0.33 “Reforge Yourself”

We are pleased to announce the release of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup: 0.33 “Reforge Yourself”!

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

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

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

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

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

0.33 Tournament Page

Hello crawlers! We’re letting you know that the official 0.33 tournament page is online! The tournament will run for 16 days from 8pm UTC Friday, May 2nd to 8pm UTC Sunday, May 18th. Please bookmark the 0.33 tournament page and use this page to track your progress throughout the tournament. We have some minor rule changes planned and will update the tournament page as those changes are finalized. As we test the tournament scripts, you may see summaries of test data in the “Overview” page taken from recent 0.33 beta games. Don’t worry, we’ll reset everything before the tournament starts.

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

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

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Trunk Update and 0.33 Tournament Announcement

Hello crawlers! The 0.33 development cycle is nearing a close, and we are pleased to announce a date of Friday, May 2nd, 2025, at 20:00 UTC for the sixteen day 0.33 release tournament. The feature freeze has started today, so we’ve stopped adding new content and will be making only balance tweaks and bug fixes over the next two weeks. A subsequent post will announce the official 0.33 tournament website, but please feel free to start organizing those tournament clans!

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

Highlights

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

Artefacts

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

Branches, Environment

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

Character

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

Gods

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

Interface and Options

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

Items

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

Monsters

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

Species

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

Spells

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

Tiles and Other Art

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

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

0.32 Tournament Results

The 0.32 tournament is over. On behalf of the Dev Team, many thanks to all the server admins, outside contributors, bug reporters, and to the many DCSS players who made the 0.32 release and tournament possible! For 16 days, players could compete for tournament points and banners by playing 0.32 games on the public servers. The only major rule change compared to the 0.31 tournament is that the Ziggurat category scoring was capped at 5 completed zigs. Zigs completed past 5 are still displayed for bragging rights, of course!

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

Other big winners:

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

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

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

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

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

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0.32 “Gods and Makers”

We are pleased to announce the release of Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup 0.32 “Gods and Makers”!

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

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

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

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

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

0.32 Release and Tournament

Hello crawlers! We’ve entered feature freeze for 0.32, in preparation for the impending release and tournament. The tournament will run from Friday August 30th 2024 at 20:00 UTC until Sunday September 15th 2024 at 20:00 UTC. An initial version of the official 0.32 tournament page is now available for bookmarking. We don’t expect many rule changes compared to 0.31, but any such changes will be noted at the bottom of that page before the tournament begins. Note that the pages will be in Test Mode and may have random test data in coming days, but any such data will be wiped before the tournament starts.

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

New Crawl Servers and a Possible Server Retirement

Greetings, Dungeon Crawlers, as I once again bring you important server information!

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

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

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

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

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

CDI is Now Official and CKO is Going Offline

Greetings Dungeon Crawlers! The official crawl.kelbi.org server, also known as CKO, is going offline tomorrow. Many thanks to floraline for generously hosting what was often our busiest crawl server since 2018! Additionally, floraline contributed several aspects to WebTiles configuration that continue to be used by other official servers to this day. Your CKO game records will of course continue to be available in Sequell and CAO scoring. We also have a new long-term home for your CKO morgue files. Those should become accessible at the new host in the next couple weeks, after which Sequell and CAO scoring will point to the new morgue URLs for all past CKO games.

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

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

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0.31 Tournament Results

The 0.31 tournament is over. On behalf of the Dev Team, many thanks to all the server admins, outside contributors, bug reporters, and to the many DCSS players who made the 0.31 release and tournament possible!

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

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

Other big winners:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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0.31 “The Alchemy of Forms”

We are pleased to announce the release of Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup 0.31 “The Alchemy of Forms”!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

0.31 Tournament Page

Hello crawlers! We’re letting you know that the official 0.31 tournament page is online! The will run from Friday January 19th, 8pm UTC to Sunday February 4th, 8pm UTC. Please bookmark the 0.31 tournament page and use this page to track your progress throughout the tournament. We have some rule changes planned and will update the tournament page with any changes. As we test the tournament scripts, you may see summaries of test data in the “Overview” page taken from recent 0.31 beta games. Don’t worry, we’ll reset everything before the tournament starts.

