0.23 Release and Tournament Info

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 Tavernreddit, 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!

Trunk Updates and 0.23 Release and Tournament Info

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!

New crawl server CKO and server CJR taken offline

Thanks to floraline, we have a new WebTiles/console server running in New York, USA, with the official acronym CKO:

crawl.kelbi.org

This server supports crawl 0.21, 0.22, and trunk for both WebTiles and console over SSH with daily trunk updates.

Important Note: The CKO hasn’t yet been added to the CAO scoring pages. Don’t worry, games you play now will retroactively show up on the scoring pages after we’ve added CKO to the CAO database. CKO has been added to the Sequell bot, so game history commands like !lg and !lm already work for CKO. Update: CKO is now in the CAO scoring pages!

This new server has come online at a good time, since ZiBuDo has taken CJR (crawl.jorgrun.rocks) offline. We recommend that any current CJR users register on the new CKO server. Sorry, we can’t transfer any current saved games you have on CJR over to another server.

Don’t worry about scoring data and morgue files of your past CJR games, as we have those backed up to another long-term location. Your old CJR games will continue to be recorded in Sequell and on the CAO pages. If you need to access your CJR RC files, for now you can find them here, but you’ll need to copy them soon. The server will go completely offline in the next couple of days.

Thanks so much to ZiBuDo for hosting CJR these last few years! Jorgrun will continue to carry the dwarven_lang banner through the great hall of memes!

0.22.1 and 0.21.2 bug fix releases

There’s a new bug fix release of the 0.22.1 stable version of DCSS. Source packages and binaries for Windows, OS X, and Linux are available now. We recommend all 0.22 users upgrade to this version. Major bug fixes and updates:

  • Support for distributing player ghosts files with releases. Now local games will have a starting set of ghosts available for ghost vaults.
  • New tiles for Azrael, shock serpents, dream sheep, mana vipers, and the Robe of Vines.
  • An additional set of Gnoll player doll tiles (male and female).
  • Fix WebTiles menus for older versions of Firefox.
  • 81 bug fixes, adjustments, and cleanups in total.

The biggest game-play change in this release is the incorporation of ghost data taken from 0.22 games played on the CAO and CBRO servers for use in offline games. 0.22 introduced “permastore” bones files so that ghost vaults always have an available ghost definition to draw from. If a level has no recently made ghost in the normal bones file, the permastore file provides more long-term data that can be repeatedly drawn upon. The problem was that offline games previously had no initial ghost data, forcing ghost vaults to fall back on making clone ghosts of the player. Thanks to work by advil, crawl can look for pre-existing permastore bones files we ship in the game data, copying these over to use as a player’s starting permastore. advil has curated this ghost data to remove excessive numbers of ghosts from the most popular combos and to filter out any offensive usernames. In the future, we’ll be able to make this release ghost data using more servers and will be improving the way the ghost data is handled and stored in general. If you have previously installed 0.22.0, we recommend that you remove any files named `*.store.*` from the bones subdirectory of your saves folder, in order to get the full effect of this change.

As usual, there are scores of smaller bug fixes, vault tweaks, description updates, and the like, so be sure to upgrade! In the bullet list above, I’ve linked a few new tiles we received for trunk that I’ve also added to 0.22.1. Also, a certain worm tells me that we may have a couple new splash screens coming our way. One will depict the exploits of a Deep Dwarf Artificer and the other the antics of uniques like Asterion and Louise (PlogChamp)! No ETA on these new splash images, but look for them to arrive in trunk when they’re ready.

Finally, we’ve also made a 0.21.2 bug fix release. Many of the bug fixes here are ones that have already been made in 0.22, but see the 0.21 changelog for a more detailed summary. The source packages as well as binary packages for Windows and OS X can be found in the 0.21 release folder. The Linux 0.21 component of the debian repository has also been updated. To install the Linux packages, just follow the Linux instructions on the download page, replacing 0.22 by 0.21 in the instructions.

Happy Crawling!

0.22 Summer Tournament Results

The 0.22 Summer 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, new and centuryplayer alike, who made the 0.22 release and tournament possible! For 16 days, players could compete for tournament points and banners by playing 0.22 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 8200 points. Yermak won 36 games during the tournament, including the longest streak at 16 games, and won 22 tier-three banners. In second place was ManMan, with 7686 points and 31 wins, including the second-longest streak for 14 wins and 15 tier-three banners. In third place was justnoob, with 6559 points and 30 wins and 16 tier-three banners. igoo was the only player to win all 24 tier-three tournament banners.

The fastest win by turncount was achieved by Yermak (10243 turns with a DDFi of Makhleb). Yermak also had the highest scoring game of the tournament, a 15 rune GnTm of Chei won in 25904 turns for 55M points. p0werm0de had the fastest realtime win at 23m 13s with a DDFi of Makhleb, and Yermak had the lowest level win with an XL 15 SpEn of Ashenzari. The first victory of the tournament was claimed by Dynast, playing a MiFi of Makhleb, just 41 minutes after tournament start. The first 15 rune win of the tournament was by ManMan, playing a GrFi of The Shining One, won in 1 hour and 19 minutes (at 2 hours and 21 minutes after tournament start).

