Saturday, July 24th, 2021 09:37

July 24 Trunk Update Post and 0.27 Tournament Page

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A +6 arbalest “Damnation” {damnation} comes into view. The +6 arbalest “Damnation” {damnation} shoots a damnation bolt at the trunk update.

Hello crawlers and welcome to the last trunk update of the 0.27 cycle. We’ve been under feature freeze since last Friday, so the remaining time before the 0.27 Release and Tournament will be devoted to bug fixes, balance tweaks, and polish. If you’ve been holding out and playing 0.26 due to concerns about stability, know that all major features are fixed in trunk, and only reasonable balance changes and bug fixes will be a thing from here until release. We’ve made the 0.27 beta branch, so servers will begin installing 0.27 soon. So please play-test trunk or the 0.27 branch when that’s available on your favorite server to help us find bugs! The 0.27 release will be either Thursday, July 29th, or Friday, July 30th, depending on timing. Look out for an official release post with download links to come.

The 0.27 tournament will run from Friday July 30th, 8pm UTC to Sunday August 15th, 8pm UTC. Please bookmark the official 0.27 tournament page and use this page to track your progress throughout the tournament. We’ll continue to update this page with any rules changes. In coming days you may see summaries of test data in the “Overview” page taken from recent 0.27 beta games. Don’t worry, we’ll reset everything before the tournament starts.

Now, onto the Trunk Update! Note that this is not the full set of 0.27 changes, just the ones since our last trunk update. For the full and official set of 0.27 changes, check out the changelog. Here are the changes since last time:

  • The starting spell sets of some Mage and Warrior-Mage backgrounds are reduced by one spell. This together with the increase in book drops will give these classes more variety in how they proceed through middle portions of the game. We didn’t get to adjusting all classes this version, since for some, any spell removal would leave the class in a difficult spot. Further changes, including potentially new spells, will happen during 0.28 development, so stay tuned! The changes for 0.27:
    • Air elementalists no longer start with Lightning Bolt.
    • Arcane Marksmen no longer start with Leda’s Liquefaction.
    • Earth Elementalists no longer start with Lee’s Rapid Deconstruction.
    • Summoners and Ice Elementalists no longer start with Summon Ice beast.
    • Venom Mages no longer start with Ignite Poison.
  • New branch end maps and adjustments:
    • New “Abyssal Woods” Lair ending featuring demonic trees and abyss-themed monsters. Beware the thrashing horrors!
    • New “Lost City” Shoals ending featuring a ruined temple theme with minotaurs and sphinxes. Beware the satyrs too!
    • New “Storm Temple” Shoals ending featuring electricity-themed monsters and many possible layouts. Beware the storm dragon! Or the titan!
    • The “Ancient Temple”,  “Frog Pond”, and “Undead Jungle Book” Lair endings have been adjusted to lower monster counts significantly. And they say we never give players anything…
    • Most Snake end maps have their monster counts significantly reduced. It’s tough work slogging through all those nagas, we know.
  • All Ice Cave maps have been rebalanced to have more varied layouts, monsters, and loot. Gone are mysterious dead reapers! The changes are substantial, as detailed in this commit. You should find the cloud generator placement less arbitrary and less frequent, more possible shortcuts in many maps, and more varied monster sets at both easy and hard difficulty ice caves. Stay frosty, friends!
  • The Robe of Folly is redesigned. It now gives you a permanent brilliance effect (spell enhancer and half spell MP costs), but sets your Will to 0. Additionally it grants +8 Int (from +4) and +4 enchant (from +3). It’d be folly indeed to not wear this robe while entering one of my lich-filled vaults!
  • Dancing ranged weapons are now a thing that can kill you. Yes, of course they have infinite ammo, I’m glad you asked! But don’t worry because…
  • …Tukima’s Dance now works on monsters wielding ranged weapons! It can make charmed dancing ranged weapons to fight by your side.
  • The Elemental Staff is featured in one new and one reworked vault. Both vaults also feature a greatly improved master elementalist monster that always wields the staff, appearing when these vaults place in Elf or Depths. Watch out, it knows Ozo’s Refridge, Crystal Spear, Chain Lightning, and Firestorm!
    • The new vault is the official “guarded unrand” vault, by first-time contributor dilly. Placing in Dungeon, Elf, and Depths, it features an elemental mage elf boss (for Dungeon) or the master elementalist (for Elf and Depths) and various elemental baddies.
    • Mu’s “elemental laboratory” vault, the one that initially introduced the master elementalist, has been given a complete overhaul. It has more challenging and interesting elemental monster sets and features much more interesting terrain.
  • Monster breath timeouts now reduce after their turn. So if you see that a monster is “catching its breath”, you know it won’t use a breath attack before your next turn unless it gets a double turn. That’s really nice!
  • Many new vaults for Elf, including entries, decorative vaults, monster vaults with weird things like defective dancing weapons and cool things like double deep elf blademasters with double double swords, and new main vaults and entries for the Elf:2 Hall of Blades! Also new are a batch of ecumenical altar vaults. New even though the altars inside are very old.
  • Eleionomae no longer land on and destroy trees when they travel next to you, instead picking a safe and comfy spot next to a tree. No more tree digging!
  • Ossuaries no longer have spear and dart traps. The days of step-and-rest-then-repeat for clearing some areas of ossuaries are over! Don’t worry, alarm traps and net traps still make an appearance. And there’s talk of introducing some new types of traps or trap-like monsters in 0.28…
  • The macro menu is greatly improved, with hotkeys Ctrl-D for an improved menu and Ctrl-E for a quick-add menu.
  • We have a bona-fide game menu available from the F1 key. It’s almost like we’re a modern game! For now you can use it to access save, quit, macro, and help functions, but we’ll probably expand it in the future.
  • The allow_extended_colors console option is now on by default. For console nerds only! We previously didn’t enable it because some major system terminals didn’t support more than 8 standard colors by default, but that’s no longer the case.
  • Hints mode has been updated and corrected. But it still recommends Vehumet over Sif Muna! Wrong!
  • The Desolation entrance is no longer ruined.

