Hi, crawlers! Today is the feature freeze day for 0.19, meaning that it’s all fixes from here until release. Here’s the last batch of major changes:

Gods: Beogh can now enchant, upgrade, and uncurse followers’ ranged weapons. Fedhas appreciates all corpse decay, and automatically rots all corpses when the player leaves a level. The ‘fungal bloom’ toadstool-generating effect is now an (a)bility, rather than a (p)rayer effect. Qazlal’s cloud immunity applies to all clouds, not just the player’s. Qazlal’s Elemental Wrath no longer generates neutral or hostile elementals from neutral or hostile clouds. Jiyva’s Jelly Paralyse ability seems to have mysteriously vanished. In the distance, you hear a contented gurgling. Uskayaw ignores damage-over-time effects (sticky flame, poison, and clouds), instead of only allowing piety gain after turns on which the player performed an attack-like action. The (p)rayer action is gone. Altars are now used with < or >, as with shops and portals.

Items: Monsters that could be butchered for their hides (trolls and most dragons) now, instead, have a chance of leaving behind the armour equivalents instead on death. Dragon armour has been correspondingly renamed to ‘dragon scales’. Spellbook rarity is fixed! For the first time since 0.4. some spellbooks will be less common on earlier dungeon levels; this was intended throughout, but the code was broken. Such an exciting feature that no one noticed it was missing for eight years… Scimitars and great swords are slightly buffed. The Plutonium Sword no longer turns plants into free xp. Manuals of stealth & unarmed combat are no longer twice as common as other types. (That behaviour was added as a hack years ago, when stabbing/traps & doors skills were removed.) Artefact weapons can now generate with Protection or Chaos brands. Amulets of dismissal suddenly vibrated and disappeared – forever.

Monsters: Ushabti Death Rattle now fires miasma, instead of negative energy clouds. Weaker Zot dragons have been replaced with nastier ones. River rats and iguanas have been almost entirely removed from Lair. Hornets and wasps have merged into one monster, roughly averaging their strengths. To avoid confusion, the new monster is called a ‘hornet’. Also it’s yellow. Putrid demonspawn and Chaos Champions have bitten the dust. Blood Saints grabbed the latter’s Call of Chaos. (Pretty rude, IMO…) Also, gelid and infernal demonspawn now have full elemental immunity (to ice/fire respectively), Corrupter’s Corrupt Body (beam-targeted) has been replaced with Corrupting Pulse (fullscreen), and Black Suns lost Malign Offering.

Spells: New spell: Lesser Beckoning (L3 Translocations). Pulls the target adjacent to the caster. Range 2 at power 0, 7 (fullscreen) at power 200. Irresistible… Apportation has been replaced in Warpers’ starting book with Lesser Beckoning; various other spellbooks have been slightly tweaked. Irradiate causes significantly less contamination; it should now be safe for 3-4 uses before entering yellow glow. The Haste spell has been removed.

Another layer of contamination is now displayed, between grey and yellow glow. This should make it easier to tell when you’re close to being dangerously contaminated.

Contamination reduction is now caused specifically by Potions of Cancellation, rather than by all ‘debuffing’ effects.

Player species and forms no longer have hidden ‘stealth factors’. Ogres’, Trolls’, and Centaurs’ stealth aptitudes have decreased by a point each, to compensate, Dithmenos’s Shadow Form now gives an explicit stealth multiplier, and various other stealth effects have been slightly tweaked. Wave goodbye as you leave, Remarkably Stealthy Tree Form…

Trees are renamed and recoloured (in console) during the effects of Awaken Forest.

Bat form no longer prevents quaffing and door use.

Berserk now costs hunger on activation, rather than on expiration. It’s no longer possible to avoid the effects of Berserkitis by remaining Very Hungry.

auto_butcher now functions only when autoexploring, to make it more useful for characters that might want to use corpses (e.g. necromancers or Fedhasites).

The messages_at_top rcfile option should, hopefully, be more useful for people using screenreaders. (It should print messages before printing the rest of the screen; if anyone reading this uses a screenreader, let us know if that helps!)

The orb run’s teleport restrictions (slow teleports, uncontrolled blinks, no Portals of Golubria) now apply throughout the Zot branch.

A large number of vaults have been added and reworked; Volcano, in particular, has been heavily revised, and should be both more dangerous and more potentially rewarding.

Hints mode text has been updated and revised, for the first time in a while.

In the last great convulsion of the Great Renaming of 0.19, greater naga are now nagaraja, and greatslings are fustibali. Great!

Orc wizards should no longer kill the player on turn 20 of D:1.

Skeletonless skeletons will no longer appear in Hell.

Happy crawling!