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

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Trunk Updates 11 December 2023 and Tournament Announcement

Hello crawlers, and welcome to the ultimate trunk update of the year! The 0.31 development cycle is (finally!) nearing a close, and we are pleased to announce a tentative tournament start date of Friday, Jan 19, 2024, at 20:00 UTC for the sixteen day 0.31 Release tournament. We’ll shift towards bug fixes and balance as we get closer to 0.31′s release, sometime before the start of the tournament. More details about the tournament, including a tournament website and rules changes, will be available here!

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!

0.30 Tournament Results

The 0.30 tournament is over. On behalf of the Dev Team, many thanks to all the server admins, outside contributors, bug reporters, and to the many DCSS players who made the 0.30 release and tournament possible!

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

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

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

Other big winners:

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

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

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

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

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

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

0.30: “The Reavers Return”

We are pleased to announce the release of Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup 0.30 “The Reavers Return”!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trunk Updates 1 April 2023 and Tournament Announcement

Hello crawlers, and welcome to the most completely serious and truthful trunk update of the year! The 0.30 development cycle is (finally!) nearing a close, and we are pleased to announce a tentative tournament start date of Friday, May 5, 2023, at 20:00 UTC for the sixteen day 0.30 Release tournament. We’ll shift towards bug fixes and balance as we get closer to 0.30′s release, sometime before the start of the tournament. More details about the tournament, including a tournament website and rules changes, will be available here!

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.

Trunk Updates 11 Jan 2023

Happy new year, crawlers! It’s been a little longer than usual since the last updates post, so this post will be a little longer than usual, too. To get you started, here’s a cool new splash screen from PhilosopherOpposite:

An Armataur Paladin, by PhilosopherOpposite.

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.
  • Further spell-related changes:
    • Manifold Assault moved to L4 (from L5) and does half as many attacks with UC as with a weapon. This is intended to make it a viable choice for more characters. Lowering its level makes it more viable for weapon-using characters to grab, and reducing its effectiveness for UC characters is compensation, since Manifold Assault was already very good for them.
    • Ozocubu’s Refrigeration’s damage has been increased.
    • Lesser Beckoning is now better at low power.
    • Slow no longer has bonus hex power.
    • The Simulacrum and Static Discharge spells have been weakened.
    • Conjure Flame and Corpse Rot have been removed. Neither were beloved by players, despite having gone through many rounds of revisions and (at least in the former case) being fairly strong; Kindle Blastsparks and Dreadful Rot are the next generation.
  • Interface-related changes:
    • Damage ratings are now shown in @. That includes ratings for unarmed combat, which were previously unavailable.
    • Bumping a foe while holding a ranged weapon now automatically shoots instead of asking if you want to hit the foe over the head with your bow.
    • Unrands have a distinct colour (teal) by default.
    • The % screen no longer shows .s for Stealth values, in an attempt to avoid misleading players into believing that there was a ‘maximum stealth’ value that could be achieved. (That is, it now shows “Stealth: +++” instead of “Stealth: +++…….”.)
    • Spells’ maximum damage is now displayed in their descriptions, in an attempt to make it a little easier to understand how spellpower relates to spell damage
    • Many weapon brands now provide more quantitative damage information.
    • New show_blood option allows disabling blood spatters and bloody corpses.
  • Notable bugfixes:
    • Various webtiles spectator issues have been fixed.
    • The Autumn Katana no longer claims to be vorpal. (Vorpal no longer exists, but also, the Autumn Katana hadn’t *actually* been vorpal since 0.27.)
    • It’s probably no longer possible to generate an Orc:1 with zero monsters.
    • Monsters are no longer described as being both resistant and immune to blinding.
    • Monsters with ‘see invisible’ no longer pretend to be unable to see invisible players while casting spells.
    • Monsters no longer get huge SH from orbs.
    • Monsters can no longer riposte when the player blocks their attacks.
    • Guardian golems and ironbound preservers no longer protect orbs of destruction.
    • Fsim (the wizmode fight simulator) once again works with ranged weapons.
    • Targeting a mirror cloned monster with Vampiric Draining will no longer give away its secret.
    • Jiyva’s missile-eating jelly mutation now works, for (possibly) the first time since 2014.
    • Remove Wu Jian’s secret ability to pick up mimic runes and shop at mimic shops.
    • Felids can no longer throw javelins.
    • Trees can no longer drown.
  • 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:

    Ereshkigal, by Micah C.

    Happy crawling!