The clan competition was won by ManMan’s clan (27039 points), followed by Dowan’s clan (25073 points), and Ge0ff’s clan (21144 points). There were 141 clans in all with points scored in the tournament.

Here are some basic statistics on the players in this tournament compared with the 0.21 Winter and 0.20 Summer tournaments (in parentheses):

  • Players: 3130 (0.21: 3153, 0.20: 2997)
  • Total player time: 41988 hrs (0.21: 41283 hrs, 0.20: 39530)
  • Avg player time:  13.41 hrs (0.21: 13.09 hrs, 0.20: 13.19)
  • Proportion of players using webtiles: 95.39% (0.21: 94.48%, 0.20: 94.15%)

A graph made by johnstein shows how various statistics progressed over the course of the tournament. Additional graphs show comparisons of these stats to the 0.21 and 0.20 tournaments.

We hope you all enjoyed playing in the tournament! We had a lot of fun bringing the 0.22 release together, and have 0.22.1 and 0.21.2 point releases planned. We also hope to rework the tournament format so that players won’t be required to put in so many hours in order to be competitive. Details on this aren’t finalized, but of course we’ll communicate those changes before the next tournament. In the meantime, we on the Dev Team are excited to start work on the next version. Thanks again, everyone, and happy crawling!

Crawl 0.22 “Ghost in a Cell”

We’re pleased to announce the release of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup 0.22: “Ghost in a Cell”

DCSS 0.22 features ghosts being sealed in thematic vaults, a new spell library for managing spells, a major UI rework that paves the way for future UI improvements, and many updates and general improvements. For a full list of significant changes, please see the changelog.

Download DCSS 0.22 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 today at 20:00 UTC, with all online 0.22 games counting towards your score. See the tournament website for more details, including how to set up or join a clan.

Many thanks to all those who have contributed to Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. We hope you enjoy playing DCSS 0.22!

0.22 Release and Tournament Info

Hello fellow player-ghost purgers, I have a quick update about the 0.22 release and tournament. Please bookmark the official 0.22 tournament page and use this page to track your progress throughout the tournament. The tournament is scheduled from 20:00 UTC Friday 10 August through 20:00 UTC Sunday 26 August. The 0.22 release will likely happen beforehand on August 9th or 8th.

The 0.22 branch won’t be available on official servers for two or three weeks, so you can’t define your clans just yet. You’ll see the 0.22 game links appear on your server’s lobby at some point a week or two before the tournament starts. At that point, you can follow the instructions on the tournament page to define/join clans by editing your 0.22 RC file. Clans can be formed and changed until one week into the tournament on 20:00 UTC Friday 17 August. See the Clans section of the tournament page for details.

There are currently no rule changes relative to the 0.21 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. At some point before Aug 10th, you may see the leaderboard, player, and clan pages populated with test data from trunk 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 Tavernreddit, or our IRC channel ##crawl on Freenode.

See you all on D:3, opening a runed door to 5 ghosts!

0.21.1 Bugfix Release

There’s a new bugfix release of the stable version of DCSS. Source packages and binaries for Windows and Linux are available now, and OS X packages will be uploaded as soon as those are available. We recommend all 0.21 users upgrade to this version. Major bugfixes and updates:

  • Dith shadow mimic of launcher attacks no longer copies the enchant and ego of the launcher.
  • Monsters lose constriction by Borgnjor’s Vile Clutch when they are moved by any means.
  • Formicids can now manually cancel Dig status, allowing them to use Wu Jian’s Wall Jump ability after digging.
  • Wu Jian’s Wall Jump ability now works under silence.
  • New splash screen art by froggy.
  • Numlock on Windows systems no longer causes unpredictable repeating movement.
  • Alt-F4 no longer causes freezing in Tiles on Windows systems.
  • Resizing the local Tiles window during prompts no longer causes crashes.
  • SDL 2 contrib updated to 2.0.7, which fixes compilation under Msys2.

Dith shadow mimics of launcher attacks were giving you all free enchantment and ego damage. That’s simply unfair to those poor dungeon monsters, so we had to fix it! The numlock key causing repeating movement was reported by users far and wide, so many thanks to advil for tracking down and fixing that rather difficult bug. Hopefully you enjoy the new splash art by South Korean artist froggy, whose inspirational depiction of Boris and Natasha is a personal favorite.

Happy Crawling!

0.21 Tournament Results

The 0.21 tournament has concluded! Many thanks to everyone for coming together and participating in our community. And thanks especially to all our server administrators, developers, organizers, and contributors for putting in their work, time, and passion to make this tournament possible.

Despite a longer release cycle and later tournament start date, participation this tournament was high and competition among players and clans continued to be fierce. Read on for a chronicle of the many and amazing achievements players managed in this competition.

