Dev Blog « Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup (2024)

by ebering

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 branchand an overhaul of Yredelemnul. Both are currently playable on the experimental crawl.dcss.iodevelopment 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 nlavskyand team member advil will soon deliver a consumables panel forweb 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 ManiacJoeand DreamDustfor 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 trapsare now limited to one shaft per branch per game.
• Portal vault portal mimicshave cackled and vanished for the last time, and are removed.

Character

• Two new Demonspawn mutations:
• The weakening stingermutation gives a tail aux attack. At level 3 it blocks the cloak slot and the aux attack applies the weak status.
• The demonic touchmutation 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 Breathno longer includes shock.
• Clarity from any source again blocks *Rage.

Gods

• Ashenzari’s passive trap avoidanceand item identificationare moved 1*. No more freebies without a curse!
• Cheibriados’passive poison slowingis moved to 0* and bend timemoved to 1*.
• Elyvilon’s abilities are streamlined to be less redundant with one another and with Zin’s sanctuary:
• Pacificationgrants full XP, and can be used on intelligent plants.
• Lifesavingis 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 Healingrenamed to Heal Selfand moved to 3*.
• Purificationis moved to 1* and is cheaper.
• Gozag’sgold distraction chance is capped.
• Ignis’ abilities are shifted based on playtesting experience:
• Rising Flameis 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 Flamesability is removed and replaced with Fiery Armour, a long lasting duration that gives +7AC and causes melee attackers to suffer fire damage.
• Jiyvagurgles 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 basedand grows very quickly.
• Jelly healing is replaced with passive HP and MP regeneration.
• Mutation giftsarrive in bursts that attempt to remove a mutation (more likely a bad one) and then max out a good one.
• rCorris now granted at 2*, and jelly-on-hitat 5*.
• New active ability Oozemancygranted at 3*. Somewhat expensive in piety it temporarily turns walls in radius 4 into slime walls.
• The chance of Ruretaliation is reduced.
• The Shining Oneabilities arrive earlier, with Divine Shield at 1* and Cleansing Flameat 3*.

Items

• The spawn rate of wandsis reduced.
• The electrocution brand now triggers on fewer attacks.
• Regenis reduced to 0.8 HP / turn per pip.
• MPRegenis increased to 0.4 MP / turn.
• The brand weapon chanceshave been tweaked, and are now described in the scroll’s description.
• The spawn rates of scrolls and potionsare 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 +3Mad 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 Spiritnow 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 alliesno longer do so when worshipping Okawaru.

Monsters

• Demonicand Holymonsters are now susceptible to fear, intoxication, and mushroom spores, and are able to go berserk.
• Monsters now have a chance to break a door permanentlywhen opening it to get to the player. This chance is higher if berserk.
• Classeddraconians now come in a fixed colour based on their job.
• Plain demonspawnare removed. Each class of classed demonspawn has one mix of demonspawn attributes.
• When Dowan dies, Duvessagoes berserk permanently; when roles are reversed Dowan gains haste permanently.
• Merfolk impalersand javlineersare nerfed slightly.
• Walking Tomeshave a summon cap on their living spells.
• Shard shrikesnow engage in batty wandering after casting icicle once, as they were meant to.
• On death, Eleionomaand Fenstrider Witchesdrop 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 Rotscales 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 Golubrianow 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 Drainingall have their power caps reduced.

And the rest of the spell changes:

4 comments!

by ebering

You feel a terrible foreboding… the trunk updates come into view!

Hello crawlers! It has been a busy month since we last wrote, with lots and lots of new stuff landing in trunk.

First of all, you’ve probably noticed a lot of fresh new looks for monsters and terrain. A big thanks to community contributor Sastreii for the stream of awesome tiles.

The long promised Hell overhaulhas arrived in trunk, with a complete refresh of each of the sub-branches and tons of new monsters. nicolaeis hard at work on new Hell vaults as well, so watch out! Speaking of vaults, hellmonk has brewed up six new WizLabsfor you to loot, or perhaps to die in.

Fighter and Fire Elementalist have both been adjusted – the latter has two new spells, and there are a few other new spells as well. The behavior of random ragefrom all sources has had a variety of tweaks, and there’s the usual grab bag of other tweaks, changes, and adjustments.

Hell Overhaul:

For a long time, players have let us know that hells are too long (28 floors!) but too easy – a “victory parade”. To fix that, we’ve taken what was fun and challenging about the hells and distilled away the rest. The result is much more lethal, shorter, and a rip-roaring good time all the way through. Changes include:

• Hell effects are divided into timed effects and branch wide persistent effects.
• The timed effects are the same for all hells, and consist of temporary mutation, stat drain, hp drain, and noise.
• The branch-wide persistent effects are:
• In Dis, players have 8 Corrosion (-8 AC and Slaying).
• In Cocytus, potions are frozen solid cannot be used.
• In Gehenna, scrolls are obscured by hellish smoke and cannot be used.
• In Tartarus, Willpower is halved by the sheer horror of the environs.
• In each hell sub-branch, floors 1-6 are shrunk to 1/4 of their original area. (The final floor of each branch, floor 7, is unchanged.)
• Each level only generates a single downstair, with no randomly placed shafts and a limited number of escape hatches.
• Hell subbranches have their monster lists refreshed with a variety of new enemies, replacing things like weak derived undead and so-called “trash mobs”.
• Each subbranch has hellions, tormentors, dread liches, and ancient liches.
• In addition to the cross-hell population, there are revised monster sets in each subbranch.
• Gehenna is now populated by brimstone fiends, hellephants, hell hogs, fire giants, salamander tyrants, balrugs, and three new monsters:
• The creeping inferno stalks the player like a lurking horror, and when it explodes it goes off in a fire storm.
• Searing wretches are ghoul-like monsters that strip fire resistance with their melee attacks.
• Stokers tend the fires of Gehenna, summoning creeping infernos and setting off wind blasts.
• Dis is now populated by hell sentinels, iron giants, caustic shrikes, iron dragons, war gargoyles, buffed iron golems, and two new monsters:
• Quicksilver elementals have quicksilver bolt and antimagic attacks, as well as batty movement.
• Crystal echidnas throw barbs and fire crystal bolts. They’re made of green crystal and are appropriately vulnerable to LRD.
• Cocytus is now populated by ice fiends, shard shrikes, azure jellies, titans, frost giants, freezing wraiths, simulacra, and two new monsters:
• Wendigos have stunning blast, paralyzing victims for 1 turn on hit. They can also turn nearby simulacra into very powerful iceblasts, destroying the simulacrae in the process.
• Narguns hit hard, have a vulnerability melee, and cast petrify. (Watch out – since potions are frozen solid in Cocytus, you can’t quaff cancellation to stop the petrification!).
• Tartarus is now populated by tzitzimimeh, silent spectres, doom hounds, bone dragons, profane servitors, eidola, shadow wraiths, spectral things, and two new monsters:
• Tainted leviathans are undead giants which mesmerise, throw large rocks, and are ringed by miasma clouds
• Putrid mouths are screaming ghosts with miasma breath, strong poison and stat draining melee.

Six New Wizard’s Laboratories:

Hellmonk, with an assist from PleasingFungus and art from Sastreii has brought a whole assortment of new WizLabs for you, including restoring two that were cut in 0.17.

• Eringya’s Formal Garden (previously removed in 0.17) returns with a modified layout, nastier archers, and the addition of some of the swamp monsters that have been added between then and now.
• Tukima’s Studio (also removed in 0.17) returns with a modified layout and several brand-new monster types to complement the dancing weapons: walking tomes, which summon living spells that cast themselves at the player. Walking Tomes also now appear as high-tier enemies in Depths.
• Yara’s Duelist Academy features mana vipers, lots of warrior-mages wielding antimagic weapons, and a fearsome semi-unique Head Instructor who likes to dual-wield triple swords.
• Borgnjor’s Mausoleum features both corporeal and incorporeal undead. Lost souls occasionally appear when monsters are killed, making big fights scarier. A cult of halazid warlocks serve as the final encounter.
• Maxwell’s Workshop features an array of golems and big, meaty workers who wield big, meaty maces. You’ll find some of Maxwell’s cast-off equipment here, perhaps including the legendary artifacts themselves.
• Alistair’s Party Mansion features an array of wizards and their bizarre guests. There’s some good consumables to be had if you don’t mind crashing the party of the century… and wading through statrotting clouds of degeneration.

