• The special diets of centaurs (fast metabolism 1, herbivorous 1) and halflings (slow metabolism 1) have been removed.
• Vampires always get the full effect of all potions, can always mutate, and always get the full effect of all mutations.
• Corrosion affects all of your equipment, but only temporarily.
• Purple (very) ugly things deal extra damage in lieu of a sickness attack.
• Sustain abilities effects no longer stack.
• Scrolls of brand weapon can roll any brand on an unbranded weapon.
• Ambrosia and royal jellies have been removed; honeycombs have been renamed to royal jellies.
• The Mercenary card generates base demonspawn instead of spriggan riders.
• Sif Muna wrath can no longer cause amnesia.
• Gods that give missile gifts can do so sooner, i.e. there is no skill-related breakpoint associated with it.

Happy crawling!

• The Lava Orc species has been removed.
• Player clinging (seen only in Spider Form and with the boots of the Spider) is no more.
• Kobolds, hill orcs, and ogres are no longer saprovorous.
• Ogres no longer have a fast metabolism.
• Silver statues and orange crystal statues are immune to disintegration, but have less health and AC and have their abilities converted to spells such that they spam less; this implies OCS confusion can be resisted.
• Bog bodies no longer randomly rot.
• Removed monsters: shedu, plague shamblers.
• New unrand: the +8 orange crystal plate armour {Archmagi, Int+3 Clar SustAb}
• Potions of blood cure a point of ghoul rotting.
• Removed unrands: the boots of the Spider.
• Decks of wonders now contain Dowsing, Battlelust, Helm, and Shadow instead of Experience, Helix, Sage, and Trowel.
• Decks of dungeon are no more.
• The Potion card has a new list of effects: power 0 is decay/curing/agility/ might/brilliance; 1 has a chance of resistance/haste; 2 has a chance of magic/heal wounds.
• Removed cards: Experience, Sage, Water, Vitrification, Trowel, Minefield, and Shuffle.
• Zin’s Recite no longer prompts for a book, instead affecting all monsters in sight with the strongest effects that would impact them.

Happy crawling!

• The gods branch has landed, bringing two new gods: Gozag Ym Sagoz the Greedy and Qazlal Stormbringer. Both are temple gods with an altar either in Temple or on D:2-9.
  • Gozag
    • Charges a service fee for joining, dependent on the amount of gold that has been generated in the game.
    • Does not have piety.
    • Defeated enemies turn to gold; these gold piles distract nearby creatures, causing them to sometimes not act.
    • Potion Petition: purchase one set of potion effects.
    • Call Merchant: fund a merchant to set up shop somewhere near to areas of the dungeon you have explored.
    • Bribe Branch: send money to the inhabitants of a branch to turn them + temporarily neutral or incite them to join you.
    • Duplication: one non-artefact item can be duplicated at an altar.
  • Qazlal
    • Piety on kills.
    • All followers are immune from their own clouds.
    • 1*: Storm Shield: you passively generate elemental clouds around you and gain bonus SH, and gain RMsl at 3*; you also generate a lot of noise.
    • 2*: Upheaval: blast a small nearby area with elemental forces.
    • 3*: Elemental Force: turn nearby clouds into elementals.
    • 4*: Elemental Adaptation: taking elemental or physical damage sometimes temporarily grants you resistance against that element.
    • 5*: Disaster Area: blast the entire area around you with elemental forces.
    • 6*: at an altar, gain a permanent elemental resistance of your choice for as long as you worship Qazlal.
• The Abyss no longer sometimes blocks blinking.
• Wanderers have tweaked starting kits with generally better items.
• Teleportitis cannot be controlled.
• Manticores have an unlimited number of spike volleys.
• Base draconians can become nonbase draconians with experience.
• Undead and nonliving enemies regenerate as fast as other enemies.
• Ghouls and necrophages can no longer equip weapons or armour.
• Monster melee attacks can no longer destroy items.
• Death Channel lasts twice as long.
• The blowgun of the Assassin returns; it has a chance to affect the target more than normal blowguns.
• Gloves of archery no longer penalise melee.
• (Plain) bows have been renamed to shortbows.
• Identify scrolls now always identify a single item.
• Monsters with special attack flavours have this noted in their descriptions.
• Summon Elemental has been removed.
• Spriggan enchanters (the monster) and phoenixes have been removed.

Happy crawling!

• The ranged_combat branch has landed – it is a rewrite of the ranged combat system to be based on many of the same formulas as melee attacks, so the effect of AC/EV on ranged attacks is more predictable, weapon delay is more predictable, and even Throwing should be a viable option compared to the other ranged weapons.
• Jewellery automatically identifies on equipping it.
• Cleaving hits the full eight squares around a player.
• Rebranding a distortion weapon no longer causes a distortion effect.
• Scrolls of brand weapon can no longer affix brands; they keep their effect of rerolling a weapon brand.
• Blessed weapons can be rebranded.
• Amulets of inaccuracy are always cursed.
• New rings of stealth and loudness, which positively/negatively adjust a player’s stealth; these take the place of rings of sustenance and hunger.
• Followers of good gods no longer get a chance to turn holy enemies neutral.
• The Book of War Chants is no more.
• Removed spells: Fire Brand, Freezing Aura, Lethal Infusion, Poison Weapon.
• Removed enemies: silver stars, flaming corpses, grizzly bears.

A brief reminder that the gods experimental branch is still available for testing on cszo and cbro; if you want to help get our newest potential additions to the pantheon into the game, be sure to help us try them out!

Happy crawling!

• A large number of enemy glyphs (for console players) have been changed; see Mantis #8242 for more details.
• Crypt has been reduced to three levels (was five); the entrance to Tomb is always on Crypt:3.
• Some areas of the Tomb layout can now vary.
• Formicids can no longer throw large rocks.
• Tengu gain their permanent flight ability at XL14 (was 15).
• Changes/improvements to forms: all non-undead forms can eat and drink normally; all forms can butcher; wisp form can read scrolls and cannot blink innately.
• Enemies are more intelligent about using some attack spells such as Symbol of Torment and Chain Lightning when the player is not in LOS.
• Manticores can now move as fast as the player.
• Komodo dragons bite harder but can no longer sicken the player.
• Deep dwarf death knights are now (human) death knights.
• Removed enemies: vapours, thorn lotuses, giant goldfish, silver stars.
• Dazzling Spray replaces Invisibility in the book of Maledictions (the Enchanter starting spellbook); Invisibility in turn replaces Apportation in the book of Burglary. (Note that each of these spells is still available in at least one other spellbook.)
• When the player casts Ozocubu’s Refrigeration, they are now prevented from using potions for several turns instead of having their potions destroyed.
• Damage from the electrocution brand has been reduced slightly.
• There are status lights for might, agility, and brilliance.
• Followers of good gods no longer get a chance to pacify holy enemies.
• The low-level weapon branding skills and the book of War Chants have been removed.
• Scrolls of brand weapon can no longer be used to affix brands, and do not trigger a distortion effect on rebranding a distortion weapon.

In addition, crawl.beRotato.org has some experimental branches available for testing: “ranged_combat”, containing a mostly-complete rewrite of the system of ranged combat (bows, crossbows, etc.), and “gods”, featuring two new deities – Gozag Ym Sagoz the Greedy and Qazlal Stormbringer. These branches should also be available on crawl.s-z.org shortly.

Happy crawling!

• MR-granting items now grant fixed increments of magic resistance (see the % screen – there are numbers involved behind the scenes but those exact values aren’t important).
• Orbs of destruction don’t explode if they collide with another orb of destruction before travelling more than a short distance (so feel free to abuse those high powered decks of destruction).
• The colours of the species/background menu selector have been changed again.
• The amount of poisoning dealt by poisonous monster attacks has been adjusted slightly (less for early game enemies, more for late game enemies).
• Josephine has a new spell set (and rN+++).
• Formicid self-shafting is no longer noisy.
• All tiered demon enemies can now open doors.

Look forward to news about the release of 0.14 soon, and happy crawling!

• Formicids can no longer wield giant (spiked) clubs and have slightly adjusted aptitudes.
• Throwing nets no longer degrade; instead they mulch similar to other projectiles.
• Fighters start with a potion of might.
• Swinging a chaos weapon no longer polymorphs or shafts the attacker.
• The shopping interface has been simplified.
• Spells can be memorised even at 100% failure rate.
• Picking up runes in Pandemonium increases the chances of exits being generated.

Here’s to a 0.14 release in the near future – and happy crawling!

• All panlords now see invisible.
• Player merfolk can now be mesmerised by mermaids and sirens.
• Plain formicids no longer generate as enemies.
• Formicid venom mages lose Stone Arrow and gain Localized Ignite Poison.
• Artificers and Wanderers do not start with knowledge of scrolls/potions they don’t actually possess.
• Chaos champions lose Rearrange the Pieces and gain Random Bolt (per the rod of destruction).
• Spriggan enemies in general now merely have fast movement speed instead of fast speed in general, more damage and less EV.
• The movement behaviour of sirens has been adjusted to make them less likely to be completely out of reach of the player.
• Spriggan air mages have Haste (replacing Shock).
• Spriggan druids’ Druid’s Call now calls 2-3 creatures out of LOS nearby and does not invisibly might creatures; instead, nearby creatures are healed and frenzied on their death. Stone Arrow also replaces Sunray in their spell set.
• Shock serpents no longer have a lightning torrent attack.
• Boggarts are more durable.
• Rakshasas gain a monster spell “Phantom Mirror”, which summons a clone of a nearby allied monster with half the hit points with a 50% chance of swapping the clone for the original; this replaces their previous self-cloning abilities. Rakshasas can now also cast Iskenderun’s Mystic Blast and will summon two clones of themselves at 50% HP as a one-time effect.
• Giant orange brains now have Mass Confusion instead of Confuse.
• The main Dungeon is now 15 levels, and the Depths five; the entrance to Vaults is now on D:13-14.
• The duration of Sentinel’s Mark has been reduced by 25%.
• The Enchantress now appears as a normal unique in Depths.

Look forward to more news about the 0.14 release soon, and happy crawling!

• The ring of Shadows now has a small umbra in lieu of EV+4 and AC-4.
• Racial armour has been removed (thus there is no racial equipment left).
• Nemelex’s deck gifts are now independent of sacrifice type.
• New summoning spells:
  • Summon Mana Viper (L5 Summoning/Hexes); it appears in the Book of Beasts.
  • Monstrous Menagerie (L6 Summoning), which summons a manticore, some harpies, a lindwurm, or a sphinx (at high spellpower); it appears in the book of Beasts and the book of Summonings (replacing Summon Ugly Thing).
  • Forceful Dismissal (L6 Summoning), which ends all player summons and damages enemies next to them; it appears in the Grand Grimoire.
  • Aura of Abjuration (L6 Summoning), a less powerful but per-turn mass abjuration effect; it replaces Mass Abjuration in the Grand Grimoire.
  • Spellforged Servitor (L7 Conjuration/Summoning), which summons a servitor with a subset of the player’s most destructive conjurations; it replaces Fireball in the book of Wizardry.
  • Dragon’s Call (L9 Summoning), which for its duration of effect summons dragons near targets at the end of LOS (at the full spell cost per summon); replaces Summon Dragon in the Book of the Dragon.
• Removed spells: Summon Ugly Thing, Demonic Horde, Mass Abjuration, Summon Dragon.
• Poison damage is now deterministic.
• Fighters and Gladiators now start with better weapons.

Most of these changes are now live on the servers, so happy crawling!

• Djinn have poofed.
• Agate snails, giant centipedes, ancient bears, and rotting devils have been removed
• The timeout of conjured ball lightnings has been reduced considerably.
• Clouds once again can be cast to hit squares out of the player’s LOS; instead, player-created clouds now timeout considerably faster when out of LOS.
• Glaciate, a level 9 Conjuration/Ice spell replacing Ice Storm which blasts targets in a cone-shaped area of effect for large damage, creates freezing clouds, encases targets in ice (slowing them for three turns), and occasionally freezes targets killed by it into a block of ice.
• New unrands:
  • The +7,+7 lajatang of Order {silver, rMut}.
  • The +7,+7 great mace “Firestarter” {flame, rF++}; it fills its victims with an inner flame.
• Autosacrifice now works with Fedhas.
• Sparkling and blood fountains can no longer be quaffed from.
• Eyeballs cannot use their abilities through translucent walls.
• Substantial edits to wizard labs.
• Substantial revisions to rods:
  • The rod of frigid destruction has been transformed into the rod of clouds – evokable to produce a cone of clouds in front of the player, with duration and type varying with evocation power.
  • The rod of demonology has been transformed into the rod of shadows – evoke to get shadow creatures, the toughness of whom depends on our evocation power.
  • Rods of venom are no more.
• The arena_delay option, which controls animation speed of some effects (and the speed of action in arena itself), is now available outside of arena as view_delay.
• A substantial overhaul of item values (courtesy of minmay).
• Wand shops have been merged into gadget shops, which now also sell rods.
• Potions of blood and curse scrolls no longer randomly generate.
• Enchant weapon scrolls now ask for a target (like brand weapon).
• The Horn of Geryon now summons 1-4 hell beasts (hostility dependent on evocations skill), and recharges with experience as with the elemental evokers.
• Formicids no longer have innate rPois-, and now gain levels more slowly but gain more HP and MP per level.
• The monster lists for the Dungeon, Vaults, and Depths have been adjusted.
• All scrolls now identify immediately on reading them.
• Curse scrolls now always prompt for a target (as the player is unlikely to see them outside worshipping Ashenzari).
• Zin warns the player of shapeshifters.
• Monster (molten) gargoyles now generate with mace-type weapons and can cast conjurations.

Have fun with these, and happy crawling!

• New summon spells:
  • Summon Lightning Spire (L4 Summoning/Air), which places a lightning spire up to two squares away from the player; it replaces Summon Scorpions in the book of Callings.
  • Summon Guardian Golem (L4 Summoning/Charms), which creates a golem that protects the player with Injury Bond and occasionally explodes on death; appears in the book of Callings.
  • Summon Forest (L5 Summoning/Translocations), which summons a dryad and temporarily converts terrain near the player to forest; it is in the Book of the Warp.
• The speed brand now consistently grants 2/3 weapon delay and no damage reduction (previously it was 1/2 delay and 10% damage reduction for melee weapons).
• Fulminant Prism is now level 4 (was 5); Iskenderun’s Battlesphere is now level 5 (was 4).
• Formicids are no longer rPois- and have the same HP and XP aptitudes as humans.
• Grey rats, spiny worms, giant amoebae and deep dwarf berserkers (the monster) are no more.
• Spellbooks of types you have seen before are automatically identified (like staves).
• Racial weapons no longer generate.
• The rod of destruction now fires random bolts instead of having a pre-set spell list.

Enjoy the tweaks, and happy crawling!

• God wrath has been changed to trigger only as experience is gained; it occurs more frequently, but tends to occur only during / after significant battles.
• Several deities – Okawaru, Trog, Vehumet, Makhleb, Yredelemnul, and Kikubaaqudgha – have had their wrath tinkered with, mainly to scale better with the player’s XL.
• The shadow mimic behaviour of Dithmenos (formerly Dithmengos) followers has changed – spells aren’t directly mimicked (except for enchantments), instead yielding a shadow shard or shadow bolt depending on the original spell, and damage output from physical attacks has been reworked.
• All skills usable by divine abilities are available to train immediately on worshipping that god, rather than needing to wait for the abilities to become available. For most gods this is Invocations where applicable; for Nemelex this is Evocations; for Kikubaaqudgha this is Necromancy. TSO followers can also train shields at any time (cf. Divine Shield).
• New unrand artefacts: the +3,+5 arc blade {discharge, rElec}, a cutlass which causes a static discharge effect on one third of melee attacks; and the +3,+6 demon whip “Spellbinder” {antimagic, MR+}, which inflicts miscast effects on spellcasters related to the spells they can cast.
• An experimental new Swamp level layout, appearing on 2/7 of all non-ending Swamp levels.
• Summoned allies will attack enemies without needing to be being prompted to do so.
• Another redesign of the Vaults:5 layout – the outer ring has returned, and all of the corners of the quadrants are now open to the ring.
• Item destruction from sticky flame has been reduced.
• Felids can now use wands.
• The list of recommended combinations has been revised heavily; as part of the changes, species and background recommendations are now independent of each other – that is, a species may recommend a background where that background does not necessarily recommend that species, and vice-versa.
• Large rocks are no longer inherently penetrating (this was itself a trunk experiment).
• Dith’s Shadow Form now causes skill drain on taking damage, and is usable by all races (i.e. undead can use it).
• Crystal golems have been replaced with crystal guardians – less HP, but the ability to fire a crystal bolt which bounces off of all features and deals either fire or cold damage on a per-bolt basis.
• Lemures and jellyfish are no more.
• Many other smaller changes.

Happy crawling!

• Repel Missiles and Deflect Missiles now time out on a per-deflection basis, rather than being a duration.
• Portal Projectile is now a duration instead of a one-shot effect; for the duration it portals projectiles for 1 MP per projectile.
• The outer ring on the final level of Vaults is no more.

Not all of these changes are available online / in the current builds yet, but within a day or so they will be there.

Although it’s not in trunk (yet), I’ll take a moment to point out that crawl.s-z.org has a new experimental branch for the purpose of testing several implementations of the spell Glaciate, a proposed replacement for Ice Storm. Read the discussion here.

Happy crawling!

Without further ado, here are some things you may not have seen yet, relative to the last time an update was posted here (which was a while ago, so some things here may not exactly be news):

• The lower half of the Dungeon from D:16 onwards is a new dungeon branch, the Depths – six levels long and containing the entrance to the Realm of Zot.
• The Depths (and D:15-) do not require a rune to enter; instead, Vaults requires a rune to enter.
• Two new races to play with: Formicids, an ant-like people with innate stasis and the ability to dig through walls and shafts in the floor, and Vine Stalkers, a plant-like parasite on a humanoid host who regenerates quickly, cannot heal through wands or potions, and possess an innate spirit shield effect and an anti-magic bite.
• A new deity: Dithmengos the Shadowed, granting a number of shadow-themed abilities.
• Ziggurats no longer charge gold for entry, but require three runes to enter.
• New uniques: Asterion, a minotaur of Makhleb; Natasha, the ex-familiar of a powerful wizard with some magic of her own; and Vashnia, the leader of an elite squad of naga sharpshooters.
• Many, many new regular enemies, especially in the Lair branches and Pandemonium.

The relatively infrequently-updated changelog contains more details on many of these, and can always be found by way of Gitorious at http://gitorious.org/crawl/crawl/blobs/master/crawl-ref/docs/changelog.txt.

Not everything that’s tested in trunk will end up in a stable release, so be sure to enjoy things while they last! You can play trunk online, or download a local build of trunk from here.

Happy Crawling!

    Commit: #f2529f3

    Rune lock.

    You need a rune to go to D:15. Downstairs of D:14 could be recoloured
    or replaced by a portal (maybe more consistent with D:27 zot portal).

This is a mandatory Vow of Courage I banner. The idea is quite old and was pushed after the 0.13 tournament so as to have as much time for testing as possible. You can read discussions about it on a old dev wiki page, or in several forum threads: here (locked), here (locked), here and here.

If the rune lock is considered to be good enough to stay for the next release, there will definitely be follow-up changes, cosmetic ones (locked staircase appearance, dungeon appearance before and after the lock) and balancing ones (unique generation springs to mind).

List of significant changes for the Unified Combat Control branch:

1. Capitalization of words is performed automatic (done by Kilobyte, altered by SamB)
• Instead of passing an explicit capitalization (NOCAP or CAP) to the mprf system, mprf determines automatically whether capitalization is necessary.
2. Fight rewrite
• Restructuring of combat into phases
• Attempted
• Hit
• Damaged
• Defender Killed
• Dodged
• Blocked
• End
3. Merging of player / monster codepaths
• This comprises the bulk of the rewrite and will be subject for continued (numerous) changes in the future. Some codepaths are not entirely unified because doing so would require symmetry between players and monsters in regards to how a particular effect is handled (weapon brands, spells, etc. etc.)

List of things for players to be aware or mindful of for bug-reporting purposes

1. Out-of-order combat messages (especially as they relate to weapon brands)
2. Combat messages which leak otherwise unknown information
3. Unusual sanctuary behavior
4. Unusual messages or behavior on the last turn of combat (when the monster is killed)
5. Brands, spell effects, or mutations which consistently do not result in a noticeable effect
6. Weapon effects or behavior which do not appropriately result in god-affects
• Examples include using speed weapons with Chei, attacking dishonorably while worshiping TSO
7. Capitalization errors in combat text
8. Missing combat effects (from uniques or from specific player-races)
• Examples include vampire-specific effects for players, or Maurice’s “thieving” attacks

Report bugs here! Thank you in advance!

We are very sorry and will add a security check to the scripts – promised!

For quite a while it was realised that MD, HO and Mi are too close to each other than is good for well-differentiated variety. In other words, developers agreed that cutting a species of the three would be an improvement. This was not urgent; that’s why it isn’t announced on the 0.10 development plan or anywhere else. However, it is also not a big change, so when we got the details ready in a session or two, we commenced with the wipeout.

First, theme. Hill Orcs are sacrosanct by Beogh’s protection. Even if you don’t like the orc god, there is no way we would get rid of HO as a player species. Choosing between MD and Mi, the lot hit the former. The reasons are less forcing than with HO, but are reasons nonetheless: Mi has a monster equivalent whereas MD has not (the monster dwarves are deep dwarves, akin to deep elves being the monster elves). Mi has an ancient mythos behind it (Minos, Crete, the labyrinth) as well as a portal vault in the game. MD on the other hand is the archetypical Tolkien-style dwarf, which in my book is a severe demerit.

Second, aptitudes. Removing a species does not happen in empty space. It might have impact on nearby species, and it certainly did so here. A table of the old and new aptitudes for Mi, HO and old MD is at the end of this text. The summary is this: new Minotaurs approached MD in certain areas (e.g. Armour is 2, also Stabbing, Traps & Doors, Evocations). Hill Orcs got additional magical competence.

Third, to dispel a myth. We didn’t use winning rates, or number of games played in order to make a decision.

Fourth, history. Over the course of DCSS, the following species had to resign: HD, GE, El, Gn, OM (Hill Dwarf, Grey Elf, Elf, Gnome, Ogre Mage). Of these, OM merged with Og into a more interesting species; the others left for the same reason MD goes now: lack of differentiation. On the other hand, some species were added over the years: Vp, DD, Fe (Vampire, Deep Dwarf, Felid). 0.10 will probably feature Octopodes. None of these are defined by aptitudes alone (but note that new Ogre is an exception!), which makes for additional complexity but also diversity. Note that species tweaking goes beyond adding and removing: Draconians and Demonspawns were changed (and will probably see further changes), and with some luck and effort, 0.10 will see more interesting Demigods.

An empty entry means no change from the old version of the species.

        Arm Ddg Sth Stb Shd T&D   Inv Evo        HP  MP   Exp
--------------------------------------------------------------
Mi old   +1  +1  -2   0  +1  -1    -1  -3        +1  -2   140
Mi new   +2          -1  +2   0        -1                 130
MD       +3  -1  -3  -2  +2  +1     0  +1        +1  -1   130
HO old   +1  -2  -2  +2  +1   0     0   0        +1  -1   100
HO new                             +2                 0      

        Fgt SBl LBl M&F Axs Pla Stv  UC   Thr Slg Bws Crb
----------------------------------------------------------
Mi old   +2  +2  +2  +2  +2  +2  +2  +1    +1  +1  +1  +1
Mi new       +1                             0
MD       +2  +1   0  +2  +2  -1  -1   0    -1  -1  -2  +1
HO old   +2   0  +1  +1  +2  +1  -1  +1     0  -1  -1  -1
HO new                                                   

        Spc Coj Hex Cha Sum Nec Trl Trm   Fir Ice Air Ear Poi
--------------------------------------------------------------
Mi old   -3  -3  -3  -3  -3  -3  -3  -3    -3  -3  -3  -3  -3
Mi new           -4  -4              -2                -2
HO old   -3   0   0  -1   0   0  -2  -3     0   0  -2   0  -1
HO new   -2                                +1  -1                  +3 Int, -1 Str
MD       -3  -1  -2  -2  -2  -3  -2  -1    +2  -2  -2  +2  -2

To train a weapon skill, you need to carry a weapon of the appropriate type, but you don’t have to wield it. For ranged weapons, carrying a launcher is enough, no need to have missiles.
For armour, you need to wear any armour with an evasion penalty (at least leather). For shields you need to be wearing one. If you can cast condensation shield or have the divine shield ability, that works too.
Spell schools can be trained as soon as you have a spell of the school memorised (whatever the success chance). You can train evocations if you carry any evocable item (no need to wear jewellery or wield rods). For Invocations you can train it if you have a divine ability that uses it.
Fighting, UC, throwing, dodging, stealth, stabbing, T&D and spellcasting can always be trained, there’s no restrictions on them.

Another recent change was made regarding skill levels. You now gain benefit from partial skill levels. This is why it is now displayed with a decimal in the skill screen. For example, casting a dual school spell with both skills at 2.5 is the same as having one skill at 2.0 and the other at 3.0, while it used to be the same as having both at 2.0. You gain a spell slot when spellcasting reaches 2.5, and another when it reaches 3.0.

For those not familiar with the 0.9 skill system, let me recap the changes that were made. XP pool has been removed. When you gain XP, it is immediately spread across the activated skills. The amount of XP attributed to each skill depends on the training percentage. In manual mode, your actions are ignored and XP is spread evenly across all activated skills. In automatic mode, the training percentages depend on which skills you have used recently.
You can also set a skill to focus (marked with *). Doing so will train the skill twice as fast (relative to others of course). In auto mode, if the skill has a very low training percentage, setting it to focus will raise it to around 20% instead of doubling.

Two options have been added:
default_manual_training: if you like to play in manual mode, set this to true and the skill training mode will default to manual instead of auto.
skill_focus: if you don’t want to set skills to focus, set this option to false. This will revert the behaviour to the simple disable/enable toggle, instead of the 3 states disable/enable/focus. If you want to change it in-game, set this option to toggle and you’ll be able to change it from within the skill screen.

As usual, please report any bug you run into on mantis. If you want to comment on the change, there’s a thread at the tavern.
Happy crawling!

Galehar

Implementable voting

The Downloads page lists 0.9 builds of the Console and Tiles version now, and also we will be able to provide more regularly updated builds of the current Development Builds.

Thank you very much to GreatZebu, who volunteered to provide OSX builds for the foreseeable future!

• Mini-Map is in!
• Permanent login via cookies!
• Browser sizes no longer matter!
• Browser versions don’t matter either anymore!
• Sprint and Tutorial available now, too!

The Mini-Map is shown and working now, alas it cannot be used yet to initiate a travel. During login you have the choice to stay logged in via cookies. Also, spectators no longer need to resize their browser when watching someone. The game always adjusts to the browser size of the player and spectator independently. Additionally, the websocket protocol was updated to support Firefox 4, 5 and 6.

And last but not least, the game-mode Sprint and the Tutorial are now playable via WebTiles, too!