Individual Winners

The champion this year is Yermak with 7751 tournament points, 36 wins, and a 51% win-rate. Yermak is widely known for his tournament victories, having won the 0.19 and 0.18 tournaments, and was solidly in first place nearly the entire time. In typical Yermak style, he pulled off the lowest turncount victory in 12323 turns and had the highest scoring victory, a 15-rune win in 22898 turns. He additionally had an 11 win streak (ended when his Demonspawn Abyssal Knight failed to pillar dance a kobold with a short sword on D:1) held 11 combo high scores, and won 21 out of 23 possible Tier 3 banners! In other categories, Yermak had the 3rd 15-rune win of the tournament, a GrFi won 3 and a half hours in, and was the 3rd player to kill all 76 uniques. An unstoppable force this time, Yermak put in over 7 and a half days of play-time with 71 games played, averaging 10 hours 42 minutes per day!

The silver medalist is Manman with 6862 points, 22 wins, and a 39% win-rate. Manman is the previous 0.20 tournament champion and won a closely fought battle for 2nd place this time around. He was the first player to get a 15-rune victory a mere 2 hours and 20 minutes in and most notably was tied with 3rd-place finisher mibe for the longest streak of the tournament. Their 20-win streaks broke the 18-win tournament streak record set by theglow all the way back in the 0.11 tournament of November 2012! Manman’s streak was ended by a lowly rat on D:1 as his Human Wizard tried to shout from the arrival vault and lure monsters over one at a time. The monsters refused to cooperate, as monsters often do. As mentioned, the battle for 2nd place with mibe was pitched, and Manman didn’t take the lead until the final days of the tournament, with the 200 points from that first 15-rune victory proving decisive. In the non-point-awarding categories, Manman’s GrFi had the second-highest AC+EV of the tournament with 82/46 AC/EV, aided by the Cloak of Starlight, the Ring of Robustness, and a +6 protection ring.

Third place goes to mibe with 6785 points, 25 wins, and a 28% win-rate. mibe has played in many previous tournaments, including an 8th place finish in the 0.20 tournament. This time his aims were to captain the winning clan, which he did, and to break the tournament streak record with a 20 game or higher streak, which he also did! His 20 streak was the first ever to break theglow’s record, with the streak ending with the death of his Formicid Wizard to a sixfirhy summoned by an obsidian statue in a Volcano. Dying to a stationary monster on a record-breaking streak is almost unforgivable, but you helped the Dev Team find bugs in 0.21, so we forgive you, mibe. mibe also made a strong attempt for last win of the tournament, playing what we must assume is his signature combo of MiBe, getting the third-to-last win in one hour 17 minutes, just 5 minutes before the end.

Clan Winners

The first place clan was Knee Deep In The Bread, with mibe (captain, #3), Charly (#6), hellmonk (playing as dying5ever, #7), Sharkman1231 (#20), RBrandon, and Surr, scoring 22873 points and 83 wins. This clan had 3 top 10 players, 22 high scores (3rd most among clans), and maintained a solid lead from early into the tournament. They had a lock on streak points with both mibe’s aforementioned 20-win streak as well as hellmonk’s 15-win streak. Hellmonk’s streak was 3rd longest, is still ongoing, and had a different skill title for every win! Finally hellmonk had the 3rd-lowest XL win of the tournament, a SpAE won at XL 18. Clan member Charly contributed a 7-win streak, had the third-fastest turncount win, a DDCK of Makhleb won in 15497 turns, and was the second player with a 15-rune victory just 3 hours in.

Coming in at second place was Gozag or Go Home, with Ge0ff (captain), Beargit (#4), Faldahar, Chobophobe, ranchugoldfish, and ToastedZergling, scoring 21509 points and 80 wins, and had 30 combo high scores, the most of any clan. This clan continued from the previous tournament, where it took 3rd place, with 4 of its 6 players returning. Beargit snagged the final win of the tournament for 100 points with a speedy 56 minute MiBe that ascended only 35 seconds before the end of the tournament! Beargit also got a 12-win streak (ended when his Merfolk Abyssal Knight took a Crystal Spear from an Ogre Mage in Vaults) and ranchugoldfish contributed a 9-win streak.

Third place is awarded to Make Aus Servers pls, with Demise (captain), Manman (#2), Ultraviolent4 (#5), gorglomux (#12), Alcopop, and Doesnt scoring 19584 points and 70 wins. The Australian CPO server owner and admin Alex was away on extended travel at the start of tournament, but was able to set up 0.21 on that server by the second day, so many thanks to him for doing this. The initial lack of CPO meant some loss of points at the start of tournament for this clan, but they made a strong showing in the end. Ultraviolent4 had the second-fastest turncount win, a GnNe won in 14682 turns, as well as a 13-win streak (ended when his Naga Berserker got outdone by a D:1 Kobold armed with a mere short sword). gorglomux had the fastest real-time win of the tournament, a Deep Dwarf Fighter won in about 37 minutes (about 4 minutes off WR), and was the second tournament player to finish a Ziggurat.