    0.29 “Shooting Stars”

    We are pleased to announce the release of Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup 0.29 “Shooting Stars”!

    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

    Trunk Updates 14 August 2022 and Tournament Announcement

    You hear the tinkle of a tiny bell. The trunk updates and a butterfly come into view!

    Hello crawlers! Welcome to the last trunk update of the 0.29 cycle. We’ll be branching off the 0.29 beta branch and rolling it out to the servers soon, in anticipation of an upcoming release and tournament starting Friday, August 26, 2022, at 8:00pm UTC. Watch this space for the tournament website soon!

    As we’ve been in feature freeze for part of the time since the last update post there’s not much to report, but here’s the latest on what will round out the version. Expect to see a few more new vaults and tweaks before the beta, and don’t hesitate to report any bugs you’ve noticed. Community contributor nlavsky has continued the stream of bug fixes; riverfiend did a deep dive in god wraths and did a lot of sanity checks, big thanks to them both! Here are the rest of the changes:

    • A new scroll of butterflies summons some insectoid cover, alternating in a set with the scroll of fog
    • Sastrei has been hard at work drawing a slew of new tiles
    • Some spell balance tweaks:
      • Irradiate now applies more contamination
      • Flame wave and sticky flame do more damage
      • Sandblast is more accurate
      • Frozen Ramparts and Ozocubu’s Refrigeration now check AC.
      • Ozocubu’s Refigeration no longer applies -Potion, does more damage, but significantly reduced damage to monsters adjacent to each other (they huddle for warmth, cute!).
    • Arcane Markspersons starting sling is now +1, and they trade the scroll of vulnerability for a scroll of poison.
    • The roll attack of Palentonga is now quieter, and they gain +2 strength.
    • A lot of behind-the-scenes work in key code handling and UI menus has been done by advil; the work has payed dividends in making new menu shortcut features easy to implement, visible in the use an item menu (toggle between wear/takeoff with !). Look forward to more of this in the next version.

    Along with these gameplay changes have been a host of bug fixes as we get the next version ready for launch. Get amped for the tournament, and until next time, happy crawling!

    The butterfly can only feel hate for you!

    Trunk Updates 18 July 2022

    The trunk updates twirl on the spot.

    Hello crawlers, and welcome to the latest trunk updates! It’s a hot summer here in Gehenna, where the devil’s team is toiling away. Before we dive into the latest diabolical ways to die, mark your calendars. The tentative dates for the 0.29 release tournament are 26 August 2022 to 11 September. Watch this space for more information as the 0.29 development cycle winds down and we ready the new version for release.

    We’ve got a big trunk update for you. Since last time we’ve added community contributions from nlavsky, robertxgray, Goratrix, Zhang Joke, Cebolla Sunbeam, chequers, perryprog, amcnicky, nikheizen, Brian Power, Aliscans, David Damerell as well as welcomed first-time contributors 4Hooves2Appendages, catern, Sentei, Reono, ruxi, and Rosstin Murphy. Some of these are bug fixes, grammar tweaks, quotations and dialog, and vaults, the little stuff that all together gives crawl its polish, but there are also some bigger-ticket items in the round up. If you’re interested in helping out with the effort to make crawl, click here for more information!

    With that said, let’s dive into what’s been shaking in trunk.

    First up, a new monster: the starflower, contributed by Cebolla Sunbeam. A stationary plant/tentacle hybrid monster with harpoon shot, reach 3 distortion melee, reach 2 melee, and an additional distortion melee attack. Meant as a vault-placed monster for abyssal vaults, guarding an exit or a rune or what have you, as a threat that’s dangerous to be close to, but can be neutralized if the harpoon shot can be blocked or avoided somehow.

    Sentei adjusted the -Scroll and -Potion mutations. They are now 2-tier mutations in the regular bad mutation pool. The Ru sacrifice corresponds to the 2nd tier. Follwing up on Senti’s work, teleportits and berserkitis are also now two tiers.

    nikheizen sent us a design to reflavour and re-mechanic gnoll shamen, turning them into gnoll bouda. They have a new spell set: Weakening Gaze, Hunting Call (like battlecry but gives swiftness instead of might), and heal other. The name bouda is a nod to the bouda of Northeast African folklore: shapeshifters that turn into jackals. They have the power of the Evil Eye which curses others with spectacular misfortune.