That wraps it up for this set of trunk updates. Until next time, happy crawling!

The damnation bolt hits the trunk update!!! The damnation bolt explodes! The damnation engulfs the trunk update! The trunk update dies…

4 comments!
Tuesday, June 15th, 2021 18:06

IRC presence moved to libera.chat

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Because of the change in ownership in Freenode, over the last few weeks we have migrated the DCSS IRC channels and infrastructure, including the Sequell/Cheibriados infobots, to #crawl and #crawl-dev on libera.chat. (Note the single “#”!)

Also: we had planned to maintain a presence on old freenode in order to point visitors to the correct new place. However, as of 6/15 the new owners have apparently wiped the network’s nickserv and chanserv databases entirely, so we no longer have control over our old channels (or identities) and are not using them at all.

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Friday, February 5th, 2021 15:06

0.26.1 Bugfix release

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The 0.26.1 bug fix release is now available on the download page. Thanks to all the many contributors who helped with this release, including patches and bug reports!

Updating is recommended for all players. Happy crawling, and report more bugs here!

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Wednesday, January 27th, 2021 11:45

0.26 Tournament Results

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The 0.26 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 0.26 release and tournament possible! For 16 days, players could compete for tournament points and banners by playing 0.26 games on the public servers. This was the second tournament held after the major revision of the tournament rules done for 0.26. There were changes based on previous input, and once again there will be discussion threads on the tavern and dcss subreddit to collect feedback on the tournament rules.

Congratulations to Yermak, perennial champion, for once again taking first place in the individual competition, with 95,456 points! Over the course of the tournament, Yermak won 47 games, including a streak of 16 games, 29 Nemelex’ Choice combos, an XL 13 win, 3 species high scores, and 3 background high scores. In second place was EnegeticOcto with 80,792 points and 38 wins, including 29 Nemelex’ Choice combos and a 28 minute 17 second real-time win, the fastest of the tournament. Rounding out the top 3 was booing with 78,169 points and 38 wins, including the first win of the tournament, 50 minutes and 27 seconds after the start, an XL 16 win, 3 species high scores, and 2 background high scores; they also collected every banner!

Our top three took several of the top spots in the individual category rankings, but they weren’t the only players on the leaderboard. Acrobat set a high standard in Win Rate and Streaking, playing and winning 22 games over the course of the tournament, for the top streak and an adjusted win rate of 95.65%. Behind Acrobat in Win Rate was DrMan with a 20 game streak. For much of the tournament Acrobat and DrMan were engaged in a high-stakes back and forth at the top of this category. The Nemelex’ Choice competition ended in an impressive 3-way tie, with Yermak, EnegeticOcto, and Shummieall winning 29 Nemelex combos for points over the course of the tournament. Yermak blew away the competition for Combo High Scores, with 329 points in the category; booing was the only other player to earn more than 200 points in the category, finishing second with a score of 226. The Best High Score of the tournament was the 72,401,124 point run by iamserjio. In the Lowest Turncount Category, Caminho won with 3 runes in 8,617 turns, the 7th lowest turncount of all time! EnegeticOcto’s 28:17 win was the Fastest Realtime Win, but Shummie was only 33 seconds behind with a 28:50 win. Felids were the weapon of choice for the Low XL Win category; Yermak’s XL 13 cat was followed by CurlyBrace who won at XL 15. The tournament was herladed by booing, who posted the first win 50 minutes after the tournament start. DrMan followed an hour later with the first all rune win. The Ziggurat Dive was an exciting back-and-forth for much of the tournament, until Sentinel decided to clear a definitive 100 Ziggurats. Finally, in seeking the favor of the gods, booing was the only player to collect every banner over the course of the tournament.

The clan competition was won by Irradiated Dongers (captained by EnegeticOcto) with 88,667 points. Following very close on their heels were Gozag or Stay Home (captained by Ge0ff) with 88,333 points. Rounding out the top three was TeamSplat (captained by Shummie) with 72,456 points.

Most of the clan categories take the best score of the member, so I won’t recap those. The Nemelex’ Choice competition was a collective effort, and each of the three-way individual tie members were on different clans, which led to a very high scoring clan competition. Gozag or Stay Home came out on top, with other clan members contributing 30 more Nemelex Combo wins on top of Yermak’s 29, for a total of 59 clan nemelex points; following were Irradiated Dongers with 52 and TeamSplat with 50. The Combo High Scores competition was similarly astronomical at the top; Gozag or Stay Home earned 533 points in the category, followed by Irradiated Dongers with 449, and Make Beogh Great Again with 392 points. These three clans were also the only three to collectively earn every banner.

Thank you to everyone for playing. The rules were adjusted after 0.25 based on collected feedback, and once again there are feedback threads on the tavern and reddit.

To close out, here are some overall tournament statistics (with the 0.25 numbers in brackets for comparison). 2,760 players started a game at some point during the tournament; of those 2,333 completed a game in a non-boring way. This definition of “player” (players who completed a non-boring game) is used for subsequent calculations and was used for the 0.25 statistics.

  • Players: 2,333 (0.25: 2,772)
  • Total player time: 29,392 hrs (0.25: 34,433 hrs)
  • Average player time: 12.6 hrs (0.25: 12.4 hrs)
  • Games played: 54,701 (0.25: 62,125)
  • Players who got a rune: 886 (0.25: 1010)
  • 476 winners and 1767 wins (0.25: 548 winners and 1871 wins)
  • Win rate: 3.23% (0.25: 3.01%)
  • Proportion of players using WebTiles: 96% (0.25: 95.9%)

The 0.27 season has begun, and it again looks to be an active trunk season. Watch this space for further information as the 0.27 trunk update posts begin to flow. Until next time, happy crawling!

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Friday, January 8th, 2021 18:45

0.26 “Roll Around the Clock”

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We are pleased to announce the release of Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup 0.26 “Roll Around the Clock”!

