As for why these backgrounds were removed, it’s because we are trying to make the Temple and altars more meaningful, so we’re reducing the number of gods available from the start. Hopefully, this will result in players wishing to take on e.g. Makhleb having to occasionally make a tough decision if the desired altar is dangerous to reach or blocked off, or if they come across another interesting altar earlier.

The debates about which gods to strike from the starting pantheon were lively, but we eventually decided on these two because neither of them shines (no pun intended) early on. They don’t shape the early gameplay like Zin, Trog or Lugonu do, and they don’t provide wacky fun in the way of Xom.

Makhleb and TSO were removed as starting options on the grounds that Makhleb works just as well when picked up from the temple, whereas TSO is more of an endgame god – and really doesn’t do much in the early game.

–Eino

Why these gods were removed, is still a mystery. Maybe to make room for more interesting gods…?

But was there really no way to salvage it? I would rather have it as level 9 spell than Tukima’s Ball. Or even increase its level to 6-7 and make it only extend a given buff one time, or give it some kind of timeout akin to exhaustion to prevent permanent buffs. My point is not that i love me a broken spell, it is that i think extension fills a void. It can be fun, useful, and at its heart it is what allows fighter mages to keep up their magical armor long enough to bust some heads. So make it cost more or nerf its length to the point where perma buffs are impractical (length shorter than time to regen mana cost). Remember if ever there was a charm/enchantment to nerf or drop it is haste not extension. Haste, a spell so good virtually every caster with reasonable aptitudes (and some without) gets their charms to 10-15 just to be able to reliably cast it in dire situations.

So long scroll of paper, you were useless, you never helped me and only very rarely killed me whilst i was trying to find an un-IDed blink/tele/fear/fog in a bad situation.

Extension is dead. Long live Extension.

As far as I’m aware, the tile_force_regenerate_levels option is no longer supported – it was just an intermediary solution until some crash bugs were fixed. If you are experiencing anything as grievous as that, please submit a bug report. :)

I don’t know my new Mac well enough to have realized that this was somehow my own setting, but I went in (emboldened by your note) and deleted that line from the options file, and sure enough it all works. :)

Now if I could just get my two 14th-level characters that don’t seem to work with this new beta version (I followed the instructions about setting up tile_force_regenerate_levels = true — but that hasn’t worked), I would be totally happy. As it is, though, I’m still very very happy. Thanks. :) –David

Also, they’re not completely gone yet – you can still find them in the undiscovered items list – they just don’t generate anymore. That’s because removing something will almost certainly break saves and we like to collect a couple of such cases before we increase the internal version counter, something we’ll do prior to the release of 0.8.

Warning: Crawl encountered errors during startup:
Invalid stash filter ‘scroll of paper’ (~/.crawlrc:213)

I’m happy that scrolls of paper are now gone, but for me… they’re not gone! :)

–David

P.S. The game otherwise starts and runs fine. I just get that message every time I start a new game, or every time I load a saved game.