Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup

Changelog

Highlights

• Beogh, Dithmenos, Yredelemnul, and Makhleb have been substantially revamped.
• Since everybody can become orcs, reworked Mountain Dwarves replace Hill Orcs.
• New species: Coglins, dual-wielding gizmo-inventing goblins in exosuits.
• More new spells, aimed at new school combinations and higher levels.
• Many more new and revamped monsters and decorations throughout the Dungeon.

Artefacts

• New and returning unrands:
  • Returning: Brilliance, an eveningstar of foul flame, which inflicts reduced damage to unholy foes and extra damage to holy foes.
  • Returning: Sword of the Doom Knight, which loses pain brand to instead make its targets lose 10% of their maximum health on hit.
  • New: Charlatan's Orb, an orb which boosts your other skills by 20% of your base Evocations but has the translocations and stealth downside of the real Orb of Zot.
  • New: Gloves of the Gadgeteer, fragile gloves that boost evoker recharge rate, wand damage, and give a chance to save wand charges on use.
• The Cloak of the Thief is now +0, but gives noise suppression instead of random bursts of fog and no longer gives negative slaying.
• Randart MP bonuses and maluses now range from 4 to 12, instead of always being fixed at 9.

Branches, Environment

• Crypt now contains more item rewards throughout its levels.
• Troves no longer ask Draconians to offer dragon scales.
• Ziggurats now scale up their enemy choices and counts up much faster if one dares to dive through multiple ziggurats on the same character.
• All bazaar portals are timed now.
• Quite a few new decorative features have been added to many a vault:
  • Several new types of decorative statue: silver statues, scintillating statues, mystic cages, and magic conduits.
  • A new decorative wall type: bedevilled crystal.
  • Completely-decorative caches of fruits and meat, which may occasionally be snacked upon when walked over.
  • Piles of debris, stony wreckage that crumbles away on a delay after being hit.
  • Sacred lotuses, extremely resilient but entirely harmless plants.
• Miasma clouds deal more damage to monsters and slow them for longer.
• Rain no longer can create deep water.
• Skeletons no longer decay.

Character

• Only players without weapons can punch with their offhand.
• Player constriction no longer deals ramping-up damage.
• Removed mutations: noise dampening.
• Undead and demonic players can wield weapons of holy wrath, but the brand is disabled for them. The same applies to good god-worshipping players who wield weapons of foul flame.
• The player can now be Blinded, which gives them a flat chance to miss with any dodgeable effect that increases with their distance from the target they are aiming at.
  • Wands of Light now Blind the player instead of inflicting Confusion.
• The Frozen status now lasts a bit longer, inflicts a heavier movement penalty, and no longer prevents the player from being hit with Flash Freeze.
• Background changes:
  • Necromancers now start with Soul Splinter instead of Necrotise, as well as a dagger and knowledge of Grave Claw.
  • Hedge Wizards now know Grave Claw instead of Cigotuvi's Dreadful Rot and start with additional Conjurations and Necromancy skill.
  • Wanderers can now start with talismans and Shapeshifting skill, and those that start with throwing items will usually start with more of them. Logic for giving suitable skill levels and items has been improved in multiple cases.