    Temples are adjusted to place six to twenty-one altars, with a distribution that lightly favors the center of that range. On a one percent chance, a rare temple is selected instead. Rare temples are to Lugonu, Jiyva, or Ignis, or have a particularly extreme number of altars. Designing a Temple map is a great way to start contributing: there’s a particular need for Temples that support 7-8, 11, 17, 19, or 20 altars. Read more about map making for crawl here!

    Support for item reskins has been added. Crazy Yiuf’s has his hammers once more. Sigmund and Reapers’ scythes are now reskinned halberds (so you can actually use them if you want, instead of trap items), and all scythes except unrand scythes are removed.

    The Bows, Crossbows, and Slings skills are combined into a single Ranged Combat skill. Fustibali are removed. Hunting slings are renamed to slings. Launcher stats and spawn rates and locations are adjusted to give the ranged skill greater strategic depth.

    Continuing to build on the item rotation concept, there is a new item: wand of roots, appears in item rotation with iceblast. Roots fires a 3×3 fireball-sized effect which constricts its victims (like BVC), with a duration scaling with wand power.

    And a grab bag of slightly smaller changes:

    • a new silent ossuary map
    • Jiyva altars now place 2/3rds of the time at the entrance to Slime
    • Hex miscasts now only slow the player, instead of also cancelling effects
    • Lair now 5 floors
    • Ijyb’s wand power is nerfed.

    That’s all for now. Expect the changes to slow down as we arrive into feature freeze in August and get ready for the release. Until next time, happy crawling!

    Which is more difficult, to awaken one who sleeps or to awaken one who, awake, dreams that he is awake?

    Trunk Updates 19 June 2022

    Kikubaaqudgha calls the trunk updates from the earth!

    Hello crawlers, and welcome back to Trunk Updates. While I’ve been away in a far corner of Pandemonium, my fellow devils have slacked off and left this space blank! Well, not slacked exactly, because they’ve been hard at work in Tar:7, as the length of this post portends. There have been several big moves, in the direction of item sets, a necromancy overhaul, and a new species, as well as balance adjustments following the opportunity attacks change and of course a wild grab bag of other changes. Before we dive into those, let’s mention community contributions since we last wrote: dilly sent in several new guarded unrand vaults, sdynet tweaked the rings of the Octopus King, and Aliscans, chequers, nlavsky, perryprog, and spicyCebolla each sent in various fixes and adjustments. I know there’s a big backlog of pull requests on the GitHub right now, but with luck we’ll bring in a bunch more new community work in the next month. Until then, let’s look at the rest of the changes!

    Item sets

    In an effort to increase run-to-run variation, experiment with new interesting item effects, while not increasing item pressure, the new notion of an item set is introduced. Only one type of item from a set can generate normally in a given game (though certain special situations, like rare vaults or shops, or perhaps a forgotten god, might bend this rule). Currently there are two item sets:

    • The hex wand set: alternating between Paralysis and Charming.
    • The bolt wand set: alternating between Acid, and two new wands: Light and quicksilver.
      • wands of light fire a bolt of blinding light, checking AC and EV but no resists. The beam blinds what it hits, and deals  damage identical to an acid wand.
      • wands of quicksilver fires a quicksilver bolt, dispelling the magical effects of targets it hits. Does slightly more damage than acid.

    Watch this space for future exciting item sets!

    Corpseless necromancy

    As foreshadowed in the last post, hellmonk and PleasingFungus have been hard at work on overhauling Necromancy to not use corpses directly, as well as make Necromancy less awkward to use and give Kikubaaqudagh some bone polish. Their efforts have paid off, and crawl’s Necromantic magic now deals directly in the shadow between life and death, instead of meddling with the long-dead.

    • Kikubaaqudgha is buffed:
      • The pain brand can be applied to ranged weapons.
      • Torment no longer requires a corpse sacrifice.
      • Corpse Delivery is removed and replaced with Unearth Wretches, which summons some paralysed, 1 HP, 0 will monsters that die in a few turns, to use Necromancy spells on.
    • Animate Dead now gives a duration, and for the duration killed monsters with corpses have a power-dependent chance to become zombies. The zombies are permanent as long as the player is on the level, and are destroyed by a subsequent cast of Animate Dead.
    • Simulacrum is now a smite-targeted spell that gives an irresistable status. Monsters that die with this status spawn a power-dependent number of simulacra.
    • Death Channel cannot be re-cast while active.
    • Corpse Rot is now Level 4 Necromancy/Poison/Air. When cast it produces miasma for each corpse-producing monster killed in sight, scaling with power.
    • New Spell: Necrotize (L1 Necromancy). Necrotize deals damage identically to the old Pain spell, but additionally gives the monster a short-lived status that causes it to animate as a skeleton on death (if it has a skeleton). It replaces Animate Skeleton and Pain in all player usable places.
    • The spells Animate Skeleton, Pain, and Excruciating Wounds are removed.

