Hi, crawlers! Here’s the latest and greatest:

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 It’s been replaced by Tukima’s Dance in the Enchanter book, and Gell’s Gravitas in the Arcane Marksman book.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

Happy crawling!

Hi, crawlers! The tournament is officially over (results up soon!), and development of 0.17 has officially begun. Here’s what’s new since 0.16.0 came out:

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

Happy crawling!

Hi crawlers!

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

See also the 0.16 changelog and the 0.16 tournament announcement.

Hi, crawlers! Here’s what’s been going on during the feature freeze:

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

Happy crawling!

Hi, crawlers! The feature freeze came down last week (Tuesday the 3rd); that means we’re focusing on bugfixing and small balance changes for roughly the next month, until the release of 0.16 (which should hopefully be early March.)

Anyway, here’s some changes:

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

Happy crawling!

Hi, crawlers! Changes:

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

Happy crawling!

Hi, crawlers! The newest changes, organized by a completely arbitrary and arguably meaningless set of priorities:

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

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

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

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

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

  Happy crawling!

Hi, crawlers! Your changes for today:

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

Happy crawling!

Hi, crawlers! First changes of the new year:

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

Happy crawling!

Hi, crawlers! Last changelog of the year:

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

Happy crawling!

Hi, crawlers! Another quiet week:

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

Happy crawling, and enjoy the holidays!

Hi, crawlers! It’s been a quiet week for changes:

• Monster spells can now be examined through the xv screen, in the same way as with books & rods (that is, by hitting a letter corresponding to the spell). At present, this lets you see the description and range of their spells.
• Cigotuvi’s Embrace has been reworked; the rate at which corpses fall off is now based purely on the number currently stacked on the player, and spellpower instead increases the amount of AC+SH per corpse, from a base of 0.5 AC+SH per corpse to a cap of 1.5 AC+SH at the new max of 100 power. Skeletons now count the same as other corpses for Cigotuvi’s purposes.
• Gell’s Gravitas now has a small chance of confusing creatures pulled by it, based on spellpower and on victims’ MR.
• A new “item_slot” rcfile has been added, to allow you to specify which letter correspond to which items by default. Works like the spell_slot option.
• Quite a lot of tiles have been tweaked; notably the Singularity & Sublimation of Blood spell icons, but also many many monsters, which now incorporate advanced artistic techniques such as ‘perspective’. Check out hippogrives!
• Xom’s mood meter has been added to webtiles.
• Shard shrike packs can no longer spawn as hell effects in Cocytus; in general, the Cocytus hell effect spawn list has been reworked.
• Lava snakes can spit again. (They accidentally lost the ability to spit several months ago.)
• Chaos Champions can no longer give the player Resistance for 4000 turns.
• Gyre & Gimble can now strike up to 16 times in a single attack. (With the help of the Blade card.)
• Artefacts may now again be named “of the Doge”.

Happy crawling!

Hi, crawlers! Some fun new toys to play with this week:

• New artefact: Gyre and Gimble, two quickblades linked by a chain. It takes two hands to wield, but strikes twice for every attack. Dual-wielding is finally here………
• New spell: Gell’s Gravitas, L6 Hexes/Translocations. Targets a creature & hurls all other nearby creatures toward it, causing damage to whichever ones collide. “Basically a one-turn Singularity”.
• The ‘blurry vision’ mutation no longer causes scroll-reading to occasionally fail. Instead, it adds a delay before the player finishes reading the scroll (and gains the benefits): one turn per level of the mutation.
• All non-shortblade weapons now stab equally well (or poorly), excepting felid claws, which now stab as well as shortblades. Clubs no longer have a chance of confusing ‘stabbed’ enemies. Ogre Enchanters and Assassins no longer start with clubs.
• Armour penalties to dodging have been smoothed; there is no longer a breakpoint at which Dodging goes from giving zero EV to the normal rate. Instead, armour decreases the rate at which Dodging gives you EV. Sample numbers are here.
• The Book of Wizardry has been removed; its spells have been redistributed.
• Monsters created by Phantom Mirrors are now only two-thirds as strong as the original.
• Orange rats have been renamed to hell rats, and are now demonic. They also glow in the dark.
• The arbalest “Hellfire” has had its hellfire-explosion damage roughly doubled.
• When active, Gozag’s gold now sparkles.
• It is once again possible for bardings of flying to generate, after they were accidentally removed earlier this year.
• Orc wizards can no longer confuse the player for 30+ turns.
• The lords of Pandemonium can now buzz and croak.
• Players in hell can no longer hear gut-wrenching screams while Silenced.
• Goblins no longer continue their peaceful slumber after being hurled through the air.

Happy crawling!

