Hi crawlers! A whole pile of changes, just waiting for some enterprising adventurer to seize them:
- Weapon enchantments and slaying bonuses (from artefacts and rings of slaying) have been merged into one number, which gives both +accuracy and +damage. Enchant Weapon scrolls have likewise been merged into a single type. Various unrands have been adjusted to account for this.
- Monster item pickup:
- Monsters will no longer pick up items that players have seen.
- Friendly monsters will no longer pick up any items at all. (And, accordingly, the old ctrl-t functionality has been removed.)
- Beogh has a new ***** piety ability, allowing the player to gift items directly to named followers.
- Beogh now improves allies’ equipment by blessing them.
- Mercenaries now start with slightly better items.
- Ctrl-T now toggles displaying enemies’ weapons’ glyphs while playing console.
- Cross-training now gives a direct bonus to skills, rather than providing an aptitude bonus.
- Anti-training has been removed.
- New monster: Ghost crabs, appearing in the Crypt and Tartarus. The clouds of ghostly flame they breathe summon dangerous specters into fleeting existence.
- Giant fireflies have flickered out of existence; spriggan riders now buzz into battle on deadly wasp mounts.
- Halfling and kobold stats have been tweaked; halflings now have more str and less int/dex, and kobolds now have slightly more dex and slightly less str.
- TSO no longer blasts you with cleansing fire when you kill holy monsters.
- Simulacrum now works on a single corpse at the caster’s feet, creating several simulacrula from it. Monsters instead have an animate-dead like version that works on all corpses in LOS and produces half as many simulacrula.
- Sublimation of Blood no longer uses chunks; it now only draws from the caster’s HP.
- Temporary brand spells (Excruciating Wounds and Warp Weapon) can now be used on branded non-artefact weapons to temporarily re-brand them.
- The Sack of Spiders now places webs directly onto enemies, rather than spreading them randomly around the area.
- The Frost card has been removed, and replaced with Hammer; Flame has been renamed to Cloud, and now produces either fire or freezing clouds.
Happy crawling!
1. Comment by Phalen
15/Jun/2014 at 23:44
Not really a fan of the single enchantment number, but all other changes seem p alright
2. Comment by Curio
15/Jun/2014 at 23:53
On the contrary, single enchantment is a step up. +acc was quite irrelevant comparing to +dam. Now it does not matter – everything is more simple.
PS. It seems that halflings gonna be axed pretty soon. Good riddance.
3. Comment by Andro
16/Jun/2014 at 06:11
What will happens to artifacts with Acc bonus, like Fencer’s gloves Acc +8?
4. Comment by PleasingFungus
16/Jun/2014 at 06:14
They’ve been tweaked in various ways – Fencer’s Gloves are currently {EV+3 Dex+6 Slay+2}, for example.
5. Comment by Andro
16/Jun/2014 at 06:53
Cheers!
6. Comment by Andro
16/Jun/2014 at 11:16
Would it be too much to ask for an updated OSX Tiles build, please?
7. Comment by muxecoid
16/Jun/2014 at 11:18
I feel like the game is being dumbed down. Monsters no longer picking up weapons is a huge hit to complexity and to game’s overal feel.
8. Comment by warren
16/Jun/2014 at 20:41
The best melee class weapon brands for 15-rune endgame are holy wrath and vorpal. Vorpal used to be acquirable consistently using brand weapon scrolls. Now vorpal only has a 10% chance from brand weapon scrolls. Since Holy Wrath is only brandable consistently for worshippers of The Shining One, it means that neither one of the best two endgame brands can be intentionally placed on a specific weapon for non-TSO worshippers. TSO was already the easiest choice for melee endgame, thus just makes all other choices even less desirable. Please add in a way for non-TSO worshippers to add Holy Wrath to a specific weapon, or at least make vorpal more acquirable than a 10% chance from brand weapon.
9. Comment by Andro
16/Jun/2014 at 22:18
I have to disagree. Anti-magic is the best brand for the extended game.
10. Comment by Teco
17/Jun/2014 at 09:43
It really would’ve been more preferable to make accuracy more useful.. Rather than merge it to make it more useful, this will probably bump the worth, rarity and costs of a scroll of enchant weapon. Maybe the only high EV enemy shouldn’t just be butterflies?
11. Comment by Pablo
17/Jun/2014 at 13:03
So basically, this means that stashes can be made even in levels full of enemies?
Nice
12. Comment by Twister
17/Jun/2014 at 15:05
Next update, DCSS name will be “refined” to Basement Crawl …
13. Comment by Fizar
18/Jun/2014 at 04:54
I feel like a lot of things are being simplified…. the slaying bonus change, the anti training bonus, the way cross-training was reworked :\, all that after dungeon was changed to 15 floors, etc. any reason for all these simplifications?
