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

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

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

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