We’re pleased to announce the release of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup 0.21: “Gnoll Country for Old Jian”! 0.21 features a new species, a new god, a new spell, and many significant updates and general improvements to the game.
Download DCSS 0.21 here, or play it online on one of many servers across the world! Packages for Windows and Linux are all available now. Packages for OS X will be available soon, and we’ll upload this post and the download page when they’re ready. Update: OS X packages are now on the download page.
The release tournament has already started today at 20:00 UTC, with all online 0.21 games counting towards your score. See the tournament website for more details, including how to set up or join a clan.
0.21′s highlights include:
- Characters: Gnolls have been added, a new species that always trains all skills at once, without any of the usual item/spell restrictions, and can’t select specific skills to train. To help overcome this limitation, Gnolls have very high apts (+6 in magic schools, +9 invocations, and +8 for the other schools) as well as higher stats. They can also sense the location of nearby items. Additionally, Ogres now have better aptitudes in shortblades, longblades, and axes.
- Gods: Wu Jian Council has been added, a new god that grants martial attacks from movement actions, including a powerful lunge attack, a cleave-like whirlwind attack, and a multi-hitting wall-jump attack that lets you leap off walls. Wu also has two powerful active abilities that cost piety. The first is a Serpent’s Lash ability granting two free movement actions that allows any resulting martial attacks to never miss. The second is Heavenly Storm, which creates opaque clouds and increases your prowess as you continue to use martial attacks. Finally, Zin now grants 100% mutation immunity at 6* piety, allowing you to use potions of mutation solely to cure mutations at this piety level.
- Spell: A new spell has been added: Borgnjor’s Vile Clutch, a level five Necromancy/Earth spell that calls forth undead hands from the earth over a smite-targeted area to constrict hostile monsters. It appears in the Necromancer starting book, the book of Unlife, and the book of Dreams.
- Items: Permanent food has been simplified, and now rations are the only type of food, replacing bread and meat rations, fruit, and royal jelly. Food item generation and the herbivore/carnivore mutations have been balanced to keep overall nutrition about the same. Additionally, wands of the same type merge charges upon pickup, and there’s no cap on wand charges. Wands also identify their charges upon pickup and are destroyed when the last charge is used.
- Dungeon: Items in doorways no longer prevent closing doors in most cases and get pushed out of the doorway if the items wouldn’t land in deep water or lava. The rate at which unique Pandemonium lord levels appear in Pandemonium has been increased. Several new dangerous vaults have been added, and the Hellbinder and Cloud Mage WizLabs have been revamped to provide greater and more varied challenge, as well as better loot.
- Monsters: Monsters no longer spawn after level-generation in most places, which includes the nasty out-of-depth monsters that formerly spawned after many turns. Instead a few more monsters generate on each level, and monsters have a small chance to generate awake, although never near stairs. Air elementals have a short-range, short-duration Tornado-like Vortex ability. Player ghosts now are all speed 10 and never spawn with chaos melee. Finally, random Pandemonium Lords no longer can have the Shatter spell.
- Interface: Players can now set training targets for skills. Press ‘=’ on the skill screen, select a skill, and enter a skill level to have training of that skill disabled when the specified level is reached. Many monsters and artefact item tiles have been updated, and Draconian player tiles now show their hats!
For a list of other major changes, see the changelog. Many thanks to all those who have contributed to Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. We hope you enjoy playing 0.21!
1. Comment by mps
6/Jan/2018 at 02:00
This is clearly the best release since .17. The skill target mechanism has been a much needed feature for a long time. The game plays much smoother with less need to micromanage skills to obtain best results. The wand and food changes were good too, though the food simplification is a half-measure where full removal is what is really needed.
While the mechanism of skill targeting is good, the interface could be improved a lot. For one, the existence of two kinds of automatic skill mechanisms, autoskill and skill targets, is clunky. It’s time for autoskill to go with default skill targets taking its place. The modal nature of the interface is also unnecessarily fiddly. If you have a special key, =, to set targets, why do you also need a special display mode? The other display modes tell the player nothing of interest. Getting rid of these extra modes would save a lot of entrance vault button mashing and improve the interface overall. Without them you just go straight to setting targets and toggling skills rather than turning off autoskill, then switching to display mode #3.
Some of the content additions are questionable, particularly the zombie singularity thing, but every release has stuff like that. Kudos to those doing the unglamorous, but important, work on the mechanical and interface side.
2. Comment by Luke
6/Jan/2018 at 17:59
This seems to be the first step in fully removing one of the most fun and unique features of dcss, which initially attracted me to play it in the first place five or six years ago, that of mutations. I simply do not understand the need to lessen the impact of a game dynamic that almost everybody seems to enjoy. I think you may be beginning to lose the crowd here guys. Luke.
3. Comment by Tegga21
7/Jan/2018 at 02:53
I disagree mps, food should always be kept and the amount you need increased.
4. Comment by spm
7/Jan/2018 at 05:03
Also want to disagree with mps. There should be more food and all chunks should be mutagenic. Eating is fun, mutations are fun, and games are SUPPOSED to be fun. Don’t see why people can’t understand that fun is good.
Also, if you can’t understand the interface you should play a dumb game like Candy Crush. The worst change in crawl history was removing the old practice-to-train system. Theoretically, if I ever won a game of crawl version > .8, the victory would be empty because the game just let me win without putting up a fight.
5. Comment by mps
7/Jan/2018 at 05:38
But seriously folks, this mutagenic chunks business… Mutation roulette exists and is practically a required part of the game now. You won, guys.
As far as I can tell, the “eat the purple” thing is a meme precisely because it was so goofy and unbalanced. You got hundreds of single serving mutations that were biased toward the good ones, giving you a very high probability of getting a lot of free bonuses. “Haha, I’m spending a lot of time on an obviously broken minigame, this is my idea of fun.” Currently you still get a lot of mutations via potions except with fewer servings, i.e. less player control and therefore better game balance, and with potential strategic implications for poor resource management. Seems pretty obvious that if you’re interested in the game as a whole this is a better situation.
What I come back to with these arguments about content removals — like purple chunks, high elves, sludge elves, evaporate, mountain dwarves, hill dwarves, grey elves, elves, gnomes, and tons of other clunky junk that that didn’t work or played no unique role in the game at all — is that if this is where you are as a player, I wonder if you really play the game. Over and over again, people make crawl forks that are focused on re-adding this kind of cruft to the game and over and over again no one plays these forks. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
Right now there’s a new crawl fork like this in development and people talking about it don’t seem to be aware of another fork with the same ethos from just last year. (By the way, no one played it though the dev did some good work mechanically.)
6. Comment by Sar
10/Jan/2018 at 12:17
People don’t play those forks because they don’t put your wins in a nice online table, so when you’re feeling down about having wasted thousands of hours on a dumb video game you can’t open the link in your browser, look at all the games from those years and think “yeah, those were the times”.
Also, sometimes you want the new stuff too. Not all of it is bad!
(I don’t care about mutagenic chunks, personally.)
7. Comment by snelelg
10/Jan/2018 at 20:36
I dislike the changes to mutations, every game you get an insane amount of bad mutations and it is very hard to get rid of them. The only way to do it seems to be to save potions of mutation to “cure” the bad mutations by rolling the dice. Way too many “trash” monsters use malmutate in my opinion which is insane because it is irresistible.
8. Comment by DoubleByte
11/Jan/2018 at 21:49
The Good: new god, wand changes
The Bad: removing mutating chunks
The ugly: food change is weird, removing wands makes some sense given the new charge system, but confusion particularly was super handy for certain melee classes