Other Notables

tidbits had the 2nd-highest scoring win of the tournament, a 15-rune GnAE won in only 23820 turnsp0werm0de followed close behind in 3rd place with a 15-rune VSNe won in 25781 turns. p0werm0de also had the 2nd and 3rd fastest wins of the tournaments, both Deep Dwarf Fighters, with his best won in 40 minutes. Additionally p0werm0de had the game with the 2nd-lowest XL for fetching a rune that wasn’t Abyssal or Slimy with an XL 14 OpTm of Jiyva that nabbed the Decaying Rune and later ascended. First place in that category was Sukerboh, who’s XL 12 SpEn picked up the Serpentine Rune with 1 HP and lived only 26 turns before being taken down by a Naga Sharpshooter. Third place in this category was SriBri whose XL 14 MiBe picked up the Barnacled Rune only to be sniped by a Satyr less than 500 turns later. Finally, p0werm0de was the first player to complete all 27 levels of a Ziggurat just 3 hours into the tournament, followed by gorglomux and Anonymous1 the next day.

tself55 had the first win of the tournament, a MiBe won just 1 hour, 24 minutes in, followed less than 4 minutes later by Likado‘s DDFi and a minute after that by NormalPerson7‘s MiBe. For combo high scores, Monsterracer had the most with 15 (only one of which was a victory!), followed by stickyfingers and Rubinko, who both had twelve. Rubinko was also the second player to kill all 76 unique monsters, followed by Yermak. Lasty was the first to achieving this milestone 7 days into the tournament. Finally, inmateoo had the game with highest AC+EV of the tournament, a GrFi with 82/49 AC, aided by +12 crystal plate armour, the ring of Phasing, and even a molten scales mutation.

The most commonly achieved banner was once again The Shining One’s Vow of Courage I, to kill Sigmund before entering the Depths, earned by a whopping 1747 players! The most rarely achieved banner was Beogh’s Heretic III, earned by no one (it was earned by two players in the previous 0.20 tournament).

The most dangerous ghost was isock, who claimed the lives of 52 players, easily eclipsing slep in 2nd place with 28 kills. isock was also competitive in the “most deaths to uniques” category. Both isock and p0werm0de died to 23 distinct uniques, behind komo4ek, who managed to die to 26.

The most lethal monster in this tournament was again the unstoppable gnoll, ending the hopes and dreams of 4104 characters and taking over 5% of all kills. The most lethal unique was again Sigmund, reaping 1640 characters with a kill ratio of 15.6%.

Statistics and Final Thoughts

Over 3,100 players participated this year! See here for a comparison of this tournament to the 0.20 summer tournament, here for a comparison to the previous winter tournament for 0.19, and here for an album of all past tournament stats images made by johnstein. The win-rate increased to 2.41% from 2.3% last year, which is in-line with the typical win-rate increases we tend to see every release as the player-base gets better at the game. We were a bit worried that tournament participation would be down due to the far later start time, but participation was instead very strong. Over 16 days, you all played nearly 78,000 games, collected over 17,700 runes, won 1,877 games and racked up 4 years, 261 days of total play-time!

We on the Dev Team had fun making all the new content and quality-of-life improvements in 0.21, and I personally have enjoyed making the most commits I’ve done in a release so far. Additionally we’ve had some major features merged after collaboration between Dev Team members and outside contributors. We’ve also had lots of good feedback and bug reports from play-testers. Once again, thanks to everyone participating in the tournament! We hope to post a bugfix 0.21.1 release soon that contains all the fixes we made after the release.

Happy crawling!

Crawl 0.21 “Gnoll Country for Old Jian”

We’re pleased to announce the release of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup 0.21: “Gnoll Country for Old Jian”! 0.21 features a new species, a new god, a new spell, and many significant updates and general improvements to the game.

Download DCSS 0.21 here, or play it online on one of many servers across the world! Packages for Windows and Linux are all available now. Packages for OS X will be available soon, and we’ll upload this post and the download page when they’re ready. Update: OS X packages are now on the download page.

The release tournament has already started today at 20:00 UTC, with all online 0.21 games counting towards your score. See the tournament website for more details, including how to set up or join a clan.

0.21′s highlights include:

  • Characters: Gnolls have been added, a new species that always trains all skills at once, without any of the usual item/spell restrictions, and can’t select specific skills to train. To help overcome this limitation, Gnolls have very high apts (+6 in magic schools, +9 invocations, and +8 for the other schools) as well as higher stats. They can also sense the location of nearby items. Additionally, Ogres now have better aptitudes in shortblades, longblades, and axes.
  • Gods: Wu Jian Council has been added, a new god that grants martial attacks from movement actions, including a powerful lunge attack, a cleave-like whirlwind attack, and a multi-hitting wall-jump attack that lets you leap off walls. Wu also has two powerful active abilities that cost piety. The first is a Serpent’s Lash ability granting two free movement actions that allows any resulting martial attacks to never miss. The second is Heavenly Storm, which creates opaque clouds and increases your prowess as you continue to use martial attacks. Finally, Zin now grants 100% mutation immunity at 6* piety, allowing you to use potions of mutation solely to cure mutations at this piety level.
  • Spell: A new spell has been added: Borgnjor’s Vile Clutch, a level five Necromancy/Earth spell that calls forth undead hands from the earth over a smite-targeted area to constrict hostile monsters. It appears in the Necromancer starting book, the book of Unlife, and the book of Dreams.
  • Items: Permanent food has been simplified, and now rations are the only type of food, replacing bread and meat rations, fruit, and royal jelly. Food item generation and the herbivore/carnivore mutations have been balanced to keep overall nutrition about the same. Additionally, wands of the same type merge charges upon pickup, and there’s no cap on wand charges. Wands also identify their charges upon pickup and are destroyed when the last charge is used.
  • Dungeon: Items in doorways no longer prevent closing doors in most cases and get pushed out of the doorway if the items wouldn’t land in deep water or lava. The rate at which unique Pandemonium lord levels appear in Pandemonium has been increased. Several new dangerous vaults have been added, and the Hellbinder and Cloud Mage WizLabs have been revamped to provide greater and more varied challenge, as well as better loot.
  • Monsters: Monsters no longer spawn after level-generation in most places, which includes the nasty out-of-depth monsters that formerly spawned after many turns. Instead a few more monsters generate on each level, and monsters have a small chance to generate awake, although never near stairs. Air elementals have a short-range, short-duration Tornado-like Vortex ability. Player ghosts now are all speed 10 and never spawn with chaos melee. Finally, random Pandemonium Lords no longer can have the Shatter spell.
  • Interface: Players can now set training targets for skills. Press ‘=’ on the skill screen, select a skill, and enter a skill level to have training of that skill disabled when the specified level is reached. Many monsters and artefact item tiles have been updated, and Draconian player tiles now show their hats!

For a list of other major changes, see the changelog. Many thanks to all those who have contributed to Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. We hope you enjoy playing 0.21!

A new game by PleasingFungus: Silicon Zeroes

Our own PleasingFungus, now mostly retired from Crawl development, has a new game out on Steam. Silicon Zeroes is a puzzle game about digital logic and CPU design, available on both Steam and itch.io. Here is a review of the game.

If you think Silicon Zeroes is a little too practical and you’d rather work with things like queue automata, you might be interested in PF’s older game Manufactoria.

0.20.1 Bugfix Release

There’s a new bugfix release of the stable version of DCSS. Source packages and binaries for Windows and Linux are available now, and OS X packages will be uploaded as soon as those are available (Update: OS X packages are now on the download page). We recommend all 0.20 users upgrade to this version. Major bugfixes:

  • Restore 5 base damage to kick aux attacks, which had been missing since 0.16.0.
  • Don’t let equipped weapon accuracy affect throwing accuracy.
  • Ignore negative relative window sizes in full-screen mode. Not ignoring these settings caused full-screen issues on Windows platforms in particular.
  • 41 other bugfixes and cleanups.

As mentioned in the changelog entry, kick aux attacks have had nerfed damage for some time. Hopefully now your poor Tengus won’t get their bird brains bashed in quite so easily in early Dungeon! Getting a boost to throwing accuracy based on the weapon you have equipped is probably too subtle for most players to notice, but at least you can sleep at night knowing that you aren’t cheating with your ranged to-hit. Lots of crash fixes and cleanups, as well as a few vault balance tweaks, so please update!

So, hookbill, your frogs did well! But let us see how they do against my birds of prey – pray the birds don’t get them! Ha-ha-ha-ha…!
-Dark Queen, “Battletoads”, 1991

0.20 Tournament Results

The 0.20 tournament has concluded! A hearty thanks to everyone for coming together and participating in our community. And especial thanks to all our server administrators, developers, organizers, and contributors for putting in their work, time, and passion to make this tournament possible.

Both the individual player competition and the clan competition were very close this year, with lots of lead changes. Read on for details of the amazing achievements players made this tournament. We’ll also discuss some tournament statistics and even an unsolved win rate mystery!

Individual Winners

The champion this year is ManMan with 7291 tournament points and 31 wins. This is ManMan’s first tournament championship, although he made a strong showing in the 0.19 tournament as well, coming in at #9, and has participated in many past tournaments. To maintain his lead ManMan pulled off a number of outstanding games, including the first all-rune win, a speedy 47 minute win, a third place low-turncount win in 17728 turns, and an incredible streak of 15 wins, the longest of the tournament! His 15-streak was ended on Swamp:4 when his Barachian Transmuter got paralyzed by a wasp from shambling mangrove. Respect the forest!

