Many thanks to tarballqc for generously hosting our newest official server! Check out his other projects at roguelikes.gg…just be sure that your system has the latest Pentium processor, at least 4MB of memory, and plug-and-play compatible peripherals! Until next time, happy crawling!

DCSS 0.34.1 features the following fixes:

• Fix the Lua error handler causing slowdowns seen in vaults like Pan’s Disco Hall.
• Properly mark unidentified talismans evil/chaotic as appropriate.
• Allow deconstructing forgecraft allies while wielding a ranged weapon.
• Fix Freezing Cloud not having a self-damage warning prompt.
• Fix the force_more prompts for dancing weapons of distortion.
• Fix banished Orb Guardians not activating the Boundless Tesseracts.
• Fix Duel/Banishment on top of a portal entrance expiring that entrance.
• Prompt for wearing any talisman that would lower max HP by more than 10%.
• Fix randart Bane scarves having hidden AC (Back-form)
• Fix Revenant spells being free and boosted by Enkindle if cast via Sif Muna’s Divine Exegesis.
• Fix removing Fragile equipment not triggering unequip effects before being destroyed.
• Don’t have Dithmenos’ Marionette treat monsters it charms as hostile for subsequent actions.
• Fix Dominate Undead not working properly for friendly casters.
• Fix the force_scroll_targeter option interfering with ability targeters.
• Fix anacondas taking no damage from cactus giant spines.
• A new clua function you.zot_orb_monster() to see the type of orb monster the player will face in Zot, if known.
• New clua functions for checking visibility between cells: view.cell_see_cell_no_trans(), view.cell_see_cell_solid(), and view.cell_see_cell_solid_see().
• 36 other bug fixes, interface improvements, and documentation updates.

Packages of DCSS 0.34.1 for Windows, macOS, and Linux are all available from the download page. Our online servers will be updated with 0.34.1 throughout next week. Happy crawling!

Congratulations to FlugKiller for taking first place in the individual competition, with 125,695 points and 21 wins! FlugKiller tied sekai for longest streak of the tournament (14 wins), had the 2nd fastest realtime win (a MiFi won in 25:47), and the 3rd lowest turncount win (a TrMo won in 15,785 turns). Additionally, FlugKiller had species high scores for Mi and Dj, class high scores for FE and Sh, and 4 combo high scores. Finally, and although this isn’t in a tournament category, it’s still impressive: FlugKiller had the first win of the tournament, a MiFi of Gozag won 48 minutes after tournament start. It’s interesting that the 0.33 tournament winner, EnegeticOcto, also had the first win of the tournament, which was also a MiFi of Gozag. Even more amazing is that FlugKiller’s MiFi of Gozag realtime win from this tournament had the exact same time as EnegeticOcto’s MiFi of Gozag realtime win in the 0.33 tournament.

Other big winners:

• EnegeticOcto (aka Lici the Crawler): 2nd place overall with  116,222 points and 23 wins. Lici had the highest scoring run of the tournament, an AtCj worth 78M points. Lici was also the only player to win all tier 3 banners, and the only person to win Elyvilon’s tier 3 banner, which he achieved via a SpEn that killed just 933 monsters. He was 2nd in the Combo High Scores category, with 2 species high scores (At and MD), 2 class high scores (Cj and HW), and 6 combos high scores. Finally, he had the 3rd fastest realtime win of the tournament, a MiFi won in 29:50.
• sekai: 3rd place overall with 108,465 and 24 wins, including a 14 win streak that tied FlugKiller for best in tournament. Sekai also got 2nd in the Nemelex’ Choice category by winning 16 Nemelex’ Choice combos. Finally, sekai had the En class high score and 8 combo high scores.
• Sergey: Won the Winrate category with a perfect performance over ten games. Before this tournament, Sergey already had an ongoing world record win streak of 92 wins with non-repeating combos. During the tournament, he extended this streak to triple digits with 102 wins. Congratulations, Sergey!
• p0werm0de: Won the Realtime category with a MiFi of Cheibriados that ascended in 23:30.
• sentinel: Won the Low Turncount category with a TrGl of Wu Jian that ascended in 12,904 turns.
• bookman: Won the Nemelex’ choice category by winning 24 Nemelex’ Choice combos.
• Turgon: Won the Combo High Scores category with just 4 wins that were both the species and class high score for that combo: OpHs, TrFw, OnGl, and BaWn.

The clan competition was won by Bane of Ogre (captained by EnegeticOcto) with 136,467 points and 1st in the clan Streak Length, Best High Score, Combo High Scores, Low Turncount Win, and Banner Collection categories. They also took 2nd in the Fastest Realtime category, and 3rd in the Nemelex’ Choice category. In 2nd place was The 27 Club (captained by particleface) with 116,047 points, 2nd place in the Best High Score, Nemelex’ Choice, and Combo High Scores categories, and 3rd place in the Streak Length and Low Turncount Win categories. In 3rd place was Doomed To Win – Cosplay (captained by TheMeInTeam) with 114,599 points, 1st place in the Nemelex’ Choice category, 2nd place in Streak Length category, and 3rd place in the Combo High Scores category.

To close out, here are some overall tournament statistics (with the 0.33 numbers in brackets for comparison). 3278 non-bot players started a game at some point during the tournament; of those 3194 completed a game without quitting or leaving the dungeon sadly orbless. This definition of “player” (players who completed a non-boring game) is used for subsequent calculations and was used for the 0.33 statistics.

• Players: 3,194 (0.33: 2,870). This is a record high for tournaments since version 0.23, over 7 years ago!
• Total player time: 34,962 hrs (0.33: 32,484 hrs)
• Average player time: 10.95 hrs (0.33: 11.32 hrs)
• Games played: 90,631 (0.33: 89,582)
• Players who got a rune: 985 (0.33: 890)
• 412 winners and 1,326 wins (0.33: 421 winners and 1,428 wins)
• Win rate: 1.46% (0.33: 1.59%)
• WebTiles win rate: 1.42% (0.33: 1.52%) / Console win rate: 3.17% (0.33: 4.06%)

Thanks to you all for playing! Many thanks as well to server admins, developers, and contributors who made the 0.34 release and tournament possible! The 0.35 development season has begun, with the new Anemocentaur species having already landed in trunk. There are other tweaks and bug fixes you can read in the commit list, and stay tuned for many more changes to come this version. Also look for an important 0.34.1 bugfix release to made soon. That’s all for now, and until next time, happy crawling!

DCSS 0.34 features:

• Many new egos for weapons, armour, amulets, and orbs.
• Big overhauls to strategic damage with a new doom system and a reduction of player mutation.
• Unlimited player inventory for consumables.
• Major updates to Troves, the Slime Pits, and the Halls of Zot.
• Dozens of new monsters spread throughout the dungeon!

For the complete list of these and the many other changes included in this version, see the release page here.

Packages of DCSS 0.34 for Windows, OS X, and Linux are all available from the download page. You can also play it online on one of many servers across the world!

The tournament starts today on Friday Feb 6th, 8pm UTC and runs through Sunday Feb 22nd, 8pm UTC, with all online 0.34 games counting towards your score. See the tournament page for more details, including how to join or setup a clan. Clans membership can be changed until Friday Feb 13th, 8pm UTC.

Many thanks to all those who have contributed to DCSS over the years. Thanks especially to the DCSS development team, whose contributions made 0.34 possible, and to the admins who run and maintain the official servers. A special thanks to the following community members who contributed to 0.34 and a warm welcome to the first-time contributors.

Aliscans, Andrew, antimachina, Brian Power, brianfaires, Claus Mouse, code2828, coraxioU9, CrawlOdds, croikle, fslottner, geekosaur, guillaume, Jared Miller, LiciTheCrawler, Lulu, mainiacjoe, Matt Smith, MikeJHeg, Nicholas Wilson, NormalPerson7, Perry Fraser, person50605, riverfiend, RypoFalem, Steinar Darri Þorgilsson, tianmaster, unutbu, Vaskritaya, Vincent Cheng, Vsevolod Kozlov, Weston Odom, yrdzrfxndfvh, Zhang Haocheng

Speaking of 0.34, here’s one last Trunk Update for 0.34 with a small batch of changes that sneaked in after the last post:

• New talismans:
• Spore talismans, tier 2 talismans providing Spore Form. This meld one’s offhand and feet into sporulating fungi, allowing attacks to weaken enemies and creating rows of burstshrooms behind them. These burstshrooms explode after a short delay and sometimes daze those hit.
• Eel talismans, tier 3 talismans providing Eel Hands Form. This melds one’s gloves, weapon, and offhand slots into twin eels, which provide rElec, and also make one’s melee attacks sometimes produce short-range electric jolts. When one falls below 50%, a stronger jolt will trigger immediately.
• Further talisman changes:
• Blade Form has been reworked. It is now tier 4, melds nothing, and provides two melee auxiliary attacks instead of an unarmed combat bonus. In addition, it provides SH while attacking based on your Slaying.
• Fortress Crab Form now doubles most egos and artifact properties on the body armour equipped. It also provides a slightly higher multiplier to body armour AC (from +135% at max skill to +150%) and Breathe Rust costs slightly less HP.
• Maw Form is now tier 3. Its bite attack triggers less often with fast weapons, but gets additional bonus damage from strength. Kills now heal more in total (especially at high skill), but over several turns. It can now briefly mesmerise the player when an edible monster is first encountered.
• Protean talismans can no longer become maw talismans, but can become spore talismans instead.
• Sphinx Form and Vampire Form now see invisible.
• Vampire Form has a high chance to briefly daze living / demonic / holy monsters when they first notice the player, preventing them from shouting. The Bat Swarm ability can now be manually cancelled, and its cooldown is now shortened by Shapeshifting skill.
• Werewolf Form now can wear helmets and cloaks.
• Fire dragon scales encumbrance rating has decreased, from 11 to 9.
• Amulets of Alchemy are now called amulets of Chemistry, but are otherwise unchanged from the last Trunk Update.
• Fortress Blast’s explosion radius has been increased from 5×5 to 7×7.
• Hellfire Mortar can no longer be recast until the lava from a previous cast has expired, but this lava now disappears more quickly.
• Sphinx Sisters’ summons are now slightly weaker and have a shorter duration.

The 0.34 release will be made and announced Thursday Feb 5th. In the meantime, the 0.34 branch will be installed on servers. Once the 0.34 branch is installed on your favorite server, you can configure your tournament clan in your RC files right now. Good luck in the tournament!

Note: The DCSS scoring pages probably won’t have 0.34 games added until after the tournament. During the tournament, scoring updates will be disabled to conserve resources on CAO. After the tournament, scoring will resume and all games not yet counted will be included. Game records are always permanently stored on each server where the game was played, so no data is lost.

Once again, we haven’t had the time to post any trunk updates during the 0.34 development cycle, but there’s plenty of new content! It would take a long time to go into detail on the past eight months of changes. For easy reading, below you’ll find the contents of the current changelog plus some recent updates:

Highlights

• Players can now carry an unlimited number of consumables.
• Big overhauls to strategic damage, adding new types and reducing mutation.
• Dozens more new monsters have been spread throughout the Dungeon.
• Many new egos have been added for weapons, armour, amulets, and orbs.
• Troves, the Slime Pits, and the Halls of Zot have received major updates.

Artefacts

• The faerie dragon scales now has a higher average enchantment, can sometimes come with evokable invisibility, and is a Hexes enhancer.
• The Mask of the Dragon loses its Will+ and Slay+3 modifiers to gain +2 enchantment and the ability to rarely summon dragons when using invocations,
  with dragon choices scaling to one’s XL.
• The Orb of Wucad Mu is no longer twice as likely to trigger as other orbs of energy, but now has a chance to apply antimagic to monsters after channelling mp for successful spells casts.
• The Scales of the Dragon King no longer has Will+, and instead has the new Command ego.
• The Sword of the Doom Knight has been renamed to the Sword of the Dread Knight.
• Randarts can now come with a Bane property, which inflicts a Bane on the player when equipped. Randarts with this property have higher enchantment.
• Armour egos that are not otherwise in the regular randart property pool can now occasionally appear once per randart as the randart’s base ego.
• Removed unrands: the Sword of Power.

Branches, Environment

• The Lair of Beasts now contains more decorative vaults as well as increased chances to see decorative vaults each game.
• The staircases to and from Vaults:5 now have unique tiles and descriptions.
• The Crypt end vault’s old thematic item rewards have been moved into a unique, guaranteed shop containing a larger quantity of the prior options at high prices.
• Slime Pits now has slimy stairs and other layout changes:
• Staircases in the Slime Pits are slimy and can no longer be climbed back up until The Royal Jelly is dead (or the player worships Jiyva).
• Going down on a slimy staircase confers a status that greatly increases HP and MP regen for a while.
• All floors are now fully connected, and up and down stairs are placed further apart.
• Altars to Jiyva are guaranteed on Slime:2-4 with a 50% chance for one on Slime:1.
• The Depths now more consistently contains threatening minivaults.
• The Halls of Zot will now contain one of three types of orb monster each game, each wielding a different element and form of strategic damage. The orb type one will encounter that game is indicated via statues placed by the Temple entrance in the Dungeon and the Zot entrance in Depths. This can also be viewed from the the Dungeon overview screen (ctrl+O) once seen.
• The last floor of Zot contains now contains two Boundless Tesseracts, immobile enemy spawners with fast regeneration.
• Tesseracts wake up the first time one kills an Orb Guardian. Once a tesseract wakes up, both are automatically detected, and 4 to 7 new monsters will appear outside of the Orb vault.
• Tesseracts spawn further monsters at random locations across the entire floor an average of once every 50 turns. These will always be outside of the player’s sight until at least 50 monsters have been created this way.
• Tesseract spawns are specially marked as such, reward no XP, are capped to 60 on the floor at a time, and will continue to spawn in a limited capacity when on other floors.
• Destroying one tesseract will destroy both, dismiss all tesseract-created monsters, and daze all other monsters in sight of the tesseract for ~9 turns.
• The Orb status from being in Zot or having picked up the Orb of Zot now also fuzzes the destination of scrolls of blinking by up to two spaces.
• The depth at which the player enters the Abyss is now based upon their XL, regardless of whether they arrive by banishment or entering a gateway themselves.
• Abyss shifts can no longer pull the player deeper than they otherwise would have entered it (unless they spend a while there at max XL), and the Abyss will no longer ‘remember’ the deepest depth a player previously reached.
• Finding the rune on Abyss:4-5 takes longer on average than before.
• Hell effects can now inflict a small amount of Doom instead of inflicting transient mutations.
• Troves’ prices and contents have been heavily revised:
• Troves will no longer ask for any consumables besides scrolls of acquirement and will no longer ask for specific named items from shops.
• Equipment costs are less common. Demon weapons are all interchangeable and and heavier dragon scales are rarer.
• The Slimy / Abyssal rune troves and Horn of Geryon troves are more common.
• Piety troves now use a new debuff that temporarily caps one’s piety at 0 until XP is gained instead of permanently draining it, allowing them to function with more gods than before.
• New trove costs include accepting pre-announced Banes and being extremely drained.
• Trove contents are no longer grouped by item category, and contain a slightly lower amount of higher-quality items themed after spell namesakes or unrand items. These items are also far less likely to be useless according to god restrictions or species limits.
• Potential troves to discover include The Dread Knight’s Derelict Chapel, Eringya’s Secret Bog, The First Justicar’s Armoury, Leda’s Sunken Stockpile, The Lost Hoard of Erebora, The Name-Rending Infernalists’ Reservoir, The Octopus King’s Forgotten Garden, Ozocubu’s Refrigerator, Rutra’s Hidden Sanctum, The Storm Queen’s Palace Crash Site, a devouring Rift, and an orange crystal hatchery.
• Dispersal traps now have a short cooldown after triggering before they can trigger again.
• Harlequin’s traps’ chaos lace buff now stacks on top of any other attack brands a monster previously had.

Character

• Players can now accumulate Doom from enemies and other hostile effects, a new form of medium-term damage displayed as a percentage. Doom has no effect on its own and disappears with gaining experience, but at 100% causes one to gain a random Bane, which itself only disappears with gaining significantly
  more experience differing between Bane types. Banes include:
• Bane of Claustrophobia, which lowers melee damage and accuracy for each wall the player is adjacent to.
• Bane of the Dilettante, which reduces the player’s highest weapon skill as well as their two highest magic / invocation / evocation skills.
• Bane of Electrospasm, which makes suffering electric damage sometimes inflict the -Move status.
• Bane of Heatstroke, which makes suffering fire damage sometimes Slow you.
• Bane of the Hunted, which makes any creatures summoned by enemy appear next to the player, last longer, and be better at tracking you.
• Bane of Lethargy, which slows the player’s movement speed.
• Bane of Mortality, which gives a chance for reapers to appear near wounded players when no other enemies are around.
• Bane of Multiplicity, which gives a chance for any monster you fight to create fragile clones of itself.
• Bane of Paradox, which gives a small chance for each new monster you encounter to learn Manifold Assault with a chance to blink after casting it.
• Bane of Snow-blindness, which makes suffering cold damage something inflict Blind and Weak.
• Bane of Stumbling, which inflicts -25 EV when moving or standing still.
• Bane of Succour, which makes killing enemies heal other nearby enemies based on the slain foe’s max HP.
• Bane of Warding, which gives a small chance to give groups of monster the Warding buff when first seen, which grants damage immunity from non-adjacent sources of damage.
• Undead species and forms lose Doom and Banes half as quickly as other species.
• Player contamination has been heavily adjusted.
• The exact amount one is contaminated is now indicated as a percentage in the sidebar. Harmful effects begin at 100% and cap at 300%.
• Crossing the 100% threshold is more likely to result in a bad mutation than before (but very high amounts are less dangerous). Mutations gained this
  way no longer ignore rMut.
• Explosions from contamination are now possible at a lower threshold, ignore AC, and are more damaging. Their potential damage can be seen on the %
  screen.
• Many existing effects have been rescaled to be similarly dangerous as before this change.
• New mutations:
• Booming Voice, which makes reading scrolls in sight of enemies incredibly loud.
• Efficient Metabolism, which doubles the duration of potion status effects.
• Feed Off Suffering, which restores HP and MP after killing poisoned or drained foes.
• Initially attractive, which sometimes pulls monsters close to the player when first seen (and then sometimes wakes them up).
• Lucky, which gives a small chance for floor items the player encounters to be randarts.
• Meek, which provides negative Slaying.
• Potion Fungus, which sometimes spreads the beneficial effects of potions the player drinks to random enemies and allies in sight.
• Protean Grace, which gives +Slay and +EV based on how mutated you are.
• Reckless, which cuts your SH in half but gives +15% damage with two-handed weapons.
• Spatial Entanglement, which gives a chance of dragging along another hostile monster whenever the player translocates.
• Spiteful Blood, which may spawn hostile XL-scaling erythrospites when the player is injured below 50% of their max HP.
• Other individual mutation changes:
• Electricity Vulnerability is now in the normal mutation pool.
• Screaming now gives a small chance to shout loudly whenever the player is damaged, rather than when first seeing monsters.
• Sense Surroundings is now stronger and only has two levels.
• Teleportitis now gives the player a few turns of a cancellable !Tele! status before they will be teleported towards monsters.
• Thick Fur can now only be mutated by Trolls and Felids.
• Weak, Dopey, and Clumsy mutations lower their respective stats by one more (from -2 to -3.)
• The unsafe potion and scroll mutations are no longer in the regular bad mutation pool.
• Removed mutations: Berserkitis.
• Transient mutations are now only removed by slaying a sufficient number of non-trivial monsters, and can no longer roll the three stat loss mutations.
• Players can no longer instantly become Petrified after being affected with another source of petrification while mid-petrifying. (Petrification and calcifying clouds have become more difficult to resist in kind.)
• Players have a longer stun immunity after being Vexed, and attack as quickly as their default attack speed would be.
• Players can now negate intrinsic rPois- with two sources of rPois.
• Players can stack up to 3 sources of rampage.
• Performing an attack while rampaging no longer affects the time that movement took. Instead, rampage attacks inflict a half-turn ministun on the target and inflict reduced damage if the player’s attack speed is slower than their movement speed.
• Players succeeding at certain optional challenges can now obtain unique titles proclaiming their triumph (or madness).

Gods

• Dithmenos’s shadow mimic no longer fully heals every time it acts while Shadowslip is active. Shadowslip costs more piety, but gives the shadow
  slightly more max HP.
• Gozag’s Gold Lust passive now properly displays when monsters are affected by it (instead of regularly losing its visual indication before its effects
  ended).
• Jiyva’s jellies can no longer eat spellbooks.
• Nemelex’s Orb card now consistently provides more orbs with spellpower, always aims one orb to the aimed target, and home into targets with fairly
  higher precision than previously.
• Ru’s Draw Out Power now also cures mesmerism and fear.
• Ru’s Sacrifice Drink and Sacrifice Words passives have been revised: they now both prevent using potions or scrolls with monsters in sight while your HP is high (and have no effect when badly injured).
• Vehumet’s first level 1 spell gift is now given immediately upon worship.
• Vehumet’s spell gift choices now account for Conjurations and Alchemy skill, and skew more to average spell skill levels instead of their sums.
• Wu Jian martial attacks can no longer fail if the player’s attack speed is slower than their movement speed, but will perform a lower damage attack instead.
• Xom has a new action: slightly Dooming the player.
• All gods besides the good gods no longer allow rejoining them if one is undergoing their wrath.
• Several wrath adjustments:
• Fedhas and Jiyva wraths have been simplified.
• Ignis’s Fire Champion effect now gives a monster rF+, 7 AC, adds fire damage to their attacks (rather than overwriting their normal effect). It can be applied to a wider range of monsters and sometimes multiple at once.
• Kiku wrath applies the Sign of Ruin instead of tormenting, has a hard cap on draining for lower amounts that can no longer be resisted by rN+, and also now applies Doom.
• Okawaru wrath summons are more varied and scale more smoothly to player xl.
• Qazlal wrath now applies the Banes of Heatstroke, Snow-blindness, and Electrospasm instead of transient mutations of rF-, rC-, or rElec-.

Interface and Options

• Inventory revamp related changes:
• The (d)rop menu is now split into 4 different pages for each inventory category: gear, potions, scrolls, and evocable items. The current page can be changed using either left and right arrow keys or Tab and Shift-Tab.
• New show_paged_inventory option: disables this page behaviour for the (i)nventory screen.
• Talismans are now considered gear and are (p)ut on instead of e(v)oked.
• Jewellery autopick-up no longer picks up extra copies of non-artifact jewellery past the max amount one can wear at a time.
• Dropping consumables now disables them from autopickup by default.
• The item_slot option has been replaced with gear_slot and consumable_shortcut options.
• Scrolls of fear, silence, vulnerability, immolation, torment, and all sources of invisibility now have targetting prompts that highlight which monsters will be affected (as well as the chance of affecting them).
• New force_scroll_targeter option: allows disabling these prompts from scrolls (or adding them for several others).
• New show_invis_targeter option: disables the prompt for sources of invisibility.
• Resting now waits by default for all negative effects and transformations, all time-based cooldowns, and all magical contamination to wear off. A new explore_auto_rest_status option allows adding or changing this list.
• The character overview screen (%) now displays how much damage is prevented by each pip of resistance the player has. A new show_resist_percent option can be used to hide these numbers.
• Temporary maluses to player AC / EV / SH now always consistently colour those values in the status bar as red.
• Sighting monsters is now described as “You encounter an X” rather than “An X comes into view.”
• All uniques now cause a –More– when first encountered.
• New monster_alert option: allows setting specific monsters or monster threat tiers to make a –More– appear when encountered.
• When monsters move out of the player’s sight to a known location, the direction they left will be indicated.
• Monsters with any status effects now list the mechanics of those status effects on a new tab when examined (xv).
• Sleeping and wandering monsters now display their chance of noticing the player each turn when examined (xv).
• The “Trivial” monster threat level threshold is now a little higher.
• Monsters with holy wrath weapons are highlighted by default as having unusual items if one is vulnerable to them by being undead or demonic.
• The unusual_monster_items option now has new “vulnerable” syntax that allows marking a brand as unusual as long as one has no matching resistance to that brand, and can also stop displaying this at a selected XL.
• Vault randarts with specified armour egos rolling randarts will no longer show redundant inscriptions (e.g. plate armour of {rF+, rF+}).
• Examining throwable missiles now displays their mulch chance in-game.
• New warn_contam_cost option: warns the player before casting Irradiate if it could potentially result in going over 100% contamination.

