood Saints grabbed the latter’s Call of Chaos. (Pretty rude, IMO…)
  • Also, gelid and infernal demonspawn now have full elemental immunity (to ice/fire respectively), Corrupter’s Corrupt Body (beam-targeted) has been replaced with Corrupting Pulse (fullscreen), and Black Suns lost Malign Offering.
• Spells:
  • New spell: Lesser Beckoning (L3 Translocations). Pulls the target adjacent to the caster. Range 2 at power 0, 7 (fullscreen) at power 200. Irresistible…
  • Apportation has been replaced in Warpers’ starting book with Lesser Beckoning; various other spellbooks have been slightly tweaked.
  • Irradiate causes significantly less contamination; it should now be safe for 3-4 uses before entering yellow glow.
  • The Haste spell has been removed.
• Another layer of contamination is now displayed, between grey and yellow glow. This should make it easier to tell when you’re close to being dangerously contaminated.
• Contamination reduction is now caused specifically by Potions of Cancellation, rather than by all ‘debuffing’ effects.
• Player species and forms no longer have hidden ‘stealth factors’. Ogres’, Trolls’, and Centaurs’ stealth aptitudes have decreased by a point each, to compensate, Dithmenos’s Shadow Form now gives an explicit stealth multiplier, and various other stealth effects have been slightly tweaked. Wave goodbye as you leave, Remarkably Stealthy Tree Form…
• Trees are renamed and recoloured (in console) during the effects of Awaken Forest.
• Bat form no longer prevents quaffing and door use.
• Berserk now costs hunger on activation, rather than on expiration. It’s no longer possible to avoid the effects of Berserkitis by remaining Very Hungry.
• auto_butcher now functions only when autoexploring, to make it more useful for characters that might want to use corpses (e.g. necromancers or Fedhasites).
• The messages_at_top rcfile option should, hopefully, be more useful for people using screenreaders. (It should print messages before printing the rest of the screen; if anyone reading this uses a screenreader, let us know if that helps!)
• The orb run’s teleport restrictions (slow teleports, uncontrolled blinks, no Portals of Golubria) now apply throughout the Zot branch.
• A large number of vaults have been added and reworked; Volcano, in particular, has been heavily revised, and should be both more dangerous and more potentially rewarding.
• Hints mode text has been updated and revised, for the first time in a while.
• In the last great convulsion of the Great Renaming of 0.19, greater naga are now nagaraja, and greatslings are fustibali. Great!
• Orc wizards should no longer kill the player on turn 20 of D:1.
• Skeletonless skeletons will no longer appear in Hell.

Happy crawling!

First, a request: if you can read Korean and are interested in us getting these fantastic Korean fan-made loading screens into the main game, please contact us! We’d really like to ask the original artists for permission to use their art in-game. This is now in progress; thanks to everyone who volunteered their help!

Second, here are the latest changes from trunk:

• We have two new devs: Brannock and CanOfWorms. Feel free to give them a hearty welcome!
• Monsters:
  • Monster renamings: giant newt -> frilled lizard, giant frogs -> bullfrogs, giant geckos -> leopard geckos, giant leeches -> tyrant leeches, giant eyeballs -> floating eyes, giant spores -> ballistomycete spores, giant orange brains -> glowing orange brains. Hill giants seem unaffected… for now.
  • Iron Giants now throw their allies at the player (as Robin/Polyphemus), instead of throwing the player at their allies..
  • Naga Ritualists’ Virulence spell no longer multiplies poison in the victim’s system; instead, it just applies rPois-.
  • Blink frogs and sixfirhies no longer heal when hit with distortion or electricity, respectively. Sixfirhies gain rElec+++ to make up for it. It’s the end of an era…
  • Tzitzimimeh’s melee attack no longer creates a ring of miasma clouds, but instead applies the rotting & slowing effect directly.
  • Mennas now has a guaranteed sacred weapon; more of a threat, or more of a temptation…?
  • Statues can be stabbed; obsidian and orange crystal statues gain sInv.
  • Turtles no longer withdraw into their shells at low HP.
  • Ragged Hierophants have been gently, lovingly nerfed.
  • Griffons have merged into hippogriffs, which is a little confusing, given that they’re originally both hybrids… anyway, hippogriffs are slightly tougher, and that’s that.
  • Say goodnight, Dan: boulder beetles attempted to squash a developer, but instead just rolled right out of crawl. They will be missed.
• Species:
  • Halflings and Kobolds have had their aptitudes and attributes adjusted, to make them more distinct. Kobolds gain better intelligence and spellcasting aptitudes, but are slightly worse at weapons; for Halflings, the reverse is true. As Halflings are now a diminutive race well suited to a heavy armour, “sword and board toon” playstyle, you may as well refer to them by the traditional name for that role: Hill Dwarves.
  • Spriggans have the same weapon restrictions as halflings and kobolds, instead of more restrictive ones. “Allows spriggans to wield triple crossbows, and makes morningstars, eveningstars, long swords, scimitars, demon blades, war axes, spears, demon tridents and greatslings one handed for them.” SpBe buff!
  • Vampires have only four distinct blood levels, instead of six: Near Bloodless is merged into Thirsty, and Alive is merged into Full.
  • Mottled draconian sticky flame is now range 3 (was range 1).
• Items:
  • The Ratskin Cloak has been buffed, from +1 to +2. This was actually an accident, but it seemed like more effort than it was worth to revert…
  • Punk’s freezing brand has been replaced with a new, unique ‘acid’ brand. Duck!
  • The *Confuse randart property is now *Slow.
  • Weapons of protection give a short-lived +7 AC on hit, instead of +5 AC passively.
  • Riposte’s trigger chance has decreased to 1/3, from 1/2.
• Interface:
  • New rcfile option: auto_butcher, which, when set, travels to & butchers edible corpses during autoexplore. Thanks to mgdelmonte for contributing it!
  • Average monster max HP is now displayed in monster descriptions, above AC and EV.
  • Stepping on manuals IDs them, without them needing to be picked up.
  • Spell noise is now visible in the I/Z casting interface.
  • Clicking on books through the local tiles UI allows you to memorize spells from a specific book, and is now available at zero Spellcasting skill. (Only nineties players will get this…)
  • Auto skill training should be a little smarter now.
• Branches & Environment:
  • The Desolation of Salt is no longer roughly guaranteed; it’ll appear in maybe ~15% of games, to keep from wearing its welcome out too quickly.
  • Beogh no longer smites creatures that destroy orcish idols.
  • The walls of Slime:5 now vanish entirely after the Royal Jelly dies, instead of simply turning to rock. Look sharp!
  • Ambient noise has been streamlined. It should be more relevant in Shoals and the Desolation, and it’s completely removed from Lair and Orc. Also, it no longer affects stealth, removing one of my favorite obscure special cases.
• A whole pile of new monster tiles, including skeletal warriors, trolls, efreets, and, in a bittersweet moment, executioners. Thanks to Roctavian for all his great work!
• Emergency flight is available from forms; if you would instantly die (from drowning/lava), you’ll enter emergency flight instead. It’s probably no longer possible to drown.
• Hexes are slightly less effective against creatures with exactly 0 MR.
• Mutations: rough black scales removed, large bone plates switched to give pure +SH, instead of a mix of +SH and +AC.
• Hepliaklqana wrath no longer suppresses XP-gated effects. This included elemental evokers, Abyss gate spawning, the Evolution mutation, and other gods’ wraths; the latter is some good tech to keep in mind, if you are for some reason playing on a month-old version of trunk.
• Using Step from Time near enemies with smite-targeted spells (entropy weavers, neqoxecs) will no longer result in the player being hit by those spells dozens of times.
• The game should no longer crash when entering Tomb:3.

Happy crawling!

• New timed portal vault: the Desolation of Salt.
  • Entrances appear in Elf and Vaults. (It’s guaranteed to appear in the current trunk, more or less, but that’s just for testing purposes; it’ll become less common shortly.)
  • Features an open layout filled with huge, blinding saltstorms, and ancient, treasure-filled ruins.
  • New monster: saltling, a small golem roughly similar to orc warriors.
  • New monster: peacekeeper, a mechanical beast with Battlecry (affecting other golems) and manticore barbs.
  • New monster: servant of whispers, casting Lightning Bolt and Still Winds, a new effect which temporarily disables all clouds.
  • New monster: ragged hierophant, casting Injury Bond and Resonance Strike, a smite-targeted damage effect that becomes more powerful for every golem next to the target.
  • New monster: imperial myrmidon, a fast, tough melee enemy with a variety of hexes and the ability to halve magic resistance on melee hits.
  • New monster: halazid warlock, a lich with a variety of powerful spells, including Ghostly Sacrifice, which turns an ally into a devastating explosion of negative energy.
  • …and various other guest monsters from other branches, including molten gargoyles and crystal guardians.
  • Tiles by the indomitable CanOfWorms!
• Monsters:
  • Sheep have been replaced with dream sheep, a new pack monster that, when present in large numbers, can put enemies to sleep.
  • Anubis guards have been merged into ushabti. The latter get anubis guards’ warning cry and dispel undead.
  • Battlecry has been simplified; instead of working differently for every monster that casts it, it always and only affects all allies of the same genus. (So orcs can might other orcs, angels can might other angels, etc.) This means that orc knights can now might warlords.
  • Iron giants are back to speed 10 (from 8), but have had their other stats reduced somewhat.
  • Snorg goes berserk less often, but can berserk from full health.
  • Giant eyeballs now cast Paralysis Gaze in only two tries, instead of three.
  • Instead of sixfirhies being tier 4 demons and chaos spawn being tier 3, the opposite is now true.
  • Monster descriptions have been revised and improved; thanks, MarvinPA!
• Clarity now gives immunity to sleep.
• Gozag and exploration gods should now work better in sprints; their gold and piety (respectively) have been multiplied, as with other gods.
• Beogh no longer enhances worshippers’ armour or shield bonuses.
• The regeneration mutation’s strength has been doubled, matching most other sources of regeneration (e.g. artefacts). Vine Stalkers now gain regen at XL 4 and 12, instead of 1, 6 and 12.
• Cure mutation is slightly rarer, though still more common than it was prior to rMut removal.
• Temporary mutations only have a 50% chance of causing statrot for undead.
• All temporary allies, including but no longer limited to summons, are unable to attack out of your LOS.
• Crawl’s secret “monster stealth” mechanics have been removed; all monsters now have the same chance for their location to be guessed at while invisible.
• Friendly detected monsters (for e.g. Jiyva) no longer interrupt resting.
• Right clicking on the webtiles minimap should work properly again.
• Very long-running bug, finally fixed: low-HP monsters will no longer fireball themselves to death or banish their allies. (This also fixed the “Hep allies will confuse the player” bug.)
• Grate traps should no longer instantly obliterate poorly-placed items.
• Eustachio the Eustachio Skeleton will no longer appear in anyone’s game.

Happy crawling!