I was told there are more features in the making – so stay tuned! Also, webtiles code has been merged into the official master branch.

Head over to its website and give it a try!

We call it WebTiles for now and it serves version 0.8 of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. Right in time for the unofficial tournament!

Edlothiol announced his great idea with working code on the mailing-list a few weeks back, and even though it’s still beta-quality in the aspects of features (mini-map missing, inventory-tab, etc), it’s fully playable and there have even been the first 4 wins by players testing it!

There is a slight draw-back: It needs a fairly modern browser which supports a technology called WebSockets:

• Chrome 6 or higher
• Safari 5 or higher
• Opera 11 or higher (enable WebSockets in opera:config#Enable WebSockets)
• Firefox 4 or higher (disable network.websocket.override-security-block in about:config)

WebTiles are actively being developed! If you’d like to participate, head over to edlothiol’s git-repository and have a look. If you’d like to play, head over to the WebTiles now and either use your login from CDO or create a new login.

Additionally, Wensley practiced his awesome AJAX skills and practically over night created an Online Player Status website. It gives a detailed list about who is playing online – in both, the Console/DGL version and the WebTiles version, on CAO and CDO.

Both, WebTiles and the Online Player Status page, are now linked from the front-page of our website for your convenience.

I’d also like to pay thankful credit to the Tornado Web Server, the open-source python library used to create and manage the websocket for WebTiles, and especially Ben Darnell, who helped edlothiol and me very quickly when we ran into trouble.

Note: CAO games are still missing from the status page, but should show up sometime during the weekend.

Add one of the lines from below to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

Stable release:        deb http://crawl.develz.org/debian crawl 0.8
Development version:   deb http://crawl.develz.org/debian crawl trunk

Additionally you should download and install our signing key to prevent warnings and to verify the packages:

wget http://crawl.develz.org/debian/pubkey -O - | apt-key add -

The available packages to apt-get are named: crawl, crawl-tiles

We’re working on getting the packages of the development version updated as regularly as the Windows binaries that we’ve been offering for a while already.

The recent changes include the incorporation of the unicode branch, which fixes a number of issues with non-ASCII path names etc., bringing Ashenzari up to speed, and the aforementioned gazillions of bug fixes. In a concerted effort of several developers, we’ve managed to close 100+ bug reports on our bug tracker over the last couple of weeks, which is quite a feat, let me tell you. Of course, we wouldn’t have been able to do that if they hadn’t been reported in the first place. So, here’s a large thank you to our diligent reporters! :)

What follows is the list of changes in the 0.8 pre-release branch currently available on CDO (a206725), meaning they’ll be included in the stable release.

Player

Bug fixes

• Fix #3676: crashes when butcher delay tries to switch back to empty hands.
• Fix #3748: crash when viewing aptitude with CK or Wa selected.
• Fix a crash when an aptitude was improved between saves.
• Fix #3156, #3709: cloud safety checks getting randomized AC reductions.
• Fix #3598: if necessary, update perma-mutation if you gain a mutation.
• Fix #2395: Disallow ending forms/levitation if it would cause drowning.
• Fix antitraining when opposite skill is nil.
• Stop quick actions from letting you search faster.
• Don’t avoid glow by cancelling semicontrolled blinks with enter instead of escape.
• Fix trying to climb when overloaded taking a turn.
• Fix #3801: Don’t consume a turn when trying to go downstairs while levitating.
• Fix #3660: canceling DD recharging ability still costing max MP.
• Fix #3781: wall clinging not triggering traps.
• No stealth bonus from boots if you’re flying or in water.
• Fix clinging status not updated properly when switching out of spider form.
• Fix #3444: off-by-one error in autopickup_no_burden checks.
• Fix #3334: boot of levitation message when melding and not levitating.
• Message fix for levitation while clinging.

Other changes for player characters

• Disable Arcane Marksmen.
• All sources of berserk are blocked at “Very Hungry”. Berserk automatically stops when you hit “Starving”.
• Remove experience pool limit; abbreviate the XP pool above 100K.
• Replace scroll reading penalty while brainless with 80% failure chance.
• A wielded ranged weapon will only “clumsily bash” monsters, no matter its enchantment.
• Prompt the player before moving to a deadly cell with an expiring status.
• Remove the satiation requirements from evokable invis.
• Disable ghost creation/loading in wizard non-debug mode.
• Better warning messages for form and levitation expiration.
• Special Airstrike message if struck while flying.
• Don’t auto-attack toadstools when wielding the Wrath of Trog.
• Reduce the spam when butchering with artefacts.
• Consistently abort teleportation attempts when wearing stasis or -TELE.
• Nerf Felid aptitudes: Fighting/UC: 0 -> -2, Ice/Earth: -1 -> -2, improve Cj: -2 -> -1.
• Decrease Felid’s factor for getting hp from Fighting from 1/5 -> 1/8.
• Reduce Felid exp modifier from 15 to 16.
• Don’t let Felids (auto)quiver anything, hide the Qv line.
• Obey no_tele_into when bringing you a new fresh kitty.
• Give Ogres an extra +1 hp per level, and +3 apts in Fighting and M&F.
• Let Kenku use beak+talons for butchering, like birds they are.
• Mention dietary and drinkary habits of mummies on the ‘A’ screen.
• Meld all weapons unless you’re in a form that allows wielding.
• Don’t consider melding a distortion weapon to be unwielding.
• Don’t check inscriptions on melding stuff — you’re not removing them.
• Don’t show “it sticks to your hand” on cursed unmeld.
• Prevent ice form from picking items at the bottom of deep water.
• Disallow wearing hats in spider or ice form.
• Allow wearing shields in statue form.
• Don’t give Green Dracs poison spit in spider form.
• Don’t cling to the wall when levitating.
• Clear clinging status when taking stairs.
• Don’t drown when transforming into a flying form while clinging.
• Allow spider form to scramble out of deep water by clinging to a wall. (#2967)
• Allow extending spider form while clinging over dangerous terrain
• Set clinging status colour according to the current feature.
• Allow wall clinging on closed doors (#3778).
• Don’t give Halfling hunters a buckler for free.
• Save weapon selection for quarterstaves with new games.
• Let player elves have elven gear.

Gods

Ashenzari

• Fix #3344: Don’t crash if you.transfer_to_skill somehow is SK_NONE.
• Fix #3735: some dropped and useless items being autopickuped.
• Don’t crash on old saves in Ashenzari penance.
• New Ashenzari passive ability: identify monster equipment with chance boundedness/3.
• Ashenzari also warns about monsters’ wands.
• Nerf Ashenzari transfer knowledge: double XP penalty (20%), greatly increase piety cost 10 -> 25.
• Lower piety gain.
• Forbid reskilling from or into Fighting.
• Make scrying fail proof and instantaneous.
• Ashenzari: scale passive mapping density with piety.
• Ashenzari on-sight item identification.
• Reskilling: keep the same letters between the from and to menu.
• Wrath: Reduces xp gain by 50%.
• Allow Ashenzarites to cancel scrolls of remove curse.
• Allow Ashenzarites to choose which piece of armour/jewellery to curse.

The good gods: Elyvilon, The Shining One, Zin

• Shorten and tweak Elyvilon’s ^! description to fit in an 80×24 screen.
• Don’t consume food/mp/piety when trying to pacify invalid targets.
• Make TSO non-holy summon extension at most double the current duration.
• Zin forbids shapeshifting spells and protects against Kirke’s pig spell.
• Fix recite working through walls and squarelosish.
• Make recite train more often.
• Add a message when you switch from a good god to another good god.

Other gods

• No stat boosts during Cheibriados penance.
• Fedhas: Don’t blame the player for trees felled by monster-cast tornado.
• Reduce the number of corpses from Kiku’s invocation.
• Makhleb: Fix Lesser Servant summoning chaos spawn instead of hellwings.
• Increase piety cost of Makhleb’s greater servant, since 1s were improved.
• Fix Okawaru not accepting kills of holy beings.
• Repair Xom’s potion of experience.
• When Xom lifesaves you, clear stat_zero penalty.
• Let His Xomminess grant you extra xp at level 27 (xp pool).
• Don’t let Yred gift Eidolons anymore.

General

• No instant divine retribution — many gods are abusable.
• Don’t give experience or items for killing monsters from god wrath
• Reduce the amount of unrands among god gifts.

Monsters

Bug fixes

• Don’t crash on banishing dancing weapons; don’t abyss any kinds of summons.
• Fix a crash when the player thinks the monster has a wand but it doesn’t.
• Fix #2404: Disallow polymorphing monsters taking the stairs.
• Fix #2927: crash when looking up ghosts in the db search.
• Fix non-ghost spells not getting loaded.
• Fix silence working on demons, orbs of fire, etc.
• Fix #3750: coming into view messages ignoring mislead.
• Fix shouting monsters not being announced.
• Fix resurrected shedu being placed in bad places.
• Fix #3718: grey draconians not floundering in deep water.
• Don’t give a chance to hit rock worms in walls except in Zotdef.
• Fix #3689: dual wielding monsters’ descriptions.

Mimics

• Remove trap mimics.
• Disable portal mimic generation for 0.8.
• Prevent stair mimics from posing as branch stairs.
• Don’t place downstairs mimic on branch bottom, and vice versa.
• Make door mimics replace actual doors.
• Make item mimics appear earlier, reduce both types’ rarity.
• Don’t include unknown mimics in beam targetting.
• Include item type in item mimics’ names.

Uniques

• Disable Terpsichore, she’s not ready for 0.8.
• Give Asmodeus a permanent ring of flames, replace greater demon with fire summon, remove bolt of draining.
• Dispater: give LCS instead of lightning bolt, remove common demon summon.
• Mnoleg: + AF_BLINK/AF_MUTATE attacks, -greater demon, -invis, +summon eyeballs, more hp.
• Lom Lobon: give AF_ANTIMAGIC attacks.
• Make Antaeus amphibious again.
• Make the royal jelly stay on Slime:6.
• Give Grinder AF_PAIN attacks instead of a weapon.
• Give Pikel a whip of elec instead of pain.
• Remove rF+ and rC+ from Nergalle.
• Allow Ijyb to get high-tier wands in normal game.
• Give Jory Mesmerise (new spell) instead of Cause Fear.
• Adjust Roxanne’s casting messages, since she can’t move.

Other monster-related changes

• Don’t give experience or items for killing monsters from god wrath or miscasts.
• Revert monsters avoiding walking into clouds — the new behaviour was abusable.
• Don’t cancel monster travels when player goes out of LoS.
• Don’t make a monster at the edge of LOS leave a trail.
• No elephants in D and Vaults, slightly reduce their frequency in Lair.
• Announce all monsters “coming into view” at once.
• Give the non-spellcasting random pan lords (10% chance) a guaranteed melee brand, and a chance of greater speed.
• Restore monster speeds for Orb Guardian, Royal Jelly, Fiends, Storm/Golden dragon, Grater Mummy.
• Tweak holy monster speeds: phoenix/blessed toe: 10, pearl dragon/shedu: 12.
• Improve Cacodemons: -Dig, -Call Imp, +Energy Bolt, +Slow, +Confuse, + 3 levels rPois/Elec, extra attack, more health.
• Green Death, Blue Death: remove call imp.
• Give Eidola spells: Cause Fear and Pain.
• Give giant orange brains Cause Fear instead of Polymorph Other.
• Hunger attack takes 25% of your nutrition.
• Give clinging to geckos, giant mites, cockroaches and demonic crawlers.
• Allow fake rakshasa to use weapons and armour like real ones; don’t hide equipment of Mara and rakshasa.
• Rework monster rElec levels.
• Set the xp for vanilla orcs to 3.
• Remove bears, replace with grizzly or black bears where appropriate.
• Boost monster ghouls’ health and damage.
• Reduce electric eel accuracy slightly.
• Make Fiends and Pit Fiends use regular spells rather than abilities.
• Give vampires blood.
• Give Ophan high intelligence.
• Convert shedu’s main attack to kick instead of claw.
• Allow raising trapdoor spider zombies.
• Always remove the mold when fungal colony is destroyed.
• Add a message for monsters casting Trog’s Hand.

Spells

Bug fixes

• Fix #3650: Don’t spend turn/MP when aborting the berserk spell.
• Fix placing Fire Storm on a wall.
• Don’t allow cancelling out of chain lightning with ally prompts.
• Guarantee IOOD placement on tiny levels.
• Correct the colour of LRDed glass.
• Don’t display a success message when aborting sublimation of blood at full mp.

Books

• Remove Summon Hydra from the Book of Summonings.
• New spellbook, book of zoology: summon butterflies, sticks to snakes, call canine familiar, ice form, summon ice beast, summon hydra.
• Move Silence from the book of Maledictions to War Chants (replaces Haste).
• Add IOOD to the book of Power.

Other spell-related changes

• Tornado changes for 0.8: pure Air, 80% damage, negative spell enhancer.
• Disable Tukima’s Ball as a player spell.
• Remove the Stonemail spell.
• Allow Sticks to Snakes on javelins, disallow on steel/silver stuff.
• Death channel spectral monsters are not abjurable.
• Invisibility becomes pure Hex.
• Silence becomes Charms/Air.
• Brand spells go back to being Charms.
• Simplify low spell success adjectives: Merge Cruddy and Bad into Very Poor (now 5-30%).
• Make poison clouds all lightgreen.
• Apportation targetting: allow cycling with +/-.
• Don’t destroy the rest when apporting part of a stack.
• Don’t destroy items apported if at the item limit.
• Don’t rot while under Death’s Door.
• Fix spells being unaffected by antimagic in some cases.

Items

Bug fixes

• Fix #2722: crash when accessing a buggy deck’s description.
• Fix 2535: “stasis identification check.
• Fix scroll of fear not being use-IDed properly.
• Fix placeholders in Xom’s book gift names.
• Remove nutrition from kills with vampiric weapons.
• Fix #3614: wizmode creating “cards” not working.
• Fix an out-of-bounds assertion with unknown rings of sustain ability.
• Fix #3441: inventory actions occasionally affecting the wrong item.
• Fix #3319: Don’t prevent butcher swap with temporary distortion brand.
• Fix #3217: equipping sInv artefact not reactivating autopickup.
• Fix #3682: Identify brand of vampiric and holy artefact weapons when wielding fail.
• Fix throwing nets becoming “stuck” after a monster pushed past another monster trapped in a net.
• Prohibit flame-branded missiles from entering trees and wax.
• Filter scrolls of (old) paper out of the item knowledge screen.

Cards

• New card for decks of Wonder: the Alchemist, transmuting some of your gold into health and magic.
• Don’t let high-power common/rare Experience card be better than legendary.
• Fill the Potion card effect list with potions that are useful in battle.
• Make the Torment and Experience cards a little rarer.
• Improve the Hammer card at low power.
• Reduce the maximum duration of Pentagram, Dance, Foxfire and Bones cards.
• Tweak the weapons created by the Dance card at low power.

Other item-related changes

• Remove crystal balls of fixation.
• Nerf the speed brand. Damage reduced to 90%.
• Reintroduce item stat loss prompts.
• Prompt before wearing or wielding a known-cursed item.
• Remove misleading messages about weapon str/dex weighting.
• Warn when equipping armour with a penalty caused by low strength.
• Don’t let the vorpalise weapon effect destroy potions or scrolls.
• Correctly mark amulets of controlled flight useless for Kenku above xl5.
• Identify rings of sustain ability if they block stat loss completely.
• Don’t allow using crystal balls if they are guaranteed to fail.
• Don’t corrode ammo by clumsily bashing jellies with it.
• Don’t let antimagic work on priests.
• Don’t acquire manuals or sage to utterly useless skills.
• Make acquiring rods of striking less likely.
• Obsidian axe bug fixes. Add +Lev to get across obstacles.
• Improve rods of striking: 1d5 -> 1d8.
• Make default books ‘:’ again, use different glyphs for detected items on Windows.

The Dungeon

Bug fixes

• Fix #218: Place upwards and downwards escape hatches in all isolated Orc bubbles.
• Fix returning from portals to Pan clobbering the level.
• Don’t place steam near fire out of bounds.
• Fix door restrictions being ignored when calculating travel paths.
• Make troves handle manuals correctly.
• Fix the portal short timeout messages for unnannounced portals.
• Fix wizmode-blinking (xm, &b) asserting in the Abyss.

Other level-related changes

• No banishment from hell effects.
• Don’t enable cTele by quaffing Elf fountains.
• Shrink the hall of blades, guarantee a single rare weapon with a brand.
• No potion troves for mummies.
• Increase the chance of bleeding on walls.
• Give troves more loot items again.
• Add a note when entering a Pan Lord level.
• Let Zot vaults spawn more often.
• Don’t block off branches with grates.
• A wizmode command (& ^R) to recreate the current level.
• ZotDef: no Abyss with Lugonu.
• Malign Gateway as a hell effect.
• If the Abyss has been wizmode-mapped, update the map on Abyss shifts.
• Various glyph changes for features.
• Give a message when a Golubria portal on the level closes.
• Disable _many_pools in Crypt.
• No more darkgrey walls/floors in Geh:7 or Gloorx.
• Let Abyss and Pan entrances overwrite vaults to make them truly guaranteed.
• Add two new Spider portal vault maps by 7hm.
• An awesome Crypt end by evilmike.
• Replace Wiglaf with Norris in Sprint 1.

Interface

Bug fixes

• Fix a crash when reloading a game after restart_after_game.
• Fix #3535: Buggy movement keys for Windows consoles.
• Fix #3609: autoexplore stopping with no monster in sight.
• Fix multidrop with monsters in sight.
• Fix #3709: travel failing to start if standing right next to a cloud.
• Fix items not being announced when revealed by opening a door.
• Fix #2930: stash search results not being coloured correctly when matching item heaps.
• Fix #1184: Limit tagged block display’s lines to screen size.
• Fix #3700: sprint map menu offering you to replay tutorial.

Options

• Change the explore_stop option to use greedy_pickup_smart by default.
• New travel_key_stop option for whether keypresses should interrupt travel/resting.
• Default easy_exit_menu to false.
• Make all keyhelp menus respect the easy_exit_menu option.
• Mantis #1282: Make autopickup_no_burden default to true.

Other interface changes

• Stop autoexplore when sensing a previously undetected monster nearby.
• New background choice layout, grouped by category.
• Autofight: fire at nearest enemy if wielding a ranged weapon.
• Don’t ranged autofight through walls/glass/scryed walls.
• Don’t start the game if terminal is smaller than 80×24.
• Don’t print wielding effect when switching back from butchering.
• Display “-) Unavailable” if you cannot wield/quiver anything.
• Better error messages for (M)emorisation. (#3665)
• Mantis #1839: Treat clearing annotation prompt as “safe”.
• Mantis #3727: When placing a single exclusion on part of a gate, exclude all of it.
• Mantis #3112: Mention any skeleton vampiric feeding leaves behind.

Tiles

Bug fixes

• Fix #3730: inventory crash at some resolutions.
• Fix #3772: Don’t crash when pressing odd key combinations.
• Fix #3643: kraken simulacra causing crashes in Tiles.
• Fix #3764: crash when drawing disconnected tentacle segment tiles.
• Fix #3596: Don’t fire at friendly monsters when clicking on them.
• Fix #3596: “Unknown command” when mouseclick-travelling.
• Fix #3703: pickup by mouseclick on player icon not taking a turn.
• Fix #3810: mouseclick movement working during the stat prompt.
• Fix manuals being mouseclick-readable while “brainless”.
• Fix mouseclick travel internally using the vi keys.
• Fix #3255: real staff tiles displayed in the undiscovered items list.
• Fix #3356: clearing the map having no effect in Tiles.
• Fix #3516: LRD exploding in odd tiles in the Elven Halls.
• Partially fix #3358: re-init tile flavour on Abyss shifts.
• Make wyvern zombies use the dragon zombie tile.
• Upgrade weapon tile when fixing a temp. brand with ?vorpalise weapon.
• Fix #3639: Slight tweaks to the player naga tiles.

New/improved tiles

• Curio: Ilsuiw, necromancer, wingless Grinder.
• Denzi: silver star, pillar of salt, Ashenzari altar, fire bat, Darkness spell, Leda’s Liquefaction spell tile, chardump command tile, arena icon, wingless shadow imp, pressure plate trap.
• dolphin: jumping spider, shark.
• Omndra: wall blood spatter.
• Porkchop: phoenix.
• purge: eye of devastation.
• XuaXua: glowing mold, death ooze.
• Add a tile for liquefied floor.
• Use !heal wounds icon (rather than !healing) for the wand of healing.
• Apply Tornado’s colour scheme to Tiles, as well.
• Remove omndra’s cauldron title screen, not fitting with the rest of them.

Also various documentation updates and description fixes that I won’t bother listing in detail.

As always, bug reports are highly welcome. After all, the stable version 0.8 is at stake. Thanks in advance!

You see, one of the first things I did when I started coding for Stonesoup was to create an in-game tutorial with situational triggers. Last year’s UP team created a new tutorial from scratch, so the old one was renamed to Hints mode. The idea was to use a fixed map with fixed puzzles and explanations. We had been planning to do something like that anyway, so we were glad when someone took up the task.

Sometime around new year, I had another look at the new tutorial and found a couple of things that made me unhappy. It was much better at its task (a gentle introduction to the game) than the old one had been, but there was still much room for improvement.

As a result and with the students’ project on the horizon, I recreated the tutorial yet again, drawing on both the UP team’s work with some of the puzzles, map definitions and underlying code, and the Hints mode with its situational triggers. The new tutorial divides the explanations into separate “lessons”, each taking about 5-8 minutes, and should be more interesting and helpful than either of the previous versions. So, if you’re new to Crawl or are still unclear about some of the basics of combat, spellcasting or gods, check out the Tutorial! :)

I’d been meaning to talk about the tile panels, too, but I’d probably need some good resolution screenshots for that. So… on with the big changes: The Shining One and Makhleb have been removed – from the list of starting gods. The Alter Self and Extension spells are no more, but there are a couple of new additions. The Elven Halls have been shortened to 5 levels. Oh, and the Enchantment skill and spell school has been split into two smaller ones called Hexes, described as spells that “affect things and monsters (usually negatively)”, and Charms (defined as “things that positively affect yourself”). The latter change brought a version change with it, so the current version is no longer compatible with saves from early January.

And now for our customary megalist of changes:

Spells

• Split Enchantments skill and spell school into Charms and Hexes.
• Remove Alter Self and Extension.
• Make Symbol of Torment and Banishment monster-only spells (plus Kiku/Lugonu).
• Implement a crude spell quiver. Store last spell cast.
• New spell: Summon Dragon (Summ 9), also eligible to pan lords.
• New spell: Summon Hydra (Summ 7), summons short-lived 4-12 headed hydra (depending on power).
• New spell: Tukima’s Ball (Hex 9), animates weapons in view.
• New spell: Darkness (Hex 7), decreases LOS radius by 2.
• Fix #3105: Lee’s Rapid Deconstruction not obeying some checks when destroying walls.
• Fix #2695: casting cloud spells on (and through) walls.
• Fix #2069: casting cloud spells out of range.
• Fix #3413: Don’t let Conjure Flame be used for free reveal of mimics.
• Fix Tukima’s Dance ignoring spell power.
• Fix #3458: silenced spells making noise in crypt.
• Fix #2481, #3460: Don’t let Mummies/Lichform cast Sublimation on themselves, do let them cast Passwall.
• Fix #3067: Don’t waste a turn/MP when failing to cast Sublimation of Blood.
• Cancel Leda’s Liquefaction if player isn’t standing on solid ground.
• Make Tornado Air -> Conj/Air.
• Don’t make Tornado drop as sharply in non-open areas.
• Tornado+Leda -> no flying.
• Make Tornado noisy.
• Make Silence Hex/Air.
• Make Summon Butterflies require spell power for effectiveness.
• Heavily nerf orb apportation. Chance and distance depends on spell power and total distance.
• Make Death Channel spectrals temporary, let ally kills work too. Reduce to level 7.
• Make semi-controlled blink random if it fails to find a location.
• Don’t cancel Condensation Shield when blinking/teleporting.
• Don’t hurt rC- players with condensation shield.
• Don’t allow immediate recasting of Death’s Door.
• Evaporate no longer uses Throwing skill.
• Summon Swarm monsters are always friendly; lower it to level 5.
• When using the Swarm spells, disallow summoning monsters that would anger your god.
• While Ring of Flame is active, flame clouds are removed when you step on them.
• Make LOS-affecting spells work through transparent walls.
• Boost LRD damage.
• Mention glow in Haste/Invis spell descriptions.
• Sticks to Snakes is now a pure transmutation spell.
• Revert the move of branding spells to Charms; they’re Hexes again.
• Sandblast, Shatter, Lee’s and Maxwell’s are no longer Transmutations.
• Leda’s Liquefaction gains Transmutations; lowered 6 -> 4.
• Reduce Passage of Golubria 5 -> 4.
• Reduce Slow 3 -> 2.
• Consolidate the books of Minor Magic into a single book, containing: Magic Dart, Blink, Call Imp, Repel Missiles, Slow, Conjure Flame, Mephitic Cloud.
• book of Changes: -Dig
• book of Conjurations [ice]: -Freezing Cloud, +Lightning Bolt
• book of Fire: -Evaporate, -Summon Elemental, +Fireball, +Dragon Form
• book of Geomancy: -Summon Elemental, +Petrify
• book of Hinderance: +Leda’s Liquefaction
• book of Morphology: -Shatter, -LRD, +Sticks to Snakes, +Petrify, +Ignite Poison
• book of the Sky: -Summon Elemental
• book of Summonings: +Summon Elemental
• book of Transfigurations: -Sandblast, -Polymorph Other, +Stoneskin, +Condensation Shield, +Ice Form
• book of Wizardry: +Agony, +Lightning Bolt
• Greatly simplify randart book generation.