Items

• Players now have four separate inventories: 52 pieces of gear (including throwing weapons, and unlimited potions, scrolls, and evokable items. Each inventory uses a separate 52 letters (ie: both a scroll and a potion may be mapped to the same letter at the same time), and most consumables now have default letter assignments when identified.
• Parchments now replace the majority of spellbooks found in game, each granting knowledge of a single spell.
• Parchments are much more common than spellbooks used to be, making the total number of spells found in the game roughly equal to previous versions.
• Floors with shops past the Dungeon and Lair have increasing likelihood to contain an additional parchment shop.
• Randbooks now only appear in select vaults or via acquirement and Sif Muna gifts.
• Higher-spell-level are now somewhat rarer early in the game and more common later.
• New amulets:
• Amulets of Alchemy, which give an Alchemy enhancer and also grant players a small amount of mp whenever they drink non-useless potions.
• Amulets of Dissipation, which cause time-based negative status effects to expire twice as quickly.
• Amulets of Wildshape, which gives +5 Shapeshifting skill.
• New orbs:
• Orbs of attunement, which double the enhancers provided by wielded magical staves and also makes melee attacks performed with them restore a small amount of MP.
• Orbs of glass, which may inflict Fragility on nearby enemies whenever they’re injured, scaling with Evocations skill.
• Orbs of mesmerism, which inflict Daze on nearby enemies when one is injured by melee attacks, are recharged by not moving, and scaled heavily with Evocations skill.
• Orbs of pyromania, which give a Fire enhancer and also produces explosions around the wielder whenever they directly kill a monster without using attacks, scaling with Evocations skill.
• Orbs of stardust, which conjure fast-moving shooting star projectiles whenever the player first spends MP each combat, scaling with Evocations, MP spent, and the number of visible monsters.
• New weapon egos, each exclusive to a given weapon class:
• Axes of Sundering, which make every sixth consecutive attack strike for triple damage and cleave with +1 range.
• Long blades of Valour, which fire short-ranged penetrating beams of energy while their wielders is above 80% of their max hp.
• Maces of Concussion, which allow their wielders to trample forward whenever they hit, briefly stunning pushed foes and dealing +25% damage if the foe’s back is to a wall.
• Polearms of Entangling, which may constrict foes they strike.
• Short blades of Deviousness, which provide temporary Slay and EV after stabbing an enemy and make it easier to do so.
• Staves of Rebuke, which give +10 SH while attacking and redirect blocked melee attacks to other adjacent foes.
• New heavy armour egos:
• Armour of archery, which have halved armour encumbrance penalties for ranged weapons.
• Armour of command, which gives Summoning spells a success chance and spellpower bonuses based on one’s Armour skill.
• Armour of death, which gives Necromancy spells a success chance and spellpower bonus, but make all non-Necromancy spells cost as much HP as they cost MP.
• Armour of resonance, which gives Forgecraft spells a success rate bonus and also increase the damage of the wearer’s melee attacks based on their Forgecraft skill.
• New other armour egos:
• Hats of sniping, which increase ranged weapon and thrown item damage against incapacitated foes.
• Hats and helmets of ice, which give Ice Magic enhancers.
• Cloaks of air, which give an Air Magic enhancer.
• Gloves of fire, which give a Fire Magic enhancer.
• Gloves of parrying, which give SH when using melee attacks, doubled if wielding a two-handed weapon.
• Boots of earth, which give an Earth Magic enhancer.
• Hats are now more likely to get egos.
• Helmets can now get the Light ego, which was previously exclusive to orbs.
• Shields can now get the corrosion resistance ego, and Tower Shields may be Ponderous.
• Cloaks of preservation are now renamed to be of corrosion resistance.
• Further general orb changes:
• Orbs of energy and orbs of guile now scale their effects with the wielder’s Evocations skill.
• Orbs of light no longer spawn naturally, but are still given to Monks on starting the game.
• Orbs are now more common.
• Talismans are cheaper in shops.
• Stones are now much less common.
• Removed items: rings of fire, rings of ice, orbs of wrath.

Monsters

• Monster staircase behaviour has been heavily adjusted:
• All monsters now instantly return to the floor they spawned on if they are lured more than three floors away from their floor of origin.
• Monsters left behind on other floors are now more consistent about approaching and encircling the last staircase they saw the player use.
• After travelling through any stairs, known or not, monsters the player hasn’t seen before will always skip their first turn.
• Wandering monsters no longer automatically notice the player whenever you perform attacks, cast spells, or zap wands. In exchange, they are somewhat more likely to notice the player each turn (especially strong monsters).
• The Slime Pits have many new and returning monsters:
• Colossal amoebae, which create copies of themselves when they hit foes.
• Creeping plasmodia, which launch explosive acid spores that can spread weaker plasmodia to other walls.
• Eyes of draining, rare sights that rapidly drain the player’s maximum HP
• Morphogenic oozes, whose melee attacks can temporarily turn players into jellies.
• Slymdras, lethally acidic combinations of hydras and slime creatures.
• Star jellies, which launch shooting stars when seriously injured.
• Two new orb types rotate with orbs of fire in Zot each game:
• Orbs of Winter, which cast Flash Freeze, Ozocubu’s Refrigeration, and inflict a new Ostracism debuff that temporarily reduces one’s piety.
• Orbs of Entropy, which cast Bolt of Draining, Acid Ball, and inflict Doom upon their foes.
• New unique: Cassandra, an oracle of Ashenzari who foresees great Doom in your future.
• Other new and returning monsters:
• Bes kemwar, magic-weakening maggot spirits for D.
• Chonchon, chaotic flying heads for Depths.
• Clockroaches, time-bending warded insects for D.
• Cognitogaunts, antimagic starghouls for Crypt and Abyss.
• Crawling flesh cages, augmented ugly things for Vaults.
• Drudes, new weak Doom-inflicting tier-5 demons for D and the Abyss.
• Kobold fleshcrafters, abomination makers for Depths.
• Kobold geomancers, deconstructing earth mages for D.
• Mountainshells, warded earthshaking tortoises for Lair.
• Ravens, Doom-inflicting birds for Lair.
• Rock fish, wall-swimming fish for D.
• Screaming refractions, crystal injury-mirroring undead for the Abyss.
• Undertakers, wall-swimming constructs for Tartarus.
• Zykzyls, the new malmutating tier-2 demon, now focused on hexes.
• Antaeus trades Flash Freeze for Sleetstrike, a variant of Airstrike that inflicts the Frozen status and deals more damage partially resistible with rC.
• Blizzard demons trade out Airstrike and Bolt of Cold for Sleetstrike and Deflect Missiles.
• Bone dragons now breathe clouds of excruciating misery, and now have less health. They no longer appear in Tartarus, and are now more common in Crypt.
• Cacodemons no longer know Malmutate or Bolt of Devastation, but can cut willpower in half with their melee and cast Doom Bolt: a penetrating bolt that inflicts Doom on hit.
• Dancing weapons are now explicitly referred to as dancing weapons in-game.
• Death knights trade Injury Mirror for higher stats, an umbra, and Hurl Torchlight (like the Yred ability), and now place in the Vaults with draugr instead of in late D.
• Doom hounds have been renamed to oblivion hounds.
• Draugr replace skeletons as derived undead monsters, losing health for more AC, no speed penalty, an ability to wield weapons regardless of their original form, and Doom-inflicting melee. They are rarer than the previous skeletons.
• Earth elementals can now move through walls and statues (which grants no innate additional protection beyond cloud immunity), are somewhat faster, and hit slightly less hard.
• Eyes of devastation are stronger and can come with a single golden eye.
• Fire bats can no longer rarely spawn over Depths lava and can now rarely spawn over late D lava instead.
• Glowing orange brains no longer have Brain Bite.
• Mara now dual-wields demon weapons and has somewhat better body armour.
• The moon troll now is warded from damage from non-adjacent foes, and loses Dazzling Flash in exchange for Lee’s Rapid Deconstruction.
• Nekomata no longer have Repel Missiles.
• Neqoxecs no longer can inflict permanent mutations, but have a new Warp Body spell that deals minor damage and inflicts transient mutations (or Vitrify, if the player has already been repeatedly Warped).
• Orb Guardians no longer follow stair-using players off of Zot:5 until the Orb of Zot is picked up.
• Oni incarcerators deal less damage and cast Manifold Assault less often.
• Purple very / ugly things now have extra Will and antimagic attacks.
• Reapers have a new non-skeletal flavour and now fly.
• The Royal Jelly can no longer be banished and can produce star jellies when injured (in addition to the other types of monsters it could already create).
• Shining eyes trade Malmutate for Mutagenic Gaze, which inflicts contamination over time (but is usable anywhere in line of sight).
• Sphinx marauders do less damage on average with their airstrike attacks.
• Sojobo and spriggan air mages now have less EV.
• Vampire bloodprinces now fly.
• Void oozes lose their antimagic attack brand for a new Diminish Spells brand, which ignores AC.
• Void ooze and water elemental Engulfing has been revised entirely. They now inflict a few turns of Flooded status on hit, which deals a low amount of asphyxiation damage each turn and Silences anything that needs to breathe air.
• Monster purple draconians have slightly less Willpower, and classed draconians have more Willpower.
• Monster allies should no longer be able to injure the player with explosion spells.
• Mummy death curses now inflict more Draining, less Torment and Slow, and have a chance to inflict Doom.
• Monster miniparalysis now consistently lasts 15 aut and is no longer affected by how fast or slow one’s pre-paralysis action was.
• Monsters with necromancy spells deal more damage with pain brand weapons.
• Monsters that know Blink and its variations will more consistently cast it to escape nets.
• Monster Corrosive Bolt now has a higher chance to corrode for higher amounts and does slightly more damage.
• Monster Bolts of Draining are more accurate.
• Monster Flash Freeze accuracy is greatly reduced and damage somewhat reduced.
• Monster Injury Bond’s damage redistribution now removes some damage entirely – those protected still take 50% of the original damage, but the caster now only takes 25%.
• Monster Lee’s Rapid Deconstruction now more consistently targets brittle players directly (i.e. gargoyles, revenants, and all species in statue-form) and is smarter about using more damaging wall types, when available.
• Monster mesmerisation effects (including merfolk siren and merfolk avatar songs) now also daze all opposing monsters.
• Monster Repel Missiles has been replaced with Deflect Missiles, which increases their effective EV against missiles by 24 (previously 15).
• Monsters’ blindness resistance has been refactored: all sources of Blind outside of light effects, Enfeeble, and divine powers are limited to
  natural / demonic / holy monsters, while light can also work on undead and Enfeeble / most divine Blind effects ignore Blind resistance entirely.
• Daze now makes monsters skip their actions until they take any damage, instead of giving them a 1-in-4 chance to skip each action (but last less time).
• Removed monsters: giant cockroaches, Psyche.

Spells

• Dazzling Flash has been renamed Gloom and moved from Hexes / Fire to Hexes / Necromancy. It is now silent.
• Enfeeble now inflicts a new Diminished Spells debuff that lowers the target’s spellpower rather than inflicting antimagic.
• Martyr’s Knell’s shade now has lower max HP and regeneration (to account for the improvement to Injury Bond), but higher AC and EV.
• Both players and monsters failing to resist Petrification while already petrifying no longer instantly completes the Petrification, but Petrification is slightly more difficult to resist in exchange.
• Silence no longer has an innate Stealth penalty.
• Summon Horrible Things now increases the caster’s Doom rather than sometimes inflicting temporary Will- mutations.

Tiles and Other Art

• New tiles for existing game elements:
• Monsters: juggernaut simulacra, Maggie, Mara, Polyphemus, sky beast zombies.
• Sprint specialties: flame-cult kobolds, witches, orb golems.
• Spells: Confusion Gaze, Mass Regeneration, Vitrifying Gaze, Weakening Gaze.
• Icons: light egos, frenzied, magnetized, sentinel’s mark.
• Traps: Archmage’s trap, devourer’s trap, tyrant’s trap.
• Features: exits out of Sewers + Bailies + the Desolation of Salt + the Crucible of Flesh, stairs to and from Zot:5.
• Walls: Lair + Gloorx Vloq’s rock walls, Lair + Orc + Elf + Depths entry + Zot:5 + Ossuary + Zonguldrok’s Shrine stone walls, Vaults + Maxwell’s Workshop metal walls, Vaults + Depths crystal walls.
• Floors: Lair, Elf’s Hall of Blades, Vaults hard vaults, Vaults:$, Zot entry vaults, Cerebov’s fortress, grassy vaults, crystal vaults.
• GUI: exclusions.
• New wall and floor tiles for vaults: stone magic shelves, magic crackling stone, vine-coated stone and tile floor, mystic pit floors.
• New Formicid and caustic shrikes splash screen by YLam.
• New Gozag and Vaults splash screen by LemurRobot.

We still have a couple weeks left of development for this release. So check out the commit list if you want to see new content and changes that make it in 0.34. Until next time, happy crawling!

DCSS 0.33.1 features the following fixes:

• Fix vampire form not having torment resistance.
• Fix bat swarm form having torment immunity instead of torment resistance.
• Fix breaking cursed items without a prompt when leaving slot-granting forms.
• Fix sphinx and serpent forms having slot items fall off when changing temporarily to another form via lignification or polymorph.
• Fix Dithmenos’ player shadow not having the same reach as the player when in aqua form.
• Fix inconsistencies in handling of beam types:
• The spells Chain Lightning and Stunning Bolt are now properly 33% resistable with rElec instead of only 25% resistable.
• Mercury Arrow is now properly 25% resistable with rPois.
• Stunning Bolt now checks half of AC like other elecriticy-themed spells.
• Qazlal’s adaptive rElec is now properly triggered by Stunning Bolt.
• Qazlal’s adaptive AC is now properly triggered by all ‘physical’ spell projectiles.
• The Slick Slippers now prevent being bound by an ironbound beastmaster’s bolas.
• Fix not being able to use Yredelemnul’s Light the Black Torch on a portal level like Necropolis if it had been used in a previous instance of that portal.
• Don’t allow orbrun spawns in Okawaru’s Arena.
• Remove erroneous extra placements of alderkings in Sprint IV.
• 37 other bug fixes, interface improvements, and documentation updates.

Packages of DCSS 0.33.1 for Windows, OS X, and Linux are all available from the download page. You can also play it online on one of many servers across the world!

Congratulations to EnegeticOcto (aka Lici the Crawler) for taking first place in the individual competition, with 112,658 points and 17 wins! Lici won the lowest turncount win (AtCj won in 11,106 turns), the fastest realtime win (a MiFi won in 25:47), had the second highest scoring game in the tournament (a GrEE with 84M points), and had the second most pacific run of the tournament (a SpEn with just 570 kills). Additionally, Lici took 2nd in the Combo Score category with species high scores for Gr and Dj, class high scores for EE, Ne, and Wn, and 8 combo high scores. Finally, and although this isn’t in a tournament category, it’s still impressive: Lici had the first win of the tournament, a MiFi of Gozag won 54 minutes, 17 seconds after tournament start.

Other big winners:

• Flugkiller: 2nd place overall with 98,012 points and 15 wins. Flugkiller had the second fastest realtime win of the tournament (a MiFi won in 26:12) and the third highest scoring game of the tournament (a HuAl with 69M points).
• tswn: 3rd place overall with 97,898 and 16 wins. tswn was first in the combo high score category with 4 species high scores (At, Mi, Ko, Tr), 5 class high scores (Br, CA, CK, Fi, Wr), and 13 combo high scores. They also had the 3rd lowest turncount win, a MiFi won in 12,013 turns, and got the second win of the tournament, a MiFi won 59 minutes, 46 seconds after tournament start.
• questionabletactics: The longest win streak with 17 wins.
• Sapher: Highest scoring win at 89M points with an ReSu that also set the all-time Revenant species high score.
• Draconius: The player with the highest adjusted winrate of 91.67% and a true winrate of 100% with 11 GnIE wins.
• WizardIke: The only player to collect all 24 tier 3 banners.
• bookman: 1st place in the Nemelex’ choice category by winning 36 Nemelex’ Choice combos.
• shadowrider38: Most pacific win, a SpEn with only 454 kills.

The clan competition was won by The Knights of B O (captained by EnegeticOcto) with 130,028 points and 1st in the clan high score, banner collection, fastest realtime win, and low turncount win categories. They also took 2nd in the clan combo high scores, win streak, and the most pacific win categories. In 2nd place was Cigotuvi’s Clown Car (captained by TheMeInTeam) with 127,455 points, 1st place in the Nemelex’ choice, win streak, and most pacific win categories, 2nd place in the banner collection, fastest realtime win, and low turncount win categories, and 3rd place in the combo high scores category. In 3rd place was The 27 Club (captained by particleface) with 116,732 points, 1st place in the combo high scores category, 2nd place in the Nemelex’ choice category, and 3rd place in the low turncount win and banner collection categories.

To close out, here are some overall tournament statistics (with the 0.32 numbers in brackets for comparison). 2944 non-bot players started a game at some point during the tournament; of those 2870 completed a game without quitting or leaving the dungeon sadly orbless. This definition of “player” (players who completed a non-boring game) is used for subsequent calculations and was used for the 0.32 statistics.

• Players: 2,870 (0.32: 2,838)
• Total player time: 32,484 hrs (0.32: 29,114 hrs)
• Average player time: 11.32 hrs (0.32: 10.26 hrs)
• Games played: 89,582 (0.32: 76,121)
• Players who got a rune: 890 (0.32: 871)
• 421 winners and 1428 wins (0.32: 421 winners and 1319 wins)
• Win rate: 1.59% (0.32: 1.73%)
• WebTiles win rate: 1.52% (0.32: 1.63%) / Console win rate: 4.06% (0.32: 5.43%)

Thanks to you all for playing! Many thanks as well to server admins, developers, and contributors who made the 0.33 release and tournament possible! The 0.34 season has begun, and a trickle of tweaks and bugfixes have already landed in trunk, with many more changes to come for this version. Also look for an important 0.33.1 bugfix release to made soon. That’s all for now, and until next time, happy crawling!

DCSS 0.33 features a new magic school, two new playable species, twelve new talisman items, a new portal level, and many new and revamped monsters! For the complete list of these and the many other changes included in this version, see the release page here.

Packages of DCSS 0.33 for Windows, OS X, and Linux are all available from the download page. You can also play it online on one of many servers across the world!

The tournament starts today on Friday May 2nd, 8pm UTC and runs through Sunday May 18th, 8pm UTC, with all online 0.33 games counting towards your score. See the tournament page for more details, including how to join or setup a clan. Clans membership can be changed until Friday May 9th, 8pm UTC.

Many thanks to all those who have contributed to DCSS over the years. Thanks especially to the DCSS development team, whose contributions made 0.33 possible, and to the admins who run and maintain the official servers. A special thanks to the following community members who contributed to 0.33 and a warm welcome to the first-time contributors.

Alejandro Ramirez, Alex Beloi, Alex Jurkiewicz, Aliscans, Antern, bobross419, Brian Faires, Brian Power, cadi, Charlie Gettys, CipHuK, croikle, Flugkiller, geekosaur, guillaume, Heinrich Ody, jjjingleheimer, Lexi Hattaway, LiciTheCrawler, Matthew Granstrom, mgdelmonte, MikeJHeg, Monkooky, NormalPerson7, Paperbell, perci, person50605, pyy156941, radio-gra, Robert J. Redelmeier, RypoFalem, Samantha Tobias, sdynet, Sean Dewar, SentientSupper, tianmaster, tuohy, William S., WizardIke, Yi Yang, yrdzrfxndfvh, Zen Liu

The 0.33 release will be made and announced either this Thursday or Friday. In the meantime, the 0.33 branch has been installed on most online servers. On these servers, you can configure your tournament clan in your RC files right now. Good luck in the tournament!

Note: The DCSS scoring pages probably won’t have 0.33 games added until after the tournament. During the tournament, scoring updates will be disabled to conserve resources on CAO. After the tournament, scoring will resume and all games not yet counted will be included. Game records are always permanently stored on each server where the game was played, so no data is lost.

We haven’t had the time to post any trunk updates during the 0.33 development cycle, but that’s certainly not due to a lack of content! It would take a long time to go into detail on the past eight months of changes. Hence I’ve put the contents of the current changelog below for easier reading:

Highlights

• New magic school + background: Forgewrights, building explosive constructs.
• Two new species: poltergeists and revenants.
• Twelve new talismans have been added, and Shapeshifters have been reworked.
• Ghost vaults are moved into a game-long repeating portal, the Necropolis.
• Yet more new monsters, decorations, and traps spread throughout the Dungeon.

Artefacts

• New unrands:
• The Crown of Vainglory, a +3 hat that grants two extra ring slots, but also makes entering floors wake up nearby enemies and temporarily prohibits stair use.
• The fungal fisticloak, a +3 cloak that also takes up the hat slot, provides another gloves slot, and grants a confusion-branded auxiliary fungus attack.
• The Justicar’s Regalia, a +5 scale mail that grants an extra amulet slot and gives allies summoned or created by the player the regeneration status.
• The Skull of Zonguldrok, a talkative off-hand item that grants Reaping brand to one’s attacks and another hat slot (on the skull).
• The macabre finger necklace now also grants +7 HP.
• Randart weapons can now be Reaping branded, which now creates spectres.
• -Cast on the Sword of the Doom Knight, Maxwell’s Patent Armour, and general randarts is replaced with *Silence, which inflicts a short-term silence on 1% of hits on the wielder.
• +Invis, Harm, and Rampage artefact properties can now be found on talisman randarts.
• Removed unrands: the Sword of Zonguldrok.

Branches, Environment

• Ghost vaults have been moved into their own portal, the Necropolis.
• Portals to the Necropolis can be found up to three times each game: once in D:5-15, Lair, or Orc; once in Swamp, Snake, Shoals, Spider, or Vaults; and once in Elf, Crypt, or Depths.
• Each Necropolis contains three separate ghost vaults, which are still flavoured and tailored towards the branch a portal entrance is found in.
• Another 10 ghost vaults have been added.
• Pre-Lair ghost vaults have been somewhat nerfed, while rewards for many ghost vaults have been increased.
• New traps, all of which activate when monsters or players step on them:
• Archmage’s traps, which drain player mp and grant monsters empowered spells.
• Devourer’s traps, which corrode players.
• Harlequin’s traps, which grant monsters chaotic attacks.
• Tyrant’s traps, which weaken players and grant monsters might.
• New decorations:
• Walkable: caches of baked goods, floral vases (sometimes broken), flower and garden patches, fountains of eyes, fur piles, infernal standards, mops and buckets (sometimes bloodied), mourning vases, and orcish standards.
• Solid: enigmatic dynamos and nascence circuits.
• Destructible: petrified flowers.
• Walking over fountains now has a chance to produce flavour messages, varying based on the fountain, one’s god, and the absence of hostile enemies in sight.
• Zot traps now can inflict blindness.
• The last floor of Crypt now has a 30% chance to contain a sanguine talisman.
• The clouds of degeneration in Alistair’s Party Mansion are now alcoholic mist, inflicting Vertigo.
• The orb chamber on Zot:5 no longer has a chance to be completely blocked off by traps, and instead will deploy several of the above newer traps.
• Frail pillars of rime can be found in Cocytus.
• Ziggurats have even more exponential scaling for those doing multiple ziggurats.
• Sprint VII (“The Pits”) has gotten major updates to balance and monster options, while Sprint V (“Ziggurat Sprint”) has had minor updates to the same.

Character

• Stat drain has been removed.
• Reaching 0 in any stat (through e.g. items or mutations) now solely makes the player permanently slow until their stats are raised again.
• Undead players being malmutated now have their HP drained instead.
• New skill: Forgecraft, used for Forgecraft spells. Most species have Forgecraft apts that are the same as their Summoning apts. Exceptions to this are Mountain Dwarves, Coglins, Yellow Draconians (all +2), Barachi (+1), Demonspawn, Felids, Poltergeists (all -1), Revenants, Minotaurs, and Tengu (all -2).
• New background: Forgewright, which starts with a +0 hammer (a reskinned mace), a potion of magic, and a variety of Forgecraft spells.
• Fighters now start with a second potion of might.
• Shapeshifters now start with a quill talisman, three flux baubles, and a protean talisman, which can be used with 6 or more Shapeshifting skill to randomly transform it into a scarab, rimehorn, medusa or maw talisman. They keep their potion of lignification and start with 1 more Fighting skill.
• Wanderers can now start with quill talismans, inkwell talismans, flux baubles, protean talismans, or any protean-tier talisman.
• Reavers now start with knowledge of Rending Blade.
• Summoners start with knowledge of Eringya’s Surprising Crocodile and Summon Seismosaurus Egg instead of Summon Blazeheart Golem or Lightning Spire.
• New mutations:
• efficient magic, making spells cost 1 less (to a minimum of 1 MP).
• ephemeral shield, granting +7 SH briefly after spells and invocations.
• poor constitution, inflicting Weak and then Slow on taking damage.
• time-warped blood, hasting some of your allies when you fall below 50% health, and can only activate again after returning to full health.
• Berserk players are now immune to fear.
• Constructs the player makes with their own Forgecraft spells can be nonviolently deconstructed by pressing ctrl+[direction] while adjacent.
• Fungus Form and Tree Form are both immune to sleep.
• Paralysis, sleep, petrification, and vex status inflicted on the player all now share the same temporary immunity cooldown.
• Penalties to body armour AC from talismans and the Deformed Body mutation are now also applied to the AC bonus from training Armour skill. To compensate, the AC penalties of Deformed Body and blade talismans have been reduced, and Naga and Armataurs have their Armour aptitudes increase by 1.
• Removed mutations: deterioration.

Gods

• Ashenzari’s curse of Companions now supports Forgecraft as well as its prior skills of Summoning and Necromancy.
• Cheibriados worshippers are never hasted by potions of haste, and can’t enter penance by deliberately drinking potions of haste.
• The wraths of Cheibriados and Trog have been simplified.
• Dithmenos’s shadow mimic also works for Forgecraft spells, creating a shadow turret that can fire through allies.
• Xom has received more adjustments:
• Xom’s bazaars have more variety and are less common.
• Polymorph and draining effects are less dangerous early on.
• New actions: hyperbuff weak ally, burn webs.
• All three good gods that care about injuring allies now consistently don’t care about injuring mindless non-living allies (like Forgecraft’s).

Interface and Options

• Examining equipment and talismans now can show the changes to the player’s spell success chances for each spell if they switched to using that item.
• Examining spellbooks in webtiles now colours spells according to their usability and whether or not one has the spell in their library.
• Examining talismans now displays their upsides, downsides, and skill scaling in a more compressed format with additional details.
• Spell range is now indicated with numbers instead of diagrams.
• Default target-picking behaviour for spells, abilities, and items has been improved: it is now more consistent at avoiding the player or their allies when aiming harmful area effects and choose more sensible default aims for some utility effects.
• Ranged autofight should no longer sometimes cast spells at invalid targets (such as Dispel Undead against living monsters in melee).
• Casting ally-creating spells when there is no nearby room is now automatically cancelled, rather than wasting a turn and one’s MP.
• Equipping an item that would require unequipping multiple other items (such as with going from a 1-handed weapon + shield to a 2-hander) no longer needs manual unequipping to work.
• Players can no longer wield non-weapon items.
• Equipment slots a player species doesn’t have access to no longer show up on the ‘%’ screen.
• The autopickup menu no longer groups together rings and amulets.
• The screen is now tinted blue during paralysis and grey during petrification.
• Examining monsters shows if they can open doors.
• Confusion on monsters no longer shares an icon with monsters being distracted.
• Non-monster UI now darkens quote text and can rarely contain flavour text instead of just quotes.