• Monsters:
  • Jellies no longer eat any items, even unseen ones, unless the player is worshipping Jiyva.
  • Zombies, skeletons, &c now display damage taken (a health bar, etc), like other enemy types.
  • Zombies are now named by their base type (e.g. ‘centaur warrior zombie’), rather than their base species (‘centaur zombie’).
  • Necromancers’ Bind Souls now creates simulacra, not spectral things. This will, ideally, increase player deaths.
  • The Ghostly Fireball monster spell is now pure negative energy, rather than being partially irresistible. It also now inflicts drain.
  • Call of Chaos has had its effects reworked, and will no longer paralyse or petrify every monster in sight.
• Spells:
  • Spells you’ve seen monsters cast are now automatically tracked. This is useful for monsters with multiple spellbooks, which now list in their descriptions only those spellbooks that they might have (based on the spells you’ve seen). Pandemonium Lords also list the spells you’ve seen them cast.
  • Spellbooks that the player walks onto or apports are now automatically identified, without needing to use the (r)ead command.
  • Book amnesia (the ability to forget spells by destroying a book that contains them) has been forgotten, and also removed from the game.
  • Paralysis and Confusion can no longer last for 50-100 turns when cast on monsters. (Players had, and have, a different formula that gives considerably shorter durations.)
  • Warp Weapon and the Akashic Record have been removed.
• Characters:
  • rN has been reworked. Various effects (e.g. vampirism, pain) that were 100% resisted by a single level of rN now require 3 levels; rN provides 50%, 75%, and 100% immunity to them at rN+/++/+++, as with damage. The Agony effect now works like Torment, and goes down to 45%/40%/35% hp damage at rN+/++/+++.
  • Stabbing has been simplified. There are now exactly two types of stabs: those against helpless (sleeping/paralysed/petrified) targets, and those against merely distracted targets. In effect, this is mainly a buff to petrification and distraction stabbing, at least for now.
  • There is no longer an EV penalty for taking stairs, but the process of climbing/descending stairs now takes slightly longer.
  • Sustain Attributes (the ring, Dg innate, etc) is no more. Most stat-draining effects have been reduced to compensate.
  • Mutations no longer rot the undead, but only cause stat-draining.
  • The mummy Self-Restoration ability has rotted away.
• Gods:
  • Most gods that require kills for piety are now less picky, and will accept kills of any monster type, including nonliving monsters and plants. (TSO and Zin remain exceptions.)
  • Divine piety decay has been simplified to one of two speeds, from seven or so. Some gods have had their piety gain speed buffed to compensate. (For other gods, the change was itself a buff!)
  • Hepliaklqanal now gives innate frail 1 on worship; this persists even after abandonment, until the god is mollified.
  • Pakellas has been temporarily disabled, until we figure out what is going on. Hopefully he’ll be back in time for the next stable release.
• Daevas can now smite unsuspecting targets.
• Zombies can no longer shapeshift.

Happy crawling!

• Sif Muna:
  • Channel Energy is gone. Replacing it at 1* is Divine Energy, a toggleable ability that lets the player cast spells without having enough mp. Using this effect causes a -Cast status for several turns, depending on how many MP the player was short by.
  • New 3* ability: Channel Magic, a Trog’s Hand-like invocation that trades piety for a brief, but significant, MP regeneration boost.
  • Book gifts now appear starting from 5*, not 6*.
  • Sif now gives partial piety for kills, in addition to (slightly reduced) piety from skill training.
• Players wielding long blades can now ‘riposte’. After dodging a melee attack, users have a 50% chance to launch a free counterattack. This does not trigger retaliation effects, such as porcupine spines or hydra head growth, but functions as a normal attack otherwise. Long blade base damage has been lowered to compensate.
• The Fencer’s Gloves no longer give bonuses to Sbl & Lbl skill; instead, they let the user riposte with any weapon. This stacks with long blades’ innate riposte.
• Various unrands have had their stats tweaked; the most notable change is to Eos, which trades its sInv -Tele for Brilliance’s halo. (Wyrmbane also trades +Rage for rC+.)
• Removed unrands: Sword of the Doom Knight, Amulet of Cekugob, and Brilliance (except for the bits Eos took).
• Ammo acquirement is no more.
• The last mountain dwarf has finally been removed; please, pour one out for our dear, departed Wiglaf. Donald got his Haste and Might, and Joseph stole his hat.
• Urug and Maud have merged into one very smelly, well-armed unique.
• Nergalle can no longer enter Death’s Door.
• Various monster spellsets have been reworked; notably, wizards’, ogre mages’, ancient champions’, and Kirke’s.
• The Vaults branch monster set has been partially reworked; among other changes, vampire mosquitoes have been buzzed off, fire crabs have clattered away, and entropy weavers are… in.
• “Special rooms” (rare rooms completely packed with monsters) have had their sets adjusted, and can now appear in Pan.
• rPois now gives immunity to green draconians’ mephitic breath. (It was previously resisted by nothing, not even by the undead!)
• Summoned monsters now vanish immediately when their summoner dies.
• Allies no longer mark fireballed plants as priority targets.
• Friendly monsters will no longer open doors. (This was generally either irrelevant or a bad thing for the player.)
• Giving orders to allies no longer makes noise, and can be done while silenced. Hand signals or telepathy? You decide…
• Sickness no longer has a chance of causing attribute damage.
• The interface for eating food from the floor has been made somewhat more consistent with other floor-item use.
• Kiku no longer gives the player extra HP while under Death’s Door.
• Good gods no longer mind the player drinking a little blood, here and there.
• Elyvilon’s no longer even pretends to care about the player letting their allies die.
• Pakellas’s Quick Charge is no longer more powerful at 0 evocations than at 27.
• Stoned creatures no longer stumble.

Happy crawling! Don’t let the death scarabs bite :)

• Spells:
  • New spell: Infestation (L8 Necromancy), found in the Necronomicon. Targets a 5×5 area; victims inside become ‘infested’, and, when killed, friendly death scarabs will pop out. Friends!
  • Alistair’s Intoxication only inflicts Vertigo on the caster if it succeeds in confusing any monsters.
  • Confusing Touch is back to level 1 (and the Book of Cantrips), after its long stay at level 2.
  • Hydra form devouring is no longer limited to victims smaller than a hydra. Yum! Support for extra-spicy meals has also been added.
  • Cure Poison has been removed. From the commit:
    Trivia: This was the last player-castable vestige of the pre-Stone Soup ‘Holy’ spell school. RIP ;_;
• Monsters:
  • New unique: Bai Suzhen, Madame White Snake. A late-game draconian unique, she casts Summon Hydras; when severely injured, she enters her true form (a water dragon) and becomes surrounded by a ring of storm clouds. Also she gets water breath. Fierce! (this is what the refrance.)
  • Necromancer monsters can now cast Bind Soul, causing nearby monsters to reform as spectral things after death. (Somewhat like Death Channel.)
  • Almost all monster ‘shouts’ are now the same volume. The only exceptions are ‘hisses’, which are half volume, ‘deafening roars’, 1.5x, and ‘deep rumbles’, 2x. Also, pigs now squeal, and a few other monsters have had their shout behaviour changed.
  • Entropy weavers have become faster, but cast Word of Entropy less often. Also, now they’re ant-men, finally answering the question of “what are these weird things, exactly?”
  • Death scarabs lost their miasma trail, but are somewhat tougher.
  • Tzitzimitl no longer have pain or draining brands.
  • Ditto the bennu draining brand.
  • Obsidian statues can now Mesmerise. Stare into their spooky jeweled eyes…
  • Young spriggan druids have been replaced by boggarts. They really were too young to die…
  • The Cloud Mage has come into his or her rightful inheritance: Tornado.
• Gods:
  • Nemelex Xobeh’s decks have been reworked, again. Current list:
    • Escape: the Tomb, Exile, the Elixir, the Cloud, Velocity, the Shaft
    • Destruction: Vitriol, the Storm, Pain, the Orb, Degeneration, Wild Magic
    • Summoning: the Elements, the Pentagram, the Dance, Foxfire, the Rangers, the
      Illusion

    If it’s not in here and it’s not a wrath effect, it’s not in the game.

  • The Vitriol card applies corrosion to all monsters in LOS.
  • Hep no longer provides additional ‘specialization’ choices beyond the initial ancestor class choice. Ancestor upgrades have been moved from XL21 to XL19 and from XL27 to XL24.
  • Hep’s Transference now drains targets at 5*, rather than slowing them.
  • Hepliaklqana’s ability piety costs are slightly higher.
• Items:
  • Rapiers have +1 base damage, matching falchions.
  • The amulet of dismissal now only triggers on hits that do at least 10% of the wearer’s max HP.
  • *Drain items and “Harm now apply 50% more draining when taken off.
  • Vorpal weapons are no longer extra-likely to chop off hydra heads.
  • Books can now be ID’d by (r)eading them while on the floor. (Ideally this should be automatic, but it’s not quite yet.)
  • Scrolls of random uselessness can no longer create butterflies. Somewhere, a tiny bell tinkles for the last time…
• Yiuf’s hut now has a runed door. Poor guy lost his keys… go let him out, wouldn’t you?
• The minimum, average and maximum number of altars in Temple has increased, by about 2 each.
• There is now a strong correlation between disco balls and demonic runes.
• Quite a lot of other new and changed vaults. I shan’t spoil them, but I will say that several contain rare & powerful artefacts. Be on the lookout…
• Web traps are no longer torn & destroyed when creatures escape from them.
• The Monk background gains a choice of weapon, but no longer gets a choice of Dg.
• Storm clouds have a 1/3 per-turn chance of striking (up from 1/4), but have dramatically less ‘spiky’ damage; from 40-131 down to 35-80.
• You can no longer ID gold.

Happy crawling!

• Potions, scrolls and books can all now be used from the floor, instead of needing to be picked up first. Scrolls of Identify can also be used on floor items.
• It’s no longer possible to drown from Flight expiring. Instead, if your flight runs out when over deep water (if you can’t swim) or lava, you’ll enter ‘emergency flight mode’ and take heavy drain until you reach solid ground again. (This includes Flight from monster-cast Tornado.) It’s still possible to drown if a flying transformation (e.g. dragon form) expires… for now.
• In tiles, monster attitudes (e.g. friendly, neutral, etc) are now displayed by coloured circles behind the monster, instead of small icons in the corner of their tile. Should be helpful for ally play, hopefully!
• Lair is now six floors (-2), and Slime is now five (-1).
• Gods:
  • To minimize Okawaru-related confusion, Ukayaw is now known as Uskayaw.
  • U’s Line Pass always confuses its victims, but for a shorter duration than before.
  • Hepliaklqana’s slow-on-transference ability has been repeatedly fixed and should hopefully work now. Fingers crossed.
  • H’s hexer ‘specialization’ choice has been moved from level 15 to level 21; instead of choosing between Metabolic Englaciation and Paralyse, Paralyse is a gimme, and the choice is between Englaciation and Mass Confusion.
  • H’s battlemage melee damage has been dramatically increased, and their level 15 specialization choice is now between Bolt of Magma and Force Lance (formerly Iceblast). But that’s probably going get replaced too, so don’t put too much effort into remembering it.
  • Misc ancestor changes: ancestor kills now give full XP (like spectral weapon), but their AC has been reduced somewhat.
  • Nemelex Xobeh’s abilities now use invocations, not evocations.
  • Dithmenos’s Shadow Step can no longer be used on allies, or when you’re a tree.
• Vampire players can now berserk and transform when merely satiated, without needing to be Full.
• Demonic guardians (from the demonspawn mutation) can no longer be angered by the player.
• New monster: meliai, bee priestesses based on obscure Greek mythology. They smite, they sting, they come in packs of three… what more could you want?
• Asterion’s spectral weapon has been replaced by a Greater Servant of Makhleb.
• Norris is gone, but Xtahua swiped his Paralyse before he left.
• Various uniques have had their genders adjusted.
• Salamander stormcallers have called their last; they are no more.
• Boxes of beasts & sacks of spiders no longer have charges, but instead have a fixed 25% chance of disintegrating after each use. They now stack.
• Elemental evokers have been differentiated a little more; the lamp of fire and fan of gales no longer create elementals when used, the phial of floods does less impact damage, and the stone of tremors has been removed.
• Amulets of harm now increase damage dealt by 30% and damage taken by 20%, instead of increasing both by 25%.
• Rods can now be gained from misc acquirement, instead of from staff acquirement; accordingly, staff acquirement is no longer available for Troggites.
• Player-created non-opaque clouds now vanish instantly outside LOS, instead of just dissipating four times faster.
• Olgreb’s Toxic Radiance does a little less damage, but no longer poisons the caster.
• Removed cards: Dowsing, Exile, Feast, Focus, Helix, Mercenary and Xom.
• Removed decks: changes, defense, summoning, wonders, and oddities (the one that you had a 1% chance of drawing from when using any deck). Decks can now only be found by worshiping Nemelex, or possibly from rare vaults.
• The monster spell Control Winds (on wind drakes, spriggan air mages, and the Cloud Mage) has blown right outta town.
• The evasion ego, and the randart blowguns that used it, are both no more.
• Xom will no longer vitrify your surroundings. :(
• Distortion weapons no longer banish individual kraken tentacles.
• Ghosts of dead trees no longer get bonus AC.

Happy crawling!

Congratulations to everyone who took part in the Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup 0.18 tournament! This (slightly delayed) post will go over the results and highlights of the event.

More than 2500 players participated, with a third of players collecting a rune, and half of those going on to win.

Some stats, with comparisons to the last tournament:

(Individual images here.)