DCSS 0.26 features a new Palentonga species that has a rolling attack and gets bonus AC after getting hit, a new Delver background that starts the player on D:5 with a variety of escape tools, a reworked Swamp branch with new monsters and other layout changes, and a vastly reworked quiver system that lets spells, wands, and abilities be quivered, fired, and autotargeted. Additionally, food is gone, replaced with a Zot clock that prevents players from lingering too long in one branch. The Kobold species now has the Nightstalker 3 mutation, the Ghoul species has chunk eating replaced with heal-on-kill, and there are a bunch of reworked spells, monsters, and items (including nine overhauled unrandart weapons). As always, there are dozens of new deadly vaults, and many more changes small and large alike!

Download DCSS 0.26 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 (Update: The Linux debs are now available). See the full list of changes on the release page here.

The tournament starts today in just a few hours at 20:00 UTC Friday 8 January and runs through 20:00 UTC Sunday 24 January, with all online 0.26 games counting towards your score. See the tournament page for more details, including how to join or set-up a clan. Clans membership can be changed until 20:00 UTC Friday 15 January.

Many thanks to all those who have contributed to DCSS over the years. A special thanks to the following community members who contributed to DCSS 0.26 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!)

Aaron Golden, AdamPG, Alex Jurkiewicz, aMcNicky, Anders Papitto,
Byrel Mitchell, CrawlCycle, Elliot Dronebarger, Emily, Eugene Abramchuk,
Gittourarmy, Goratrix, Heinrich Ody, hellmonk, Implojin, Joe
Childers, Kieron Dunbar, Marcelo Henrique Cerri, mgdelmonte,
Midn8, Naruni, nikheizen, Nikolai Lavsky, Paul Pollack, Peter
Gerlagh, Peter Hurst, Petri Salminen, Quipyowert2, randomMesh,
RJ Cunningham, Roderick Schertler, Cebolla Sunbeam, Ryan McNeive,
sdynet, Sebastian Łużyński, Shummie, Skrybe, syranez, Umer
Shaikh, ukdong99, wjchen

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Wednesday, December 30th, 2020 19:41

Dec 30 Trunk Update and 0.26 Tournament and Release Dates

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gammafunk gestures. gammafunk spews toxic sludge! The Trunk Update festers in the toxic bog!

Hello crawlers and welcome to the last trunk update of the 0.26 cycle. We’ve been under feature freeze since last Friday, so the remaining time before the 0.26 Release and Tournament will be devoted to bug fixes, balance tweaks, and polish. If you’ve been holding out and playing 0.25 due to concerns about stability, know that all major features are fixed in trunk, and only reasonable balance changes and bug fixes will be a thing from here until release. We’ll be making the 0.26 beta branch soon, at which time servers will begin installing 0.26. So please play-test trunk or the 0.26 branch when that’s available on your favorite server to help us find bugs! The 0.26 release will be either Thursday, January 7th, or Friday, January 8th, depending on timing. Look out for an official release post with download links to come.

The 0.26 tournament will run from Friday Jan 8th, 8pm UTC to Sunday Jan 24th, 8pm UTC. We don’t don’t yet have a rules page installed on this server, but expect that link in a forthcoming post. Check out the pages for the previous tournament to get a sense of the rules and presentation. We’ll try to announce any rules changes in that subsequent post, but as always the final rules page will cover everything you need to know.

Now, onto the Trunk Update! Note that this is not the full set of 0.26 changes, just the ones since our last trunk update. For the full and official set of 0.26 changes, check out the changelog. Here are the changes since last time:

  • Monster draining attacks now temporarily reduce player max HP instead of skills. The UI cost of skill drain was high…beware! See a more detailed discussion in this commit. Right now, the new drain effect is a bit weak, but I plan on making a couple balance changes to it during the freeze. Don’t worry, you’ll be afraid of bolts of drain, but it’ll be the good kind of afraid. Note that drain inflicted by the player is unchanged.
  • Frozen Ramparts has its effect end upon movement. Yes, another nerf to your favorite new ice spell. That’s ok, kiting isn’t very fun, and now it works much better with Ozocubu’s Armour!
  • Eringya’s Noxious Bog now places bogs on all squares within a range of 4 where there is no adjacent solid feature. A much-needed power increase for this spell, and hopefully an interesting positional trade-off. Kudos to hellmonk for the idea!
  • Irradiate now checks monster AC but does slightly more damage. Ignoring AC was not part of the original PleasingFungus vision (which is all-powerful).
  • The cloak of Starlight gains *Dazzle, which sometimes dazzles foes like the Dazzling Flash spell upon successful dodge. It no longer has rElec and rC+. This cloak wins you so many style points when you go swish that monsters are dumbfounded!
  • The glaive of the Guard gains a spectral weapon brand in addition to electricity, and loses sInv and +Rage. That’s right, dual branding!
  • The sword of Power is now +5, vorpal, and sometimes fires a powerful but low-accuracy beam with chance based on the player’s current HP. Have you played the lesser-known indie game The Legend of Zelda? It’s a bit like the sword from that game.
  • New Vaults! Sadly I don’t have enough time to go into detail about most individual vaults, but here’s a quick summary.
    • A big set of winding woodlands vaults from nikheizen that feature a forest/woodland theme with many variations.
    • A new Swamp rune vault by nikheizen featuring a coven of 13 witches, mages, sorcerers, and wizards who want tell you all about demons.
    • A ghost vault, two greek myth themed Shoals vaults, four Swamp vaults, and 7 altar vaults from nikheizen.
    • A set of 11 arrival vaults, 4 minivaults, and 2 altar vaults from amcnicky.
    • A Wu Jian altar vault from pdpol.
  • Damage and accuracy for spells and damage for wands are now shown in the UI. No more looking up info on various pages and bots just to get an idea of how much damage you can do! Well, for the most part. Some spells like Tornado refuse to cooperate.
  • Boulder beetles now stop rolling when they can’t move towards their target (that’s you) nor will they start rolling if this is the case. I know it was funny, but beetles rolling in place behind that poor little kobold in front of them was too traumatizing for the kobold.
  • Gauntlet monsters now generate awake, and those other than the minotaur can’t pickup loot. Now characters in Gauntlets don’t have weird incentives to explore the map in certain ways to not wake up monsters or to see the loot before monsters do.
  • Temporary allies all dismiss when you leave the level. Apparently there were corner cases where they didn’t do that right away!