Spell changes:

• New spell: Scorch (L2 Fire). Hits a random enemy within 3 tiles, dealing fire damage. If damage is dealt, applyies short term rF- to the foe. Cinder Acolytes start with Scorch instead of Foxfire.
• New spell: Flame Wave (L4 Fire/Conj). Flame Wave is a channeled spell (like Searing Ray) that hits all surrounding tiles in ever-wider waves of flame. The initial cast costs 4 MP, and each turn of channeling costs 1 MP. The noise starts a bit louder than a shout, and gets up to fireball level by the last wave.
• New spell: Summon Cactus Giant (L6 Summoning). Summons a jolly green giant, which impales attacking enemies on its giant spines. Appears in the Book of the Wilderness and the Book of Scorching
• Searing Ray‘s power scaling is decreased.
• Storm Form’s power scaling is decreased, but blinkbolt is now always LOS range.
• Bolt of Magma and Corona are now monster only.

The rest of the changes:

• All derived undead keep their reach, constriction, and trample effects.
• New entry vaults, ruin sub vaults, and maps for Desolation
• Red Devils no longer kite, and instead their melee attack inflicts the barbs status if damage is done.
• The Ranger Card now summons rangers from these three types: centaur warrior, naga sharpshooter, deep elf master archer. (thanks sdynet!).
• Ironbound Beastmasters are removed.
• Depths is now 4 floors.
• The experience cost of high-level skills is reduced (approximately equivalent to a +1 increase in aptitude at skill level 23).
• To compensate, late game XP is reduced.
• The top-end two handers have slightly lowered skill requirements for mindelay. Executioner’s axes and bardiches now reach mindelay at skill 24, and triple swords at skill 22.
• Throwing ammunition is reduced.
• Abyssal Knights background stat contribution is changed to 5/2/5 Str/Int/Dex, from 4/4/4.

On the horizon:

That rounds out the changes for this update. Looking to the future is always fraught, but amid the miasmatic haze of Tartarus there are some outlines of a spider overhaul, adjustments to the wanderer start, more efforts tocompactify mid-to-lategame, and a host of community and dev-team designed new vaults. Further afield there are rumors of new Bailies, overhauls of Yredelemnul and Jiyva, and perhaps even something about ranged combat. Stay tuned! And until next time, happy crawling!

The trunk update rustles loudly! The trunk update casts itself at you!!!!!!! You die…

3 comments!

by ebering

The trunk updates begin to smolder around you…

Hello crawlers, and welcome to the first trunk update of the 0.28 cycle. Coming fresh out of the gate are a new god Ignis and accompanying zealot background Cinder Acolyte, plus a big new feature for Okawaru and freedom from the summon XP penalty. On top of all that, a new unique Mlioglotlstalks the dungeon. Mlioglotl unique horror with the power to corrupt the level, changing terrain and summoning other abyssal horrors, as well as cause fear. He places in the S-branches and rarely in the Abyssal lair end.Thanks to community contributor amcnicky for the nightmares. Watch out!

Ignis, the Dying Flame

Ignis is a new god who does not appear in the temple. Indeed, altars to Ignis do not place in the regular dungeon at all! Ignis worship can only begin at character creation or from a faded altar. Ignis is dying, and as their last worshipper you are given all remaining power right from the get go.

• Ignis worshippers start at 5* piety (6* if a monk joining from afaded altar).
• Ignis has no piety gain and no piety decay.
• Once abandoned and mollified, Ignis dies and can never be worshipped again.
• Ignis grants the following abilities:
• 0*: Passive rF+
• 1*: Active ‘Sea of Flames’ ability. Creates smoldering embers (likeConjure Flame) on every empty square in LOS. They ignite after thenext player turn unless snuffed out by something occupying the cell.
• 1*: Active ‘Foxfire Swarm’ ability. Conjures Foxfire on every open squarein radus 2 around the player.
• 2*: Active ‘Rising Flame’ ability. Gives the player the “Rise” status,after 2-4 turns the player rockets through the ceiling and up onefloor.

The main way to worship Ignis is by starting as a Cinder Acolyte. Cinder Acolytes are a new background and start worshipping Ignis, along with: a 7/5/0 stat split, a robe, a -1 flame branded weapon of their choice, and the spell foxfire memorized.

Okawaru, god of (single) Combat

In the 0.27 cycle Okawaru gave up on their old honorable ally conduct. That was the beginning of a shift in their point of view on allies, and the god of combat now wants to see you prove yourself a worthy hero alone!

• Okawaru nowforbids all allies, as if you had sacrificed love under Ru.
• And gains a new 5* ability Duel. The Duel ability smite-targets a singlenon-summoned enemy in LOS (which must be threat level “tough” or higher),and transports them and the player to an Arena portal vault. Winning theduel opens a gate to return from the portal vault, and the player will beforcibly teleported back after a short duration.
• Finesseis moved to 4*.

Summoning Changes

For a long time summons have applied an XP penalty, stealing up to half of the XP reward from each kill. This was used as a balance tool, because allies in crawl are very powerful. However, over the past many versions a lot of the sources of ally power (summons attacking out of LOS, sources of permanent, very long lived, or cheap and powerful allies) have been removed. Summoning spells were still extremely powerful, owing to the large number of creatures that could be brought to bear on a problem. In trunk summons and allies are changed in the following way, to enable removing the XP penalty.

• Summon caps are reduced:
• Summon Small Mammal, Summon Hydra, and Monstrous Menagerie are capped at 2.
• Haunt is capped at 8.
• Summon Horrible Things and Dragon’s Call keep their old summon caps.
• All other summon spellsare capped at 1.
• Summon-capped summons all time out uniformly and disappear after 10 auts.
• Shadow Creaturesis made a monster only spell.
• The XP penaltyis removed from all temporary allies.
• Permanent allies from Beogh and Yredelemnul currently retain the XP penalty, with a hope to change their design in the future in a way that allows us to fully remove the XP penalty.

And all the rest

Of course, in addition to big projects there are myriad tweaks, adjustments, and smaller features in trunk. Here’s the latest

• Ziggurats no longer require a rune of zot to enter.
• The Enchanter background no longer starts with the Corona spell, and instead starts with a potion of invisibility.
• The evolution mutation is revised. Once per XL’s worth of experience it activates, providing a good mutation. Every two activations it reduces its level by one.
• New bad mutation: devolution. Mechanically similar to evolution but dispenses bad mutations and activates once every 1/4th of an XL.
• Strength 0‘s regeneration reduction is replaced with -Regen in monster LOS.
• Intelligence 0‘s 4/5 chance to fail scroll reading is replaced with -Scroll.
• The staff of Battle now triggers the battlesphere on melee hit (in addition to the usual spell trigger).
• All shields now only use Dex for stat scaling.
• The robe of Clouds‘ thunder cloud ability is now passive, placing storm clouds on enemies within range 2 each turn.
• Riposte is removed from long blades and base damage is increased.
• Demonspawn warmongers’ Sap Magic effect now causes a short term -Cast after casting a spell.
• Lesser Beckoning’s power cap is reduced to 100 and range reduced to 5.

What’s on the horizon

That’s all for now, crawlers, but there’s a lot cooking down here in Dis:7. There is a major refresh of the hells underway, discuss play testing feedback on reddit or the tavern! Hellmonk has some hellish new wizlabsnearing completion. PleasingFungus has been at work in his own wizard laboratory and has two new spell designs that might make it to trunk soon. Beyond that, who can say what malicious whims will flit through the devteam’s head. So until next time, happy crawling!

With a burst of heat and light, the trunk updates rocket away!

3 comments!

by gammafunk

We’ve uploaded the 0.27.1 bugfix release. Packages for Windows, MacOs, and Linux are all available on thedownload page. Thanks to all the many contributors who helped with this release, including patches and bug reports!

Highlights (full commit list via github):

• The frequency of D:1 jackals is reduced.
• Sigmund and Robin are nerfed gently.
• Maxwell’s Capacitative Coupling now has LOS range.
• 80 other fixes, tweaks, copy-edits, and interface improvements.