Gods

• Beogh has been completely overhauled, becoming the god of collective pariahs and outcasts. All species may elect to worship Beogh and become orcs when at low HP in front of orc priests. Most abilities are also changed:
  • Orc apostles, scaling throughout the game, will challenge the player with their own followers, unalterable artefact equipment, and potent mystic might. Forfeiting their challenge by leaving the floor inflicts penance, which only dismisses worshippers' followers and disables their invocations.
  • Shortly after defeating apostles, worshippers can recruit up to three apostles to follow them at a time. Beogh now will automatically revive those apostles if they die, but only after the player gains sufficient piety.
  • Other encountered orcs are pacified instead of recruited.
  • Beogh gains a new 5* ability, Blood for Blood. This can only be invoked on top of an orc apostle's corpse, and summons a large amount of orcs both immediately around the player and around the edges of the screen over time.
• Dithmenos has been completely overhauled, becoming the god of actors, thieves, and everyone else who works in the shadows. They no longer count as evil, and have replaced nearly all of their active and passive abilities.
  • 1*: Passive noise dampening, halving all noise made around the player.
  • 2*: A passive shadow mimic, which now casts differing spells based on the spell schools of spells cast to now cover all spell types, deals more damage with weapons scaling to XL, and also lingers around afterwards.
  • 3*: Shadowslip, which instantly swaps worshippers' places with a lingering shadow and misleads foes into targeting the shadow for a while instead.
  • 4*: Aphotic Marionette, which forces an enemy with spells to instantly cast random conjurations at other enemies or give buffs & summons to the player.
  • 5*: Primordial Nightfall, which reduces one's line of sight to zero, with line of sight gradually coming back over the duration.
• Yredelemnul has been significantly overhauled.
  • Yred now uses a somewhat conventional piety system again, though followers have to obey the rules of raising the black torch.
  • Followers of Yred get an umbral aura around them that grows as they gain piety, and zombies are passively animated only in the umbra aura.
  • Yredelemnul grants the following active abilities:
    • 0*: Raise the Black Torch, which enables piety gain, but which can only be used once per floor and only lasts until the player leaves the floor. Starting at 1*, this ability also summons scaling undead allies.
    • 2*: Hurl Torchlight, which mights undead while damaging most others.
    • 4*: Bind Soul, which now temporarily flays the player until the binding is successful and heavily scales the soul's HP with invo.
    • 5*: Fathomless Shackles, which binds a large area centered on the player and damages over time while vampirically draining foes.
    • Removed abilities: Dark Bargain, Drain Life.
• Makhleb has been significantly revamped.
  • Minor and Major Destruction have been merged into a single ability: Unleash Destruction. Earned at 2*, it costs more HP than Major Destruction, but no piety.
  • At 4* the player will receive one of 4 random upgrades to their Unleash Destruction ability. These upgrades, themed after each of the 4 Hells, grant additional effects and elements to your Destruction as well as allow it to pierce enemies.
  • Lesser and Greater Servant have been merged into a single ability: Infernal Servant. Earned at 3*, this costs an amount of piety between Lesser and Greater Servant. Many more types of demons can be summoned by this ability and the quality of demon increases with Invocations skill. It is no longer possible to reduce the chance of a hostile demon, but the player will always receive a friendly one at the same time.
  • At 6*, the player is offered a one-time choice between 3 different Infernal Marks which they may brand themselves with. These Marks grant powerful effects so long as the player continues to worship Makhleb:
    • Mark of Haemoclasm: Gives all slain enemies a chance to explode in a shower of gore upon death. This explosion may cause a chain reaction if it kills something.
    • Mark of the Legion: Replaces Infernal Servant with Infernal Legion, which summons a swarm of lower-level demons over time. You may fire Unleash Destruction freely through these allies.
    • Mark of Carnage: Infernal Servants appear next to enemies instead of the player and arrive in a large explosion of Destruction.
    • Mark of Annihilation: Replaces Infernal Servant with Globe of Annihilation, which fires a slow-moving homing projectile that explodes in a massive blast of hellish Destruction.
    • Mark of the Tyrant: Infernal Servants last much longer and killing enemies will buff them with Haste, Might, Regeneration, or Brilliance. At high Invocations skill, it becomes possible to summon even Hell Sentinels.
    • Mark of the Celebrant: Unleash a flurry of blood arrows at nearby enemies whenever the player falls below 50% of their max HP, but does not recharge until they are fully healed once more.
    • Mark of Execution: Upon killing an enemy in melee, there is a chance to temporarily take on the appearance of an Executioner, gaining a strong auxiliary blade attack and rampage. This effect lasts indefinitely, so long as the player continues attacking.
    • Mark of Atrocity: Both the damage and HP cost of Unleash Destruction now increases with the number of times in a row it is used. Upon the 4th use in a row, a huge barrage of empowered Destruction will be fired at many enemies in sight.
    • Mark of the Fanatic: Gives the player the Vessel of Slaughter ability, temporarily transforming them into a demonic avatar of Makhleb and greatly increasing their power and durability. But when the form ends, they will be forced to fight their way out of the Crucible of Flesh as a cost!
• Xom has received significant adjustments and many new effects.
  • Summoned monsters (both friendly and hostile) now scale with the player's XL, resulting in fewer unfair encounters at low XL and fewer harmless ones at high XL. A much greater variety of creatures can now be summoned.
  • Xom can now transport sufficiently-wealthy players to a curious bazaar where an assortment of spells and consumables Xom finds amusing may be purchased (as well as occasionally a chaos-branded unrand weapon).
  • Many other new Xom effects have been added, such as planting a garden, creating a safe adventurer enclosure, teaching rats how to chant Word of Recall, and summoning a fleet of living Force Lance spells.
  • Xom wrath now causes hostile effects of much greater intensity than those experienced while worshipping.
• Both Beogh and Yred's recall abilities are now instant.
• Jiyva now prevents all harm players could do to all jellies and slimes, instead of punishing them whenever they did so. Fedhas now also prevents players from doing harm to friendly plants.
• Nemelex is now a chaotic (but not evil) god.
• Okawaru's Duel now heals the player for half their missing health when used, but resets their HP and MP back to whatever they were before entering, once the duel is complete. It costs half as much piety and is now usable in Sprint.
• Qazlal's Upheaval and Disaster Area no longer hit the player nor any of their elemental allies.
• Cheibriados' Step From Time ability is now significantly more likely to result in monsters wandering away from the player's location, and monsters can no longer act before the player takes a subsequent action.
• Kikubaaqudgha's Torment ability has been replaced with Sign of Ruin, which applies a temporary status effect to a group of enemies that causes them to suffer Draining and also one of Weak, Blind, or Slow whenever they take melee damage.
• Vehumet's range extension now applies to Hailstorm, Frozen Ramparts, Eringya's Toxic Bog, and any eligible spells cast by the player's Spellforged Servitor.
• Vehumet's second spell gift is now level 2-3 instead of 1-2.
• The Shining One's Divine Shield ability has been reworked. It now provides a 100% block chance for the next several attacks after using it. Ranged projectiles will be reflected and melee attackers have a high chance to become blinded.
• Makhleb, Vehumet, and the Shining One are now much more likely to restore HP or MP on eligible kills made while at low piety.
• Trog's Brothers in Arms ability no longer costs extra piety in Sprint.
• Most gods now comment upon or otherwise influence the player's death.