Items

• New weapon: partisans, uncommon one-handed polearms with higher base damage than demon tridents and the longest swing delay of any one-handed weapon.
• Talisman skill thresholds have been reworked, with older talismans adjusted upwards in baseline stats for higher thresholds. The new tier summary is now:
• Tier 1 talismans (old beast talisman): 0 skill minimum, 7 skill maximum
• Tier 2 talismans (old flux talisman): 8 skill minimum, 14 skill maximum
• Tier 3 talismans (blade talisman): 12 skill minimum, 20 skill maximum
• Tier 4 talismans (granite talisman): 17 skill minimum, 25 skill maximum
• Tier 5 talismans (storm talisman): 23 skill minimum, 27 skill maximum
• New talismans:
• Tier 1:
• quill talismans, providing Quill Form. This melds all auxiliary equipment, but grants retaliatory quills damaging those who attack the player in melee.
• inkwell talismans, providing Walking Scroll Form. This melds all equipment, increases all magic school skills scaling to one’s Shapeshifting, grants extra max mp, disables casting spells above level 4, and cuts one’s melee damage in half in exchange for a 50% to gain 1 MP on every hit.
• Tier 2:
• scarab talismans, providing Sun Scarab Form. This small form melds weapons and armour, carts around a solar ember that cleaves with fire attacks when scarabs attack, and grants Fire-exclusive spellcasting success bonuses.
• rimehorn talismans, providing Rime Yak Form. This large form melds weapons and armour, makes adjacent walls deal cold damage over a short while on attacks, and grants Ice-exclusive spellcasting success bonuses.
• medusa talismans, providing Medusa Form. This melds one’s head and cloak slots into a jellyfish, which inflicts poison on random nearby enemies on attacks and which petrifies poisoned enemies when falling to 60% health.
• Tier 3:
• spider talismans, providing Jumping Spider Form. This tiny form melds all armour and weapons, but gains Rampage, a small chance for melee to ensnare enemies, short-blade quality stabs, and a special un-aimed jump ability.
• lupine talismans, providing Werewolf Form. This melds all auxiliary armour, grants a stacking slaying bonus on kills, gives a chance to howl on kills to lock enemies in immobile fear, and grants jumping attacks on afraid foes.
• wellspring talismans, providing Aqua Form. This melds body armour, provides two extra squares of melee range (stacking with polearms and working with auxes), and granting an ability to waterstrike + waterlog nearby enemies.
• fortress talismans, providing Fortress Crab Form. This melds all auxiliary armour, multiplies AC from body armour, and can breathe clouds of minorly-damaging, corroding and weakening rust.
• Tier 4:
• riddle talismans, providing Sphinx Form. These sphinxes can still wear cloaks and bardings (except for Felids), but meld all other armour and can’t wield weapons. Their unarmed strikes Airstrike their targets, they get major Hexes-exclusive spellcasting success bonuses, and their Hexes apply more easily to all susceptible foes.
• hive talismans, providing Living Hive Form. This melds body armour and helm slots into a hive with high health + magic regeneration that also releases berserk curare-branded killer bees when the user is sufficiently wounded.
• sanguine talismans, providing the living-undead Vampire Form. These vampires don’t regenerate with enemies visible, get vampiric attacks at 50% health, can raise a vampiric thrall when killing monsters with stabs, can transform into a swarm of bats that leave sleep-inducing clouds of bats, and have partial torment resistance.
• Many other talismans have been adjusted:
• Flux talismans have become stacks of flux baubles, which require less skill and deal more damage but each transformation lasts for only a finite amount of attacks instead of indefinitely.
• Maw talismans have been lowered down a tier, with the maw dealing less damage and healing on kills for less HP, but can now break through body armour to reduce base AC by 75% instead of melding such entirely.
• Serpent talismans now transform the user into a two-headed snake that can wear two hats (but no other equipment).
• Granite talismans now apply a percentage EV penalty and provide additional strength in exchange for less unarmed base damage.
• Dragon-blood talismans (now dragon-coil talismans) now transform non-draconians into golden dragons instead of fire dragons, changing the corresponding resists; they also get Draconian-style breath charges for a new tri-element breath, but deal less melee damage. Draconians also recharge their breath much faster in dragon form.
• Talismans of death now uniquely require 26 Shapeshifting at minimum.
• Talisman / randarts are notably more common throughout the game, with stones made less common in exchange.
• Talismans no longer meld Gargoyle AC and resists unless they change substances entirely, and never meld away Spriggan move speed.
• Beast talismans have been removed.
• Acquirement now gives more out more talismans.
• Acquirement gives less magical staves overall, but makes more randart staves.
• Potions of degeneration are now of moonshine and solely inflict Vertigo.
• Darts of dispersal are now darts of disjunction, which now repeatedly blink a target each turn for several turns and deal damage with each blink.
• Experience-gated evokers now appear multiple times per game, stack up to a max of +5, and decrease the experience needed to gain charges with each stack.
• Rings of slaying are no longer rarer than other rings.

Monsters

• New monsters:
• Alderkings, fae trees and necromantic masters of Depths.
• Goblin riders, wvyern-taming cavalry for Bailies.
• Fravashi, mid-tier warrior-summoning angels.
• Ironbound Mechanists, dual-wielding forgewright coglins for Vaults.
• Nekomata, self-cloning ranged cat demons for Pan.
• Oni incarcerators, Manifold Assault users for Gehenna.
• Sphinx marauders, masters of winds and minds for Shoals and Vaults.
• Vampire bloodprinces, sleep-inducing lords of Crypt.
• Wyrmholes, terrifying relocations drakes for Depths and rarely Zot.
• Returning monsters:
• hippogriffs, now nearly exclusive to bailies, now with both Warning Cry and a new damaging wind spell that slowly pulls enemies in.
• ironbound beastmasters, now with a passive animal and slime hasting aura plus the ability to throw bolas to bind foes in place.
• New uniques:
• Nobody, a revenant made from countless forgotten souls, who can burn the memories of their deaths to both heal and change spellsets.
• Sprozz, an early-game coglin forgewright who casts Clockwork Bee and Nazja’s Percussive Tempering and sometimes drops a Forgecraft spellbook.
• Apises now have a passive aura that doubles the health of other monsters.
• Arcanists now have more health and EV.
• Ball pythons deal less damage.
• Bennu deal more holy damage.
• Blood saint and Mnoleg Call of Chaos now can temporarily double monster hp.
• Monster deep elves and orc high priests now more consistently wear body armour, mostly gaining robes.
• Creeping infernos now have a fairly large amount of health, move normally towards the player, and deal more damage when they explode.
• Crystal echidnas deal more damage and are now speed 13.
• Crystal guardians deal more damage.
• Elementals in general now have animal intelligence instead of being mindless.
• Endoplasms no longer have rPois.
• Glowing orange brains are now unblindable.
• Iron golems now have less health and EV.
• Mummy death curses now more frequently drain hp, and the flat damage effects no longer check rTorment.
• Mutant beasts count as chaotic.
• Occultists now have more health and EV.
• Player ghosts now respect the movement speed of their original species.
• Quicksilver oozes have been renamed, rethemed, and retiled to void oozes.
• Searing wretches can now swim across lava.
• Simulacra can now always swim, regardless of their base type.
• Sin beasts now come in duos in Pan.
• Plain sphinxes are now “guardian sphinxes”, are stronger overall, and no longer appear in D or in Shoals.
• Sky beasts lose electric damage and random invisibility to instead deal damage depending on the number of open spaces next to what they hit in melee.
• Thermic dynamos and undying armouries reward more experience.
• Water elementals and elemental wellsprings are now amorphous, gaining the same immunity to nets, constriction, and webs jellies have.
• Mindless non-living monster allies consistently don’t get angry at the player for being hit, and do not disappear if they were summoned or constructed.
• Removed monsters: quasits.

Species

• New species: Poltergeists, ghostly trickster whirlwinds. Features:
• They have the resists and immunities of being both undead and insubstantial.
• They have six slots that can interchangeably wield auxiliary armour (hats, helmets, cloaks, scarves, gloves, or boots), but cannot wear body armour.
• Whenever enemies are debuffed, they gain AC scaling to their XL.
• At XL 13, they gain the ability to expand into a whirling cacophony, noisily animating each piece of armour worn into allies that try to stay close to the player and which can inflict random debuffs.
• New species: Revenants, memory-burning mystic skeletons. Features:
• Whenever they cast damage-dealing spells, they automatically attack a nearby monster with the highest health.
• At XL 3, they start gathering memories from slain foes, charges they may burn away all at once to make that many damage-dealing spells cost 0 mp, be easier to cast while ignoring encumbrance penalties, and get extra power. Spell-activated automatic attacks during this also heal the player.
• At XL 3, they also gain knowledge of a random level 1 destructive spell.
• Formicids now may wield an additional pair of gloves.
• Merfolk Long Blades apt is lowered from +2 to +1, and their Polearms apt is increased from +3 to +4.
• Mountain Dwarf Summoning apt is lowered from 0 to -2.
• Enhancer staves are now one-handed instead of two-handed for spriggans and kobolds.
• Vampires and ghouls have been removed.

Spells

• New spell school of Forgecraft: thematically a school of constructing bombs, cannons, and limited automata, mechanically a mostly-ally school more focused on direct damage and blasting than Summoning, and design-wise a new means of providing more cross-school spells and pivoting options.
• New Forgecraft spells:
• Kinetic Grapnel (L1 FC): A weak physical projectile connected to one’s weapon that guarantees the next melee attack hits and deals extra damage.
• Construct Spike Launcher (L2 FC): Builds a spike launcher in a random adjacent wall, which launches spikes at random adjacent targets.
• Launch Clockwork Bee (L3 FC): Targets a monster to wind up and ready a clockwork bee over several turns, which can be rewound up when it collapses.
• Rending Blade (L4 FC / Conj): Temporarily transforms all of the caster’s mp into a blade that pierces through enemies whenever the caster attacks.
• Nazja’s Percussive Tempering (L5 FC): A healing and buffing spell for Forgecraft summons that also produces an ally-avoiding physical explosion.
• Alistair’s Walking Alembic (L5 FC / Alch): A summon that vents poisonous fumes as it attacks to brew various beneficial potion effects.
• Fortress Blast (L6 FC): A highly-damaging blast that takes several turns to charge up and pins the caster in place, but which solely scales off of AC.
• Forge Phalanx Beetle (L6 FC): A summon that always tries to stay by the caster’s side and protects them with an AC boost if adjacent.
• Forge Monarch Bomb (L6 FC / Fire): Creates a bomb factory that launches bomblets on top of enemies, both of which only detonate on recast.
• Diamond Sawblades (L7 FC): Places up to four sawblades on diagonals around the caster that shred everything around them each turn.
• Splinterfrost Shell (L7 FC / Ice): Raises up several sturdy walls around the player that fire off as heavily damaging icicle salvos if broken.
• Platinum Paragon (L9 FC): A metallic apotheosis of a single ally that replicates a given artefact weapon, blocks attacks for the caster, does extra attacks with player attacks, and can hit large areas by recasting the spell when charged-up.
• The following spells have moved to Forgecraft:
• Summon Lightning Spire: now “Forge Lightning Spire”, Summ/Air -> FC/Air.
• Summon Blazeheart Golem: now “Forge Blazeheart Golem”, Summ/Fire -> FC/Fire.
• Animate Armour: now “Awaken Armour”, Summ/Earth -> FC/Earth.
• Iskenderun’s Battlesphere: L5 Conj -> L4 FC/Conj.
• Hoarfrost Cannonade: Alch/Ice -> FC/Ice.
• Spellforged Servitor: now “Spellspark Servitor”, Summ/Conj -> FC/Conj.
• Hellfire Mortar: Fire/Earth -> FC/Fire/Earth.
• New other spells:
• Eringya’s Surprising Crocodile (L4 Summ): Creates temporary shallow water and a lunging crocodile all at once to drag an enemy and the caster back.
• Summon Seismosaurus Egg (L4 Summ / Earth): Creates an egg that will hatch into a mighty dinosaur if the caster stays next to it with visible enemies.
• Detonation Catalyst (L5 Fire / Alch): Gain a buff that makes non-cleaving melee attacks explode for damage scaled to damage dealt, avoiding allies, and which lasts for very little time if the user stops attacking.
• Sphinx Sisters (L7 Summ / Hexes) that summons a pair of riddling sphinxes, one guardian and one maurader, to debilitate the enemies with hexes and batter them with violent winds.
• Spell changes:
• Awakened Armours now equip a replica of the body armour they’re echoing.
• Battlespheres last longer at lower spell power, are better at pathing towards their target, and will target the most proportionally damaged foe if possible.
• Ensorcelled Hibernation’s sleep no longer can be interrupted by noise or failing stealth checks, and has a slightly higher minimum duration.
• Hellfire Mortar now scales heavily with spellpower, deals more damage, has longer mortar range, and pushes back singular flying foes.
• Lightning Spires now target the furtherest-away foe, if possible.
• Maxwell’s Capacitive Coupling can no longer be started without a visible monster in sight of the caster.
• Maxwell’s Portable Piledriver can now be aimed and can push a connected line of lined-up enemies all at once.
• Mephitic Cloud is now flavoured as throwing a non-damaging flask of fumes.
• Mercury Vapours is now Poisonous Vapours, moved to level 1, no longer inflicts Weak, inflicts less poison status, and deals a small amount of flat
• AC-ignoring damage against targets without rPois.
• Permafrost Eruption’s damage has been lowered.
• Rimeblight now chains to two other targets on cast and now reliably spreads on death instead of also spreading through its explosions.
• Sculpt Simulacrum’s simulacra now attack the turn they finish forming.
• Sting is now Mercury Arrow, moved to level 2, no longer inflicts the poison status (but still partially checks rPois), and gains Mercury Vapours’ previous HD-check area-of-effect Weak status.
• Summon Horrible Things now has a chance to inflict a Will-lowering temporary mutation with each cast.
• Teleport Other is now smite targeted.
• Spells that can’t miss are no longer affected by player blindness debuffs.
• Monstrous Menagerie is removed as a player spell, but is still used by Kirke.

Tiles and Other Art

• New tiles for existing game elements:
• Abilities: Accepting Makhleb’s infernal marks.
• Features: altars to Fedhas, altars to Xom, caches of meat, granite statues in Depths and Zot.
• Items: all forms of leather armour.
• Monsters: apises, boggarts, brain worms, creeping infernos, culicivora, great orbs of eyes, living spells, ophanim, rakshasa, scrub nettles, shapeshifters and glowing shapeshifters, sky beasts, all tengu types.
• Mutation icons: big wings, demonspawn demonic touch, mp-powered wands, screaming, subdued magic, tendrils, pseudopods, wild magic.
• Plants, both regular and withered.
• Player dolls: Coglins.
• The prune curse from the glaive of Prune.
• Ru sacrifices: sacrificed eye, sacrificed hand.
• Species passives: barachi hops, demigod divine attributes, djinn flat hp, human explore regen, mertails.
• Spell components: Hoarfrost Cannonade, Hellfire Mortar.
• Spell icons: Blazeheart Golem, Dazzling Flash, Fulsome Fusillade, Hellfire Mortar, Hoarfrost Cannonade, Lightning Spire, Magnavolt, Permafrost Eruption, Spellspark Servitor, all remaining monster-only spells.
• Starting screen icons: high scores.
• Unrands: the robe of Augmentation, Brilliance and its brand, Firestarter, Punk’s acid brand, the robe of Folly, the sword of the Doom Knight, and the toga “Victory”.
• Visual effects: airstrike, draining gaze, doom howl, entropic weave, fire storm, fulsome fusillade, ice blasts, magma, manifold assault, mephitic cloud, mystic blast, potion petition, sap magic, sentinel’s mark, wand of warping.
• Walls: Vaults and Trove rock.
• Pandemonium now has unique stone wall tiles for regular floors and unique wall tiles for each of the unrand Pan lord vaults.
• Gehenna now has unique stone wall tiles.
• Depths and Zot now have unique metal wall tiles.
• Webtiles now has the banishment animation offline tiles uses.
• New oni splash screen by benadryl.

That’s all for now, so until the next update, happy crawling!

Congratulations to Flugkiller for taking first place in the individual competition, with 114,782 points and 27 wins! Flugkiller won the most Nemelex Choice combos (19), got all tier 3 banners, one of only two players to do this, and took 1st in the Piety category. He also got the second-fastest real-time win, a MiFi won in 00:24:58, and won the second-highest scoring game, an AtCj with 74M points.

Other big winners:

• TheMeInTeam: 2nd place overall with 97,543 points and 22 wins. TheMeInTeam tied for the longest win streak of the tournament with 10 wins, and was 2nd in Nemelex Choice combos (18 wins) and Piety categories. He was also 2nd in the Combo High Scores category, with species high scores for Coglin (CoWn) and Kobold (KoCa), the Hexslinger class high score (MDHs), and high scores for 8 combos in total.
• BerryKnight: 3rd place overall with 93,883 points and 11 wins. They won the 2nd most pacific game of the tournament, a MiFi with just 1044 kills, and took 3rd in the Combo High Scores category with a DgSh that took the Dg species and Sh class high scores and the Na species high score.
• TallOdds (aka CarefulOdds): Tied with TheMeInTeam for the longest win streak with 10 wins.
• Sapher: Highest scoring win at 98M points with an FoEE that also set the all-time Formicid species high score!
• p0werm0de: Fastest realtime win with a 0:24:57 MiFi.
• acrobatsimulacrum: The only other player along with Flugkiller to collect all 24 tier 3 banners.
• RepoMan: 1st place in the Combo High Scores category with 6 species and 6 class high scores. Legends say that RepoMan won all these games using Wu Jian and a certain wiki guide.
• zran (aka narz): Lowest turncount win, a GnEE won in 11,445 turns.
• sentinel: Most pacific win, a TrDe with only 964 kills.
• qw (bot): The third win of the tournament, a GrFi of Okawaru won in only 8 attempts. A 12.5% winrate is very good for qw and represents a combination of good luck and recent improvements to its code.
• The first three wins of the tournament were by EnegeticOcto (a MiFi in 0:54:59), tempest (a MiBe in 1:37:22), and qw (a GrFi in 1:50:46).

The clan competition was won by XOMS CoCKtail Party (captained by EnegeticOcto) with 131,548 points. They bested the 2nd place clan in the Combo High Scores (1st overall), Best High Score (1st overall), Fastest Realtime Win (2nd overall), Lowest Turncount win (1st overall), Most Pacific win (1st overall), Banner Collection (tied for 1st overall), and Piety (1st overall) categories. In 2nd place was Artifact Hats Only – Cosplay (captained by TheMeInTeam) with 117,174 points, 1st place in the Streak Length and Nemelex Choice categories, 2nd place in the Piety and Banner Collection categories, and 3rd place in the Fastest Realtime Win category. In 3rd place was TeamSplat (captained by Mandevil) with 98,358 points and 2nd place in the Most Pacific Win category.

To close out, here are some overall tournament statistics (with the 0.31 numbers in brackets for comparison). 2,904 non-bot players started a game at some point during the tournament; of those 2,838 completed a game without quitting or leaving the dungeon sadly orbless. This definition of “player” (players who completed a non-boring game) is used for subsequent calculations and was used for the 0.31 statistics.

• Players: 2,838 (0.31: 2,728)
• Total player time: 29,114 hrs (0.31: 30,498 hrs)
• Average player time: 10.26 hrs (0.31: 11.18 hrs)
• Games played: 76,121 (0.31: 71,851)
• Players who got a rune: 871 (0.31: 861)
• 421 winners and 1319 wins (0.31: 454 winners and 1367 wins)
• Win rate: 1.73% (0.31: 1.90%)
• WebTiles win rate: 1.63% (0.31: 1.85%) / Console win rate: 5.43% (0.31: 3.59%)

Thanks to you all for playing! Many thanks as well to server admins, developers, and contributors who made the 0.32 release and tournament possible! The 0.33 season has begun, and changes are already commit storming in. In the development branch, you can already try out several new player mutations, experience new and reworked Pandemonium monsters (both holy and demonic), and see some awesome new tile art! Also look for an important 0.32.1 bugfix release to made this week. That’s all for now, and until next time, happy crawling!

DCSS 0.32 features redesigns of four gods, two new playable species, eleven new spells, many new and revamped monsters, as well as new decorations throughout the Dungeon! For the complete list of these and the many other changes included in this version, see the release page here.

Packages of DCSS 0.32 for Windows, OS X, and Linux are all available from the download page. You can also play it online on one of many servers across the world!

The tournament starts on Friday August 30th, 8pm UTC and runs through Sunday September 15th, 8pm UTC, with all online 0.32 games counting towards your score. See the tournament page for more details, including how to join or setup a clan. Clans membership can be changed until Friday September 6th, 8pm UTC.

Many thanks to all those who have contributed to DCSS over the years. Thanks especially to the DCSS development team, whose contributions made 0.32 possible, and to the admins who run and maintain the official servers. A special thanks to the following community members who contributed to 0.32 and a warm welcome to the first-time contributors.

910rd, Alex Jurkiewicz, Aliscans, Andrew O’Neill, bjiorn, caryoscelus, Christopher Partin, Chuck Sellick, CipHuK, DevJac, elliottbernstein, geekosaur, grumposus, Isaac Clancy, Lexi Hattaway, mainiacjoe, mgdelmonte, michaelhunter27, Monkooky, NormalPerson7, orjb1, Quinten Konyn, RypoFalem, Rytis Petronis, Sean Dewar, SentientSupper, Wizard Ike, yrdzrfxndfvh, Zhang Kai

The 0.32 release will happen a day or two before August 30th. Also stay tuned for a forthcoming Trunk Update covering all the changes in 0.32. This post will mostly be a summary of the now up-to-date changelog, so take a look there if you’re dying to know what spells Xom has taught rats to cast. Best of luck to you all in the tournament!

We have a new server hosted in South Korea at crawl.nemelex.cards, known officially as CNC. This server is owned by ASCIIPhilia, who has worked with us to make addition of a new server as painless as possible. This server uses a snapshot of the CPO user database from June 19th, 2024 as its starting user database, which means users already registered on CPO at that time won’t have to re-register on CNC. Please see the the drop-down instructions at the top of the CNC lobby for detailed instructions on dealing with any account conflicts. On the CNC lobby page you’ll also find a link to the CNC chat Discord as well info on an improved version of the famous multi-purpose WebTiles extension module that ASCIPhilia developed for CWZ. Many thanks for ASCIIPhilia for generously hosting our newest official server!

Speaking of CWZ, unfortunately it suffered an SSD failure and is offline until further notice. Although the CWZ owner and admin, hong, is trying to have the server’s data recovered, it’s not clear if or when that will be completed. In any case, many thanks to hong for hosting CWZ, which has supported the South Korean DCSS community for over nine years! If CWZ does ever make a triumphant return, we’ll be sure to let you know. Regardless of this, CNC will continue to exist as its own independent server.

Next, XTAHUA IS REJOICING because CXC has a new owner and admin that has migrated all data to a new host! Many thanks to melvinkitnick for providing the new server long-term and for working with Namanix, the previous owner and admin, to migrate the data. This transition should be seamless for CXC users, since the user database, morgues, ttyrecs, etc were all copied over from the old host. And of course, many thanks to Namanix for providing a host for CXC for almost 5 years!

Unfortunately, the CPO server may be going offline in October unless a new owner can come forward and provide a replacement server. The CPO owner and admin, chequers, is able to provide the current server as-is as well as transfer the hostname to a new admin who’s willing provide the funding and has the necessary technical expertise. See the CPO Lobby Page for further details. Many thanks to chequers for hosting CPO and supporting the Australian and Oceania DCSS community for 10 years!

Finally, a quick note that all games from CDI and CNC are now finally integrated into CAO Scoring. If you have games on any official server that aren’t showing up in the score pages, please let us know in #crawl-dev on Libera or in the Roguelikes Discord. That’s all I have for now, so until next time, happy crawling!

Speaking of official servers, I’m upgrading the development server crawl.dcss.io aka CDI to become official! We’re using the cbro.berotato.org aka CBR2 account db as the starting db for CDI’s accounts. Players who were already registered on CBR2 as of Friday March 30 can log into CDI with their CBR2 credentials, otherwise please register a new account on CDI. Users migrating from CKO should see very similar latency, since CDI is hosted in the same New York City data center where CKO was located.

Finally, I’ve set up a Patreon to help cover hosting costs for CDI. Head over there for more details, and thanks for any support you can provide! Observant gizmo inventors might notice qw trying out the new Coglin species in trunk on CDI at some point soon. And who knows what kind of memes one might eventually find on our newest server? As always, happy crawling!

For 16 days, players could compete for tournament points and banners by playing 0.31 games on the public servers. The only major rule changes compared to the 0.30 tournament were the addition of a Gem Collection category, making Uskayaw’s banner be based on gems, and allowing Felids to win the Ruthless Efficiency banner.

Congratulations to Sergey,  for once again taking first place in the individual competition, with 115,521 points and 16 wins! Sergey got the most points for combos won, with species high scores for HO and Hu, and class scores for Hu and Wn, won the most pacific game (a SpEn with only 421 kills), achieved an 8 win streak (3rd best overall), a 64M HuEE high score (3rd best overall), collected 17 tier 3 banners, and won 6 Nemelex’s Choice combos.

Other big winners:

• Wizard1ke: 2nd place overall with 106,191 points and 28 wins. Wizard1ke was the only player to collect all 24 tier 3 banners, and had the most points in the piety category, reaching max piety with 21 gods and winning with 21 gods. They also got the second most points for combos won, including the Te, Dj, and On species high scores, and won 13 Nemelex Choice combos.
• Flugkiller: 3rd place overall with 99,209 points and 13 wins. He got a 0:25:20 realtime MiFi win (2nd overall), collected 19 tier 3 banners (2nd overall), won a TrFi in only 14,063 turns (3rd overall), got a 7 win streak, and won 6 Nemelex Choice combos.
• TheMeInTeam: Longest win streak with 19 wins and highest in the winrate category (won 22 of 23 games played).
• Sapher: Highest scoring win at 91M points with an OpEE.
• EnegeticOcto: Fastest realtime win with a 0:22:48 MiFi.
• qw: Fastest realtime win by a bot with a 0:10:50 DjHu. qw won 3 games this tournament, including first ever wins of Dj and Dg (with DgHu). It also got 3 runes twice this tournament with SpHu.
• zran: Lowest turncount win with an AtCj winning in 10,274 turns.
• bookman: 23 Nemelex’s Choice wins, the most in the tournament.
• The first three wins of the tournament were by FlugKiller (a MiFi in 0:46:25), ShadowRider38 (a MiFi in 0:41:59), and p0werm0de (a MiFi in 0:27:52; 3rd fastest realtime win overall!).
• The last win of the tournament was by sewnkin, an OnEE that ascended 14 seconds before the end of tournament.