Updating is recommended for all players. Happy crawling, and report more bugs here!

by gammafunk

The0.27 tournamentis over. On behalf of the Dev Team, many thanks to all the server admins, outside contributors, bug reporters, and to the many DCSS players who made the 0.27 release and tournament possible! For 16 days, players could compete for tournament points and banners by playing 0.27 games on the public servers. This was the third tournament held after the major revision of the tournament rules done for 0.25. There were changes based on previous input, and once again we’ve collected the feedback posted on tavern and reddit.

Congratulations to Yermak, perennial champion, for once again taking first place in the individual competition, with105,402 points! Over the course of the tournament, Yermak won 48 games, including a streak of 24 games (best in tournament), an 86M high score run (also best in tournament), an XL 14 win (also tied for best in tournament!), 27 Nemelex’ Choice combos,5 species high scores, 3 background high scores, and 19 tier 3 banners. In 2nd place was Sergeywith 91,825points and 34 wins, including a streak of 21 games, 3rd lowest turncount win, 2nd 15 win of the tournament, 4 species high scores, 3 background high scores, and 14 tier 3 banners. Rounding out the top 3 was dillywith84,283 points points and 38 wins, including a streak of 7 wins, 28 Nemelex Choice wins (tied for most in tournament), and 18 tier 3 banners.

Our top three took several of the top spots in the individual category rankings, but they weren’t the only players on the leaderboard. Acrobat set the top standard in Win Rate once again, winning 37 out of 43 games over the tournament for an adjusted win rate of 84%.Third place finisher dilly tied withPrakerorein the Nemelex’ Choice competition, both winning 28 Nemelex combos for points over the course of the tournament. Yermak and Sergey took the number one and number two spots in the quest for Combo High Scores, with CryingNoob rounding out the top 3. The lowest turncount was 9,903 turns, shared in a tie by Caminho and DrMan. Seasoned speed runner p0werm0de took the fastest real-time win with a 22:37 victory. Spriggan Enchanter was the power-combo of the Low XL win category, with Acrobat, Yermak, and Prakerore in a three way tie at XL14. The tournament start was heralded by p0werm0de who posted the first win after 33 minutes, and dilly brought home the first 15 rune win in an hour and 20 minutes. The Ziggurat Dive was more restrained than the 0.26 tournaments’ 100 ziggurat fiesta, with Ge0ff clearing 60 Ziggurats. Finally, both poncheis and booingearnedevery banner, the only two players to complete this feat.

The clan competition was won by Gozag or Stay Home(captained by Ge0ff) with105,343 points. In 2nd place was Team Splat (captained by shummie) with78,267 points. Following close on their heels in 3rd place were ABCDEF(captained by fbynet) with 76,046.

Most of the clan categories take the best score of the member, so I won’t recap those. The Nemelex’ Choice competition was a collective effort, and and just as in 0.26 it was quite high scoring. Gozag or Stay Home came out on top, with a total of 49 clan nemelex points; closely following were ABCDEF with 47. The Combo High Scores competition was blown away by Gozag or Stay Home with 917 points in the category, a result of having both Yermak and Sergey on the team. This tournament only two clanscollectively earned every banner:ABCDEF thanks to the ‘B’, booing; and chatdotcrawlBR, which had poncheis as a member.

Thank you to everyone for playing.

To close out, here are some overall tournament statistics (with the 0.26 numbers in brackets for comparison). 2,527 players started a game at some point during the tournament; of those 2,474 completed a game in a non-boring way. This definition of “player” (players who completed a non-boring game) is used for subsequent calculations and was used for the 0.27 statistics.

• Players: 2,474 (0.26: 2,333)
• Total player time: 27,502 hrs (0.26: 29,392 hrs)
• Average player time: 11.2 hrs (0.26: 12.6 hrs)
• Games played: 67,203 (0.26: 54,701)
• Players who got a rune: 734 (0.26: 886)
• 404 winners and 1571 wins (0.26: 476 winners and 1767 wins)
• Win rate: 2.34% (0.26: 3.23%)
• Proportion of players using WebTiles: 94.4% (0.25: 96.7%)

The 0.28 season has begun, and it again looks to be a very active trunk season. Watch this space for further information as the 0.28 trunk update posts begin to flow. Until next time, happy crawling!

1 comment...

by gammafunk

We are pleased to announce the release of Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup 0.27 “The Cursed Flame”!

DCSS 0.27 features a new Djinni species that cast spells using HP, can only learn new spells at random as they level up, and only use the spellcasting skill to train magic. We’ve redesigned Ashenzari, who now offers curses for your gear to gain piety and skill levels, at the cost of destroying the item when the curse is removed.

A batch of new spells have been added, including Manifold Assault, which attacks multiple foes at once with your melee, Storm Form, which transforms you into a tempest with electrified, cleaving melee and the ability to hurl yourself as lightning at foes, and Animate Armour, which draws out the spirit of your armor to fight by your side. Polar Vortex is a more damaging, ice-themed replacement for Tornado. Maxwell’s Capacitive Coupling is a level 8 air-themed replacement for Absolute Zero that vaporizes a nearby monster after a delay. Chain Lightning has been reworked into a more powerful level 9 spell.

Spell books have many new types and generate more often, but contain fewer spells. We’ve re-balanced branch monster sets and end maps, as well as made new end maps for Lair, Shoals, and Snake. As always, there are dozens of new deadly vaults, and many more changes small and large alike!

Download DCSS 0.27hereorplay it onlineon one of many servers across the world! Packages for Windows and OS X are available now. Linux debs are coming soon. See the full list of changes on the release pagehere.

The tournament starts onFriday July 30th 8pm UTCand runs throughSunday August 15th 8pm UTC, with all online 0.27 games counting towards your score. See thetournament pagefor more details, including how to join or setup a clan.Clans membership can be changed untilFriday August 6th 8pm UTC.

Many thanks to all those who havecontributedto DCSS over the years. Thanks especially to the DCSS development team, whose contributions made 0.27 possible, and to the admins who run and maintain the official servers. A special thanks to the following community members who contributed to 0.27 and a warm welcome to the first-time contributors, listed in italics. (Let us know if someone is missing, this data is tricky to collect in bulk!)

4Hooves2Appendages,AdamPG, Aliscans,Alexei Barnes, Beargit, Elliott Bernstein,dicedlemming, dilly, DreamDust,Goratrix, hyperactiveChipmunk,Implojin,Alex Jurkiewicz,Zhang Kai, l33t-d00d,Nikolai Lavsky,Christopher Landry,MainiacJoe,mgdelmonte,Mintice,Andrew O’Neill,Alexander Posch,robertxgray,Sastreii,sdynet,WhiteShark,Shummie, Skrybe,Jeffery Stager, Cebolla Sunbeam, Wensley,Mara Williamson

by gammafunk

A +6 arbalest “Damnation” {damnation} comes into view.The +6 arbalest “Damnation” {damnation} shoots a damnation bolt at the trunk update.

Hello crawlers and welcome to the last trunk update of the 0.27 cycle. We’ve been under feature freezesince last Friday, so the remaining time before the 0.27 Release and Tournamentwill be devoted to bug fixes, balance tweaks, and polish. If you’ve been holding out and playing 0.26 due to concerns about stability, know that all major features are fixed in trunk, and only reasonable balance changes and bug fixes will be a thing from here until release. We’ve made the 0.27 beta branch, so servers will begin installing 0.27 soon. So please play-test trunk or the 0.27 branch when that’s available on your favorite server to help us find bugs! The 0.27 release will be either Thursday, July 29th, or Friday, July 30th, depending on timing. Look out for an official release post with download links to come.

The 0.27 tournamentwill run from Friday July 30th, 8pm UTCto Sunday August 15th, 8pm UTC. Please bookmark theofficial 0.27 tournament pageand use this page to track your progress throughout the tournament. We’ll continue to update this page with any rules changes. In coming days you may see summaries of test data in the “Overview” page taken from recent 0.27 beta games. Don’t worry, we’ll reset everything before the tournament starts.