Interface and Options

• Examining a monster with 'xv' now displays more accurate and detailed information about a monster's damage (especially with weapons) and your chance to hit them.

Items

• New evoker: Gell's Gravitambourine, which pulls all monsters in a large radius close together and then binds them in place for several turns.
• Dispersal darts are now much more likely to blink their targets away from the thrower.
• Condenser vanes now reroll misery clouds if the good gods would block their creation, rather than placing nothing as a result.
• Randart launchers can now generate with Chaos or Holy brands.

Lua

• A new crawl.stack() function that returns a backtrace string for either the current lua execution stack or that of a coroutine given as an argument.

Monsters

• Uniques:

  • Revamped: Arachne has been exiled out of the Spider Nest, now appearing a bit later in games without Spider's Nest, with a Greater Ensnare spell and an orb spider band.
  • Revamped: Blork the orc is now Blorkula the Orcula, both vampire and orc. He now casts a wider spread of conjurations and can delay death by becoming a rainbow swarm of vampire bats.
  • Revamped: Wiglaf has returned, gaining a randart hat, and dropping Okawaru invocations of Haste for Hellfire Mortar.
  • New: Xak'krixis, a formicid Royal Expeditionary Alchemist, found solely in the Spider Nest. They have Ignite Poison and a version of Fulminant Prism that doesn't hurt allies.
  • Reflavoured: Nergalle is now an archivist, and Ijyb is now an ex-Coglin artificer.

• New monsters:

  • Marrowcudas, early-D skeleton fish that summon swarms of themselves whenever they hit foes.
  • Obsidian bats, Orcish Mines stone bats which summon demonic animals whenever they hit foes.
  • Polterguardians, Vaults geists that give their allies Repel Missiles.
  • Scrub nettles, which fire partially-irresistible poison stings.
  • Thermic dynamos, Elven Halls vortex-engines that wield both hits and rebounding bolts of fire and ice.
  • Undying armouries, late Vaults terrors that hurl dancing weapons and grant temporary copies of the same weapon to their allies.

