Hi crawlers! It’s been a while, but now that the tournament is over, the 0.16 season has kicked off with a bang. Here’s what’s new so far in trunk!

New god: Ru the Awakened, a new temple god, lord of sacrifice and power! Periodically offers the player a choice of three permanent sacrifices in exchange for piety. All abilities scale with piety; piety never decreases. Leaving Ru incurs no wrath, but leaves all your sacrifices in place (permanently). 1*: Enemies may fail to attack you, or even attack each other or themselves instead. 2*: Enemies that hurt you may be punished with status effects. 3*: Draw Out Power: restore health and mana to yourself, break free of webs and constriction, and cure confusion and petrification. Inflicts minor self-drain and exhaustion. 4*: Power Leap: Blinks you three tiles and deals high AOE damage at your destination. Costs exhaustion. 5*: Apocalypse: Deals very high damage to all monsters in LOS and inflicts statuses. Costs heavy drain and exhaustion.

Monster changes: Mermaids have been renamed to sirens; sirens have been renamed to merfolk avatars. Mimics now cackle and vanish (forever) when discovered. This optimizes their psychological damage potential (PDP). The Serpent of Hell is considerably tougher; it now has three heads which can attack and/or breathe separately, and can also summon (dragon-shaped) backup. Mnoleg now has a pair of tentacles, acting similarly to eldritch tentacles. New monster: elemental wellsprings, appearing in Cocytus. They fire powerful waves of water which produce hostile water elementals – but deplete their own ‘health’ in the process. New monster: bennu, the divine phoenix, appearing in Tomb. Attacks with fire, draining, and holy; when killed, explodes into ghostly flame and instantly returns to life (once). Curse skulls now move – fast!

Completing a ziggurat (by exiting from the top floor, zig:27) makes all subsequent zigs harder. Dare you face the terror of the Megazig?

Ziggurats now only require two runes to enter, instead of three.

A Hall of Blades area (not branch) is now guaranteed on Elf:2.

Demigods now gain one stat of their choice on 2/3 levels (2,3,5,6…26,27), instead of gaining one stat of their choice on every third level and one random stat on every other level.

All species can now choose ‘unarmed’ when playing backgrounds that allow a weapon choice.

Necromutated characters can now memorize spells normally, even ones that undead characters are unable to cast.

Dragon Form now provides a spell power & success chance enhancer for Dragon’s Call.

The captain’s cutlass is now +5 (was +10) and can disarm enemies.

TSO’s Divine Shield no longer benefits from Shields skill.

Zin’s Hell effect protection has been halved; it now caps out at a 50% chance to block the terrors of Hell at max piety, down from 100%.

Zin’s Recite is now more effective at very low Invocations.

A third page has been added to the god description (^) screen, listing causes and effects of divine wrath.

Some effects (Shatter, banishment, etc.) now display animations.

Stealth is now displayed as a bar in the % screen. (The old ‘stealth words’) are still visible with @.)

Monsters no longer appear on the minimap.

The init file now allows you to specify an arbitrary monster tile for your character to be displayed as. Play as the Royal Jelly you always knew you were!

Porcupine-shaped players now have blood.

Happy crawling!