The silver medalist is Yermak with 7052 points and 33 wins. Yermak is no stranger to this competition, being the previous winner of the 0.19 and 0.18 tournaments. Yermak pulled off an incredible 10406 turn win (less than 1k behind WR; third fastest all-time), got the highest scoring run of the tournament, got the second all-rune victory, got third most combo high scores (10), and won 19 Tier-III banners! His best hope for retaking first place with a streak late in the tournament was hindered by an unfortunate crawl bug. Item slot key mappings can be ignored when purchasing previously unidentified items from shops, thus leading Yermak to read the wrong scroll and die to a berserked ettin. Sorry Yermak, we’ll try to get that bug fixed soon!

Third place goes to Ultraviolent4 (playing as YTcomUltraviolent4) with 6155 points and 18 wins. Ultraviolent4 also had the fastest and third fastest real-time runs of the tournament, his best being an incredibly fast Deep Dwarf Fighter won in 38 minutes, 17 seconds (4th-fastest all-time), a win that he improved from his third place DDFi won in 44 minutes. Additionally Ultraviolent4 had the second win of the tournament and the third longest streak at 12 wins, which was ended abruptly when his Troll Conjurer became a snack for the Dis Serpent of Hell. Streak snacks are its favorite!

Clan Winners

The first place clan was Who Left the Gnolls Out, with Demise (captain, #4), ManMan (#1), Ultraviolent4 (#3), Alcopop, gammafunk, and Pekkekk, scoring 22933 points and 93 wins. Fielding a majority of the top 5 players, it’s no surprise that this clan was so competitive. They gained an edge with 46 streak wins (compared to 40 for the second-place clan), having the aforementioned 15 streak by ManMan and 12 streak by Ultraviolent4, but also a 12 streak from team captain Demise. Demise also got the first win of the tournament and had the second-fastest real-time win, a MiBe won in 38:12, a mere 4 seconds behind his teammate Ultraviolent4.

Coming in at second place was Tolkien Minorities, with dying5ever (captain, #10), mibe (#8), koboldina (#11), araganzar (#20), minmay, and Doesnt, scoring 22018 points and 74 wins. This clan had the second most combo high scores of any clan at 33 high scores. Mibe’s streak of 13 games was the second-best of the tournament, and team captain dying5ever (also known as Hellmonk) was no slouch himself with a 12 streak. Minmay was the first player to reach the end of a Ziggurat as well as the third person to kill all 76 uniques, helping to make her clan the first to harvest them all. Finally, Doesnt had the second fastest turncount win, a DDFi won in 13912 turns.

Third place is awarded to Gozag or Go Home, with Ge0ff, Beargit (#5), Faldahar, Kenran, sage1234, and toastedzergling, scoring 19584 points and 70 wins. This clan had the most high scores of any in the tournament with 41 in total, aided by Beargit who had the most combo high scores of any player at 14. Beargit also got the third win of tournament, and team captain Ge0ff was the third fastest in the tournament to reach the end of a Ziggurat.

Other Notables

murphy had the lowest XL win with a level 14 FeEn of Dith in addition to having second and third place for rune fetched at lowest XL. First place in that category goes to KoreanRuneSaw, who was the first to fetch a (gossamer) rune at XL 9 with a SpEn that died strengthless from a ghost moth’s bite a mere 17 turns later. murphy also fetched a (barnacled) rune at XL 9, this time with a different FeEn of Dith that would lose a felid life a mere 13 turns later to a merfolk aquamancer.

inmateoo was the first player to harvest all 76 uniques, doing so less than 6 days into the tournament, and Tegga21 has the distinction of winning with the highest combined AC+EV. Their GrFi of Zin ascended with 99 AC and 49 EV, aided by gold dragon scales, rings of Robustness and Phasing, and quite a few status high jinks. Finally, Dowan snuck in the last win of the tournament, their GrBe winning in 1:48:26 just 40 seconds before the end of the tournament!

The most commonly achieved banner was The Shining One’s Vow of Courage I, to kill Sigmund before entering the Depths, earned by a whopping 1624 players! The most rarely achieved banner was Beogh’s Heretic III, earned only by kuniqs and Rocknlol.

The most dangerous ghost was everyone’s favorite Crawl lua bot, qw, who claimed an incredible 150 kills, over three times as many as SirKenneth in second place, who had 44 kills. Playing over 21 hours a day on average during the tournament no doubt gave qw the edge here, and this also resulted in 25 wins and an overall player ranking of 23! Not surprisingly, qw and SirKenneth also respectively held first and second place in the most deaths to uniques ranking.

The most lethal monster in this tournament was again the gnoll, ending the hopes and dreams of 4306 characters. The most lethal unique was again Sigmund, reaping 1733 characters; that’s 1.07 kills per Vow of Courage I banner. You may be wondering how Ijyb is doing in the rankings now that she always has a wand but places a bit deeper. She’s moved up 7 ranks and killed 281 more players compared to the 0.19 tournament, with over 8 times as many wand kills compared to melee kills.