The Player

• Prevent chain paralysis: When coming out of a paralysis, you’re immune for 1d3 turns.
• Assign xp from monster kills proportional to the damage dealt by player/allies out of total damage.
• Remove Paladins and Reavers.
• Remove Chaos Knight of Makhleb.
• Fix crash when a corpse is raised from under a Vampire drinking from it.
• Fix #3311: crash when subliming your last blood potion.
• Fix #2958: crash with Naga poison breath.
• Fix #2329: Don’t count melded slots when calculating stat modifiers.
• Fix Dowsing not updating until the next turn.
• Fix antennae/Ashenzari overriding Dowsing (which gives more data).
• Fix #3245: Defer call to level_change() to prevent SIGHUP abuse.
• Fix #3234: Make gain stat work for satiated Vampires.
• Split out CK/Lugonu -> Abyssal Knight, Pr/Yredelemnul -> Death Knight.
• Overhaul combo recommendations (elliptic).
• Allow starting with a falchion for Fi and Gl, also restrict trident to these backgrounds.
• Add quarterstaff as an option for monks.
• Differentiate Ha/Ko aptitudes: Kobolds are good at Summ/Necro/Hex, Halflings at Charm/Tloc.
• KoHu and KoAM get a crossbow instead of sling + buckler.
• Halflings gain innate mutation resistance 1.
• Give DD a couple more charges in their starting wand but no potions.
• Give DK enough MP and piety to use Animate Remains on D:1, reduce their weapon to +1,+1.
• Give Pr a little more HP and MP (as their healing potion was removed).
• Give He one extra dodging and a +1 robe.
• Give Stalkers a bit more Tmut skill. Don’t pre-ID potions of poison.
• Artificers always start with scroll of recharging identified.
• Lower Felid Conjurations aptitude -1 to -2.
• Bump grey draconians back up to +1 fighting apt.
• Boost Mummy base MR 3 -> 5.
• Nerf Gladiator’s shield to a buckler.
• Give small Gladiators darts instead of stones.
• Make LOS reducers multiplicative rather than additive.
• Potions/cards of experience give you a full level; similarly drain costs a full level.
• Reduce xp loss from draining, (over)compensating for the recent increase.
• Don’t allow any headgear with Horns 3 or Antennae 3.
• Remove map-forgetting and spell-forgetting Divination miscast effects.
• Don’t prevent blink from putting you in dangerous clouds.
• Add a note when paralysed by a monster.
• Add paralysis status to the death message.
• Allow kenku to land/lift off while in lich form.
• Allow to Tomb over unknown traps.
• Show stat zero disability on the HUD and in a few other places.
• Modify the “Nothing wielded” message for forms and clawed chars.
• Include the killing cloud’s source in obituaries.
• Remove Demonspawn breath mutations.
• DS rN+++ and Fire tier 3 facets show up a little earlier, as does Mapping.
• Adapt exclusion radius to the Nightstalker mutation.
• Wider choice of demonic guardians.
• New DS mutation Powered by Pain: restores MP when sufficient damage is taken.
• Double the dex bonus from thin skeletal structure.
• Give freezing cloud immunity to Icemail instead of Passive Freeze.

The Dungeon

• Shorten Elven Halls from 7 -> 5 floors.
• Fix #3258: travel infinite-oscillating when Ashenzari/antennae detect+wipe mimic memory.
• Fix #3182: Don’t attempt to set autoexclusions in unmappable areas.
• Fix inverted logic in in_damaging_cloud.
• Fix rain considered one of the harmless clouds.
• Fix Felids getting unusable items in troves.
• In Lair level generation, don’t ruin the map boundary.
• Don’t place unneeded downstairs on branch ends.
• Fix #3320: make trove manual requests function properly.
• Fix #3257: trees being immune to fire and lightning.
• Fix #3324: travel/explore stopping when opening doors.
• Fix #3014: mispluralisation of staircases/gateways.
• Fix #3335: state that troves only accept identified items.
• Trove price changes.
• Every random Pan vault now has a 1/9 chance of having a demonic rune in it.
• Reduce ambient noise in Hive from 20->5; Orc, Lair 5->4.
• Implement #1960: Allow traveling across radius 1 excluded stairs.
• Implement #1962: Don’t generate cloud autoexclusions when immune.
• Implement #2374: Don’t prompt for cloud-excluded staircases.
• Don’t display cloud exclusions on the Ctrl-O screen.
• Disallow setting exclusions while targeting. xe still works.
• Describe level 1 upstairs as “staircase leading out of the dungeon.”
• Don’t mark level 1 upstairs and branch exits as unvisited.
• Great new vaults by, among others, evilmike (Abyss), minmay (Vaults) and st (Orc).
• Change temple_entry_steam to mist, which doesn’t block autotravel.
• Change the oklob temple entry to a sapling.
• Remove potions of slowing from Cheibriados altar vault.
• Reduce serial vault chances.
• Reduce Lair:8 loot.
• Nerf some loot-heavy minivaults.
• Add no_rtele_into to a number of altar vaults and Ziggurat entries.
• Don’t let early angels teleport out of altar vaults and early Zig portals.
• Allow vaults to specify shops: name, type name, items, greed, count.
• Allow specifying multiple spellbooks in monster specs, one of which is randomly chosen.
• Fix corpse placement not working well on levels with high wall density.
• Tweak randbook mapdef tags: predefined title, player name as owner.
• Allow predefining several spells for randart books in mapdefs.
• New mapdef item tag “mundane” => ego-less +0, +0 item.
• New mapdef item tag “charges” for defining wand charges.
• Allow Gretell to access vault-defined monster descriptions.

Monsters

• Get rid of mummy death curses turning potions into decay.
• Fix #3280: ghosts and Mara illusions not getting spells.
• Fix #3239: ‘x’ hiding monster shields.
• Fix #3102: Don’t spawn monster bands on stairs.
• Fix #3298: Enable door mimic generation.
• Fix #3436: los not updating when a door mimic is killed.
• Fix #3424: assertion when targeting beyond door mimic.
• Fix #3357: Make door mimics block LOS.
• Make detected mimics known.
• Fix #3222: Shedu don’t resurrect banished pairs.
• Fix #3223: Shedu wake when their partner is killed.
• Fix #424: Polymorphed uniques may only cast spells if they can speak.
• Fix monster halos not appearing immediately after save restore.
• Fix monsters not respecting no_rtele_into.
• Fix “2 ancient champions” showing as “2 skeletal warriors”.
• Fix #3218: “It turns to fight!” for invisible sky beasts.
• Better movement AI for ranged attackers, now try to regain line of fire.
• Make yaks, death yaks, ugly things and slime creatures stick together when wandering.
• Try to make wandering band members stick around the leader.
• Make wandering band members path back to the leader.
• Let band leaders displace their followers.
• Allow friendly monsters to path to you across the level.
• Friendlies start following you again after killing target instead of wandering.
• Smart monsters use pathfinding to go around shallow water.
• New unique: Terpsichore, casting Tukima’s Ball.
• Monsters floundering in shallow water move slowly and fumble attacks.
• Large monsters don’t flounder in shallow water.
• Giant monsters can walk through deep water as if it were shallow.
• Give Geryon a reaching attack, make beasts trample.
• Allow monster spiders to cling on walls.
• Tweak Grinder’s spells, weapon, and reduce depth (6-10 -> 3-6).
• Greatly reduce Eustachio’s depth from 8-13 -> 4-10.
• Beef DD (especially Be), sixfirhies and hairy devils.
• Make Murray somewhat more likely to spawn.
• Make skeletal warriors obey silence.
• Sometimes hint at the location of invisible monsters.
• Don’t give Grinder a high-tier wand, nor Ijyb in Sprint.
• Add paralysis and draining to the list of high tier wands.
• Rot-inducing corpses for vampire mosquito, poison+contam corpses for hell hound/hog.
• Make Flame Tongue a monster spell.
• Let player ghosts cast Agony.
• Boring beetles may now burrow along diagonals.
• Remove resistance flags from training dummy.
• Fix monster DDDKs almost never using Injury Mirror.
• Water elementals can now swim rather than fly.
• Apply the same limitation as the player to monsters for casting Leda’s.
• Highlight monsters with pain mirror active.
• Move oklob saplings from lightgreen ‘p’ to lightcyan ‘P’.
• Shiny new Serpent of Hell colours (elemental colours).
• Don’t generate laboratory rat zombies, skeletons, etc.
• Disable ophan corpses, enable generation in ZotDef.
• Wizard commands for banishing or killing a monster.
• Rename blowfly -> vampire mosquito, removed giant mosquito.
• Rename giant ant -> worker ant.
• Rename giant bat -> megabat.
• Rename giant beetle -> goliath beetle.

Gods

• Fix #3405: crash when transfer knowledge brings skills to level 27.
• Fix an overflow error in transfer knowledge.
• Don’t allow negative card power under Nemelex penance.
• Fix #3522: Elyvilon’s weapon destruction not giving piety.
• Fix #3150: No instant retribution from Beogh. Fixes an XP exploit.
• Except for Jiyva, prayer is now only used for (piety-gaining) sacrifices. Other effects are abilities.
• Demand confirmation when butchering forbidden corpses.
• Gods ignore kills of dancing weapons, ball lightning and vortices.
• Mention what weapon is to be blessed in TSO/Kiku/Lugonu final prayer.
• For Ashenzari’s passive monster detection, differentiate by threat level.
• Don’t give piety for eating with Chei.
• Make Cheibriados warn you when putting on boots of running or “rage.
• Use Necromancy skill for Kikubaaqudgha’s invocations.
• Make corpses received from Kiku actually fit for reanimation.
• Okawaru: Might -> Heroism, increasing all weapon skills by 5, up to 27.
• Okawaru: Haste -> Finesse, doubled combat speed (melee and ranged).
• Don’t reduce Sif Muna’s penance for miscasts.
• Add Summon Hydra to Xom’s list of tension spells.
• Reinstate random Xom titles removed a couple of years ago.
• Let Yredelemnul gift eidolons, don’t gift hungry ghosts.
• Overhaul Zin’s Recite invocation: much more powerful and interesting.
• Adjust Zin’s ability piety costs.
• Make Zin hate monsters with mutagenic/rot corpses.

Items

• Remove scrolls of blank paper.
• New GDR formula (elliptic): 14 * (baseAC-2)^(1/2); this is a buff to the medium armours, and a slight nerf to the heavier ones.
• Identify staff types on wield, just like weapons and rods do.
• Give staves and rods a chance to be generate cursed.
• Auto-id gourmand for non-Mu non-full-herbivores (level 3).
• Fix #3468: scroll of fear being identified when read with plants in LOS.
• Allow cancelling some scrolls without consuming them.
• Mention butchery requirement for food in corpse description.
• Allow (M)emorising from books on the floor.
• When using an unidentified potion or scroll, display its name in the message.
• New Demon axe unrandart: obsidian axe, adds a siren-like pull to nearby monsters.
• All weapons have min 7 delay, or better.
• Limit bardings to +4 enchantment.
• Allow staves of poison to affect monsters with rPois.
• Give the staff of death rN+.
• Give the staff of summoning warding, sometimes abjure summons on hit.
• rod of demonology: -Recall.
• rod of summoning: -Abjuration, -Summon Elemental, +Call Canine Familiar.
• Restore part of the chances for unrand weapon/armour generation.
• Remove wizardry effect from Archmagi, boost Tmut/Tloc spells.
• Improve Maxwell’s Patent Armour: AC+15, +preservation ego, +MR.
• Improve Staff of Wucad Mu: remove miscast effects.
• Allow antimagic on lajatangs and demon weapons.
• Allow club unrandarts.
• Axe the ring of Charms.
• Make potions of experience give some xp for skills as well.
• Pearl dragons now leave pearl dragon armour.
• Nerf PDA to AC 10, EV -3.
• Foxfire cards summon a combination of friendly and hostile monsters.
• Disallow Foxfire summon vapours if you have no SInv, add vampire mosquitoes.
• Add elephants, hippogriffs, griffons to the Herd card.
• Make Pentagram and Foxfire a little rarer in decks of summoning.
• For scroll weapon acquirement, give a boost to quick blades.
• Mark scrolls of holy word as dangerous to undead/demonic players.
• Mark rings of hunger as bad for ghouls.

Interface

• New tutorial, split into different maps/lessons.
• Fix numpad being shown inverted in the command help.
• Fix #3263: unknown items toggle not working.
• Don’t prompt for partial stack pickup when travelling.
• Fix #3321: Don’t prompt for unarmed attacks if your “previous weapon” wasn’t a real weapon.
• Fix #3517: crash when binding CMD_AUTOFIGHT if autofight.lua is not included.
• Move partial stack pickup to ;
• Display piety in main screen.
• Use inventory colours for stats area and % screen.
• For local builds, mention morgue location after hiscore or when doing a chardump.
• Extend and rearrange tutorial/hints mode command help.
• Bind Tab to autofight, shift-Tab to autofight_nomove.
• Implement #2840: Clear stack autopickup flag when dropping an item on top of it.
• List prompt choices explicitly, i.e. “(y)es or (n)o” rather than “y/n”.
• Mention scrolling commands on message history screen.
• If you don’t recognise any items, make \ shown all unknown ones.
• Starting sub-menus: Escape brings back to main menu instead of exiting the game.
• Add a message on forgetting a spell by book destruction.
• Acknowledge several canceled prompts with “Okay then.”
• More feedback at the macro prompt.
• Make tutorial selectable from the command line: -tutorial option.
• After a tutorial or sprint map, go back to map screen instead of main screen.
• Mention in ‘@’ that you are inside an external halo.
• Allow ~/.crawl/init.txt as alias for ~/.crawlrc on unix.
• Split monster, feature quotes into another screen toggleable via ‘!’.
• Add several missing descriptions, improve some existing ones.
• Update the manual, FAQ, and options guide.

Tiles

• Fix #3332: crashes with kraken tentacles out of sight.
• Fix #3160: slowdown caused by the command tab.
• Fix #3313: crashes when searching the database for zombies and tentacles.
• Fix #3404: manuals being mouseclick-readable while berserk.
• For the message overlay, treat mouseclicks as relevant to the map (travel etc.) rather than the message history.
• Fix item/feature mouseover leaking mimic information.
• Fix #2914: click on the title screen making selection in the startup menu.
• Fix the startup menu layout.
• Fix #3195: Don’t set swamp_tree_water for water without trees.
• Fix #3284, #3285: click-travel stopping for mimics and toadstools.
• Fix #3485: lantern of shadow not being wieldable by mouseclick.
• Fix misinformation when clicking on rotten chunks as a non-saprovore.
• Move tile info during Abyss shifts.
• Fix #3408: weapon not showing on most of Tiamat’s tiles.
• Fix water walking Beoghite tile being drawn in water.
• Fix #2726: Wrong tooltip for evokable staves.
• Update tile tooltips to Felid item restrictions.
• Allow mouseclick movement through exclusions and stationary monsters.
• Clicking on an enemy while wielding a ranged weapon fire at it.
• Fix the need to click on an enemy twice to fire or cast at it.
• Casting with ctrl+click casts the last spell if appropriate.
• Suppress tree descriptions on mouseover.
• Make sure mouseover descriptions are only triggered by mouse movement.
• Use poison icon for player doll, if poisoned.
• A single mouseclick on the player is enough to pull up the pickup menu.
• Don’t require standing on altars or stairs to get the tooltip.
• Add single-turn waiting to the command tab.
• Add wielded weapon to the training dummy tile.
• Make the tiles quantity prompt pull up a single-item pickup menu.
• For Windows Tiles builds, also print asserts to STDERR.
• Shift the inventory tooltip to the right, so it doesn’t overlap with the messages.
• Automatically zoom the minimap to fill available space.
• Replace “Shift-L-Click” tooltips with “Shift + L-Click”, etc.
• Overhaul tiles_help.txt.
• New title logo by Denzi.
• Fix randart item tiles never actually being used.
• Actually use the zombie/spectral worm tiles in-game.
• Actually use the grate tile for DNGN_GRATE.
• Remove shield tiles from various shieldless monsters. (Done by co.)
• Add co‘s new lair floor tiles, appropriately weighted.
• Other new tiles by co: Killer Klown, giants (capable of weapon display) including Antaeus, vampires, Homunculus spell, lurking horror, Ashenzari’s sensed monsters.
• New tiles by coolio: deep dwarves, Maurice, ancient zyme, Joseph, Mennas, gnoll sergeant/shaman.
• New tiles by Curio: rat zombie, Frederick, lizard zombie, mangroves (Swamp trees), Donald, Kirke.
• New tiles by Denzi: air elemental, statue tiles (dungeon feature), statue form (capable of weapon display), Terpsichore, Charms skill tile, Passage of Golubria spell, raven, various command tiles, Summon Dragon/Hydra spell.
• New tiles by LoginError: dungeon exit, item knowledge and prayer command tiles.
• New tile by LordBistian: Leda’s Liquefaction spell.
• New tiles by psyshvl: eldritch tentacles.

Other stuff

• Increase internal version to 32.
• Don’t include lua chunks in save files.
• Fix #3177: crash when playing after arena.
• Reduce idle clock threshold, fix several bugs in measuring play time.

Lots of bug fixes, and 0.8 draws ever nearer…

And with that, we’re up-to-date with revision 81b92e8 which, as usual, can be downloaded here.
As always, bug reports are highly welcome!

Thank you for your valuable feedback!

You already know about the big Armour unnerfing, and also about the the new skill menu, so what else is new?

Well, for one, there have been so many updates to the Zot Defence minigame that, this time around, I had to put them into a subheading of their own. We’ve got a truckload of new tiles. Lots of crash bugs introduced, and even more resolved. Oh, and the noise propagation has been changed to produce pretty pictures. Well, that and to make it less likely to wake up monsters behind several layers of walls.

Now, without further ado, here’s the (probably woefully incomplete) list of changes within the last month:

Zot Defence

• Rename Zot Defense to Zot Defence.
• Start Zot Defence characters near the Orb.
• Start with the map mapped.
• In ZotDef, the “safest place” is near the orb, even with 20 pan lords there.
• Disable the Abyss.
• Greatly cheapen skill training.
• Don’t explode if hostile plant lands on Orb (such as from attacking a friendly plant). Enjoy the rot.
• Don’t rot people almost instantly when accidentally hitting a plant on the orb.
• Fix broken Bazaar ability.
• Don’t charge for Bazaar portal if the portal doesn’t show up for whatever reason.
• Make predefined waves in ZotDef actually work.
• Scale up the cost of plants and fungus when there’s hundreds of them.
• Introduce a hard cap of 350 allies.
• Fix #3051: Zot Defence create traps not identified.
• Don’t generate several problematic cards (Tomb, Warpwright, Water, Trowel, Minefield, Stairs).
• Fix friendly orange statues being completely useless.
• Fix an overflow for the cost of oklobs.
• Don’t spawn dummy monsters, orb guardians or test spawners.
• Don’t show “Go fetch the orb” messages for Zot Defence.
• Don’t claim there are 27 levels of the dungeon.
• Save the game every time a boss is spawned.
• Set zotdef rune types correctly.
• Dump the ZotDef waves’ table during a crash.

Tiles

• Fix #2884: crash with the monster tab.
• Fix #3092: Update monster tab before drawing it.
• Fix #3117: tile save file data sometimes being read incorrectly.
• Fix #3149: Silently ignore invalid tile_names indices instead of asserting.
• Fix #3145: Clear env.tile_names before loading/creating a level.
• Add temporary option tile_force_regenerate_levels to fix corrupted tile saves.
• Fix #3081: Properly create and destroy detached tabs when needed.
• Fix #3033: crashes when drawing tentacle tiles for kraken zombies.
• Fix #3056: crash on restarting the game with restart_after_game.
• Fix #2815: Re-add the old ghoul tiles.
• Fix a crash with small resolution.
• Reinitialise dungeon tiles if TILE_WALL_MAX changed between versions.
• Fix #2754: switching from console to tiles now displays map properly.
• Fix #3061: Restore minimap after redoing layout.
• Fix #2981, #3001: Items and player being drawn on top of large monster tiles.
• Don’t check i_feel_safe and abilities for drawing the command tab.
• Add a tile_layout_priority option for fully customizable detached tabs.
• New tile tab for common commands.
• Space allowing, detach monster, spell and command tabs.
• Generate a Windows Alert dialog on assertions (Tiles).
• Ctrl-mouseclick asks for quantity for drop/pickup.
• Add an outline to the skill level numbers on the the skill tab.
• Add aptitude icons to the skill tab.
• New title screens (Denzi, Omndra).
• Replace the tile_title_screen option by tile_skip_title.
• Add tiles to the startup menu (Denzi).
• Add kraken tentacle tiles.
• Awesome new giant tiles (co).
• Felid tiles (Denzi).
• Add Centaur/Naga/Felid lich-form tiles. (psyshvl, Denzi)
• Zombie hound and toad tiles (Curio), also kraken.
• New Zz icon for sleeping (stabbable) monsters, question mark for confused ones.
• Add Denzi’s 32×48 Lernaean hydra tiles.
• New swamp tree tiles (Curio), displayed as based in water.
• Desaturate red of Swamp floor tiles.
• Add withdrawn turtle/agate snail variant tiles (coolio).
• Add some deep dwarf monster tiles (coolio).
• Steal the inappropriate air elemental tile for twisters.
• Suppress blood overlay for the torch wall variants.
• Draw blood overlay beneath non-wall dungeon feature tiles.
• Reinit feature tiles for wizmode-created features.
• Update gate tiles when changing features in wizard mode.
• Store tile name for vault-defined monsters.
• Store vault-defined tile names in the save.
• Use rusty sewer tile when a sewer times out.
• Don’t treat pressing and releasing the mouse button as the same event.

Monsters

• Fix #2975: crash on loading save after monster cast Malign Gateway.
• Fix #3114: remembered feature mimic crash.
• Fix #2941: a crash involving kraken heads killing themselves.
• Fix ghosts not getting mids.
• Fix an arena crash with monster indices.
• Fix arena crashes with monster berserkers.
• Fix #3111: Make monster operator= copy mid so that monsters placed from the transit list don’t lose their mid.
• Fix #3043: feature mimic glyph changes.
• Fix #3146: branch stair mimics breaking overview, ^G travel.
• Fix several bugs with respect to monster Brothers in Arms.
• Don’t give more xp for killing berserk monsters.
• Fix monsters losing maxhp on berserk.
• Fix #2975: eldritch tentacle attitude change affecting all monsters.
• Allies animating dead is ok for hungry herb3.
• Don’t mislead into dummy monsters.
• Disallow polymorphing plants into oklob saplings, at least for now.
• Fix #2480: Recolour greater nagas to light magenta. Yellow made them not stand out from Snake walls.
• Fix plants getting Xom-polymorphed into burning bushes.
• Make monster tracers round up average expected damage so that monsters like oklob plants will use ranged attacks on high-AC targets.
• Fix helpless fake enchantment not removed when aux hit does no damage.
• Fix mon.number being 32 bit in memory but only 16 in saves.
• Fix message leak for unseen Spriggan riders.
• Fix unseen returning weapon message leak.
• Fix monsters not being disturbed by clouds unless damaged by the cloud.
• Fix monsters getting not the same bonuses from dragon hides as players.
• Give every monster a globally unique id for proper attribution of clouds, poisoning etc.
• New unique: Jory, unique vampire in the Tower of Silence vault.
• New monsters: fire crab, raven, porcupine, bog mummy.
• Replace grey rats with porcupines in most instances.
• Fix bog mummies being capable of “withdrawing into their shells”.
• Shedu are now fully implemented (paired holy monsters, capable of resurrecting one another).
• Implement laboratory rats, using coolio’s tiles as base.
• Non-stupid monsters try to avoid slime walls.
• Make monsters consider resistances along with AC for armour pickup.
• Only allow allies to pick up weapons, armour and ammunition.
• Boost ettins to hit as hard as dual-wielding stone giants. Move them deeper.
• Sheep can catch fire and spread it to other sheep.
• Fix mermaid/siren mesmerise not attracting Shoals merfolk as intended.
• If a wandering monster fails to move, try a new wander target.
• Delay monsters’ Brothers in Arms until after first berserk.
• Tweak sets of monsters’ acceptable “Brothers in Arms”.
• Convert corpse rot into a monster-castable spell.
• Allow adding monster enchantments from Lua.
• Add ENCH_PERM_TORNADO for monsters, with the appropriate effect and immunity to Tornado spell.
• Add new wizmode targeting command to heal monsters (Ctrl-H).
• Unnerf friendly orange crystal statue out of ZotDef.
• Casting messages for all holy monster spells.
• Rename holy dragon to pearl dragon.

Spells

• Fix beam tracer assert when casting mephitic cloud.
• Fix a double miscast crash.
• Fix silence only taking effect 1 turn after loading a save.
• Fix igniting poison clouds not giving xp.
• Remove spells: Bone Shards, Tame Beasts, Portal.
• Remove the Book of Beasts.
• New spell: Leda’s Liquefaction (area slowing effect).
• Nerf sticky flame range to 1.
• Fix Sticky Flame having range 2 under Vehumet.
• Reduce Haunt duration
• Make Tornado respect wind corridors.
• Allow other clouds to overwrite tornado.
• Buff Static Discharge: Higher damage and slightly higher chance of arcing.
• Increase Sandblast to range 2 without stones, range 3 with.
• Boost Stone Arrow damage from 2d12 at 50 power to 3d11.
• Change Necromancy spell levels: Control Undead: 6 -> 5, Borgnjor’s: 5 -> 7, Death Channel: 9 -> 8.
• Move spells around among the Necromancy books.
• Cheapen Translocation spells: Teleport Other: 4 -> 3, Warp Weapon: 7 -> 5, Dispersal: 7 -> 6.
• Reduce Ring of Flames level 8 -> 7.
• Fix #2991: Allow immediate re-casting of Malign Gateway.
• Fix #2865: mupltiple malign gateways.
• Make IOOD’s caster suffer from Injury Mirror.
• Fix #2400: Shadow Creatures summoning feature mimics.
• Add Freeze to Vehumet’s list, it’s unquestionably direct physical damage.
• Shift Air miscasts by one level, adjust level 1 miscasts.
• New level 3 Air miscasts.
• Ensure Death’s Door leaves you at least 1 hp.
• Ignore DDoor if maxhp goes to 0 or below.
• Don’t take notes or cancel tornado when restoring the game.

The dungeon

• Fix #3055: Don’t use KILL_NONE for unknown killers.
• Fix crashes when wizmode teleporting between branches.
• Fix #2772: Refactor volcano_caves to prevent trapping.
• Fix #3021: Kiku or Yredelemnul sometimes missing from the dungeon.
• Fix Shoals open-sea background and inappropriate wall types in portals.
• Troves: don’t ask for +5 robes of resistance, +2 is the max.
• Fix #3107: Trove portals shouldn’t inspect the ground.
• Fix #2940: Shoals plants being placed before minivaults.
• Don’t overdo vitrification in labyrinths, but still make glass more common.
• Replace labyrinths’ stone wall minotaur vaults with green crystal ones.
• Generate at most one labyrinth per game (~70% chance), at depth 10-20, never in Slime or Orc.
• Prevent randomly teleporting into the Slime:6 loot chambers.
• New noise propagation system, taking into account walls and doors.
• Nerf troves: increased entry fees, reduced loot.
• Reduce sewer loot.
• Store the blame when clouds are placed.
• Limit MAX_SHOPS to 64.
• Introduce serial vaults consisting of several mini vaults.
• Only one serial vault per level, with reduced chances of generation.
• New sprint map by 78291.
• New Lair and Snake endings by minmay.
• Many new minivaults.
• Dump extra vaults properly.
• Allow maps to specify different CHANCE and WEIGHT for different depth ranges.
• Don’t randomly generate shops within minivaults already on the level.
• Give different welcome spam for different game types.
• Dungeon builder code clean-up.

The player

• Fix crash on creating FeRe, FeCr, or HEAM.
• Fix a few cases of LOS distortion.
• Double GDR from body armour.
• Re-balance Demonspawn’s Fire Facet, Nightstalker, Iridiscent scales.
• Fix #2943: Don’t prompt for actions if item isn’t in inventory.
• Fix Deep Dwarves not dying to rot.
• Prevent grey draconians from drowning if they fall in deep water when transformed.
• Fix #3010: Unify cloud damage routines for player and monsters.
• Fix wasted turn when attempting to quaff berserk rage whilst exhausted
• Fix an off-by-one bug with torment resistance.
• Fix #2937: Apply terrain change to player when banished.
• Add evil items to default autopickup exceptions
• Kill the player instantly if drained below 0 maxhp (possible with Borgnjor’s).
• Someone who’s flying won’t be “waist-deep” in water.
• Felids: make corpses and zombies named after you.