That wraps it up for this set of trunk updates. Stay tuned for more tournament details, and until next time, happy crawling!

The Trunk Update looks as sick as possible!

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Wednesday, September 23rd, 2020 03:11

CBRO upgrade/transition plan

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Sad news: CBRO will be retiring. But good news: CBRO will be replaced by CBR2, which will not run out of hard drive space for at least 10 years! Here’s the full plan:

  • CBR2 (cbro.berotato.org) is a completely new server with a much bigger disk and better cpu, administered by ZureaL, advil, and johnstein, hosted by ZureaL, and located in the midwest.
  • We have imported the CBRO login database from CBRO to CBR2, but most other data (including save files) will not be imported, for a fresh start.
  • CBR2 is currently open for test games only, and the server will be reset on 9/25 at 11:59 EDT — games played before then are not on the record. Games played after this reset will appear in CAO scoring and Sequell. (We will do one last pull of the username db around then as well.)
  • After CBR2 goes live on 9/26, CBRO will stop allowing new games to begin. CBRO will remain open for a while to allow finishing off any old games, and will continue hosting its current data until its shutdown (we are estimating final shutdown around 12/1/20). Any games finished until that point will also be on the record. At that point we will most likely archive long-term data away from the CBRO server into cloud storage.

Thanks very much to johnstein for solo-running CBRO for so many years, and to ZureaL for taking the lead in setting up CBR2!

3 comments!
Friday, July 17th, 2020 21:38

0.25.1 bugfix release

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We have just uploaded the 0.25.1 bugfix release, available on the download page. Thanks to all the many contributors who helped with this release, including patches and bug reports!

Highlights (Full commit list via github):

  • Artefacts from acquirement now leave a note in morgues.
  • Scarf of harm is fixed.
  • Foxfire will no longer attack out of LoS.
  • Stacking from empty Nemelex decks is no longer possible.
  • Wizlab entry now generates a milestone / note again.
  • Fix a bug where cloud generators triggered on load when no time had passed, leading to a different cloud arrangement from saving + reloading.
  • Seeded play fixes for seed instability in a few cases, as well as crashes related to seed stability and pregeneration code.
  • Several speedups for dungeon rendering, especially in zigs.
  • Sprint 3 cloud generators have been retuned.
  • Improvements to the behavior of restart_after_save (on by default since 0.25.0).
  • Using [] in map view from stairs to view other levels now correctly finds the matching stairs.
  • Crashes to do with annotation, off-level map view, and custom flashes have been fixed.
  • It is no longer possible for a bug to cause the player to drown or fall into lava, emergency flight will be activated instead.

Updating is recommended for all players. Happy crawling, and report more bugs here!

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Saturday, July 4th, 2020 19:04

0.25 Tournament Results

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The 0.25 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 0.25 release and tournament possible! For 16 days, players could compete for tournament points and banners by playing 0.25 games on the public servers. This was the first tournament held with a major revision of the tournament rules, and there will be discussion threads on the tavern and dcss subreddit to collect feedback on the tournament rules.

This post is going to focus on the results. First, a few highlights from the player and clan results. For comprehensive results with first through fifth place winners in all categories, please see the tournament overview page.

The winning player was Yermak with 5,819 points. Over the course of the tournament, Yermak won 44 games, including a streak of 17 games and a low-turncount world record of 8,783 turns (Sapher, the previous record holder has reclaimed the throne with a post tournament 8,331 turn win). In second place was shummie with 4,235 points and 20 wins, including the lowest XL win with an XL 15 SpEn and a 52 Ziggurat mega-zigging character. Rounding out the top 3 was Flugkiller with 3,513 points and 14 wins, including the first win of the tournament 35 minutes and 32 seconds after the tournament started with a duration of 35 minutes and 12 seconds.

The new tournament format divided scoring in to several categories, and our top three took several of the top spots in these categories. They weren’t the only players at the top of the leaderboard. Yermak maxed out the Piety category, championing and winning every god over the tournament. The Unique Harvesting category included player ghosts, and by diving Ziggurats for player ghosts ehdcjf2142 won the category with 1,332 points. Long time crawl dev elliptic topped the tournament Win Rate category, with an impressive 90.91% adjusted win-rate, winning all 10 games played over the tournament. Yermak had the longest streak, and tied for second place were GordonOverkill and MrMan with 13 game streaks each. Acrobat was the master of Nemelex’ Choice, winning 25 choice combos over the tournament. Yermak also took the Combo High Scores category with 62 points (21 combo high scores, 20 of which were won, 4 species high scores and 3 background high scores), followed by aperiodic with 34 points (17 combo high scores, 6 of which were won, and the Spriggan and Ice Elementalist high scores). It should be no surprise that Yermak continues to top category leaderboards, with the highest score of the tournament (56,717,235 points); followed by Flugkiller (51,589,384 points) and aperiodic (45,485,504 points). I already mentioned Yermak’s turn-count world record; EnegeticOcto came in second place for best turn-count win, completing a game in 10,320 turns itself one of the lowest turn-count runs of all time. p0werm0de topped the fastest real-time win category with an impressive 24:20 win. Our top players were also at the top of the Low XL-win leaderboard; shummie at XL 15, Yermak at XL 16, followed by EnegeticOcto and sentinel who both posted XL 17 wins. Flugkiller heralded the start of the tournament with his first win; the first all-rune win came from p0werm0de a mere 40 minutes after that. shummie and Flugkiller topped the Ziggurat Dive leaderboard, followed by ehdcjf2142′s 26 consecutive Ziggurat dive for 3rd place. Finally, Ge0ff and shummie were the only two players to complete all tier 3 banners both finishing the tournament with a perfect Banner Score.