The clan competition was won by Retired Ogres Bocce Club (captained by EnegeticOcto) with 132,494 points. They bested the 2nd place clan in the Combo High Scores (1st overall), Best High Score (1st overall), Fastest Realtime Win (1st overall), Most Pacific Win (1st overall), Fastest Realtime (1st overall), Low Turncount (1st overall), Banner Collection (tied for 1st overall), and Piety (1st overall) categories. In 2nd place was The TeAM in MeEE-Cosplay(captained by TheMeInTeam) with 102,015 points, and first place in the Streak Length category, and 2nd place in the Piety and Nemelex Choice categories. Not far behind in 3rd place was Harold and a Few Mara Go to Wight Castle (captained by Wizard1ke) with 98,358 points, and 2nd place in the Combo High Scores, Best High Score, Low Turncount Win, and Most Pacific Win categories.

To close out, here are some overall tournament statistics (with the 0.30 numbers in brackets for comparison). 2,817 non-bot players started a game at some point during the tournament; of those 2,728 completed a game without quitting or leaving the dungeon sadly orbless. This definition of “player” (players who completed a non-boring game) is used for subsequent calculations and was used for the 0.30 statistics.

• Players: 2,728 (0.30: 2,708)
• Total player time: 30,498 hrs (0.30: 30,426 hrs)
• Average player time: 11.18 hrs (0.30: 11.24 hrs)
• Games played: 71,851 (0.30: 69,571)
• Players who got a rune: 861 (0.30: 926)
• 454 winners and 1367 wins (0.30: 454 winners and 1433 wins)
• Win rate: 1.90% (0.30: 2.06%)
• WebTiles win rate: 1.85% (0.30: 1.94%). Console win rate: 3.59% (0.30: 6.18%)

Thanks to you all for playing! Many thanks as well to server admins, developers, and contributors who made the 0.31 release and tournament possible!

The 0.32 season has begun, and changes are already in motion. We have two online experimental branches that implement a new Steel Elf species and redesigns the gods Beogh and Yredelemnul. The Legends Say that Watch this space for further information as the 0.32 trunk update posts begin to flow. Until next time, happy crawling!

DCSS 0.31 features some major spell school and starting background changes, a variety of new spells, many dangerous new monsters, and some major species changes.

The Transmutations forms spells have been moved into talisman items, which allow permanently shifting into forms based on the new Shapeshifting skill. The remaining Transmutations spells and the Poison Magic spells have been merged into a new Alchemy school. The Shapeshifter and Alchemist starting backgrounds replace Transmuter and Venom Mage, respectively. To support these changes, this release adds 4 new spells, sees 7 spells reworked into improved replacements, and has many tweaks to the levels and schools. In fact it’s a bit too much for me to write up as we’re getting ready for tournament! So please check out the “Spells” section of the release for full details.

The new Oni species replaces Ogres. Oni love a good drunken brawl, gaining double effect when drinking any potion that restore HP or MP, and also perform an immediate cleaving melee attack. They are otherwise similar to Ogres, but also have horns and some increased apts. Starting at XL 7, Armataurs now regenerate HP and MP while rampaging. They also lose their double potion effect, and no longer read scrolls slowly. Felids now have an extra life at XL 1 and don’t lose XLs when dying. Tengu have an inherent acrobat effect (like the amulet) at XL 1, and gain 4 EV at XL 7 instead of gaining an EV bonus and fast movement. Humans gain the exploration healing effect formerly found on Meteorans, which are no more. Instead, players of any species can now rush to find gems stashed at the end of many branches as achievement items.

Download DCSS 0.31 here or play it online on one of many servers across the world! Packages for Windows, OS X, and Linux are available now. See the full list of changes on the release page here.

The tournament starts on Friday January 19th 8pm UTC and runs through Sunday February 4th 8pm UTC, with all online 0.31 games counting towards your score. See the tournament page for more details, including how to join or setup a clan. Clans membership can be changed until Friday January 26th 8pm UTC.

Many thanks to all those who have contributed to DCSS over the years. Thanks especially to the DCSS development team, whose contributions made 0.31 possible, and to the admins who run and maintain the official servers. A special thanks to the following community members who contributed to 0.31 and a warm welcome to the first-time contributors. (Let us know if someone is missing, this data is tricky to collect in bulk!)

910rd, aedyr, AlexanderPosch, Aliscans, Alvin, Anabel, Antal Spector-Zabusky, CipHuK, cureja, DevJac, geekosaur, Jared Miller, kippig, laserbat, MainiacJoe, mgdelmonte, Monkooky, Nephila Hirsch Oliveira, NormalPerson7, orjb1, Perren Yang, Quinten Konyn, Roadster Tracker, Rosstin Murphy, RypoFalem, Rytis Petronis, sandertyu, sdynet, Sean Dewar, Sebastian Zivota, Skrybe, yrdzrfxndfvh, Zhang Kai

The 0.31 release which will be made and announced either this Thursday or Friday. In the meantime, the 0.31 branch is being rolled out to our online servers. Servers CBR2, CKO, and LLD all have it available, with more to come soon! You can configure your tournament clan in your RC files right now on one of those three servers, or simply wait until your favorite official server has 0.31 installed. Finally, we’re finishing up one last belated Trunk Update to fill you in on the torrent of changes we had in December. So stay tuned, and good luck in the tournament!

A heads-up also that crawl.kelbi.org will be shutting down after the tournament. Many thanks to Floraline for their years of hard work maintaining the server! We’ll have news on a replacement server sometime in the coming few months.

Looks like we somehow have not even posted one trunk update since 0.30 released (!), so to fit all the major changes in, this post will be a little more condensed than usual. I’ll still try to sneak in one or two fun things, and the changelog has more details on some things.

• Shapeshifting and Transmuting:
  • Form spells have turned into a new type of item, ‘talismans’.
  • Talismans are very rare items that, when used, transform the user into a corresponding form until they choose to leave it.
  • A new skill, Shapeshifting, governs use of talismans. Like Spellcasting, the ‘default’ (human) aptitude for this is -1.
  • Form changes:
    • Beastly Appendage has been replaced by Beast Form, provides innate Slaying but melds all auxiliary armour.
    • Spider Form has been replaced by Flux Form, which causes melee attacks to magically contaminate and explode victims. It melds weapons, shields, and body armour.
    • Ice Form has been replaced by Serpent Form, which transforms the user into a massive, foe-crushing python.
    • New form: Maw, which opens a horrible, foe-devouring second mouth in the user’s chest. It grants an auxiliary bite attack and sometimes heals the user when they kill foes in melee, in exchange for melding body armour.
    • Lich Form has been replaced by Death Form, which severely debilitates foes struck in melee and grants an active ‘Siphon Essence’ ability that torments nearby foes to heal the player. It’s otherwise similar.
    • All forms have had their stats adjusted and scaling rebalanced.
  • A new background, Shapeshifter, replaces the Transmuter start. Shapeshifters start out with two talismans, Beast and Flux.
  • The Transmutations skill continues to support use of the ~ten remaining Transmutations spells. There are no current plans to remove it.
  • You can read more about the motivation for these changes here and here. Note that many of the implementation details have changed since those were written.
• Hexslingers:
  • Hexslingers have had their starting spell set vigorously reworked.
  • New L2 Hex spell: Jinxbite. Deals additional Will-checking damage to foes attacked while its duration lasts, but also halves the caster’s will. Lots of faerie laughter is involved.
  • New L3 Hex spell: Sigil of Binding. Creates two magical traps nearby, which temporarily bind hapless victims in place. Don’t step in these yourself!
  • New L4 Hex spell: Dimensional Bullseye (replacing Portal Projectile). Targets a foe and teleports all shots fired at other foes to also hit the chosen unfortunate.
  • Inner Flame and Cause Fear are still included. Slow is no longer in the starting spell set.
• Uniques:
  • New: Jeremiah, a peaceful barachi trapped between sleep and waking. Their dreams leak into reality in a stream of beautiful butterflies.
  • Returned and revamped: Norris, a death cultist who surfs into battle with a gang of skysharks.
  • Maurice is now a vine stalker, with high regen and antimagic bites.
  • Erica is now an octopode, with constriction and a more focused spell set.
  • Frederick has a new spell set.
• Other monsters:
  • New and returning:
    • Kobold blastminers, who blast enemies with alchemical cannons and get sent flying backwards by the recoil.
    • Brain worms, which eat magic and minds alike
    • Glass eyes (replacing floating eyes), which vitrify victims to make them fragile as glass.
    • Formless jellyfish, which constrict and sting for single-turn paralysis.
    • Arcanists, a kind of fairly dangerous vitrifying wizard.
    • Crocodiles, which drag victims backward.
  • Alligators and reapers are now somewhat weaker, but drag victims backward.
  • Ufetubi and tengu warriors now slip behind their foe before meleeing.
  • Tengu reavers now have rMsl.
  • ‘Wizard’ has been renamed to ‘occulist’ and is now somewhat stronger.
  • Great orbs of eyes have a new spell set, and are slightly stronger.
  • Deep Elf Elementalists now cast LRD instead of Awaken Earth.
  • Red very ugly things now do direct fire damage instead of sticky flame.
  • Abominations’ speed is no longer randomized. (Did you know it was..?)
  • Behavioral changes:
    • Attacks of opportunity have been reworked. Previously, whenever players moved away from a same-speed-or-faster monster, the monster had a 1/3 chance of launching a free melee attack. Now, they launch such attacks only if they move to follow the player, and there’s a chance for the attack to cost a small amount of their time (so they can fall behind). The old ‘random energy’ effect, causing monsters to have a chance of gaining or losing a small amount of time when moving, has returned specifically when monsters are pursuing the player. Some discussion of the reasoning for these changes: A, B, and C. The last of those describes an experimental ‘hot pursuit’ section which has since been removed, but ‘history’ section remains applicable.
    • Giant monsters can now be ensnared by webs and nets.
    • Jellies can no longer be netted or constricted.
    • Allied undead no longer become angry when damaged.
    • Monsters no longer use up charges when zapping wands.
    • Monsters can no longer use scrolls or potions.
    • Some monsters now have special dialogue after killing the player.
• Other species changes:
  • At XL 7, Armataurs now gain temporary regeneration when they roll (rampage) toward foes. Their base health has been decreased to compensate.
  • Felids now get an extra life at XL 1, don’t lose XLs on dying, and have somewhat more base health. They no longer have fast movement – see here.
  • Tengu now have inherent Acrobat (+15 EV after moving/waiting) at XL 1, and gain +4 EV at XL7 instead of a 20% EV bonus.
  • Mummies now get their first necromancy enhancer at XL 1, not 3.
  • Vine Stalkers now get regeneration at XL 1, not 4.
  • Djinn now use all magic skills, instead of only Spellcasting. Djinn can only choose to train all magic skills or none. This is pretty similar to how they worked before, but means that e.g. they can now use skill manuals, do elemental staff or pain brand damage, and care about other types of Ashenzari skill curses.
  • Ghouls start with an additional +4 Int, to encourage more variety in playstyles.
  • Formicids can no longer be involuntarily shafted.
• Items:
  • An old favorite returns: sack of spiders, an XP-charged evoker which webs foes and summons creepy-crawlies. Alternates with boxes of beasts.
  • Changes to ranged weapons:
    • New weapon: orcbow, between a shortbow and an arbalest in strength.
    • Hand crossbows are now hand cannons, alchemically belching smoke and death. (See here for why.)
    • New unrand: Mule, a +7 flaming hand cannon which sometimes knocks the user backwards when fired.
  • Potions of flight replaced with potions of enlightenment, which also give Will+.
  • Scrolls of magic mapping replaced with scrolls of revelation, which also give X-ray vision and sInv for one turn.
  • Quick blades now hit twice for every swing, with a higher attack delay. Gyre & Gimble hits four times.
  • Artefact staves can now enhance other schools of magic, even those which don’t have corresponding base enhancer staff types.
  • The dreamshard necklace now has Acrobat, but only restores the player to 1 HP when they’d otherwise die, rather than healing 50-100% of their max HP.
  • To simplify, shields no longer degrade in effectiveness with each hit taken per-turn. Instead, they now have a limit on per-turn blocks, based on shield type – bucklers give 2, kites give 3, towers give 4.
• Spells:
  • New: Brom’s Barrelling Boulder (L4 Earth/Conj). Creates a boulder, which crushed and knocks back foes until it’s broken or it hits a wall. (In the latter case, it explodes!)
  • Arcjolt now initially arcs to foes within two tiles of the caster.
  • Static Discharge now does more damage, but checks half AC instead of none.
  • Borgnjor’s Vile Clutch (and Fastroot) now work on invisible enemies, but the former now does less damage.
  • Hailstorm does more damage at low power and less at high power.
  • Swiftness now works in water. (Did you know it didn’t?)
• Other Notes:
  • The Slime Pits now have many possible endings, instead of one fixed pre-designed one. Many thanks to long-time contributor nicolae for his work on this one!
  • Monsters with unusual items (e.g. distortion) are now highlit in purple by default.
  • Okawaru now gives exactly one weapon gift and one armour gift as a capstone (chosen by the player), rather than giving many random gifts.
  • Nemelex’s Cloud, Elements and Swarm cards have been changed to scale more appropriately with power.
  • The Ecumenical Temple is now fully mapped on entry. This saves time for some of the really big temples, and also lets us add really silly stuff like a labyrinth-themed temple. Not that we’d ever actually add one of those, of course…

Many thanks also to Sastreii and CanOfWorms for contributing many new tiles over this period, including spell icons, artefact art, cat dragons, and more. In particular, thanks to CanOfWorms for commissioning this lovely new splash screen.

Thanks also to all the community members who’ve contributed over the last year, who I am too tired to credit in full. Crawl wouldn’t be Stone Soup without you.

Happy crawling, and happy holidays!

For 16 days, players could compete for tournament points and banners by playing 0.30 games on the public servers. This was the fourth tournament held after the major revision of the tournament rules done for 0.25. There were changes based on previous input, and once again we’ve collected the feedback posted on tavern and reddit.

Congratulations to Sergey (aka yegreS),  for once again taking first place in the individual competition, with 87,793 points! Over the course of the tournament, Sergey won all 11 games he played (!), the 3rd longest win streak overall. He also achieved an 86M MeIE high score (5th highest overall), a 0:30:53 realtime win (6th best overall), collected 14 tier 3 banners, got a species and a background high score (from a 45M score GnEE), won 4 Nemelex’s Choice combos, got 4 combo high scores, and completed 27 ziggurats.

This is the first time someone has won the tournament with 100% winrate since theglow won all 18 of their games in the 0.11 tournament in 2012. elliptic (27th(!) overall) notes that there have been 24 tournaments with the 16-day format, and in the first 12 of them there were 15 distinct players who won at least 18 games in a single tournament, while in the second 12 of them there were 66 such players. Despite this trend, Sergey, who also took 1st place in the previous 0.29 tournament, took 1st place in this tournament with 14 fewer wins (11 vs 25 in 0.29) and played over 3 hours less per day on average (4:43:25 vs 7:58:28 in 0.29)!

Other big winners:

• kuniqs: 2nd place overall (82,079 points, 19 wins), with a 96M MeEE high score (2nd overall), a 0:29:35 realtime win (4th overall), 18 tier 3 banners (4th most overall), a 5 win streak, 7 Nemelex’s Choice wins, two combo high scores, and 28 Ziggurats cleared.
• ShadowRider38: 3rd place overall (77,239 points, 21 wins), with a 0:35:02 realtime win (7th overall), a 17,829 turns MeFi win (8th lowest overall), 15 tier 3 banners (5th most overall), 8 Nemelex’s Choice wins (9th overall), 11 combo high scores, a 5 win streak, and 27 Ziggurats cleared.
• narz: Highest scoring win at 132M with MeEE and the most pacific win with a SpEn that killed only 186 monsters.
• FlugKiller: Fastest realtime win at 00:21:48 with a MiFi.
• TheMeInTeam: Longest win streak with 15 wins.
• Wizard1ke: The only person to collect all 24 tier 3 banners.
• removed: 30 Nemelex’s Choice wins.
• FizzleGong: Lowest turncount win with a MeEE winning in 5,881 turns.
• SnakkuSnakku7: 3 species (At, Gh, HO) and 3 background (Ar, CK, Hs) high scores, and 1st in the Combo High Scores category.
• The first three wins of the tournament were by EnegeticOcto (a MiFi in 0:56:35), ShadowRider38 (a MiFi in 1:08:58), and hihot (a MiFi in 1:31:43).
• The last win of the tournament was by RailBird80, a HuFE that ascended 16 minutes before the end of tournament yet took over 4 days to win.

The clan competition was won by Heavy Weight Lifting Club (captained by EnegeticOcto) with 112,811 points. They sealed their victory by besting the 2nd place clan in the Combo High Scores (1st overall), Most Pacific Win (1st overall), Fastest Realtime (1st overall), Piety, Nemelex’s Choice, and Streak categories. In a close 2nd place was Uncle Xoms Tabbin (captained by themargong) with 104,283 points, and first place in the High Score and Lowest Turncount Win categories. They tied for 1st place with Heavy Weight Lifting Club in the banners category, together collecting all 24 tier 3 banners. 3rd place was held by My Boolean is Binary (captained by TheMeInTeam) with 93,023 points, and 1st place in the Nemelex’s Choice and Streak categories.

To close out, here are some overall tournament statistics (with the 0.29 numbers in brackets for comparison). 2,765 players started a game at some point during the tournament; of those 2,711 completed a game without quitting or leaving the dungeon sadly orbless. This definition of “player” (players who completed a non-boring game) is used for subsequent calculations and was used for the 0.29 statistics.

• Players: 2,711 (0.29: 2,573)
• Total player time: 30,408 hrs (0.29: 27,360 hrs)
• Average player time: 11.2 hrs (0.29: 10.6 hrs)
• Games played: 69,601 (0.29: 64,339)
• Players who got a rune: 926 (0.29: 759)
• 454 winners and 1433 wins (0.29: 368 winners and 1183 wins)
• Win rate: 2.06% (0.29: 1.84%)
• Proportion of players using WebTiles: 97.1% (0.29: 96.9%)

Thanks to you all for playing! Many thanks as well to server admins, developers, and contributors who made the 0.30 release and tournament possible!

The 0.31 season has begun, and changes are already in motion. Watch this space for further information as the 0.31 trunk update posts begin to flow. Until next time, happy crawling!

DCSS 0.30 features the return of the legendary Reaver background. These warrior-mages start with two new powerful yet situational spells: Kiss of Death and Momentum Strike. They also start with the Hailstorm spell, which has been moved down to level 3 yet can sometimes miss.

The new Armataur species replaces Palentongas, who have rolled peacefully off into the sunset. Armataurs are large, scaly mammals that wear bardings, but instead of rolling and curling, they have innate rampage and a long tongue mutation that doubles potion effects and slows down scroll reading.

A grand total of 7 new spells have been added! Two we’ve already mentioned for Reaver, with two more being likewise new designs and three replacing existing spells:

- Kiss of Death (L1 Conj/Necro): does high draining damage to an adjacent enemy, at the cost of significant max HP drain to the caster.
- Momentum Strike (L2 Conj/Tloc). Redirects the caster’s momentum for a damaging attack that doesn’t require line of fire, but locks the caster in place for some turns after a hit (and cannot be recast until this expires).
- Cigotuvi’s Dreadful Rot (L2 Necro/Air/Pois). Rots away the caster’s flesh to create a cloud of deadly miasma on their tile. Replaces Corpse Rot.
- Volatile Blastmotes (L3 Fire/Tloc). Creates an explosive cloud on the caster’s tile, usable as a land mine or tricky tool. Replaces Conjure Flame.
- Vhi’s Electric Charge (L3 Tloc/Air). Launches the caster at a nearby foe and launches a crackling melee attack, phasing through creatures en route.
- Arcjolt (L5 Air/Conj). Electrocutes everything adjacent to the caster, everything adjacent to those creatures, etc, etc, in a chain. Replaces Lightning Bolt.
- Plasma Beam (L6 Fire/Air): Fires a bolt of lightning and another bolt of fire, both at the most distant foe.

We’ve added 6 new unrands and made changes to 11 existing ones. Additionally you can now find randart orbs, scarves, and magical staves!

Finally, Lugonu has been mutated into a new form. Banishment is available at 2* piety (instead of 3*) and mutates foes that resist getting banished. To encourage adventurers to abandon their current god, Lugonu helpfully banishes some hostile monsters whenever other gods act with their wrath. There are also now more Lugonu altars in the Abyss, and more piety is awarded for conversions in the Abyss.

Download DCSS 0.30 here or play it online on one of many servers across the world! Packages for Windows and OS X are available now. Linux debs are coming soon. See the full list of changes on the release page here.

The tournament starts on Friday May 5th 8pm UTC and runs through Sunday May 21st 8pm UTC, with all online 0.30 games counting towards your score. See the tournament page for more details, including how to join or setup a clan. Clans membership can be changed until Friday May 12th 8pm UTC.

Many thanks to all those who have contributed to DCSS over the years. Thanks especially to the DCSS development team, whose contributions made 0.30 possible, and to the admins who run and maintain the official servers. A special thanks to the following community members who contributed to 0.30 and a warm welcome to the first-time contributors, listed in italics. (Let us know if someone is missing, this data is tricky to collect in bulk!)

Aliscans, Ernest Antanishin, Antern, bfaires, Josh Braendel, Marcelo Henrique Cerri, Perry Fraser, greenscarf, Duong Hoang, Alex Jurkiewicz, kippig, kd7uiy, mainiacjoe, Monkooky, Michael Del Monte, pdpol, Brian Power, Roadster Tracker, Rypofalem, Rytis Petronis, Aleksando Sansan, sdynet, Skrybe, Antal Spector-Zabusky, spiros, Sergio Thompson, Samantha Tobias, Benjamin S Wolf, yrdzrfxndfvh, Zhang Kai

We’d also like to celebrate the addition of two (!) new devs to the team. Félix Medrano (née robertxgray) and Implojin have both more than proven themselves by their work so far, with Félix specializing on the Crawl Android port and Implojin contributing great designs like Rampage and the toga of Victory. We’re very happy to have them onboard!

Anyway, let’s get some very real and serious changes headed your way.