Individual Winners
First place goes to Yermak, who won comfortably with 6260 points. Yermak has been a regular sight at the top of recent DCSS tournaments, placing second or third in the 0.14, 0.15 and 0.16 competitions. His wins in this tournament include at least one with every species, background and god, making him the first tournament greaterplayer and polytheist!

Second place was taken by Demise. As well as collecting 5648 points, Demise won the fastest game of crawl ever in 41:00 minutes*! As well as second individual place, his clan Distracted by YoutubeDollars** also came in second.

Rounding out the podium, third place is awarded to Ultraviolent4 with 5459 points. Also part of Demise’s clan, Ultraviolent4 had the equal second longest streak of eight wins in a row***.

Clan Winners

Top clan was AWBW – Ban Blowguns – End Needles Violence, led by WalkerBoh (#6) with members MorganLeah, Snack (#9), moose, n1000 and Lasty.

Second place was Distracted by YoutubeDollars, led by Demise (#2) with members BobtheCannibal69, Megaslime, Ultraviolent4 (#3), chequers and krfreak.

Third place goes to The Shining Kimchi, a clan hailing from the Korean crawl community. It was led by irum and made up of Dowan, SilvereR, mooon, sheltermaker01 and thrrja.

Notable Achievements

The most commonly collected banner was “Vow of Courage I: Kill Sigmund before entering the Depths”, earned by 1495 players. The least common was a tie between “The Heretic III: Over the course of the tournament, abandon and mollify nine gods excluding Beogh, Elyvilon, Ru, The Shining One, and Zin.” and “Ruthless Efficiency III: Win the game before reaching experience level 19.”, each collected by just four players.

Yermak had the longest streak of the tournament, winning 10 games in a row. His streak was broken by a d:1 shaft—see, it happens to the best of us!

The most successful ghost was Iamsock‘s, who killed 27(!) players, including themselves seven times.

Most impressive tournament stats goes to xeno23. They played just six games in the tournament and won them all, five of which were 15-rune games. Congratulations!

Finally, a massive thank you to elliptic. For the past five years he quietly coded and ran DCSS’s tournaments. He’s passed on the crown this time around, but without his help and assistance this year’s would have never come to fruition. Cheers!

Notes

* as a point of reference, the second fastest win ever took 48 minutes and the average won game is around eight and a half hours long

** full disclosure: your scribe was part of this clan, contributing a mere 7% of points. He probably won’t be invited back next year

*** it would have been nine, but Ultraviolent4 won two games with the Monk background, so the second wasn’t counted. Bad luck!

• Gods:
  • Ukayaw the Reveler, god of ecstatic dance.
    • Tactical piety: gain piety by damaging enemies, lose piety extremely rapidly over time.
    • 1*: Stomp: deal damage to all adjacent enemies, increasing with their max HP and with your Invocations skill.
    • 2*: Line Pass: instantly pass through a contiguous line of enemies, confusing some.
    • Solo Time: On reaching 3*, all visible enemies are briefly paralysed, for a time increasing with Invocations skill.
    • Pain Bond: On reaching 4*, all visible enemies gain the Pain Bond status, causing them to share damage taken with other nearby Pain Bonded enemies. This can cascade!
    • 5*: Grand Finale: spend all piety to telefrag target intelligent monster. They explode.

  

  • Hepliaklqana the Forgotten, god of ancestral memory.
    • On joining, grants a permanent ancestor spirit that fights alongside you. The ancestor increases in power as you level up, and will reappear on a delay after dying or being trapped in the Abyss.
    • 0*: Recall: recall your ancestor. Works across different floors.
    • 2*: Remember Life: choose between Hexer, Knight or Battlemage classes for your ancestor.
      • Hexer: starts out with Slow, Confuse, and a dagger of draining. At XL 15, trades Slow for either Paralyse or Metabolic Englaciation (player’s choice). At XL 21, trades Confuse for Mass Confusion. At XL 27, swaps the dagger for an antimagic quickblade.
      • Knight: starts out with a shield, long blade, and bonus AC. At XL 15, swaps to either a flaming broad axe or demon trident (player’s choice). At XL 21, the shield becomes large & reflecting. At XL 27, the weapon switches to a speed ego.
      • Battlemage: starts out with Throw Frost, Stone Arrow, and a quarterstaff. At XL 15, trades Throw Frost for either Iceblast or Bolt of Magma (player’s choice). At XL 21, swaps the quarterstaff for a freezing lajatang. At XL 27, swaps Stone Arrow for Lehudib’s Crystal Spear.
    • 3*: Transference: swap your ancestor with another creature in LOS. The player is a creature in LOS.
    • 4*: Idealise: heal your ancestor, remove harmful status conditions, and apply the Idealise buff, which increases AC and doubles damage & spellpower for the duration. Duration & healing amount scale with Invocations.
    • 5*: Transference slows enemies adjacent to the target, for a duration dependent on Invocations power.
    • Piety gained by exploration.

  

  • Many divine abilities have had their hunger costs removed (ABCJMOP1) or increased (KTY).
  • Beogh’s water walking now lasts until you reach shore, even if you drop below the required piety, enter penance, etc. Funny though “drowning by using Smite too many times in a row” was.
  • Pakellas’s wrath no longer drains the player or their devices, but instead passively prevents device use for its duration.
  • Pakellas suppresses Vine Stalkers’ MP draining bite. (It still applies damage & antimagic.)
  • Pakellas no longer gifts potions of magic to mummies.
  • Dithmenos’s Shadow Step can now be used to step into invisible enemies’ invisible shadows.
  • Monsters hated by your god (e.g. wizards for Trog) can once again be temporarily enslaved.
  • Gozag will no longer attempt to bribe your own summons.
• Deep elf archers no longer fire in melee.
• Hellions no longer resist fire or are vulnerable to cold.
• Unrands:
  • The arbalest ‘Damnation’ no longer provides resistances, but does significantly more damage.
  • Firestarter and Frostbite now provide immunity to fire & cold clouds respectively; the duration of the latter’s clouds have increased.
  • The Staff of Olgreb now has a fixed +9 enchantment, rather than varying by the player’s Poison skill.
  • The Trident of the Octopus King now has twice as large an enchantment bonus per Octopus King ring worn; can *you* get the legendary +24 Trident?
  • The Sword of Zonguldrok no longer creates hostile dead (when an enemy dies due to something other than its attacks) or curses itself
  • The Mace of Variability no longer uncurses itself every turn.



• The amulet of harm is no longer evil.
• Corrosion slaying penalties now apply to unarmed & auxiliary (e.g. hoof) attacks.
• All monster-wielded (or dancing) branded weapons are now listed when they come into sight; this should be helpful for noticing, for example, that d:1 goblin with a dagger of electrocution.
• Spells:
  • Elemental enhancers (e.g. staves of earth, rings of fire) no longer penalise casting spells of the opposite element.
  • Cigotuvi’s Embrace no longer degrades when taking damage.
  • Simulacrum’s duration is somewhat reduced.
  • Dazzling Spray’s damage is slightly lower.
• Tiles:
  • Jewellery tiles have been completely replaced.
  • Mutant beasts (from the box of beasts) now have custom tiles that display their exact combination of traits.
  • Many more types of zombies, especially those of early-game creatures, now have custom tiles.
  • Many low-level demons have new tiles.
• X> once again finds the closest set of stairs by travel distance, rather than by grid distance.
• For the first time in three years, being in water not only claims to prevent player invisibility from working (because of the disturbance you leave), but actually does so.
• The player being silenced no longer prevents monsters from shouting.
• Muted monsters can once again bristle with rage.
• Sheep now bleat.
• Inscribing an item with “<ice>” no longer crashes the game.

Happy crawling!

Download DCSS 0.18 here, or play it online on one of many servers across the world! The Windows packages are available now, as well as the source; the Linux and OS X binaries should be online within a few days.
Update: The hotfix release 0.18.1 is now available.
Update #2: Linux debs of 0.18.1 are now available.
Update #3: OS X packages are now available.

The release tournament begins on May 6 2016, at 20:00 UTC, with all online 0.18 games counting towards your score. See the tournament website for more details, including how to set up or join a clan.

0.18′s highlights include:

• Spells: Charms have been rethought and reworked, and a new spell, Yara’s Violent Unravelling, allows you to punish any enemies with charms of their own.
• Branches: The Elven Halls have a new set of enemies, there’s a new way to make your way through (or out of) the Abyss, and the Orcish Mines are half as long, but twice as packed with gold.
• Items: Magical jewellery and wands have both been massively reworked, with many new types appearing and old types gone. Try out the new Amulet of Harm, which increases all damage dealt by – and to – the wearer!
• Monsters: Many monsters have been reworked or added, with a special focus on the early and very late game.
• Gods: Pakellas the Inventive gifts and empowers magical evocables, such as wands and rods. Yredremnulites can now enslave the souls of angels and demons, and Beoghites can bring their followers back from the dead.

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 0.18!

The rules page will contain all the details about how to score points and earn banners in the tournament. We’re still settling on the rules for this tournament, but they’ll probably be pretty similar to previous years’.

As usual, clans (teams of up to six players) can be formed and changed until one week into the tournament, so don’t panic if you aren’t on one yet! (Being on a clan isn’t necessary to participate in the tournament, but it can be a lot of fun.)

Once the tournament has started, the tournament leaderboard will contain the current results. (Before tournament start, some scores might briefly appear on this page as we test the tournament scripts, but they are just for testing.)

If you want to get a head-start, the 0.18 beta is now out. It is now playable on our Australian server, CPO, and should be available on other servers soon. Local beta binaries should also be available in the immediate future. (See also the 0.18 changelog.)

See you soon!

• Gods:
  • Pakellas now gifts exactly one weak wand, one strong wand, one charge-based evoker, and one XP evoker as characters advance in piety, rather than gifting an endless succession of evocables.
  • Lugonu’s Banish no longer has a power cap; instead of reaching maximum power at 10.5 Invocations, it scales smoothly up to 27 Invocations. It’s also somewhat harder to invoke.
  • Ru’s sacrifice descriptions are somewhat more verbose and, hopefully, more useful.
  • Enemies buffed by Gozag’s wrath remain buffed until slain.
• Monsters:
  • Shadow fiends have been renamed and rethemed to Tzitzimitl, Aztec skeletal demon-gods which threatened to devour the sun. Their defenses are slightly better than before, and their attacks create a ring of miasma around (but not on) the player’s tile, similarly to the late, lamented salamander firebrands.
  • Giant eyeballs are back! They can show up in Depths and Slime, accompanied by tough allies. They’ve also gone from slow to normal speed, but need to charge up twice before being able to paralyse the player, similar to orb spiders or salamander stormcallers.
  • Lich & ancient liches have spellbooks again, instead of per-lich randomly-generated spell lists.
  • Salamander stormcallers have traded their Sticky Flame for a higher rate of Fire Storm casting.
  • Iron Giants have been slowed to 80% speed.
  • Hell Hogs now spit Fireballs. Beware, or your bacon may be cooked…
  • Demonic, angelic, and ‘magical’ spells have all been merged into one category. This primarily affects descriptions.
  • Monsters can no longer use vampiric drain on gargoyles, nor heal from draining summoned creatures.
  • Monsters can no longer zap or evoke equipment while confused or fleeing.
• Items:
  • Rods are no longer treated as weapons; hitting someone with a magic rod is no longer more effective than hitting them with a rolled-up scroll. (Previously, they functioned as… clubs.) They can no longer be cursed.
  • Scrolls of enchant weapon & enchant armour no longer remove curses.
  • Ziggurat figurines can be used even after having sacrificed Evocations through Ru.
  • The lantern of shadows has faded, mysteriously, into the shadows.
  • Sniper can no longer miss. Its enchantment has been correspondingly downgraded to +9, from +15.
  • Arrows, bolts & sling bullets no longer have brands.
  • Poison needles scale with skill; they reach their old effectiveness at 8 Throwing, and improve from there.
• Throwing speed scales like weapon skills, rather than being like unarmed combat; it’s floored at 0.7 turns per toss, up from 0.5, but scales faster with skill.
• Wild/subdued magic are both much less dramatic; each level of the mutation has been reduced in severity to about 60% of what they were before. (E.g., wild magic 1 increases spellpower by 30%, instead of 50%.) Subdued magic’s effects on spell failure were reduced even further, to reinforce its status as a bad mutation.
• If you would starve with food in your inventory, you will automatically eat that food instead.
• rElec reduces damage by 2/3rds, rather than 3/4ths.
• ‘Defensive actions’ (dodging, blocking, etc) can now be listed in morgues.
• Wind Blast no longer misleadingly claims to ‘summon’ wind; instead, it correctly conjures wind, in accordance with Dungeon Crawl lore.
• The Abyss has been decisively deanthropomorphised.
• High score entries featuring mountain dwarves that died of stupidity no longer crash the game.

