We’ve issued a new stable version of DCSS that contains an important fix for a bug affecting version 0.16.0 where all melee damage done by the player is approximately doubled. This bug only affects player melee, not ranged or spells, and doesn’t affect monster damage at all. It has a dramatic effect on game balance, so it’s strongly recommended that all 0.16.0 users upgrade. All operating systems have 0.16.1 binaries available on the download page above.

When this bug was discovered, the development team decided (after some deliberation) that it’d be better to fix it immediately, since otherwise many would choose to stop playing online until it was fixed. Nearly all online games played during the 0.16 tournament were affected up until the fix, namely any game played from version 0.16.0 to version 0.16.0-17-g811c1d7. The fix in version 0.16.0-18-g484a79e was made on Sun, 22 Mar 14:24 UTC, however server updates took some time, and not every server was able to be updated at the same time.

For any completed game, the morgue file shows the exact crawl version played at the top of the file (these morgues are linked to on the player tournament pages). Note that this is only the version when the game ended, and some games were played in-part with the affected versions but transferred to a fixed later version. This bug likewise affected online trunk games played from versions 0.17-a0-22-ge0bdd66 to 0.17-a0-123-gf2c12c4. There’s no plan to change anything relative to the tournament (including scoring) now that the bug is fixed.

In addition to this bugfix, here are the other changes:

Fix a bug in sprint where controlled blink was blocked as if from the stasis effect.

Artefacts with the Contam property are no longer marked as chaotic and hence hated by Zin, since Zin wouldn’t give penance for using e.g. weapons with this property anyhow. There’s now a warning under Zin when Contam items are removed, since this does incur penance.

Monsters no longer avoid walking on shadow traps.

Fix the build for the Android port of DCSS.

For the debian version, build against less recent dependencies to support a wider range of OS.

Other minor bugfixes.

NOTE: the developer who introduced this bug has gone AWOL, and we’re trying to track him down. If you see this person, please report him to your nearest centuryplayer. Do not approach him, as he is bugged and extremely winscumming.