• Branches and Environments:
  • You can now enter the Vaults without holding a rune. However… you can never leave! Unless you get a rune while you’re inside.
  • Slime walls now corrode instead of dealing damage. Unless you use Oozemancy, in which case they still do damage. Also, they don’t corrode monsters. Unless the monsters take Oozemancy damage. It’s all pretty straightforward.
  • Thunderstorms now do much more damage. If you were in the habit of standing in the middle of thunderstorms before… this might be a good time to break the habit.
  • Zigsprint now lets you start with orbs of guile or mayhem. But why would you not use Gong? It’s Gong!
  • By overwhelming popular demand, you can now place up to 100 waypoints. We know you, the players, were suffocating under the previous 10 waypoint limit. Now you are freed. Go forth!
• Characters:
  • Harm now stacks. This is a game changer.
  • Channeling effects (from Wucad Mu or orbs of energy) no longer backlash and no longer scale with Evocations. They just give -Wiz and have a flat chance of refunding spell costs. We’ve reworked this mechanic about four times this year and I’m sure it’s going to stick at some point.
  • The acidic bite mutation works again, for the first time since 2016. Oops.
  • Armataurs no longer claim to drink ten potions at once. Their tongues are long, but they aren’t actually that long.
• Gods:
  • Piety costs are now shown more clearly for invocations. Did you know that Enter the Abyss costs Piety——-? Sort of unclear what that means, but it seems like an awful lot of -s, huh?
  • Kikubaaqudgha’s second gift is now a little less predictable. It could be anything. It’s probably about four Necromancy spells… but what if it’s not?
  • Good gods will no longer get mad when you generate negative energy clouds with a condenser vane. Instead, they’ll get even. They put their metaphysical foot down and squash the evil clouds – just like that!
  • Hepliaklqana’s Knights are now as good at attacking as ogres, or at least as slow as them.
  • Xom is no longer fixated on giving you a few different mutations.
  • Ashenzari’s trap detection ability is now only available at 4* of piety. Except that traps are always revealed these days, so this is more of a malevolence suppression ability. The world is so cruel…
  • Ashenzari’s skill boost is a little less boosted.
  • For Gozag’s gold distraction aura duration, size really doesn’t matter. (Anymore.)
  • Ru can no longer redirect butterflies’ attacks.
  • Flame Tongue is removed.
• Unrands:
  • New unrand: the toga ‘Victory’. Gives +AC, Int, and Slay if you kill scary stuff while wearing a toga. If you drink or read anything while foes are in sight, though, you are a coward and a fool, and the toga will revert to its primal state. Victory!
  • New unrand: the Consecrated Labrys. It’s like the obsidian axe, but it’s good instead of evil, and it gets more enchanted the more scary enemies are in sight. As with the obsidian axe, we strongly recommend charging headfirst at every group of enemies while holding this.
  • New unrand: the Storm Queen’s Shield. You have probably never in your life thought “I would like to be a shock serpent”, but that’s how powerful this shield is: it will grant a wish you didn’t even know you had.
  • The Staff of Dispater is now an orb. It has +AC and *Corrode. Much to ponder…
  • The Slick Slippers are even slicker and slipperier than before. Also, they’ll no longer hustle you around when your feet are already occupied climbing stairs.
  • Majin-Bo’s spell-vamprisim now can suck up blood from a Polar Vortex. It all just flies right into the middle, it’s kinda gross.
  • Many unrands now have helpful inscriptions for their special effects, like EVERVAMP, MEGAVAMP, and probably some other things that don’t involve VAMP.
  • Morg has been removed. Actually, for all you know, it might have been removed years ago. Would you have even noticed?
• Items:
  • Orbs, scarfs, and even magical staffs can now all generate as random artefacts. Finally, you can find the orb of “Zot” of rage!
  • Randarts are very slightly, ever so imperceptibly, worse. Yes, that is why your best character splatted the other day. How did you know?
  • Hyperinflation has hit throwing weapons, causing javelins, boomerangs, darts, and even large rocks to skyrocket in price.
  • Tremorstones and condenser vanes are now in a set: you only get one of the two per game. Star-crossed lovers…
  • When throwing weapons break, they now deal extra damage. It’s a considerate thing. They’re very sorry that you can’t throw them around anymore and they’d like to offer you a little parting gift as they go.
  • Spectral weapons now deal damage as if you were launching an extra attack, rather than using a secret and inscrutable set of spectral weapon monster stats. They’re also not allowed to attack themselves anymore, since that was really creeping us out.
  • Longbows, arbalests, and hand crossbows have all had their stats shuffled around a little.
• Spells:
  • New spell: Plasma Beam (L5 Fire/Air), which shoots a bolt of lightning AND a bolt of fire at the most distant foe around. My first email address involved both “fire” and “plasma” so I’m very excited about this.
  • Lesser Beckoning is now level 2 (was level 3). This gives more potential design space for Greater Beckoning, to say nothing of the long-awaited Greatest Beckoning.
  • Battlespheres now fire when you cast any destructive spell, matching Vehumet. Vehumet says that a god can’t be matched by a mere L5 spell, but I’m unconvinced.
  • Arcjolt can now hit any monster in sight, as long as there are a continuous chain of other monsters between you and that monster.
  • Irradiate now only malmutates monsters sometimes. Try saying ‘pretty please’ before casting it for best effects.
  • Lightning Bolt is gone. Amazing it lasted this long, really. Not really famous for their longevity, lightning bolts.
• Monsters:
  • New monster: sleepcaps. If they hit you, their spores might put you to sleep. If they put you to sleep, the next thing that hits you will get a big stabbing damage multiplier. And if you lose all your hit points? That’s right: you die in real life.
  • New monster: skysharks, cutting through the air (as sharks are known to). If they bite you and draw blood, somehow they’re the ones that get mad about it? And that makes them bite even harder? Seems very unfair, frankly.
  • Smitten monsters now wake up, but they’re not happy about it.
  • Giant fish zombies have been removed.
  • Endotherms have been removed.
• Webtiles:
  • You can now enter explore mode online! Hit + to explore freely… without any fear of death. You are immortal. You are a god!
  • You can now block trolls. They cannot regenerate from this. (Not yet enabled on every server: this will roll out to servers next time they restart webtiles.)
• Crawl has, somehow, become even more Australian.
• We fixed a typo in which we wrote “entire the” instead of “the entire”. Not really a big deal, honestly… except that this text has been in every single morgue since 2007! Shouldn’t someone have told us? We’re so embarrassed right now.
• Last but not least, we rewrote maybe_bool to be, arguably, better. See below for
  motivation, but here are the practical notes up front:

  * `maybe_bool` becomes a class rather than an enum.
  * After this commit, nearly anywhere you would write MB_FALSE or
    MB_TRUE you would simply write `false` or `true`.
  * Where you would write MB_MAYBE you now should write
    `maybe_bool::maybe`.
  * Comparison to `true` or `false` is safe and will do exact
    comparison. (The latter may appear surprising, but it is because
    comparison will cause a bool to be cast to maybe_bool, rather than a
    maybe_bool to be cast down to bool.)
  * Semantics change: `maybe_bool::maybe` does not convert to true by
    default under any circumstance.
  * In cases where you would have previously written `mb == MB_TRUE` you
    can just rely on a bool cast (`maybe` does not convert to `true`). In
    cases where you would write `mb == MB_FALSE` you can write `!mb`.
  * frombool and tobool are replaced respectively by constructors and
    the class method maybe_bool::to_bool (as well as an explicit bool
    cast).
  * While bool explicit operators have weird rules and can be used
    implicitly in some cases, there are still times when you'll need
    to do the cast. In particular, if a function returns a bool, to
    return a maybe_bool you'll need to explicitly cast.
  * Mixing bools and maybe_bools in logical expressions generally requires
    an explicit cast. (If you write a condition that just uses !, that
    doesn't need one.)
  
  Old `maybe_bool` had the advantage of simplicity: it was just an enum
  and as long as these enum values are used consistently, it is pretty
  simple to use and as efficient as any integer-based type, with
  effectively no implementation code.
  
  However, there are a few complaints about it. First, the naming scheme
  was quite ad hoc across the enum values and various functions that used
  them.  Second, and more importantly in my mind, the enum-based
  implementation led in a very non-clean way to implicit int and bool
  casts, and a very ad hoc semantics for this type, especially in its
  interaction with boolean expressions. Taken as a three-valued logic, it
  is very weird. The law of the excluded middle *is* valid (in the sense
  that `p || !p` is always true), but double negation elimination is *not*
  valid (i.e. `!!p != p`); the weaker double negation inference `!!!p ==
  !p` does hold conceivably classing it with some paraconsistent logics,
  though I haven't found an exact analogue (see [1], though this logic
  doesn't much resemble L8 there, which has the same double negation
  pattern). At a practical level this ad hoc nature made mixing with bools
  in both directions weird and somewhat error prone; aside from the above
  concerns (which essentially result from MB_MAYBE implicitly casting to
  `true`), `true` would cast to the enum value MB_MAYBE, leading to clunky
  conversion code in a lot of places, needing to always use MB
  constants, and error-prone comparison with regular bools.
  
  This commit tries to systematize things more cleanly, albeit with a much
  more complicated implementation. The underlying data type does still
  amount to a fancy enum (now an enum class), but it's wrapped with a more
  clearly defined class, largely inspired by boost's logic::tribool.  (I
  considered whether importing one of the various "`optional` but for
  c++11" packages out there might be a solution, but ultimately rejected
  this, because these classes tend to have an even weirder, for a
  bool-based type, set of implicit conversions to bool). A `bool`
  constructor is provided making it generally safe to use `true` and
  `false` as e.g. return values, and an explicit cast to bool is provided
  that has a better default than MB_MAYBE->true. (In some cases, this may
  be the desired semantics, of course, but this is still doable via
  `to_bool` or direct checks against false.) The operator semantics is
  based on the standard "Strong Kleene" three-valued logic operators,
  which provide a (imo) very sensible set of defaults for a three-valued
  logic. Note that because of the existence of the bool operator, this
  won't let you mix `maybe_bool`s in logical expressions together with
  bools without some explicit casting one way or the other.  The
  implementation is nearly (but not quite) purely header-based.
  
  As part of this commit, I have implemented everything as a
  back-compatibility layer and purely just tried to clarify the semantics
  of various instances of maybe_bool in cases where it did get an implicit
  conversion. The bulk of this is around `can_wear_item` which does tend
  to treat its maybe return as truth-y.  A future commit will convert
  MB_TRUE etc into their `maybe_bool::t` etc equivalents.
  
  [1] Kamide 2013, A Hierarchy of Weak Double Negations, Studia Logica 101.6

Many thanks also to Sastreii and CanOfWorms for contributing many new tiles over this period, including spell icons, artefact art, Shrek, and more.

Thanks also to all the community members who’ve contributed over the last few months, who I am too tired to credit in full. In particular, check out what SpinningBird sent us!

Happy crawling! Stay serious out there.

And off we go!

• New background: Reaver.
  • Reavers are warrior-mages, primarily focused on melee combat but with
    situational Conjurations for tough situations.
  • New starting spell: Kiss of Death (L1 Conj/Necro). Does high draining damage to an adjacent enemy, at the cost of significant max HP drain to the caster.
  • New starting spell: Momentum Strike (L2 Conj/Tloc). Redirects the caster’s momentum for a damaging attack that doesn’t require line of fire, but locks the caster in place for some turns after a hit. (It cannot be recast until this effect expires.)
  • Reavers also start with Hailstorm, which is now L3 (formerly L4) and can now miss. Ice Elementalists lose Hailstorm, but get Summon Ice Beast in exchange.
• Species rework: Palentongas have become Armataurs.
  • Like Palentongas, Armataurs are large, scaled mammals, wearing bardings
    instead of boots.
  • New species innate: Long Tongue, which doubles the effects of drinking potions, but makes reading scrolls take 50% longer.
  • New species innate: Rolling (innate Rampage – extra movement when moving toward enemies).
  • Rolling Charge is now a spell, Vhi’s Electric Charge (L3 Tloc/Air). It sends the caster charging toward a nearby foe to deliver an electrified strike, phasing through targets in the way. Warpers now start with Vhi’s Electric Charge instead of Gell’s Gravitas.
  • Armataurs lose the Rolling Charge and Curl abilities.
  • Armataurs’ aptitude have been adjusted across the board.
  • See these commits for more explanation of the reasoning behind the changes.
• God rework: Lugonu has been substantially revised, with the goal of being a much more tempting pick for players unlucky enough to have been banished to the Abyss.
  • The Banishment ability is now available at ** piety (was ***). It fails less often, and when it is resisted, the victim will be malmutated instead, making them more vulnerable in future. (This does not apply to other sources of banishment, such as the monster spell or weapons of distortion.)
  • When another god’s wrath descends upon a worshipper, Lugonu now scornfully responds by banishing several nearby foes.
  • Altars to Lugonu are more than three times as common in the Abyss.
  • Converting to Lugonu in the Abyss now gives even more bonus piety.
  • The Abyssal Knight background and the Bend Space ability have been removed. (For more explanation of why, see these commits.)
• New brand: Heavy.
  • Heavy weapons have +80% base damage and +50% attack delay. (This has proven to be pretty strong, so don’t be surprised if this gets toned down slightly before release.)
  • Both melee and ranged weapons can be Heavy.
  • The Vorpal brand has been removed. It simply wasn’t very exciting. Flaming and Freezing remain as very simple damage multiplier brands.
  • The Dark Maul and Sniper are both now Heavy instead of Vorpal, and have had various stat adjustments. (Sniper is now +27.) Other formerly Vorpal unrands have changed or lost brands and gained enchantment as needed.
• New unrands:
  • The Hermit’s Pendant, an amulet of faith that sets the wearer’s Invocations skill to 14 and their Evocations skill to 0. (Only for as long as you continue wearing the amulet, of course.)
  • The Force Lance, a Heavy +5 lance (a spear with +2 base damage, like Wyrmbane). When it lands a damaging hit, there’s a 1/3 chance of the target being knocked back, suffering extra damage if it collides with anything.
  • The Slick Slippers, which make all damaging melee attacks trample their wearer backward. They also provide immunity to constriction, engulfing, webbing and netting!
• New spells:
  • Cigotuvi’s Dreadful Rot (L2 Necro/Air/Pois). Rots away the caster’s flesh to create a cloud of deadly miasma on their tile. Great for escapes, but also very fun with effects like Lesser Beckoning and potions of attraction! Replaces Conjure Flame in the Hedge Wizard starting spell set.
  • Kindle Blastsparks (L3 Fire/Air/Tloc). Creates a cloud of ‘blastsparks’ on the caster’s tile, which explode when any creature moves into them or when they are hit by fire damage. Usable as a land mine, as a way to create distance from enemies, or for other fun tricks. Replaces Conjure Flame in the Fire Elementalist starting spell set.
  • Arcjolt (L5 Conj/Air). Electrocutes everything adjacent to the caster, everything adjacent to those creatures, etc, etc, in a chain.
  • (And of course Reavers’ Kiss of Death and Momentum Strike are both new, too – see above!)
• Further item-related changes:
  • The Mad Mage’s Maulers have been reworked. They lose Int-3 and RegenMP and gain -Cast and MPVamp, causing the wearer to gain MP when they strike foes in melee. They now add as much damage when spending MP in melee, matching the normal infusion ego’s ratio of MP to bonus damage.
  • Rings of evasion are now +5 instead of +4, to be closer in value to other rings (eg AC/Dexterity). The Ring of the Hare, accordingly, goes from +8 to +10.
  • Majin-Bo is now a one-handed staff instead of a two-handed quarterstaff. (The HP vamp and not being able to wield an enhancer staff is plenty of drawback.)
  • Scrolls of butterflies now create dramatically more butterflies. They now alternate with scrolls of summoning instead of scrolls of fog, since the latter have a more unique and irreplacable effect. Watch this space!
  • All ranged weapons can now generate with electrocution, antimagic, and draining brands. Venom ranged weapons no longer appear.
  • Short sword attack delay reduced.
  • Evocable invisibilty and blink no longer have an MP cost.
  • Spells have been reshuffled between books, and a new Maxwell’s Memoranda book has been added.
  • Hand crossbows are very slightly weaker and slower.
  • The Lochaber Axe now causes temporary HP drain on unequip.
• Further character-related changes:
  • Arcane Marksmen (Markspersons?) have been renamed to Hexslingers, for stylistic and pun reasons.
  • Base regeneration increased by 0.2 HP/turn, to make resting faster in the early game.
  • Mummies have innate Faith, giving extra piety gain.
  • Reaching the end of the Zot clock now causes a smaller amount of permanent max HP loss (similar to Borgnjor’s Revivication), rather than temp HP drain. The Zot clock can no longer directly kill the player. (This change is intended to simplify the mechanic and to move away from a weird/nonstandard use of HP draining.)
  • Large species move at normal speed through shallow water.
  • rF- and rC- are added to the ‘bad mutations’ pool.
  • Will is now capped at +++++. (When affected by the Will/2 status, the cap is applied before halving.)
  • Pale draconians’ breath is no longer usable twice as often as others’.
  • Formicids can now shaft themselves in the Tomb of the Ancients.
• Further god-related changes:
  • When worshipping at a faded altar, the player is given a preview of three gods the altar might belong to. (Then you can back out if you don’t like the options, without suffering wrath.) Care to take a gamble on that altar to Sif Muna, Vehumet, or Trog?
  • Gozag’s corpse-to-gold effect now blocks enemies from creating simulacra.
  • Fedhas protects trees from being set on fire by the player.
  • Okawaru’s Heroism and Finesse abilities cost more piety.
  • Removed Ashenzari’s Astral Vision (automatically seeing through walls). It was very annoying for autotravel/resting/etc, had a surprising number of bugs, and Ashenzari was quite strong enough without it. Maybe we’ll try to add a fixed version back in someday as a potion or such.
• Further monster-related changes:
  • Demonic Crawlers lose their Warning Cry ability, their omni-elemental resistances, and some Willpower. In exchange, they get higher damage and very fast regeneration. This is intended to make Spider overall easier (by making it easier to sneak around), to reduce overlap with Swamp’s Bunyips (and their Warning Cry), and to experiment more with fast regenerating monsters.
  • Doom Hounds’ Howl is now resistable by Will.
  • Many monsters (boulder beetles, two-headed ogres, various orcs…) do less damage.
  • Walking Tomes are now unable to cast while silenced.
  • Ironbound Frosthearts’ Creeping Frost spell is now fully resistable by rC.

Many thanks also to Sastreii for contributing many new tiles over this period, including spell icons, artefact art, new draconian sprites, and more.

Thanks to all the community members who’ve contributed over the last 6 months: robertxgray, Zhang Kai, Monkooky, 张凯, pdpol, Roadster Tracker, Rytis Petronis, Perry Fraser, scarf, bfaires, Aliscans, mainiacjoe, Benjamin S Wolf, Ernest Antanishinm, yrdzrfxndfvh, Alex, RypoFalem, Samantha Tobias, Michael Del Monte, Marcelo Henrique Cerri, Josh Braendel, Duong Hoang, and kd7uiy.

To send you off, here’s another new splash screen, this one from Micah C:

Happy crawling!

DCSS 0.29 features a sweeping rework of Necromancy, streamlining and upgrading many of its spells, along with similar improvements to the necromantic god Kikubaaqudgha. Ranged weapons have likewise been streamlined and reworked to be more satisfying to use.

For those seeking a special challenge, we’ve also added a new Meteoran species that heals when seeing new terrain and has great skills and attributes. However, Meteorans have to move fast, with only one-tenth the normal time per floor before they suffer heavy draining.

Many backgrounds now start with extra scrolls, potions, or other consumables, allowing more tactical options when faced with a sticky situation. Speaking of sticky situations, characters cast into the Abyss will find that monsters there once again give experience and piety, and an ultra-dangerous ‘deep abyss’ is now accessible…

Many new item types have been added, like scrolls of poison and wands of quicksilver. Some of these ‘alternate’, with only one type of item from a set being generated in any given game. We’ve also added many exciting new unique monsters, from Amaemon the Diabolical Poisoner to the alt-timeline troll Parghit the Mighty.

Launchers, long blades and short blades all now use dexterity instead of strength when calculating damage, allowing new evasive playstyles. Monsters no longer gain and lose ‘random energy’, and can instead launch opportunistic attacks on fleeing players. As always, there are many more changes small and large alike!

Download DCSS 0.29 here or play it online on one of many servers across the world! Packages for Windows and OS X are available now. Linux debs are coming soon. See the full list of changes on the release page here.

The tournament starts on Friday August 26th 8pm UTC and runs through Sunday September 11th 8pm UTC, with all online 0.29 games counting towards your score. See the tournament page for more details, including how to join or setup a clan. Clans membership can be changed until Friday September 2nd 8pm UTC.

Many thanks to all those who have contributed to DCSS over the years. Thanks especially to the DCSS development team, whose contributions made 0.29 possible, and to the admins who run and maintain the official servers. A special thanks to the following community members who contributed to 0.29 and a warm welcome to the first-time contributors, listed in italics. (Let us know if someone is missing, this data is tricky to collect in bulk!)

4Hooves2Appendages, Aliscans, Ernest Antanishin, Spencer Baugh, Elliott Bernstein, David Damerell, DreamDust, dilly, Diego Essaya, Perry Fraser, Goratrix, Implojin, Alex Jurkiewicz,  Nikolai Lavsky, neo-bop, Oleksiy Pavlikovsky, Rytris Petronis, Brian Power, Reono, riverfiend, robertxgray, Rosstin Murphy, ruxi, sdynet, Jeffery Stager, Cebolla Sunbeam

Hello crawlers! Welcome to the last trunk update of the 0.29 cycle. We’ll be branching off the 0.29 beta branch and rolling it out to the servers soon, in anticipation of an upcoming release and tournament starting Friday, August 26, 2022, at 8:00pm UTC. Watch this space for the tournament website soon!

As we’ve been in feature freeze for part of the time since the last update post there’s not much to report, but here’s the latest on what will round out the version. Expect to see a few more new vaults and tweaks before the beta, and don’t hesitate to report any bugs you’ve noticed. Community contributor nlavsky has continued the stream of bug fixes; riverfiend did a deep dive in god wraths and did a lot of sanity checks, big thanks to them both! Here are the rest of the changes:

• A new scroll of butterflies summons some insectoid cover, alternating in a set with the scroll of fog
• Sastrei has been hard at work drawing a slew of new tiles
• Some spell balance tweaks:
• Irradiate now applies more contamination
• Flame wave and sticky flame do more damage
• Sandblast is more accurate
• Frozen Ramparts and Ozocubu’s Refrigeration now check AC.
• Ozocubu’s Refigeration no longer applies -Potion, does more damage, but significantly reduced damage to monsters adjacent to each other (they huddle for warmth, cute!).
• Arcane Markspersons starting sling is now +1, and they trade the scroll of vulnerability for a scroll of poison.
• The roll attack of Palentonga is now quieter, and they gain +2 strength.
• A lot of behind-the-scenes work in key code handling and UI menus has been done by advil; the work has payed dividends in making new menu shortcut features easy to implement, visible in the use an item menu (toggle between wear/takeoff with !). Look forward to more of this in the next version.

Along with these gameplay changes have been a host of bug fixes as we get the next version ready for launch. Get amped for the tournament, and until next time, happy crawling!

The butterfly can only feel hate for you!

Hello crawlers, and welcome to the latest trunk updates! It’s a hot summer here in Gehenna, where the devil’s team is toiling away. Before we dive into the latest diabolical ways to die, mark your calendars. The tentative dates for the 0.29 release tournament are 26 August 2022 to 11 September. Watch this space for more information as the 0.29 development cycle winds down and we ready the new version for release.

We’ve got a big trunk update for you. Since last time we’ve added community contributions from nlavsky, robertxgray, Goratrix, Zhang Joke, Cebolla Sunbeam, chequers, perryprog, amcnicky, nikheizen, Brian Power, Aliscans, David Damerell as well as welcomed first-time contributors 4Hooves2Appendages, catern, Sentei, Reono, ruxi, and Rosstin Murphy. Some of these are bug fixes, grammar tweaks, quotations and dialog, and vaults, the little stuff that all together gives crawl its polish, but there are also some bigger-ticket items in the round up. If you’re interested in helping out with the effort to make crawl, click here for more information!

With that said, let’s dive into what’s been shaking in trunk.

First up, a new monster: the starflower, contributed by Cebolla Sunbeam. A stationary plant/tentacle hybrid monster with harpoon shot, reach 3 distortion melee, reach 2 melee, and an additional distortion melee attack. Meant as a vault-placed monster for abyssal vaults, guarding an exit or a rune or what have you, as a threat that’s dangerous to be close to, but can be neutralized if the harpoon shot can be blocked or avoided somehow.

Sentei adjusted the -Scroll and -Potion mutations. They are now 2-tier mutations in the regular bad mutation pool. The Ru sacrifice corresponds to the 2nd tier. Follwing up on Senti’s work, teleportits and berserkitis are also now two tiers.

nikheizen sent us a design to reflavour and re-mechanic gnoll shamen, turning them into gnoll bouda. They have a new spell set: Weakening Gaze, Hunting Call (like battlecry but gives swiftness instead of might), and heal other. The name bouda is a nod to the bouda of Northeast African folklore: shapeshifters that turn into jackals. They have the power of the Evil Eye which curses others with spectacular misfortune.

Temples are adjusted to place six to twenty-one altars, with a distribution that lightly favors the center of that range. On a one percent chance, a rare temple is selected instead. Rare temples are to Lugonu, Jiyva, or Ignis, or have a particularly extreme number of altars. Designing a Temple map is a great way to start contributing: there’s a particular need for Temples that support 7-8, 11, 17, 19, or 20 altars. Read more about map making for crawl here!

Support for item reskins has been added. Crazy Yiuf’s has his hammers once more. Sigmund and Reapers’ scythes are now reskinned halberds (so you can actually use them if you want, instead of trap items), and all scythes except unrand scythes are removed.

The Bows, Crossbows, and Slings skills are combined into a single Ranged Combat skill. Fustibali are removed. Hunting slings are renamed to slings. Launcher stats and spawn rates and locations are adjusted to give the ranged skill greater strategic depth.

Continuing to build on the item rotation concept, there is a new item: wand of roots, appears in item rotation with iceblast. Roots fires a 3×3 fireball-sized effect which constricts its victims (like BVC), with a duration scaling with wand power.

And a grab bag of slightly smaller changes:

• a new silent ossuary map
• Jiyva altars now place 2/3rds of the time at the entrance to Slime
• Hex miscasts now only slow the player, instead of also cancelling effects
• Lair now 5 floors
• Ijyb’s wand power is nerfed.

That’s all for now. Expect the changes to slow down as we arrive into feature freeze in August and get ready for the release. Until next time, happy crawling!

Which is more difficult, to awaken one who sleeps or to awaken one who, awake, dreams that he is awake?

Hello crawlers, and welcome back to Trunk Updates. While I’ve been away in a far corner of Pandemonium, my fellow devils have slacked off and left this space blank! Well, not slacked exactly, because they’ve been hard at work in Tar:7, as the length of this post portends. There have been several big moves, in the direction of item sets, a necromancy overhaul, and a new species, as well as balance adjustments following the opportunity attacks change and of course a wild grab bag of other changes. Before we dive into those, let’s mention community contributions since we last wrote: dilly sent in several new guarded unrand vaults, sdynet tweaked the rings of the Octopus King, and Aliscans, chequers, nlavsky, perryprog, and spicyCebolla each sent in various fixes and adjustments. I know there’s a big backlog of pull requests on the GitHub right now, but with luck we’ll bring in a bunch more new community work in the next month. Until then, let’s look at the rest of the changes!

Item sets

In an effort to increase run-to-run variation, experiment with new interesting item effects, while not increasing item pressure, the new notion of an item set is introduced. Only one type of item from a set can generate normally in a given game (though certain special situations, like rare vaults or shops, or perhaps a forgotten god, might bend this rule). Currently there are two item sets:

• The hex wand set: alternating between Paralysis and Charming.
• The bolt wand set: alternating between Acid, and two new wands: Light and quicksilver.
• wands of light fire a bolt of blinding light, checking AC and EV but no resists. The beam blinds what it hits, and deals  damage identical to an acid wand.
• wands of quicksilver fires a quicksilver bolt, dispelling the magical effects of targets it hits. Does slightly more damage than acid.

Watch this space for future exciting item sets!

Corpseless necromancy

As foreshadowed in the last post, hellmonk and PleasingFungus have been hard at work on overhauling Necromancy to not use corpses directly, as well as make Necromancy less awkward to use and give Kikubaaqudagh some bone polish. Their efforts have paid off, and crawl’s Necromantic magic now deals directly in the shadow between life and death, instead of meddling with the long-dead.

• Kikubaaqudgha is buffed:
• The pain brand can be applied to ranged weapons.
• Torment no longer requires a corpse sacrifice.
• Corpse Delivery is removed and replaced with Unearth Wretches, which summons some paralysed, 1 HP, 0 will monsters that die in a few turns, to use Necromancy spells on.
• Animate Dead now gives a duration, and for the duration killed monsters with corpses have a power-dependent chance to become zombies. The zombies are permanent as long as the player is on the level, and are destroyed by a subsequent cast of Animate Dead.
• Simulacrum is now a smite-targeted spell that gives an irresistable status. Monsters that die with this status spawn a power-dependent number of simulacra.
• Death Channel cannot be re-cast while active.
• Corpse Rot is now Level 4 Necromancy/Poison/Air. When cast it produces miasma for each corpse-producing monster killed in sight, scaling with power.
• New Spell: Necrotize (L1 Necromancy). Necrotize deals damage identically to the old Pain spell, but additionally gives the monster a short-lived status that causes it to animate as a skeleton on death (if it has a skeleton). It replaces Animate Skeleton and Pain in all player usable places.
• The spells Animate Skeleton, Pain, and Excruciating Wounds are removed.