Happy crawling!

• It’s now possible to make progress through the Abyss via murder. Killing monsters will eventually generate an exit from the Abyss; further kills will generate stairs down, if you’re looking to fetch the abyssal rune before leaving. The speed at which this occurs depends on the XP value of the monsters killed and on your current level, so a single kill at very low level will often generate an exit.
• Large abominations have some extremely cool new tiles, thanks to CanOfWorms. Check them out the next time you take an Abyssal jaunt!
• Hellfire is now Damnation. It no longer melts ice armour or triggers Dith’s fire conduct, but is otherwise unchanged.
• Explosions can now ignite trees; Fireball, for example, can now ignite trees with its explosion, not just with the center of the fireball itself. The Rod of Ignition can also now burn trees.
• New option: autofight_warning, disabling autofight (tab) if successive commands are received too quickly. Should be helpful in cases of lag or accident.
• Monsters should be less likely to ‘flip-flop’ between emerging from behind a corner to take pot-shots at the player & retreating back behind that corner.
• Ally AI will no longer lock up when ordered to attack a monster that’s invisible to them.
• D:1 gnolls no longer have a chance of spawning with a pile of throwing nets.
• The ‘roused’ and ‘battle-frenzied’ monster status effects have been removed and replaced with Might. This is mainly a simplification and should have relatively little impact on gameplay, with the possible exception of spriggan druids’ death effect; the latter’s duration has been shortened to partially compensate.
• Status effect descriptions have been moved from the manual to an in-game lookup tool, ?/s(T)atus. Existing descriptions have been reworded & clarified, and more have been added.
• To reduce visual clutter, the tile_show_demon_tier option is now off by default, meaning that demon tiles no longer have pentagrams added.
• Tar:7 should be somewhat more threatening to any character who worries about packs of shadow fiends.
• Zot:5 no longer has a 1/3 chance of spawning extra-huge numbers of traps.
• Some of the easier wizlabs have been buffed; the Cloud Mage has a nastier spellset and more friends, and Cigotuvi’s Monster is now a mutant beast, not a tentacled monstrosity.
• Maxwell’s Etheric Cage now multiplies received magical contamination, rather than intermittently generating chunks of contamination.
• Ongoing spell effects (r/dMsl, delayed fireball) are now removed after forgetting the spell.
• Tukima’s Dance’s power multiplier has been reduced.
• Player breath weapon ranges have been belatedly adjusted for squarelos.
• Ru’s Sacrifice Courage now gives a penalty to slaying, rather than giving a bonus to damage.
• It is no longer possible to use Pakellas to supercharge non-evocables. Relatedly, you can no longer create +72 clubs.
• It is no longer possible to unequip a Fragile item without destroying it. (By putting it in your quiver and tossing it away.)

Happy crawling!

• Beogh no longer gives piety for sacrificing dead orcs’ bodies. Instead, they can be brought back from the dead with a new 6* ability, Resurrection. Hostile orcs will be converted by the experience. Saint Roka may be tough to persuade to your side, but he’s considerably less so once he’s dead…
• Also, orcs will no longer drop items that you’ve gifted them, even if they preferred whatever weapon/armour they had before.
• Monster changes:
  • New monster: Dart Slug, a slow D:1 monster with a ranged attack. It probably won’t kill you, but it’ll be very funny if it does.
  • New monster: Howler Monkey, an early D monster that’s fairly weak, but makes a heck of a lot of noise. On later levels, they spawn in packs.
  • New monster: Rime Drake, replacing fire drakes. Very similar, but instead of fire, they breathe Flash Freeze, a single-target cold-damage spell that slows victims’ movements for a few turns after they’re hit.
  • Flash Freeze can sometimes miss, though if Antaeus is casting it, it probably won’t.
  • Pandemonium lord generation has been considerably reworked, hopefully resulting in more distinctive foes.
  • Nymphs will flood any type of adjacent walkable terrain, including shops and stairs. They’re also significantly more fragile.
  • Shock serpents’ discharge now only strikes whatever hit it, rather than all enemies (but not any of the serpent’s allies!) in a wide area.
  • Deep Elf High Priests and Sorcerers no longer cast Summon Demon.
• New command: “?#” lets you browse your character dump in-game.
• Qazlal’s wrath can now summon a range of elemental-themed creatures, rather than just elementals of subtly-varying HD.
• Gozag no longer demands any service fee in sprint, rather than demanding a significant fraction of all gold on the entire map to join.
• Covering a ziggurat in gold with Gozag no longer causes enemies to be completely paralyzed.
• “Megazigs” (ziggurats entered after fully clearing previous ziggurat(s)) are now considerably nastier, and should give a bit more of a challenge to players & characters who are capable of fully clearing multiple ziggurats.
• Ziggurats no longer all have the same layout in a given game.
• The rMut artefact property now works the same as the mutation: a 2/3rd chance of preventing mutations, down from 9/10.
• Mass Confusion is no longer a player-castable spell.
• Passwall’s range is now fixed for a given spellpower (& displayed on the spell screen), rather than being random per-cast.
• Needles of slowing have been removed.
• Blowguns no longer have extra power when ‘stabbing’ unaware targets.
• Monsters can no longer pick up items from stacks you’ve seen, even if you haven’t seen the specific items that they’re trying to pick up.
• However, Maurice can now pick things up from the floor. Even things you’ve seen! Is he cheating…?
• It’s no longer possible to evolve a permanently petrified plant into a permanently petrified oklob.
• Spectral shapeshifters can now once again turn into something other than spectral ghost crabs.
• Vampires can no longer drink ghosts’ blood.
• Bribed demons can no longer escape Hell.
• Dumb monsters can no longer shout.
• Dead monsters can no longer shout.

Thanks to chequers for helping to compile this post.

Happy crawling!

The Problem With Buffs

Dungeon Crawl is a long game. A 3-rune game, on average, takes about six and a half hours to win. (Often longer – very skilled players drag down the average.) An ‘extended’ game, getting all 15 runes, takes twice as long – about 13 hours, on average. And, of course, not all games are won – only one in a hundred! The average unwon game is considerably shorter (about 20 minutes), but weight of numbers will tell – on average, each won game represents a great amount of playtime, thousands of fights and hundreds of thousands of turns.

There’s nothing wrong with a long game, of course, but it does change what makes sense to design. In a shorter game – a sprint, perhaps – a spell that you cast at the start of every fight, or just every 50 turns, isn’t too bad. In Crawl’s main game, though, remembering to refresh your buffs regularly gets tiring very fast! And if you don’t, you’re just reducing your chance to win (passing up free AC, EV, SH…) for no benefit but retaining a tenuous grip on sanity. That’s exactly the sort of choice that Crawl is opposed to; opposing ‘optimal play’ to ‘fun’.

This was the space that many of Crawl’s ‘buff spells’ found themselves in. If you’d memorized and learned to cast Stoneskin, it was totally possible to keep it running at all times, and generally a good idea to do so. But, the work involved wasn’t any fun.

The fact was, Stoneskin and friends were certainly good for a character – they were useful spells! They provided interesting strategic decisions, about skill investment, armour, spell slot use. But, in practice, the annoyance involved over the course of a long game – the choice between ‘good play’ and ‘avoiding tedium’ – made the game less fun. That’s why we cut them!

But Why Didn’t You Just…?

There’s quite a lot of suggestions I’ve seen for what we should have done instead of removing these spells. The simplest is probably to dramatically reduce the duration. If a buff doesn’t stay up for more than a dozen turns, it becomes impractical to keep it running constantly!

The trouble is that this only solves one part of the problem. You’re still left with the choice to cast your buffs at the start of every encounter, and many characters will be well-advised to do so – if you’re waiting for your enemy to close to melee, why not take a turn and a little MP to give yourself some extra defense? Well, because it’s a pain to do that at the start of nearly every encounter in a game with hundreds or thousands of fights… and so we’re back, more or less, where we started.

Another suggestion goes in the opposite direction. So players are keeping these buffs up all the time, or should – why not just automate it for them, and make the spell never expire once cast? That’s how Repel Missiles and Deflect Missiles work these days – they have a chance of expiring when they repel an incoming attack, but stay up forever otherwise.

The problem is that Dungeon Crawl’s spell system is fundamentally built around the assumption that spells are being cast in combat. In combat, the turn spent casting a spell matters – that’s a turn for enemies to act! The MP spent matters – that’s less MP to use for the rest of the fight! And the chance of failure matters – your turn is gone, your MP is gone, and you’re no better off than you were before!

Out of combat, none of those things matter. A turn doesn’t matter, MP doesn’t matter, failure doesn’t matter – you can just rest and try again. This is a problem for buffs in that you don’t need to worry about failure chance very much – get it below, say, 80% failure, and you can just recast until you succeed. What’s more, armour doesn’t matter – normally the choice of body armour is an important strategic choice for spellcasting (something heavy and protective, or something light and easy to cast in?), but for out-of-combat spells, you can just shuck your armour, cast the spell, and put the armour back on. This effectively means that Repel Missiles, for example, is a free, permanent buff for anyone who finds a spellbook containing it – no noticeable skill requirement, just a couple of spell slots. Not too much tactical annoyance, but no strategic decisions, either. It’s no good.

You can try to start patching this problem – what if taking off your body armour took off the spell! (Well, would that also apply to switching in a staff of wizardry, or a couple rings of wizardry?) What if the chance of the spell expiring when it reflected a projectile was based on your current spell failure chance, not spellpower? But when you have to keep suggesting a series of unintuitive mechanics that work like no other spell in the game, in an attempt to make an effect work within Crawl’s spell system, you have to wonder whether it makes sense for that effect to be a spell at all.

There are other variants on the ‘permanent buff’ approach – one suggests making buffs reduce your maximum MP when active, to make it less of a ‘no-brainer’ to keep the spell around all the time. But that doesn’t solve the spell failure issue, and has other undesirable effects – should armour buffs be more useful for melee warriors (who aren’t using much MP otherwise), rather than lightly armoured ‘casters’? Should these buffs become eventually almost ‘free’ later in the game, when MP pools become larger? There aren’t easy answers here.

What Does Work?

We haven’t removed all buffs quite yet. In fact, almost all of them are still around. Why?

Well, let’s look. Something like Swiftness is clearly a buff – you move faster! But the drawback when it wears off, slower movement for a time, means that it’s pretty silly to try to cast it all the time, or even at the start of every fight. It’s situational – useful, but situational. A fine spell to learn, but not one you feel like you should be casting every fight, or every 50 turns!

Other good buffs follow the same pattern. Portal Projectile teleports your shots directly to their target, letting you shoot past intervening enemies – useful, but each shot costs MP, and a miss is totally useless, whereas normal shots could hit another enemy behind your original target. Excruciating Wounds gives your weapon dramatically better killing power (against living enemies, and with investment in Necromancy…), but makes a considerable noise when cast. Invisibility makes you invisible (perhaps unsurprisingly), but the contamination means that you’re not gonna be able to turn invisible again for a while afterward, and haste would be dangerous – which can leave you in some pretty tight spots…

Adding ponderous to Ozocubu’s is an attempt to make it fit that same pattern – useful, but situational. This is an experiment! It may not work out – the drawback may be too weak, or too irrelevant (as for Cheibriados worshippers, perhaps) – or too strong in other cases! We’ll see how it works out.

A Dash Of Context

We don’t want to kill your playstyles, and we won’t. Statue Form has already been buffed to make up for the loss of Stoneskin; other forms will likely have some similar compensation in the near future. Transmuters and other light-armour characters will not stop being viable; trust us on this one.

Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup has a long and storied history of removals. Remember Alter Self, the spell that randomly mutated your character? (Repeat until desired mutations achieved…) Or Divinations, the spell-school entirely made up of out-of-combat spells? Or, perhaps, Mountain Dwarves?