The clan competition was won by TeamSplat (captained by mandevil) with 7,007 points who topped the Piety, Harvesting, Combo High score, and Banner Score categories, as well as had several top players (including shummie). They were followed by FSTVLKers (captained by EnegeticOcto) with 6,563 points and Stick to Your Gods (Yermak’s one-player-clan). Overall 142 clans scored points in the tournament (compared to 143 in the 0.24 tournament).

Several of the clan categories simply gave the clan credit for their best player’s performance in a category, so I won’t recap those. The Piety, Unique Harvesting, Combo High Score, Nemelex’ Choice, and Banner Score categories were scored as a collective effort among clan members. In the Piety category, FSTVLKers, Make_Beogh_Great_Again, Stick to Your Gods, and TeamSplat all championed and won every god over the tournament. TeamSplat topped the Unique Harvesting category, followed by FSTVLKers and Gozags Lazy Faire fiscal policy. TeamSplat also finished first in Combo High Scores, followed by Stick to Your Gods and BLACK LIVES MATTER. FSTVLKers took the trophy for Nemelex’ Choice winning 31 Nemelex’ Choice combos between them, followed by Make_Beogh_Great_Again with 27 combos. Finally three clans completed (as a clan effort) all tier 3 banners to tie for first in Banner Score: TeamSplat, FSTVLKers, and Gozags Lazy Faire fiscal policy.

In both the individual and clan categories competition was fierce. Flugkiller came out to an early lead with his first-win points, and throughout most of the tournament held close to Yermak from 2nd place, until being edged out by shummie in the final days of the event. The Clan category followed similarly, with a fierce battle between Flugkiller’ FSTVLKers and mandevil’s TeamSplat (which had shummie as a member).

Thank you to everyone for playing, for your patience with the delayed start, and for your bug finding in the new tournament pages. I hope you enjoyed the new format, and look forward to reading your commentary in the discussion threads on the tavern and reddit.

To close out, here are some overall tournament statistics (with the 0.24 numbers in brackets for comparison). 2,947 players started a game and earned a point in some category; of those 2,772 completed a game in a non-boring way. This definition of “player” (players who completed a non-boring game) is used for subsequent calculations and was used for the 0.24 statistics.

  • Players: 2,772 (0.24: 2,880)
  • Total player time: 34,433 hrs (0.24: 35,422 hrs)
  • Avg player time: 12.4 hrs (0.24: 12.3 hrs)
  • Games played: 62,125 (0.24: 63,048)
  • Players who got a rune: 1010 (0.24: 1046)
  • 548 winners and 1871 wins (0.24: 540 winners and 1930 wins)
  • Win rate: 3.01% (0.24: 3.06%)
  • Proportion of players using WebTiles: 95.9% (0.24: 95.5%)
The 0.26 season is off to a rapid start with retired dev PleasingFungus sending in some neat ideas and several projects that were started just before the tournament receiving attention. Watch this space for further developments as the trunk update posts from the 0.26 cycle begin to flow.
Until next time, happy crawling!
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Thursday, June 4th, 2020 09:17

0.25 Tournament Delayed But Tournament Page Now Available

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Hello crawlers. The ongoing protests in the United States and elsewhere have greatly limited the availability of some community members, including those working on the new tournament project, to do DCSS things. Although we’ve basically completed the tournament script changes and could run the tournament on time, it wouldn’t be fair to those people participating in protests or those just trying to deal with this difficult situation. To that end, we are delaying the start of the 0.25 tournament for one week until June 12th, 8pm UTC, and it will run for 16 days until June 28th, 8pm UTC. We’re sorry for the abrupt change of start date, but sometimes there are more important concerns.

That said, we do have a new tournament page populated with test data from online 0.25 games that you can take a look at now:

https://crawl.develz.org/tournament/0.25/

This will give you a chance to become better acquainted with the new rule set, but just as importantly you can help us find bugs and give suggestions for improvements! If you’re a UX expert with experience in the relevant technologies, check out the new-scoring branch in our repository of the tournament source code and consider making a pull request. Everyone can feel free to leave constructive feedback for the tournament pages in comments on this post or in your favorite venue for crawl discussion where you see devs lurking! We’ll continue finishing up the scripts and fixing bugs over the next week. Note that any games you see listed on the page above are just test data, and the database will be reset before start of tournament.

The 0.25 release will be made available for download at some point before June 12, and we’ll make an announcement when that happens. Thanks again for your understanding, and we hope you all are staying safe. Hopefully, in a week’s time, we’ll be ready to begin our quest to obtain a fabled artefact, the Orb of Zot!

2 comments!
Sunday, January 26th, 2020 18:27

Community Competitions

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Hello crawlers!

We occasionally get asked about opportunities for competitive crawling outside of the official release tournaments. Several community members have organized a variety of competitions, and this post aims to point them out.

The Tavern Dart Board

The Dart Board on our official forums is a clearinghouse for community organized competitions as well as discussion of all things competitive crawl. It’s a good first place to go when looking for ongoing competitions and challenges.

The Crawl Cosplay Challenge

Run by kitchen_ace, these challenges give character conducts inspired by crawls many uniques. From the CCC website, “The goal is not to emulate the unique’s behaviour exactly, but to get a good starting point on playing games with interesting requirements. Challenges [...] are suitable for players of all skill levels — the Challenge is about personal achievement rather than competition.” Check them out! The current set (Set 10) is ending, but a new one will begin soon.

Crawl Sudden Death Challenges

Organized in an officially unofficial way by me, based on the popular series originally organized by WalkerBoh, he idea is for players to compete by trying to do as well as possible in a game of Crawl with one attempt only; if you die, that challenge is over. More information and sign-ups can be found on the CSDC website.

DCSS Secret Santa Tournament

Organized by CPO admin chequers (who also offers a weekly challenge seeded run on CPO), this festive adventure comes once a year. Keep an eye out next year when the temperatures start to rise and summer gets into full swing.

1 comment...
Tuesday, November 19th, 2019 04:15

0.24 Tournament Results

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The 0.24 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 0.24 release and tournament possible! For 16 days, players could compete for tournament points and banners by playing 0.24 games on the public servers. First let’s give a few highlights from the player and clan results. For comprehensive results with first through third place winners in all categories, please see the tournament overview page.