Gods

• Give the player better control over what items to sac to Nemelex.
• Fix #2995: reskilling from fighting reducing your maxHP to 0 or below.
• Fix #3116: End transfer knowledge when destination skill is trained to level 27.
• Fix spells working through walls via Scrying.
• Give monsters pathfinding AI boosts when you’re under Ashenzari penance.
• Fix #2642: Zin warns for initial yellow glow, penance for deliberate additional glow.
• Make high-powered Recite try to find an effect that applies to the monster.
• Recite resistance tweaking; there are less bad effects early on, and it is still useful later.
• Stop TSO from considering monsters with a Heal Other spell to be holies.
• Allow recasting of Injury Mirror.
• Cancel Injury Mirror on abandoning Yred.
• Make rage-inducing missiles considered to be potentially hasty.
• Tweaks to tgw_lugonu_bribe.

Items

• Cap armour’s enchantments to its base AC.
• Scrolls of enchant armour no longer have a chance of failing.
• Boost staves of venom. Olgreb becomes 1/4 irresistible.
• Fix staff of Olgreb on demons with no rPois.
• Buff Mace of Variability, Bloodbane, Jihad, plutonium sword, crystal spear, Eos.
• Fix acquirement hardly ever generating “plain” crystal plates and dragon armour.
• Make acquirement’s “redundant armour” check consider things seen rather than worn.
• Don’t consider over-expensive shop items as “seen” for acquirement purposes.
• Allow acquirement of non-regular shields, weighted by skills.
• Adjust plate acquirement (scrolls/genie) to 0.6 dodging changes.
• For non-divine armour acquirement, prefer not yet seen base types as well.

Other

• New, more informative and mouse-operable skill menu.
• Reduce spam of ‘foo comes into view’ messages
• Inform the user if travel/explore cuts off because the PC is in an excluded area.
• For single items of quantity > 1 ‘g’ now prompts for an amount. Use the bindkey option to change this behaviour.
• Don’t prompt for quantity when picking up a pile of gold.
• autofight.lua is now loaded by default.
• Update the FAQ on questions of Mantis, Tavern, etc.
• Update INSTALL.txt.
• Don’t try to use curses in print_error_screen if curses hasn’t been initialised yet.
• Don’t spam about tile data not being present in console builds.
• Simplify tag minor version handling.
• Fix a memory leak and potential crash on browsing corrupted saves.

My, we have been busy!

And with that, we’re up-to-date with version c2f102f0 which, as usual, can be downloaded here, including Mac builds even!

1. Aptitudes are always displayed.
2. You can press * to view all skills.
3. Crosstrain bonus and antitrain malus are displayed as aptitude bonus/malus.
4. You can navigate the menu with a cursor. It is disabled by default. Just press enter or a directional key (arrow or numpad) to enable it.
5. When toggling a skill with enter, the cursor automatically move to the next skill. This allows you to quicky toggle several consecutive skills.

Tiles

1. Mouse support for selecting skills and pushing the buttons at the bottom.
2. Skill icons (thanks to Denzi for drawing them!). You need a window height of at least 702 pixels. You can disable them by setting the tile_menu_icons option to false.

Transfer knowledge. This is the last ability of Ashenzari, the new cursed god. It allows you to transfer skill points from one skill to another. The interface is integrated in the new skill menu. The transfer isn’t instantaneous, points are transferred each time you gain XP.

1. Preview: when selecting a skill as the source or destination of the transfer, the new level at which it will be raised or lowered is displayed.
2. Transfer progress: During the transfer, the skill menu will show the transfer progress by default. You can change view with “!”.

Come to the Tavern if you have any comments about it.

Galehar

So, here are some recent changes:

• Guaranteed damage reduction (GDR) from body armour is doubled
• Body armours are now enchantable up to a bonus equal to their base AC
• AC/EV bonuses are no longer generated on randarts

GDR is based on base AC of the armour. You now get 5% of GDR for each base AC over 2. So, a robe gives 0%, a leather armour gives 5%, a scale mail gives 15%, plate gives 40% and the rare crystal plate mail gives 60%. This means that armour is especially good against fast enemies with many not-so-strong attacks (such as executioners).

Enchanting armour: robes have base AC of 2, so they can be enchanted up to +2. Chain has 6 AC, so +6 is possible. Plate can go up to 10, and CPM up to +14! This might well be too much, capping to +9 is a possibility (to match weapons). Enchant armour scrolls now no longer have that chance of failing when you try to enchant a piece with high pluses. Randart armour can be generated with a plus of higher than the base AC (e.g. you’ll still find +6 randart robes). Heavier randart armour with very high pluses isn’t currently generated.

Finally, AC/EV bonuses from randarts were often as big as skill investment. These are now gone, so getting high AC on an EV character, and vice versa, is now harder. edit: the base type of the randart can still be one that gives AC or EV, such as rings of evasion or weapons of protection.

This should provide plenty of testing material for heavy armour characters. The builds are available on the Windows test build page, and playable online on CDO. All the player feedback and testing has been very important. Big thanks to ledtim for providing some dodging/armour statistics in the wiki. Automatic statistics from morgue files is on the TODO/wishlist. Happy crawling!

–Eino

• Provide (some) divinations, as the spell school got axed in 0.7.
• An introverted/laidback god: many deities ask for a lot attention by the player, e.g. praying, sacrificing, training Invocations. There was demand for a god who is not like that.

The current incarnation meets both goals. Here is a list of properties:

• Piety is gained by exploration. Piety gain is considerably faster if you wear some cursed items. (Remove Curse scrolls can be turned into Curse Foo scrolls. There are now also Curse Jewellery scrolls.) Piety drops over time.
• All abilities but two are passive and focus on detection. You will map your surroundings, see presence of nearby items and monsters, and identify items.
• One active ability is scrying: this turns all walls into glass to look though, but only for you! So you can have a look into some vault before deciding whether it is worth or reasonable to storm it.
• The other active ability is about reskilling. You can sacrifice one skill in order to boost another. The interface for this should be very straightforward, thanks to a completely reworked skills screen. Needless to say, neither ability can be abused (e.g. you cannot smite through scryed walls, and you won’t produce virtual xp by reskilling cross-trained skills.)

What is the theme of such a god? The question is not at all rhetorical, there have been many complaints in advance about the concept.

• Ashenzari seems very unflexible when it comes to the actual world. Presumably the deity is cursed in some way as well. Hence, followers can demonstrate dedication by donning cursed garb and gear.
• On the other hand, the god is one of knowledge. Pious followers can tap some of this power so as to see more than their neighbours will.
• The pinnacle of outward torpor yet inward flexibility is reskilling. While Ashenzari cannot change items or threaten monsters for you, there is help to change your way of life to accomodate to new situations.

What does it boil down to in actual play? I am happy to have won a SpAs of Ashenzari. Here are my impressions:

• There is a curse mini-game. Scrolls of Remove Curse and Curse Foo are valuable, throughout the game. I found this interesting in all of my testing games. An unfortunate Demonspawn happened to have only two rings early on, Hunger and Sustenance; so I cursed both.
• My winning Spriggan used only cursed jewellery. This was enough to get all the piety I needed — an indication that the piety boosts are too good at the moment.
• Whatever you curse, it will make you more inflexible. This is also interesting in practise.
• Seeing the presence of monsters is often very useful, when stabbing, fleeing, etc.
• You will use the two active abilities not very often but Scrying can be of high tactical value. It is not very expensive, too. Reskilling gives great strategical flexibility. If you are a caster, you don’t need to sweat about choosing schools to specialise. It would be possible to turn all your skills into Fighting and Spellcasting (something that was mentioned as an argument against the mechanic). I believe that this is a shortcut to kill off your character.

So the god is perfect then? Of course not. I think the current state is playable and (naturally) diverse enough, but there are rough edges:

• In order to gain the curses bonus for piety gain, you want more than half of your potential armour items cursed. Or at least two jewellery pieces. Or your weapon. In any case, there is no benefit for cursing more than that. But there should be. One solution would be to give a little piety boost for cursedness as now, and a higher boost for full cursedness (armour and jewellery only).
• Item and monster detection only tells you that something’s there. While there is Scrying, it would be much better to give slightly better feedback, e.g. to announce monsters in three levels (puny, approximately in depth, OOD) and to distinguish between plain and rare items.

As ever, you can play Ashenzari on CDO and, as usual, feedback is welcome. We are finetuning the god, so don’t expect your “This is a dumb god” to have a far-reaching effect.

So here’s the gargantuan listing of what’s been going on in 0.8 development. Enjoy!

Bug fixes

Critical bugs

1. Fix #2289: crashes on entering new levels with restart_after_game = true.
2. Fix Jiyva off-level eating crash.
3. Fix a crash when Jiyva worshippers spawn jellies for non-monster-damage.
4. Fix #2628: Don’t treat rods as throwable. Fixes crashes.
5. Fix a crash when autoinscribing items no longer in the inventory.
6. Fix ?/M crashing; monster_info won’t have a real monster.
7. Fix a demonspawn mutation loop.
8. Fix #2909: Prevent save file corruption for overly long player names.
9. Fix #537: wizard mode spellcasting crash.
10. Fix #2879: gods missing from the game due to corrupted_temple.

Non-critical bugs are listed under the corresponding category.

The big stuff

New god:

• Ashenzari, god of divinations

New species:

• Felids, sentient cats

New spells:

• Passage of Golubria (level 5 Translocations)
• Malign Gateway (level 7 Summonings/Translocations)
• Tornado (level 9 Air)

New monster sets:

• holy monsters
• deep dwarves
• feature mimics

The former two may be encountered in Ziggurats.

Everything else

Gods

Yredelemnul

• Turn Yred’s prayer (Injury Mirror) into an ability.
• Reduce Injury Mirror spam when getting hit by multiple attacks.
• Remove Yred’s twisted enslaved souls, they’re all intact now.
• Let torment damage be reflected by Yred.
• Take kills of artificial beings (golems, gargoyles).

Kikubaaqudgha

• Tone down Kiku’s mummy death curse protection.
• Kiku protects followers from ordinary mummy curses.
• Make Kiku properly accept your undead slaves’ kills of demons.

Elyvilon

• Allow Ely’s Destroy Weapons ability to work on staves.
• Improve Elyvilon’s healing descriptions.
• Improve Ely’s in-game pacification messaging.

Zin

• Allow Zin to protect from Hell effects, dependent on piety.
• Make spell failure glow anger Zin.
• Distinguish costly glow in Zin’s messages.

The Shining One

• Remove item sacrifices.
• Fix #2784: Properly remove halo on TSO penance.

All good gods

• Extending (card/Xom) Necromutation results in excommunication.

Xom

• Fix #2903: Disallow starvation by Xom swapping you to a vampiric weapon.
• Harmless new Xom effect: coloured smoke trail behind player.
• Tiles: Xom altar animations (by coolio).

Cheibriados

• Beefed up Chei wrath to be interesting and dangerous.
• Make armour keep its ponderousness when melded.

Jiyva

• Followers of Jiyva gain food, hp and mp on jellies slurping items.
• Jiyva no longer provides the “amulet of conservation” effect.

Trog

• Extended rage doesn’t cause glow.
• Fix #411: Properly handle igniting spellbooks under clouds or features.

Fedhas

• Fix #2457: Make Fedhas care about trees burned down in forest fires.

Sif Muna

• Sif Muna punishes destruction of spellbooks.

General

• Add some penance welcome messages.
• New wizmode command &W to force god wrath.

The player character

Bugs fixed

1. Fix doubled berserk penalties
2. Fix mutators and glowing occasionally giving good mutations.
3. Fix clarity being ignored in some cases when it’s supposed to be heeded.
4. Fix Merfolk in water having functional talons.
5. Fix #873: Make hellfire ignore monster AC.
6. Fix #2727: Handle passive freeze mutation properly handle in clouds of cold.
7. Fix #2186: Demonspawn Fire and Ice facets are now mutually exclusive.
8. Fix #2758: Blade Hands being better for STR and DEX of multiplies of 4.
9. Fix #2901: Player undead and Demonspawn can now be mutated properly again.
10. Fix some body slot mutations not taking effect immediately.
11. Fix #2205: Ghouls being unable to use food-cost abilities while starving.
12. Fix #2294: Let bloodless Vampires and starving Ghouls evoke invisibility.
13. Fix #2380: Scale Vampire hunger for poisonous blood with duration.
14. Fix #2136: Don’t train stealth for unaware pacified monsters.
15. Fix Empathy not working in portal vaults and Pan.
16. Always display ability upgrade messages in the proper sequence.
17. Fix skill points rescaling when changing race in wizmode.
18. Fix #2506: Update Draconians’ glyph on maturing (show_player_species).

Other player character changes

• More interesting Draconians.
• Dragon form changes for Draconians according to colour.
• Allow Merfolk transformations even in water.
• Retain talons, fangs and tail in appropriate transformations.
• Stalkers as transmutations-based Stabbers.
• Balanced demonic guardian timeout, minimum time of existence at 4 turns.
• Don’t treat contaminated chunks as clean for Ghouls.
• Allow Merfolk/Kenku to blink over deep water/lava.
• Allow Kenku to stop flying.
• Change Kenku aptitudes to air +3 and earth -3.
• Boost yellow scales acid resistance.
• Auxilary unarmed attacks have additional effects, according to type.
• Character selection: highlight recommended species in aptitudes table (%).
• Show cross/anti training as aptitude bonus/malus on the m-screen.
• Potions of berserk rage are useful for Vampires when full or above.
• Let fur help against acid, but only for naked slots.
• Healers gain 1 extra starting mp, but no Unarmed Combat.
• Allow redefining the spider form’s glyph (“spider”).
• Tiles fix: Fix Merfolk keeping the fishtail tile when levitating out of water.
• Tiles: Many new player doll tiles (by coolio).

Interface improvement

Bugs fixed

1. Fix #2513: exclusion LOS not being updated properly.
2. Fix #1983: Don’t waste a turn for not renouncing religion.
3. Fix cursor placement with messages_at_top.
4. Fix #2399: Tab not working correctly in startup menus.
5. Fix #2595: default god choice not being read correctly.
6. Fix #2228: Reinitialize the message window and the notes for new games.

Other interface changes

• Allow item interaction from the inventory.
• Messages for things coming into view even when not exploring.
• More status lights: transformation, post-berserk exhaustion, temporary resistances.
• Timeout information for temporary resists and See Invisible.
• Don’t consider places next to slime walls as “safe”.
• Make i_feel_safe smarter about stuff behind lava/statues/etc.
• Explicitly name inventory items that are getting destroyed.
• Display ghosts’ xl rank, species and background when they come into view and in the notes.
• ASCII: Don’t override monster colour when berserk.
• Stop shift-running for exclusions.
• Allow ‘ to auto-switch from unarmed to slot (b).
• Misc. items don’t require wielding (except decks, lantern of shadow).
• Don’t waste turns attempting known prevented scroll teleports/blinks.
• Abort scrolls used on items if none are available.
• Inscribe item modification scrolls with “tried on foo”.
• Disallow accidentally blinking to dangerous places.
• Disallow autoexploring while berserking.
• Colours for output of Ctrl-F.
• Re-enable highlighting of notes.
• Colour annotations in Overview.
• Colouring labyrinth messages.
• Add force_more_messages for bazaar and labyrinth announcements.
• Don’t prompt for which ring to swap if one of them is cursed.
• When enchanting an unknown piece of armour, mark it as uncursed.
• Make the . drop/pickup selector respect quantity input.
• ‘*’ inverts selection instead of selecting drop_filter, and ‘,’ selects all instead of inverting.
• More information when missing.
• More information when MR is effective.
• Display on the HUD if you’re both hasted and slowed.
• Add a toggle to the discoveries screen to display _un_known items.
• Check terrain before clouds for moveto check.
• Don’t warn about entering excluded portals.
• Force a -more- on death.
• Autoinscribe randarts after death.
• Allow easyexit on the overview screen.
• Add “You are wearing:” message when amulet of stasis autoIDs.
• Taskbar overlap is now automatically detected, and the window is placed just above it.
• Allow setting of the window size relative to the screen size.
• Tiles: Add a skill management tab. (Tiles by Denzi.)
• Tiles: Disturbance tiles for invisible monsters in clouds.
• Tiles: More helpful and less obnoxious exclusion tiles.

Spells

Bugs fixed

1. Fix #2018: Prevent passwalling into deep water and lava if it would kill you.
2. Fix #2581: Teleportation and trampling interrupt Passwall.
3. Fix #2274: Disallow targeting Passwall at self, thereby wasting a turn.
4. Fix weapon grinding via Shadow Creatures in the Hall of Blades.
5. Fix #801: Animate Dead no longer animates through walls.
6. Fix #2265: Don’t prompt for casting auto-hit spells “in direction” of allies.
7. Fix #2291: More accurate Conjure Flame error messages.
8. Fix #2598: bugginess in Confusing Touch status display.

Other spell changes

• Haste now makes you go at x1.5 speed, not x2 as before. Similarly, Slow makes you only
  1.5 times slower, not 2.
• Replace Selective Amnesia with scroll of amnesia.
• Allow forgetting spell from book, destroying the book in question.
• Removed slower training for magic schools, doubled exp cost for opposing schools.
• Add a toggle to the memorisation screen for the spell descriptions.
• Remove the restriction for cursed gear blocking transformations.
• Auto-id items of wizardry if you have spellcasting skills.
• Enable autotargeting for Vampiric Draining and Freeze.
• Make Borgnor’s Revivification cost 2-11 *percent* of maxhp.
• Restore casting noise for target spells.
• Add noise level to spell description.
• Increased claw damage for Dragon Form, also allows trampling.
• Animate Skeleton works on unskeletalized corpses and leaves chunks behind.
• Shadow Creatures summons only mobile monsters.
• Slightly bump Orb of Destruction (IOOD) damage.
• Mention the damage reduction for short range in IOODs’ description.
• Allow Sticks to Snakes on staves.
• Allow Tukimizing staves.
• Move Horrible Things and Haunt from Summonings into Demonology.
• Remove Call Imp, Abjuration and Recall from the book of Demonology.
• Move around spells between books of Summonings and Demonology.
• Reduce the chance of any book to be replaced by Power/Wizardry from 10% to 4%.
• Don’t prompt for targeting self with clouds if you’ve got the matching resistance.
• Make trying to cast Death’s Door when ineligible cost no time nor MP.
• Make only heavy armour remove Ozocubu’s Armour on wearing.
• Make large rocks do extra damage with Sandblast.
• Allow swapping to large rocks when Sandblast is memorised.
• Offer wielding coagulated blood for Sublimation of Blood.
• Make transformations affect stealth.
• Don’t prompt for unwielding weapons branded with Warp Weapon.
• Don’t incorrectly mark Levitation/Flight as useless.
• More sensible spell sorting in the memorisation list.
• Include spell hunger in the chardump.

Monsters

Bugs fixed

1. Fix #2450: Disallow monsters casting emergency spells while berserk.
2. Fix #2497: Disallow various attacks on submerged monsters.
3. Fix #33: sleeping trapdoor spiders submerging.
4. Fix #2862: silence message from off-screen monster.
5. Fix #2566: undead krakens’ tentacles regenerating health.
6. Fix #2280: Aizul casting sleep through allies, same for Mara’s bolts.
7. Fix #2547: rock worms aimlessly moving around instead of attacking.
8. Fix information leaks for misled monsters in monster_info.
9. Fix Pikel’s freed slaves following the player.
10. Fix #2434: Fix dispersal and Lugonu’s bend space blinking monsters more than once.
11. Fix monsters throwing unthrowable weapons.
12. Fix #2746: Prevent monsters from bleeding when no damage was dealt.
13. Fix #2452: Make jumping spiders leap rather than blink.
14. Fix #2609: buggy description of monster missile deflection.
15. Fix buggy monster names involving prefixes or adjectives.
16. Fix #2853: buggy messages for helpless monsters.

Other monster changes

• New monsters: silent spectre, sky beast.
• New monster spells: Cause Fear, Drain Life, Agony, Summon Elemental, Noxious Cloud.
• New unique: Mennas, unique angel.
• Compensate for the haste nerf by slowing monsters that most people fight hasted.
• Huge monsters (dragons, elephants) can trample smaller ones, moving them around.
• Krakens have multi-segment tentacles.
• Spiders can cling to walls which allows them to effectively bypass water and other obstacles.
• Limit number of summons from lamp of fire and fan of air.
• Get rid of chain paralysis.
• Prevent confused giant eyeballs from paralyzing.
• Make aquatic monsters chase instead of submerging if they can.
• Friendly monsters told to “wait here” don’t follow through stairs.
• Merged slimes split on polymorph.
• Ghost moth no longer hits like a bulldozer.
• Porkelated monsters can’t cast spells either.
• Enable elephant generation in Dungeon and Lair.
• Implement snail/turtle shells; withdrawing into such a shell adds extra protection.
• Replace monster spriggan warpers with berserkers.
• Monster draconians may upgrade their weapons/armour.
• Revert “more descriptive size names”.
• Print “zot!” sound when a friendly monster triggers a zot trap outside LOS.
• Make zombified monsters retain their stats (at least HD and HP).
• Monsters respect glowing when deciding whether to cast Invisibility.
• Ugly things may mutate if adjacent to a monster glowing with radiation.
• Make good and strict neutral monsters not choose nearby foes.
• Disallow armour mimics from taking the forms of hides.
• Naga/serpent glyph changes.
• Refactor monster vamp draining.
• Remove Duane, Francis, Norbert; rename Wayne to Wiglaf.
• Experimentally increase iron imps’ AC from 5 to 6.
• Experimentally decrease bushes’ AC from 30 to 15.
• Don’t consider plants/fungi “interesting”, no matter their rarity.
• Tiles: New mimic overlay (by coolio).
• Tiles: Different-coloured variant tiles for Tiamat (by minmay).
• New tiles for Geryon and the water elemental (by coolio).
• Tiles fix: Burning bushes now actually use their tile.

Level/Map changes

Bugs fixed

1. Fix #2493: portal vault levels not getting deleted.
2. Fix #1542: duplicate baileys in dungeon due to trowel card.
3. Fix #1870, #2651: beach-front portal vaults.
4. Fix #2641: entering portal vaults from Hell.
5. Fix #2837: Travelling to/from the Vestibule of Hell works now.
6. Fix #2576: Handle missing portal vault levels more gracefully.
7. Fix no-ctele announcements being affected by Tloc skills.
8. Fix vetoed levels messing up previous level’s connectivity data.
9. Don’t generate outright useless troves.
10. Fix #2394: Shoals incremental tide updates to guarantee a shallow water intermediate step.
11. Fix #1417: Don’t open transparent secret doors with warnings.
12. Fix #2583: Update stair emphasis on level load.
13. Fix good_item gold giving ludicrous amounts.
14. Fix traps on Zot:5 not being generated.

Other level changes

• Ambient noise levels for dungeon branches (affecting stealth).
• Add Spider levels to Zigs, with bonus ghost moths and tarantellas.
• Include 2010 tournament Dungeon Sprint map, slightly tweaked.
• Plain water fountains give no nutrition.
• Reveal teletraps triggered by a monster in sight.
• Replace hell exit stairs with portals.
• New temple maps, many with < 12 altars.
• Overflow altars for Xom.
• New orb chamber vaults.
• Boost alarm trap noise to 25.
• A custom trap: basket of spiders.
• A custom trap: falling grate.
• Many new entry vaults and mini vaults.
• Allow specifying monster gods in vaults.
• Add a KPROP “no_jiyva” that renders items safe. Used in slime end.
• Add explicit KFEAT: O = enter_branch, instead of relying on rune_subst.
• Add a wizard command (^E) that dumps level generation information.
• Tiles: New statue tiles (by coolio and LoginError).

Items

Bugs fixed

1. Fix #2435: stacks of blood potions breaking when eaten by jellies and coagulating.
2. Fix #2670: Autopickup weapons subjected to Tukima’s Dance.
3. Fix #2441: Disallow blowing Geryon’s horn when silenced.
4. Fix randarts with unknown base type sometimes not being eligible for identification.
5. Fix #2188: AutoID’d “clarity not identifying item type.
6. Fix #2224: rod pluses not being considered for ?identify.
7. Fix #1880, #2626: misleading spell descriptions on rods; display average power.
8. Fix #1998: unknown scrolls listing themselves in the item menu.
9. Fix #2807: wrong items showing up in the wield screen.
10. Fix #1791: Inscribe “was cursed” for items uncursed using enchant foo.
11. Fix #2597: incorrect “comes into view” message for Xom animated weapons.
12. Disallow creation of randart demonic weapons with the holy wrath brand.
13. Fix #2714: permafood being coloured brown like contaminated chunks.
14. Fix an information leak about magic resistance from unidentified items.

Other item changes

• Remove the robe of the Archmagi’s exp penalty, without any compensation.
• Fix the robe of the Archmagi doubly enhancing Haunt and Regen.
• New items: scroll of curse jewellery, scroll of amnesia.
• Antimagic weapon brand.
• New artefact: ring of Charms. (May enslave creatures of your species.)
• Disable equipment corrosion from slime walls.
• Asphyxiation resistance blocks curare damage, but not slowing.
• Poison resistance protects against curare entirely.
• Add new chunk type that is both poisonous and contaminated.
• Remove +AC/+EV from randarts. Fixedarts still keep them.
• Do proper foe checking for rod spells that are direct effects.
• ?EWII may uncurse blowguns.
• Remove nutrition on hit for vampiric weapons.
• Make Evocations skill help with ball of seeing radius.
• Disallow use of staff of channeling when starving.
• Give missiles of flame / frost some bonus damage.
• Add noise to missiles.
• Make wield mass check apply to all items.
• Make torment rarer in plain/ornate decks.
• Allow staves and rods to become cursed.
• Special and non-special unrandarts use the same generation code.
• More detailed corrosion resistance reporting.
• Tweak blood potion descriptions to mention nutrition for non-herbivores.
• Hide pluses for rings and rods in the \ menu.
• Tiles fix #2590: randomized animation of unidentified wand/missile.
• Tiles: New runed armour/weapon tiles (by LoginError).

Other Tiles-related changes

• Add Omndra’s cool new title screen.
• Reinstate the red haze during berserk.
• Improve default tiles layout for high resolutions.
• New blood tiles.
• Run pngcrush in non-debug builds if installed, shaving 700KB per download.

Some of the changes (especially for Tiles) can be admired on the updated Screenshot page.

Coding changes

• New save file format (safer, more convenient and *much* smaller).
• Autosave at game start and in Sprint, to keep crashes from losing the game.
• Internal changes to handling monsters/LOS/map/UI, merged from NetTiles.
• Merge “Zot Defense” code into trunk.
• Plug security holes: multiuser, chmod, …
• Except for public servers, ensure robustness against filesystem crashes.
• Reorder spell code by school and functionality.
• Simplify ghost I/O.
• Cleanup the level generation code.
• New option: show_real_turns (default off).