Meteorae

The roiling success of hellmonk’s April fools Mayflytaurs’s mechanic comes back in a modified form. Welcome Meteorae!

Meteorae have an exciting variety of bonuses – great attributes and aptitudes across the board, passive mapping, and exploration healing, regaining HP and MP when viewing new territory. In exchange, they have one big downside: instead of getting 6,000 turns of Zot clock for each floor, they get 600! Meteorae are humanoid beings. (In the night sky, they look like dots because they’re very far up.) Hat tip to Neil Gaiman’s Stardust. They also glow in the dark, with permanent backlit status (not halo!), that they can’t escape by transmuting (Dithmenos can hide them, though!).

Along with their introduction comes a softening of the Zot clock, a slight move away from “instant death”. The Zot clock now applies very heavy draining the first time it trips, and gives the player an additional set of turns. Only at very low max HP will it outright kill the player.

Balance adjustments

The introduction of attacks of opportunity was a significant shift, and there have been several follow up changes to adjust balance while keeping the tighter tactics they introduce.

• Some early game monsters are nerfed a bit in terms of base damage.
• Consumable generation is increased.
• Monsters slower than the player don’t get opportunity attacks.
• The maximum duration of paralysis a monster can inflict is reduced to 5 turns.
• Dungeon shafts attempt to send the player to a location outside of LOS of monsters.
• Using all un-explored stairs and hatches is now fast.

The rest

Of course, this wouldn’t be a trunk updates post without a potpourri of other assorted changes. First of all, advil has done a host of behind the scenes work, improving the shopping menu, the plumbing of various bits of UI and save handling. And of course, Sastreii’s artistic endeavors continue to beautify the dungeon as well as clarify UI elements: you might have noticed the flashy new status icons for various status effects that are applied to monsters. Read on for the rest:

• Timed hell effects no longer apply on a timer, and instead have a chance to apply on each level entry.
• Hunter‘s starting dexterity is increased.
• Positive stat mutations now give +4 to the primary stat and -1 to the other two.
• Formicids’ base dexterity is increased by 3.
• Formicids  can now wield giant (spiked) clubs.
• Demonspawn demonic touch damage is doubled.
• Uskayaw grants piety for ally damage.
• Lugonu’s Bend Space is adjusted. It no longer does damage, and makes a better effort to blink monsters away from the destination.
• Stones always mulch when thrown.
• Shadow dragon scales AC increased
• Weapon descriptions now display a “damage rating“, describing the contributions to weapon damage from various sources.
• New item: scroll of poison. When read the scroll of poison fills every unoccupied space on the screen with poison clouds for 10-20 turns.
• +MP items remove MP when they are taken off.
• New unrand: the +8 trishula “Condemnation” {holy, Anguish Fly rN+}. Inflicts 4-8 turns of the Anguish status on targets it hits.
• New unrand: the +3 mountain boots {rDislodge, rC+}. Prevent the player from being involuntarily moved by physical means (trampling, shafts, tentacles, etc.).
• The amulet of Vitality now gives two pips each of Regen and RegenMP, and is now evil (Borgnjor is said to have made or used it or been involved in it somehow).
• Scrolls of holy word are removed
• Animated Armour now flies.
• Sandblast no longer uses stones as ammo. Instead it takes twice as long to cast as a normal spell, and has its range increased by one.
• Airstrike’s bonus from empty space is doubled.
• Finally, Deep Dwarves are removed.

Wow! It’s been a few months since we last wrote and a lot has happened. Still more is on the horizon, though through the haze what exactly remains as mercurial as a quicksilver elemental. So, until next time, happy crawling!

Whisper “Farewell” when you leave, Dimli…

Hello crawlers, and welcome to the first trunk update post of the 0.29 development cycle. The dust has settled from the 0.28 tournament, and a bug fix release for 0.28 will appear soon. Meanwhile, trunk development has taken off as various members of the team and the community get to work on new exciting projects. First off we have several new vaults by community contributors DreamDust, and spicyCebolla, as well as tweaks, fixes, and text from Antern, chequers, CipHuk, Elliot Bernstein, Diego Essaya, Implojin, perryprog, and robertxgray. Many thanks to the community contributors that keep crawl alive and healthy! Now let’s turn to the gameplay changes since 0.28.

Launcher ammo is removed

You read that correctly: player launchers now have unlimited ammo. Along with this are changes and tweaks to bring balance in this new, free firing world:

• ranged weapons have had their stats adjusted downward
• the Hunter background no longer starts with a short sword and no longer has a throwing option
• Kobolds now have +3 crossbows aptitude
• Armour penalties apply to ranged weapon attack delay
• Launcher damage scales with dex instead of str
• Spriggans can no longer wield triple crossbows, and fustibali are 2-handed.

Several new Uniques stalk the dungeon

• Parghit the Mighty. Following the example of Maggie/Margery, Parghit is an “alt-timeline” version of Pargi. Parghit appears in late Depths, Zot, Crypt and Tomb, and sports high-enchantment golden dragon scales (with a 1% chance of wearing the Dragon King) and an astonishing 27 HP regenerated per turn. He’s definitely killable, but best not underestimated.
• Josephina the Ice-Lich. As one more “alt-timeline” unique, Josephina is an upgraded version of Josephine. She appears in late Vaults, Depths, Crypt, Tomb, and Zot, and borrows Wendigo Seracfall (turning simulacrula into 3d33 bombs) to add to her classic Ghostly Fireball. She comes with a guaranteed randart ring of ice.
• Amaemon the Diabolical Poisoner. Crawl’s first demonspawn unique, appearing in mid-D, early Lair and Orc:1. Alongside his orange demon companion, Amaemon summons scorpions (the classic returns!) and casts Concentrate Venom, upgrading his allies’ poison into curare. To encourage players to try to kill him, he wields a demon whip of venom, with 1% chance of the unique Snakebite.
• Lodul the Thundrous. Lodul is an ironbound thunderhulk who’s been sent to patrol outside the Vaults, in late D. He’s got a weaker version of Call Down Lightning and a big band of ogres and two-headed ogres to help him keep distance from the player. Defensively, he looks a lot like Erolcha.
• Vv the Exile. Vv is a combination of ironbound frosthearts (Creeping Frost) and Salamander Tyrants (Eruption/Pyroclastic Surge), appearing in Depths, Zot, Crypt, and Tomb. She’s themed as a new species, the Stoneborn, sentient earth elementals. She also has strong defenses and both flaming and cold melee.
• Zenata, Seeker of Sheza. Zenata is another late-game unique (appearing in Depths, Zot &c), borrowing a bit from the Desolation of Salt and putting a twist on it. She’s taken the ragged hierophants’ “Resonance Strike”, which is like airstrike that gets bonus damage from adjacent constructs instead of from open spaces, and uses it in conjuction with a new “Sheza’s Dance” spell, which summons 2-4 dancing weapons. She comes with a high-tier weapon with some plusses already on it.

Monster energy and attacks of opportunity

A major mechanical change has landed in trunk. “Random energy” was introduced long ago in Stone Soup’s history as an attempt at deterring tedious-but-optimal levels of pillar dancing and luring, while permitting shorter trips. It has not been successful in that role, and additionally offered a “get out of jail free-ish” card in many fights against certain monsters. The spirit that motivated it also motivated previous devteam attempts to meet the problem with a better solution, such as the dynamic-monsters experimental during the 0.17 cycle. This time around we’re tinkering with the mechanic again, in the following form:

• Monster move energy is no longer randomized.
• Monsters adjacent to the player gain a 1/3 chance to gain a free* attack if the player moves away from them. Wu Jian martial attacks & rampaging give immunity, and monsters that don’t move fast enough to follow you can’t attack. *Terms and conditions apply: the monster must have sufficient energy to be able to move the next turn (monsters slower than the player don’t get this chance on the turn they fall behind), and monsters that attack slowly don’t get a full refund on the energy used for the attack, only the amount of a normal turn.
• Ogres, 2-headed Ogres, Ogre magi, and Thunderhulks attack more slowly in melee.
• Early D spawns are nerfed a bit, with top killers less common and Harold moved later.

In addition to the direct tuning changes above, backgrounds have their starting kits improved a bit with extra consumables, to increase tactical options in the very early game. See the next section.

Expanded starting kits

Many backgrounds get improved starting kits with a new consumable or two to help with the very earliest moments of the game when tactical options are limited.

• All ‘mages’ (‘pure casters’) start with a potion of magic.
• Gladiators get a throwing weapon (one); a javelin, large rock, or boomerang.
• Monks get a potion of ambrosia.
• Hunters get a scroll of immolation.
• Brigands get an additional poisoned & curare dart.
• Artificers trade their chesspiece for nine charges of iceblast.
• Wanderers get an additional random potion or scroll.
• Abyssal Knights start at 60 piety (just over 2*) instead of 38 (just over 1*). This should allow them to use Bend Space if needed.
• Chaos Knights get Artificer’s xom chesspiece.
• Transmuters get a potion of lignification.
• Warpers get more boomerangs of dispersal.
• Arkane Markspersons get a scroll of vulnerability.
• Enchanters get another potion of invisibility.

Everything else

Along with big-ticket changes there’s the usual froth and fizz of trunk development, with little tweaks and small features all over.

• Unrand tweaks:
• the Glaive of the Guard is reduced to +5
• the arbalest “Dammnation” is reduced to firing 2d14 explosions
• Gyre & Gimble are now +12
• the Woodcutter’s axe is now a battleaxe
• Long and short blade damage scales with Dexterity instead of Strength.
• Merfolk’s polearms aptitude is reduced to +3, with long blades increased to +2
• Mummy necromancy enhancers now appear at XL 3 and 13
• Most zombies and skeletons are removed from Dungeon generation.

That’s all for now! The team is still getting organized around 0.29 priorities, so through the haze of Gehenna it’s hard to make out what’s coming. One big project is an overhaul of Necromancy, particularly the corpse exploitation spells; it’s still in the early phases so keep an eye out to see what sort of dark abomination comes out of the work. Until next time, happy crawling!

The trunk updates hit you as you move away! Ouch! That really hurt!!! You die…

For 16 days, players could compete for tournament points and banners by playing 0.28 games on the public servers. This was the fourth tournament held after the major revision of the tournament rules done for 0.25. There were changes based on previous input, and once again we’ve collected the feedback posted on tavern and reddit.

Congratulations to Yermak, perennial champion, for once again taking first place in the individual competition, with a spectacular 111,412 points! Over the course of the tournament, Yermak won 43 games, including a streak of 13 games (second-best in tournament), an 76M high score run (first in tournament), 30 Nemelex’ Choice combos, 4 species high scores, 3 background high scores, and 19 tier 3 banners.

Other big winners:

• Acrobat2: 2nd place overall (101,150 points, 34 wins), longest streak (18 games), 4 species high scores & 1 background high score, tied for lowest XL win at 16, all level 3 banners completed.
• Fagentul: 3rd place overall (89,909 points, 21 wins), 5 species and background high scores, tied for lowest XL win at 16, 16 level 3 banners completed, 8-win streak.
• p0werm0de: Fastest realtime win (an auspicious 27 minutes 44 seconds), 2nd place low turncount, 8th place overall.
• Caminho: Lowest turncount win in a scanty 8,492 turns.
• sweetandcool: A third tie for lowest XL win at XL 16; 14th place overall.
• Lici The Crawler (alias Borgnjor’s Vile Crotch): First win of the tournament.
• Ge0ff, RubberyChicken and NoScrollMutBadDesign all tied for most ziggurats completed at 27 apiece.

The clan competition was won by Gozig or Gozag (captained by Ge0ff) with 105,656 points, sealing their victory by winning 40 Nemelex Choice combos to second place’s 30. In a close 2nd place was That felt unstrangely rewarding (captained by acrobat2) with 98,434 points, and first place in the Clan Combo Highscores and Streak Length leaderboards. 3rd place was held by Team Splat (captained by shummie) with 85,513, following up on last year’s 2nd place ranking by maxing out the Clan Low Turncount Win leaderboard.

Thank you to everyone for playing! I hope you all had fun.

To close out, here are some overall tournament statistics (with the 0.27 numbers in brackets for comparison). 2,559 players started a game at some point during the tournament; of those 2,504 completed a game without quitting or leaving the dungeon sadly orbless. This definition of “player” (players who completed a non-boring game) is used for subsequent calculations and was used for the 0.27 statistics.

• Players: 2,504 (0.27: 2,474)
• Total player time: 28,008 hrs (0.27: 27,502 hrs)
• Average player time: 11.2 hrs (0.27: 11.2 hrs)
• Games played: 69,201 (0.27: 67,203)
• Players who got a rune: 742 (0.27: 734)
• 357 winners and 1160 wins (0.27: 404 winners and 1571 wins)
• Win rate: 1.68% (0.27: 2.34%)
• Proportion of players using WebTiles: 96.6% (0.27: 94.4%)

The 0.29 season has begun, and changes are already in motion. Watch this space for further information as the 0.29 trunk update posts begin to flow. Until next time, happy crawling!

DCSS 0.28 features a new Cinder Acolyte zealot background that begins the game worshiping a new god, Ignis, the Dying Flame. Cinder Acolytes start with the new Scorch spell, a -1 flaming branded weapon of choice, and five stars of piety. Ignis worshipers cannot gain piety, losing it only when using Ignis’ abilities. The abilities are Fiery Armour, which grants AC and retaliation flame damage, Foxfire Swarm, which summons many foxfires, and Rising Flame, a one-time ability sends the player one level above. Once all piety is spent, players will typically abandon for another god, and Ignis dies forever when wrath is over.

The Hell branches have been revised to offer substantially more challenge. Each branch features a distinct and persistent negative effects that applies while in the branch along with timed effects common to all Hells. The branches all have revised monster set with many new monsters and smaller layouts for the first six levels, each of which has only one downward staircase. The Spider branch has likewise been retooled with a roster of new creepy-crawlies, new and revised end maps, and updates to the existing layouts and vaults.

A new magical orb item type exists for the shield slot. Each orb type grants an ego with a powerful passive effect, such as a 3-radius halo or a reduction of monster willpower at the expense of your own. The god Yredelemnul has been completely redesigned, granting passive reaping and accepting the reaped zombies as payment for its dark abilities. Okawaru and Jiyva have also seen significant, though not quite as sweeping, changes.

A batch of new spells have been added, As always, there are dozens of new deadly vaults, and many more changes small and large alike!

Download DCSS 0.28 here or play it online on one of many servers across the world! Packages for Windows and OS X are available now. Linux debs are coming soon. See the full list of changes on the release page here.

The tournament starts on Friday February 4th 8pm UTC and runs through Sunday February 20th 8pm UTC, with all online 0.28 games counting towards your score. See the tournament page for more details, including how to join or setup a clan. Clans membership can be changed until Friday February 11th 8pm UTC.

Many thanks to all those who have contributed to DCSS over the years. Thanks especially to the DCSS development team, whose contributions made 0.28 possible, and to the admins who run and maintain the official servers. A special thanks to the following community members who contributed to 0.28 and a warm welcome to the first-time contributors, listed in italics. (Let us know if someone is missing, this data is tricky to collect in bulk!)

AdamPG, Alex Jurkiewicz, Aliscans, ArmiesAndCastles, Brian Power, Chris Landry, Justin Clark Ong, David Damerell, DreamDust, Ed Dewey, Elliott Bernstein, Gopall, Goratrix, Implojin, Jonathan Klabunde Tomer, Kiëd Llaentenn, MainiacJoe, Hurricos, Matthew Daley, Monkooky, Nikolai Lavsky, Oneirical, Perry Fraser, RojjaCebolla, Santiago Acosta, Zachary Chandler, Zhang Kai, amcnicky, dilly, floraline, John Stahara, Beargit, mgdelmonte, Nikolai Lavsky, Robert Gray, Paul Pollack, sdynet

We’re in the process of finalizing the 0.28 release which will appear in the next couple of days, and 0.28 is being rolled out to our online servers.

Hello crawlers, and welcome to the first trunk update of the new year! As hinted in the previous update, the 0.28 development cycle is nearing a close, and with that we are pleased to announce a tentative tournament start date of Friday, February 4, 2022, at 20:00 UTC for the sixteen day 0.28 Release tournament. We are chilling trunk into a feature freeze and will be focusing on bug fixes and balance in the coming three weeks, and plan to release 0.28 before the start of the tournament. More details about the tournament, including a tournament website and rules changes, will be available here soon!

With that announced, let’s dive into the 215 commits that have arrived in trunk since the start of the year (more or less). These commits included community contributions from Aliscans, DreamDust, Zhang Kai, perryprog, nlavsky, Goratrix, and a new rare Temple layout featuring Ignis by pdpol. In total, in these commits were 72 bug fixes spread among GitHub issues, Mantis issues, reports directly to the devteam, and community contributions to fix a bug the fixer noticed. Along side the polish and gameplay balance, UI improvements are always something we’re happy to include, and team member advil has done extensive work to make arrow keys and menu help more consistently available across the UI.

The last “big ticket” block of changes to land was to the Abyss, let’s open with that suite of changes:

• Random items no longer generate in the abyss.
• Kills in the abyss grant no reward (experience and piety), though Uskayaw still rewards damage and Yred still grants zombies.
• Exploring no longer grants piety in the abyss.
• The chance of plunging deeper into the abyss on teleport is increased.
• Wretched stars only apply a single temporary mutation per use of corrupting pulse, and use it less often.
• The abyssal rune, staircases, and exits are more common.
• On collecting the abyssal rune, the player gains two potions of experience worth of experience.

With two-hundred commits there’s still a lot of churn, and although at this stage we’re much more focused on balance, there’s also a new goody or two. Let’s dive in!

• New spell: Anguish (L4 Hex/Necromancy). Gives monsters in sight that fail a Will check the anguished status. Whenever an anguished monster deals damage it also takes the same amount of damage.
• Shield penalties now work more like armour skill; the penalty scales down as skill is increased from 0 up to 27, based on a shield encumbrance rating and species factor. Skill 27 is required to completely remove the penalty, regardless of size.
• Spider is no longer quiet, and completely open level layouts are much rarer
• Ghost moths toned down in melee
• orbs of mayhem are now disliekd by Cheibriados, and energy disliked by Trog
• the robe of Misfortune loses its unequip penalties
• Ashenzari’s skill boost is turned down
• Wendigo’s seracfall damage is reduced
• To-hit penalties from armour and shields are removed
• Aux attack chance and damage is now based on XL instead of attribute for all aux attacks.
• Offhand punch chance now starts at 5% chance and scales with unarmed combat skill to 50% at max skill.
• Dragon form gets 2 extra levels of fangs.
• The UI for interacting with frenzied monsters is greatly improved.
• The player gets XP for kills by and of frenzied monsters.
• Jiyva no longer grants piety for exploring the slime pits
• The poison dart generation rate is dropped
• Assorted tweaks to Spider monster band mixes and sizes

Well, that’s all for now! If you’re interested in helping in the release effort, drop us a line in #crawl-dev on libera.chat, check out the open issues on GitHub, or just keep playing and discussing trunk as the balance and tuning come in.

On the horizon, well, I opened with it. There’s the 0.28 Release and Tournament! The team is going to be focusing on getting release-ready in the next 3 weeks. Until next time, happy crawling!

The trunk update hits you! The trunk update is wracked by anguish!!! The trunk update dies!

A ho ho ho from Santaeus here in the icy expanse of Cocytus the North Pole! Welcome to the last trunk update of 2021. The frenzied pace of trunk development continues, with 150 commits since we last wrote. One big chunk of commits was some behind the scenes web tiles modernization, with some help from CKO admin and community contributor floraline. There are three big headliner sets of changes: a new set of Spider monsters, a variety of new early-game appearing unrands, and a new type of item to carry in your offhand instead of a shield. Before we get to those three change sets, let’s check out the rest of the trunk changes:

• The glaive of Prune now turns you into a prune when paralysed, petrified, or put to sleep, causing you to take half damage until the effect ends.
• If Jiyva dies Dissolution‘s summon eyeballs is replaced with a cantrip.
• Sewer maps have been updated and re-vamped, plus two new sewer maps.
• Bailey maps have been updated and re-vamped, plus three new baileys.
• New Spell: Enfeeble (L7 Hexes). Enfeeble irresistibly applies weakness and antimagic to a single foe. Additionally the target is also dazed and blinded if they fail a willpower check.
• Formicids now dig at normal movement speed, and each cell dug causes draining.
• Centaur warriors replace centaurs in Shoals.

New and updated Spider monsters

• Pharaoh ants are an undead spider that drains and when killed binds the souls of all nearby monsters.
• Steelbarb worms are fast, regenerative, fire-resistant worms that apply barbs in melee.
• Jorogumo are tough ensnaring monsters with bolt of draining and hornet poison melee.
• Broodmothers summon spiders and bite to summon spiders.
• Culicivora are healing spiders, with heal other and a vampiric bite, appearing in spider packs.
• Sun moths are holy moths with a single tile halo, sticky flame, and energy bolt.
• Radroaches are armoured roaches that cast irradiate, which contaminates the player a lot (not a direct malmutation).
• Demonic crawlers gain warning cry.
• Emperor scorpions are less tough but faster.
• Ghost moths no longer poison but their stat draining is much more intense.

Early Game Artefacts

Artefacts can now generate on D:2-3. Additionally, several new unrandarts specifically designed to be interesting early and then fall off are added:

• Delatra’s gloves heal the wearer for drinking unknown potions and restore MP for reading unknown scrolls.
• The woodcutter’s axe is a vorpal +8 war axe that always swings at 10 aut, regardless of skill, shield penalty, slow or haste, etc.
• The staff of the Meek is a +7 quarterstaff of protection with an extra protective bonus AC when below 55 HP.
• Throatcutter is a +7 long sword of draining with a 1/3 chance to instantly kill foes that are below 21 HP.

Orbs to ponder

This round of updates brings a new item type: orbs. A shield-slot analog of scarves that give no SH and no penalty. Several new armour egos are added that appear only on orbs:

• light: a radius 3 halo.
• wrath: gives *Rage (20% berserk chance).
• mayhem: when the wearer kills something, it has a chance to send a monster that saw the kill into a frenzy.
• guile: reduces the will of the wearer’s target by 3 pips, while reducing the wearer’s will by 2 pips.
• energy: gives a source of passive channeling: a chance to power a spell instead of using the wearer’s MP, with a chance to backfire and drain int or cause confusion. The success chance goes up with each source of passive channeling, and the backfire effect triggers if each source backfires. The staff of Wucad Mu now counts as two sources of channeling (so it stacks with an orb of energy in addition to being buffed!).

That’s all for now. This development cycle is coming to a downslope, most of the big ideas for 0.28 have reached trunk, but of course there are always surprises in Santaeus’ sleigh. So I don’t have horizon prognostication for you about what might appear next beyond the polish, balance tweaks, and bug fixing that make up the later end of the release cycle. Until next time, happy crawling!

The energy of discovery flows out of the trunk update and into your fingertips!

Hello crawlers! We’re getting back to a more regular trunk updates post schedule, but this comes hand in hand with a continued feverish pace of change. Since we last wrote there have been 186 commits to trunk. Unlike last time a much larger fraction of these are fixes, tweaks, and technical behind the scenes work that enable the headliner items.

First, a big congratulations and thank you to longtime community contributor nlavsky and team member advil for initiating and seeing through to completion the implementation of a consumable panel for web tiles, similar to the inventory pane of local tiles. This has been an outstanding feature request for almost a decade, and is the number one reason offline players cite for why they don’t play online. So if you’re a long-time offline player and you don’t mind playing trunk, come check it out; otherwise, we look forward to you trying it during the 0.28 release! In addition to this panel, advil has been doing a lot of work expanding the web tiles mouse support, the second most requested online feature. Try it out!

Since we last wrote, we also had community contributors Aliscans, ArmiesAndCastles, Brian Power, EdDewey, Gopall, Goratrix, Jonathan Klabunde Tomer, Oneirical, Perry Fraser, aMcNicky, mgdelmonte, Zachary Chandler, and sdynet send in various tweaks, fixes, new items, lua api improvements (mgdelmonte is a big driver of these), and other assorted changes. As always, a big thank you to the community for participating in development.

On the gameplay side, the two big headline changes are the Yredelemnul overhaul and a revision of the Wanderer background start. Let’s dive in.

Carry the Black Torch!

Last post I mentioned an experimental overhaul of Yredelemnul looking for playtesting feedback. This overhaul has arrived in trunk, after a set of balance tweaks and bug fixes thanks to your feedback. Here’s what Yredelemnul now offers, instead of permanent ally gifts.

• At 0* Yredelemnul grants passive reaping of living and demonic creatures, as well as recall, and immunity to umbra and spectral mist clouds. Things with a corpse come up as zombies, things without as spectrals (including those poor souls whose corpse was exploded). These reaped creatures stick around until the player leaves the level.
• Piety is proportional to the total strength of reaped dead in the player’s LOS.
• At 2* grants the Dark Bargain active, which trades some zombies/specters for a long-duration undead servant summon. Summon quality scales with piety, and the summon list now covers all (non-harmful) ghoul, skeleton, vampire, and wraith genus monsters (except Vampire magi who belong to Kiku); for console players that’s monsters on glyphs n, z, V, and W.
• At 4* grants Drain Life. Same as old drain life, but now costs zombies/specters as well as mp.
• At 5* grants Bind Soul. Same as old enslave soul, but also costs zombies and has been renamed. Bound souls can follow the player between levels, retain the spells and weapons they had when alive, and are tougher than before.