• Other monster changes:

  • Arcanists now cast Searing Ray instead of Force Lance.
  • Crystal guardians and crystal echidnas no longer fire rebounding bolts of fire or ice, and instead have crystallizing shots that inflict Vitrify.
  • Deep elf elementalists cast Hoarfrost Cannonade instead of Freezing Cloud.
  • Deep elf high priests give a long duration brilliance buff to every ally in their sight, rather than using an aura of brilliance.
  • Demonspawn Black Suns have been renamed to Soul Scholars and their Black Mark spell has been replaced with Sign of Ruin (which functions like the new Kikubaaqudgha invocation).
  • Demonspawn corrupters now summon thunderhulks instead of vault sentinels.
  • Draconian monster adjustments: yellow draconians have acidic bites, white draconians have more damaging breath, and stormcallers no longer are hurt by their own Upheavals.
  • Glowing orange brains are now reluctant to move closer to their foes and having an innate aura of brilliance affecting their allies.
  • Guardian serpents and draconian shifters' Blink Allies Encircling now blinks over 3 to 6 allies as is possible, instead of always 8.
  • Hell beasts have become sin beasts, gaining HD and antimagic attacks. Geryon's (hell -> sin) beast summoning has been weakened in exchange.
  • Monster shadows are now called shadowghasts.
  • Necrophages are weaker and now only appear from Yred's summonings.
  • Norris now casts Draining Gaze instead of Brain Bite.
  • Ophanim now passively irresistibly inflict Mark on all those they see.
  • Worldbinders now summon ironbound frosthearts instead of thunderhulks and their summons have a longer duration.
  • The Serpent of Hell has been adjusted to have more appropriate breath attacks in Dis, Gehenna, and Tartarus.

• Monster constriction is now more difficult to escape via moving, but blinks now always work as an escape.

• Monster repel missiles now acts as a flat +15 effective EV against projectiles, rather than scaling heavily to the monster's own EV.

• Player ghosts now can cast many additional low-level and mid-level spells.

• Monsters put to sleep through effects like Ensorcelled Hibernation cannot be woken by any means until after the player's next action.

• Removed monsters: burning bushes, lorocyprocas.

Species

• New species: Coglins, goblins in mechanical exoskeletons. Features:
  • Their exoskeletons allow them to dual wield, but innately take a few swings to rev up to normal damage.
  • They can't wear jewellery, but at XL 14 they can choose to invent one of three gizmos that passively provide resists and unique benefits.
• Returning species: Since all species can become orcs, Hill Orcs swap out with Mountain Dwarves, with similar but less skewed apts and stats. New features:
  • They ignore half of the spellcasting penalty heavy armour would inflict.
  • They can enchant randart equipment up to the base equipment's default enchantment maximum.
• Draconian breaths have been revamped: most effects have been replaced for much stronger and flashier effects, but now use a limited number of charges refilled by gaining experience instead of coming back on a breath timer.
  • Red draconians breathe penetrating bolts that explode on each hit.
  • White draconians breathe high-damage penetrating bolts that turn defeated foes into blocks of ice.
  • Black draconians breathe projectiles that chain in a connected group.
  • Grey draconians now have mud immunity and breathe large mud blasts.
  • Green breathe now get additional noxious clouds alongside the main path.
  • Yellow draconians breathe a penetrating bolt that leaves acidic clouds.
  • Purple draconians breathe an explosion of both dispelling and antimagic.
  • Pale draconians now deal fairly more impact damage with their steam breath.
• Deep Elves now regenerate MP more rapidly and their Air Magic apt has been raised from 0 to +1.
• Formicid Translocations apt raised from -1 to +2.
• New Demonspawn mutation: Foul Shadow, which wreathes the player in umbra to reduce monster accuracy and increases stealth, and also burns attackers in melee range with foul flame.

Spells

• New spells:
  • Soul Splinter (L1 Necro): Force a tiny fragment of an enemy's soul from their body, weakening them and creating a short-lived soul wisp ally.
  • Grave Claw (L2 Necro): Skewers an enemy on shards of bone, dealing unavoidable damage and briefly preventing them from moving. It uses the malice of the recently dead as ammunition and can only be recharged by slaying living beings.
  • Maxwell's Portable Piledriver (L3 Tloc): Grabs an adjacent foe and hurls both you and it forward, inflicting damage if they collide with something solid in the process.
  • Cigotuvi's Putrefaction (L4 Necro / Air): Causes a heavily wounded living monster to spew a large amount of miasma clouds over several turns, but drains the caster.
  • Hoarfrost Cannonade (L5 Ice / Alch): Summons two transient icy cannons that deal damage, slow down movement, and eventually (safely) explode.
  • Gell's Gavotte (L6 Tloc): Pulls the player and everybody else in sight four tiles in a chosen direction, damaging those flung into solid objects.
  • Permafrost Eruption (L6 Ice / Earth): Creates an explosion of rock and ice on top of the densest cluster of enemies in sight.
  • Hellfire Mortar (L7 Fire / Earth): Temporarily digs out a river of lava, then deploys an auto-firing magma cannon to float down that river.
  • Magnavolt (L7 Air / Earth): Magnetises enemies, making them lose all EV and drop magnetised vortices on death, then zaps every magnetised foe in sight.
  • Rimeblight (L7 Ice / Necro): Inflicts a plague on enemies that spreads through icy explosions, which can instantly kill foes at low health.
  • Fulsome Fusillade (L8 Conj / Alch): Rains reagent explosions of random elements on top of random foes, inflicting random debuffs if they overlap.
• Teleport Other now tries to teleport affected monsters out of the caster's sight.
• Players with Spellforged Servitor memorised now get an Imbue Servitor ability that allows you to choose which compatible spell the servitor will cast.
• Manifold Assault has moved from L4 to L7, no longer misses its strikes, and hits 4 to 12 foes at once instead of 2 to 4.
• Blazeheart Golem now scales properly with spellpower.
• Polar Vortex no longer damages enemies outside the player's line-of-sight.
• Animated Armours now gain the resists from their armour base type.
• The Dryad created by Summon Forest now avoids moving towards hostile monsters.
• Removed spells: Necrotise, Cigotuvi's Dreadful Rot, Gell's Gravitas.

Tiles and Other Art

• New tiles for existing game elements:
  • Dozens of monster-only spells.
  • Dozens of mutation icons.
  • Several monster-specific metal spell effects.
  • The Alchemist starting screen icon.
  • Boulders from Brom's Barrelling Boulder.
  • Box of beasts & the tin of tremorstones (now with inert and usable splits).
  • Calcifying dust clouds.
  • Call Canine Familiar's spell icon.
  • Crystal walls in Zot.
  • Formless jellyfish.
  • Jiyva's altar.
  • Yred's Recall tile.

Anyone already played this release/trunk and can report their highlights? 🙂

Not sure how this is calculated but it threw me off for a second :)

After having not played for about 10 years, I went and did a few runs of my old reliable, gargoyle fighter, with a couple runs going to 5 runes before my discipline failed them. What are some fun new combos to try out? I used to enjoy high elves sword&sorcery but I see that this race is gone, anything that would fill that kind of fantasy?

Of course, I'm playing a race that can't wear them. 🙂

Recently gave Hill Orcs more of a chance and realized, they're quite cool. Any others I should be looking at?

Probably since 0.30, the imp summoned by "Call Imp" now has a spear to poke enemies from behind you. The imp also doesn't blink around anymore.

Personal highlights:

Many monsters (boulder beetles, two-headed ogres, various orcs…) do less damage.

Been surprised by how hard these hit many times. 🙃

Bumping a foe while holding a ranged weapon now automatically shoots instead of asking if you want to hit the foe over the head with your bow.

Makes playing purely-ranged characters a lot less annoying.

When worshipping at a faded altar, the player is given a preview of three gods the altar might belong to.

So far, it felt 'optimal' to always gamble and just throw away a character when you get a bad god. Now it feels a lot more like an actual decision.

They can fly, but they'd rather not do it over land. Apparently.

Noticed on Trunk that Sandblast doesn't need stones anymore and figured I should do a serious run with a GrEE. Of course, now the game gives me lots of stones...