And with that, we’re up-to-date with version 0.8.0-a0-3582-g199d915.

As always, you can play trunk online or download a fairly recent build for Windows/Mac.
Please submit bug reports to our fabulous bug tracker and give feedback on the wiki. Thank you!

Mac and Windows binaries are on the development builds page as usual.

When filing bug reports on Mantis, please attach your save games if you have them. Also, please make your bug reports as detailed as possible to help us find and fix bugs before release.

Please pick up Mac and Windows builds for 0.7.0-rc2 on the development builds page. The new Windows installer is also available directly from the development builds page now.

There’s also a detailed list of changes if you enjoy that kind of thing.

Mac and Windows builds for 0.7.0-rc1 are available from the development builds page as usual.

We’re testing a new Windows installer for Crawl from kilobyte, and we’d appreciate feedback from Windows users.

Please file all bug reports on Mantis as usual.

If you haven’t been paying close attention (or you happen to be one of those backwards, curmudgeonly console players), you may have missed the boatload of new tile art going into 0.7. New dungeon! New monsters! New trousers! By my count, there were almost 300 modified or added tiles in this release.

This post is an overview of what you can expect to see when you start playing the shiny new version in a week or few.

A lot of this art has come from the ever-prodigious Poor Yurik (who you can thank for the new dungeon look, the spriggans, the kobolds, the goblins, the fabulous elephants, &c &c). However, there’s also a ridiculous amount of thanks for Denzi, coolio, Porkchop, LoginError, minmay, KiloByte, and others as well.

New Dungeon Tiles

The most immediate change that you will see in 0.7 is the new look for the main dungeon. Although it may look very grey at first blush, the desaturated colors on the walls and floors are intended to give the monsters and items a much more visible pop. This next picture is a comparison between how the main dungeon looked in 0.6 and how it looks now in 0.7.

It’s not just the tiles that have changed, though. There’s a few other code changes that make the new dungeon look even better. The left side of the following image is what 0.7 would look like if only the tiles had changed. The right side is what 0.7 actually looks like with the code and tile changes.

“Spot the differences!”

They’re all subtle, but there are three separate things going on in the picture on the right. First, like the water in the Shoals, there are transition wave tiles between shallow and deep water. Secondly, where ground touches water, there are some very thin transition shore tiles. Finally, shadows are added around walls to make them stand out as if they were lightly embossed.

One unexpected bonus from the new water tiles is that the previously garish 0.6 swamp is now a lot easier on the eyes in 0.7.

Finally, keep an eye out for the future! Poor Yurik has some great ideas about making the dungeon look even better that already have me excited for 0.8.

New Monster Tiles

A ridiculous number of monsters have gotten a facelift in 0.7. Here’s a quick comparison chart between old and new awesome.

There are also a whole lot of awesome new undead tiles for 0.7. The previous version only had two types of skeletons and zombies and only one spectral thing tile which made it nearly impossible to tell them apart.

To help you sort out which new monster tile is which, you may want to use the new “monster list” in the tiles version. You can find the monster list by clicking on the monster tab underneath the inventory and spell tabs. This will show all the monsters in view, sorted by difficulty.

Mouse interaction with the monster list functions just like mouse interaction with the dungeon. In other words, you can left click on the monsters in the list to move towards and attack them or right click to describe them. You can also zap spells, evoke wands, or fire quivered items using shift, ctrl, and alt key modifiers. It’s super convenient!

Trousers!!!

There’s one final change in 0.7 that I’d like to take the time to point out. After thousands tens of player complaints and bug reports, this critical issue has now been addressed.

Dignity is no longer an obstacle in the search for the fabulous Orb of Zot—players now enter the dungeon wearing not just pants, but trousers.

Mac OSX Tiles Build
(Last updated 2010-07-09, 0.7.0-a1-136-g6024cb9)

Mac OSX Regular Build
(Last updated 2010-07-09, 0.7.0-a1-136-g6024cb9)

We’re close to a release candidate for 0.7, but saves will remain compatible with the alpha versions of 0.7. Have fun with Menkaure in the Violet Keep (Sprint), courtesy Chapayev, and please report bugs on Mantis as usual.

Windows builds are available on the Development Builds page.

The consolidation aspect of 0.7:
* Monster double actions due to energy randomisation always include a move. The double action was a source of a lot of controversy. In 0.7, an adjacent monster won’t hit you twice, although a monster a step away might still approach and hit you in a single turn.
* Make heavy armour guaranteed damage reduction percentage independent of armour skill. This makes heavier armours a bit better again, after the severe but long overdue nerf in 0.6.

In other news, there have been a lot of improvements to Tiles, Tutorials (tutorial and hints mode are now distinct) and the interface in general. Crawl will also officially feature Chapayev’s awesome Sprint variant.

Gameplay-wise, the biggest changes are these:
* Demonspawns will feature less lottery; all mutations grow to the full; also, mutations are meaningful, in particular, many of them are specific to the species.
* Zin has finally seen the light help: Recite is less risky, hence more useful. Also, there’s a new ability, which allows to imprison intelligent monsters.

Feedback on DS, Fi and Zinners are appreciated. We won’t re-design these on short notice, with release being so close. But comments on how far you get (and got in older versions) would help to see gauge we stand with the new AC/DS/Zin.

Some more changes which will be of interest:
* Aptitudes now on a scale +5 to -5.
* Remove Death Knights and Thieves.
* Show effective weapon speed in ‘@’ character info.
* Walls in the Slime Pits are acidic.
* Changed shop distribution between branches.
* Removed instant stat death.

Changes since rc3:

• Remove the framerate limiter from tiles, as it was causing quite a few issues.
• Fix lag in tiles when autoexploring into a shop.
• Fix crash/save file corruption when Mara fails to summon an illusion.
• Using Lugonu’s Corruption ability no longer prevents special branch effects (such as re-enabling teleport control after picking up the rune in Tomb) from triggering.
• Used staircases are now colored green for upstairs and red for downstairs, on both the main screen and the X map (to be more easily distinguishable from unused staircases).
• Artifact amulets of stasis can no longer get the Rage or *RAGE properties.
• Weight display misalignment on the ^X screen should be fixed.
• Unwielding a non-weapon updates the wield display properly.
• Fix an error in the 034_monster_glyphs file.

-doy

Crawl 0.6.0-rc3 Mac Tiles

I’m not the person who usually builds Mac binaries so I may have screwed something up. If you notice problems with the build, please file bug reports on Mantis as usual.

Important bug fixes since 0.6.0-rc1:

• Fix various permanent stat change bugs related to equipment melding during transformations
• Monster list targeting should actually work properly now
• Fix tiles lag issues, and make the maximum frames per second configurable (for slower systems)
• Fix TSO worshippers not healing when killing demons
• Wizlabs have more balanced loot, random monster lists for shadow creatures, and have all tiles properly specified
• Fix acquirement giving players with bad shield apts almost solely two-handed weapons
• Fix Kirke’s hogs being hidden until they move, when they turn into humans on her death
• Fix monsters not showing up immediately when gaining see invisible from armour
• Rods should no longer highlight spells as though Vehumet is empowering them
• A few documentation fixes

Thanks for all the bug reports, and keep them coming!

As some devoted players may have noted already, the Divinations school is gone: vanished, disappeared, no traces left. Actually, that’s not quit true, some traces are still there.

But one thing after the other — why did the developers, blessed with their insight and wisdom, remove a whole spell school? The main reason is that some effects are interesting and useful, but should never have been spells. Most former divination spells belong in this category, including: Identify, Detect Curse, Remove Curse, Detect Creatures, Detect Items, Detect Secret Doors, Detect Traps and Magic Mapping.

Here is why:

1. All of these effects are not tactical. That’s the strongest indicator something is wrong with these spells. For example, use outside of battle means that the usual approaches for balancing spells won’t work: the MP cost is irrelevant and, for a slightly contrived example, one could go about casting Magic Mapping by taking off armour and using two rings and a staff of Wizardry.
2. Magic Mapping and Detect Traps are easy to pick up, even for otherwise strict non-casters and extremely useful. Ideal play would demand to get these spells and use them on every level. So not only are these spells inherently unbalancable, they break the game. What’s worse is…
3. Magic Mapping, Identify, Detect Curse, Remove Curse are copies of scroll effects. In other words, the accused spells remove interesting choices. Whereas the scrolls are valuable resources, the spells render them obsolete.
4. Most of the spells were never used; they were only added to provide some flesh for an otherwise barren school.

To be fair, there are other spells that suffer from this affliction: Alter Self is a spell never used tactically and many Conjuration spells have doubles among wands or abilities. Nevertheless, the Divination spells in the dock stand out like sore thumbs, and the verdict was unanimous: eradication.

Luckily, a few spells from the rotten school proved to be better, and they escaped extinction: See Invisible (now Enchantments) is a good way to increase dedicated casters’ flexibility. Forescry (now Phase Shift, a Translocation spell) is the EV counterpart of the various AC boosting spells. These are both of tactical value.

What does that mean for your 0.6 characters?

First, trap detection is now only done by the Traps & Doors skill. Second, scrolls of magic mapping and detect/remove curse are more valuable; although the latter two could still stand to appear less often. There have been some related changes which are worthy of mention: active abilities like levitate, sense surroundings, teleport are no longer potential properties of random artefacts. The reason is similar to 1 above: players should not be encouraged to carry around weapons for purposes which are outside of combat. While the mapping mutation still exists, it now works in a passive manner. Most players will find this to be more convenient. Finally, no form of magic mapping will find secret rooms.

The future

Scrying into the more distant future, there will be a god centered around a divination theme. In a curious deviation from the normal design process, the name is already fixed: Ashenzari, and this god’s powers allow us to fix the bad effects incriminated above. Also, there may come additional consumables to provide ways to Detect Something. The most natural candidates are scrolls and miscellaneous items. However, play-testing with the Divinations school removed, it was quite obvious that the need for such items is not as pressing as one may have thought.

So, stash your crystal balls and rods of divination, and let’s get onto the Great Big List!

A note by the editor: many thanks to David Ploog for providing this piece on the removal of Divinations. Tune in next week for something (hopefully!) on the new Portal Vaults feature in 0.6.

We’ll start at commit 290637fc2afa3, where we left off last week.

Bugs fixed

1. Some mouse slow-down has been resolved by reducing screen redraws.
2. Shaft trails are no longer generated on non-shaft levels.
3. Shopping list toggles now properly clear in-shops, while gold messages fit 80 columns when prices exceed thousands of gold.
4. Melee noise no longer wakes hibernated monsters on the turn that they have been hibernated on.
5. The shopping list symbol is now shown in the stash tracker shop inventories.
6. The screen is updated before delayed god gifts, meaning that messages no longer appear before gifts are actually granted.
7. Yellow draconians no longer have inherit resist corrosion.
8. Trog no longer appreciates kills of non-spellcasting ghosts.
9. Saint Roka now uses his special Messiah speech.
10. Some vaults have been repaired.
11. Tiles: mousing over areas out of sight no longer gives away undetected traps, needle tiles are now transparent instead of white background.
12. Brilliance’s spelling in Troves has been corrected.
13. Merfolk no longer enter water twice while in ice form.
14. Monsters flying over unknown traps and related detection has been fixed.
15. EV is redrawn after wielding weapons of evasion.
16. Weapon inscriptions will now appear in the proper region of the screen in tiles mode, and should no longer cause crashes.
17. The dungeon Lua item wrapper for egos has been fixed, “holy wrath” is now represented as such, instead of “hlywrath”.
18. Ctrl-X should now display Unicode items properly, while Unicode book glyphs are properly encoded in command help.
19. Ziggurat milestones are now generated through epilogue in post-generation hooks; this means that when a Ziggurat level fails to build for whatever reason, it will not generate upward of 35,000 milestones.
20. Shift-targeting Evaporate no longer increases its reduced range, while you are always prompted if you target yourself with it.
21. Bad line-break in the e’x'amine documentation has been fixed.
22. The non-existent Lair branch is properly hidden in the overview, while D:1 is properly reported as being explored fully.
23. The travel cache is now properly initialised before the ‘X’ map is viewed for the first time.
24. Crashes no longer occur if you die to a beam whose thrower is already dead.
25. Tiles no longer redraws as often while resting; this option is configurable using the tile_runrest_rate, and has reduced slowdown in resting.
26. Nessos will now properly fire his bow at people; likewise other spellcasters now have a chance of starting with a range weapon which they will then use.
27. An occasional crash when updating the monster pane with zombies in view has been fixed.
28. Excessive Jiyva piety gain has been improved.
29. Non-ego ponderous armour now uses the ponderous brand tile.
30. An off-by-one error fix for background colouring has been reverted as it caused other weird background colouring issues.
31. Tiles targeting mode performance issues have been fixed.
32. Tiles not running with umlauts in the game path has been resolved.
33. Killer klowns are properly treated as chaotic.
34. Map knowledge is no longer inappropriately filled in the Abyss.
35. Tiles no longer causes a delay on the last step of auto-travel, and beams targeting the player function correctly.
36. Mummy death curses should no longer cause crashes when they kill a moving animal.
37. Jiyva piety gain has been greatly improved.
38. Tiles: it is no longer possible to scum Fulsome Distillation for endless amounts of water potions.
39. Tiles: secret doors should now function properly both for vault-selected tiles as well as normal wall types.

Features changed

1. Pandemonium levels now generate milestones.
2. Current status and full fee are now displayed in relevant places for Trove portals, while the locking message is more explicit.
3. Tiles: new (preliminary) tiles for teleporter vaults, rusted sewer portal.
4. Monster-used shafts are now destroyed, while known shafts are safe for monsters.
5. Butterflies no longer generate corpses.
6. Shopping-listed items are no longer coloured cyan.
7. Necromantic spells are no longer marked as empowered by Kikubaaqudgha.
8. “Wandering” stationary monsters are described as “unaware”.
9. Transmuter ghosts retain Evaporate as Mephitic Cloud.
10. Overview display has been tweaked slightly.
11. Tutorial spacing has been made consistent, and a description has been noted for monsters that do not have any resistances, while information on chunks making you sick has been included.
12. Descriptions are no longer shown if pointing at floor/walls in targeting mode.
13. Friendly monsters will no longer animate corpses that you are butchering, nor will they animate corpses while you are less than satiated.
14. Animate dead now uses specific verbs instead of defaulting to “walking” when animating monsters that do not walk.
15. Tiles: in-flight tiles for the new sling bullet types.
16. Player ghosts speak properly now, instead of using default ghost speech, and they now optionally use speech dependent on their best skill.
17. Smart monsters and natives will walk over unknown shafts without triggering, while stupid monsters will always trigger them, regardless of nativity; low weight monsters have a chance of escaping a shaft.
18. Tiles defaults to using CSET_ASCII instead of IBM.
19. Kraken tentacles are now water-only, and the speed of both kraken and their tentacles have been increased.
20. Scrolls of detect curse now automatically identify, unless you have no items in your inventory.
21. You are now prompted for saving macros when exiting the game, if you have actually changed them; this also applies to dying, quitting or escaping.
22. Milestones are now generated for Labyrinths as well as Bazaars, meaning that all portal vaults generate milestones.
23. Milestones now report the parent level that you entered from properly, thus, “FOO entered BAR (D:1)”, instead of “FOO entered BAR (BAR)”.
24. All efreeti, including Azrael, now have flame trails.
25. slouch no longer affects sleeping monsters.
26. Island and atoll creation algorithms for Shoals have been improved.
27. Tiles: demon pentagrams use a smaller icon in design.
28. Skill training has been improved.
29. Donald is no longer missing speech for Vehumet worshippers.
30. Chaotic, like mindless, is mentioned when examining monsters.
31. Experimentally, demon pentagrams are now coloured differently.
32. Improved tile: hexagonal wall tile.
33. The default low hit-points warning is now 30%, instead of the previous value of 10%.
34. Alter Self now aborts, instead of failing, when your hit-points are too low to cast it.
35. Terrain is now stored in map knowledge, meaning that it is possible to view what terrain is under a current cloud, while clouds are no longer copied to map knowledge; the key ‘|’ can be used to show just the terrain in e’x'amine mode.
36. The credits have been expanded to specifically list some major contributions by past and current community members.
37. New tiles: hive-shaped walls instead of rock walls for the Hive.

Other changes

1. Documentation update: milestones are now used in epilogues, rather than the main Lua code chunk.
2. Documentation for autofight.lua.
3. Documentation has been updated to explain the difference between “any good_item” and “|” symbols.
4. Combination of speech tags for Donald are no longer needed and have been removed.
5. Makefile, debug, and wizard and some code improvements.
6. Documentation: the new aptitudes system is explained further.
7. A variety of placeholders have been added to dngn.png to allow for additions to tiles in 0.6.
8. MONS_GHOST now exists and is the base type for ghosts, instead of MONS_PLAYER_GHOST being the base type for all ghostly creatures.
9. Dynamic monster casts from actor have been replaced by actor::as_monster.
10. New framework for portal debugging using x+”. This queries the “portal_debug” property of a marker, allowing the hooking in of specific debug functions, or simply returning relevant text values.
11. Considerable tweaks to autofight.lua and the mons_info Lua wrapper.
12. LuaJIT 2.x is now included as a submodule for testing purposes, though is currently not used by default.
13. The stash_filter option now only affects the stash searching; filtered items are still stored, but are merely filtered out.
14. There is now a maximum FPS rate limiter for tiles, and documentation about lag issues has been updated with possible solutions.
15. Skill exercise and cross-training checks have been cleaned up and simplified.
16. Casting spell source code has been improved.
17. Dungeon Sprint has now been merged into the main repository.
18. The tiles create guide has been updated.
19. Debug information can now be generated for random monster spawns.
20. Arena monster vetoing for Abyss monsters has been fixed.
21. Major version has been increased to avoid compatibility issues with 0.6 saves.
22. The identified/type check for dungeon Lua items has been improved.

That’s us up-to-date at commit 1696ef06816e705! Tune in next week for another big list, and, as mentioned above, hopefully something on recent additions to the realms of Portal Vaults.

Tune in next week for a piece discussing the recent removal of the Divinations school! We’ll start where we left off last week, at commit b11820d43d9!

Bugs fixed

1. Force shallow water for icy Swamp ending, as azure jellies are not amphibious.
2. Traps no longer trigger when leaving ice form.
3. Troves should now have correct descriptions.
4. Killing fleeing kraken or otherwise disturbing them should no longer cause random crashes.
5. Some relevant vaults have been tagged as no_monster_gen in order to prevent generation of electric eels and so on.
6. Some visibility checks have been simplified and fixed, hopefully fixing issues with monsters smiting through walls, etc.
7. The < and > symbols should now appear properly in the Portal spell prompt.
8. Fedhas’s shoot through neutral plants message now checks player’s line of sight.
9. Use of religion in speech should hopefully be fixed.
10. Shoals tide should be applied after post-processing vault heights, not during initial generation.
11. Runed ammunition now appears as such, and is displayed in the “Quiver” section of the HUD.
12. Acquirement no longer produces orcish animal skins, etc.
13. The tutorial screen will no longer appear when falling out of the characters election screen.
14. Tiles: the “no spells” message will no longer be displayed repeatedly when in the ememorisation tab.
15. The cursor is drawn immediately whene using direction in tiles, preventing instances where it is not actually printed until the cursor is moved.
16. Attacking friends previously did not trigger under some circumstances. This has been resolved.
17. Xom will never say “No, never mind” after a successful acquirement.
18. Memorisable spells will no longer be marked as invalid in Tiles, likewise the memorisation display will not be drawn without memorisable spells.
19. Autoexplore now works after leaving bat form.
20. Drowning checks for unequipping randarts are only run when actually levitating; this prevents merfolk from being unable to unwield randarts with the +Lev property while swimming in deep water.
21. Tiles: inventory mouseover descriptions will now be displayed properly.
22. ‘x’ and mouse-click travel are now usable in the Abyss.
23. Cheibriados will no longer permanently gift merfolk stats, nor permanently deduct them.
24. Several typos in Xom’s description were fixed.
25. Tiles: Messages are now flushed after examination of the level map prompts.
26. Tiles: the net tile is no longer drawn under the player while the player is trapped.
27. Spells can now target active ballistomycetes once more.
28. Firing with the direction keys will no longer give mephitic cloud extra range.
29. For Jiyva worshippers, neutral slimes (such as eyeballs) that previously did not eat items but were given the ENCH_EAT_ITEMS will now actually eat items.
30. Some actions that would kill merfolk due to -stat bonus are prevented.
31. An incorrect tile-name causing occasional crashes has been fixed.
32. The unrandart Vampire’s Tooth now functions halfway between old and new vampiricism brand.
33. Tile offsets are capped at 0 for clouds with negative decays; this prevents them from selecting strange tiles.
34. Known amulets of stasis will no longer allow you to waste blink and teleport scrolls.
35. The shield display value will be updated when the player is disabled, and the colour is changed if the player is actually wearing a shield.
36. Sewers will no longer generate large amounts of gold.
37. Randart amulet of inaccuracy descriptions should be fixed.
38. Thrown branded launcher ammunition no longer cause status effects when thrown at monsters (“hillbilly sting”).
39. Reconverting to Jiyva after abandonment will no longer cause an assert; a timeout is now used for Jiyva’s mutation gifts.
40. Being hit by a warrior statue will no longer cause a crash.
41. Autopickup now functions properly in the Abyss.
42. Sticky flame is no longer put out when hovering above water.
43. Some instances of Troves reporting “compare value to nil” have been fixed.
44. Tiles: Shift/Ctrl + L-Click now properly targets the selected moster, and mouse click targeting now works for Evaporate.
45. Further typo fixes.
46. Tiles: The map is redrawn staright away when setting exclusions with ‘xe’.
47. Tutorial: Sif Muna’s altar is special-cased for non-spellcasters.
48. The ‘%’ symbol is now properly printed and escaped when being displayed, instead of being assumed to be a printf token.
49. Tutorial: A hint to go berserk when low on hit-points is no longer given if the player is already berserk.
50. Experience halving for summon kills, etc, now gives the correct halved value for monsters with low XP values.
51. You will no longer be asked twice if you want to switch weapons when interrupted during butchering.
52. Death’s door no longer prevents winning.
53. Lugonu’s corruption no longer preserves “essential” features, such as altars, but destroys them instead.
54. Only positively enchanted needles are marked as “runed”, instead of all branded needles (and therefore, all needles).
55. Tiles: a segfault on the update of the tiledef files has been fixed.
56. Incorrect message for spells being unmemorisable due to Lichform has been fixed.
57. Long book descriptions should appear correctly in the console version, while ?/ will also display book descriptions.
58. Uniques that are zombifiable are no longer picked as random spawns.
59. Mummy self-restoration now works on rotted HP independent of rotted stats.
60. Stash brand is applied to stationary monsters, such as statues, who are standing on top of loot.
61. Corpse glyphs and corresponding messages are now correct in the tutorial.
62. Tiles: blood and mold are no longer displayed when out of sight, in order to prevent information leak.
63. Draconians and skeletal warriors, etc, now have correct tiles in the Abyss.
64. Clouds are now described when examining surroundings using the ‘x’ command.
65. Tiles tooltips no longer give away the presence of invisible monsters.
66. Distortion unwield effects do not apply to temporarily branded weapons.
67. “Bad” chunks from disintegrated monsters are marked as dropped and are not automatically picked up.
68. Elyvilon’s guaranteed protection from harm during prayer is now guaranteed.
69. Leaving the dungeon during the tutorial no longer prompts twice.
70. CMD_MAP_JUMP and related command keys are now properly and correctly documented.
71. Uniques with specific weapons (Psyche’s chaos branded dagger, Yiuf’s staff, Pikel’s whip, etc) will no longer ditch them for “better” weapons.
72. Duplicate punctuation has been fixed in some feature descriptions.