Every removal’s led to some wailing and gnashing of teeth. This one’s far from the worst in that regard, and it certainly won’t be the last – but it is one of the removals with the most history behind it, and which the most thought and design effort has been applied to. It’s my hope that this post is helpful to those who were confused, informative to those who were curious, and, if perhaps not a perfect salve to those who were angry, at least reassuring with regards to the care which has been invested here.

Thanks for reading, and happy crawling!

Many thanks to dpeg for the help with this post.

• Wand changes:
  • Removed: Cold, Fire, Draining, Fireball, Frost, Invisibility, and Magic Darts.
  • New: Acid, which shoots a beam of corrosive acid. Roughly as powerful as Draining was.
  • New: Iceblast, which launches an explosive, partially physical explosion. Somewhat more powerful than Fireball was.
  • Monsters will no longer machine-gun their wands quite as often.
• Other removed items: Xom’s chesspieces, rods of destruction & the swarm, and potions of poison.
• Luckily, potions of degeneration are back! They now drain all stats by 1d3 points when consumed.
• Even more luckily, stats now regenerate faster at low XLs.
• Statue form, bat form & hydra form no longer have stat modifiers. Low-strength Vampires rejoice!
• Statue form also now gives somewhat more AC.
• Other spell changes:
  • Ozocubu’s Armour now gives ponderousness (+0.1 movement delay).
  • Passwall is now level 2 (previously, level 3).
  • Song of Slaying has been simplified; it now gives +slay with every kill, capping at +9 slay. (It was previously… complicated.)
  • Removed spells: Stoneskin, Condensation Shield, and Phase Shift.
• God changes:
  • Ashenzari now lets you directly curse items, rather than needing to create scrolls of curse armour/weapon/jewellery. This ability still consumes a scroll of remove curse.
  • Okawaru’s abilities (Heroism & Finesse) are now considerably lower duration at low Invocations, but cost less piety and scale to higher max durations.
  • If you would regenerate MP under Pakellas while already full, you can now get a potion of magic instead.
  • Sif now gives miscast protection at ** and amnesia at ****. (Previously, the reverse was true.)
  • Yredelemnul’s Enslave Soul now works on angels and demons.
• Swamp worms’ ambush predator functionality should now function correctly. Beware…
• The Captain’s Cutlass now does flat bonus damage when it disarms an enemy.

Thanks to chequers for helping to compile this post.

For those who are interested, there’s also two new experimental gods being tested – Ukayaw, God of Ecstatic Dance, and Hepliaklqana, God of Ancestral Memory. They can be played on CBRO or, for the antipodeans, CPO.

Happy crawling!

• Items:
  • New unrand: the Warlock’s Mirror, a +3 buckler of reflection. Unlike other shields of reflection, it’s also capable of reflecting piercing beams, enchantments, and other effects. Watch as that neqoxec’s Malmutate bounces off and malmutates its caster!
  • New amulet type: amulets of harm, which increase damage done by and to the player by 25%.
  • New amulet type: amulets of magic regeneration, which increase player MP regeneration considerably after a short warmup period.
  • Weapon types no longer have hidden ‘strength weights’. Instead of dex and str both giving varying bonuses to damage, str now solely gives a bonus to-dam, and dex now solely gives a bonus to accuracy.
  • Potions of cure mutation are now dramatically (~50%) more common.
  • Potions of ambrosia now bypass clarity.
  • The amulet of corrosion resistance is now a ring.
  • Evocable +tele effects are gone. Rings of teleportation now only provide random teleportation.
  • Rings of invisibility have disappeared; they are no more.
  • Ditto, potions of degeneration. They will be missed by someone, somewhere, somehow.
• Monsters:
  • Natasha no longer becomes weaker upon revival.
  • Swamp worms are now amphibious and generate submerged, emerging to attack the player and never resubmerging.
  • Deep elf high priests now have an Aura of Brilliance spell that affects all allies in their view, making them cast spells more frequently and with more spell power.
  • Demonspawn warmongers’ Sap Magic has been simplified: it now has three levels, rather than scaling continuously, and the spellcasting chance penalty now expires at the same time as the Sap effect itself.
  • Demonspawn corruptors’ Corrupt Body and wretched stars’ Corrupting Pulse now tend to cause multiple levels of a single bad mutation, rather than single levels of multiple bad mutations.
  • Doom hounds’ howls now summon a variety of nasty things, rather than other doom hounds.
  • Trapdoor spiders have crawled out of the game.
• Spells:
  • Alistair’s Intoxication is now level 5 and gives Vertigo status instead of confusing the player or draining Int, and can sometimes affect rPois monsters.
  • The Infusion spell now ramps up to maximum power much more quickly, which should make it more useful past the first floor or two of the dungeon. (If still not too much longer than that.)
  • Spectral Weapon now bases the strength of the summoned weapon on spell power, instead of weapon skill.
  • Summoning tweaks: Shadow Creatures is now level 6, Monstrous Menagerie is now level 7.
• Gozag’s Call Merchant shops no longer secretly vary in quality by the floor they’re called to.

Happy crawling!

• New feature: ecumenical altars, appearing in the early Dungeon & allowing you to convert to a random god… if you dare!
• Controlled Teleportation has been removed. Rings of control teleport, the spell Control Teleport, and the book of Control are no more. Levels no longer have -cTele (meaning that you can now cBlink your way straight to the Orb of Zot on Zot 5, if you like), but the Orb of Zot now renders blinks completely uncontrolled while carried (making it somewhat trickier to get out again).
• Monster descriptions now list spells’ chance of affecting the player on the main description page, rather than requiring that the player view the detailed spell descriptions.
• Potions quaffed by monsters are now always explicitly identified, instead of ‘almost all of the time’.
• Ravens will be seen in Crawl – nevermore! Mainly because they were removed.
• Ghostly flame clouds have been renamed to spectral mist clouds, to avoid confusion with the completely unrelated ‘ghostly fireball’ effect.
• Ghostly fireballs no longer partially ignore AC.
• Unarmed attacks no longer receive an extra, small attack speed penalty while using shields.
• Zin’s Vitalization no longer provides nutrition, and also has a very small MP cost.
• Jiyva’s Slime Prayer now paralyses slimes for longer, and also has a very small MP cost.
• Friendly monsters bribed by Gozag’s ability are now permanently bribed, but will not leave the branch from whence they came.
• Sif no longer requires worshippers to know any spells before entering Sif’s service.
• Wanderers should no longer start out with completely useless items (!cure for mummies, ?tele for formicids…)
• Ice Cave necromancers no longer have a special chance to spawn with wands of fire.
• Hell beasts no longer have randomized speeds. (Quiz for the comments section: how many people knew that their speeds *were* randomized? Also, can you name the other two types of monsters which still have randomized speeds?)

Happy crawling!

• Chimerae have been removed; the box of beasts now produces ‘mutant beasts’, a new type of creature varying in strength & abilities. Each has a ‘tier’ of strength, varying by the evocations skill of the box’s user, and a random pair of ‘facets’ providing abilities, attacks & resistances. Check them out!
• Most spells and abilities have had their descriptions rewritten for consistency & clarity. Many thanks to MarvinPA for the painstaking work!
• AC now applies before elemental resistances when taking damage for clouds, as with other sources of resistible damage; this effectively makes them more dangerous in the late-game.
• Sticks to Snakes now takes arrows from the inventory, rather than requiring them to be wielded.
• Powered by Death now triggers on kills, not corpses.
• All scrolls & potions can now generate in stacks, even potions of XP, scrolls of acquirement, or a few others.
• Monsters will now pick up all scrolls & potions, not only ones they can actually use. (This only applies to items you haven’t seen yet, of course.)
• Most monsters have lost Teleport Self*; now only Maurice, Ribbit and Sonja can cast it. Rare and powerful magic…
• Weapon descriptions now list the skill level required to reach minimum attack delay.
• Slime wall damage no longer varies by depth.
• Deep dwarf player ghosts now lose their un-regeneration-ness on death; their ghostly ectoplasm reknits normally over time. Now they can finally fit in with the other ghosts…
• Moth of wrath zombies are now pluralized correctly.
• Friendly torpor snails now slow enemies. Rejoice, gastropedomaniacs!
• The Rod of Destruction no longer has a chance of producing bolts of crystal.
• Monsters casting Legendary Destruction no longer lose HP.
• You can no longer die by casting Vampiric Draining on a tile with an invisible demon on it.
• Forms which prevent spellcasting no longer also give a penalty to spell success chance.
• Pan has been removed. (Again.)

*perhaps they left it on the nightstand?

Happy crawling!

• Monster intelligence has been simplified from six levels to three. This has a limited number of gameplay effects. Some highlights:
  • High-intelligence monsters (e.g. deep elves, non-berserker spriggans, salamanders, Killer Klowns) are now in the same category as human-intelligence monsters, and so no longer have shaft immunity, walking-into-deep-water-while-confused-and-drowning immunity, better ability to estimate victims’ MR when deciding whether to hex them, or other esoteric effects.
  • Human-intelligence flying monsters no longer dip into water to extinguish sticky flames.
  • Starcursed masses no longer care about their victims’ intelligence.
  • Stupid monsters that suffer noisy miscast effects (as caused by Spellbinder, etc) no longer have a chance of thinking that someone else made the noise.
  • If Kirke porkalates something, and then you kill Kirke, whether or not that monster become permanently friendly no longer depends on whether it had human intelligence before it was porkalated.
• Air elementals no longer randomly ‘submerge’ in air.
• Fire elementals no longer fly (though they can still cross lava). They can also now cross shallow water, which means that my brilliant vault showing off their former inability to do so has been removed… It’s a messed up world we live in, and it’s tragic as heck, basically.
• Various unrandarts now more clearly indicate their effects in their names; e.g., the Captain’s Cutlass {speed, disarm}.
• The Sceptre of Torment is now a staff, not a mace. (The Sceptre of Asmodeus was already a staff.)
• The Dragonskin Cloak no longer gives rCorr.
• The *Corrode randart property has had its chance of triggering reduced from 10% to 3%.
• Corrosion no longer depends on the player holding a weapon or wearing armour.
• Black Mark (both the demonspawn mutation & monster spell) no longer has a ‘vampiric’ effect, and now applies one effect at a time (instead of two). The non-vampiric effects (antimagic/weakness/draining) are now stronger, to compensate.
• Gozag’s potion petition prices are now more variable.
• Uniques are now somewhat less likely to have wands, especially high-level, late-game uniques.
• ‘Sustain Abilities’ is now ‘Sustain Attributes’.
• You can now use a Crystal Ball of Energy with less than 2 intelligence.
• The chance of doors creaking when opened no longer depends on Dexterity.
• Confused monsters are no longer also bewildered.

Happy crawling!

• Cleaving now functions while confused. Ctrl-attacking does not (except when a tree); in compensation, you can no longer stumble into deep water/lava while confused.
• You can no longer open/close doors while confused.
• Jellies will no longer eat items you’ve seen, unless you follow Jiyva. (This does not include items at the bottoms of stacks which you haven’t stepped on – you haven’t seen those items yet!)
• The Serpent of Hell is now somewhat weaker.
• Apporting the Orb of Zot now causes the orb run to begin (spawns, etc). You can now apport the orb in Sprints.
• The Storm card can no longer summon twisters.
• With the default rc, getting drained by an invisible ghost moth or missed by an invisible creature’s attack should now stop autoexplore/resting.
• New negative randart property: *Drain, which causes drain when un-equipped.
• New negative randart property: *Confuse, which causes a chance of confusion when taking damage.
• New negative randart property: *Corrode, which causes a chance of corrosion when taking damage.
• The mountain dwarf population has doubled! Jorgrun is no longer a deep dwarf, and now regenerates normally.
• Faith is now useless for Gozagites.
• Giant spores no longer appear normally in the dungeon.
• Dropping items now takes 10 aut apiece (as most actions do), instead of 0.8.
• The Flight spell has flown away forever. Replacements: Silence in the Book of Dreams, Flame Tongue in the Book of the Dragon, Lightning Spire in the Book of the Sky, and nothing in the Book of Air.
• Cigotuvi’s Embrace is now somewhat stronger in most circumstances, but will probably no longer provide hundreds of points of AC/SH in ziggurats.
• The Horn of Geryon is now worth somewhat less gold.

Happy crawling!