Hi, crawlers! Last week was a little quieter, possibly because of some of our US devs visiting friends and family for the holiday weekend, rather than toiling away in the Crawl mines as they know they should. Still, a few changes to report:

• Potions of confusion have been befuddled out of existence. In their place sit Potions of Ambrosia, which grant considerable health & magic regeneration for a short period, along with confusion. If the confusion is prevented (by e.g. clarity) or cured, the regeneration immediately ends.
• Liches (and their ancient & antique friends) now have a much wider variety of spells available, rather than being restricted to a handful of spellbooks.
• Singularity is now considerably stronger at low spellpower, and less powerful at very long range.
• Makhleb now gives somewhat more piety for kills, and no longer accepts corpse sacrifice.
• Xom now has a ‘mood meter’, looking suspiciously like the piety meter for other, more boring gods. (And yet somehow different…)
• Gozag’s “shining gold” visual effect is now only present on the tile of the gold itself, rather than on surrounding tiles. In console, it’s now a different colour from normal gold.
• Gozag’s “duplication” ability can now duplicate stacks of items.
• A wide variety of quotes have been added, mainly for spells.
• Pandemonium lords now come in a riotous variety of colour; they have a number of new tiles, and their text descriptions now match up with the tiles.
• The Plane Papyrus has been renamed to the Akashic Record.
• Various other tile tweaks; all potion tiles have been replaced, goblins & pals were reworked, the Seraph is now considerably taller, and wretched stars now have a worrying glow about them, among other changes.
• Irradiate now offers a warning before harming allies.
• The game no longer crashes whenever the player takes cloud damage.
• Delayed Fireball is now back to being two schools, after a brief, yet torrid romance with the mysterious “Utility” school.
• It is no longer possible to hit monsters so hard that their souls are completely obliterated.
• Messaging has been improved for attempting to close doors on Orbs of Destruction.
• Orb spiders no longer have poisonous bites.
• Trees can no longer enter malign portals.

Happy crawling!

Hi, crawlers! This week has been simply magical, by which I mean, full of spells. New spells. Two new spells. And a bunch of other changes:

• New spells:
  • Cigotuvi’s Embrace, a L5 Necromancy spell that turns corpses into temporary AC & SH. The corpses slowly slough off over time & (sometimes) when the player is hit or blocks an attack. Found in the Book of Unlife and (sometimes) in Kikubaaqudgha’s second gift.
  • Singularity, a L9 Translocations spell that summons an all-devouring interdimensional maw. Nearby enemies are sucked inward & damaged, moreso the closer they get. Found in the Plane Papyrus, a high-level Translocations book containing Dispersal, Controlled Blink, Malign Gateway, Disjunction, and of course Singularity. (Various other books have been adjusted slightly.)
• Force Lance is now L4 Conjurations/Translocations, slightly more accurate, and better at knocking back enemies. Flying enemies are especially vulnerable.
• Dispersal now affects a wider area, and has a chance of confusing affected creatures.
• Twisted Resurrection has been removed.
• New enemies:
  • Robin of the Strong Arm, a hobgoblin unique appearing in the very early Dungeon. She’s stronger than your average hobgoblin, and accompanied by her own personal army of hobgoblins & goblins, the latter of which she will happily hurl at her enemies. Duck!
  • Shard Shrikes, batty monsters that appear in Cocytus. They spit Throw Icicle, resist and attack with cold, and flock in small bands. They have 2 AC, but are only literally made of glass in certain non-canonical fanfictions.
• Seraphim are now considerably more dangerous: damage doubled, speed increased by 50%, and a new spellset, including Hunting Cry, Summon Holies, Injury Bond and Cleansing Flame.
• Seraphim now occasionally appear on the orb run.
• Ghost crabs have scuttled sideways all the way from Crypt to Swamp.
• Insubstantial wisps are now slightly more fragile & less numerous, but have Static Discharge.
• Hellwings now have Cigotuvi’s Embrace, and spawn with it active.
• If the player clears a ziggurat and enters another, they may occasionally find themselves in the center of the floor rather than the edge. The odds of this increase with depth and number of ziggurats cleared.
• Zin’s Recite is no longer usable if no enemies with low enough HD are visible. Recite invulnerability is now mentioned in monster descriptions.
• Gozag will no longer offer the player shops that are entirely useless for their race.
• Ctrl-direction now always attacks, rather than sometimes opening or closing doors, or removing traps.
• In Zot Defense, the player can now place traps on top of other traps.
• Butchering and bottling blood now only takes a single turn.
• Powered by Death now works with all corpses.
• The Wild Magic card now afflicts enemies with miscast effects, rather than the player, and restores the player’s MP for each enemy affected. It’s moved from the Deck of Punishment (back to) the Deck of Wonders.
• When in shadow form, the player can no longer be petrified.
• Monsters can no longer block their own attacks.
• Butterfly colours have been disambiguated.
• The legendary weapons “Glorpy”, “Loopy”, and “Plog” may now appear.
• Gozag’s shopkeepers have had their genders randomized.
• Insects are no longer referred to as ‘she’.
• Electric golems can no longer breathe.
• Monsters no longer believe that rN+ armour allows them to see invisible.
• Angels no longer have demonic powers.
• Bats can now memorize spells.

Happy crawling!