Now, onto the Trunk Update! Note that this is not the full set of 0.27 changes, just the ones since our last trunk update. For the full and official set of 0.27 changes, check out the changelog. Here are the changes since last time:

• The starting spell setsof some Mage and Warrior-Mage backgrounds are reduced by one spell. This together with the increase in book drops will give these classes more variety in how they proceed through middle portions of the game. We didn’t get to adjusting all classes this version, since for some, any spell removal would leave the class in a difficult spot. Further changes, including potentially new spells, will happen during 0.28 development, so stay tuned! The changes for 0.27:
• Air elementalists no longer start with Lightning Bolt.
• Arcane Marksmen no longer start with Leda’s Liquefaction.
• Earth Elementalists no longer start with Lee’s Rapid Deconstruction.
• Summoners and Ice Elementalists no longer start with Summon Ice beast.
• Venom Mages no longer start with Ignite Poison.
• New branch end maps and adjustments:
• New “Abyssal Woods” Lair ending featuring demonic trees and abyss-themed monsters. Beware the thrashing horrors!
• New “Lost City” Shoals ending featuring a ruined temple theme with minotaurs and sphinxes. Beware the satyrs too!
• New “Storm Temple” Shoals ending featuring electricity-themed monsters and many possible layouts. Beware the storm dragon! Or the titan!
• The “Ancient Temple”, “Frog Pond”, and “Undead Jungle Book” Lair endings have been adjusted to lower monster counts significantly. And they say we never give players anything…
• Most Snake end maps have their monster counts significantly reduced. It’s tough work slogging through all those nagas, we know.
• All Ice Cavemaps have been rebalanced to have more varied layouts, monsters, and loot. Gone are mysterious dead reapers! The changes are substantial, as detailed in this commit. You should find the cloud generator placement less arbitrary and less frequent, more possible shortcuts in many maps, and more varied monster sets at both easy and hard difficulty ice caves. Stay frosty, friends!
• The Robe of Follyis redesigned. It now gives you a permanent brilliance effect (spell enhancer and half spell MP costs), but sets your Will to 0. Additionally it grants +8 Int (from +4) and +4 enchant (from +3). It’d be folly indeed to not wear this robe while entering one of my lich-filled vaults!
• Dancing ranged weaponsare now a thing that can kill you. Yes, of coursethey have infinite ammo, I’m glad you asked! But don’t worry because…
• …Tukima’s Dancenow works on monsters wielding ranged weapons! It can make charmed dancing ranged weapons to fight by your side.
• The Elemental Staffis featured in one new and one reworked vault. Both vaults also feature a greatly improvedmaster elementalist monster that always wields the staff, appearing when these vaults place in Elf or Depths. Watch out, it knows Ozo’s Refridge, Crystal Spear, Chain Lightning, and Firestorm!
• The new vault is the official “guarded unrand” vault, by first-time contributor dilly. Placing in Dungeon, Elf, and Depths, it features an elemental mage elf boss (for Dungeon) or the master elementalist (for Elf and Depths) and various elemental baddies.
• Mu’s “elemental laboratory” vault, the one that initially introduced the master elementalist, has been given a complete overhaul. It has more challenging and interesting elemental monster sets and features much more interesting terrain.
• Monster breathtimeouts now reduce after their turn. So if you see that a monster is “catching its breath”, you know it won’t use a breath attack before your next turn unless it gets a double turn. That’s really nice!
• Many new vaults for Elf, including entries, decorative vaults, monster vaults with weird things like defective dancing weapons and cool things like double deep elf blademasters with double double swords, and new main vaults and entries for the Elf:2 Hall of Blades! Also new are a batch of ecumenical altar vaults. New even though the altars inside are very old.
• Eleionomae no longer land on and destroy trees when they travel next to you, instead picking a safe and comfy spot next to a tree. No more tree digging!
• Ossuariesno longer have spear and dart traps. The days of step-and-rest-then-repeat for clearing some areas of ossuaries are over! Don’t worry, alarm traps and net traps still make an appearance. And there’s talk of introducing some new types of traps or trap-like monsters in 0.28…
• The macro menuis greatly improved, with hotkeys Ctrl-D for an improved menu and Ctrl-E for a quick-add menu.
• We have a bona-fide game menuavailable from the F1 key. It’s almost like we’re a modern game! For now you can use it to access save, quit, macro, and help functions, but we’ll probably expand it in the future.
• The allow_extended_colorsconsole option is now on by default. For console nerds only! We previously didn’t enable it because some major system terminals didn’t support more than 8 standard colors by default, but that’s no longer the case.
• Hints modehas been updated and corrected. But it still recommends Vehumet over Sif Muna! Wrong!
• The Desolation entranceis no longer ruined.

That wraps it up for this set of trunk updates. Until next time, happy crawling!

The damnation bolt hits the trunk update!!! The damnation bolt explodes! The damnation engulfs the trunk update! The trunk update dies…

4 comments!

by ebering

You open the Incunabulum of Trunk Updates and begin reading…

Hello crawlers! Coming hot on the heels of our previous trunk update we’re back with more of the latest. Before we dive into changes, some exciting scheduling matters:

The 0.27tournament istentatively scheduled for July 30th-Aug 15th

As usual, watch this space for links to the tournament webpage, more information about scoring, etc.

While it has only been a week since our last little chat, almost 100 commits have landed in trunk. One significant area of change is to spellbooks, feedback on the feel of this change is most welcome and we look forward to reading your remarks on various crawl forums. With that said, on to the changes!

• Thanks to community contributor Aliscans, wizmode monster creationnow has in-game help, for all your monster experimentation needs.
• Archmagican now appear on randart robes.
• Several unrandshave been adjusted:
• Damnationonly consumes bolts and explodes on hit.
• the staff of Wucad-Muhas been buffed, refunding MP more often and including the refund even when it backfires.
• the Wrath of Trogis angrier: it now extends your berserk duration on kill (sometimes) and grants Rampage. Raarhrhrhghghghghgh!
• The post-berserk penaltyno longer includes paralysis.
• Using Trog’s Berserknow has a piety-adjusted chance to fail.
• Salamander Tyrants, Rockslimes, and Quicksilver oozes have been added to Ziggurat monster sets.
• Several further enhancements to the quiver:
• Potions and scrolls can now be quivered for use.
• Autofight correctly supports “waiting spells” like searing ray.
• New options are available to customize the quiver order
• A new spell:Maxwell’s Capacitive Coupling (Level 8 Air). When cast, the player begins charging up. If the player waits (with ‘.’) and is not moved then after a bit of time (random and depending on spell power) the accumulated charge is discharged, vaporizing the nearest foe (nearest at the end of the spell, not when it is cast!). This might seem familiar, but I’ve got absolutely zero idea where you might have seen the mechanics before.
• Werebloodnow only grants its healing for kills of adjacent monsters.
• Felids no longer get a stealth penalty from Blade Hands.
• Everyone else can improve their stealth with a new good mutationthat dampens sounds.
• Spell book changes:
• Spellbooks are always identified
• Randart spellbooks have fewer spells
• Fixed spellbooks are split into smaller books of 2-4 spells each, and 30 new booksare added to pick up the contents.
• Spellbooks generate more than twice as oftento keep the number of spells generated about the same. Book rarity is now more closely tied to the spell level.
• Book pricing in shops is reworked
• Backgrounds that previously started with a spell book are unchanged, their starting spells are added directly to the spell library at game start.

That’s all for now. In the run up to the release and tournament, “feature freeze” is scheduled roughly around July 16 or 23. Before then expect to see many more exciting new vaults reach trunk, both from our new devteam members and from several community contributors; along with balance tweaks, bug fixes, and user interface improvements (including, hopefully, an item panel in the WebTiles UI). Until next time, happy crawling!

Weird images run through your mind. The Trunk Updatesvapourize in an electric haze!

4 comments!

by ebering

Welcome toTudoco Ucre’s Tempting Trunk Update!

Hello crawlers, it has been a while since a post has appeared in this space. While your author has been inactive the rest of the team and the community have been working away in the depths of Gehenna to sift the most lethal ideas from the hellish magma.

First of all, a warm welcome to the two newest players for the Devil’s team:hellmonk–along time community contributor, fork developer, and notorious memelord. nicolae–another long time community vaultsmith, with a special talent for shop vaults, whimsey, and good quotations. We’re happy to have both of them aboard the team.

