Hi, crawlers! It’s set to be a spooky week. Get ready for some fresh changes… and maybe drop by on the 31st, for a slightly different experience :)

Clouds of draining now work like other sources of draining; they’re reduced by each pip of rN & negated at rN+++, rather than being completely negated by a single pip of rN.

Clouds of miasma now apply the ‘rot’ status, rather than causing rotting directly & immediately.

New tomb monsters! Ushabti, fearsome funerary statues, which breathe a heady mix of draining clouds & miasma, and rumble resoundingly to alert enemies from a great distance. Death scarabs, fast-moving swarming insects. They trail miasma and bite to drain life, speed, and skill, in addition to applying rN-. Anubis guards, living foes that have been conditioned immunity to all forms of pain and torment. They breathe draining, dispel undead, confuse, and howl to reveal your location to other anubis guards.

Chunk changes: All chunks of an edibility type (clean, poisonous, mutagenic…) now merge together, into an undifferentiated meaty slurry. (Also, a single inventory stack.) Rotten chunks are gone; chunks rot away directly. Rotten corpses are likewise gone; corpses rot directly into skeletons. Blood no longer coagulates, but rots away directly. Ghouls now gain as much healing from clean chunks as they previously gained from rotten chunks. (There was surprisingly little difference.) Ghouls now always heal rot when eating chunks. (There was a 75% per-chunk chance, before.) Gods that forbade the player from eating certain types of creatures (that is, the good gods and Beogh) now forbid them from butchering those creatures, instead. Penalties are much steeper. (The old ones were surprisingly trivial!) Effects that spectacularly disintegrate creatures (Orb of Destruction, Disintegrate, etc) do not create any chunks if eating those creatures is forbidden by your god.

Spell miscast effects have been hugely revamped. The summary is as long as the rest of this post, just… read the commit. I’m sorry.

revamped. The summary is as long as the rest of this post, just… read the commit. I’m sorry. All short blades (except for the Captain’s Cutlass) now do piercing damage; this is relevant to short swords and cutlasses. The latter have been renamed to rapiers, being as they no longer cut.

Sense invisibility has been simplified; the range limit has been dropped, and monsters with it now have strict immunity to the ‘blind’ effect (from dazzle, zin, ru), rather than being partially affected. A number of other niche special effects (e.g. better detection of sneaking characters) have also been dropped.

Xtahua’s breath now creates a cloud of flames, like red draconians’.

Tiamat can now be any colour of draconian, except grey.

Mnoleg’s tentacles, so briefly with us, have departed for another realm. Mnoleg now has Malign Gateway again, as well as a new set of excitingly branded melee attacks.

Ashenzari’s clear vision perk now also grants immunity to the negative effects of blurry vision mutations.

All food other than rations, chunks, and royal jellies now takes one turn to eat.

Corrosion is now displayed in the weapon bar as a temporary penalty to weapon enchantment; e.g., with one level of corrosion, a +1 mace would show up as -2 (and red).

Branch tiles have been widely adjusted; in particular, Spider has been recolored significantly.

A wide variety of missing ‘emergency’ spell flags have been reinstated; liches should be significantly less likely to Banish players on sight.

Entering a piety-sacrifice trove while wearing an amulet of faith no longer causes the player to be excommunicated.

Hell beasts no longer slow down when hasted.

Happy crawling!