You hear the tinkle of a tiny bell. The trunk updates and a butterfly come into view!

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!