• All range-based mechanics now treat diagonals identically to orthogonal directions. Line of sight, spell range, and other effects are now visually ‘square’. Many of those, including line of sight, are now slightly shorter. (This results in them covering roughly the same number of squares).
• Removed monsters: baby alligators, boring beetles, and goliath beetles. (To compensate for baby loss, alligators now come in pairs.)
• Removed curses: basic mummies’.
• Removed spells: Abjuration is gone. Aura of Abjuration is now level 5 and in the book of Summonings instead of the Grand Grimoire.
• Monstrous Menagerie is now in the Grand Grimoire in Aura of Abjuration’s place; it’s no longer in the book of Summonings or the book of Beasts.
• Summon Mana Viper has been moved from the book of Hinderance to fill Monstrous Menagerie’s place in the book of Summonings.
• Followers of good gods can no longer be Demonologists. (They get different high-level summoning titles.)
• ‘?’ should now work on the offline title screen.
• Player-made storm clouds no longer fire at four times the rate of those onscreen.
• Monsters can no longer zap empty wands & leave them with negative charges.
• Vine stalkers no longer have fur.

Happy crawling!

• Stat rot is now restored by gaining XP (like drain), rather than over time.
• The deterioration mutation is now two levels, instead of three, and causes a chance of losing stats when taking damage, rather than over time.
• Potions of restore ability have rotted away, and, coincidentally, were removed.
• To prepare for summer, Crawl is going on a diet: Snake, Spider, Swamp and Shoals are now all four levels long.
• Heavy armour no longer provides a speed penalty to Unarmed Combat and Throwing.
• New Ru sacrifice: Sacrifice Eye. Causes inaccuracy as if you were wearing two amulets of inaccuracy at once, which, like those, affects both melee, ranged and spells. Stacks with amulets of inaccuracy.
• New Ru sacrifice: Sacrifice Resistance. Provides rF- rC-.
• When following Gozag, gold that lands in deep water/lava now teleports into the player’s pockets.
• The wrath of Chei now slows the player’s movement until it expires.
• Killing demonspawn now give Yredremnulites piety, as with murdering other living beings.
• The Placid Magic card has been placidified; much as that is not a word, Placid Magic is no longer a card, since it’s been removed.
• Scrolls of random uselessness can no longer reassemble in your hands after being read. Please join me in mourning.
• Queen ants are now normal speed.
• The Spiny mutation is now considerably stronger.
• Corpses in deep water can no longer be animated.

Players may also be interested to hear that a legendary feature is back in testing…

Happy crawling!

• Character:
  • When taking movement actions that last longer than a normal turn (10 arbitrary units of time), the game no longer caps the resulting hunger and hp/mp regeneration at 10-aut levels. This increases effectively increases hunger for slow-moving players. Nagas have been given Slow Metabolism 1 to compensate, and Chei’s metabolism slowing effectiveness has been increased.
  • The game will now warn before the player reads a scroll near enemies while blurry vision is active.
  • Very high levels of stealth are now less effective.
  • DrFi no longer gets extra aux armour.
  • You no longer get -5 EV for most multi-turn actions; only ascending and descending stairs, now.
  • You no longer get -5 EV for winning.
  • Poison immunity now makes you immune to poison.
  • Vampires can now drink from anything with blood, regardless of chunk type.
  • Vampires no longer get a very small amount of extra healing from vampire weapons under very specific conditions.
  • Kirke can no longer trap the player in vampire form.
• Monsters:
  • Poisonous chunks have been merged with rot chunks to form ‘inedible chunks’, which are inedible by all non-ghouls, regardless of rPois status. Several formerly poisonous monsters (e.g. beetles, snails) have had their meat cleaned up.
  • Unrelated monsters can now swap with each-other.
  • Ghouls no longer rot in melee.
  • Mummies have been mostly removed from D.
  • Some strange, rarely relevant monster-eating special cases have been removed; for example, death oozes no longer take damage for eating silver items (!).
  • Monsters will now zap empty wands, once.
• Spells:
  • Ignite Poison has been reworked. It’s now level 3 Tmut/Pois/Fire (from level 5 Tmut/Fire), and now only burns poisoned enemies & poisonous clouds. The damage to the former is dramatically higher than before, especially at low power.
  • Undead created by the Animate Skeleton and Animate Dead spells are now temporary, though with a long duration. (Yred’s invocations are unaffected.).
  • Sacrifice Love now blocks the use of minion spells. (Summoning, animate dead, etc.)
• Items:
  • New unrand: Maxwell’s Etheric Cage, which occasionally causes small amounts of contamination while worn. In exchange, it provides rElec and + MP. Our seventh head-slot unrand, and the first helmet unrand!
  • New unrand: the Crown of Eternal Torment, which provides rN+++, sInv, complete immunity to Torment, and -20% mhp. Embrace… torment!!!
  • The fencer’s gloves now give +4 to Long and Short Blades skills, rather than a flat +2 slay.
  • Scrolls of Holy Word now apply the Daze status effect, rather than stunning monsters directly. Daze is now more effective, and Holy Word now also does more damage.
  • The game should no longer crash whenever the player picks up gold or runes on the Android version.
• Gods:
  • Xom will no longer swap the player’s weapon with an enemy’s.
  • Gozag:
    • Potion Petition’s cost is now slightly higher, but no longer increases with use.
    • The joining fee has been decreased, especially early on.
    • Monsters without corpses (e.g. demons) now drop gold on death.
    • Exploding monsters no longer multiplies the amount of resulting gold.
• The player no longer needs to enter a name at character creation (when playing offline).

Happy crawling!

• Character:
  • MP apts & scaling have been reworked again, and are slightly less linear (extra MP for the first few levels).
  • Healing effects now cure rot first, rather than last; while the player has rot, half of their healing goes toward curing the rot rather than healing them.
  • The Forlorn mutation is no more.
  • MP-powered wands is now a single-level mutation (down from 3).
• Monsters:
  • New monster: Salamander stormcaller, fire cultists appearing in late D and Vaults. They chant for a few turns before calling down a Fire Storm on their enemies. (They also have a few other fire spells.)
  • New monster: Entropy weaver, creepy humanoids appearing in Spider, Vaults and Depths. They chant for a few turns before heavily corroding their enemies’ equipment.
  • The concept of ‘confusion-immune’ monsters has been removed; everything that’s not magic immune is now confusable. This includes e.g. gargoyles & thorn hunters.
  • Nergalle no longer recasts Death’s Door when no enemies are nearby, and takes ten times longer to recover from exhaustion after it expires.
  • Monster-summoned Spellforged Servitors are now dramatically weaker.
  • Pale & grey draconians no longer appear outside a few vaults.
  • Phantasmal warriors have +50% base damage (up to the same as large abominations), to compensate for losing SH+AC piercing.
  • Monsters with spines now all work the same way as Hell Sentinels previously did (a 1/3 chance when attacked in melee of doing 5d4 AC-reduced damage). This is mainly a buff to porcupines, which also have significantly increased melee damage (now somewhere between sheep & yak damage).
  • Tough monsters should generally no longer waste their time with terrible wands.
  • Giant mites have been shrunken right out of the game.
• Spells:
  • Enslavement has been removed. It’s been replaced by Tukima’s Dance in the Enchanter book, and Gell’s Gravitas in the Arcane Marksman book.
  • Gell’s Gravitas is now level 3, smite-targeted, and no longer confuses enemies.
  • Tukima’s Dance is now somewhat more powerful.
  • Being in water now prevents catching on sticky flame.
• Items:
  • Staves of power now give a flat +15 MP, rather than 5 + 40% of your base MP.
  • Troll leather armour now provides regeneration for trolls. Be the troll troll…
  • Exploding tomahawks now spawn.
• Gods:
  • Trog no longer accepts corpse sacrifices. (Piety from kills & piety decay have been improved to compensate.)
  • Gozag’s gold distraction effect is now a duration on the player that refreshes whenever more corpse-gold is found (made), rather than being an effect centered on the gold piles themselves.
  • A prompt is now given before casting most spells that would anger your god.
  • The success chance for Banishment is now shown properly for all values of Invocations skill.
  • Beogh’s chance of providing blessings has been considerably reduced – it was accidentally increased by 50% in January in a commit that intended to halve it.
  • The Shining One no longer blesses allies’ weapons and armour. Angel summoning is now cheaper.
• Shadow Traps have been removed.
• Picking up the Orb of Zot now increases the time until a teleport goes off.
• Xv now allows examining from the ‘map screen’ (just as xv does).
• EV penalties from constriction & multi-turn actions are now displayed in the game UI.
• Multi-turn macros should no longer reduce EV.
• Spacing in all messages has been improved to the Gallic standard.
• Beogh now reacts properly when a Beoghite player is slain by a hostile orc priest.
• Natasha can now talk in her sleep.
• Harold can no longer talk after exploding.

Happy crawling!

• Monsters:
  • Most uniques (mainly those that can spawn in D) have had their XP and placement adjusted. In general, their XP has been increased (by anywhere from 50% to 150%), and they’ve been prevented from spawning in areas that were late enough to make them no longer challenging. (E.g., Fannar in Elf.)
  • Phantasmal Warriors’ attacks no longer pierce SH & AC.
  • Silent Spectres are now much rarer in Crypt, no longer spawning outside vaults.
  • Unborn have been merged into death knights; the latter now have Agony, Haunt, and Injury Mirror, and the former no longer exist.
  • Revenants no longer ignore silence.
  • Monster rElec has been changed; rElec++ has been removed, and monsters that had it now either have rElec+ or rElec+++ (immunity).
  • Mnoleg’s attacks have been simplified.
• Spells:
  • Summon Guardian Golem is now level 3 (previously 4).
  • Sure Blade has been removed.
  • Blade Hands has its offhand attack back (accidentally lost it at the start of 0.16 development), and Dragon Form now has one too. Beware the rising dragon punch!
• Items:
  • The Cloak of Flash has been merged into the Cloak of Starlight; the latter now has a +2 enchantment and gives Stlth– (from Stlth-).
  • Wands of fireball, lightning, and draining now have 15 max charges, up from 9 for the former & 12 for the latter two.
  • -Cast should no longer appear on non-armour randarts.
  • Staves of power no longer store power for a short while after being unwielded.
  • Quicksilver Dragon Armour has had its base armour reduced by one, from 10 to 9.
  • Potions of decay have been removed.
  • Gnoll sergeants no longer have a special chance to spawn with potions of curing or heal wounds.
  • Staves of summoning no longer have a chance of abjuring on hit.
  • Warding now affects ranged attacks from summoned enemies, in addition to melee attacks.
  • Faith no longer makes your god more likely to save you.
• Gods:
  • Finesse no longer causes contamination. (It previously caused slightly less contamination than dissipated naturally per-turn.)
  • Shadow Step no longer works on harmless plants (‘plant’, ‘fungus’, ‘bush’…).
  • Beogh’s Smite ability now scales more strongly with Invocations.
  • Lugonu no longer accepts corpse sacrifices. (Piety gains from kills has increased.)
• All races’ evocations aptitudes have been reduced by 1.
• MP limits have been reworked & simplified; you now get 0.9 max MP for each experience level, and the lowest highest of (0.9 MP per level of spellcasting, 0.54 for each level of Invocations, or 0.45 for each level of Invocations). The preceding is already out of date – rapid balance changes…
• Species that cannot wear armour can no longer get the ‘ill-fitting armour’ mutation.
• Throwing wielded items is no longer three times faster than normal.
• Krakens no longer spew ink continuously.
• The rod of shadows can no longer summon friendly pan lords.

Happy crawling!

Download DCSS 0.16 here, or play it online on one of many servers across the world! Update: OS X binaries are now available!

The release tournament begins today (13 March 2015), with all online 0.16 games counting towards your score. See the tournament website for more details, including how to set up or join a clan.