14. Comment by PleasingFungus
18/Jun/2014 at 05:34
The reasons vary from case to case.
Cross-training was reworked because the old system was unintuitive and encouraged training skills to very specific breakpoints for optimal xp use; anti-training was removed as part of that change, for what I understand to be technical reasons. Depths replaced the bottom 12 floors of Dungeon because they were, well, boring & unchallenging. I’d argue that was a complication rather than a simplification, to be honest!
The slaying change is the one I’m best qualified to speak for, since that was my decision. Essentially, the old +acc/+dam split didn’t lead to any real decisionmaking; +acc, in particular, was not very relevant in most circumstances outside the very early game. (And of course there aren’t many slaying bonuses in the early game!) All it did was confuse players who thought that a “+10/+1″ weapon might be good. (It wasn’t.)
It might have been possible to make +acc relevant (e.g. by increasing enemy EV), but not only would that be very frustrating to play, it’d still not make +acc a good mechanic; we really don’t need more mechanics to encourage tactical weaponswapping. It just really didn’t have any reason to exist.
Weapon base accuracy still exists because accuracy is relevant in the early game.
15. Comment by muxecoid
18/Jun/2014 at 06:59
Removal of item mass also feels like needless oversimplification. Now ogres can carry 50 large rocks for ammunition. And deep elves suddenly can carry lots of swappable gear and consumables.
16. Comment by kek
18/Jun/2014 at 20:14
why do enemies not pick up seen items?
17. Comment by Anonymous
19/Jun/2014 at 00:33
Why was sublimation of chunks removed?
18. Comment by PleasingFungus
19/Jun/2014 at 00:35
Chunk sublimation was removed as part as an ongoing cleanup of chunk mechanics. The spell remains quite strong.
19. Comment by Not_A_Happy_Crawler
20/Jun/2014 at 02:43
And here we see more proof of the devs dumbing the game down. Don’t go saying this on the forums though, oh no, they’ll rip you apart for even suggesting that perhaps the devs haven’t been making the best decisions for the past….3 years.
20. Comment by Update
20/Jun/2014 at 16:55
I cool update! You’re just stupid!
21. Comment by TehRei
20/Jun/2014 at 23:27
What’s with all the negative comments? o_O
With all the quality-of-life additions in trunk I might actually consider trying Beogh out. Removing all monsters’ ability to pick up items is certainly simplifying the game, but having to lug around all distortion weps and dangerous wands wasn’t exactly an interesting complexity…
Huge thanks for removing anti-training and merging +Acc/+Dam as well!
22. Comment by cuteverything
23/Jun/2014 at 18:10
This has just gone to far. So many removals and simplifications that its turning into a coffee break style game rather than an epic quest.
Please rethink some of these changes and bring back some of the complexity we play DCSS for!!!!!
23. Comment by saemon
27/Jun/2014 at 02:19
I don’t see why the words “removals” and “simplifications” have negative implications. A good roguelike doesn’t need to be unnecessarily complex or unwieldy. Dwarf Fortress could upgrade to a better UI with mouse support, and while that would be simplifying it, I don’t think anyone would consider it to be a bad thing.
Regarding the comments of cuteverything and Not_A_Happy_Crawler: why not suggest alternate ideas for the design issues the patch is addressing? Stating the developers are “dumbing the game down” doesn’t serve any real purpose. This is a small enough community that if you have a better design choice, others might agree and it could be implemented in the game.
It must be disheartening for people to put a lot of work into something only to have its community make senseless, negative comments. Making senseless complaints rather than suggestions will not bring back the aspects you wanted (if any), but it might just make a developer less inclined to do you the favor of keeping the game you enjoy relevant. In that case, sure you’ll keep all the obscure mechanics you enjoy, but the game will slowly die out.
24. Comment by warren
27/Jun/2014 at 21:06
Additions are not inherently good. Removals are not inherently bad. The developers ARE dumbing the game down. They are also making it more accessible to a broader audience. The most important question is whether those changes are good or bad. All the feedback here is valuable, including the critical feedback.
25. Comment by avis
28/Jun/2014 at 23:02
As someone who has played this game for some time (0.9) and never won, I’d say that removing complexity probably does make the game more accessible and easier. I wouldn’t object to removals or additions which made the game more difficult (reduced numbers of potions and scrolls or other balancing measures).
Dying is what keeps me coming back….
26. Comment by DaStockMan
29/Jun/2014 at 20:40
In other news, DCSS now simplified to the level of a 7DRL. DCSS keeps losing complexity, it has been for years, and it is now to the point that I’m no longer interested in playing it. And no you cannot compare it to improving the UI for dwarf fortress. Instead it would be like removing the preferences of the dwarves in dwarf fortress, or removing the granularity of stockpiles. I would now recommend DCSS only for beginners of the roguelike genre, which is fine. But I prefer deeper roguelikes and DCSS no longer qualifies.