The trunk updates are haunted by guilt!

Hello crawlers, and welcome to the first trunk update of the new year! As hinted in the previous update, the 0.28 development cycle is nearing a close, and with that we are pleased to announce a tentative tournament start date of Friday, February 4, 2022, at 20:00 UTC for the sixteen day 0.28 Release tournament. We are chilling trunk into a feature freeze and will be focusing on bug fixes and balance in the coming three weeks, and plan to release 0.28 before the start of the tournament. More details about the tournament, including a tournament website and rules changes, will be available here soon!

With that announced, let’s dive into the 215 commits that have arrived in trunk since the start of the year (more or less). These commits included community contributions from Aliscans, DreamDust, Zhang Kai, perryprog, nlavsky, Goratrix, and a new rare Temple layout featuring Ignis by pdpol. In total, in these commits were 72 bug fixes spread among GitHub issues, Mantis issues, reports directly to the devteam, and community contributions to fix a bug the fixer noticed. Along side the polish and gameplay balance, UI improvements are always something we’re happy to include, and team member advil has done extensive work to make arrow keys and menu help more consistently available across the UI.

The last “big ticket” block of changes to land was to the Abyss, let’s open with that suite of changes:

  • Random items no longer generate in the abyss.
  • Kills in the abyss grant no reward (experience and piety), though Uskayaw still rewards damage and Yred still grants zombies.
  • Exploring no longer grants piety in the abyss.
  • The chance of plunging deeper into the abyss on teleport is increased.
  • Wretched stars only apply a single temporary mutation per use of corrupting pulse, and use it less often.
  • The abyssal rune, staircases, and exits are more common.
  • On collecting the abyssal rune, the player gains two potions of experience worth of experience.

With two-hundred commits there’s still a lot of churn, and although at this stage we’re much more focused on balance, there’s also a new goody or two. Let’s dive in!

  • New spell: Anguish (L4 Hex/Necromancy). Gives monsters in sight that fail a Will check the anguished status. Whenever an anguished monster deals damage it also takes the same amount of damage.
  • Shield penalties now work more like armour skill; the penalty scales down as skill is increased from 0 up to 27, based on a shield encumbrance rating and species factor. Skill 27 is required to completely remove the penalty, regardless of size.
  • Spider is no longer quiet, and completely open level layouts are much rarer
  • Ghost moths toned down in melee
  • orbs of mayhem are now disliekd by Cheibriados, and energy disliked by Trog
  • the robe of Misfortune loses its unequip penalties
  • Ashenzari’s skill boost is turned down
  • Wendigo’s seracfall damage is reduced
  • To-hit penalties from armour and shields are removed
  • Aux attack chance and damage is now based on XL instead of attribute for all aux attacks.
  • Offhand punch chance now starts at 5% chance and scales with unarmed combat skill to 50% at max skill.
  • Dragon form gets 2 extra levels of fangs.
  • The UI for interacting with frenzied monsters is greatly improved.
  • The player gets XP for kills by and of frenzied monsters.
  • Jiyva no longer grants piety for exploring the slime pits
  • The poison dart generation rate is dropped
  • Assorted tweaks to Spider monster band mixes and sizes

Well, that’s all for now! If you’re interested in helping in the release effort, drop us a line in #crawl-dev on libera.chat, check out the open issues on GitHub, or just keep playing and discussing trunk as the balance and tuning come in.

On the horizon, well, I opened with it. There’s the 0.28 Release and Tournament! The team is going to be focusing on getting release-ready in the next 3 weeks. Until next time, happy crawling!

The trunk update hits you! The trunk update is wracked by anguish!!! The trunk update dies!