Another week, another play testing post! You can catch any that you might have missed in our play-testing category.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bug fixes

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

New and changed features

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

Other

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

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