Speaking of community contributors, since I last wrote from among the 285 commits to trunk we’ve seen

• A new splash screen by ArbitUHHH
• New tiles from Sastreii, including for demonic treeswhich inspired a new dungeon feature
• Tweaks and fixes from Goratrix, dilly, nlavsky, and DreamDust
• Specific mechanical input from engineand pubby

On to the changes!

New and Improved Vaults and Environment

• Everyone’s favorite lair ending, the Jungle Book, has been overhauled to no longer be a Lua-trigger spoiler. There are still plenty of appearing monsters, brought back from the dead by necromancers that now appear.
• hellmonkhas been on fire, adding three new Volcanoes: a smoke and steam themed map, a tribute to the Zot hot tub (beware the orb of fire), and an elven volcano full of pryromancers.
• To cool off, he then added a slime themed new Ice Cave.
• Both hellmonkand nicolae have been at work improving Snake vaults; the first with a new rune vault, and the second with a wide variety of thematic vaults.
• Many old guarded unrand vaults have been tweaked and adjusted, as well as a slew of new ones.
• While not exactly a vault: demonic treesnow appear in the Abyss, Pan, and themed vaults. They can be awakened like normal trees but when burned produce a cloud of chaos instead of a forest fire.
• Early out of depth monstershave a shallower maximum depth.

Gods

• Hepliaklqanawaits until you have shown enough devotion to earn 1* of piety to bring your ancestor out of the mists of memory (and kindly also waits to impose the HP penalty).
• Sacrifice Experience costs more XP now: the experience cost of skills is calculated with your old XL value, which will have a much longer effect. The sacrifice can now be repeated up to three times.
• Sacrifice words and sacrifice drink grant bonus piety when both are taken (Mummies get the bonus just for sacrificing words.)
• Other sacrifice piety values have been tweaked and rebalanced in various directions.
• Okawaruno longer cares if you slaughter your allies.
• Kikubaaqudghanow gifts spells directly into your library; the capstone grants all of the spells of the Necronomicon and also Haunt once more.

Character

• Djinniaptitudes are adjusted (XP is increased from 0 to +1 and spellcasting reduced from -2 to -3).
• Unbreathing is no longer a mechanic distinct from rPois or holiness type (this applies also to monsters).
• Palentongacan now silence their rolls.
• Wisp formno longer has blinkitis.
• The guaranteed damage reductionmechanicis changed. Instead of being a secret percentage associated with particular armour items, it is an internal calculation derived from AC from any source. For the curious you can read the details, but to quote the LearnDB “If you’re making equipment decisions based on this, please reconsider.”

Spells

• The amulet of the Air loses EV+5 and becomes an Air magic enhancer.
• Monster Bind Soulsnow always creates a simulacrum when the targeted monster dies.
• Air Elementalslose their twisters, and gain Stunning Burst which inflicts 1 turn of paralysis and is resistible with rElec, stasis, or by dodging the attack (but not Will).
• Ice form‘s AC scaling with power is buffed.
• New spell: Storm Form Level 7 Air/Transmutations. Transforms the caster into a storm, melding all non-jewellery, and granting power-scaling electric cleaving melee, power-scaling defenses, and an activated blinkbolt ability.
• Werebloodgrants a small amount of healing on each kill.
• Blade Handsis again level 5.
• Freezing Cloudis now level 5.
• Tornadois re-named and re-flavoured to Polar VortexLevel 9 Ice; the damage flavour is changed to icicle damage and increased.
• Chain Lightningis increased to Level 9 Conjurations/Air, and has its mechanics simplified to be easier to reason about (but still a bit more complicated than a bullet point).
• Poisonous Vapoursno longer creates a cloud as part of its mechanical function.
• Absolute Zero and Hydra Formare removed.

The trunk updates go straight to hell!

2 comments!

by advil

Because of the change in ownership in Freenode, over the last few weeks we have migrated the DCSS IRC channels and infrastructure, including the Sequell/Cheibriados infobots, to #crawl and #crawl-dev on libera.chat. (Note the single “#”!)

Also: we had planned to maintain a presence on old freenode in order to point visitors to the correct new place. However, as of 6/15 the new owners have apparently wiped the network’s nickserv and chanserv databases entirely, so we no longer have control over our old channels (or identities) and are not using them at all.

by ebering

The trunk updates feel delightfully devilish…

Hello crawlers, and welcome to another installment of the 0.27 trunk updates!

A big thanks to nicolae for another big batch of vaults, this time for Spider; to Dilly, ShaperMC, and hellmonk for new ecumenical altar vaults; and to Sastreii for a continued stream of new tiles!Additionally a big thanks to hellmonk for the overhaul to Demonspawn Tier 3 facets:

• The Black markfacet gives the following benefits. At level 1 hex enhancer, level 2 black mark, and at level 3 a radius 1 silence donut around the player (the player isn’t silenced).
• The Damnation facet is adjusted to feel more like becoming a Brimstone fiend. At level 1 the facet grants Will+ and passive retaliation to hex attempts, at level 2 gives 50% torment resistance, and at level 3 hurl damnation (which has some tweaks to its damage scaling).
• A new Chaos facetwhich gives at level 1 a chance to corrode enemies when you damage them, at level 2 a chance to malmutate enemies when you damage them, and at level 3 an active ability to forcibly blink away and apply negative statuses to enemies in line of sight.
• The Robustand Augmentationfacets are unchanged; Passive freezeis removed, and the passive freeze mutation moves into the general pool.

Read on for the rest of the trunk changes:

• New Unrand:the seven-league boots, which grant a full-LOS rampaging effect
• Yredelemnulagain permits statue form
• Nemelex’ Foxfire card is renamed “the Swarm” and summons a swarm of bees with size varying on power.
• More salamanders have been placed in Snake rune vaults
• Draconian Knights and Fannar no longer cast Ozocubu’s Armour and have higher base AC.
• Ice elementalists now start with Metabolic Englaciation instead of Summon Ice Beast
• Hailstorm now affects icy creatures
• Wands of random effects are removed, replaced with the XP-charged pieces from Xom’s chessboard, which apply a random effect to a random target in LOS.
• The diversity of early dungeon books is increased.
• Static Discharge is lowered to level 2, and Swiftness increased to level 3.
• Mnoleg loses Random Bolt, to better focus on summoning eyeballs.
• The demonic runeis announced when a vault that is guaranteed to place it is generated.
• The player and their Hepliaklqana ancestorcan now fire through one another.
• Major Destructionis buffed and has the list of zap adjusted. Makhleb’spassive heal on kill is reduced in strength.
• Vehumetnow supports Poisonous Vapours.

That’s all for now! As always, the future is hazy; there are some big changes proposed by community contributors that are under discussion, as well as some big UI projects under way. One of those projects, by long time contributor nlavskyis nearing completion: it will bring an inventory panel to WebTiles! Until next time, happy crawling!

You make a move on the chessboard. The trunk updates cackle and vanish!

2 comments!

by ebering

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:

• Newvaultsbybeargit,nicolae,andShaperMC,appearing in various places in the dungeon. If you’re interested in making vaults (prefabricated bits of the map), read an introduction to editing vaultshereand consider setting up adevelopment environment to test your vaults.
• NewtilesbySastreii. If you’re interested in making tiles, read our tiles guidelinehere.

Both kinds of contribution can be submitted on ourGitHub 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 godon 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 eitherin the Ecumenical Temple or in an overflow templebetween 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.
• Ogresand Two headed ogresagain attack slowly and hit harder.
• Scorpionsare now fast.
• Gnollson D:1 no longer get halberds.
• Worker ants, soldier ants, and queen ants are removed.

The new Djinnispecies continues to be tweaked in response to play testing:

• Weapon aptitudes have been lowered by one.
• The scholarly godsnow all reject Djinn worship (that’sSif 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 scalesexcept Iridescentscales are now Demonspawn only.
• Iridescent scales, bone plates, thin skeletal structure, and sturdy frame are no longer incompatible.
• Blurry visionis removed, replaced by allowing Ru’s -Scrollwhile threatened mutation in the random mutation pool.
• Shoutitisand No potion healare reduced to 2 levels, with the maximum level effect at the top level, and half the effect at the first level.
• A new Jiyva mutationgives player melee an engulfeffect, engulfing foes in ooze (gross).
• The blink mutationis 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 Hellhas 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 feelthreatened and lose the ability to read!