Features changed

1. Four new books: book of the Dragon, book of Burglary, book of Dreams and book of Chemistry.
2. Troves now report needed item in the overview and full description screens, as well as needed amounts.
3. Potions of magic are less rare, and now come in stacks.
4. Targets of Fedhas’s Evolution get a bonus to their HD propotional to invocations power; oklob plants’ chance of using their acid spit is a function of their HD.
5. Monsters can now use special abilities while out of line of sight of the player.
6. “Glowing” ammunition is now described as “runed” ammunition.
7. New tiles: rune ammunition, silenced grids.
8. Vampiric weapons no longer cause hunger over time.
9. Randart launchers no longer get the evasion brand.
10. Joseph now uses slings with enchanted ammunition.
11. Skeleton depths have been fixed, and OOD generation on Dungeon:2 has been reduced.
12. Bone shards has had a significant buff.
13. The summoning of hostile vapours with the Foxfire card generates a warning.
14. Silver only hurts corporeal undead, as opposed to incorporeal; it also affects highly mutated players, though it doesn’t take racial mutations into consideration unless the player in question is a demonspawn; silver no longer cares about monsters of players who worship chaotic gods, hwoever, Zin still does.
15. Frederick’s speech and description have been overhauled.
16. Tiles: new tab tiles and icons for spellcasting, etc.
17. Rock is more predominantly used in Shoals generation, using stone outcroppings merely for high points.
18. Tiles: while switching tabs, the name of the new mode is now displayed in the text tag.
19. Fedhash’s Growth ability now has a visualisation of what order plants will be placed in, including priority numbering for tiles.
20. Player ghosts no longer get bonus HP from transformations or berserk statuses they may have had when dying.
21. Dowan and Duvessa now pacify as a pair; they also have different speech for when one of them has been killed by the other (enslavement, confusion, etc).
22. Wayne’s flavour has been improved in both speech and description, using a Glaswegian accent instead of the previous faux Scots.
23. “There is nearby!” has been changed to ” is nearby!”. Appropriate for “there is a giant bat nearby”, but inappropriate for “there is edmund nearby”.
24. Tiles: new tooltip for disarming adjacent mechanical traps; altars, stairs and gates, shops and fountains, and known shaft traps are now no longer overlaid with blood or mold; mold now has tiles.
25. Tiles: Shift-L-Click on the minimap is now a shortcut for autoexplore.
26. Forbidden or dangerous spells are now marked as such in the description of the spell.
27. New tiles: chests, currently unused, the “wounded” HP bar is now coloured darkred instead of black.
28. Labyrinth entrance description now notes its shifting walls.
29. Message colourings are gone from food_colouring.txt, meaning that some unrelated messages will no longer be coloured as food.
30. Fedhas worshippers now have a message when their food is protected from spore destruction; likewise, the “evolves to an oklob” message has been improved”.
31. “You must be new here” no longer appears in the character choice menu.
32. Ctrl+L-click spellcasting behaviour now uses ‘Z’ (force) behaviour instead of ‘z’ (fail when no enemy present) behaviour.
33. Tiles: chunk brand tiles have been improved, new icon for rotten corpses, which will be displayed if the player is non-saprovorous.
34. Wielding a cursed weapon triggers the tutorial curse message.
35. Exclusions centred on doors are annotated as such.
36. Fedhas’s Growth method has been improved, and given more detailed messages when it doesn’t work; it also no longer reacts to invisible monsters.
37. For Fedhas worshippers, piety loss is no longer so great for fungal colonies dying; this is unlikely to occur in any event.
38. Hunger per turn is no longer proportional to time taken during that turn; this means that fast races no longer gain less hunger, and slow races no longer gain extra hunger.
39. Iskenderun’s Orb of Destruction’s damage has been reduced when at close range, and its accuracy is now tied to spell pwoer.
40. Clouds’ exclusion radii now depend on cloud type.
41. In inventory prompts, “?” and “Esc” commands are now listed for menu access and quitting.
42. Scrolls of enchant weapon now mention that they affect wielded weapon, rather than a weapon contained in the inventory.
43. Robe of the Archmagi description has been improved to reflect EXP loss.
44. New tile: stealth brand, “strange machine”, shark tile cleanup.
45. There are now safe-guards that make killing oneself with crystal balls harder.
46. Monsters now reveal Zot traps which they trigger.
47. Moderate OOD level fuzz has been reduced to +5 from +7.
48. Mara, as a demonic creature, is no longer silencable.
49. New tile: Wizard Laboratory portal vaults.
50. Vehumet’s altar is no longer described as “shining”, in order to avoid conflict with The Shining One’s.
51. New tile: the Abyss portal tile backgrond is now sky blue, making it more noticeable.
52. You can now set and remove travel exclusions with the e’x'amine option, using ‘e’.
53. New vaults: bazaars, Hive:2, bailey map, ossuary, and sewers.
54. Improved monster descriptions.
55. Improved speech in the Cigotuvi WizLab.
56. Fedhas’s Reproduction ability now indicates on the screen where spores will be placed before generating them.
57. Monster weights, sizes, zombie and corpses havebeen tweaked.
58. Pandemonium Lord level messages are now made following generation, rather than before.
59. Ilsuiw is no longer considered a natural leader of her party, nor are other boss merfolk.
60. Pathfinding has been cleaned up, meaning that monsters should no longer hide behind trees if there is no shorter route towards the player.
61. Artefact weapons now always have one other non-brand property.
62. Tiles: Ctrl+Shift is now a synonym for Alt in mouseclick combinations.
63. Tutorial now gives information on how to zap wands.
64. Shoals no longer places aquatic monsters, bringing its total experience up in line with that of the Snake Pit.
65. Portal vault milestones and welcome messages now use Lua epilogues, meaning that milestones will no longer be generated by the thousands every time a vault (such as a Ziggurat) fails to build.
66. Bazaars now generate milestones.
67. Players can now browse “risky” spell books, while power, range and food cost are shown when viewing descriptions.
68. Tiles: giant new tile is now a lighter shade of gray, making it stand out from the dungeon floor; crocodile shadow has been tweaked, new alligator and baby alligator tiles, Tukima’s strange machine, more variants for Makhleb’s altars, inky waves for kraken’s ink clouds, Cigotuvi’s Monster.
69. Tiles: Jiyva’s altar now jiggles, runed steel and silver ammunition.
70. Ossuary portals are now coloured brown to differentiate from shops.
71. Unseen altars are no longer displayed in character dumps or morgues.
72. Tile: new tile for lichform/necromutated players.
73. New messages mentioning the disappearance of the previous portal and the fact that the walls shift are now printed in Labyrinths.
74. Tile: new design for the Cheibriados altar, now with a clock as well as a turtle

Other changes

1. The Lua monster wrappers have been extended for debug purposes.
2. Wizard mode created items now properly gain cosmetic flags.
3. dgn.cloud_at wrapper, returning a string value for the relevant cloud, or none otherwise.
4. mons_is_insubstantial has been refactored into an actor function.
5. Monster death effects now exist in their own file.
6. Shop help is now printed on a separate line.
7. Alternate (system, shipped, etc) fonts are stipulated using #define.
8. Documentation updates (release, monster speech, etc.)
9. Crawl will kill itself within 10 seconds of seeing a SIGHUP, if it does not otherwise respond.
10. Lua maps now support “epilogue” Lua chunks, run after the generation of the Dungeon, allowing for messages to be displayed (and the more() command to be called) after the screen is updated with the new level, rather than before.
11. Use “sqldbm.h” instead of <sqldbm.h>, as it’s a local header file.
12. The tutoriial’s hardcoded options have been changed, and a lot of information in it has been updated; secret doors on the first level in the tutorial have also been made unsecret.
13. The MinGW rltiles makefile has been removed, rltiles now properly generates dependency files, and the tiledef files are only updated if changed.
14. The lua cache is regenerated whenever the executable is rebuilt.
15. test_lua_boolchunk now reports errors for the proper lua chunk.
16. player::{water,lava}_in_sigh functions have been removed.
17. Wizard-mode identify adds autoinscriptions for randarts, wizmode &o+ always turn mundane items into artefacts.
18. New manual section for autoinscription abbreviations.
19. Dependencies should now work for files in subdirectories.
20. The rltiles makefile has been improved.
21. The xcode project has been fixed.
22. Skill aptititudes are now on a logarithmic scale, where 0 is the default “average”, a positive integer is good, and a negative integer is bad.
23. For dgamelaunch builds, timestamps are recorded every 100 turns to a .ts file in the morgue directory.
24. Wizmode portal descriptions (&P) are now correct.
25. Large amounts of documentation updates.

And that’s us mostly up-to-date at commit 290637fc2afa3! Please remember that this applies specifically to trunk. Not all of these changes have been cherry-picked into the 0.6 branch and are therefore not live on crawl.develz.org. You can find current builds of both trunk and the 0.6 branch on the trunk page and its archive.

Good luck and good play-testing!

As you might or might not know, the overall Shoals development happened with the speed of a glacier. First started during the development of 0.3.x, the beginning of the Shoals implementation, then codenamed Islands, roughly coincided with Enne Walker’s integration of tiles into Stone Soup. To me, it thus makes perfect sense to have a look at the relationship between Tiles and Shoals development.

Actually, the very first effect of the Shoals on the game had nothing to do with tiles and was quite indirect:
With the unexpectedly slow development of our first attempt at creating a new dungeon branch and the huge success of portal vaults, both of which were introduced around the same time, level designers were encouraged to implement their branch ideas in the form of portal vaults. One could say that indirectly, the Shoals’ repeated postponement resulted in a larger number of portal vaults than might otherwise have been the case.

Shoals screenshot in DCSS 0.5.2 wizard mode

When I had my first look at the tiled version of Dungeon Crawl, around the release of 0.3.2, I believe it already had Denzi’s beautiful sandy floor tiles, but the Shoals didn’t have a unique monster set yet, instead drawing on centaurs, cyclopes and fish. During 0.4 development, Haran Pilpel changed the Shoals’ level generation to create a number of islands, the size of which decreased as their number increased the deeper you delved into the branch. We also added merfolk fighters and mermaids as well as the Shoals-only unique cyclops Polyphemus, but little else happened. 0.5 saw the addition of sirens, harpies, sharks and the unique merfolk sorceress Ilsuiw, but that was still by far not enough to declare the branch “ready for shipping”.

Sure, we were dreaming of plants and rocky island shapes, a greater merfolk variety, krakens and tides, but it all seemed so very far away.

Shoals screenshot in the 0.6 development version, showing new water and kraken tiles

Then, in 0.6, suddenly things picked up speed, as many developers chimed in so as to, this time, finally get the Shoals out of the door. First, the rock border was changed to “open sea”, both to slam down on the cheap trick of digging out the level border and for greater flavour. A while later, Denzi’s new water tiles were added, their wave like look considered perfect for a sea-based dungeon branch. Next came Adam Borowski’s implementation of the fearsome kraken, and, of course, the addition of the corresponding tiles, again courtesy of Denzi. The idea of krakens inhabiting the Shoals was actually a very old one, but it took a long time for us to work out how to handle its tentacles, now treated similarly to summoned monsters that disappear when they stray too far away from the kraken’s main body.

A few months later, Darshan Shaligram stepped in, and in a series of baffling commits greatly overhauled the Shoals’ level generation — and introduced tides! Without the islands’ previous strongly elliptic shape, the levels now look much more natural and the tides’ rising water gives a sense of urgency to exploring the branch, especially as the merfolk monsters, now of greater variety and more dangerous than ever before, feel very much at home there and don’t mind high tide in the least.

When I had a look at the new and improved Shoals, I couldn’t help thinking that the water tiles’ clearcut edges, while working okay for stagnant bodies of water, looked out of place with the rise and fall of the sea. Thus, the introduction of the tides prompted me to add transitional wave tiles between water and floor, something that incidentally would have been much harder to do without Denzi’s new tiles.

0.6 Shoals screenshot, featuring Ilsuiw and entourage, as well as a snapping turtle

Unfortunately, the overlays for monsters standing in water couldn’t cope with the new dynamically constructed water tiles, which is why Enne Walker rewrote the Tiles’ transparency calculations – twice! – so the overlays are displayed correctly for everyone. You see, one of the methods doesn’t work well for some systems, so we had to implement another, simpler way of doing overlays. The former method is nicer and can be enabled by setting the option tile_better_transparency = true. As it’s not entirely reliable we unfortunately can’t make it the default one.

Independently from that, we also modified the code to allow developers to assign weights to tile variants in a tileset, so they can have different probabilities of being used when chosen at random. Again, I mostly had the Shoals in mind when I did that because I felt that the more eyecatching “large rock” floor tiles shouldn’t be as common as the ones featuring pebbles or only sand, though it also came in handy for the animated water tiles as well as for a variety of wall types. The animations, incidentally, were not spawned by the Shoals but were originally supposed to be a mere debugging tool in tracking down the infamous Tiles’ lag. Then I liked the effect so much that I applied it whereever I could. :)

After December’s introduction of merfolk aquamancers, javelineers and impalers, in January, we got snapping turtles and alligators. While I was happy to see the Shoals becoming more and more interesting, the tiles developer in me grumbled quite a bit about the sudden demand for more and more new tiles. It was a similar frustration, actually, in response to the great number of tileless new uniques, which led me to create some public lists on the wiki covering missing tiles for 0.6 and elsewhere, which in turn resulted in us getting more tile submissions from players than we’d ever bargained for, including redesigns of old uniques and, of course, many tiles for new monsters and dungeon features. At the same time, my working method has always been to add tiles in two phases: first, a preliminary version that is workable and hopefully not too shabby, and later, an improved version thereof. This is why, all the while the other development took place, already existing tiles (and not only for monsters) were getting tidied up, modified to some degree, or replaced with new designs, some of them contributed by non-devteam members. Today, of the Shoals monsters, only the alligators are still lacking tiles.

0.5.2 Shoals monster tiles, plus first turtle version

0.6 Shoals monster tiles, now improved

Development of the Shoals continues, and overhauls of level generation have branched out to other sections of the Dungeon, such as the Lair, the Swamp, the Vaults. Meanwhile, the tile developers of the team like the transitional water tiles much more than we had anticipated and are by now planning to apply the new water tiles and wave transitions to the rest of the Dungeon as well. In the long run, we’d like to make levels look less grid-like, less “tiled” for lack of a better word, in general by also smoothening the transitions among other tile types, most prominently floor, and maybe also some of the more natural wall types. For 0.6, we regard the Shoals as some kind of testing ground where we can experiment with the goal of a smoother level layout.

0.6 Shoals screenshot, between ruins and the open sea

Just imagine the whole of the dungeon looking like that! I certainly like what I’m seeing and I hope you do, too.

This week we’re going to take a few minutes to discuss those things rather than focusing on a specific set of changes.

We’ll get the negatives over and done with first: crawl.develz.org will now be hosting 0.6 branch binaries and serving 0.6 via secure shell and telnet until 0.6 is officially released (hopefully, shortly). This means that you won’t be able to playing bleeding edge, up-to-date trunk at all the usual places.

That’s not much of a negative, is it? And there are so many more positives: this means that the next stable release of DCSS, namely 0.6, will be released relatively soon! Hooray! All of the things that you’ve been reading about on the blog will be in it, as will a large amount of the commits mentioned in the posts over the coming weeks. It does mean that we have a large amount of testing and balancing left to do and this is where you, the faithful reader, come in!

You can read about current 0.6 targets that we’ve been polishing and testing here. The easiest way to contribute to this process is simply to play the game and comment on any issues (bugs, balance and so on) that you might encounter.

The easiest way to comment would be to reply to this post. For bugs, however, please file an issue on our Mantis tracker; you can also post comments to the crawl-ref-discuss mailing list, open feature requests (also on the Mantis tracker) or tell us directly via IRC (##crawl-dev on freenode). Good play-testing and good luck!

And now, onto The Great Big List, starting at commit cf82e8e8ec.

Bugs fixed

1. The Lernaean Hydra’s multiheaded attack has been restored, as has its ability to target multiple foes in one round.
2. Further references to Shoal:X have been replaced by references to Shoals:X, hopefully removing the last of these strange bugs.
3. A bug with the Message Window clearing the screen after –more– prompts has been fixed, removing a crash in the Arena.
4. Trees and plants now block opacity, meaning that monsters will attempt to pathfind around them instead of just standing there watching you.
5. Unique maps are now tagged as “transparent”, meaning that these creatures can be placed in “encompass” maps (such as the pre-generated Vaults, Tomb, Vestibule of Hell and so-on).
6. Active armour training is now 1.5 per successful attempt, instead of the previous 1 per successful attempt as caused by the light/heavy distinction removal.
7. Shallow water transparency rendering on some platforms with improper OpenGL support now functions properly; the previous functionality (manually-drawn transparency, “player sliced in half with a laser”) is currently default, but the new functionality can be enabled with “tile_better_transparency”.
8. Merfolk aquamancers will no longer fire icicles through like-attitude monsters.
9. A rare crash in acquirement code (a misplaced parenthesis) has been fixed.
10. Large clusters of uniques should no longer be as common, as the chances of placing another unique reduce sharply after three have been placed.
11. Tiles: Crashes on secret doors with overridden tiles should no longer occur. Secret doors should also correctly take a variant tile from nearby neighbours; this removes the previous “last_tile” hack.
12. Artefact amulets of Stasis also prevent teleportation properly, while these artefacts will not come with properties involving teleportation or blinking.
13. Messages reported on the turn before death will properly show up in the morgue and character logs.
14. Tracers will no longer continue past features that their beams cannot destroy, meaning that monsters will no longer attempt to target the player through trees.
15. Hopefully, all of the INVALID BEAM messages have been resolved; instances of this happening in messages involving Smite have been removed, while ghosts should have proper spellcasting flags meaning that they no longer “throw energy” but actually cast spells; finally, vapours should no longer generated INVALID messages.
16. _finalise_tile calling feat_is_ for out-of-bounds cells should be fixed, no longer causing a crash at map edges.
17. Apportation and other beam spells no longer mentioned “transparent wall” (a holdover from when there were no trees).
18. Vampires of sufficient EXP now have the bottle blood ability displayed at all times in the Ability screen, not just when there are available corpses.
19. Macros maps will no longer expand exponentially until they contain all sequences and subsequences of keys entered by the player in a session.
20. Fedhas’s Evolution ability now prioritises low count stacks of food over high count stacks of fruit.
21. Blessed blades are no longer even considered for acquirement purposes, as they only way to get these is via the worship of the Shining One; this means that long blade acquirement (specifically, acquirement via Trog and Okawaru) should actually generate long blades.
22. If two Lair branches have already been discovered, the third (and not generated) will not be displayed on the overview; finally, Hell portals begin showing up on D:21, not D:20.
23. Friendly monsters will no longer cast Dig at the player, fixing messages such as “Your Cacodemon gestures at you.”.
24. Friendly monsters will no longer attempt to cast emergency spells that are targeted (such as teleport other, blink other) on the player when at low health.
25. Finally, friendly monsters will no longer cast self-enchantments on the player.
26. Gourmand is marked as useful for non-full saprovores, and is marked as useful for ghouls (as it provides “instant rotting” of chunks).
27. The aptitude table width has been increased, allowing proper highlighting of aptitudes to work.
28. Monster casting targets now default to “something” instead of “nothing”, preventing weird messages.
29. Tracers no longer give away unidentified exploding missiles.
30. Clouds in the Cloud Mage Wizard Laboratory no longer break rest.
31. Friendly monsters will now use the player’s genus for relation checks, instead of their foe.
32. Manually specified grid colours will be visible once returning to a targeting prompt.
33. Confused monsters will properly zap wands in random directions, instead of always at themselves or the player.
34. Kikubaquudgha’s Weapon Blessing is now properly noted on the ^ screen.
35. Monster speech now functions properly in the Dungeon; previously, “Dungeon” was not being considered a branch prefix, meaning that only monsters whose entries contained this prefix (currently none) would speak.
36. Creation of randart books no longer causes a crash due to increasing the maximum size of CrawlVector.
37. Identification of the Singing Sword now functions properly, giving the “Hi, I’m the Singing Sword!” message.
38. Erica no longer gives misleading statements about drinking potions; this line has been removed from her speech.
39. Unique vaults that are transparent will now be placed with regard for terrain; this prevents amphibious uniques from being placed in the middle of nowhere in levels such as the Shoals.
40. Cheibriados worshippers will no longer get permanent stat loss when having their equipment melded.
41. Cursed randart items should colour properly.
42. Unmemorisable spells are now properly grayed out in the memorisation screen.
43. A missing separator in the jewellery database meant that items could have names such as “jewellery appearance”. This is no longer the case.
44. Rod descriptions now indicate that they no longer require attachment to the player in order to recharge.
45. Clearing the map now properly clears tiles that have been overridden in vaults, as well as secret doors.

Changed features

1. Giant spores now leave trails of squares “mold covered”, while ballistomycetes now only give experience when you kill the last one on the level. The trails of spores will also lead to other ballistomycetes and giant spores, while the activation of a ballistomycte by killing another will temporarily highlight the section of spore trail that leads to the activated one in red.
2. New tiles: dead trees (used in the Zonguldrok WizLab), mirrored wall (used in the Tukima WizLab).
3. Shoals now uses better flood filling when deepening water, this should prevent rectangular shapes of water at low tide.
4. Out-of-depth monster generations that would normally result in a band now instead generate as a single monster, unless a large period of time has elapsed (1.4k – 117 * depth turns spent on a level); this means that instead of generating out of depth yak packs, you will get a single yak, and so on.
5. Tiles: the player doll hair tiles have been adjusted slightly.
6. Fulsome Distillation now aborts without cost if there are no available corpses for distillation, while menu colours are used for colouring corpses listed during Fulsome Distillation prompts.
7. Fedhas’s Reproduction ability now gives a message indicating why spore production failed, instead of “nothing happens”, while worshippers of Fedhas will be given a message indicating why they can’t walk through trees.
8. Some Liches (including Boris) now have the spell Iskenderun’s Orb of Destruction.
9. Xom is less likely to polymorph plants, as the generation of these has been increased in the Lair of the Beasts and Shoals branches.
10. Amulet of Stasis now functions consistently with ARTP_PREVENT_TELEPORTATION (-Tele artefacts).
11. Fedhas now uses the “circles” version of the Oklob retribution more often, allowing circles of oklobs to be created as small as radius four around the player.
12. Fedhas now appreciates your contribution to the ecosystem upon death.
13. Iskenderun’s Orb of Destruction initial move has been randomised, removing guaranteed range for instant damage, while it now causes noise upon hit.
14. Trapdoor spiders are now in line with other submergers, while functionality for kraken submerging has been removed, as these no longer submerge.
15. Khufu is now silenceable, meaning that monsters who are and are not affected by silence can now be determined by glyph.
16. Fedhas now only dislikes Necromantic magic that affects corpses and chunks. These include Sublimation of Blood, Animate Dead, and so-on.
17. Labyrinth outer walls are now permarock, helping to clear up the confusion with metal.
18. Player ghosts can now be marked as worshippers of Fedhas once more, as the necromantic conduct does not care about the incorporeal undead.
19. Depths for undiscovered branches are now indicated on the overview screen.
20. Exclusions are now annotated based on map knowledge, rather than the actual monsters present.
21. (Neutral) Ballistomycetes no longer activate for Fedhas worshippers, while friendly giant spores will create friendly ballistomycets; finally, hostile ballistomycetes will show up in the monster list and stop travel.
22. Ogre hunters start with a club instead of a hand-axe, but also have a knife for butchering purposes.
23. Vampires’ ability to bottle blood from corpses is now activated as an ‘a’bility instead of using the ‘c’ command, while corpses are now a valid choice for the ‘q’ menu (when accessing the entire inventory with *).
24. Xom’s Snakes to Sticks effect is more common.
25. Out of range squares are now marked as such during targeting.
26. Reflected Orbs of Destruction no longer have a free move, while they are no longer attacked by monsters and are immune to damage; it will currently start as being off-direction when launched, and will then attempt to correct itself and home in on the target; they will also steer when necessary, instead of just when badly off course.
27. Cheibriados now supports Ponderous armour by granting stat boosts as well as resistances.
28. Hellfire no longer respects AC, but the overall damage has been reduced as much as having 15 AC previously would have; this removes discrepancy between EV and AC in that regard.
29. Guardian Spirit documentation has been updated: it no longer prevents “internal damage”, such as poisons, casting cost of Pain.
30. Fedhas’ Evolution ability now grows ballistomycetes from mouldy squares, while a message is given if the user attempts to evolve trees; experience is also given if a player’s ally destroys the last ballistomycete on a level.
31. Spore creation chains (created by a giant spore (created by an active ballistomycete), and so on) have been removed.
32. Fedhas’ Decomposition ability will no longer cause a piety loss by causing toadstools to grow in squares that have harmful clouds on them; toadstools will no longer generate on these squares.
33. Amulet of Inaccuracy now affects the casting of Iskenderun’s Orb of Destruction.
34. With the introduction of Iskenderun’s Orb of Destruction into the Lich spellbook (IV), Frederick now has his own spell book, as does Boris.
35. Silver now hurts the player according to player_is_shapechanged, and how mutated they are.
36. The unrand Serpent Scourge is now made of the hides of black mambas, who are poisonous, instead of anacondas, who are not.
37. i_feel_safe now takes into consideration monsters that are exposed in deep water (“~”) and will no longer attempt to auto-explore you next to them.
38. You can no longer worship Sif Muna if you do not know any spells.
39. Lemuel’s fog machine vaults (involving dangerous clouds) now include auto-explore stoppers (statues repurposed for this), while the “rotting” minivault has a warning-inscribed door to prevent auto-opening.
40. Cheibriados’s Ponderousify ability will never failure, and no longer has an MP cost; it still retains the piety cost.
41. Troves now have two mechanisms of tolling the player: the first is the original fee, during which the portal may time out; the second is a two-part quest: you can “lock” the portal for a small fee, but then the portal will require a magical item (or items) to open properly. These items can include consumables (stacks of potions), randarts found in shops, and so-on.
42. Tide levels in the Shoals will be the same across multiple levels; if it is high tide on one level, it is high tide on all levels, and so-on.
43. Due to carrying capacity changes, the weight of large stones has been increased once more; this reverts the previous decrease in weight.
44. “was cursed” messages are no longer generated on items that the player saw being cursed, and are cleared when items are fully identified.
45. Cheibriados’s Ponderousify ability now converts items to randarts, and his ponderous property is now a randart property; the -2 EV penalty for each ponderous item worn has also been removed.
46. Spells are now coloured in the memorisation, ‘I’ and Z/z? screens; these colours are according to usefulness (darkgrey for useless), religious obligations (red for spells forbidden by your god), and so-on.
47. Kikubaquudgha’s necromancy miscast protection is now noted on the ^ screen.
48. Duane, Edmund and Frances have had their descriptions, speech and other flavour overhauled; Duane is now an experienced guard, Edmund is Sigmund’s jealous younger and less talented brother, while Frances is a warrior who defeated a Pandemonium Lord and took over its realm and demons.
49. Ice Cave entries have been improved.
50. Murray is now placed in 1 out of 8 Vestibules of Hell, and is directly placed using the vault syntax for that map, rather than using the unique placement system.
51. Wayne has been buffed and is now a dwarven priest of Okawaru, with the spells Might and Haste; he also comes with all-dwarven gear. His speech and flavour have been improved.
52. Tiles: tile_force_overlay option, allowing the message window to forcefully be overlayed over the play area, meaning that this can be larger.
53. Cheibriados gives extra piety in some instances. See commit 4507799433cbc6e1f2f.
54. Shoals tides occasionally washes blood off features.
55. If the player knows Evaporate, the list of clouds that the various potions can created are included in their descriptions.
56. Tiles: the inventory screen now has visual tabs, allowing you to switch between the inventory, spells, and memorisation screens.
57. New tiles: Fedhas altar, silver and steel darts.

Other tweaks

1. A confusing comment for the Lua absdepth wrapper has been changed.
2. Monsters are now removed from the mgrd before firing the death Lua event.
3. Place-population script now properly reports shapeshifters and hydrae; uniques can be grouped using the -groupuniques option.
4. FAQ2html.pl scripts converts the plaintext FAQ into a HTML version.
5. Further issues with stdarg(h) causing crashes on long messages with make_printf have been hopefully resolved for the last time.
6. Instances of “targetted” and “targetting” have been renamed to “targeted” and “targeting”, respectively.
7. The targeting help screen (x?) has been overhauled.
8. The message window system now supports “temporary” messages that will be removed from both the screen and the message history when scrolling away.
9. Indications of mimic and dancing weapon status for the dLua monster wrapper.
10. rltiles now has a tile_ _basetile function that returns the root tile of a variant (or non-variant) tile; for example, a tile passed that is TILE_WALL_NORMAL+3 will return TILE_WALL_NORMAL.
11. Place-population now groups mimics, dancing weapons and very ugly things.
12. mons_cast_noise has been split up, removing UNSEEN_BEAM.
13. Beams whose names were “0″ have been removed; the beam code has been cleaned up, meaning that demonics who cast smite no longer have it considered a “visible” beam. Visibility is instead tracked via the “visible” method of the bolt structure.
14. you.your_level has been renamed to you.absdepth0.
15. Auto-generated artefact files have been removed from the repository.
16. “base_type”, “ego_type”, “sub_type”, and “artefact_name” wrappers for dLua. For a “+0 short sword of Trog {flaming}” for example, they will respectively return “weapon”, “flaming”, “short sword”, “short sword of Trog”.
17. melee_attack has been split from fight.h, meaning that this no longer includes artefact.h and reduces dependencies.

And that’s us, up-to-date at commit b11820d43d9! Tune in next week for more!

Our current developmental release seeks to relieve some of the monotony with two of these packs: slime creatures and ugly things.

Slime creatures

Slime creatures, a common sight in multiple branches (you might find them camped out in the Swamp, or perhaps huddled in the corner of a room in the Vaults), now combined form larger and larger slime creatures. Two slime creatures combined form a “large slime creature”, three a “very large slime creature”, and so on^*. As their size increases, so also do their various statistics: damage is combined, as are hit-points. Thankfully, as these increase, so does the experience granted by them upon death.