    Meteorae

    The roiling success of hellmonk’s April fools Mayflytaurs’s mechanic comes back in a modified form. Welcome Meteorae!

    Meteorae have an exciting variety of bonuses – great attributes and aptitudes across the board, passive mapping, and exploration healing, regaining HP and MP when viewing new territory. In exchange, they have one big downside: instead of getting 6,000 turns of Zot clock for each floor, they get 600! Meteorae are humanoid beings. (In the night sky, they look like dots because they’re very far up.) Hat tip to Neil Gaiman’s Stardust. They also glow in the dark, with permanent backlit status (not halo!), that they can’t escape by transmuting (Dithmenos can hide them, though!).

    Along with their introduction comes a softening of the Zot clock, a slight move away from “instant death”. The Zot clock now applies very heavy draining the first time it trips, and gives the player an additional set of turns. Only at very low max HP will it outright kill the player.

    Balance adjustments

    The introduction of attacks of opportunity was a significant shift, and there have been several follow up changes to adjust balance while keeping the tighter tactics they introduce.

    • Some early game monsters are nerfed a bit in terms of base damage.
    • Consumable generation is increased.
    • Monsters slower than the player don’t get opportunity attacks.
    • The maximum duration of paralysis a monster can inflict is reduced to 5 turns.
    • Dungeon shafts attempt to send the player to a location outside of LOS of monsters.
    • Using all un-explored stairs and hatches is now fast.

    The rest

    Of course, this wouldn’t be a trunk updates post without a potpourri of other assorted changes. First of all, advil has done a host of behind the scenes work, improving the shopping menu, the plumbing of various bits of UI and save handling. And of course, Sastreii’s artistic endeavors continue to beautify the dungeon as well as clarify UI elements: you might have noticed the flashy new status icons for various status effects that are applied to monsters. Read on for the rest:

    • Timed hell effects no longer apply on a timer, and instead have a chance to apply on each level entry.
    • Hunter‘s starting dexterity is increased.
    • Positive stat mutations now give +4 to the primary stat and -1 to the other two.
    • Formicids’ base dexterity is increased by 3.
    • Formicids  can now wield giant (spiked) clubs.
    • Demonspawn demonic touch damage is doubled.
    • Uskayaw grants piety for ally damage.
    • Lugonu’s Bend Space is adjusted. It no longer does damage, and makes a better effort to blink monsters away from the destination.
    • Stones always mulch when thrown.
    • Shadow dragon scales AC increased
    • Weapon descriptions now display a “damage rating“, describing the contributions to weapon damage from various sources.
    • New item: scroll of poison. When read the scroll of poison fills every unoccupied space on the screen with poison clouds for 10-20 turns.
    • +MP items remove MP when they are taken off.
    • New unrand: the +8 trishula “Condemnation” {holy, Anguish Fly rN+}. Inflicts 4-8 turns of the Anguish status on targets it hits.
    • New unrand: the +3 mountain boots {rDislodge, rC+}. Prevent the player from being involuntarily moved by physical means (trampling, shafts, tentacles, etc.).
    • The amulet of Vitality now gives two pips each of Regen and RegenMP, and is now evil (Borgnjor is said to have made or used it or been involved in it somehow).
    • Scrolls of holy word are removed
    • Animated Armour now flies.
    • Sandblast no longer uses stones as ammo. Instead it takes twice as long to cast as a normal spell, and has its range increased by one.
    • Airstrike’s bonus from empty space is doubled.
    • Finally, Deep Dwarves are removed.

    Wow! It’s been a few months since we last wrote and a lot has happened. Still more is on the horizon, though through the haze what exactly remains as mercurial as a quicksilver elemental. So, until next time, happy crawling!

    Whisper “Farewell” when you leave, Dimli…