0.16′s highlights include:

• Spells: Five new spells have been added, including Singularity, a level 9 Translocations spell that sucks in and destroys enemies with an intense gravitational field.
• Monsters: A huge number of monsters have been reworked or added; in particular the Tomb of the Ancients now has a far more diverse population.
• Gods: Ru the Awakened offers strength through sacrifice; Gozag Ym Sagoz the Greedy provides power through wealth. Nemelex Xobeh’s decks have been reworked and strengthened considerably, and Elyvilon’s abilities have been completely reworked.
• Branches: The tides in Shoals now shift only between shallow water & land, preventing players from getting stranded; they also move much faster than before. Each ziggurat successfully ‘cleared’ (by exiting from the 27th floor) makes all subsequent ziggurats even harder.
• Items: Many new rare and valuable items are now available, including shadow & quicksilver dragon armour, potions of ambrosia (replacing potions of confusion), and the dual-linked artefact quickblades, “Gyre & Gimble”. All chunks of flesh of a given type now merge together into a single, meaty slurry, and rotting chunks are gone. Double and triple swords are back.

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 0.16!

Crawl 0.16 has entered the beta phase; it is now playable on CBRO and CXC, and should be available on other servers soon. Local beta binaries should also be available in the immediate future.

See also the 0.16 changelog and the 0.16 tournament announcement.

The rules page contains all the details about how to score points and earn banners in the tournament. Quite a few changes to banners, in addition to a few other tweaks to scoring rules – check up!

As usual, clans (teams of up to six players) can be formed and changed until one week into the tournament, so don’t panic if you aren’t on one yet! (Being on a clan isn’t necessary to participate in the tournament, but it can be a lot of fun.)

Once the tournament has started, the tournament leaderboard will contain the current results. (Before tournament start, some scores might briefly appear on this page as we test the tournament scripts, but they are just for testing.)

(If you just want advice on how to contribute, skip to the end of the article!)

== Stats ==

(Global stats as of 0.16 (ish) from openhub.net)

Over the course of Crawl’s development, we’ve had 47,577 commits by 203 authors (not counting contribs not in commit form!) resulting in 373,054 lines of code.

All this took an estimated 101 years of combined effort! A century of crawl.

For 0.16 specifically, we had

• 50 commit authors.
  • 24 members of the team contributed, the other 26 were community members,
  • with 5 more making contributions but not listed as commit authors.
• Nathaniel Rook, infiniplex, Edgar A. Bering IV, and Chris Oelmueller all had more than 10 commits; Chris Oelmueller had 39!
• Altogether 54 tiles were edited or added by community tiles authors, with Bloax contributing to 48 tiles.
• Over 150 commits credited community members for their input.

During development approximately 580 new mantis tickets were opened on our bug-tracker, and 680 were resolved.

== Highlights: ==

Volunteer contributions ranged the gamut for this commit. Some people added new items, like the unrand Gyre and Gimble (designed by argonaut before being rewritten by wheals), or the new Potion of Ambrosia that replaces Potions of Confusion (thanks again, Edgar!). Others added new dungeon features, like Nathaniel Rook‘s troves that take piety instead of items, or Infiniplex‘s new set of dungeon layout generators. (Probably most noticeable in Elf!) Bloax added an enormous number of new tiles, for monsters, items, icons & features; Chris Oelmueller contributed a preposterous number of balance tweaks, bugfixes, and general quality of life improvements.

== Full breakdown: ==

• Game Mechanics & Items:
  • MP Powered wands – Nate Rook [c235d9a]
  • Potion of Ambrosia – Edgar A. Bering IV [4319a51, 91c5bcb, 06f1e9d]
  • Various nerfs – Chris Oelmueller [da37df7, db7d090, 4f19e5c]
  • Gyre and Gimble – argonaut [dd79bc7]
• Vaults & Dungeon Features:
  • Vaults – John Boyle [b5f10d0]
  • Elf, Spider and other dungeon generation – infiniplex [86f53c5, 453ed26, 1ce2b6a, 2c9155b, e393dcd, 5f1a7ec, 90934ab, 8f58c59, c71123d, c2d8bb1]
  • Piety Troves – Nate Rook [0598440, 87a0f83, 97dfbf9, 3be1ec8, a1962e9, e8d63ac, 4a7ea2a]
• Flavour & text:
  • Alex ‘chequers’ Jurkiewicz [fb3039f]
• User interface & display:
  • Stealth bar – Cedor [6a06390]
  • Shopping list sorting – Alex Henry [19b1b05]
  • Safe move/safe wait – Mark Lodato [d31a67b]
  • Xom mood meter – Edgar A. Bering IV [784a923, f29fc7b]
  • Runed door and other level annotations – Edgar A. Bering IV [e3cf528, 67aa517, 477aa95]
  • Hex success chance display – Chris Oelmueller [5ec9153, 866e5ec, 568023d, 5627181, 9bc942c]
  • artefact, HUD, and % screen display quality of life – Chris Oelmueller [122ca20, 1a50928, 4727367, a82f3fd, 31b0019, 74483ed, 0e9d014]]
  • Other display quality of life – Chris Oelmueller [2bf1b22, 986f71d, a488ed3]
• Tiles:
  • Vitor ‘Baconkid’ Costa
    • New Dowan and Duvessa title screen
  • Bloax
    • Dowan & Duvessa, Frances
    • Wraiths, thrashing horrors, acid blobs, and some butterflies
    • Summon Horrible Things
    • Nemelex ability icons
    • Sack of Spiders
    • Playerdoll tiles for ring, scale, chain & plate armour
    • Vaults stone tiles
  • Brannock
    • Quarterstaves
  • CanOfWorms
    • Bone dragons, azure jellies and Dissolution
• New options:
  • new option: fail_severity_to_confirm – Sandman25 [5649082]
  • new option: item_slot – Sandman25 [3c7236e]
  • feature, item_glyph, and mon_glyph are now list options – Edgar A. Bering IV [17baf73, 0e41352, 0292bcd]
  • small_more to work with clear_messages – Chris Oelmueller [de8d0ee]
  • new option: always_show_exclusions – Chris Oelmueller [23b77bc, 1aa8fe1]
• Tweaks, bugfixes, and other corrections:
  • Brandon Allbery [30145bb]
  • Akinori MUSHA [dc488c0]
  • Alex Henry [1cbfad4]
  • Peter McLarnan [d607eb1]
  • Thom Chiovoloni [fa1ea45]
  • Austin Appleby [93d1bf1]
  • waylon531 [02c350a]
  • Tanner Swett [9ad1ca1]
  • Ben Haines [8150550]
  • Chris Terenzi [931e68f]
  • Kyle Fox [ca94107]
  • Nicholas Connelly [ed37a4e]
  • Ryan Svoboda [6a05d28, 1f8aa9a]
  • Richard Soderberg [30d2c40, 555ca3c]
  • nagdon [2625ad1, 91f9442]
  • Zannick [ff07b5f, b205902]
  • Alex ‘chequers’ Jurkiewicz [18f3f21, bdb1c56]
  • Ed Gonzalez [fedf916, 3187ff9, 5179ca8, 0a3dd61, 2ed3cef, 77cb719, da56f66]
  • Nate Rook [06c7d7e, c49590a, de63cc4, 06da542]
  • Edgar A. Bering IV [1a44955, 92c252e, 1402169, 437ab35, 8860622, 303d90c, 69029fd, 621cfab]
  • Chris Oelmueller [4e34004, 8bbc685, 901aaec, 4dbdd72, 6d9fe09, 88da044, 973cab0, 289536a, 81848e5, 44aede0, 65c414e, aa3ee12, 812cefa, 172840c, 7e2cf2e]

== Interested in contributing? ==

That’s great! So, what do you want to do?

If you want to make art, that’s great! If you feel comfortable working with small sprites (generally around 32×32), then we can always use new tiles for almost everything – monsters, features, you name it. (Most of our monster tiles date back to the first release of tiles, nearly ten years ago!) You can check out our existing tiles by looking through the subdirectories here, and this document provides a full guide to the rest.

If you don’t feel comfortable with sprites that small, we can always use new loading screens – our existing ones are here.

If you prefer coding, probably the simplest place to start is by looking through the list of open bugs, finding something that looks promising, and uploading a fix. The code is here, and there are also guides to creating a patch.

If neither of those are your strong suit, you can try creating a new vault – a partially randomized area of the game. Documentation is here You can also try designing a new part of the game, like a god, species, or spell, and suggest it on the forums – remember to keep a thick skin and not take criticism too personally, though!

Once you’ve made something, art or a vault or anything else, put it on mantis in a new issue. Don’t feel too stressed about all of the fields – we can fix small mistakes with that sort of thing.

For help with any of these, feel free to visit ##crawl-dev on irc://chat.freenode.org – there’s generally devs around to help any time, between 9 AM to 11 PM Pacific. (And even if no one’s around, you can leave a message and come back later – generally someone will read the logs sooner or later.)

Thanks for reading, and happy crawling!

• Gozag changes:
  • Gozag’s wrath now lasts until the player accrues a considerable amount of XP (like Ashenzari’s wrath), instead of being based on a number of punishments.
  • Gozag’s wrath no longer turns items to gold, or taxes gold that’s picked up.
  • Gozag’s wrath can now bribe more kinds of enemies, and no longer gives them invisibility.
  • Odds of Gozag preventing quaffing under wrath is up from 20% to 33%.
  • The first use of Gozag’s potion petition is now free.
  • Duplicate is no longer offered.
• Monsters can no longer be distracted by your allies if you follow TSO. (Thus preventing annoying situations where you can’t attack an enemy, since it’s busy fighting your angel pal…)
• Gell’s Gravitas is now level 5 (down from 6), and its confusion effect lasts somewhat longer.
• Player ghosts now should have the proper rate of remembering spells again. (It was considerably too low for the last few months, owing to a badly named function.)
• rMut now properly gives 90% mutation protection again, instead of 81%. (Broken since mid-September of last year.)
• Ancient zymes’ melee attacks no longer drain stats.
• rPois- randarts no longer generate.
• Monster spriggans no longer have weird resistances (rPois for druids, rElec for air mages, rF & rC for the Enchantress)
• rHellfire has been removed from most monsters that do not actually cast Hellfire, with the exception of Cerebov. Also, Cerebov is now magic immune.
• Many previously magic-immune enemies are no longer: notably, most plants, eyes, mummies, and angels.
• The Royal Jelly now spews jellies when polymorphed.
• Descriptions for body armour now list the AC that they provide after Armour skill is taken into effect.
• The Orb of Zot now always degrades controlled blink to semicontrolled blink (previously had a 50% chance of turning it into uncontrolled blink).
• Xom is no longer amused when the player destroys the Orb of Zot. (It is impossible to destroy the Orb of Zot.)
• Bazaars no longer ever contain oklobs.
• THE GIAGGOSTUONO is now available for player tile use. (As “giaggostuono”.) Beware!
• Fleshy orifices have been made a little more obvious.

Happy crawling!

Anyway, here’s some changes:

• Card changes:
  • The Storm card can no longer create a twister & storm clouds at the same time (thus blowing you into the clouds & killing you), and can no longer create elemental wellsprings.
  • The Water card is back; it now creates temporary shallow water & summoned wellspring allies.
  • The Repulsiveness card will now always create at least one friendly ugly thing if it creates any hostile ugly things.
• The Abyss that Abyssal Knights start out in has been tweaked. It can now generate stairs down; it’s once again possible to get a rune without leaving the abyss. (In theory!)
• Monsters can now shout even if they’re already awake; in practice, this means the “tossing stones at wandering monsters” tech is considerably weaker.
• Zombies, skeletons & other non-healing monsters can no longer be healed by any effect. (Including e.g. Ghostly Fireball.)
• Josephine’s band of zombies & skeletons has been replaced by a band of wraiths.
• The Dark Maul has had its enchantment & base damage increased; it should be more usable now.
• Monstrous menagerie has had its summon cap decreased from 4 to 3.
• Fake languages can now only be stacked up to 3 times. ‘Butt’ is now parameterizeable.
• Friendly monsters should chatter a bit less.

Happy crawling!

