You pray at the faded altar. The Trunk Updates accept your prayer!

Hello crawlers, trunk is currently as hot as Geh:7 on a hot day with lots of commits coming fast. Since we last wrote over 150 changes have landed in trunk, a mix of tweaks, shifts, new features, community contributions, and bugfixes. As with last time, I want to again highlight our non-code contributors:

  • New vaults by beargit, nicolae, and ShaperMC, appearing in various places in the dungeon. If you’re interested in making vaults (prefabricated bits of the map), read an introduction to editing vaults here and consider setting up a development environment to test your vaults.
  • New tiles by Sastreii. If you’re interested in making tiles, read our tiles guideline here.

Both kinds of contribution can be submitted on our GitHub repository, either as an issue or a pull request, if you don’t have a mantis account. If the documents seem a little old, they’ll be getting updates in the coming month.

Work on spicing up the early dungeon experience has continued with significant changes to the overflow altar system:

  • Each floor from D:1-3 has a 50% chance of placing a faded altar. We need more faded altar vaults! If you’re interested in making vaults this is a good place to start (as are arrival vaults).
  • There is a 20% chance of an identified `altar to a random Temple god on D:2.
  • Except for the previous two chances, no other altars appear on D:1 or D:2.
  • Every “Temple god” receives exactly one guaranteed altar, appearing either in the Ecumenical Temple or in an overflow temple between D:3 and D:10. We also need more overflow temple vaults!

In addition to the changes to altar placement, further adjustments continue:

  • Oozes are renamed endoplasms
  • Dungeon spawn tables are adjusted to produce more depth appropriate monsters
    and less chaff.
  • Ogres and Two headed ogres again attack slowly and hit harder.
  • Scorpions are now fast.
  • Gnolls on D:1 no longer get halberds.
  • Worker ants, soldier ants, and queen ants are removed.

The new Djinni species continues to be tweaked in response to play testing:

  • Weapon aptitudes have been lowered by one.
  • The scholarly gods now all reject Djinn worship (that’s Sif Muna, Vehumet, and Kikubaaqudgha)
  • Spells are guaranteed on level-up: if a starting book spell is rolled the spell gets re-rolled until an available spell is found.

Some changes to the mutation pool:

  • All scales except Iridescent scales are now Demonspawn only.
  • Iridescent scales, bone plates, thin skeletal structure, and sturdy frame are no longer incompatible.
  • Blurry vision is removed, replaced by allowing Ru’s -Scroll while threatened mutation in the random mutation pool.
  • Shoutitis and No potion heal are reduced to 2 levels, with the maximum level effect at the top level, and half the effect at the first level.
  • A new Jiyva mutation gives player melee an engulf effect, engulfing foes in ooze (gross).
  • The blink mutation is removed.

And of course, a grab bag of other changes:

  • Manifold Assault is raised to level 5.
  • Depths vaults have their monster lists updated to match the spawn table.
  • The Vestibule of Hell has its monster list updated to remove chaff monsters.
  • Flying equipment, species, and forms cause you to fly at all times.
  • Sif Muna’s book gifting rate has been reduced, to make it more feasible to reach 6* piety.
  • Blade Hands is now level 6 and appears only in the book of Transfigurations
  • Hydra Form is now level 5 and appears in the book of Changes and the Fen Folio
  • Heavenly Storm grants bonus EV and is a bit quieter.
  • Scrolls of random effects are removed.

That’s all for now. On the horizon: new demonspawn tier 3 facets have come into focus. The winds of freshening continue to blow through branches but just where they’ll go remains mysterious. Until next time, happy crawling!

You feel threatened and lose the ability to read!