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

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

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

Hi, crawlers. If you want to know about the latest changes in trunk, you’re in the right place! If not, well, uh… leave a comment and I’ll see what I can do.

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

Happy crawling!

Edit: removed marriage, and other errors.

Hi, crawlers! Welcome – to the second changelog of 2017! Even better than the first!

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

Hi, crawlers! Welcome – to the first changelog of 2017!

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

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

Hi, crawlers! Hope everyone’s been enjoying the holiday season as much as we have. Here’s the latest, most festive changes from trunk:

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

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

(P.S.: take the survey!)

Hi, crawlers! Here’s the first set of changes for 0.20:

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

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

Hi, crawlers! Today is the feature freeze day for 0.19, meaning that it’s all fixes from here until release. Here’s the last batch of major changes:

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

Happy crawling!