The winning player was Yermak, with 8149 points. Yermak won 50 games during the tournament, including a streak of 22 wins, and won 18 tier-three banners. In second place was JiyvaJigglypuff, with 7979 points and 36 wins, including a streak of 18 wins and 19 tier-three banners. In third place was cosmonaut, with 7717 points, a streak of 24 wins (!), and 14 tier-three banners. MeekVeins was the only player to win all 24 tier-three tournament banners.

The fastest win by turncount was achieved by JiyvaJigglypuff (10299 turns with a DDFi of Makhleb). p0werm0de had the highest scoring game of the tournament, a 15 rune VSWr of Chei won in 28978 turns for 50M points. Caminho had the lowest level win with an XL 14 MiFi of Okawaru. The first victory of the tournament was claimed by p0werm0de, winning a DDFi of Makhleb in just 43 minutes (52 minutes after tournament start). The first 15 rune win of the tournament was by Mintice, winning a MiBe of The Shining One in 1h 47m (2h 11m after tournament start).

The clan competition was won by Grow Some Ballistomycetes (26661 points), followed by Gozag or Go Home (26172 points), and XTAHUA RAWR (22185 points). There were 143 clans in all with points scored in the tournament.

Here are some basic statistics on the players in this tournament compared with the 0.23 tournament (in parentheses):

  • Players: 2880 (0.23: 3100)
  • Total player time: 35422 hrs (0.23: 36643 hrs)
  • Avg player time:  12.3 hrs (0.23: 11.8 hrs)
  • Games played: 63048 (0.23: 65857)
  • People who got a rune: 1046 (0.23: 1046)
  • 540 winners and 1930 wins (0.23: 531 winners and 1770 wins)
  • Winrate: 3.06% (0.23: 2.69%)
  • Proportion of players using WebTiles: 95.5% (0.23: 95.4%)

Looks like winrate keeps on slowly creeping up, so we’ll have to bring on more nerfs (mostly kidding). After a relatively slow development cycle, it was neat to see this release come together towards the end as some large changes landed. I had great fun working on the Sif and Fedhas redesigns, myself. The next 0.25 release looks like it will be a big one. I’m particularly excited to see where ebering’s positional attack magic project goes in 0.25. It’s playable now as an experimental branch on CKO! Stay tuned for future posts about this and other things we’ll be adding in the next version.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the 0.24 tournament! Note that we are still interested in a tournament format revamp, and will hopefully make that more of a priority for 0.25 after we nail down some of the CAO score page issues. We’ll put up a wiki page and everything, I swear! But if Xom just replaces it with a recipe for rock worm and boulder beetle soup, well that’s on Xom! Until next time, fellow Ziggurat Zaggers, happy crawling!

3 comments!
Friday, October 25th, 2019 07:37

0.24 “Plants vs. Vampires”

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We are pleased to announce the release of Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup 0.24 “Plants vs. Vampires”!

DCSS 0.24 features an overhaul of gods Fedhas and Sif Muna, a new and improved version of Vampires, and a streamlined throwing system, not to mention UI improvements, many smaller changes, and all sorts of bugfixes. For players interested in seeding, you’ll be pleased to hear that stable seeding no longer requires full generation of the dungeon in advance, hopefully paving the way to seeded games online. For a full list of significant changes, please see the changelog for the 0.24 branch.

Download DCSS 0.24 here, or play it online on one of many servers across the world! Packages for Windows, OS X, and Linux are all available now. (Debs coming very soon.)

The tournament starts tomorrow, 20:00 UTC Friday 25 October with all online 0.24 games counting towards your score. See the tournament page for more details, including how to join or set-up a clan. Clan membership changes remain open until 20:00 UTC Friday 1 November.

Many thanks to all those who have contributed to DCSS over the years. A special thanks to the following community members who contributed to DCSS 0.24 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!)

G. Bailey, Josh Braden, achuah, argonaut, CollinJ, cut1less, Doesnt, dplusplus, Higor Eurípedes, Joshua Gelbard, Koen De Groote, Quinten Konyn, Nikolai Lavsky, Gabriel Marks, mgdelmonte, Byrel Mitchell, mwvdev, neofelis, NormalPerson7, Michael Nowack, Andrew O’Neill, s.panicho, Ashley Elizabeth Raine, Chris Rendle-Short, rmcneive, runrin, shelmazad, sdynet, Umer Shaikh, John Stilley, Sean VanMeter, Richard Wardin, wjchen

Happy Crawling!

P.S. by gammafunk. Sorry we couldn’t get that Trunk Update for 0.24! I’ll try to make it up to you all with a more detailed write-up of 0.24 changes in the style of a Trunk Update, along with some details about future directions for 0.25. Best of luck to you all in the tournament!

5 comments!
Friday, October 18th, 2019 05:37

0.24 Release and tournament dates and CXC server info

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Hello digital vampires! I’m referring, of course, to those among you who are undead, capable of turning into an adorable flying mammal, and who have had their blood states recently simplified. Trunk players probably know what I’m talking about, and soon, the rest of you will as well. We’ve been bad, greedy devs, binging on our source code and commits and template metaprogramming and querying the current scissors, but not giving you any Trunk Updates during the 0.24 cycle. I’ll try to make amends with a big Trunk Update post for all of 0.24 soon. It might take us a bit longer to write up those changes, so let’s get some important dates out there right now.

The 0.24 release will (tentatively) happen on Wednesday 23 October, and that the 0.24 tournament will (definitely) happen on 20:00 UTC Friday 25 October through 20:00 UTC Sunday 10 November. We’ll be getting a tournament page up and running very soon as this tournament date is only a week away! Watch out for a future post with the new tournament URL.

We’ve been in the feature freeze since 9 October, and the 0.24 stable branch is already available, soon to be hosted on servers. We’ll be making balance tweaks and bugfixes until release next Wednesday. Online players, please help us test the 0.24 beta by playing the 0.24 branch when that’s available or trunk until then.