So, when do slime creatures merge? If you’re fighting them in a corridor (a common trick for fighting multiple slime creatures in older versions of crawl), you can expect them to merge immediately. If you’re otherwise surrounded, or the closest position is already filled by a slime creature, they’ll merge. Occasionally, if you are positioned diagonally away from a group, they’ll merge.

There are also a few circumstances under which they’ll unmerge: if you leave them to wander around on their own, they’ll eventually become bored and split up. If the closest move to you is an empty space, there’s a chance that they’ll unmerge. In practice, if you’re fighting a merged slime creature and there is an adjacent space that is free, they will likely unmerge.

A few tips: don’t fight them in corridors and try not to fight them once they’ve merged, as they’ll most probably be doing much more damage than multiple single slime creatures would. Thankfully, merged slime creatures are easy to spot: they’re coloured a light green, as opposed to the dark green of the unmerged.

Ugly and very ugly things

Another “boring” feature of the Dungeon are packs of ugly things. No longer a boring variety of brown ‘u’ – these now come in a rainbow of colours. Indeed, the colour of each one defines its flavour. Their type of attack is also randomised: some ugly things may bite you, others may headbutt and others still may slap you with tentacles!

Let’s take a quick look at the various colours and the “flavour” associated with them:

Very ugly things are similarly coloured, though their colour is visually the lighter version (light red instead of red; yellow instead of brown; etc). Some of their attacks are likewise “upgraded”:

However, their colours aren’t the only thing that makes them interesting – and they are not static! Packs of ugly things work off each other in interesting ways and if you allow several to follow you around, you’ll notice a variety of messages like “The ugly thing basks in the mutagenic glow of its kin!”. One of the most visually unique change is that of an entire band slowly changes colour, until all are the same. It’s like being chased by a rainbow!

Finally, there are a few minor things to note: Ugly things are no longer polymorphable. Instead, trying to do so will cause its colour to change. Also, their corpses are no longer “contaminated” but guaranteed to be “mutagenic”. Be careful with lunch or you might find yourself changing into an ugly thing!

And now, onto the Big List! We’ll start at commit 891a5325e8, where we left off last week:

Bugs fixed

1. Mara will no longer clone hostile clones of himself.
2. Some instances of items being visible in deep water or lava for non-merfolk have been fixed; gods will no longer gift items while over deep water or lava, and they will no longer accept sacrifices from items in lava, or under deep water (unless you are a merfolk).
3. Auto-explore no longer causes the player to travel into deep water while in ice form; this is similar to auto-explore not taking the player over deep water while levitating, and so on.
4. Bogus “your shield/armour blocks your attack” messages should be gone.
5. Shop items are no longer examinable via ‘x’ look around and auto-explore.
6. Fedhas’s Evolution ability no longer continues even if the player cancels, and targets correctly (instead of targeting a previously-targeted monster, it will always target plants).
7. Potion of Blood acquirement now uses the correct quantity, instead of having it overwritten by another part of the function.
8. Monsters killed using Cheibriados’s Slouch ability are now attributed to the player.
9. Tiles: unknown mimics are now displayed properly, while known mimics are now described as such; health bars are no longer displayed for unknown mimics.
10. Non-adjacent mimics are now safe for resting and travel.
11. Multiple mimics are no longer grouped together as “piles of gold”.
12. Unknown mimics are no longer stabbable during auto-explore and auto-pickup.
13. Missiles are now identified before the first throw, instead of after; this means that monsters will no longer throw a “glowing” missile one turn, and then a “” missile the next turn; the “glowing” status remains until pluses are identified.
14. Monster’s LOS is now initialised and updated correctly, hopefully resolving issues where giant eyes can paralyse even when they cannot see the player, priests being able to smite the player without line of sight, etc.
15. Ziggurats now generate properly. An error where an instance of “Shoal” had not been corrected to “Shoals” that prevented the proper generation of a Ziggurat level also created some thirty-eight thousand Ziggurat entry milestones.
16. Travel issues, slow-down and information leak caused by recent changes to mimics has been resolved.
17. Feature list glyphs on the X map are now coloured correctly: this means that monsters standing on stairs (in map knowledge) will no longer mark them as grey, and so on.
18. Melded armour and shields will no longer block attacks.
19. Permanent bazaars now have a long description that can be viewed using the “xv” combination.
20. Extraneous periods have been removed from the monster description prompt; monsters exposed via water and clouds are now represented properly.
21. Amphibious monsters will no longer submerge themselves under the floor.
22. For players with claws or claw mutations that are wearing gloves, butchery will prefer to swap to a weapon instead of removing the gloves and then wearing them again.
23. Crashes when attempting to examine Ziggurats on shopping lists should hopefully no longer occur.

Features changed

1. Only unidentified items are marked as “was cursed” when reading Remove Curse or casting the spell.
2. Only 1/3 of plain merfolk are given throwing spears, instead of 2/3.
3. Merfolk aquamancers will no longer push the player back into hostile terrain: this will prevent them from drowning the player in deep water, or incinerating them in lava.
4. Armour and dodging training are no longer linked to “heavy” or “light” armour. Please see this commit for more information.
5. Tiles: the old giant lizard (and current crocodile) tile has been recoloured to better match its current purpose.
6. Ozocubu’s Armour no longer works with elven heavy armours; light armour is now considered to be evasion penalty of less than two.
7. Yredelemnul’s gifts now follow down stair cases even if they aren’t adjacent. This means that micromanaging zombies is no longer required in order to let stair-using allies follow.
8. Tiles: new slime creature tiles (titanic and very large), meaning that there are now tiles for each level of slime creature merge status.
9. Tiles: a variety of new and adjusted tiles for the Wizard Laboratories, and a variety of changes made to these maps.
10. Tiles: temporary fix for overridden door tiles causing a segfault when opened.
11. Vault depths have been updated to reflect the fact that the Lair of the Beasts no longer has ten levels, but eight.
12. Tiles: new tiles for entrances to Ice Cave, Sewer.
13. Glyphs in the feature list of the ‘X’ map are now sorted: this means that shaft traps will no longer be included with stairs.
14. Tiles: demons now have pentagram indicators instead of numerical indicators of tier.
15. Gates to Pandemonium no longer occur in the Abyss.
16. Further tweaks to the message window changes: more shortcutting works properly now.
17. Tiles: new tile for Fedhas’s altar (may change).
18. The “Control Teleport” spell now reports “CTele” as a status, similar to Invisibility and Confusing Touch.
19. Tiles: coloured variations now exist for glass, metal walls.
20. Creatures now submerge differently; trapdoor spiders use the same submerging rules as before, but other monsters will only submerge if there isn’t a nearby attack target; crocodiles and sea snakes now submerge.
21. The message window leading dashes have been replaced by leading underscores; one type of more prompt (the simplified “+”, for example) will no longer cause another type of more prompt (such as “-more-”).
22. The Orb of Zot, various runes, and the unused Horn of Geryon are no longer sacrificeable.
23. Tiles: there’s now a loading screen that indicates that things are actually happening, instead of the splash screen just “locking up” while the game parses maps and databases, etc.
24. Tiles: new tiles for potions of agility and potions of brilliance.
25. Wayne is now dwarven, and therefore now has dwarven equipment.
26. Gaining levels no longer generates a variety of “-more-” prompts via code, but instead via the “force_more_message” option in the main settings file.
27. Draconians’ scale colour changes are now caught properly by the “force_more_message”s.
28. For testing purposes, a Jiyva altar is now guaranteed at the Slime entrance.
29. The help screen (“?”) is now identified in a message when starting the game; this will hopefully make it more accessible.
30. The “small more” (“+”) is now an option: setting small_more=false will use “-more-” instead. This defaults to true.
31. Short messages are now optionally joined together to form one long line. This is toggled using the option “msg_condense_short”, which currently defaults to true; joining punctuation is always light grey.
32. The spell controlled blink is now only slightly louder than uncontrolled blink.
33. Vaults: new vaults by Minmay (minivaults, temple entrances and actual temple maps).
34. Targeting now describes monster status, enchantments, and so-on.
35. Tile: new orb guardian tile, replacing the old jelly baby-esque orb guardian tile.
36. Experimentally, Jiyva and Ely now use the piety pool instead of directly giving piety to the player for large piety gains. This piety is then handed to the player slowly over a period of time.
37. Silence has been nerfed: it now has a variable range that decreases with duration.
38. Monster EXP has been tweaked again to better reflect difficulty.

Other changes

1. Subvaults now validate with everything else when using the validate Lua prelude.
2. The Microsoft Visual C++ project has been updated and should function properly for compilation.
3. Features converted to floor no longer re-use the existing feature override tile as provided by Lua.
4. New auto-pickup check hook: ch_deny_autopickup, and autopick_exceptions.txt now uses it.
5. Tiles: tweaks have been made to how the doll files work, new tiles have been added, etc.
6. New “veto” type for vault features: “veto_fire” prevents fire from melting wax and from setting trees on fire. It also prevents fire from spreading to these cells.
7. Vaults can mark areas as “no_submerge” using the relevant KPROP. This prevents submerging monsters from submerging in this area.
8. There is now a hard cap of 200 million turns in the game. This prevents time-wrapping.
9. The stash tracker no longer uses a separate versioning system to the rest of the game.
10. New Lua wrapper for monster_info that provides a description; ch_mons_is_safe now passes and receives monster_info objects, instead of actual monsters.
11. mini.des has been split into three files: mini.des, mini_monsters.des, mini_features.des.
12. SAFE_EXPLORE is no longer a compile-time option, but the default.
13. The information for updating the website when making a release is now included in the release documentation file.

And that’s us up-to-date at commit cf82e8e8ec! Tune in next week for more!

If you’ve played an ASCII build of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup recently, you might’ve noticed that some monsters have had a makeover recently. If you play tiles, then you might also have noticed a new addition to the tiles of imps, devils and other demons. We’re going to take a short moment to discuss some of the changes.

Insects and spiders

The most noticeable change is that the two large insect families of bees and ants have been standardised. Instead of using multiple glyphs, one for larvae, one for normal monsters, and one for “queen” monsters, we now use the same glyph and scale colour instead.

For bees:

For ants:

In order to remove confusion with ants and cockroaches, we’ve also moved giant cockroaches from the a glyph, onto the s glyph, where they join spiders, giant centipedes, scorpions, and giant mites. This means that ants are purely on a, and bees purely on k. To compensate for the fact that this move (without a colour change for giant cockroaches) would result in three “brown” s monsters, the following changes have been made:

Minotaurs and demonic creatures

Part of our glyph changes have been aimed towards consolidating monsters that are alone on a glyph onto another, more suitable glyph. This means that we have space for expansion, the creation of new types of monsters, etc, without having to pout them on a glyph that doesn’t necessary suit them. As such, we’ve moved minotaurs off t and onto H, to reflect their hybrid state, and efreets from E and onto R, with Rakshasas, another type of demonic creature.

Another part of our glyph changes are to resolve confusion with some demonic creatures. These mostly inhabit the glyphs 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1, the difficulty increasing as the number in question decreases. Part of a recent set of changes have been to give demonic creatures in tiles a numerical overlay, reflecting the tier that they belong to. This isn’t a permanent change, but it should hopefully give tiles players access to the same instantaneous threat indicator as ASCII players.

Slimes

With the new pack changes to slime creatures (the subject of a future post), and the fact that merged slime creatures are now a considerably bigger threat than normal slime creatures, their colour has been upgraded; as this would clash with acid blobs, these have also had a colour change:

Insubstantial monsters, etc

Insubstantial monsters have been spread out across a variety of glyphs. Insubstantial monsters include insubstantial wisps (out of place on p due to the fact that all other p are undead), vapours (on #, which clashes with walls), and shadows (on _, which is bad for a variety of reasons, including accessibility).

Therefore, the following changes have been made:

Elementals

Finally, we come to elementals. These monsters were spread across a variety of glyphs, including three which matched up with features. This is confusing from an accessibility standpoint, but also from a visual standpoint: it’s difficult to work out if that brown # is actually a wall, or an earth elemental.

Therefore, the following changes have been made:

^* denotes that the colour in question is actually an elemental one, which can’t be indicated via static colouring. Please check them out in-game to see what the colours actually are.

And that’s our summary of glyph changes done! It turned out a bit longer than I had expected. We’ll start the Big List Summary where we left off last week, at commit 629a7ff!

Bugs fixed

1. “Triggerable already removed” messages should be gone from the Trog burning book altar vault.
2. Vampiric draining no longer aborts when there are no monsters on the screen. This allowed for easy identification of present but invisible threats.
3. “of Pain” no longer generates as a randart name.
4. Tiles: Flying creatures (including the player) no longer appear submerged.
5. Fix a bad pluralisation on database lookup.
6. Tiles: won’t attempt to unpack a non-existent doll file.
7. flush_prev_message is no longer called when fetching a character from the keyboard in tiles and Windows builds, hopefully fixing random crashes in Windows.
8. Messages are cleared before the tutorial begins to tweak options.
9. Explosions will be drawn properly when messages_at_top option has been enabled.
10. Some instances of calls to sqrt() have been cast into double to prevent compile errors on Microsoft Visual C++ platforms; also provided an implementation of round() for these platforms.
11. “Stairs” are now being pluralised properly in exclusion messages.
12. Armour/shield penalty is never negative, therefore never turning into an actual bonus.
13. Tiles: some issues with the player minibar for health and mana points have been fixed.
14. Long message will be line-broken properly in message history.
15. Monsters no longer auto-target “firewood” creatures, meaning that allies will no longer automatically attack plants, over other monsters.
16. Glowing ammunition that stacked with non-glowing ammunition should no longer happen, meaning that brands are neither lost nor suddenly gained; this was caused by the stacking code not checking item brands.
17. Poisoned poison arrow of flame of flame, and other permutations of this error, should now be completely resolved.
18. Your wielded weapon is no longer auto-quivered if it is similar to the currently quivered weapon.
19. Vampires’ cold resistances at near bloodless state are now reported correctly.
20. Item pickup Triggerables now function properly, meaning that picking up Runes or the Orb of Zot will adjust the branch flags as per normal; these runes and the Orb have also been masked as no_item_gen so that nothing will generate on top of them and cause issues (“too many items for Triggerable”, etc).
21. player::equip now uses a signed char instead of assuming that char is signed. char is unsigned on some platforms, including PowerPC.
22. Volcano exits are now “rocky tunnel(s) leading out of here”, which should hopefully clear up confusion.
23. Monsters that are sleeping no longer attempt to gain a foe; this should help with some performance issues.
24. Spirit shield (such as Guardian Spirit) should now function properly on shields.
25. Friendly monsters that sense invisible can sense adjacent invisible monsters, instead of not being able to see them at all; in reverse, hostile monsters that sense invisible can only sense the player if they are within radius 4.
26. Cause Fear no longer generates a large number of “is unaffected” messages for toadstools, etc.
27. AUTOMATIC_HIT (needles, some spells) will work properly even with deflect missiles.
28. Missing down-stairs in the Iron City of Dis have been fixed.
29. Large rocks shattering in sight will generate a message properly instead of nothing.
30. Fulsome distillation no longer prompts if there is only one corpse available.
31. Zin’s gold donation has been fixed.
32. Actor line of sight should be initialised properly, preventing monsters from smiting targets they cannot see, giant eyeballs paralysing you even while out of sight, and so on.
33. Pacification of monsters obeys MF_NO_REWARD, and half of these monsters’ base EXP will no longer be granted to the player. This fixes Pikel’s EXP being inflated by 325, and removes any incitement to keep the slaves alive.

Features, new and changed

1. The direction code has been completely rewritten, reworking the entire interface. There are still some issues with this, so please report any that you might have on the Mantis tracker.
2. Beam spells no longer affect submerged monsters, targeting never selects them directly, you cannot freeze nor vampiric drain them.
3. Giant lizards have been renamed to crocodiles; giant iguanas have been renamed to iguanas.
4. New monsters: alligator and baby alligator. Alligators are normal speed, but can put on bursts of speed to attack you; baby alligators are fast, but do not have the same attacks as their adult forms. Baby alligators “level up” into alligators; these new threats spawn with regularity in the Swamp, where they always generate as patrolling (unless they are part of a band of baby alligators)
5. Kraken no longer submerge when fleeing, but shoot out clouds of ink (a line of sight blocking cloud that can exist only in water). They will also remove all their tentacles from play, removing the option of attacking the tentacles as they flee with the head.
6. AC and EV have been changed dramatically, as have 1.5-handed weapons. Please see this commit for a full explanation.
7. A variety of changes to how Cheibriados works; please see last night’s play-testing post regarding gods for a full explanation of current mechanics.
8. New tile: burning bush, centaur paladin (currently unused).
9. Players get a hand-and-a-half bonus even if the player qualifies for an unarmed auxiliary attack.
10. The Lernaean Hydra can now knock down trees, and is SIZE_HUGE.
11. Dangling transparent pixels have been removed from the Maurice and Angel tiles.
12. Xom’s opening and closing of doors is now noisy, and issues involving large gates have been resolved.
13. Fedhas worshipers now acquire fruit instead of food from scrolls of acquirement.
14. New tiles: ego and randart tiles for banded and plate mails, penetration brand, adjusted tree tiles, holy scourge doll tile.
15. The XP cap for hundreds of kills has been removed in favour of the recent changes to out-of-depth monster generation.
16. Trees in Swamp are 25% brown, 75% dark green.
17. Monsters given a random colour on generation will never be given BLACK or DARKGREY.
18. Pikel’s slaves now turn neutral when left behind, if he leaves the level; they will not currently turn neutral if they follow you off the level (still a bug).
19. You can now stab friendly monsters, as though they were confused.
20. Donald’s speech has had some contentious lines removed.
21. Hasting other monsters is now a hasty act for Cheibriados purposes.
22. Returning from stepping out of time will attempt to move monsters that were at our old position.
23. Shadows and phantoms, in line with other p glyphs, now levitate.
24. Liches are no longer resistant to electricity.
25. ossuary_due_mausoleum is now harder.
26. Alligator snapping turtles are different to snapping turtles, so the latter no longer level up into them.
27. Tiles: you can now leave the doll editor screen without actually saving your changes to it.
28. Stacks of poisoned needles have been increased again; these were not affected by the recent buff to poisoned ammunition, and therefore should be unaffected by the nerf to stack sizes of poisoned ammunition.
29. slime_altar_2 has been tweaked to longer cause instant death when opening the door.
30. You are no longer prompted when entering teleport traps if you have a -TELE or amulet of Stasis item worn. This also no longer affects autoexplore (with teleport traps blocking sections of the map). Likewise, known shaft traps no longer block sections of the map.
31. Leading dashes are now included in the message history, as are repeated messages.
32. Large WizLab overhauls and clean-ups.
33. Some –more– prompts are converting to a “+” instead of the full “–more–”, as well as a variety of other changes to the new messagewindow. Please file any bugs found with it on the Mantis tracker.
34. Poison arrow’s irresistible damage has been reduced from 60% to 30%.
35. The blue “Invis” status message is greyed out when you aren’t actually invisible; the @ and % screens show “invisible (but backlit and still visible)” when they are.
36. Stacks of gold now list how much gold is in them in the ‘x’ over screen.
37. Orbs of destruction are no longer warped during Time Step and Abyss moving, and are immune to some effects.
38. Apportation now works properly in the Abyss, and other areas that have no map knowledge.
39. Monster haloes as well as some aspects of monster line of sight have been disabled for performance reasons.
40. Sunlight auto-targets disturbances in deep and shallow water.
41. Some instances of “magic resistance” have been converted to “hostile enchantments”.
42. Giant spores have been moved to * and are no longer native spawns in the Pits of Slime.
43. Jiyva’s jelly shield has been replaced by jelly paralysis during prayer.
44. Fedhas’s evolution ability is now a smite-targeted one.
45. Friendly wandering mushrooms will now follow you as a normal monster would, unless there are other monsters in sight, in which case they will be stationary.
46. Items which were previously cursed and have been uncursed are marked as “was cursed”. This option can be triggered by “autoinscribe_cursed”.
47. Monster energy is now randomised slightly; this means that instead of getting 10 energy per turn, there is a chance of only getting 9 energy, or possibly getting 11 energy. This means that monster actions (movement, etc) is randomised slightly, and there is a chance of a monster acting twice on the same turn (when they have a surplus of energy). This is an experiment, and may (and likely will) be adjusted slightly.
48. Top-tier merfolk are now rarer in the Shoals; all merfolk now speak.
49. The tide no longer submerges runes, but instead pushes them about; the Shoals huts have been split up again (rune and non-rune); the rune Shoals hut now has a bigger “honour guard”.
50. Tiles: demons are now overlaid with the relevant tier number.
51. New tiles: dispersal and exploding brands, icons for armour brands.
52. Mara has been nerfed (HD 20 reduced to HD 18) and buffed (bolt of fire instead of bolt of lightning, which does more damage), and nerfed again (as bolt of fire no longer bounces, and people who run into Mara are more likely to have fire resistance than electricity resistance).
53. The overmap has been completely overhauled.
54. New Xom effect: snakes to sticks, having the reverse effect of sticks to snakes.
55. Portal vaults can now use tiles for entrances, as well as a tile for when the portal has timed out.
56. Shoal:X has been replaced with Shoals:X: there are many shoals, not an individual shoal.
57. Armour and shield are no longer combined when reporting what made the player miss a melee attack.
58. Mara’s illusion can now clone any monster, not just the player.
59. Joseph’s placement is now depth seven to twelve, instead of ten to thirteen.

Other changes

1. godprayer.(cc/h) has been split out of religion.cc.
2. The clua item library (l_items.cc) has been converted from using the former items.name(userdata_item object) to using a Lua items metatable, meaning that the syntax is now item_object.name(). This has caused some issues with autopickup, wielding of reagents for spells, etc. Hopefully they have all been resolved, please file if you come across any.
3. God is no longer consulted about butchery when picking up knives and other bladed weapons.
4. The WizMode piety adjustment function (&^) now prompts for a piety level instead of merely increasing it by a set amount; the WixMode god gift function has been cleaned up and documented.
5. dgn.stash_items now works properly with the new lua items table, as do several other function calls that use items.
6. Lua wrapper for travel stoppers, and portal vault messages are automatically added to this.
7. Code readability: EQ_MIN_ARMOUR and EQ_MAX_ARMOUR are aliases for EQ_CLOAK and EQ_BODY_ARMOUR.
8. Place-population script can now generate unique statistics, as well as combined stats for all levels in a branch.
9. The manpage has been updated.
10. There’s a new (dlua) wrapper identification status for the items metatable.

And that brings us up-to-date at the latest commit, 891a5325e8! Tune in next week for more play-testing posts, and please feel free to comment if you spot any issues or have any questions!

We thought we’d take a bit of time out of our busy lives to reflect on the religious aspects of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup: if you’ve played a recent version of trunk, you may have noticed two new temple Gods¹, and if you’ve ventured into the Pits of Slime, you may have a third new God!

These three new Gods are Fedhas Madash, the Plant God; Cheibriados, the Slow God; and Jiyva, the Slime God. This article is going to give a quick run down of each of them, their flavours, their gifts, and the abilities they grant. Please keep in mind that these Gods are still being developed, and that the abilities listed in this post may not be in their final form.

¹ A “temple God” is defined as one that is found specifically in the Ecumenical Temple (or in overflow altars, as discussed in last week’s post). Non-temple Gods include Lugonu and Beogh, as well as the newly-introduced Jiyva.

Fedhas Madash

We’ll start by looking at Fedhas Madash, God of plant and fungal life. The most noticeable, and indeed the first, gift gained is that all plant life in the dungeon (including Oklob plants, hooray!) turn neutral, and you gain the ability to walk and fire through all neutral and allied plants.

Fedhas likes it when you speed up decomposition (more on this shortly), and dislikes it when you (or your allies) destroy plants, when allied (though not neutral) plants die, or if you use Necromancy (including Necromantic spells, abilities, wands and weapons). Most of Fedhas’s abilities are linked to plant growth and natural life, and some require fruit to use properly.

Something you may have noticed in recent builds of trunk (and new since our last stable release) is that corpses have a tendency to grow fungi while decomposing. These toadstools are short-lived, and will die after a few turns. These toadstools are also linked in to Fedhas’s first ability, Decomposition.

This ability allows you to speed up this natural process, causing all corpses in line of sight to instantly decompose. This sped-up process also has the effect of generating a large number of neutral toadstools, which can provide interesting (albeit fragile) cover for escaping large mobs of monsters.

Here’s a quick run-down of the rest of Fedhas’s abilities and gifts:

• Evolution allows you to “upgrade” a plant (using a smite-based targeting interface). You can upgrade toadstools and fungi into wandering mushrooms, and plants and bushes into Oklob plants. Evolving a neutral plant will cause it to become friendly.
• Sunlight allows you to call sunlight over an area of the dungeon; monsters touched by this will be easier to hit, while deep water will evaporate to shallow water, and shallow water will evaporate to floor. Plants have a chance of growing when water is evaporated.
• Growth uses fruit to grow a ring of friendly plants around the player. The hit-points of the plants will be increased dependent on your Invocations skill.
• Reproduction creates friendly giant spores from corpses in line of sight.
• Rain creates shallow water around you, or deepens shallow water to deep water. At high invocations skill, it can also create rain clouds, which have a similar effect over a longer duration of time.

The ability to shoot through plants, and the ability to grow “cover”, marks Fedhas as the premier god for all users of ranged combat (including spells as well as missiles). Fedhas has three types of retribution:

1. Corpses in line of sight will produce hostiles spores, which will then attack you.
2. The elements will be invoked against you, the equivalent of an ice, earth, fire and air miscast.
3. Hostile plants (biased towards oklobs) will grow around you; this effect will only happen when abandoning Fedhas, never when simply under penance.

All previously neutral or allied plants will also turn hostile upon abandonment or excommunication.

Cheibriados the Contemplative

Cheibriados is the God of the Slow and Contemplative. Cheibriados likes it when you move slowly, kill monsters that are fast, eat when you are already full, and dislikes it when you hasten yourself or others, or use items that make you unnaturally quick. The first ability that you gain when joining the worship of Cheibriados is the ability to give your armour the “ponderous” brand.

The “ponderous” ego is quite rare, and usually only found on body armour. Cheibriados’s “Make Ponderous” ability can apply this ego to any piece of armour, however, and grants a +2 movement delay. You can use “Make Ponderous” to fine-tune your speed against that of monsters, which is useful for some of Cheibriados’s other abilities.

Cheibriados will support the wearing of ponderous armour. This grants a resistance and +1 to your stats for each of the first three items that you wear; the resistances are, respectively, life protection, cold resistance, and fire resistance; he will support one item for each of the piety stars that you have.

Here’s a quick run-down of the rest of Cheibriados’s abilities:

• Your metabolism is slowed considerably (similar to that of the first level of the slow metabolism mutation).
• Bend Time allows you to slow down monsters that are adjacent to you.
• Slouch causes damage to monsters in sight that are faster than you; it may cause extra damage to monsters in sight who are hasted or otherwise magically moving fast.
• Step From Time removes you completely from the “flow” of time. Monsters will move about and forget you, plants will grow and die, corpses will rot and decay, until you are returned to the normal flow of time.