Wandering About

hellmonk took the charge in re-designing the random generation process of the Wanderer background. I won’t bore you with the old creation model, Wanderer players will know that the bad rolls could just be absolutely nonsensically awful. The new generation model picks three skills in an apt-weighted way: a “good” skill and two “decent” skills. Using these choices it hands out starting gear, “good” stuff for the good skill and “decent” stuff for the decent skill. Finally it assigns stats and skill points based on these choices, again in an apt-weighted way. The result is more lopsided and more likely to align with the gifted items, though it is not guaranteed to be that way. Along with a change to the random model, the possible items have been expanded, with some carried over from the old model. To entice you to check it out, here’s the possible list:

• “good fighting” selects a weapon and gives the good weapon instead. “decent fighting” gives an extra plus to a weapon if one was already given, or a decent potion or scroll otherwise.
• “good weapon” gives a +2 weapon, an upgraded base type or a vorpal branded starting weapon (hunting slings with sling bullets are now possible). “decent weapon” just gives a plain weapon.
• “good unarmed” gives two random good potions or scrolls. “decent unarmed” gives a single decent potion or scroll.
• “good armour” gives either +2 scale, chain, or acid scales to weirdly shaped wanderers. “decent armour” gives either plain scale or ring mail, or aux armour to weirdly shaped wanderers.
• “good shield” can give either a +2 buckler or a +0 buckler of protection (upgraded to a kite shield for species that can’t use a buckler). “decent shield” gives a +0 buckler.
• “good magic school” gives a 3-spell randbook (capped at level 4) from that school. “decent magic school” gives a 2 spell book totaling 4 levels from that school.
• “good spellcasting” gives a 4-spell randbook (capped at level 3), picking spells from any school. “decent spellcasting” gives a 2 spell book totaling 4 levels from any school.
• “good stealth” gives either a +2 dagger and a good consumable or a +0 dagger and atropa and datura darts. “decent stealth” gives a piece of aux armour.
• “good throwing” gives a +2 dagger and curare darts. “decent throwing” gives either boomerangs or poison darts.
• “good dodging” gives either a +2 leather armour or a +0 leather armour and some nets (oddly shaped wanderers get an aux armour instead of leather). “decent dodging” gives a piece of aux armour.
• “good evocations” gives either a wand (weighted towards the stronger wands) with a good number charges or an XP evoker other than the chess piece. “decent evocations” gives a handful of flame or polymorph charges or a piece from Xom’s chessboard.
• The possible range of starting consumables is expanded.
• If starting with the sandblast spell, a wanderer also receives stones.

Trunk Updates

Of course, with 184 commits, even with all of the User Interface work there are plenty of other gameplay changes around. Read on for the mix

• New Unrand: the dreamshard necklace. Concept and initial implementation by community contributor aMcNicky, the dreamshard necklace is an amulet an amulet of nothing that for the most part does nothing. However, on a lethal or near-leathal blow the necklace shatters, absorbing the blow and releasing protective dreams of healing (a big heal, between half and full HP), friendship (shadow creatures), and clouds (fog).
• The ring of the Mage loses Will++ and Int+3 and trades them for Archmagi. Multiple sources of Archmagi now stack, so have fun blasting!
• The autumn katana loses Clarity and trades it for a chance to cast Manifold Assault on hit, slicing through space because it is too sharp. This unrand refresh by community contributor sdynet.
• The monster mix in Dis and Cocytus is adjusted to bring them closer in line with Gehenna and Tartarus threat levels.
• Okawaru’s Duel ability is more expensive, and the post-duel grace period shorter.
• Quazlal abilities have had their costs balanced: Upheaval is cheaper in MP and Piety, Elemental Force cheaper in MP, and Disaster Area more expensive in MP.
• Chain Lightning damage now falls off more quickly with range.
• Yara’s Violent Unravelling can now unravel summons in addition to enchantments. When targeting a summon it causes the summon to explode, killing it instantly. Additionally, it is now smite targeted.
• The briar patch monster now blocks all non-aligned beams, shielding its allies from all hostile fire, while allowing allied beams to fire through them. Bushes allow all beams to pass through, regardless of alignment.
• The infusion ego is buffed, now costing only one MP per hit.

There’s still a lot more brewing on the horizon this trunk season, with a Spider refresh and a lot of new and updated vaults on the way. So until next time, happy crawling!

You go downstairs. The trunk update is left behind to rot!

Hello crawlers! Sorry for not writing, there was a leak in the lava system down here in Gehenna and it was all hands on deck for the Devil’s team to get it contained. Despite the chaos, since the last trunk update there have been a whopping 480 commits to trunk. So buckle up for a meaty post. Before we dive into the details, some headlining information.

First, a warm welcome to Sastreii, who has joined the dev team as a tiles artist and has been prolific in refreshing old tiles and filling in art for the new content that’s arrived in this cycle.

Next, on the horizon in this version are a refresh of the Spider branch and an overhaul of Yredelemnul. Both are currently playable on the experimental crawl.dcss.io development server (not tracked in scoring or Sequell). Playtesting feedback is welcome and wanted on these branches, drop us a line on GitHub, reddit, the tavern, or #crawl-dev on libera.chat if you have substantive feedback based on playing experience. Both sets of changes should arrive in trunk very soon, but they aren’t quite there yet.

Also on the immediate horizon: a combined effort by community contributor nlavsky and team member advil will soon deliver a consumables panel for web tiles. This has been a desired feature for a long time, so hats off to both of them for the effort!

A big thanks to community contributors ManiacJoe and DreamDust for new vaults, as well as to AdamPG, Aliscans, ArmiesAndCastles, Brian Power, David Damerell, Gopall, Implojin, Martin Kennedy, nlavsky, perryprog, Santiago Acosta, dilly, mgdelmonte, paul, and robertxgray for patches with tweaks, bug fixes, balance adjustments, lua improvements, and more since we last wrote.

With all that said, lets dive into the trunk changes!

Branches & Environment

• Exploration-based shaft traps are now limited to one shaft per branch per game.
• Portal vault portal mimics have cackled and vanished for the last time, and are removed.

Character

• Two new Demonspawn mutations:
• The weakening stinger mutation gives a tail aux attack. At level 3 it blocks the cloak slot and the aux attack applies the weak status.
• The demonic touch mutation adds irresistible damage to the off-hand attack. At level 3 it blocks the gloves slot and applies the vulnerable status.
• Player-chosen attribute increases now happen every 6 XLs, starting at XL 3, and increase a stat by 2. Demigods are unchanged.
• Black Draconian Breath no longer includes shock.
• Clarity from any source again blocks *Rage.

Gods

• Ashenzari’s passive trap avoidance and item identification are moved 1*. No more freebies without a curse!
• Cheibriados’ passive poison slowing is moved to 0* and bend time moved to 1*.
• Elyvilon’s abilities are streamlined to be less redundant with one another and with Zin’s sanctuary:
• Pacification grants full XP, and can be used on intelligent plants.
• Lifesaving is completely passive, and is a bonus chance on top of the usual good god chance that becomes guaranteed at 5*, but with a piety-gated timeout.
• Lesser Healing is removed, with Greater Healing renamed to Heal Self and moved to 3*.
• Purification is moved to 1* and is cheaper.
• Gozag’s gold distraction chance is capped.
• Ignis’ abilities are shifted based on playtesting experience:
• Rising Flame is now a one-time use ability, but costs no piety.
• The cost of the other two active abilities is increased to compensate.
• The Sea of Flames ability is removed and replaced with Fiery Armour, a long lasting duration that gives +7AC and causes melee attackers to suffer fire damage.
• Jiyva gurgles merrily and shifts into a new form:
• Stat shuffling, healing and piety from item eating, and cure mutation, are all removed.
• Piety is now exploration based and grows very quickly.
• Jelly healing is replaced with passive HP and MP regeneration.
• Mutation gifts arrive in bursts that attempt to remove a mutation (more likely a bad one) and then max out a good one.
• rCorr is now granted at 2*, and jelly-on-hit at 5*.
• New active ability Oozemancy granted at 3*. Somewhat expensive in piety it temporarily turns walls in radius 4 into slime walls.
• The chance of Ru retaliation is reduced.
• The Shining One abilities arrive earlier, with Divine Shield at 1* and Cleansing Flame at 3*.

Items

• The spawn rate of wands is reduced.
• The electrocution brand now triggers on fewer attacks.
• Regen is reduced to 0.8 HP / turn per pip.
• MPRegen is increased to 0.4 MP / turn.
• The brand weapon chances have been tweaked, and are now described in the scroll’s description.
• The spawn rates of scrolls and potions are adjusted slightly and now described in in-game descriptions.
• New glove ego: infusion. Gloves of infusion add damage per hit in exchange for 2 MP per hit.
• New unrandart: the +3 Mad Mage’s Maulers {Infuse+∞ RegenMP Int-3}. These exchange all of the wearer’s current MP in exchange for bonus damage proportional to the amount of MP used.
• The hat of the Bear Spirit now grants extra bonus HP while berserk (for a total of +100% HP) and reduces the post-berserk slow duration, though it loses rN+.
• Unrandarts that produce allies no longer do so when worshipping Okawaru.

Monsters

• Demonic and Holy monsters are now susceptible to fear, intoxication, and mushroom spores, and are able to go berserk.
• Monsters now have a chance to break a door permanently when opening it to get to the player. This chance is higher if berserk.
• Classed draconians now come in a fixed colour based on their job.
• Plain demonspawn are removed. Each class of classed demonspawn has one mix of demonspawn attributes.
• When Dowan dies, Duvessa goes berserk permanently; when roles are reversed Dowan gains haste permanently.
• Merfolk impalers and javlineers are nerfed slightly.
• Walking Tomes have a summon cap on their living spells.
• Shard shrikes now engage in batty wandering after casting icicle once, as they were meant to.
• On death, Eleionoma and Fenstrider Witches drop a wand if they drop a corpse (similar to a dragon’s hide).

Spells

Within the spell changes, a big chunk of them involve making existing spells scale with power and making sure the power caps for low level spells aren’t too high. Here’s that set first:

• Corpse Rot scales with power, placing more miasma clouds per corpse and placing clouds at radius 2 if all the radius 1 space is already filled.
• Passage of Golubria now has a range that scales with power.
• Blink has a cool down that scales (downwardly) with power.
• Teleport Other, Sublimation of Blood, Spider Form, Inner Flame, Gell’s Gravitas, and Vampiric Draining all have their power caps reduced.

And the rest of the spell changes:

Hello crawlers! It has been a busy month since we last wrote, with lots and lots of new stuff landing in trunk.

First of all, you’ve probably noticed a lot of fresh new looks for monsters and terrain. A big thanks to community contributor Sastreii for the stream of awesome tiles.

The long promised Hell overhaul has arrived in trunk, with a complete refresh of each of the sub-branches and tons of new monsters. nicolae is hard at work on new Hell vaults as well, so watch out! Speaking of vaults, hellmonk has brewed up six new WizLabs for you to loot, or perhaps to die in.

Fighter and Fire Elementalist have both been adjusted – the latter has two new spells, and there are a few other new spells as well. The behavior of random rage from all sources has had a variety of tweaks, and there’s the usual grab bag of other tweaks, changes, and adjustments.

Hell Overhaul:

For a long time, players have let us know that hells are too long (28 floors!) but too easy – a “victory parade”. To fix that, we’ve taken what was fun and challenging about the hells and distilled away the rest. The result is much more lethal, shorter, and a rip-roaring good time all the way through. Changes include:

• Hell effects are divided into timed effects and branch wide persistent effects.
• The timed effects are the same for all hells, and consist of temporary mutation, stat drain, hp drain, and noise.
• The branch-wide persistent effects are:
• In Dis, players have 8 Corrosion (-8 AC and Slaying).
• In Cocytus, potions are frozen solid cannot be used.
• In Gehenna, scrolls are obscured by hellish smoke and cannot be used.
• In Tartarus, Willpower is halved by the sheer horror of the environs.
• In each hell sub-branch, floors 1-6 are shrunk to 1/4 of their original area. (The final floor of each branch, floor 7, is unchanged.)
• Each level only generates a single downstair, with no randomly placed shafts and a limited number of escape hatches.
• Hell subbranches have their monster lists refreshed with a variety of new enemies, replacing things like weak derived undead and so-called “trash mobs”.
• Each subbranch has hellions, tormentors, dread liches, and ancient liches.
• In addition to the cross-hell population, there are revised monster sets in each subbranch.
• Gehenna is now populated by brimstone fiends, hellephants, hell hogs, fire giants, salamander tyrants, balrugs, and three new monsters:
• The creeping inferno stalks the player like a lurking horror, and when it explodes it goes off in a fire storm.
• Searing wretches are ghoul-like monsters that strip fire resistance with their melee attacks.
• Stokers tend the fires of Gehenna, summoning creeping infernos and setting off wind blasts.
• Dis is now populated by hell sentinels, iron giants, caustic shrikes, iron dragons, war gargoyles, buffed iron golems, and two new monsters:
• Quicksilver elementals have quicksilver bolt and antimagic attacks, as well as batty movement.
• Crystal echidnas throw barbs and fire crystal bolts. They’re made of green crystal and are appropriately vulnerable to LRD.
• Cocytus is now populated by ice fiends, shard shrikes, azure jellies, titans, frost giants, freezing wraiths, simulacra, and two new monsters:
• Wendigos have stunning blast, paralyzing victims for 1 turn on hit. They can also turn nearby simulacra into very powerful iceblasts, destroying the simulacrae in the process.
• Narguns hit hard, have a vulnerability melee, and cast petrify. (Watch out – since potions are frozen solid in Cocytus, you can’t quaff cancellation to stop the petrification!).
• Tartarus is now populated by tzitzimimeh, silent spectres, doom hounds, bone dragons, profane servitors, eidola, shadow wraiths, spectral things, and two new monsters:
• Tainted leviathans are undead giants which mesmerise, throw large rocks, and are ringed by miasma clouds
• Putrid mouths are screaming ghosts with miasma breath, strong poison and stat draining melee.

Six New Wizard’s Laboratories:

Hellmonk, with an assist from PleasingFungus and art from Sastreii has brought a whole assortment of new WizLabs for you, including restoring two that were cut in 0.17.

• Eringya’s Formal Garden (previously removed in 0.17) returns with a modified layout, nastier archers, and the addition of some of the swamp monsters that have been added between then and now.
• Tukima’s Studio (also removed in 0.17) returns with a modified layout and several brand-new monster types to complement the dancing weapons: walking tomes, which summon living spells that cast themselves at the player. Walking Tomes also now appear as high-tier enemies in Depths.
• Yara’s Duelist Academy features mana vipers, lots of warrior-mages wielding antimagic weapons, and a fearsome semi-unique Head Instructor who likes to dual-wield triple swords.
• Borgnjor’s Mausoleum features both corporeal and incorporeal undead. Lost souls occasionally appear when monsters are killed, making big fights scarier. A cult of halazid warlocks serve as the final encounter.
• Maxwell’s Workshop features an array of golems and big, meaty workers who wield big, meaty maces. You’ll find some of Maxwell’s cast-off equipment here, perhaps including the legendary artifacts themselves.
• Alistair’s Party Mansion features an array of wizards and their bizarre guests. There’s some good consumables to be had if you don’t mind crashing the party of the century… and wading through statrotting clouds of degeneration.

Spell changes:

• New spell: Scorch (L2 Fire). Hits a random enemy within 3 tiles, dealing fire damage. If damage is dealt, applyies short term rF- to the foe. Cinder Acolytes start with Scorch instead of Foxfire.
• New spell: Flame Wave (L4 Fire/Conj). Flame Wave is a channeled spell (like Searing Ray) that hits all surrounding tiles in ever-wider waves of flame. The initial cast costs 4 MP, and each turn of channeling costs 1 MP. The noise starts a bit louder than a shout, and gets up to fireball level by the last wave.
• New spell: Summon Cactus Giant (L6 Summoning). Summons a jolly green giant, which impales attacking enemies on its giant spines. Appears in the Book of the Wilderness and the Book of Scorching
• Searing Ray‘s power scaling is decreased.
• Storm Form’s power scaling is decreased, but blinkbolt is now always LOS range.
• Bolt of Magma and Corona are now monster only.

The rest of the changes:

• All derived undead keep their reach, constriction, and trample effects.
• New entry vaults, ruin sub vaults, and maps for Desolation
• Red Devils no longer kite, and instead their melee attack inflicts the barbs status if damage is done.
• The Ranger Card now summons rangers from these three types: centaur warrior, naga sharpshooter, deep elf master archer. (thanks sdynet!).
• Ironbound Beastmasters are removed.
• Depths is now 4 floors.
• The experience cost of high-level skills is reduced (approximately equivalent to a +1 increase in aptitude at skill level 23).
• To compensate, late game XP is reduced.
• The top-end two handers have slightly lowered skill requirements for mindelay. Executioner’s axes and bardiches now reach mindelay at skill 24, and triple swords at skill 22.
• Throwing ammunition is reduced.
• Abyssal Knights background stat contribution is changed to 5/2/5 Str/Int/Dex, from 4/4/4.

On the horizon:

That rounds out the changes for this update. Looking to the future is always fraught, but amid the miasmatic haze of Tartarus there are some outlines of a spider overhaul, adjustments to the wanderer start, more efforts to compactify mid-to-lategame, and a host of community and dev-team designed new vaults. Further afield there are rumors of new Bailies, overhauls of Yredelemnul and Jiyva, and perhaps even something about ranged combat. Stay tuned! And until next time, happy crawling!

The trunk update rustles loudly! The trunk update casts itself at you!!!!!!! You die…

Hello crawlers, and welcome to the first trunk update of the 0.28 cycle. Coming fresh out of the gate are a new god Ignis and accompanying zealot background Cinder Acolyte, plus a big new feature for Okawaru and freedom from the summon XP penalty. On top of all that, a new unique Mlioglotl stalks the dungeon. Mlioglotl unique horror with the power to corrupt the level, changing terrain and summoning other abyssal horrors, as well as cause fear. He places in the S-branches and rarely in the Abyssal lair end. Thanks to community contributor amcnicky for the nightmares. Watch out!

Ignis, the Dying Flame

Ignis is a new god who does not appear in the temple. Indeed, altars to Ignis do not place in the regular dungeon at all! Ignis worship can only begin at character creation or from a faded altar. Ignis is dying, and as their last worshipper you are given all remaining power right from the get go.

• Ignis worshippers start at 5* piety (6* if a monk joining from a faded altar).
• Ignis has no piety gain and no piety decay.
• Once abandoned and mollified, Ignis dies and can never be worshipped again.
• Ignis grants the following abilities:
• 0*: Passive rF+
• 1*: Active ‘Sea of Flames’ ability. Creates smoldering embers (like Conjure Flame) on every empty square in LOS. They ignite after the next player turn unless snuffed out by something occupying the cell.
• 1*: Active ‘Foxfire Swarm’ ability. Conjures Foxfire on every open square in radus 2 around the player.
• 2*: Active ‘Rising Flame’ ability. Gives the player the “Rise” status, after 2-4 turns the player rockets through the ceiling and up one floor.

The main way to worship Ignis is by starting as a Cinder Acolyte. Cinder Acolytes are a new background and start worshipping Ignis, along with: a 7/5/0 stat split, a robe, a -1 flame branded weapon of their choice, and the spell foxfire memorized.

Okawaru, god of (single) Combat

In the 0.27 cycle Okawaru gave up on their old honorable ally conduct. That was the beginning of a shift in their point of view on allies, and the god of combat now wants to see you prove yourself a worthy hero alone!

• Okawaru now forbids all allies, as if you had sacrificed love under Ru.
• And gains a new 5* ability Duel. The Duel ability smite-targets a single non-summoned enemy in LOS (which must be threat level “tough” or higher), and transports them and the player to an Arena portal vault. Winning the duel opens a gate to return from the portal vault, and the player will be forcibly teleported back after a short duration.
• Finesse is moved to 4*.

Summoning Changes

For a long time summons have applied an XP penalty, stealing up to half of the XP reward from each kill. This was used as a balance tool, because allies in crawl are very powerful. However, over the past many versions a lot of the sources of ally power (summons attacking out of LOS, sources of permanent, very long lived, or cheap and powerful allies) have been removed. Summoning spells were still extremely powerful, owing to the large number of creatures that could be brought to bear on a problem. In trunk summons and allies are changed in the following way, to enable removing the XP penalty.

• Summon caps are reduced:
• Summon Small Mammal, Summon Hydra, and Monstrous Menagerie are capped at 2.
• Haunt is capped at 8.
• Summon Horrible Things and Dragon’s Call keep their old summon caps.
• All other summon spells are capped at 1.
• Summon-capped summons all time out uniformly and disappear after 10 auts.
• Shadow Creatures is made a monster only spell.
• The XP penalty is removed from all temporary allies.
• Permanent allies from Beogh and Yredelemnul currently retain the XP penalty, with a hope to change their design in the future in a way that allows us to fully remove the XP penalty.

And all the rest

Of course, in addition to big projects there are myriad tweaks, adjustments, and smaller features in trunk. Here’s the latest

•  Ziggurats no longer require a rune of zot to enter.
• The Enchanter background no longer starts with the Corona spell, and instead starts with a potion of invisibility.
• The evolution mutation is revised. Once per XL’s worth of experience it activates, providing a good mutation. Every two activations it reduces its level by one.
• New bad mutation: devolution. Mechanically similar to evolution but dispenses bad mutations and activates once every 1/4th of an XL.
• Strength 0‘s regeneration reduction is replaced with -Regen in monster LOS.
• Intelligence 0‘s 4/5 chance to fail scroll reading is replaced with -Scroll.
• The staff of Battle now triggers the battlesphere on melee hit (in addition to the usual spell trigger).
• All shields now only use Dex for stat scaling.
• The robe of Clouds‘ thunder cloud ability is now passive, placing storm clouds on enemies within range 2 each turn.
• Riposte is removed from long blades and base damage is increased.
• Demonspawn warmongers’ Sap Magic effect now causes a short term -Cast after casting a spell.
• Lesser Beckoning’s power cap is reduced to 100 and range reduced to 5.

What’s on the horizon

That’s all for now, crawlers, but there’s a lot cooking down here in Dis:7. There is a major refresh of the hells underway, discuss play testing feedback on reddit or the tavern! Hellmonk has some hellish new wizlabs nearing completion. PleasingFungus has been at work in his own wizard laboratory and has two new spell designs that might make it to trunk soon. Beyond that, who can say what malicious whims will flit through the devteam’s head. So until next time, happy crawling!

With a burst of heat and light, the trunk updates rocket away!

Highlights (full commit list via github):

• The frequency of D:1 jackals is reduced.
• Sigmund and Robin are nerfed gently.
• Maxwell’s Capacitative Coupling now has LOS range.
• 80 other fixes, tweaks, copy-edits, and interface improvements.

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

Congratulations to Yermak, perennial champion, for once again taking first place in the individual competition, with 105,402 points! Over the course of the tournament, Yermak won 48 games, including a streak of 24 games (best in tournament), an 86M high score run (also best in tournament), an XL 14 win (also tied for best in tournament!), 27 Nemelex’ Choice combos, 5 species high scores, 3 background high scores, and 19 tier 3 banners. In 2nd place was Sergey with 91,825 points and 34 wins, including a streak of 21 games, 3rd lowest turncount win, 2nd 15 win of the tournament, 4 species high scores, 3 background high scores, and 14 tier 3 banners. Rounding out the top 3 was dilly with 84,283 points points and 38 wins, including a streak of 7 wins, 28 Nemelex Choice wins (tied for most in tournament), and 18 tier 3 banners.

Our top three took several of the top spots in the individual category rankings, but they weren’t the only players on the leaderboard. Acrobat set the top standard in Win Rate once again, winning 37 out of 43 games over the tournament for an adjusted win rate of 84%. Third place finisher dilly tied with Prakerore in the Nemelex’ Choice competition, both winning 28 Nemelex combos for points over the course of the tournament. Yermak and Sergey took the number one and number two spots in the quest for Combo High Scores, with CryingNoob rounding out the top 3. The lowest turncount was 9,903 turns, shared in a tie by Caminho and DrMan. Seasoned speed runner p0werm0de took the fastest real-time win with a 22:37 victory. Spriggan Enchanter was the power-combo of the Low XL win category, with Acrobat, Yermak, and Prakerore in a three way tie at XL14. The tournament start was heralded by p0werm0de who posted the first win after 33 minutes, and dilly brought home the first 15 rune win in an hour and 20 minutes. The Ziggurat Dive was more restrained than the 0.26 tournaments’ 100 ziggurat fiesta, with Ge0ff clearing 60 Ziggurats. Finally, both poncheis and booing earned every banner, the only two players to complete this feat.

The clan competition was won by Gozag or Stay Home (captained by Ge0ff) with 105,343 points. In 2nd place was Team Splat (captained by shummie) with 78,267 points. Following close on their heels in 3rd place were ABCDEF (captained by fbynet) with 76,046.

Most of the clan categories take the best score of the member, so I won’t recap those. The Nemelex’ Choice competition was a collective effort, and and just as in 0.26 it was quite high scoring. Gozag or Stay Home came out on top, with a total of 49 clan nemelex points; closely following were ABCDEF with 47. The Combo High Scores competition was blown away by Gozag or Stay Home with 917 points in the category, a result of having both Yermak and Sergey on the team. This tournament only two clans collectively earned every banner: ABCDEF thanks to the ‘B’, booing; and chatdotcrawlBR, which had poncheis as a member.

Thank you to everyone for playing.

To close out, here are some overall tournament statistics (with the 0.26 numbers in brackets for comparison). 2,527 players started a game at some point during the tournament; of those 2,474 completed a game in a non-boring way. This definition of “player” (players who completed a non-boring game) is used for subsequent calculations and was used for the 0.27 statistics.

• Players: 2,474 (0.26: 2,333)
• Total player time: 27,502 hrs (0.26: 29,392 hrs)
• Average player time: 11.2 hrs (0.26: 12.6 hrs)
• Games played: 67,203 (0.26: 54,701)
• Players who got a rune: 734 (0.26: 886)
• 404 winners and 1571 wins (0.26: 476 winners and 1767 wins)
• Win rate: 2.34% (0.26: 3.23%)
• Proportion of players using WebTiles: 94.4% (0.25: 96.7%)

The 0.28 season has begun, and it again looks to be a very active trunk season. Watch this space for further information as the 0.28 trunk update posts begin to flow. Until next time, happy crawling!

