The 0.18 tournament will begin in just over a week! From 20:00 UTC Friday 6 May through 20:00 UTC Sunday 22 May, any 0.18 game played on any of the online servers will count for the tournament. 0.18 will be officially released a few days before the start of the tournament.

The rules page will contain all the details about how to score points and earn banners in the tournament. We’re still settling on the rules for this tournament, but they’ll probably be pretty similar to previous years’.

As usual, clans (teams of up to six players) can be formed and changed until one week into the tournament, so don’t panic if you aren’t on one yet! (Being on a clan isn’t necessary to participate in the tournament, but it can be a lot of fun.)

Once the tournament has started, the tournament leaderboard will contain the current results. (Before tournament start, some scores might briefly appear on this page as we test the tournament scripts, but they are just for testing.)

If you want to get a head-start, the 0.18 beta is now out. It is now playable on our Australian server, CPO, and should be available on other servers soon. Local beta binaries should also be available in the immediate future. (See also the 0.18 changelog.)

See you soon!

The 0.17 tournament is over. For 16 days, players could compete for tournament points and banners by playing 0.17 games on the public servers.

The winning player was cosmonaut, with 5787 points. cosmonaut won 22 games during the tournament, including a 5-game streak, and won 15 tier-three banners. In second place was johnnyzero, with 5644 points and 17 wins, including the longest streak for 10 games. In third place was iafm, with 5432 points and 27 wins, the most wins of any player, and 16 tier-three banners. EnterQ won the most tier-three banners of the tournament, getting 20 of 22 possible. The only unwon banner was Ruthless Efficiency III.

The fastest win by turncount was achieved by 4thArraOfDagon (19225 turns with a VSMo of Cheibriados). This game was also the highest scoring win of the tournament at 74M points, and incredibly is the second-highest-scoring game among all online games ever played! Demise had the fastest realtime win at 57m 37s with a HOBe, and johnnyzero had the lowest level win with an XL 19 FeAE of Dithmenos. The first victory of the tournament was claimed by CcS, playing a MiMo of Cheibriados, just 86 minutes after tournament start, followed by lessens a mere 32 seconds later, playing a MiBe.

The clan competition was won by tasonir’s clan (17151 points), followed by Vidiiot’s clan (16340 points), and MorganLeah’s clan (14161 points). There were 167 clans in all with points scored in the tournament.

Here are some basic statistics on the players in this tournament compared with the 0.16 tournament (in parentheses):

• Players: 2836 (2773)
• Total player time: 40866 hrs (43008 hrs)
• Avg player time:  14.4 hrs (15.5 hrs)
• Proportion of players using webtiles: 89.8% (88.9%)

A graph made by johnstein shows how various statistics progressed over the course of the tournament. See here for additional comparison graphs. 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 0.17 release and tournament possible!

We’re proud to announce the release of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup 0.17: “Squaring the Circle”! 0.17 features a square line of sight, shorter Lair rune branches, new rune vaults for many branches, and many, many additions and improvements to the game.

Download DCSS 0.17 here, or play it online on one of many servers across the world! The source and Windows packages are available now, and our deep build annihilator elves are hard at work on the OS X binaries. We’ll update the website as soon as those files are ready!
Update: The linux debian 0.17 packages are now in the repository!
Update 2: The OS X packages are now on the download page. Many thanks to geekosaur for making these and troubleshooting signing issues! If you have problems running this on OS X, please tell us in ##crawl-dev or file a bug report on Mantis.

The release tournament begins today, Nov 6 2015, at 20:00 UTC, with all online 0.17 games counting towards your score. See the tournament website for more details, including how to set up or join a clan.

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 0.17!

We have now have the official page for the 0.17 Tournament online! Bookmark that URL, since it will eventually have a nice leader-board with links to all tournament results for players, clans, and banners, as well as a table of ongoing tournament games. The page currently shows the 0.17 tournament rules, included the rule changes from the 0.16 tournament.

This biggest change is that Beogh’s Saint banner has been reworked and is now called Heretic. This banner rewards players for abandoning and mollifying one, three, or nine gods, excluding Beogh, Ely, Ru, TSO, and Zin. There’s no longer a clan-based banner, but clans are still tracked with clan points awarded in all the various ways. Gone are the days when Saint I was either a trivial banner or perhaps the most difficult one if you were in a high scoring clan! Hopefully enduring epic god wrath will also make for some memorable games. Lugonu’s Heretic banner has been renamed to Spiteful, which has the same rules but no longer rewards tournament points for the tier 3 banner.

The other changes:

• Nemelex’ Choice bonus points are now awarded to the first eight winning players instead of the first seven.
• Lord of Darkness III allows you to enter Temple. No more altar grinding required!
• Angel of Justice III requires that you kill the Serpent of Hell at least once.
• No more clan points from winning with the highest AC+EV. Cigotuvi’s Embrace certainly spelled the end of that one…

Remember, the tournament will take place from 20:00 UTC Friday 6th November to 20:00 UTC Sunday 22nd November. If you’re participating in a clan, don’t forget to edit your RC file per the instructions. Clan memberships can be changed during the tournament (with changes detected automatically) until 19:00 UTC Saturday 14 November, after which time clans are effectively frozen.

Note that for testing purposes, the tournament page is currently tracking all games played in November. Don’t worry about any tournament results you see listed now, since the database and pages will be reset before the start of the actual tournament. Finally, the tournament page may get a visual overhaul thanks to work being done by chequers, the CPO admin who also helped overhaul the crawl.develz.org homepage. If we get these changes incorporated in time for this tournament, you’ll see them automatically when you visit the tournament page.

Best of luck to all participants!