1 comment...

by ebering

A trunk update comes into view. Wyrmbane glows green as a worthy foe approaches.

Hello crawlers, it’s been a busy few weeks in the cottage industries of the Iron City. This trunk update has several big things, but before we get to them I want to highlight some non-code community submissions since we last wrote:

• New vaultsby beargit,nicolae, and Skrybe,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 hereand consider setting up a development environment to test your vaults.
• New tilesby Sastrei. 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.

Diving into some of the other changes that have happened since we last wrote. Several brancheshave had changes.

Of course, trunk development is not all headline items. There’s been a lot of behind the scenes technical work, bug fixing, and an assortment of other changes. Read on to see what else has changed.

• Wyrmbane now glows when a dragon that can upgrade it comes into view.
• Dexterity and EV formulas are tweaked again.
• Assorted autoexplore edge-case improvements by Aliscans.
• Swamp is now loud.
• Cheibriados no longer hates quickblades.
• Elixir gives both heath and mp at all power levels.
• Zin sanctuary no longer applies holy word.
• Empty space no longer reduces the variance of Airstrike‘s damage.
• Kobold Fighters start with bucklers now.
• Monster weapon delay is standardized at the monster’s speed, certain monster
  base damages are adjusted to compensate. (hellmonk)
• Poisonous Vapours can no longer target empty space.
• Palentonga HP apt is reduced to +0.
• Player poison now ticks much faster.
• Yredelemnul accepts nonliving worshippers again. Return the black torches to your Gargoyles and statuary!
• Halflings are removed.
• Shatter deals bonus damage to toenail golems (youch).

That’s all for now. The future keeps approaching even though we can never see it clearly, but by desperate Aperomancy it seems that the branch freshening trend might reach to Spider or the Hells. More vaults from vault smiths new and old are soon to appear. Perhaps hellmonk’s promised Tier 3 demonspawn changes will materialize? Or perhaps none of these things will happen and this space will show something completely different next time! Until then, happy crawling!

The trunk updates whisper ‘farewell’ as they head to the true west.

1 comment...

by ebering

Ashenzari offers you a vision and a curse of trunk updates…

Hello crawlers and welcome to the first trunk update of March! It’s been busy here in Coc:7 dreaming up new and varied ways of torturing players. The first thing of note in this round of trunk updates is anAshenzari overhaul:

• Ashenzari periodically offers followers cursesas they explore.
• Cursesare applied to equipped items and have the following effects:
• Bind the item to you, so it cannot be removed,
• Increase your piety with Ashenzari,
• and grant a boost to two groups of skills (described when Ashenzari offers the curse).
• Curses can be removed at any time by shattering the chains. This destroysthe item, freeing you from the curse.
• In exchange for binding yourself with curses, Ashenzari grants the following benefits:
• Skill boosts granted by your curses grow with piety.
• At 0* Ashenzari reveals a wealth of knowledge: all items (including consumables) are identified, exploration traps are prevented, and portals are revealed.
• Passive monster and item detection and passive mapping, with detection range scaling with piety.
• At 2* See Invisible
• At 3* Clarity
• Starting at 4* passive scryingwith radius 2, scaling up to radius 4 at 6*.

Other changes since we last wrote:

• Plain Licheshave a new spell set: Bolt of Cold, Orb of Destruction, Slow, Haste and Invisibility; and Ancient Lichestrade Slow for Petrify.
• If he spawns on the orb run, Boris will do so with permanent haste and a permanent aura of brilliance, spurred on by his lust for the ORB.
• Airstrikeno longer does bonus damage to flying things.
• The obsidian axecannot be unwielded while mesmerised; watch out!
• Once you complete a Ziggurat, the Zot clock no longer applies.
• The spectral brandhas been simplified: The weapon pops out when you attack, immediately follows up, and then sticks around until the end of your next turn. If you hit again, everything repeats. Otherwise, it vanishes.
• Unidentified equipmentis now identified when you touch the cell that it is on, instead of on wear.
• The Depthsmonster list has been trimmed of so-called “trash mobs” for a deadlier experience.
• *Slowas an artefact property now stacks, multiple sources will increase the chances of getting slowed when hit.

That’s all for now! On the ever changing horizon, changes to Snake and the Vaults seem in focus, but it is always hard to see through the impenetrable haze at the border between Cocytus and Gehenna, so who can say, really? Until next time, happy crawling!

You shatter the chains binding the trunk update!

by ebering

As you read the scroll of trunk update it crumbles to dust…

Hello crawlers and welcome to the first trunk updates post of the 0.27 cycle. Things have commenced with a shebang! and there are a lot of new changes to report on. This update will have some thematic organisation to highlight several big sets of changes: curse removal, statchanges, monsterspellbooks,adjusted demonspawn facets, and two new spells. There are of course all sorts of tweaks, shifts, changes, and new spells. Read on for more!

Curse Removal

The system of cursed items is no-more, courtesy of PleasingFungus who finally found the collective remove curse scroll and read it for all of us. Practically, this means the following:

• All items that generate are uncursed
• No mundane negative-plus items generate on the floor (though some special shops still place them)
• Scrolls of remove curse, rings of attention and teleportation, and amulets of innacuracyare removed.
• Ashenzari is the only source of curses. In current trunk, Ash uses identify scrolls instead; however this is a place-holder and a larger revision to Ashenzari is currently in-progress but not yet in trunk.
• The Scythe of Cursesand Obsidian axenow have *Drain instead of *Curse; the necklace of Bloodlustno longer has a swap penalty.

Stat changes

Several tweaks to the stat system (including the impact of weapon stats) have arrived, to simplify the impact of base stats and remove hidden breakpoints and step-downs. Thanks to hellmonkand chequersfor the submissions! Along with these changes are some adjustments to species stats.

• Dexterityand evasionno longer have hidden step-downs
• The percentage damage modifier for strength on weapon damage is derandomzied and simplified. 10 strength corresponds to 100% damage, and each point of strength above adds 2.5 percentage points to the modifier (points below 10 remove 2.5 percentage points).
• Demigodbase stats are reduced to 9/10/9, and now gain 4 points of the stat of their choice every 3 levels. This will give players almost divine control over their stats.
• Gnollsbase stats are reduced to 7/7/7.
• Sprigganslose one point of base dexterity and have their Dodging apt reduced to +3.

Monster Spellbooks

Monsters with multiple distinct spell books have had their spell sets combined into single sets. For a couple of monsters with multiple iconic sets, new monsters have been created to carry the torch. The full set of changes can be perused in the pull request, here are some of the highlights:

• Psychehas a new, more insane, spell set. She can cast Polymorph, Chain of Chaos (hi Xom!), Invisibility, and Cantrip.
• The named lords of the hells and pandemonium who summon demons now summon demons specific to their realm: Cerebovonly summons fiery demons now, Ereshkigalonly tzitzimimeh, and Dispateronly hell sentinels.
• New monster: Dread Lich. Ancient liches now have an earth-conjurations spell book with LCS and Corrosive Bolt, but lich summoned demons are a classic. Enter the Dread Lich, with Summon Greater Demon, Paralyse, Invisibility, and Haste; appearing in the same places as ancient liches.
• Deep elf magesare removed, replaced with deep elf pyromancers(who have a fire-themed spell book) and deep elf zephyrmancers(with an air-themed spell book).

Adjusted Demonspawn Facets

Thanks tohellmonk for continued demonspawn improvement work! This latest round of mutation changes focused on the tier 2 facets, with the following adjustments and a new spellcasting-focused facet (combine with Big Brain “scales” for a truly demonic mage experience!).

• The mana linkfacet is re-ordered. The first rank increases MP Regen, the second rank provides guardian spirit, and the third the mana link.
• Foul stenchgenerates miasma at every rank of the facet (scaling with rank) as well as miasma cloud immunity.
• The damage curve of spinesis adjusted to be a bit better at high level.
• Ignite bloodnow ignites blood at every rank of the facet, with power scaling on rank.
• Demonic guardiansare summoned when the player takes damage, and the tier of the guardian grows with level.
• Theicemailfacet shifts from pure AC to AC+SH; at rank 1 it grants a condensation shieldfor 4SH, with ranks 2 and 3 granting 4 AC of icy armour each.
• A new facet: malignant magic. Demonspawn with this facet attempt to paralyse foes in a radius equal to the rank of the facet whenever they cast a spell; at rank 3 this extends to include wand usage. The power of the paralysis depends on the level of the spell cast.

New Spells

PleasingFungus has developed two new spells aimed at generating new incentives to hybridise.

• Animate Armour. Level 4 Summoning/Earth magic. “Call forth the spirit of your armour, bringing fortha slow-moving ally that hits harder the heavier your armour is. Wham, pow! (Summon limit is 1, as with CCF.)”. Animate Armour appears in the book of Earth and the book of Dreams.
• Manifold Assault. Level 4 Translocations. Manifold Assault launches attacks with your melee weapon against 2-4random enemies in LOS, depending on spellpower. Manifold Assault replaces Passage of Golubria in the book of Spatial Translocations, and appears in the book of the Warp (along with Passage of Golubria).

The rest of the changes

This has been an active month for trunk, and there is a lot more going on. Read on for the rest!

• Storm cloudsno longer make noise; making Qazlalworship quieter at low piety.
• Regenerationis buffed; one pip of regen grants 1 HP per 10 auts (a normal turn). This is 2.5x as strong as it was before.
• Trollsand Vine Stalkersare adjusted slightly to compensate.
• Monsters with ranged weaponsnow have unlimited ammo. No more running that stone giant out of large rocks. (Except nets; infininetting gnolls are reserved for gnollcrawl.)
• Phantomshave less HP, and now blink the player with themwhen they blink from attacking.
• Big Koboldsare re-named Kobold Brigandsand always spawn with darts (one third of the time curare, yikes!). Normal kobolds can no longer spawn with curare (though they can still pick it up from the ground, if you’re very unlucky!).
• Ranged targeting shows to-hit chance, and a monster’s to-hit chance can be seen in xv.
• Hauntmoves from the Necronomicon to the Grand Grimoire
• Scarves of shadowsno longer act as a spell de-enhancer
• Wands ofdisintegrateare now called wands ofmindburst, and do not work on mindless creatures.
• Manualsno longer require an inventory slot; once picked up they boost skill aptitude until used up.
• Hatsand Glovescan spawn with the stealth ego.
• Wands of random effectsare de-spoiled, applying a random buff or debuff to the target (15% chance of a buff), with the list of effects visible in the description.
• Ozocubu’sarmour and Frozen Rampartsnow break on any player position change.
• Ozocubu’s Refridgerationis now level 7.
• Stone arrowdamage is increased.
• Monstrous Menagerie no longer summons harpies.
• Summon Demonand Summon Greater Demonare removed as player spells.
• Gadget shopsare removed.
• Rings of Stealth and Boots of Runningare removed.

That’s all for right now! In addition to the Ashenzari changes, on the horizon are more demonspawn changes, refreshes of Vaults and Snake, and new vaults from returned vaultsmith nicolae—plus who knows what other twisted horrors we can dig out of the abyss. Until next time, happy crawling!

You feel as if something is helping you. You feel blessed forevermore.

8 comments!

by ebering

The 0.26.1 bug fix release is now availableon the download page.Thanks to all the many contributors who helped with this release, including patches and bug reports!

Updating is recommended for all players. Happy crawling, and report more bugshere!

by ebering

The0.26 tournamentis over. On behalf of the Dev Team, many thanks to all the server admins, outside contributors, bug reporters, and to the many DCSS players who made the 0.26 release and tournament possible! For 16 days, players could compete for tournament points and banners by playing 0.26 games on the public servers. This was the second tournament held after the major revision of the tournament rules done for 0.26. There were changes based on previous input, and once again there will be discussion threads on the tavern and dcss subreddit to collect feedback on the tournament rules.

Congratulations to Yermak, perennial champion, for once again taking first place in the individual competition, with 95,456 points! Over the course of the tournament, Yermak won 47 games, including a streak of 16 games, 29 Nemelex’ Choice combos, an XL 13 win, 3 species high scores, and 3 background high scores. In second place was EnegeticOcto with 80,792 points and 38 wins, including 29 Nemelex’ Choice combos and a 28 minute 17 second real-time win, the fastest of the tournament. Rounding out the top 3 was booing with 78,169 points and 38 wins, including the first win of the tournament, 50 minutes and 27 seconds after the start, an XL 16 win, 3 species high scores, and 2 background high scores; they also collected every banner!

Our top three took several of the top spots in the individual category rankings, but they weren’t the only players on the leaderboard. Acrobat set a high standard in Win Rate and Streaking, playing and winning 22 games over the course of the tournament, for the top streak and an adjusted win rate of 95.65%. Behind Acrobat in Win Rate was DrMan with a 20 game streak. For much of the tournament Acrobat and DrMan were engaged in a high-stakes back and forth at the top of this category. The Nemelex’ Choice competition ended in an impressive 3-way tie, with Yermak, EnegeticOcto, and Shummieall winning 29 Nemelex combos for points over the course of the tournament. Yermak blew away the competition for Combo High Scores, with 329 points in the category; booing was the only other player to earn more than 200 points in the category, finishing second with a score of 226. The Best High Score of the tournament was the 72,401,124 point run by iamserjio. In the Lowest Turncount Category, Caminho won with 3 runes in 8,617 turns, the 7th lowest turncount of all time! EnegeticOcto’s 28:17 win was the Fastest Realtime Win, but Shummie was only 33 seconds behind with a 28:50 win. Felids were the weapon of choice for the Low XL Win category; Yermak’s XL 13 cat was followed by CurlyBrace who won at XL 15. The tournament was herladed by booing, who posted the first win 50 minutes after the tournament start. DrMan followed an hour later with the first all rune win. The Ziggurat Dive was an exciting back-and-forth for much of the tournament, until Sentinel decided to clear a definitive 100 Ziggurats. Finally, in seeking the favor of the gods, booing was the only player to collect every banner over the course of the tournament.

The clan competition was won by Irradiated Dongers (captained by EnegeticOcto) with 88,667 points. Following very close on their heels were Gozag or Stay Home (captained by Ge0ff) with 88,333 points. Rounding out the top three was TeamSplat (captained by Shummie) with 72,456 points.

Most of the clan categories take the best score of the member, so I won’t recap those. The Nemelex’ Choice competition was a collective effort, and each of the three-way individual tie members were on different clans, which led to a very high scoring clan competition. Gozag or Stay Home came out on top, with other clan members contributing 30 more Nemelex Combo wins on top of Yermak’s 29, for a total of 59 clan nemelex points; following were Irradiated Dongers with 52 and TeamSplat with 50. The Combo High Scores competition was similarly astronomical at the top; Gozag or Stay Home earned 533 points in the category, followed by Irradiated Dongers with 449, and Make Beogh Great Again with 392 points. These three clans were also the only three to collectively earn every banner.

Thank you to everyone for playing. The rules were adjusted after 0.25 based on collected feedback, and once again there are feedback threads on the tavern and reddit.

To close out, here are some overall tournament statistics (with the 0.25 numbers in brackets for comparison). 2,760 players started a game at some point during the tournament; of those 2,333 completed a game in a non-boring way. This definition of “player” (players who completed a non-boring game) is used for subsequent calculations and was used for the 0.25 statistics.

• Players: 2,333 (0.25: 2,772)
• Total player time: 29,392 hrs (0.25:34,433 hrs)
• Average player time: 12.6 hrs (0.25: 12.4 hrs)
• Games played: 54,701 (0.25: 62,125)
• Players who got a rune: 886 (0.25: 1010)
• 476 winners and 1767 wins (0.25: 548 winners and 1871 wins)
• Win rate: 3.23% (0.25: 3.01%)
• Proportion of players using WebTiles: 96% (0.25: 95.9%)

The 0.27 season has begun, and it again looks to be an active trunk season. Watch this space for further information as the 0.27 trunk update posts begin to flow. Until next time, happy crawling!

by ebering

We are pleased to announce the release of Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup 0.26 “Roll Around the Clock”!