• Ely rework:
  • Piety gain now comes from exploration, not pacification or weapon destruction.
  • Abilities have been reworked: Lesser & Greater Heal Self are now 1* and 4* abilities respectively (and have been renamed), Greater Heal Other is now 2*, 3* is Purification, and Lesser Heal Other has been removed. The “Heal Self” abilities have been renamed to just “Lesser/Greater Healing”.
  • Wands of Heal Wounds can no longer be used to pacify monsters.
  • The Healer background has been removed.
• Other removals: the spell Forceful Dismissal, the spear of the Botono, and rN- effects.
• Tomb monster tweaks:
  • Death Scarabs no longer cause draining (or rN-).
  • Bennu no longer have sticky flame.
  • Ushabti now only create negative energy clouds, not miasma.
  • Anubis guards no longer have Control Undead.
• Shadow traps now deactivate temporarily after being triggered.
• Display of artefact weapons in non-webtiles HUDs has been tweaked; the names no longer display if it would cause the line to become too long.
• Elemental evokers no longer stack.
• Meatsprint lost souls have been renamed to wretched souls, so as to avoid ambiguity with the completely unrelated monster, non-meatsprint lost souls.
• Dispersal & Gell’s Gravitas have had their confusion effects slightly buffed.
• The lantern of shadows now drains MP while wielded, and summoned shadows disappear after reaching 0 MP or unwielding the lantern. It no longer recolours the environment in console.
• Large rocks no longer have a randomized throwing range.
• Steel ammo now mulches at the same rate as normal ammo.
• Two new Ru sacrifices: “sacrifice skill”, reducing all skill apts by 1 point (and adjusting your existing skills accordingly), and “sacrifice experience”, costing you 2 XL and reducing the XL cap by 2. (So max level becomes 25.)
• Beogh now has the same chance of blessing followers after a kill, regardless of whether you or your followers made that kill. (Previously, the odds of a blessing were dramatically higher for kills made by followers.)
• The ‘pizza=’ rcfile option has been added back & improved, after over two years in rcfile exile. As the famous pizza chef once said: Have It Your Way.

Happy crawling!

• Major:
  • Shoals tides have been reworked: they now shift only between shallow water & land, never creating or destroying deep water tiles. They also move fifteen times faster.
  • New fake language: ‘butt’. To quote the purpose statement of the original:

    Buttbot is a social experiment in humour and interaction, it
    playfully mocks those around it. Almost deconstructionist in
    nature by manipulating the context of the text it parodies,
    it forces people to reexamine what has been said in a new light.

    It builds on the tradition of mechanising surrealist techniques,
    such as example Dadadodo by Jwz implementing the cut-up technique
    made famous by William S. Burroughs (and used by Radiohead).
    However instead of merely rearranging the content, buttbot aims
    to augment it with the simplistic low brow humour.

    The use of puerile humour is mainly to bring the conversation
    back down to earth, to remind us that in our intellectual pursuits
    that childish references to anatomy can bring a smile to our
    faces…

  • Fake languages are now stackable. Try adding “fake_lang = dwarven,!!!” to your rcfile, or see the options guide for more languages and options.
  • New rcfile option: “easy_door”, which toggles whether or not to ask for a prompt when (C)losing doors if only one open door is adjacent. (For consistency.) Defaults to true.
  • add_autopickup_func() rcfile functionality has changed; returning false now signifies that corresponding items should never be picked up. I am told that if your autopickup is broken by this, you should do the following: “in the function passed to add_autopickup_func, change return false to return nil and change return a and b or c and d to return (a and b or c and d) or nil”. If you don’t understand that (I’m not super confident on it myself), maybe just delete the relevant functions and hope for the best.
  • Evocables now charge & discharge per-type, rather than individually. (That is, whenever you use a lamp of fire, all lamps of fire are unuseable until you gain enough xp to recharge it.) The elemental spirits are whimsical beings…
• Moderate:
  • Light armour now has a small penalty to spellcasting success chance, and heavy armour’s penalties to spellcasting are slightly reduced.
  • Bucklers now have a very slightly smaller encumbrance penalty.
  • Shields’ evasion penalties, & the skill required to completely mitigate them, are now displayed in their descriptions.
  • Caustic shrikes, after being nerfed, buffed, nerfed, and nerfed, have been buffed. Specifically, they’re now somewhat buffer, and less likely to appear when polymorphing earlier, weaker creatures. Celebrate!
  • Natasha has traded her Mephitic Cloud for Conjure Flame, which she’ll use to try to block off the player’s avenues of manuever. (She had a bad habit of walking into her own mephitic clouds. Ridiculous cat…)
  • All book tiles have been completely replaced.
  • New tiles for several uniques. Check out Nikola’s new look, just before the next time he electrocutes you to death!
  • Gargoyles, being statues, can no longer cast Statue Form.
  • Exploration piety no longer scales by the size of the level; it now is based solely on the number of tiles explored. (Early Ziggurat levels no longer give enormous amounts of Ash/Nemelex piety.)
  • Throwing net range no longer varies by the size of the player; all races can now throw them to the edge of LOS, up from 5 squares for most races, 6 squares for ogres, 4 for halflings & kobolds, & a mere 3 squares for spriggans.
  • The Tome of Destruction has been utterly destroyed.
  • All non-permanent summoned monsters are now unable to use stairs.
  • Trog’s wrath summons are now permanent.
  • rPois- items now prevent the player from reaching rPois+.
• Minor:
  • Item descriptions no longer claim that rPois- “protects against poison”.
  • It is no longer possible to instantly die from putting on a -hp item, or from having your last maximum hit point rotted away, or by being tormented at 1 hp while at rN-.
  • You can no longer drink !poison, !decay or !degeneration if you know what they are and are not immune to them. Crawl does not encourage self-destructive drinking among its players.
  • Hell rats no longer appear in the Sewers.
  • Hexes with a 100% success chance should no longer fail.
  • +Twstr and +-HP have been removed from randart generation.
  • Artefacts can no longer spawn with both “cause random teleportation” and “prevent all teleportation” properties.
  • Mummies can no longer be trapped in an infinite loop when calling for merchants.

  Happy crawling!

  ]]> https://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/trunk-updates-23-january-2015/feed 4 https://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/trunk-updates-15-january-2015 https://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/trunk-updates-15-january-2015#comments Fri, 16 Jan 2015 04:01:13 +0000 PleasingFungus http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/?p=3067 Hi, crawlers! Your changes for today:
  • Random artefact generation has been reworked.
    • Artefact property distribution is now considerably more structured, and there’s now a weak correlation between bad & good properties (an artefact with a few good properties is now less to have bad ones, and vice versa).
    • New, rare property: +Twstr, which, when evoked, summons a hostile twister nearby. Its winds shred everything nearby – including you, if you’re not light on your feet!
    • Other new properties: Regen+, HP+-, MP+-, rPois-, rN-, and probably a few others I’m forgetting.
    • Artefact stats now range +-2-6, up from +-1-5.
  • Acid walls now display the ‘acid floor tile’ all around themselves, even when outside Slime. Should help discourage a few accidental acid deaths…
  • Irradiate now has an animation – console-only for now, until I make some decent tiles for it.
  • When following Ashenzari, (p) now sacrifices one scroll at a time, and tells you which scrolls were created.
  • Gozag food shops are now 2/3rds as pricey.
  • Cigotuvi’s Embrace no longer hurls hundreds of corpses across the floor (visually). Maximum five animated corpse movements per casting. Sorry (?), zig-spammers. (The actual functionality of the spell is unchanged; this is just visual.)
  • Applying Excruciating Wounds and Warp Weapon in succession (in either order) no longer permanently changes weapons’ brands.
  • Good news – &^Ib works again!
  • Invisible giant eyeball messages have been disambiguated.
  • Confused terrified fungi stumble around.

  Happy crawling!

  ]]> https://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/trunk-updates-15-january-2015/feed 0 https://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/trunk-updates-7-january-2015 https://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/trunk-updates-7-january-2015#comments Thu, 08 Jan 2015 04:23:00 +0000 PleasingFungus http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/?p=3064 Hi, crawlers! First changes of the new year:
  • Blurry vision’s effect has been reduced; it now adds a delay of 0.5/1/2 turns (by mutation level), down from 1/2/3.
  • It should now be possible to safely cancel controlled & semicontrolled blink in most situations.
  • New rcfile option, fail_severity_to_confirm, allowing you to set a threshold of spell failure rates above which the game will warn & prompt you before casting. The default is to prompt at dark red failure (very high to guaranteed).
  • Hydra form now only gives +30% HP (down from +50%), and gives half as much healing when devouring enemies.
  • Gargoyles no longer get 4 less AC from Statue Form than every other race.
  • Various new tiles, mainly for uniques: check out Eustachio’s sweet ‘stache the next time you see him!
  • The demonic rune now has a random tile.
  • Baileys have had their oriflamme replaced with a portcullis.
  • ?/I now lists the contents of decks.
  • The deck of oddities is now documented in-game.
  • The deck of summonings has been renamed; it is now the deck of summoning.
  • Yaktaurs are now slightly more dangerous.
  • Wasp monsters have been renamed: red wasps are now known as ‘hornets’, and yellow wasps are now just ‘wasps’.
  • Boring beetles can no longer teleport onto the player in D:1.
  • There’s a commit here which uses the word “retrogdorise”, and I’m gonna be honest, I don’t care about what the commit does. I’m not even gonna read it. I just wanted to share that with you.
  • Held weapons no longer apply their brands to thrown weapons.
  • rElec now protects against lightning.

  Happy crawling!

  ]]> https://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/trunk-updates-7-january-2015/feed 1 https://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/trunk-updates-31-december-2014 https://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/trunk-updates-31-december-2014#comments Wed, 31 Dec 2014 21:36:51 +0000 PleasingFungus http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/?p=3056 Hi, crawlers! Last changelog of the year:
  • New trap: the Shadow Trap, appearing from d:3 downward. Any non-summoned creature that moves into it will summon a small group of shadow creatures from the current level, which are always hostile to the player.
  • Traps are now more common in most parts of the game, and considerably less common in Slime.
  • Elemental evocables now stack.
  • ?/ has been considerably improved, and a new ?/c(L)oud option has been added.
  • When examining features with clouds over them, both the description of the feature & the cloud are now displayed.
  • Maxwell’s Patent Armour has been moved back toward its old egos; it now has rCorr rElec instead of Resistance.
  • Cleaving’s damage to secondary targets has been reduced from 75% to 70%.
  • A number of rock wall tiles have been replaced or reworked; in particular, Sewers no longer have acid wall tiles.
  • Megazigs no longer sometimes place the player in the centre of the floor.
  • The MP cost of the wand-power mutation has been halved; it now costs 3 MP per wand use per level, down from 6.
  • Ru now applies antimagic to enemies, rather than Muting them.
  • Dithmenos no longer sometimes considers steam to be a source of fire.
  • Ironheart Preservers now have significantly worse defenses, but significantly more HP. This may make it worthwhile to bother actually attacking them.
  • Call Imp now becomes stronger at high power, instead of becoming weaker.
  • Linux and OS X no longer double all numpad inputs.
  • ?/K no longer lists the skills “Stabbing”, “Traps”, “rat”, and “bat”.
  • Chokoban has been upgraded.

  Happy crawling!

  ]]> https://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/trunk-updates-31-december-2014/feed 5 https://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/trunk-updates-23-december-2014 https://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/trunk-updates-23-december-2014#comments Wed, 24 Dec 2014 04:10:28 +0000 PleasingFungus http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/?p=3052 Hi, crawlers! Another quiet week:
  • Spells & abilities that check enemy MR now display their success chance in the targeting interface.
  • Examining monsters’ spells now allows you to see their chance of affecting you with MR-checking spells.
  • Ru’s Draw Out Power drain has increased by 20%, and the odds of Apocalypse applying status effects has increased from 3/5 to 3/4.
  • Troves that ask for the Horn of Geryon now actually take it, instead of just requesting that you present it.
  • Ashenzari no longer suppresses blurry vision.
  • Hydra Form’s duration has been increased considerably; it’s now roughly the same as Blade Hands’.
  • Dragon Form no longer enhances Dragon’s Call.
  • The rock walls of the stone huts in Shoals:5 now actually look like rock in Tiles.
  • Elemental weapon brands now only have their damage multiplied by 1.5x for each level of negative resistance the target has (e.g. rC-), down from 2x. This is consistent with the extra damage that all other sources of elemental damage get.
  • Orcish allies no longer cast Animate Dead for Beoghites.
  • The Iron Rod’s scaling with spellpower has been considerably reduced; it probably no longer one-shots the toughest monsters in the game.
  • The Arc Blade’s discharge effect has been fixed; it now arcs repeatedly to multiple targets rather than only affecting one, making it considerably more powerful.
  • Sif now gives penance for destroying books, again.

  Happy crawling, and enjoy the holidays!

  ]]> https://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/trunk-updates-23-december-2014/feed 1