Trunk Updates 6 December 2021

The blog shudders from the hit and a flood of trunk updates pours out!

Hello crawlers! Sorry for not writing, there was a leak in the lava system down here in Gehenna and it was all hands on deck for the Devil’s team to get it contained. Despite the chaos, since the last trunk update there have been a whopping 480 commits to trunk. So buckle up for a meaty post. Before we dive into the details, some headlining information.

First, a warm welcome to Sastreii, who has joined the dev team as a tiles artist and has been prolific in refreshing old tiles and filling in art for the new content that’s arrived in this cycle.

Next, on the horizon in this version are a refresh of the Spider branch and an overhaul of Yredelemnul. Both are currently playable on the experimental crawl.dcss.io development server (not tracked in scoring or Sequell). Playtesting feedback is welcome and wanted on these branches, drop us a line on GitHub, reddit, the tavern, or #crawl-dev on libera.chat if you have substantive feedback based on playing experience. Both sets of changes should arrive in trunk very soon, but they aren’t quite there yet.

Also on the immediate horizon: a combined effort by community contributor nlavsky and team member advil will soon deliver a consumables panel for web tiles. This has been a desired feature for a long time, so hats off to both of them for the effort!

A big thanks to community contributors ManiacJoe and DreamDust for new vaults, as well as to AdamPG, Aliscans, ArmiesAndCastles, Brian Power, David Damerell, Gopall, Implojin, Martin Kennedy, nlavsky, perryprog, Santiago Acosta, dilly, mgdelmonte, paul, and robertxgray for patches with tweaks, bug fixes, balance adjustments, lua improvements, and more since we last wrote.

With all that said, lets dive into the trunk changes!

Branches & Environment

• Exploration-based shaft traps are now limited to one shaft per branch per game.
• Portal vault portal mimics have cackled and vanished for the last time, and are removed.

Character

• Two new Demonspawn mutations:
• The weakening stinger mutation gives a tail aux attack. At level 3 it blocks the cloak slot and the aux attack applies the weak status.
• The demonic touch mutation adds irresistible damage to the off-hand attack. At level 3 it blocks the gloves slot and applies the vulnerable status.
• Player-chosen attribute increases now happen every 6 XLs, starting at XL 3, and increase a stat by 2. Demigods are unchanged.
• Black Draconian Breath no longer includes shock.
• Clarity from any source again blocks *Rage.

Gods

• Ashenzari’s passive trap avoidance and item identification are moved 1*. No more freebies without a curse!
• Cheibriados’ passive poison slowing is moved to 0* and bend time moved to 1*.
• Elyvilon’s abilities are streamlined to be less redundant with one another and with Zin’s sanctuary:
• Pacification grants full XP, and can be used on intelligent plants.
• Lifesaving is completely passive, and is a bonus chance on top of the usual good god chance that becomes guaranteed at 5*, but with a piety-gated timeout.
• Lesser Healing is removed, with Greater Healing renamed to Heal Self and moved to 3*.
• Purification is moved to 1* and is cheaper.
• Gozag’s gold distraction chance is capped.
• Ignis’ abilities are shifted based on playtesting experience:
• Rising Flame is now a one-time use ability, but costs no piety.
• The cost of the other two active abilities is increased to compensate.
• The Sea of Flames ability is removed and replaced with Fiery Armour, a long lasting duration that gives +7AC and causes melee attackers to suffer fire damage.
• Jiyva gurgles merrily and shifts into a new form:
• Stat shuffling, healing and piety from item eating, and cure mutation, are all removed.
• Piety is now exploration based and grows very quickly.
• Jelly healing is replaced with passive HP and MP regeneration.
• Mutation gifts arrive in bursts that attempt to remove a mutation (more likely a bad one) and then max out a good one.
• rCorr is now granted at 2*, and jelly-on-hit at 5*.
• New active ability Oozemancy granted at 3*. Somewhat expensive in piety it temporarily turns walls in radius 4 into slime walls.
• The chance of Ru retaliation is reduced.
• The Shining One abilities arrive earlier, with Divine Shield at 1* and Cleansing Flame at 3*.

Items

• The spawn rate of wands is reduced.
• The electrocution brand now triggers on fewer attacks.
• Regen is reduced to 0.8 HP / turn per pip.
• MPRegen is increased to 0.4 MP / turn.
• The brand weapon chances have been tweaked, and are now described in the scroll’s description.
• The spawn rates of scrolls and potions are adjusted slightly and now described in in-game descriptions.
• New glove ego: infusion. Gloves of infusion add damage per hit in exchange for 2 MP per hit.
• New unrandart: the +3 Mad Mage’s Maulers {Infuse+∞ RegenMP Int-3}. These exchange all of the wearer’s current MP in exchange for bonus damage proportional to the amount of MP used.
• The hat of the Bear Spirit now grants extra bonus HP while berserk (for a total of +100% HP) and reduces the post-berserk slow duration, though it loses rN+.
• Unrandarts that produce allies no longer do so when worshipping Okawaru.

Monsters

• Demonic and Holy monsters are now susceptible to fear, intoxication, and mushroom spores, and are able to go berserk.
• Monsters now have a chance to break a door permanently when opening it to get to the player. This chance is higher if berserk.
• Classed draconians now come in a fixed colour based on their job.
• Plain demonspawn are removed. Each class of classed demonspawn has one mix of demonspawn attributes.
• When Dowan dies, Duvessa goes berserk permanently; when roles are reversed Dowan gains haste permanently.
• Merfolk impalers and javlineers are nerfed slightly.
• Walking Tomes have a summon cap on their living spells.
• Shard shrikes now engage in batty wandering after casting icicle once, as they were meant to.
• On death, Eleionoma and Fenstrider Witches drop a wand if they drop a corpse (similar to a dragon’s hide).

Spells

Within the spell changes, a big chunk of them involve making existing spells scale with power and making sure the power caps for low level spells aren’t too high. Here’s that set first:

• Corpse Rot scales with power, placing more miasma clouds per corpse and placing clouds at radius 2 if all the radius 1 space is already filled.
• Passage of Golubria now has a range that scales with power.
• Blink has a cool down that scales (downwardly) with power.
• Teleport Other, Sublimation of Blood, Spider Form, Inner Flame, Gell’s Gravitas, and Vampiric Draining all have their power caps reduced.

And the rest of the spell changes: