Trunk Updates 6 January 2020
- A new swamp worm tunnel vault offering a transporter puzzle for your death enjoyment
- A new Fedhas vs Yredelemnul themed swamp rune vault with a cameo by an undead Lernean Hydra
- On the back-end we’ve added catch2 testing to the build process
- Foxfire no longer damage the player when swapping, just dissipate
- A new abyss-escape themed ghost vault
- Regeneration has regenerated for the last time, and is removed. Agony replaces it in the book of Necromancy, and Ozocubu’s Armour in the Book of Battle
- A new unique Maggie enters the dungeon. Maggie is a younger version of Margery, and is a test of reaverb’s new multiple-unique-encounter storytelling approach. Maggie knows Bolt of Fire and Mesmerise, and comes equipped with a light dragon skin and a good weapon. Margery’s dragon armour is upgraded. Both Maggie and Margery have a chance of carrying Wyrmbane, which comes already slightly leveled up!
- dtsund can send us an “I told you so!”. Scrolls of acquirement now offer a choice of 4-5 items: food (if you eat), gold, and three random choices from the old acquirement categories. These items are fully identified, and you can inspect them before making your choice.
- However, the miscellaneous category of acquirement has been removed, so you won’t be seeing evocables on the list ever again!
Trunk Updates – 21 February 2020
- Frozen Ramparts, a new L3 Ice spell that makes all walls within radius 3 become covered in icicles that release when a monster walks nearby. The icicles do light damage that checks AC but is only partly resistable. Affected monsters additionally receive a “frozen” debuff that slows their movement by 4 aut for a few turns. Available now for any Ice Elementalist in their starting book!
- Tin of Tremorstones, a new multi-use evocable. When used, it creates two radius 2 explosions at range 3 that are triple-affected by AC (like LRD), but the explosions are randomly skewed and may hit the user. Most useful for players with good armour. It has a 33% chance to fall apart with each use. It’s a tin of angry earth elementals waiting to explode!
- New Potion of Stabbing that gives a 50% chance to upgrade weak stabs (e.g.distracted monsters) to strong ones (e.g. sleeping monsters). I wonder what this potion would taste like?
- New unrand: Cigotuvi’s Embrace, a +4 leather armour with rN+, rRot and *Drain that automatically gathers corpses to increase AC. The AC decays slowly over time but decays more quickly as more corpses are added. That’s right, the former Cigotuvi’s Embrace spell has returned, but as an unrand!
- Ledas’ Liquefaction gets a boost: the player is now immune to the effects of liquefied ground made by casting it. With this spell, we can all pretend to be a centaur.
- Scrolls of Magic Mapping now reveal any floor traps on the level. Now you can feel the pain of finding of a double-zot-trapped Hall of Zot:5 right after you enter the level!
- The vorpal weapon ego no longer has distinct adjectives for each weapon class. Now all such weapons are described as ‘vorpal’. Vorpality is the new reality.
- Shields have gotten a reskin. Ordinary shields are renamed to kite shields and large shields have been renamed to tower shields. Sword-and-tower sounds cooler than sword-and-board, in my humble opinion.
- Confusing Touch is now level 3 and checks MR instead of monster HD. Additionally, the Confuse spell has been removed. Now there’s exactly one “confuse exactly one thing” spell and it’s not so overpowered.
- Boots of the Assassin are now called the hood of the Assassin and use the headgear slot. Imagine wearing this while quaffing a potion of stabbing and standing next to a distracted Rupert. Nothing personnel, kid.
- The demon blade Leech gains *Rage/+Rage and loses its AC-3 and EV-3 properties. Bloodbane has been removed, having been merged into Leech.
- Warlock’s Mirror can now reflect piercing ranged weapons. Is there anything this little gadget can’t do?!
- God conducts for harming allies now apply to spells and items that place harmful clouds. But don’t worry, demonspawn, your ignite blood mutation won’t anger Oka.
- The Staff of Olgreb now grants poison immunity to monsters wielding it. The gauntlet minotaur can’t wait to try this out when he next finds Olgreb in his loot pile.
- Potions of Agility have been removed. Among the less interesting of the many buff potions that fill our inventories, agility potions have been replaced with the more specialized potions of stabbing.
- Monsters such as spiders can no longer cling. Rest in peace, a myriad of clinging code bugs.
Trunk Updates – 31 March 2020
by
gammafunk
You mumbles some strange words. You chill the trunk update to absolute zero! The trunk update is frozen into a solid block of ice!
Greetings fellow crawlers, it’s time for another Trunk Update. The 0.25 development cycle is slowly winding to a close, but we have some changes for you to try out, with more to come! Expect a release and tournament in the next month or two, barring any unforeseen delays. As always, we’ll make an announcement once we have a date in mind. This update features a couple larger changes we’ll give some extra detail about, along with some smaller updates described further below.
First up is the new L9 Ice spell
Absolute Zero, which replaces the L9 Ice/Conj Glaciate spell. Level 9 spells are tricky to get right since they cost so much XP, yet we want to give players a reason to learn them. We also want these spells to be both distinct from the other L9 spells and relevant to their school; the latter is especially a focus with our spell changes this version. Glaciate fits reasonably into the Ice theme we’ve established, being a “diffuse” AOE spell, but it has too many similarities with Fire Storm yet functions like a worse version of that spell! Where Fire Storm is one of the best ways to kill monsters safely, Glaciate requires close proximity to be effective, and is far less good at blocking monster movement and line-of-fire.
Instead of reworking Glaciate and likely ending up with something similar to Fire Storm, so we went for more distinctiveness with Absolute Zero. This spell kills the closest target, leaving behind an ice block. It chooses randomly among the closest monsters if there’s a tie by distance. This kill is unconditional, so it works on everything from orbs of fire to Cerebov! The positional aspect comes getting the right monsters close enough when multiple monsters are involved, which is usually the case for dangerous fights late in the game. Absolute Zero might feel too cheesy at its max range, which scales with spellpower up to 7. We may reduce the range to a fixed lower value of, say, 5, and have noise scale down with spellpower instead. The latter aspect was in fact part of hellmonk’s original implementation of this spell. Thanks to him for that patch as well as other Discord regulars for discussing the idea.
Next we have a round of
item removals; that’s right, the dreaded r-word! On the chopping block are:
lamp of fire,
sack of spiders,
fan of gales,
crystal ball of energy, and
staff of power. See the links for kate’s brief description of why each item was removed. The crystal ball and staff of power removals won’t surprise many long time crawl players. The former is notoriously useless in most situations and the latter is an annoying swap with an effect duplicated by other equipment. As an aside, we’d like all magical staves to have a good melee effect; see below regarding staves of poison and Olgreb, and look out for similar changes
(or removals!) in the future.
Regarding the other removed items, we want the set of evocables be relevant reasonably often, as distinct as possible, and not too numerous. The fan of gales was an escape item you’d use very infrequently, and this game already provides so many escape consumables, spells, abilities, and god powers. The lamp was a strong item, yet its design was underwhelming, as kate says. Its notorious targeter was awful to use in open spaces, and while it was very good in corridors, we already have an evocable that makes clouds and which is good in both open and closed areas. The sack was a very strong item, like all summoning consumables, but the summons it created aren’t memorable, at least not until getting ghost moths at high evocations. We have a bunch of other consumable items that create interesting summons and that everyone has to carry around as things are. The sack’s net effect might show up on some future item or ability, but not attached to summons.
These removals make the remaining evocables feel more distinct, free up a lot of item slots, and reduce the cognitive load in a game with such a large number of items. Speaking of loadstones, if you’ve been using the new tin of tremorstones and found it underwhelming, have no fear. We’ll be taking a look at these and seeing how they can be improved before release. Now, for the rest of the changes:
- Phial of floods now applies a silencing “waterlogged” debuff to all monsters in the flooded area and no longer summons water elementals. So you can still get those cool silencing debuff on monsters, just without so much accompanying summoning cheese.
- D:1 level spawns can no longer generate within LOS distance of the player’s starting position. A surprising nerf to tiny arrival vaults, to be sure, but a welcome one.
- Potions of Brilliance now only provide a stronger universal spell enhancer and remove spell hunger. They no longer provide an Int bonus nor wizardry.
- Staves of poison now do resistable poison damage on hit like other staves instead of just having a chance to poison.
- The Staff of Olgreb now has a chance to deal poison-arrow flavored damage on hit, based on evocations skill. It no longer has an additional chance to cast Venom Bolt on top of casting OTR when evoked. Once again, I await kills from the Gauntlet minotaur wielding this.
- Potions of Might no longer provide a bonus to strength. Don’t worry, the 1d10 bonus damage remains, and that’s the really good part.
- The Dragonskin Cloak now provides rCorr instead of sticky flame resistance. Waiting for the complaints to roll in from the die-hard rSticky fans.
- The -Tele property no longer appears on artefact weapons and jewellery. Sorry, no more cheesing those Zot traps with your -Tele stick!
- Ziggurats now have a level set featuring many player ghosts. Zig ghosts are back! Accompanying them are a variety of undead assistants. This set replaces the “draining” monster set, since that idea is well covered by this new set and the existing ones.
- Frozen Ramparts has its radius of effect reduced to 2 and its damage was slightly reduced. Even with the removal of the monster slow movement debuff, I found this spell to be too strong, doing lots of damage over huge areas in many situations. With these nerfs, Ramparts feels like it has damage more appropriate to a level 3 spell.
- Many arrival vaults have been reworked to allow better player tactics. After all, tactics are important, or so the wiki guides say.
- All Evocable items can no longer be used by the player while confused. Target fuzzing, be gone!
- Trog now hates use of all magical staves and pain weapons. On the upside, Troglodytes won’t get offered these by scrolls of acquirement!
- Nemelex abilities can no longer be used while silenced. This was a loophole from when decks used to be items. Remember those long gone days?
- Call Imp no longer bases the type of imp summoned on spellpower. Don’t worry, this spell is still really good, crimson imps included!
- The WebTiles server has seen a major overhaul and now supports python 3 as well as Tornado 5+. Thanks to advil, aidanh, and chequers for all their work on this development and testing. More WebTiles updates will be rolled out after testing, with work to come from aidanh on making it easier for us to upgrade server chroots. That way we can have a modern development toolchain on every server.
Trunk Updates 1 May 2020
Hello crawlers. The 0.25 development cycle continues apace. Expect an announcement about a forthcoming release and tournament within the month.
This round of updates comes with an overhaul of the spell miscast system, to couple with the magic overhaul of this version. Miscasts have been thoroughly simplified, to the point that the effect of miscasting a spell can be included in its description! Read on for details and the scoop on the latest from the Iron City.
- Zot traps have had their effect flowchart replaced with an effect table with a more focused list of awful terrible things to do to the player.
- The Wu Jian Council met in executive session and tweaked some of their martial arts. Wall jumps move only to the ‘a’bility menu, movement triggering is no more. Whirlwind attacks no longer pin. Heavenly Storm has had its slaying mechanics simplified.
- With miscasts simplified Xom now finds them boring and has turned their attention to summoning more demons on low level players.
- As a prelude to the miscast changes several gods no longer use miscasts in their retribution. The new wraths are:
- Trog replaces fire miscasts with pure fireballs in her fiery rage.
- Lugonu exchanges translocations miscasts with a chance to banish, summon Abyssal things, or teleport the penitent to nearby monsters.
- Cheibriados replaces miscasts with a chime on their clock before putting the player to sleep at high tension, and stat damage at low tension.
- Fedhas’ elemental damage is now more focused: a corrosive bolt, a primal wave, or a thorn volley await those who would trample the flowers.
- Yredelemnul prefers the simplicity of a bolt of draining to necromancy miscasts.
- Kikubaaqudgha will still impose necromancy miscasts on those who attempt to use necromancy while under penance; for outright retribution they now apply the same ancient and terrible death curses used by mummies.
- The scythe of Curses also replaces necromancy miscasts with death curses.
- The distortion brand no longer teleports on hit; unwielding a distortion weapon has a chance to teleport the unwieldier to nearby monsters, contaminate, or banish.
- Regeneration items (troll armour, artifacts) must attune to a player before granting their effect. No more carrying TLA to swap while resting!
- Mummies have consulted the book of death and determined that necromancy miscasts no longer suit their vengeful needs. Death curses are now their own effect table, separate from miscasts. Kikubaaqudgha was involved as well, and still protects loyal followers from curses.
- New monster: nameless horror. Nameless horrors are brought into the world by summoning miscasts, have an antimagic attack and abjure other summons as a natural ability.
- Absolute Zero has been reduced to a fixed range of 5 (up to 6 with Vehumet), the noise now scales with power down to 0 at maximum power.
- Leda’s Liquefaction regains its slow movement penalty, but the caster remains immune to its effects on melee combat.
- Deflect Missiles has been removed. The tedious-but-optimal armour-wizardy-int dance has danced its last!
- Lesser Beckoning and Teleport Other now turn allies hostile.
- Tukima’s Dance cannot be used by Ru followers who have sacrificed Love.
- Two new Gauntlet maps are live: one presents a sequence of arenas, after each you can chose to press your luck or turn and face the minotaur. The other has a choke point in the sequence: there is only one middle arena in the three-arena-sequence to the minotaur.
- Miscast effects have been simplified. When miscasting a spell, the player receives magical contamination, and if the miscast is bad enough an additional effect that scales with the spell’s current failure chance. These effects vary by school as follows (compare to the old miscast effects, which could you even correctly lists all of them without a source dive?). For damaging effects the damage message is punctuated like other damage messages.
- Charms and Hexes: debuff and slow
- Summoning: durably summon a nameless horror
- Translocation: dimension anchor
- Transmutation: polymorph
- Conjuration: irresistible AC-ignoring damage
- Elemental schools: school flavored damage (Earth magic does fragmentation damage like Lee’s Rapid Destruction).
- Monsters on D:1 are now back asleep, after briefly getting into the coffee.
Trunk Updates 15 May 2020 and tentative 0.25 release tournament info
Hello crawlers and welcome to the last featureful trunk update of the 0.25 cycle. We’re entering into
feature freeze today, the remaining time before the
0.25 Release and Tournament will be devoted to bug fixes, balance tweaks, and polish—as well as implementing a
new tournament scoring system. You can give your feedback on the proposed new system on the tavern. Tentatively the
0.25 Tournament will start on either May 29 or June 5, depending on the implementation of the new scoring system.
So as you oil up those tab keys and clean your monitors, lets look at the very latest round of changes you’ll face in the upcoming release (stay tuned for the full 0.25 changelog!):
- Abyss exits that spawn from earning xp can spawn after the initial spawn, instead of every subsequent spawn being a downstair.
- A few Nemelex cards have changed:
- The Pain card no longer summons flayed ghosts, instead it torments monsters at high power (not the card user, though)
- The cloud card now places vision obscuring black smoke instead of damaging clouds
- Tins of Tremorstones are now an XP charged evocable with 3 charges that scales with evocations and automatically targets the center of all visible monsters. Wands of Scattershot have been removed.
- Several amulet, scarf, and cloak egos have been shuffled or adjusted:
- Gourmand, Harm, and Rage amulets are no more.
- Amulets of reflection now attune at full HP and give +5 SH. Additionally, piety is now properly given for reflected missiles, banishment, and poison damage.
- Scarves of cloud immunity and spirit shield are removed; new scarf egos harm and invisibility are added.
- Invisibility cloaks are no more (you need a scarf for that now!); cloaks can now grant stealth or preservation (corrosion resistance).
- Jewelry with plusses now get constant plus values: strength, intelligence, and dexterity rings give either +6 or -4; protection, evasion, and slaying rings give either +4 or -4.
- Summon Lightning Spire now places the spire on a random square.
- Malign Gateway tentacles can no longer attack out of LOS and appear sooner after casting.
- Scrolls of acquirement are now cancelable, allowing you to fully inspect your character, stash, etc. before making a decision. When you reread the scroll, you’ll get the same choices until you make a final selection.
- Leech is now a (cosmetic) sloppy eater: large hits will sometimes turn monsters into large blood explosions!
- Sceptre of Torment can now be used with spectral weapon. You’d just better be undead unless you want your spectral weapon to torment you!
- An ASCII screenshots section has been added to morgues, and a screenshot is made there every time you take a note with the : key.
- Target acquisition for the Foxfire and Conjure Ball Lightning spells has been improved so they only acquire targets within player LOS.
- Formicids can no longer cast the spell Swiftness.
- The option auto_butcher defaults to true and the option auto_butcher_max_chunks now defaults to 10.
- The option explore_auto_rest now defaults to true.
- Several usability improvements for visually impaired players have been implemented.