DCSS 0.26 features a new Palentonga species that has a rolling attack and gets bonus AC after getting hit, a new Delver background that starts the player on D:5 with a variety of escape tools, a reworked Swamp branch with new monsters and other layout changes, and a vastly reworked quiver system that lets spells, wands, and abilities be quivered, fired, and autotargeted. Additionally, food is gone, replaced with a Zot clock that prevents players from lingering too long in one branch. The Kobold species now has the Nightstalker 3 mutation, the Ghoul species has chunk eating replaced with heal-on-kill, and there are a bunch of reworked spells, monsters, and items (including nine overhauled unrandart weapons). As always, there are dozens of new deadly vaults, and many more changes small and large alike!

Download DCSS 0.26hereorplay it onlineon one of many servers across the world! Packages for Windows and OS X are available now. Linux debs are coming soon (Update: The Linux debs are now available). See the full list of changes on the release pagehere.

The tournament starts today in just a few hours at20:00 UTC Friday 8 Januaryand runs through20:00 UTC Sunday 24 January, with all online 0.26 games counting towards your score. See thetournament pagefor more details, including how to join or set-up a clan.Clans membership can be changed until20:00 UTC Friday 15 January.

Many thanks to all those who havecontributedto DCSS over the years. A special thanks to the following community members who contributed to DCSS 0.26 and a warm welcome to the first-time contributors, listed in italics. (Let us know if someone is missing, this data is tricky to collect in bulk!)

Aaron Golden, AdamPG, Alex Jurkiewicz, aMcNicky, Anders Papitto,
Byrel Mitchell, CrawlCycle, Elliot Dronebarger, Emily, Eugene Abramchuk,
Gittourarmy, Goratrix, Heinrich Ody, hellmonk, Implojin, Joe
Childers, Kieron Dunbar, Marcelo Henrique Cerri, mgdelmonte,
Midn8, Naruni, nikheizen, Nikolai Lavsky, Paul Pollack, Peter
Gerlagh, Peter Hurst, Petri Salminen, Quipyowert2, randomMesh,
RJ Cunningham, Roderick Schertler, Cebolla Sunbeam, Ryan McNeive,
sdynet, Sebastian Łużyński, Shummie, Skrybe, syranez, Umer
Shaikh, ukdong99, wjchen

by gammafunk

Hello fellow Bogchamps! I have a quick update about the 0.26 tournament. Please bookmark theofficial 0.26 tournament pageand use this page to track your progress throughout the tournament. As a reminder, the tournament is scheduled from20:00 UTC Friday 8 Januarythrough20:00 UTC Sunday 24 January. The 0.26 release will likely happen beforehand on January 7th.

The 0.26 branch is available and already installed on CBR2, CKO, CUE, and CXC. For other servers, you’ll see the 0.26 game links appear on the server lobby at some point before the tournament starts. Once 0.26 is available on your server, you can follow the instructions on the tournament page to define/join clans via your 0.26 RC file. Clans can be formed and changed until one week into the tournament on 20:00 UTC Friday 15 January. See the How to Play section of the tournament page for details.

We’ve made some rule changes relative to the 0.25 tournament, so see the Changes section of the tournament page for details. Once the tournament has started, the leaderboardwill display the current standings. You may see the leaderboard, player, and clan pages populated with test data from 0.26 games. Don’t worry, the test pages and data will be wiped before the tournament begins. If you’re looking for people to play with, you can find them in the Tavern,reddit, or our IRC channel ##crawl on Freenode. Many thanks to Napkin for again letting us host the tournament on CDO, and to ebering for updating the tournament scripts for our rule changes.

See you all on Swamp:4, paralyzed by a fenstrider witch!

by gammafunk

gammafunk gestures. gammafunk spews toxic sludge! The Trunk Update festers in the toxic bog!

Hello crawlers and welcome to the last trunk update of the 0.26 cycle. We’ve been under feature freezesince last Friday, so the remaining time before the 0.26 Release and Tournamentwill be devoted to bug fixes, balance tweaks, and polish. If you’ve been holding out and playing 0.25 due to concerns about stability, know that all major features are fixed in trunk, and only reasonable balance changes and bug fixes will be a thing from here until release. We’ll be making the 0.26 beta branch soon, at which time servers will begin installing 0.26. So please play-test trunk or the 0.26 branch when that’s available on your favorite server to help us find bugs! The 0.26 release will be either Thursday, January 7th, or Friday, January 8th, depending on timing. Look out for an official release post with download links to come.

The 0.26 tournamentwill run from Friday Jan 8th, 8pm UTCto Sunday Jan 24th, 8pm UTC. We don’t don’t yet have a rules page installed on this server, but expect that link in a forthcoming post. Check out the pages for the previous tournament to get a sense of the rules and presentation. We’ll try to announce any rules changes in that subsequent post, but as always the final rules page will cover everything you need to know.

Now, onto the Trunk Update! Note that this is not the full set of 0.26 changes, just the ones since our last trunk update. For the full and official set of 0.26 changes, check out the changelog. Here are the changes since last time:

• Monster draining attacks now temporarily reduce player max HP instead of skills. The UI cost of skill drain was high…beware! See a more detailed discussion in this commit. Right now, the new drain effect is a bit weak, but I plan on making a couple balance changes to it during the freeze. Don’t worry, you’ll be afraid of bolts of drain, but it’ll be the good kind of afraid. Note that drain inflicted by the player is unchanged.
• Frozen Rampartshas its effect end upon movement. Yes, another nerf to your favorite new ice spell. That’s ok, kiting isn’t very fun, and now it works much better with Ozocubu’s Armour!
• Eringya’s Noxious Bognow places bogs on all squares within a range of 4 where there is no adjacent solid feature. A much-needed power increase for this spell, and hopefully an interesting positional trade-off. Kudos to hellmonk for the idea!
• Irradiate now checks monster AC but does slightly more damage. Ignoring AC was not part of the original PleasingFungus vision (which is all-powerful).
• Thecloak of Starlight gains *Dazzle, which sometimes dazzles foes like the Dazzling Flash spell upon successful dodge. It no longer has rElec and rC+. This cloak wins you so many style points when you go swish that monsters are dumbfounded!
• The glaive of the Guardgains a spectral weapon brand in addition to electricity, and loses sInv and +Rage. That’s right, dual branding!
• The sword of Power is now +5, vorpal, and sometimes fires a powerful but low-accuracy beam with chance based on the player’s current HP. Have you played the lesser-known indie game The Legend of Zelda? It’s a bit like the sword from that game.
• New Vaults! Sadly I don’t have enough time to go into detail about most individual vaults, but here’s a quick summary.
• A big set of winding woodlands vaults from nikheizen that feature a forest/woodland theme with many variations.
• A new Swamp rune vaultby nikheizen featuring a coven of 13 witches, mages, sorcerers, and wizards who wanttell you all about demons.
• A ghost vault,two greek myth themedShoals vaults, four Swampvaults, and 7 altar vaultsfrom nikheizen.
• A set of 11 arrival vaults,4 minivaults, and 2 altar vaults from amcnicky.
• A Wu Jian altar vault from pdpol.
• Damage and accuracy for spells and damage for wands are now shown in the UI. No more looking up info on various pages and bots just to get an idea of how much damage you can do! Well, for the most part. Some spells like Tornado refuse to cooperate.
• Boulder beetlesnow stop rolling when they can’t move towards their target (that’s you) nor will they start rolling if this is the case. I know it was funny, but beetles rolling in place behind that poor little kobold in front of them was too traumatizing for the kobold.
• Gauntletmonsters now generate awake, and those other than the minotaur can’t pickup loot. Now characters in Gauntlets don’t have weird incentives to explore the map in certain ways to not wake up monsters or to see the loot before monsters do.
• Temporary alliesall dismiss when you leave the level. Apparently there were corner cases where they didn’t do that right away!

That wraps it up for this set of trunk updates. Stay tuned for more tournament details, and until next time, happy crawling!

The Trunk Update looks as sick as possible!

« Newer Posts

Older Posts »