Finally, let’s talk about a red dragon THAT TALKS LIKE THIS. As many of you know, the CXC server in France recently went offline after a recent server issue. Medar and Zkyp had graciously hosted CXC for many years, but no longer have time to do so. Thankfully, an admin who goes by Namanix has stepped up to host a new server using the current CXC domain. Namanix tells me that the replacement server is ready and the domain transfer should be complete by 8PM CET on 18 October. All data for logins, current and past games, morgues, ttyrecs, etc should eventually be transferred over to the new server, and games will be played at the same CXC Webtiles URL and SSH host as before. Once again, thanks to Medar and Zkyp for hosting CXC all those years, and thanks to Namanix for taking over the (dragon) reins.

See you all around the lava pit, tossing your blood potions into the fire!

4 comments!
Sunday, March 31st, 2019 21:58

0.23.2 and 0.22.2 bugfix releases

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There’s a new bug fix release of the 0.23.2 stable version of DCSS. Source packages and binaries for Windows, OS X, and Linux are available now. We recommend all 0.23 users upgrade to this version. Major bug fixes and updates:

  • Various seed-related bugfixes and improvements:
    • Seed input now supports pasting, and is autofilled from the last game.
    • The seed input box now has an extra digit.
    • The game seed is saved correctly and will no longer show as 0 for games
      started after this fix.
    • Seed stability for floating point calculations: for most configuration the
      main dungeon should remain unchanged, but 32 bit systems (and 32-bit builds)
      should now be much more stable, among others. Slime will likely differ.
    • Seed stability for rc options: certain rc options affected the generation
      of some layouts, leading to divergent seeds.
  • AK starts will no longer crash when exiting the abyss in pregen games.
  • Gozag bribe branch in pregen games now works correctly when entering a
    previously unvisited level.
  • Meatsprint is now difficult again.

Aside from the major fixes listed above, there are scores of smaller bug fixes, vault tweaks, description updates, and the like, so be sure to upgrade! If you’d like to read more about the seeding project, see here.

In addition, there is a new bugfix release of the 0.22.2 previous stable version, that backports a number of fixes. If you are still playing 0.22, we recommend that upgrade, especially if you have a shared save folder with 0.23 versions (common on OS X) — this release will prevent a major incompatibility between the two versions.

Happy Crawling!

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Friday, March 1st, 2019 06:32

0.23.1 Bugfix Release

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There’s a new bug fix release of the 0.23.1 stable version of DCSS. Source packages and binaries for Windows, OS X, and Linux are available now. We recommend all 0.23 users upgrade to this version. Major bug fixes and updates:

  • Vampiric attacks by the player against allies created from Sticks to Snakes and the Ratskin Cloak no longer restore HP or give vampires satiation.
  • Damage from Ozocubu’s Refrigeration has been increased to the correct amount.
  • Placement for the uniques Aizul, Bai Suzhen, Donald, Jorgrun, and Mara has been fixed so they can place throughout their intended level ranges.
  • The chance of Boris to respawn has been lowered to match previous rates.
  • Yellow draconians now correctly receive their rCorr mutation at XL 7.
  • 45 bugfixes, adjustments, and cleanups in total.

You may have noticed during the tournament that certain uniques were a bit hard to find. Sif Muna intones: ”And with gammafunk’s fateful decision to wrap unique placement statements to an aesthetically pleasing 80 character limit, thus triggering a hitherto unknown vault definition bug, the fates of countless adventurers were altered forever…” Oops! We fixed that, so the uniques listed above should show up more often now. You may also have noticed that old Boris had a bit more life in him than he used to. Due to changing his method of placement to better support the new seeded play mode, Boris was respawning roughly twice as often as he did in previous versions. Congrats to the player Volrath on setting a new record for the number of Boris kills in one game, 10 times! This has also been fixed, so Boris should return to haunt you about as often as he did in 0.22.

Aside from the major fixes listed above, there are scores of smaller bug fixes, vault tweaks, description updates, and the like, so be sure to upgrade!

Happy Crawling!

4 comments!
Friday, March 1st, 2019 05:09

0.23 Winter Tournament Results

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The 0.23 Winter 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 0.23 release and tournament possible! For 16 days, players could compete for tournament points and banners by playing 0.23 games on the public servers. First let’s give  a short summary of player and clan results. To see first through third place winners in all categories, please see the tournament overview page.

The winning player was Yermak, with 8721 points. Yermak won 35 games during the tournament, including the longest streak at 22 games, and won 21 tier-three banners. In second place was MrMan, with 8092 points and 31 wins, including the second-longest streak for 20 wins and 17 tier-three banners. In third place was JiyvaJigglypuff, with 6631 points and 36 wins and 16 tier-three banners. The players ethniccake and watermold were the only ones to win all 24 tier-three tournament banners.

The fastest win by turncount was achieved by Yermak (13586 turns with a DDFi of Makhleb). Yermak also had the highest scoring game of the tournament, a 15 rune GnEE of Chei won in 19994 turns for 71M points. p0werm0de had the fastest realtime win in 25 minutes with a DDFi of Uskayaw, and Yermak had the lowest level win with an XL 15 FeEn of Ashenzari. The first victory of the tournament was claimed by JiyvaJigglypuff, winning a MiFi of Makhleb in just 33 minutes (38 minutes after tournament start). The first 15 rune win of the tournament was by YTcomUltraviolent4, winning a GrGl of The Shining One in 2h 29m (2h 31m after tournament start).

The clan competition was won by Tab and Dab (26578 points), followed by Gozag or Go Home (22637 points), and Big Dispersal (19276 points). There were 126 clans in all with points scored in the tournament.