DCSS 0.27 features a new Djinni species that cast spells using HP, can only learn new spells at random as they level up, and only use the spellcasting skill to train magic. We’ve redesigned Ashenzari, who now offers curses for your gear to gain piety and skill levels, at the cost of destroying the item when the curse is removed.

A batch of new spells have been added, including Manifold Assault, which attacks multiple foes at once with your melee, Storm Form, which transforms you into a tempest with electrified, cleaving melee and the ability to hurl yourself as lightning at foes, and Animate Armour, which draws out the spirit of your armor to fight by your side. Polar Vortex is a more damaging, ice-themed replacement for Tornado. Maxwell’s Capacitive Coupling is a level 8 air-themed replacement for Absolute Zero that vaporizes a nearby monster after a delay. Chain Lightning has been reworked into a more powerful level 9 spell.

Spell books have many new types and generate more often, but contain fewer spells. We’ve re-balanced branch monster sets and end maps, as well as made new end maps for Lair, Shoals, and Snake. As always, there are dozens of new deadly vaults, and many more changes small and large alike!

Download DCSS 0.27 here or play it online on one of many servers across the world! Packages for Windows and OS X are available now. Linux debs are coming soon. See the full list of changes on the release page here.

The tournament starts on Friday July 30th 8pm UTC and runs through Sunday August 15th 8pm UTC, with all online 0.27 games counting towards your score. See the tournament page for more details, including how to join or setup a clan. Clans membership can be changed until Friday August 6th 8pm UTC.

Many thanks to all those who have contributed to DCSS over the years. Thanks especially to the DCSS development team, whose contributions made 0.27 possible, and to the admins who run and maintain the official servers. A special thanks to the following community members who contributed to 0.27 and a warm welcome to the first-time contributors, listed in italics. (Let us know if someone is missing, this data is tricky to collect in bulk!)

4Hooves2Appendages, AdamPG, Aliscans, Alexei Barnes, Beargit, Elliott Bernstein, dicedlemming, dilly, DreamDust, Goratrix, hyperactiveChipmunk, Implojin, Alex Jurkiewicz,  Zhang Kai,  l33t-d00d, Nikolai Lavsky, Christopher Landry, MainiacJoe, mgdelmonte, Mintice, Andrew O’Neill, Alexander Posch, robertxgray, Sastreii, sdynet, WhiteShark, Shummie, Skrybe, Jeffery Stager, Cebolla Sunbeam, Wensley, Mara Williamson

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hello crawlers! Coming hot on the heels of our previous trunk update we’re back with more of the latest. Before we dive into changes, some exciting scheduling matters:

The 0.27 tournament is tentatively scheduled for July 30th-Aug 15th

As usual, watch this space for links to the tournament webpage, more information about scoring, etc.

While it has only been a week since our last little chat, almost 100 commits have landed in trunk. One significant area of change is to spellbooks, feedback on the feel of this change is most welcome and we look forward to reading your remarks on various crawl forums. With that said, on to the changes!

• Thanks to community contributor Aliscans, wizmode monster creation now has in-game help, for all your monster experimentation needs.
• Archmagi can now appear on randart robes.
• Several unrands have been adjusted:
• Damnation only consumes bolts and explodes on hit.
• the staff of Wucad-Mu has been buffed, refunding MP more often and including the refund even when it backfires.
• the Wrath of Trog is angrier: it now extends your berserk duration on kill (sometimes) and grants Rampage. Raarhrhrhghghghghgh!
• The post-berserk penalty no longer includes paralysis.
• Using Trog’s Berserk now has a piety-adjusted chance to fail.
• Salamander Tyrants, Rockslimes, and Quicksilver oozes have been added to Ziggurat monster sets.
• Several further enhancements to the quiver:
• Potions and scrolls can now be quivered for use.
• Autofight correctly supports “waiting spells” like searing ray.
• New options are available to customize the quiver order
• A new spell: Maxwell’s Capacitive Coupling (Level 8 Air). When cast, the player begins charging up. If the player waits (with ‘.’) and is not moved then after a bit of time (random and depending on spell power) the accumulated charge is discharged, vaporizing the nearest foe (nearest at the end of the spell, not when it is cast!). This might seem familiar, but I’ve got absolutely zero idea where you might have seen the mechanics before.
• Wereblood now only grants its healing for kills of adjacent monsters.
• Felids no longer get a stealth penalty from Blade Hands.
• Everyone else can improve their stealth with a new good mutation that dampens sounds.
• Spell book changes:
• Spellbooks are always identified
• Randart spellbooks have fewer spells
• Fixed spellbooks are split into smaller books of 2-4 spells each, and 30 new books are added to pick up the contents.
• Spellbooks generate more than twice as often to keep the number of spells generated about the same. Book rarity is now more closely tied to the spell level.
• Book pricing in shops is reworked
• Backgrounds that previously started with a spell book are unchanged, their starting spells are added directly to the spell library at game start.

That’s all for now. In the run up to the release and tournament, “feature freeze” is scheduled roughly around July 16 or 23. Before then expect to see many more exciting new vaults reach trunk, both from our new devteam members and from several community contributors; along with balance tweaks, bug fixes, and user interface improvements (including, hopefully, an item panel in the WebTiles UI). Until next time, happy crawling!

Weird images run through your mind. The Trunk Updates vapourize in an electric haze!

Hello crawlers, it has been a while since a post has appeared in this space. While your author has been inactive the rest of the team and the community have been working away in the depths of Gehenna to sift the most lethal ideas from the hellish magma.

First of all, a warm welcome to the two newest players for the Devil’s team: hellmonk–a long time community contributor, fork developer, and notorious memelord. nicolae–another long time community vaultsmith, with a special talent for shop vaults, whimsey, and good quotations. We’re happy to have both of them aboard the team.

Speaking of community contributors, since I last wrote from among the 285 commits to trunk we’ve seen

• A new splash screen by ArbitUHHH
• New tiles from Sastreii, including for demonic trees which inspired a new dungeon feature
• Tweaks and fixes from Goratrix, dilly, nlavsky, and DreamDust
• Specific mechanical input from engine and pubby

New and Improved Vaults and Environment

• Everyone’s favorite lair ending, the Jungle Book, has been overhauled to no longer be a Lua-trigger spoiler. There are still plenty of appearing monsters, brought back from the dead by necromancers that now appear.
• hellmonk has been on fire, adding three new Volcanoes: a smoke and steam themed map, a tribute to the Zot hot tub (beware the orb of fire), and an elven volcano full of pryromancers.
• To cool off, he then added a slime themed new Ice Cave.
• Both hellmonk and nicolae have been at work improving Snake vaults; the first with a new rune vault, and the second with a wide variety of thematic vaults.
• Many old guarded unrand vaults have been tweaked and adjusted, as well as a slew of new ones.
• While not exactly a vault: demonic trees now appear in the Abyss, Pan, and themed vaults. They can be awakened like normal trees but when burned produce a cloud of chaos instead of a forest fire.
• Early out of depth monsters have a shallower maximum depth.

Gods

• Hepliaklqana waits until you have shown enough devotion to earn 1* of piety to bring your ancestor out of the mists of memory (and kindly also waits to impose the HP penalty).
• Sacrifice Experience costs more XP now: the experience cost of skills is calculated with your old XL value, which will have a much longer effect. The sacrifice can now be repeated up to three times.
• Sacrifice words and sacrifice drink grant bonus piety when both are taken (Mummies get the bonus just for sacrificing words.)
• Other sacrifice piety values have been tweaked and rebalanced in various directions.
• Okawaru no longer cares if you slaughter your allies.
• Kikubaaqudgha now gifts spells directly into your library; the capstone grants all of the spells of the Necronomicon and also Haunt once more.

Character

• Djinni aptitudes are adjusted (XP is increased from 0 to +1 and spellcasting reduced from -2 to -3).
• Unbreathing is no longer a mechanic distinct from rPois or holiness type (this applies also to monsters).
• Palentonga can now silence their rolls.
• Wisp form no longer has blinkitis.
• The guaranteed damage reduction mechanic is changed. Instead of being a secret percentage associated with particular armour items, it is an internal calculation derived from AC from any source. For the curious you can read the details, but to quote the LearnDB “If you’re making equipment decisions based on this, please reconsider.”

Spells

• The amulet of the Air loses EV+5 and becomes an Air magic enhancer.
• Monster Bind Souls now always creates a simulacrum when the targeted monster dies.
• Air Elementals lose their twisters, and gain Stunning Burst which inflicts 1 turn of paralysis and is resistible with rElec, stasis, or by dodging the attack (but not Will).
• Ice form‘s AC scaling with power is buffed.
• New spell: Storm Form Level 7 Air/Transmutations. Transforms the caster into a storm, melding all non-jewellery, and granting power-scaling electric cleaving melee, power-scaling defenses, and an activated blinkbolt ability.
• Wereblood grants a small amount of healing on each kill.
• Blade Hands is again level 5.
• Freezing Cloud is now level 5.
• Tornado is re-named and re-flavoured to Polar Vortex Level 9 Ice; the damage flavour is changed to icicle damage and increased.
• Chain Lightning is increased to Level 9 Conjurations/Air, and has its mechanics simplified to be easier to reason about (but still a bit more complicated than a bullet point).
• Poisonous Vapours no longer creates a cloud as part of its mechanical function.
• Absolute Zero and Hydra Form are removed.

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

Hello crawlers, and welcome to another installment of the 0.27 trunk updates!

A big thanks to nicolae for another big batch of vaults, this time for Spider; to Dilly, ShaperMC, and hellmonk for new ecumenical altar vaults; and to Sastreii for a continued stream of new tiles! Additionally a big thanks to hellmonk for the overhaul to Demonspawn Tier 3 facets:

• The Black mark facet gives the following benefits. At level 1 hex enhancer, level 2 black mark, and at level 3 a radius 1 silence donut around the player (the player isn’t silenced).
• The Damnation facet is adjusted to feel more like becoming a Brimstone fiend. At level 1 the facet grants Will+ and passive retaliation to hex attempts, at level 2 gives 50% torment resistance, and at level 3 hurl damnation (which has some tweaks to its damage scaling).
• A new Chaos facet which gives at level 1 a chance to corrode enemies when you damage them, at level 2 a chance to malmutate enemies when you damage them, and at level 3 an active ability to forcibly blink away and apply negative statuses to enemies in line of sight.
• The Robust and Augmentation facets are unchanged; Passive freeze is removed, and the passive freeze mutation moves into the general pool.

Read on for the rest of the trunk changes:

• New Unrand: the seven-league boots, which grant a full-LOS rampaging effect
• Yredelemnul again permits statue form
• Nemelex’ Foxfire card is renamed “the Swarm” and summons a swarm of bees with size varying on power.
• More salamanders have been placed in Snake rune vaults
• Draconian Knights and Fannar no longer cast Ozocubu’s Armour and have higher base AC.
• Ice elementalists now start with Metabolic Englaciation instead of Summon Ice Beast
• Hailstorm now affects icy creatures
• Wands of random effects are removed, replaced with the XP-charged pieces from Xom’s chessboard, which apply a random effect to a random target in LOS.
• The diversity of early dungeon books is increased.
• Static Discharge is lowered to level 2, and Swiftness increased to level 3.
• Mnoleg loses Random Bolt, to better focus on summoning eyeballs.
• The demonic rune is announced when a vault that is guaranteed to place it is generated.
• The player and their Hepliaklqana ancestor can now fire through one another.
• Major Destruction is buffed and has the list of zap adjusted. Makhleb’s passive heal on kill is reduced in strength.
• Vehumet now supports Poisonous Vapours.

That’s all for now! As always, the future is hazy; there are some big changes proposed by community contributors that are under discussion, as well as some big UI projects under way. One of those projects, by long time contributor nlavsky is nearing completion: it will bring an inventory panel to WebTiles! Until next time, happy crawling!

You make a move on the chessboard. The trunk updates cackle and vanish!

Hello crawlers, trunk is currently as hot as Geh:7 on a hot day with lots of commits coming fast. Since we last wrote over 150 changes have landed in trunk, a mix of tweaks, shifts, new features, community contributions, and bugfixes. As with last time, I want to again highlight our non-code contributors:

• New vaults by beargit, nicolae, and ShaperMC, appearing in various places in the dungeon. If you’re interested in making vaults (prefabricated bits of the map), read an introduction to editing vaults here and consider setting up a development environment to test your vaults.
• New tiles by Sastreii. If you’re interested in making tiles, read our tiles guideline here.

Both kinds of contribution can be submitted on our GitHub repository, either as an issue or a pull request, if you don’t have a mantis account. If the documents seem a little old, they’ll be getting updates in the coming month.

Work on spicing up the early dungeon experience has continued with significant changes to the overflow altar system:

• Each floor from D:1-3 has a 50% chance of placing a faded altar. We need more faded altar vaults! If you’re interested in making vaults this is a good place to start (as are arrival vaults).
• There is a 20% chance of an identified `altar to a random Temple god on D:2.
• Except for the previous two chances, no other altars appear on D:1 or D:2.
• Every “Temple god” receives exactly one guaranteed altar, appearing either in the Ecumenical Temple or in an overflow temple between D:3 and D:10. We also need more overflow temple vaults!

In addition to the changes to altar placement, further adjustments continue:

• Oozes are renamed endoplasms
• Dungeon spawn tables are adjusted to produce more depth appropriate monsters
  and less chaff.
• Ogres and Two headed ogres again attack slowly and hit harder.
• Scorpions are now fast.
• Gnolls on D:1 no longer get halberds.
• Worker ants, soldier ants, and queen ants are removed.

The new Djinni species continues to be tweaked in response to play testing:

• Weapon aptitudes have been lowered by one.
• The scholarly gods now all reject Djinn worship (that’s Sif Muna, Vehumet, and Kikubaaqudgha)
• Spells are guaranteed on level-up: if a starting book spell is rolled the spell gets re-rolled until an available spell is found.

Some changes to the mutation pool:

• All scales except Iridescent scales are now Demonspawn only.
• Iridescent scales, bone plates, thin skeletal structure, and sturdy frame are no longer incompatible.
• Blurry vision is removed, replaced by allowing Ru’s -Scroll while threatened mutation in the random mutation pool.
• Shoutitis and No potion heal are reduced to 2 levels, with the maximum level effect at the top level, and half the effect at the first level.
• A new Jiyva mutation gives player melee an engulf effect, engulfing foes in ooze (gross).
• The blink mutation is removed.

And of course, a grab bag of other changes:

• Manifold Assault is raised to level 5.
• Depths vaults have their monster lists updated to match the spawn table.
• The Vestibule of Hell has its monster list updated to remove chaff monsters.
• Flying equipment, species, and forms cause you to fly at all times.
• Sif Muna’s book gifting rate has been reduced, to make it more feasible to reach 6* piety.
• Blade Hands is now level 6 and appears only in the book of Transfigurations
• Hydra Form is now level 5 and appears in the book of Changes and the Fen Folio
• Heavenly Storm grants bonus EV and is a bit quieter.
• Scrolls of random effects are removed.

That’s all for now. On the horizon: new demonspawn tier 3 facets have come into focus. The winds of freshening continue to blow through branches but just where they’ll go remains mysterious. Until next time, happy crawling!

You feel threatened and lose the ability to read!

Hello crawlers, it’s been a busy few weeks in the cottage industries of the Iron City. This trunk update has several big things, but before we get to them I want to highlight some non-code community submissions since we last wrote:

• New vaults by beargit, nicolae, and Skrybe, appearing in various places in the dungeon. If you’re interested in making vaults (prefabricated bits of the map), read an introduction to editing vaults here and consider setting up a development environment to test your vaults.
• New tiles by Sastrei. If you’re interested in making tiles, read our tiles guideline here.

Both kinds of contribution can be submitted on our GitHub repository, either as an issue or a pull request, if you don’t have a mantis account. If the documents seem a little old, they’ll be getting updates in the coming month.

Diving into some of the other changes that have happened since we last wrote. Several branches have had changes.

Of course, trunk development is not all headline items. There’s been a lot of behind the scenes technical work, bug fixing, and an assortment of other changes. Read on to see what else has changed.

• Wyrmbane now glows when a dragon that can upgrade it comes into view.
• Dexterity and EV formulas are tweaked again.
• Assorted autoexplore edge-case improvements by Aliscans.
• Swamp is now loud.
• Cheibriados no longer hates quickblades.
• Elixir gives both heath and mp at all power levels.
• Zin sanctuary no longer applies holy word.
• Empty space no longer reduces the variance of Airstrike‘s damage.
• Kobold Fighters start with bucklers now.
• Monster weapon delay is standardized at the monster’s speed, certain monster
  base damages are adjusted to compensate. (hellmonk)
• Poisonous Vapours can no longer target empty space.
• Palentonga HP apt is reduced to +0.
• Player poison now ticks much faster.
• Yredelemnul accepts nonliving worshippers again. Return the black torches to your Gargoyles and statuary!
• Halflings are removed.
• Shatter deals bonus damage to toenail golems (youch).

That’s all for now. The future keeps approaching even though we can never see it clearly, but by desperate Aperomancy it seems that the branch freshening trend might reach to Spider or the Hells. More vaults from vault smiths new and old are soon to appear. Perhaps hellmonk’s promised Tier 3 demonspawn changes will materialize? Or perhaps none of these things will happen and this space will show something completely different next time! Until then, happy crawling!

The trunk updates whisper ‘farewell’ as they head to the true west.

Hello crawlers and welcome to the first trunk update of March! It’s been busy here in Coc:7 dreaming up new and varied ways of torturing players. The first thing of note in this round of trunk updates is an Ashenzari overhaul:

• Ashenzari periodically offers followers curses as they explore.
• Curses are applied to equipped items and have the following effects:
• Bind the item to you, so it cannot be removed,
• Increase your piety with Ashenzari,
• and grant a boost to two groups of skills (described when Ashenzari offers the curse).
• Curses can be removed at any time by shattering the chains. This destroys the item, freeing you from the curse.
• In exchange for binding yourself with curses, Ashenzari grants the following benefits:
• Skill boosts granted by your curses grow with piety.
• At 0* Ashenzari reveals a wealth of knowledge: all items (including consumables) are identified, exploration traps are prevented, and portals are revealed.
• Passive monster and item detection and passive mapping, with detection range scaling with piety.
• At 2* See Invisible
• At 3* Clarity
• Starting at 4* passive scrying with radius 2, scaling up to radius 4 at 6*.

Other changes since we last wrote:

• Plain Liches have a new spell set: Bolt of Cold, Orb of Destruction, Slow, Haste and Invisibility; and Ancient Liches trade Slow for Petrify.
• If he spawns on the orb run, Boris will do so with permanent haste and a permanent aura of brilliance, spurred on by his lust for the ORB.
• Airstrike no longer does bonus damage to flying things.
• The obsidian axe cannot be unwielded while mesmerised; watch out!
• Once you complete a Ziggurat, the Zot clock no longer applies.
• The spectral brand has been simplified: The weapon pops out when you attack, immediately follows up, and then sticks around until the end of your next turn. If you hit again, everything repeats. Otherwise, it vanishes.
• Unidentified equipment is now identified when you touch the cell that it is on, instead of on wear.
• The Depths monster list has been trimmed of so-called “trash mobs” for a deadlier experience.
• *Slow as an artefact property now stacks, multiple sources will increase the chances of getting slowed when hit.

That’s all for now! On the ever changing horizon, changes to Snake and the Vaults seem in focus, but it is always hard to see through the impenetrable haze at the border between Cocytus and Gehenna, so who can say, really? Until next time, happy crawling!

Hello crawlers and welcome to the first trunk updates post of the 0.27 cycle. Things have commenced with a shebang! and there are a lot of new changes to report on. This update will have some thematic organisation to highlight several big sets of changes: curse removal, stat changes, monster spellbooks, adjusted demonspawn facets, and two new spells. There are of course all sorts of tweaks, shifts, changes, and new spells. Read on for more!

Curse Removal

The system of cursed items is no-more, courtesy of PleasingFungus who finally found the collective remove curse scroll and read it for all of us. Practically, this means the following:

• All items that generate are uncursed
• No mundane negative-plus items generate on the floor (though some special shops still place them)
• Scrolls of remove curse, rings of attention and teleportation, and amulets of innacuracy are removed.
• Ashenzari is the only source of curses. In current trunk, Ash uses identify scrolls instead; however this is a place-holder and a larger revision to Ashenzari is currently in-progress but not yet in trunk.
• The Scythe of Curses and Obsidian axe now have *Drain instead of *Curse; the necklace of Bloodlust no longer has a swap penalty.

Stat changes

Several tweaks to the stat system (including the impact of weapon stats) have arrived, to simplify the impact of base stats and remove hidden breakpoints and step-downs. Thanks to hellmonk and chequers for the submissions! Along with these changes are some adjustments to species stats.

• Dexterity and evasion no longer have hidden step-downs
• The percentage damage modifier for strength on weapon damage is derandomzied and simplified. 10 strength corresponds to 100% damage, and each point of strength above adds 2.5 percentage points to the modifier (points below 10 remove 2.5 percentage points).
• Demigod base stats are reduced to 9/10/9, and now gain 4 points of the stat of their choice every 3 levels. This will give players almost divine control over their stats.
• Gnolls base stats are reduced to 7/7/7.
• Spriggans lose one point of base dexterity and have their Dodging apt reduced to +3.

Monster Spellbooks

Monsters with multiple distinct spell books have had their spell sets combined into single sets. For a couple of monsters with multiple iconic sets, new monsters have been created to carry the torch. The full set of changes can be perused in the pull request, here are some of the highlights:

• Psyche has a new, more insane, spell set. She can cast Polymorph, Chain of Chaos (hi Xom!), Invisibility, and Cantrip.
• The named lords of the hells and pandemonium who summon demons now summon demons specific to their realm: Cerebov only summons fiery demons now, Ereshkigal only tzitzimimeh, and Dispater only hell sentinels.
• New monster: Dread Lich. Ancient liches now have an earth-conjurations spell book with LCS and Corrosive Bolt, but lich summoned demons are a classic. Enter the Dread Lich, with Summon Greater Demon, Paralyse, Invisibility, and Haste; appearing in the same places as ancient liches.
• Deep elf mages are removed, replaced with deep elf pyromancers (who have a fire-themed spell book) and deep elf zephyrmancers (with an air-themed spell book).

Adjusted Demonspawn Facets

Thanks to hellmonk for continued demonspawn improvement work! This latest round of mutation changes focused on the tier 2 facets, with the following adjustments and a new spellcasting-focused facet (combine with Big Brain “scales” for a truly demonic mage experience!).

• The mana link facet is re-ordered. The first rank increases MP Regen, the second rank provides guardian spirit, and the third the mana link.
• Foul stench generates miasma at every rank of the facet (scaling with rank) as well as miasma cloud immunity.
• The damage curve of spines is adjusted to be a bit better at high level.
• Ignite blood now ignites blood at every rank of the facet, with power scaling on rank.
• Demonic guardians are summoned when the player takes damage, and the tier of the guardian grows with level.
• The icemail facet shifts from pure AC to AC+SH; at rank 1 it grants a condensation shield for 4SH, with ranks 2 and 3 granting 4 AC of icy armour each.
• A new facet: malignant magic. Demonspawn with this facet attempt to paralyse foes in a radius equal to the rank of the facet whenever they cast a spell; at rank 3 this extends to include wand usage. The power of the paralysis depends on the level of the spell cast.

New Spells

PleasingFungus has developed two new spells aimed at generating new incentives to hybridise.

• Animate Armour. Level 4 Summoning/Earth magic. “Call forth the spirit of your armour, bringing forth a slow-moving ally that hits harder the heavier your armour is. Wham, pow! (Summon limit is 1, as with CCF.)”. Animate Armour appears in the book of Earth and the book of Dreams.
• Manifold Assault. Level 4 Translocations. Manifold Assault launches attacks with your melee weapon against 2-4 random enemies in LOS, depending on spellpower. Manifold Assault replaces Passage of Golubria in the book of Spatial Translocations, and appears in the book of the Warp (along with Passage of Golubria).

The rest of the changes

This has been an active month for trunk, and there is a lot more going on. Read on for the rest!

• Storm clouds no longer make noise; making Qazlal worship quieter at low piety.
• Regeneration is buffed; one pip of regen grants 1 HP per 10 auts (a normal turn). This is 2.5x as strong as it was before.
• Trolls and Vine Stalkers are adjusted slightly to compensate.
• Monsters with ranged weapons now have unlimited ammo. No more running that stone giant out of large rocks. (Except nets; infininetting gnolls are reserved for gnollcrawl.)
• Phantoms have less HP, and now blink the player with them when they blink from attacking.
• Big Kobolds are re-named Kobold Brigands and always spawn with darts (one third of the time curare, yikes!). Normal kobolds can no longer spawn with curare (though they can still pick it up from the ground, if you’re very unlucky!).
• Ranged targeting shows to-hit chance, and a monster’s to-hit chance can be seen in xv.
• Haunt moves from the Necronomicon to the Grand Grimoire
• Scarves of shadows no longer act as a spell de-enhancer
• Wands of disintegrate are now called wands of mindburst, and do not work on mindless creatures.
• Manuals no longer require an inventory slot; once picked up they boost skill aptitude until used up.
• Hats and Gloves can spawn with the stealth ego.
• Wands of random effects are de-spoiled, applying a random buff or debuff to the target (15% chance of a buff), with the list of effects visible in the description.
• Ozocubu’s armour and Frozen Ramparts now break on any player position change.
• Ozocubu’s Refridgeration is now level 7.
• Stone arrow damage is increased.
• Monstrous Menagerie no longer summons harpies.
• Summon Demon and Summon Greater Demon are removed as player spells.
• Gadget shops are removed.
• Rings of Stealth and Boots of Running are removed.

That’s all for right now! In addition to the Ashenzari changes, on the horizon are more demonspawn changes, refreshes of Vaults and Snake, and new vaults from returned vaultsmith nicolae—plus who knows what other twisted horrors we can dig out of the abyss. Until next time, happy crawling!