Cheibriados’s wrath consists of:

• Putting you to sleep for a period of time. This is unresistible.
• Slows and exhausts you (similar to post-berserk exhaustion). This is also unresistible.

Jiyva the Shapeless

Jiyva is the most different of our new Gods, the ancient and chaotic god of all Slimes. The first thing that you’ll notice upon converting is the gift of a new jelly (a “fellow slime”). The second is that your method of gaining piety is similar to that of Nemelex Xobeh’s, in that you sacrifice items to Jiyva, but the method by which you do this is very, very different.

Instead of directly sacrificing items, you can summon jellies or lead them over items for them to eat. All slimes (eyeballs on the G glyph, and slimes on the J glyph) will eat items, regardless of their previous item-eating state. Similarly to Xom, Jiyva will randomly mutate you; Jiyva will also shuffle your stats randomly.

Praying will temporary halt the progress of nearby slimes, preventing them from moving and also from eating items.

Jiyva’s other abilities are:

• Request a jelly, allows you to summon a hungry follower.
• Slimify coats your weapon in slime, allowing you to use this to turn some foes into slimes.
• Remove a bad mutation at will, at a cost to both MP and piety.
• While at “royal jelly” status (maximum piety), hits that take 25% or more of your maximum HP will generate neutral, high-end jellies, similar to the effect of the unique royal jelly.

Upon abandonment, all friendly and neutral slimes will turn hostile, and some of the following may occur:

• Gives you a random, bad mutation.
• Slimifies a hostile monster nearby.
• Floods you with mutagenic radiation, and has a chance of transforming you into a bat, a spider, or a statue, and locking you in that transformation until it ends.
• Summons hostile eyeballs of all types.

And that’s it for gods! Tune in tomorrow for this week’s blow-by-blow write-up, and a short piece of glyphs!

This week, we’re going to talk about the Ecumenical Temple: with all the new gods (who you can read about here), it’s started to feel a little bit cramped. In order to solve this issue, we’ve devised a new system of “overflow” altars.

As normal, the Temple will show up between levels four and seven in the main Dungeon. It will have a large percentage of the altars representing each of the “temple” gods (excluding Beogh, Jiyva and Lugonu), but it may lack the one that you’re looking for.

Don’t panic! The altar that you’re looking for will appear as an “overflow” altar. These are small vaults that are placed throughout the dungeon, between levels two and nine, and which are dedicated to the god in question. Some of these overflow altars may prove to be a challenge, and you might not be able to get the god that you want when you want it. Rest assured, the altar to that god will always show up.

What else does this mean for you? Well, the positive side of this is that the altar that you’re looking for could show up as early as D:2. It also could be that the altar shows up as late as D:9, and that you might have to decide whether or not you wait, or pick another god.

Hopefully, the changes will not only aid us, as developers, in the addition of new gods (preventing the necessity for constantly changing the size and layout of the temple), but it will also provide interesting tactical decisions for you, the player! Good luck, and good religion.

And now, on to the great list of changes! We’ll start where we left off, at commit cd1279820c.

Bug fixes

1. Tiles: Drawing the Dance card (or any form of Dancing weapons, as well as summoning mimics) would cause a crash in initialisation. This has been fixed.
2. Tiles: Beam paths should now be displayed properly in Tiles.
3. Pandemonium Lords are no longer silenceable.
4. Loot in bailey_polearm_2 is now always accessible.
5. Amulet of Stasis now has a cost similar to that of the Amulet of Rage.
6. A variety of minivaults and floating vaults that no longer work with the current Swamp layout have been disabled.
7. Swamp drake mephitic cloud breath now functions properly, instead of having absolutely no effect.
8. Decomposed skeletons and corpses now get speed and HP maluses.
9. Toadstools can now be placed on the same grid as the player for Fedhas worshipers: this means that using the decomposition ability while standing on a corpse has the proper effect.
10. Allies no longer head for the map origin when the player is out of sight. This was caused by the code setting their target grid to 0,0.
11. Statues in dis_mu should now all come to life when Dispater is destroyed.
12. Fixed a bug that was causing monsters to never speak at all.
13. Iskenderun’s Orb of Destruction now tries multiple times to place the orb, instead of just “fizzling” the first time that it fails.
14. Monsters will now pathfind and target through toadstools if it means that they can get to the player quicker; friendly monsters will not destroy likewise friendly toadstools, meaning that there will be no piety loss for Fedhas worshipers.
15. A variety of typos and doubled words in descriptions have been fixed.
16. Hand axes of reaching will no longer appear in or around Bailey entrances.
17. &M-created player ghosts without a specified background no longer causes crashes when viewing their full description. They were not being initialised properly.
18. Overly long quiver names will no longer clear the following line.
19. Call Tide now ends properly, meaning that you can never become stuck in a Shoals level at high tide.
20. Attempting to draw a holy scourge on holy monsters no longer causes a strange and confusing assert.
21. Using ^C to clear the map no longer clears monster memory, therefore no longer causing issues with autotravel.
22. Autopickup will turn back on once a backlit (whether by halo, sticky flame, or corona) monster has been killed.
23. Post-mortem inventory screen is once more browsable.
24. Save selection screen now appears properly at the start of the game.
25. Torment scrolls are no longer marked as useless for the torment-immune, while multiple copies of the new amulets are.
26. Searching for “artefact” now lists all artefacts, instead of just identified ones; searching for “stick” also returns all objects that are suitable targets for Sticks to Snakes.
27. Travel exclusions can no longer be placed in Labyrinths.
28. Shield value is now redrawn when the player’s strength changes.
29. Snapping turtles now get their tile picked properly.

Features, new and changed

1. Ilsuiw’s Call Tide peak has been adjusted upwards, meaning that this spell has a much more interesting visual effect.
2. There have been many further changes to key-bindings, making the system much more flexible for re-keying. This includes changes to allow re-binding of vi-keys, as well as a rebinding for the Dvorak keyboard.
3. CDO: Swamp has been re-enabled for testing purposes.
4. Instead of occasionally replacing Swamp with Shoals, pick two of Shoals, Swamp and Snake.
5. There’s a new Swamp layout generator: this uses trees and mixture of shallow and deep water in more natural looking layouts. Gone are the weird corridors! Hooray!
6. New tiles: sixfirhy, improved Angel tile considerably, Dowan and Duvessa.
7. Burning trees in Swamp now produce clouds of steam (as do all sources of flame near water), and once destroyed, are left behind by shallow water, rather than dry land.
8. New Swamp ending: old school. This ending also contains the Lernaean Hydra, good luck!
9. Swamp now gets a variety of “pool” vaults: these are deep water pools surrounded by trees, which are either randomised, or contain patrolling Swamp drakes.
10. The alternative Swamp ending now has a higher number of hydras and swamp dragons than before.
11. Giant leeches now generate with more regularity in the Swamp than they did before.
12. New tiles: Nessos tile has been adjusted, the human tile is now used for detected Dwarves; flowered grass tiles now exist, and existing grass tiles have been recoloured to be slightly darker.
13. Fedhas tweaks: Rain is now more difficult to use, the Evolution ability has had its cost display updated, and the descriptions of Growth and Evolution have been tweaked to reflect the current mechanism, the player can now target themselves with Sunlight, but are prompted to do so.
14. Water transparency in tiles is no longer dependent on overlays.
15. Ilsuiw now no longer appears on Shoals:1-2.
16. Berserk maxhp also scales by 1.5x, rather than the previous 2x.
17. Sticks to snakes no longer converts artefact weapons into snakes.
18. Needle brands have been adjusted: paralysis and frenzy are now the rarest, with sleep and slow the most common, and sickenss and confusion common. Stack sizes for poisoned needles and poisoned darts have also been reduced.
19. Mara’s summons are now “wove by” him, rather than “summoned by” him.
20. New unique (kinda): Donald. He is utterly different than before, now having speech that is dependent on both the player’s current religion, as well as the branch you find him in. He has similar stats to an orc warlord (though not quite as heavy), generates with nice equipment, and always comes with a shield.
21. Tile: Shift-click running is now replaced by mouse-click running in Tiles, Angels now use dynamic weapon placement in their tiles.
22. Ice form is now amphibious, matching with the changes to monster ice form: they do not see items in deep water, however, nor are they able to pick them up.
23. ossuary_due_mausolem now uses door restriction on the central chamber, meaning that the guardian mummy will not exit via the secret doors to attack the player if disturbed.
24. MessageWindow branch has been merged into master: this has involved quite a lot of new changes, which fix a variety of issues involving the ‘–more–’ prompt overlaying text, and a huge subset of other bugs. There may still be issues with the new code that haven’t been ironed out yet, so please, file a bug if you see them!
25. delay_message_clear has been renamed to clear_messages.
26. New tile: Donald, replacing the previous tile. This tile looks more like the player, and always is created with a shield.
27. Silver no longer affects the demonic, unless they are chaotic as well as demonic; Crazy Yiuf, Psyche and Gastronok are now considered unclean creatures for Zin purposes; Cigotuvi’s Degeneration, Summon Horrible Things, Twisted Resurrection and Banishment are marked as chaotic spells; abominations are now chaotic, as are scrolls of summoning.
28. Tiles: the player character now gets a health and magic bar similar to that of monsters, the display of which is controllable via an option, Frances’ tile has been improved to look more feminine; new Polyphemus tile.
29. Tile cleanup: Menkaure, Purgy, Roxanne.
30. Current HP is now conserved when merging and splitting slimes, instead of just the maximum HP, and slimes now use grid distance instead of actual distance when determining whether or not to split.
31. Monster attitudes (charmed, friendly, peaceful) are now listed correctly in the ^X window; the default behaviour for it is also now defaulting to ACT_EXECUTE, or examining the monster in question.
32. Instances of “job” and “class” in the game are now referred to as “background”: Hunter, Arcane Marksmen, Conjurer, etc, are now backgrounds instead of classes. This is a semantic change, but reflects the fact that the background is merely what you have (skill and equipment) when you come into the dungeon, not what you must be, as nothing prevents a conjurer from picking up a sword and becoming a fighter, or a fighter picking up a spell book and becoming a conjurer.
33. New tiles: holy scourge, orb of destruction and the cloud that it creates.
34. david_glass_crypt now works properly (hopefully) when walking over the loot. Unfortunately, linking this in to item_pickup is currently unfeasible.
35. Tiamat is now considered a chaotic creature; just because a spellcaster has chaotic spells does not make them inherently chaotic. If they have spells that are considered “innate” abilities, they are. This does not affect how Zin deals with these creatures.
36. Massive Mummy changes: they now get a +5 stat bonus for starting, getting diminishing EXP gains for hundreds of kills. Affecting everyone, monster spawns have been dramatically reduced, while out-of-depth spawns have been increased: monster spawn rate reduces after 3,000 turns on a level, and is stopped completely after 15,000 turns on a level.
37. Gourmand no longer gives piety with Cheibriados.
38. Tentacled monstrosities are no longer as rare as they were before in Swamp.
39. HT_AMPHIBIOUS_LAND and HT_AMPHIBIOUS_WATER have been merged. Amphibious monsters no longer get an automatic speed bonus in water. This is instead defined per-monster. Slime creatures and jellies, as well as ice beasts and a small selection of other amphibious monsters, no longer get this bonus; slugs and snails are no longer amphibious.
40. Submerging is no longer linked to habitat, but is instead controlled per-monster by using the M_SUBMERGES flag.
41. Attackers that are swimming no longer get an attack bonus against defenders that are floundering; this affects both aquatic monsters damaging the player, as well as player merfolk attacking floundering monsters while swimming.
42. The many pools layout (and modifier) now occasionally place clusters of trees instead of pools of deep water or lava.
43. Unidentified artefacts also get marked as artefacts in their description.
44. New tile: hog-form player, Robe of Clouds (on the floor).
45. Steam cloud generation near shallow water has been reduced.
46. Cheibriados worshipers can cause any armour slot to be ponderous, allowing for fine-tuning of their speed; removing ponderous armour causes a piety loss.
47. “You hear a splashing noise!” only occurs within short distances, or if you can see the monster that is floundering.

Other changes

1. Mara’s Mislead, Summon Fake Mara and Summon Player Ghost spells now have waste_of_time checks, meaning that they’ll only be cast when they’re needed.
2. .des files for branches have now be split absolutely: each file contains only the vaults required for itself, and none of its sub-branches.
3. fprops are now accessible and modifiable by vaults using dgn.fprop_at, dgn.fprop_changed.
4. The height map is now accessible via vaults by using the FHEIGHT specifier. Tides can be seeded from a starting position by using a marker (see documentation).
5. New Lua marker: RestrictDoor. This prevents monsters from opening a door that has never been previously opened by the player.
6. Door opened and door closed now generate dungeon events.
7. Branch and the player’s religion are now included in speech prefixes.
8. Fixed a typo in Purgy’s entry of the mon-speak.txt file.
9. New Wizard-mode command for adjusting the tides: ).
10. New Lua accessors for monster: get_prop and has_prop, for interfacing with monster props. monster_dies triggerer now also checks for these props, looking for monster->props[target]==target.
11. .des vault files are now found in the dat/des/ folder, and in subfolders: branches/ contain all branch files, portals/ for portal vaults, variable/ for floating vaults, etc.
12. Lua slave iterator now generates an error message when not finding any markers, rather than generating a weird error further down the line in the point iterator.
13. Monster casts (as_player, as_monster) are now found in the actor interface, returning NULL if the actor isn’t the relevant player/monster.
14. mon-util has been split up into a variety of files, and the functions have been split between these.

And that’s us–up-to-date at commit 629a7ffc5d! Tune in throughout the week, as we’ll hopefully have further play-testing posts before next weekend’s update!

This week, we’re going to talk about amulets: there have been a lot of changes to them recently, and while they aren’t finished, I thought we could highlight some of the major changes and how they’ll affect you!

The most noticeable of the amulet changes is that the Amulet of Resist Slowing has been removed. The effect of resisting the slow enchantment has been merged into the new Amulet of Stasis (more on this later), but the ability to resisting the slowing and fatigue effects of berserk have been removed from the game.

The Amulet of Resist Slowing could previously be used to bypass all the negative effects involved in berserk, which made the ability, be it god-given, spell-given, or from potions or other sources, extremely unbalanced. We hope that this removal (read: nerf) will help to balance berserk once more.

The two additional amulets introduced recently are the amulets of Stasis and Faith. Stasis, as already mentioned, prevents the slow enchantment, as well as other enchantments that affect the player’s speed or movement. This includes teleportation and blink of any form, hasting, paralysis and petrification, as well as berserker rage. Wearing it will not affect current effects, such as pre-existing haste, or pre-existing post-berserk slowing.

The Amulet of Faith provides several interesting effects: piety gain is increased by one third; Gods which protect from harm have a higher chance of doing so, as piety in this check is increased by one third before performing the check; Xom’s “piety” is also one third faster when changing, and he has a higher chance of acting. Finally, removing the amulet will affect the player’s current piety, though it will never reduce it to the point of (or near the point of) excommunication.

Of course, these effects are not necessarily the final effects, and may be subject to change at a later date. Further amulets are also planned, so expect more changes in the future! And with that, let’s move on to the list of this week’s changes:

We’ll start from where we left off last week, at commit 26707f530e!

Bug fixes

1. Thieves get Throwing instead of Crossbow skills.
2. Lair ruination will no longer affect walls of special rooms or vaults; this means no jelly rooms without walls.
3. Intrinsic reaching attacks can no longer do so at full diagonals.
4. Okawaru’s wrath monsters are now marked as summoned, instead of being permanent.
5. Weird blink messages involving confused monsters timing out and being moved have been solved; this still causes a message regarding monsters being “less confused” before being redrawn elsewhere.
6. trog_book vault no longer allows you to bypass the burning of the book by throwing an item on top of it; you can still retrieve the book if you have Apportation.
7. Weapons of pain are no longer marked as useless with no Necromancy skill: they can still be used as well as an unbranded weapon of the same stats.
8. Missile acquirement should no longer gift stones to slings users.
9. Poison is no longer combined with other brands randomly, instead of just flaming; the only exception to this is Nessos, who still has “poisoned arrows of flame”.
10. Holy wrath weapons are now marked useless in the right circumstances.
11. Silver statues are now marked as unholy.
12. Tiles: skeletons no longer have chunk effect icons applied to them.
13. The stash tracker is now initialised at the start of the game: this prevents the errors of not being able to search for items that are in line of sight upon entry to the dungeon, as well as the upstairs on D:1 not being marked as visited.
14. An instance of Ruinous Time in Cheibriados’s god abilities has been correcting to Slouch.
15. Tiles: The splash screen is now displayed before beginning to parse the relevant databases: this means that you are no longer greeted with a black screen that can last for thirty or so seconds when first starting the game in tiles mode.
16. Mimics’ glyphs are now displayed properly if the item in question has had its glyph altered by a player setting.
17. Exclusions set in areas that are not accessible (bubbles, using the [ and ] options in the X map, and for non-fully explored levels) will actually be displayed in red when setting the exclusion.
18. Certain prompts (particularly &P portal map choices) no longer crash when text is typed.
19. Spellcasters no longer throw their weapons at you (this includes enemy priests).
20. Books being displayed with the incorrect glyphs in stacks due to size restrictions have been fixed.
21. Poison Weapon (and indeed, any venom-branded launcher) now works with ammunition properly; duplicate messages (“poisoned poison”, “of flame of flame”) have also been fixed.
22. Inverted logic regarding monsters that are berserk and harmful clouds has been fixed; monsters will now ignore harmful clouds when they are in a berserk rage, even if it may kill them.

New and changed features

1. Mara and Rakshasas are now immune to silence, like all other demonic beings.
2. The Lair ruination procedure now places plants and bushes as well as allowing for the occasional door to be left instead of “ruined”.
3. New cloud type: thick gloom. It obscures line of sight and recolours features magenta, instead of using the ‘#’ glyph. It is currently unused, but will be used in portal vaults.
4. Berserk HP scale has been reduced to 1.5x, instead of 2.0x.
5. The amulet of Resist Slowing has been removed.
6. New amulets: Amulet of Faith, Amulet of Stasis (discussed above).
7. Fedhas’s Growth ability now prompts for a number of fruit to use, instead of using a specific slot and its total number of fruit; plants created by this skill also receive a HP bonus based on the player’s invocations skill. Nothing will happen if the ability cannot be used.
8. Fedhas’s Piety has also been tweaked: Growth no longer uses as much, and the loss of piety for allies dying has also been reduced.
9. The glass_crypt Crypt:5 liches will now be set free when you walk over the loot.
10. Fedhas’s Evolution ability now only uses piety, and only affects plants, etc, that are adjacent to the player; its activation cost has been reduced, and Fedhas’s overall abilities have been reorganised to: decomposition, evolution, sunlight, growth, spores, rain (from first to last in scale of piety gain).
11. Tiles: tool tips are now drawn at the mouse pointer, rather than above it. This prevents them from covering up the inventory header line. Names are also drawn in the inventory header line, instead of one line above the item.
12. Shoals are now limited to 180 plants per level, and the density of the plant clusters has been reduced.
13. Slime creatures will now randomly split in open spaces, unless they have a chance of moving closer to their foe.
14. Trees no longer reflect electricity like a normal wall, but instead have a chance of igniting as though hit with a bolt of fire, and are also disintegratable.
15. Tiles: deep water now has similar wave overlays and effects to shallow water.
16. Flamethrower exclusions are now updated for descriptions if they do not have one; auto-exclusions placed on stairs are also annotated with a relevant up/down notice.
17. Miscast-created (including Xom and Zot trap effects) clouds no longer generate an auto-exclusion.
18. Slime Pits now generate between levels 6 and 8 of the Lair of the Beasts, changed from the original 5 to 8; this used to be 8 to 10 before the length of Lair was reduced.
19. Tiles: left-clicking on books with no spellcasting ability now calls read_book instead.
20. Tiles: new tile for Pikel, Sonja’s tile has been cleaned up and recoloured, and the deformed tiles from the WizLab branch have also been cleaned up.
21. Merged slime creatures are now lightgreen, and acid blobs are now lightcyan.
22. Tiles: New snapping turtle and alligator snapping turtle tiles. The latter also now has spikes; Dissolution has been recoloured; Ilsuiw, siren and mermaid tiles now have shadows; turtle corpse tiles are also fixed.
23. Shoals monster set changes: merfolk impalers now have less damage output and evasion, alligator snapping turtles now have an action cost of 10 (but slow movement), sea snakes are now speed 12 instead of speed 14, and harpies are now more common; alligator snapping turtles are also rarer.
24. Generic overflow vault will no longer generate electric eels or lava snakes.
25. Call canine familiar no longer generates a message, as there is no chance of these being hostile.
26. Tiles: variant tiles for slaves, this introduces a smaller one that isn’t quite as burly as the current one. These are randomly assigned to slaves when they are placed.
27. Tiles: new tile for normal humans. The previous tile has been moved into the “UNUSED” folder; the player hog tile has also been recoloured to differentiate it from a normal hog.
28. Chaos spawn and giant spores are no longer insubstantial; phantoms, flayed ghosts, spectral things, wraiths, freezing wraiths, and spectral warriors now are.
29. Aizul now appears between depths fourteen and twenty, and his spells have been tweaked slightly: he has one less poison arrow (replaced with venom bolt), one more sleep (replacing blink other), and minor healing is replaced by blink other for his escape spell.
30. Wayne is now a dwarf again.
31. New key bindings specifically for Dvorak; vi-keys can now be set to do nothing, preventing harmful typos for players who use the num-pad; the key binding system is also more flexible now.
32. Tiles: new tiles for all new merfolk monsters; new tiles specifically for toadstools.
33. Tiles: new tiles for the sleeping brand of needles, and new tiles for bushes.

Other

1. The skills layout in the ‘m’ screen has been changed: Stealth is now found in the right-hand column, above Traps and Doors.
2. rltiles now supports a “%weight” command, that allows for weighting of tile variations. This means that highly ornate version of tiles (face and eyes for flesh walls, crumbled brick, etc) will not appear as often.
3. A variety of new Lua wrappers for dungeon-building: util.range, is_valid_coord, find_in_area, is_passable_glyph, make_box and make_box_doors.
4. New “force God gift” Wizard mode function.
5. Also re-implemented the _city_level layout in not-quite-identical Lua (“layout_city”).
6. Island-building code designed for Shoals branch has been moved from dgn-shoals.cc to dgn-height.cc.
7. The credits Perl script now updates CREDITS.txt instead of outputting to stdout.
8. The last remnants of code relating to butchery have been finally removed.
9. Tiles: New monster prop “tile_num”, the offset that should be applied to their default tile if they have variants. This is currently used for toadstools and Pikel’s slaves.

And that’s us up-to-date at commit cd1279820c, and that’s us for this week. Expect further posts regarding recent changes to Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup that have yet to be covered in an individual post or highlighted in a play testing post. As always, you can report any bugs to our Mantis tracker or by comment here!

We’ll start our list in order of addition, with the most recently added last.

• Kirke, named for the minor Greek Demigoddess, can be found in the Dungeon between levels fourteen and nineteen (and equivalent depths). She comes with a band of hogs, and would very much like for you to join them! Don’t run into her without a stash of holy moly, or, if that is not forthcoming, a good source of magic resistance, unless you enjoy spending the rest of your short life as a swine.
• Seasoned adventurers may recognised that the animal pelt worn by Grum originates from a war dog. Non-seasoned adventurers need not fear, as they’ll shortly run into Grum and his friendly pack of war dogs! Grum is found in the early dungeon, between levels eight and thirteen (and equivalent depths), and comes with a band of war dogs, as well as a polearm with a guaranteed reaching brand! If you want it you’ll have to survive to take it off his corpse.
• Purgy, an unusually thin and nervous troll. He was bullied by the bigger trolls for being so small, and took refuge in the sewer. As a result of this, you are more likely to find him camped out there, where he can appear in two maps, though he does occasionally visit the dungeon, between depths three and four. But be warned! Just because he’s skinny doesn’t mean he’s an easy fight.
• Priests sought to mummify the remains of Menkaure, a benevolent ruler, and in so doing grant him eternal life. In the process, his soul was twisted and, like many undead, he gained an intimate knowledge of pain and torment. He now seeks vengeance on the wandering adventure who woke him from his long sleep. He can be found wandering the Dungeon between depths four and seven, as well as in one Ossuary map.
• Duvessa and Dowan, Elf twins who are inextricably (and, indeed, psychically) linked, both in life, as well as in death. If one of them is spotted, surely the other one is not far behind. Dowan is a capable but vain magician, while his sister, Duvessa, is slightly more plain, though an expert with swords. They appear between depths four and nine, but beware: the death of one will trigger an emotional breakdown in the other, with sometimes surprising results.
• Greedy Gastronok is an elephant slug who just so happened to eat a valiant Wizard for lunch one day. It wasn’t until spells came unbidden to his mind that he realised something was amiss. Indeed, he hadn’t even realised he’d had a mind before, but now he had absorbed the Wizard’s intelligence as well as his magic. Despite this fact he remains as greedy as ever, and happy to use his new-found skills to charge down his next meal. He often appears in the Lair of the Beasts, between levels four and eight, but also in the general Dungeon, between depths eight and thirteen.
• Maurice is a sly and conniving thief, who is perfectly happy to separate you from your hard-earned loot. He likes nothing more than sneaking up on you while he’s invisible to pick your pockets, and then leave before being noticed! Thankfully, you can get your gear back–if you can find him again, which could be between depths of eight and thirteen in the Dungeon.
• Khufu was an incredibly powerful emperor. His people built him a great pyramid, in which they stored his mummified remains, in hopes of sending him to early godhood. A follower of the Polar star, he can be found lurking in the Tomb and the Crypt, and has a rather unique way of recuperating during battle.
• Nikola is a brilliant scientist with a predilection for electricity. After a terrible accident involving an electric golem he found himself constantly phasing in and out of reality. Don’t forget your rubber boots and gloves when facing him! He can be found between the depths fourteen and nineteen.
• The sleepy Aizul, a guardian serpent, was once the head guard of a great vault of treasure. Late one night, however, he fell asleep on the watch and the vault was raided. He was humiliated, stripped of his position, and replaced by his subordinate. Now aimless, he can be found wandering the dungeon between depths fourteen and twenty. Be careful, because perhaps his yawn really is contagious!
• The slaver Pikel is bringing a group of humans to sell in the Orcish Mines. He hopes they’ll bring him a good price, and set him on the road to being a wealthy kobold. The only snag to his problem is that he can’t work out where the stairs to the mines are. You can find him and his slaves between four and nine, but definitely not in the Orcish Mines!
• Crazy Yiuf is, to put it simply, crazy. As he would say, “You leg down broken song, no?” He hangs out in his cottage between depths two and seven in the Dungeon, and is always found with a chaos-branded quarterstaff, the effects of which are almost as crazy as he is!
• Lord Mara‘s illusions are capable of misleading even the greatest spell-casters, and far surpass those of even the strongest of the Rakshasas which he rules over. Those who are willing to face Mara can find him between depths eighteen and twenty-five, and should be ready not only to fight Mara, but also the horrors that he can dredge up from their minds.

And for now, this is it! Good luck in your valiant fights and victories (or defeats, as the case often is).

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