Here are some basic statistics on the players in this tournament compared with the 0.22 Summer and 0.21 Winter tournaments (in parentheses):

  • Players: 3440 (0.22: 3130, 0.21: 3153)
  • Total player time: 38876 hrs (0.22: 41988 hrs, 0.21: 41283)
  • Avg player time:  11.3 hrs (0.22: 13.41 hrs, 0.21: 13.09)
  • Proportion of players using WebTiles: 95.88% (0.22: 95.39%, 0.21: 94.48%)

It’s nice to see that this tournament had the most players of any we’ve run so far. It looks like the winrate decreased from the high of 2.82% in version 0.22 down to 2.46%, which is similar to version 0.21. We buff players by locking up ghosts, then we nerf players by giving them new traps and Klown pies to the face. Yet you all keep coming back for more! It must be the shiny loot…

We had a lot of fun bringing the 0.23 release together, with multiple devs individually putting in hundreds of commits. We also had lots of great outside contributions ranging from vaults to artwork to bugfixes, including some important feature implementations. Thanks to all those taking the time to contribute to the project! A 0.23.1 bugfix release is imminent, so be on the lookout and be sure to update if you’re playing offline.

In the meantime, we on the Dev Team are excited to start work on the next version. Thanks again, everyone, and happy crawling!

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Friday, February 8th, 2019 00:55

Crawl 0.23 “Nemelex Needs Traps Badly!”

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We are pleased to announce the release of Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup 0.23 “Nemelex Needs Traps Badly!”

DCSS 0.23 features an overhaul of the trap system, a new Gauntlet portal thrown down to replace Labyrinths, a complete revision of Nemelex Xobeh, nine certified-pre-owned refreshed unrandarts plus one new unrandart, and support for seeded dungeon play. This is all in addition to dozens of new fatal vaults, some refreshed monsters, UI improvements, and many more smaller changes. For a full list of significant changes, please see the changelog.

Download DCSS 0.23 here, or play it online on one of many servers across the world! Packages for Windows, OS X, and Linux are all available now.

The tournament starts 20:00 UTC Friday 8 February with all online 0.23 games counting towards your score. See the tournament page for more details, including how to join or set-up a clan.

Many thanks to all those who have contributed to DCSS over the years. A special thanks to the following community members who contributed to DCSS 0.23 and a warm welcome to the first-time contributors, listed in italics.

Brent Adams, AndSDev, Beargit, biasface, bjobae, Matthew Boeh, David Candido, cws, Doesnt, Erich Erstu, Floodkiller, floraline, freepotion, Ge0ff, GenericPseudonym, Aaron Golden, Max ‘Ploomutoo’ Hon-Anderson, ICC, johnstein, Alex Jurkiewicz, Nikolai Lavsky, Jean Martel, Johannes Maier, Jacob Meigs, mgdelmonte, Muffindrake, NormalPerson7, Aaron Olowin, palyth, psywombats, RealzHS, Sandman25, Umer Shaikh, Stenella, WanderingBlade, ximxim

Happy Crawling!

7 comments!
Friday, February 1st, 2019 04:45

0.23 Release and Tournament Info

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Hello fellow Gauntlet runners! I have a quick update about the 0.23 release and tournament. Please bookmark the official 0.23 tournament page and use this page to track your progress throughout the tournament. The tournament is scheduled from 20:00 UTC Friday 8 February through 20:00 UTC Sunday 24 February. The 0.23 release will likely happen beforehand on February 6th or 7th.

The 0.23 branch is available and already installed on CKO, CUE, CXC, and LLD. For other servers, you’ll see the 0.23 game links appear on the server lobby at some point before the tournament starts. Once 0.23 is available on your server, you can follow the instructions on the tournament page to define/join clans via your 0.23 RC file. Clans can be formed and changed until one week into the tournament on 20:00 UTC Friday 15 February. See the Clans section of the tournament page for details.

There are currently no rule changes relative to the 0.22 tournament, but check the tournament page for any final rule changes before the tournament begins. Once the tournament has started, the leaderboard will display the current standings. You may see the leaderboard, player, and clan pages populated with test data from 0.23 games. Don’t worry, the test pages and data will be wiped before the tournament begins. If you’re looking for people to play with, you can find them in the Tavern, reddit, or our IRC channel ##crawl on Freenode.

As you may have noticed, we’re now hosting the tournament on crawl.develz.org, also known as CDO. Special thanks to Napkin for making CDO available to run the tournament scripts and database! Due to this change, there may be some issues with scoring updates early on this tournament. So please bear with us; we’ll try minimize any interruptions as best we can. Also many thanks to |amethyst for making dobrazupa.org available for every tournament from versions 0.12 to 0.22!

See you all on Lair:3, making away with the Minotaur’s loot!

1 comment...
Wednesday, January 30th, 2019 04:15

Trunk Updates and 0.23 Release and Tournament Info

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Hello crawlers, welcome to the last trunk update of the 0.23 cycle. Before we plunge into the abyss of changes, the 0.23 Release will occur tentatively on 6 February, with the accompanying 0.23 Release Tournament running from 20:00 UTC Friday 8 February to 20:00 UTC Sunday 24 February. The tournament website will be brought online soon, watch this space for details.

And now, the latest from the depths of Gehenna.

  • Clear runed doors replaced most runed doors.
  • An experimental seeded dungeon mode has been implemented, allowing for plays through a pre-generated dungeon. See the new manual section “Seeded play” for further information.
  • Tengu now gain permanent flight at XL 5, but no longer apply their flight evasion bonus to evasion from rings and artefacts.
  • Nemelex’s Storm card now unleashes a fearsome blast of wind and electricity, instead of clouds and an elemental.
  • The xv display now shows monster spell ranges.
  • An extra pane has been added to the religion screen for Ashenzari, Beogh, Gozag, Hepliaklqana, Nemelex Xobeh, and Wu Jian; displaying god specific extra information.
  • Spell damage punctuation now reflects the damage done in the same way as melee damage.
  • A new unrandart demon trident has been added, the +8 demon trident “Rift”, distortion branded with a reaching range of 3 and smite-targeted attack. Thanks to aolowin for the concept and first draft!
  • The Singing Sword has been taking voice lessons, and now sings more often and with greater vigor.
  • The circus has come to Zot, with new klown and carnival vaults; watch out for the klown kars!
  • Grate traps have been removed.
  • The traps in the Tomb have been overhauled, toned down in places and toned up in others.
  • High Elves have been removed again.

Space warps horribly around the trunk updates!!!!! The trunk updates disappear!

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