Hello fearless yet terribly naive dungeon adventurers! Last time I said we’d update more frequently than once every two months, yet here we are again nearly two months later. It’s because of all the torpor snails, they’re everywhere! In addition to the usual round of updates, we want to announce the date of the upcoming 0.17 release and tournament.

Break out your best clan name puns, because the 0.17 Tournament will take place from 20:00 UTC Friday 6th November to 20:00 UTC Sunday 22nd November. We’ll make a follow-up post in a few days with the tournament home page when we have that ready for you. The release itself will happen on or before the start of tournament. If 0.17 is available on your server, please play that version to help us track down bugs before the release!

• Gods
• Gozag’s Call Merchant now places all shops at the player’s location. Customer service is our motto!
• Monsters
• Orange crystal statues now have Shadow Creatures and both they and obsidian statues cast their spells much faster. Don’t be surprised to find a lot of brainless MiFi stumbling around the next time you visit the dungeon.
• Derived undead now have damage that’s 80% of their monster’s base damage instead of losing a fixed amount.
• Player
• The demonic guardian from the demonspawn mutation now has Fedhas-style protection from ranged attacks. Could this spell the end of complaints about demonic guardian? Tune in next time to find out!
• The player blink mutation now only has one level and increases its success rate more rapidly as you gain levels.
• Some species now have lower Throwing skill aptitudes (you’re welcome):
• Centaur, Halfling, and Kobold go from +3 to +1.
• Ogre, Spriggan, Tengu, High Elf, and Deep Elf go from +1 to 0
• Hill Orc and Gargoyle go from 0 to -1.
• Dungeon
• New Lair branch end vaults:
• A Shoals winter wonderland featuring frosty the kraken simulacrum.
• A Shoals garden with plants that the satyrs lovingly tend to when they’re not shooting you to death.
• A scaly new Snake ending, brought to you by the letter V, for Vashnia.
• A Spider ending in one of three delicious spider flavors, brought to you by the letter A, for Arachne.
• A Swamp ending with three possible rune locations for hydra to devour delicious players. Brought to you by the letter L, for Lerny.
• Four new baileys:
• A flooded polearm bailey that throws you right into the middle of things.
• A gnoll polearm bailey with a chance to meet the incredibly glamorous and popular crystal plate armour gnoll sergeant.
• An axe bailey castle that Rodney himself would recognize. Don’t worry, mortals, you don’t need the passtune to enter.
• An axe bailey with an orc warlord boss you’ll only see if you survive the mobs outside its chamber…
• Giant-themed zig levels now have juggernauts, and Earth-themed zig levels now have entropy weavers, octopode crushers, juggernauts, and caustic shrikes! Remember, you can always do Just One More Zig Level!
• Spells
• Controlled Blink is now level 8. They say that with -cTele gone controlled blinks are even stronger these days…
• Gell’s Gravitas has been reworked to allow targeting empty squares and to have stronger power initially, scaling more slowly to max power. Hopefully these changes make the spell more usable.
• Items
• New unrand artefacts:
• The Robe of Vines: a +5 robe with massive regeneration but which renders the wearer unable to heal by external means.
• Kryia’s mail coat +7 scale mail which amplifies the effect of healing items (and grants rC+ to boot).
• Hammers are gone. Head over to CYC to reminisce about the good times we used to have with hammers…also go there if you just want to get maced.
• Interface
• Fix a long-standing bug related to player messages that caused lag in WebTiles games over time. Hopefully refreshing WebTiles due to lag will be a thing of the past!
• The skill menu now shows the relative XP cost of gaining skill levels.
• A fancy new rune menu that shows the runes you have and all the ones you’ll never ever be good enough to get.
• An ability_slot rc option that lets you map abilities to specific letters.

Check out the home page for follow-up posts about the tournament pages and release. After all, I know many secrets…

We’ve issued a new stable version of DCSS that contains an important fix for a bug affecting version 0.16.0 where all melee damage done by the player is approximately doubled. This bug only affects player melee, not ranged or spells, and doesn’t affect monster damage at all. It has a dramatic effect on game balance, so it’s strongly recommended that all 0.16.0 users upgrade. All operating systems have 0.16.1 binaries available on the download page above.

When this bug was discovered, the development team decided (after some deliberation) that it’d be better to fix it immediately, since otherwise many would choose to stop playing online until it was fixed. Nearly all online games played during the 0.16 tournament were affected up until the fix, namely any game played from version 0.16.0 to version 0.16.0-17-g811c1d7. The fix in version 0.16.0-18-g484a79e was made on Sun, 22 Mar 14:24 UTC, however server updates took some time, and not every server was able to be updated at the same time.

For any completed game, the morgue file shows the exact crawl version played at the top of the file (these morgues are linked to on the player tournament pages). Note that this is only the version when the game ended, and some games were played in-part with the affected versions but transferred to a fixed later version. This bug likewise affected online trunk games played from versions 0.17-a0-22-ge0bdd66 to 0.17-a0-123-gf2c12c4. There’s no plan to change anything relative to the tournament (including scoring) now that the bug is fixed.

In addition to this bugfix, here are the other changes:

• Fix a bug in sprint where controlled blink was blocked as if from the stasis effect.
• Artefacts with the Contam property are no longer marked as chaotic and hence hated by Zin, since Zin wouldn’t give penance for using e.g. weapons with this property anyhow. There’s now a warning under Zin when Contam items are removed, since this does incur penance.
• Monsters no longer avoid walking on shadow traps.
• Fix the build for the Android port of DCSS.
• For the debian version, build against less recent dependencies to support a wider range of OS.
• Other minor bugfixes.

NOTE: the developer who introduced this bug has gone AWOL, and we’re trying to track him down. If you see this person, please report him to your nearest centuryplayer. Do not approach him, as he is bugged and extremely winscumming.