Statistics and Final Thoughts

Just under three thousand players participated this year! See here for a comparison of this tournament to the 0.19 winter tournament, here for a comparison to the previous summer tournament for 0.18, and here for an album of all past tournament stats images made by johnstein. Summer tournaments like this one tend to have a bit less participation than winter tournaments, but our total play time was still slightly higher compared to 0.19. That’s over 4 years and 187 days of cumulative playtime for 2997 tournament players! It looks slightly more reasonable when you consider it’s just over 49 minutes per day for each player on-average.

One statistic was significantly higher this tournament than we expected: the win rate. Win rate does tend to increase with each new tournament, since we don’t increase the game’s difficulty drastically with each new version, yet our player base keeps growing in experience. You players always get better at winning! However some versions have significant increases in win rate due to major changes or bugs. In 0.15 we removed item destruction and player burden, and increased the benefit of shield enchantment, which saw a 33% increase in win rate (1.34% -> 1.78% from 0.14 to 0.15). In 0.16 we had a the infamous melee bug that doubled melee damage and was fixed well after the tournament began, resulting in a 72% increase in win rate (1.78% -> 3.06% from 0.15 to 0.16). See here for a graph of tournament win rates for all past tournaments for which we have data, excluding games that were quit or played by bots.

This year win rate increased by 29%, which is a bit surprising to us here on the dev team, because on paper this doesn’t look like a version that would make winning significantly easier. New high-level wands, new scarf items, and slightly increased potions of hasting/heal wounds are offset by removal of rods, removal of the Repel Missiles spell, and removal of wands of hasting/heal wounds/teleport. Even though Ijyb was moved deeper and we removed hill giants (and their infamous nets), Ijyb always gets a wand now (and has gotten more kills), and two-headed ogres place earlier than hill giants did and are pretty nasty monsters!

The win rate for players with fewer than 10 wins before the respective starts of this tournament and last is also up 37% (0.7% -> 0.96% from 0.19 to 0.20). This higher than usual win rate increase may be due to a subtle bug we haven’t found yet, but it might also be that the cumulative changes have actually made the game a bit easier. We’ll keep an eye out for explanations and will continue looking at balance issues in 0.21 like we do for every version.

Once again, thanks for participating in the 0.20 tournament! We hope to post a bugfix 0.20.1 release soon that contains fixes made after the release.

Happy crawling!

Crawl 0.20: “Scarf Our Wanderful Fried Frogs”

We’re toadally pleased to announce the release of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup 0.20: “Scarf Our Wanderful Fried Frogs”! 0.20 features a new species, some new items and spells, dungeon updates, and many other additions, streamlinings, and general improvements to the game.

Download DCSS 0.20 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 release tournament begins on May 26 2017, at 20:00 UTC, with all online 0.20 games counting towards your score. See the tournament website for more details, including how to set up or join a clan.

0.20′s highlights include:

  • Characters: Barachim have been added, a new species that moves slowly but has good aptitudes, a powerful Hop ability, and can see one tile more than other species. Ogres have had their aptitudes and stats reworked, allowing them to be more proficient spell-casters and not just melee brutes, and mummies have a much higher spell-casting aptitude.
  • Spells: Two new spells have been added: Ignition, a high level Fire Magic spell that drops a weakened Fireball on every monster in view, leaving the player and their allies unaffected, and Poisonous Vapours, a Poison/Air spell in the Venom Mage starting book the creates a very short-lived poisonous cloud on a single monster.
  • Items: Scarves have been added, which are auxiliary armour for the cloak slot that has 0 AC and can’t be enchanted, but have special powerful egos like Repel Missiles, Cloud Immunity, Resistance (rF+ & rC+), and Spirit Shield. Mutation potions are now the only mutation-changing potion, and each quaff cures multiple existing mutations and grants several new ones. Additionally, spells formerly found on rods have been moved to wands of clouds and scattershot and the new rod of lightning XP evocable, and other wands have had their ranges and effects adjusted.
  • Dungeon: Many new dangerous vaults have been added, including an epic level-wide Depths vault as well as tricky loot vaults using the new one-way transporter dungeon feature. The Tomb of Ancients now features more dangerous one-way stairs that don’t allow easy, immediate return, and the treasure walls of the Slime Pits now always breach when the Royal Jelly dies.
  • Interface: A new noise meter now shows the relative loudness of each action, and in console mode this can be replaced by a bar showing the glyph of each equipped item. Stash searches now exclude distant duplicate matches of vanilla weapons, armour and ammo by default. Finally, the mouse can now be used in WebTiles by default and the species selection menu is reworked to have groupings in “simple”, “intermediate”, and “advanced” categories.

For a list of other major changes, see the changelog. Many thanks to all those who have contributed to Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. We hope you enjoy playing 0.20!

0.20 Tournament Page is Online

For all the warriors, adventurers, zealots, mages, and warrior-mages out there, I’m here with a quick update about the 0.20 tournament. Please bookmark the official 0.20 tournament page and use this page to track your progress throughout the tournament. Remember, the tournament is scheduled from 20:00 UTC Friday 26 May through 20:00 UTC Sunday 11 June.

There are currently no rule changes relative to the 0.19 tournament, but check the tournament page for any final rule changes before the tournament begins. Once the tournament has started, the tournament leaderboard will display the current standings. For now this page has test data from servers with 0.20 available, but this data will be wiped from the tournament database before friday.

Clans can be formed and changed until one week into the tournament. See the Clans section of the tournament page for details, and you can get a head-start on configuring RC on any server that already has 0.20 available. Currently that list is: CAO, CBRO, CJR, CPO, CXC, LLD; the remaining servers will have 0.20 available soon. If you’re looking for people to play with, you can find them in the Tavernreddit, or our IRC channel ##crawl on Freenode.

See you all on D:1, holding the Orb of Zot!

Upcoming 0.20 Release and Tournament

Fellow crawlers, I’m here to let you know that DCSS 0.20 will be officially released on the 24th of May! Two days later, from 20:00 UTC Friday 26 May through 20:00 UTC Sunday 11 June we’ll be running the 0.20 tournament. More details along with a 0.20 tournament rules page will be given in an upcoming post. Note that we’re not quite at feature freeze and that the 0.20 version doesn’t yet have its own game branch listed on official servers, but those things will happen soon!

There aren’t many new features since our last update, since we’re so close to feature freeze, but here’s a teeny tiny trunk update all the same:

  • Gnolls, the new species that senses items and have a short attention span, have been disabled for the next release. This commit talks about some of the issues with the current species, and this commit is a preview of Gnolls 2.0, which may get merged soon. Although Gnolls won’t be in the 0.20 release, don’t worry, you’ll still be able to play these puppers in trunk.
  • Wu Jian has also been disabled for the 0.20 release. We’re examining a few different options for Wu, which may involve reworking an ability or two or even merging some of the god’s abilities into Uskayaw (!). This work won’t take place until after the tournament finishes, but until then, you can continue to worship Wu in your trunk games.
  • New cloud ego for scarves that grants immunity to all clouds, replacing the ultra boring rC+ scarf ego. Cast conjure flame and stand in the flames! Stand in miasma clouds, breathing in deeply! Laugh in Xom’s face when he dumps chaos clouds all over you!
  • Coming soon: more transporter loot vaults, featuring steamed eels, bookish nerds, Jiyva/Lucy/Beogh altar ambushes, and more.

See you all in the Hall of Zot!

Making DCSS with 253 cooks and no head chef

Our own dpeg and Lasty were interviewed in Rock Paper Shotgun!

Have a read and learn a little about Crawl’s development process.

0.19.5 Bugfix Release

There’s a new bugfix release of the stable version of DCSS. Source packages and binaries for Windows, OS X, and Linux are all available. We recommend all 0.19 users upgrade to this version. Major bugfixes:

  • Fix save compatibility when loading games from version 0.18.
  • Macros now work in map mode in Tiles.
  • Autopickup is now smarter about whether items are permanently or temporarily useless.
  • 22 other bug-fixes and cleanups.

Users upgrading their saves from a version 0.18 game should be able to do so properly.

Some dance to remember, some dance to forget.
-Eagles, “Hotel California”. 1976.

0.19.4 Bugfix Release

There’s a new bugfix release of the stable version of DCSS. Source packages and binaries for Windows, OS X, and Linux are all available. We recommend all 0.19 users upgrade to this version. There are two major bugfixes:

  • Fix mouse lag experienced by trackpad users on Mac OS X systems.
  • Fix to allow the Temple entrance to place as part of a vault instead of always by itself.

This release fixes heavy lag reported by Mac OS X trackpad users in version 0.19.3. If you continue to experience any mouse-related woes, please file a bug report on Mantis.

The release also contains an important fix to Temple vault placement. Since 0.19, Temple entrances had been placing only as ordinary stairs and never as part of a vault. I know you’ve been missing that special feeling you get when those Oklob saplings kill you before you ever see the altars. What are you waiting for, download right away!

Some dance to remember, some dance to forget.
-Eagles, “Hotel California”. 1976.

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0.19.3 Bugfix Release

There’s a new bugfix release of the stable version of DCSS. Source packages and binaries for Windows and Linux are available now, with OS X binaries coming soon. We recommend all 0.19 users upgrade to this version. There are four major bugfixes, along with 25 other bugfixes and cleanups:

  • Fix a long-standing Tiles mouse lag bug. Now there is no lag when updating cursor information upon mouse movement to a new tile.
  • Work around an AMD driver bug where the game crashes when loading 512×512 images.
  • Demon tridents are two-handed for small races, as intended.
  • Fix to allow helmets as armour acquirement gifts.
  • Fix to prevent Infestation death scarabs becoming hostile when killing their host in an explosion.

Note that there was no 0.19.2 bugfix release. We tagged that release, but the AMD driver issue was reported and fixed shortly afterwards, so we made 0.19.3 to include that crash fix for the affected users.

Some dance to remember, some dance to forget.
-Eagles, “Hotel California”. 1976.

Update: OS X zips for 0.19.3 are now on the download page.