If you’ve been following the Stonesoup development, you might have noticed the recent shift of activity from longterm development to shortterm bugfixing, as well as a switch of trunk to version 0.9; the reason being the release of 0.8 that is currently slated for April 24.

The recent changes include the incorporation of the unicode branch, which fixes a number of issues with non-ASCII path names etc., bringing Ashenzari up to speed, and the aforementioned gazillions of bug fixes. In a concerted effort of several developers, we’ve managed to close 100+ bug reports on our bug tracker over the last couple of weeks, which is quite a feat, let me tell you. Of course, we wouldn’t have been able to do that if they hadn’t been reported in the first place. So, here’s a large thank you to our diligent reporters! :)

What follows is the list of changes in the 0.8 pre-release branch currently available on CDO (a206725), meaning they’ll be included in the stable release.

Player

Bug fixes

Fix #3676: crashes when butcher delay tries to switch back to empty hands.

Fix #3748: crash when viewing aptitude with CK or Wa selected.

Fix a crash when an aptitude was improved between saves.

Fix #3156, #3709: cloud safety checks getting randomized AC reductions.

Fix #3598: if necessary, update perma-mutation if you gain a mutation.

Fix #2395: Disallow ending forms/levitation if it would cause drowning.

Fix antitraining when opposite skill is nil.

Stop quick actions from letting you search faster.

Don’t avoid glow by cancelling semicontrolled blinks with enter instead of escape.

Fix trying to climb when overloaded taking a turn.

Fix #3801: Don’t consume a turn when trying to go downstairs while levitating.

Fix #3660: canceling DD recharging ability still costing max MP.

Fix #3781: wall clinging not triggering traps.

No stealth bonus from boots if you’re flying or in water.

Fix clinging status not updated properly when switching out of spider form.

Fix #3444: off-by-one error in autopickup_no_burden checks.

Fix #3334: boot of levitation message when melding and not levitating.

Message fix for levitation while clinging.

Other changes for player characters

Disable Arcane Marksmen.

All sources of berserk are blocked at “Very Hungry”. Berserk automatically stops when you hit “Starving”.

Remove experience pool limit; abbreviate the XP pool above 100K.

Replace scroll reading penalty while brainless with 80% failure chance.

A wielded ranged weapon will only “clumsily bash” monsters, no matter its enchantment.

Prompt the player before moving to a deadly cell with an expiring status.

Remove the satiation requirements from evokable invis.

Disable ghost creation/loading in wizard non-debug mode.

Better warning messages for form and levitation expiration.

Special Airstrike message if struck while flying.

Don’t auto-attack toadstools when wielding the Wrath of Trog.

Reduce the spam when butchering with artefacts.

Consistently abort teleportation attempts when wearing stasis or -TELE.

Nerf Felid aptitudes: Fighting/UC: 0 -> -2, Ice/Earth: -1 -> -2, improve Cj: -2 -> -1.

Decrease Felid’s factor for getting hp from Fighting from 1/5 -> 1/8.

Reduce Felid exp modifier from 15 to 16.

Don’t let Felids (auto)quiver anything, hide the Qv line.

Obey no_tele_into when bringing you a new fresh kitty.

Give Ogres an extra +1 hp per level, and +3 apts in Fighting and M&F.

Let Kenku use beak+talons for butchering, like birds they are.

Mention dietary and drinkary habits of mummies on the ‘A’ screen.

Meld all weapons unless you’re in a form that allows wielding.

Don’t consider melding a distortion weapon to be unwielding.

Don’t check inscriptions on melding stuff — you’re not removing them.

Don’t show “it sticks to your hand” on cursed unmeld.

Prevent ice form from picking items at the bottom of deep water.

Disallow wearing hats in spider or ice form.

Allow wearing shields in statue form.

Don’t give Green Dracs poison spit in spider form.

Don’t cling to the wall when levitating.

Clear clinging status when taking stairs.

Don’t drown when transforming into a flying form while clinging.

Allow spider form to scramble out of deep water by clinging to a wall. (#2967)

Allow extending spider form while clinging over dangerous terrain

Set clinging status colour according to the current feature.

Allow wall clinging on closed doors (#3778).

Don’t give Halfling hunters a buckler for free.

Save weapon selection for quarterstaves with new games.

Let player elves have elven gear.

Gods

Ashenzari

Fix #3344: Don’t crash if you.transfer_to_skill somehow is SK_NONE.

Fix #3735: some dropped and useless items being autopickuped.

Don’t crash on old saves in Ashenzari penance.

New Ashenzari passive ability: identify monster equipment with chance boundedness/3.

Ashenzari also warns about monsters’ wands.

Nerf Ashenzari transfer knowledge: double XP penalty (20%), greatly increase piety cost 10 -> 25.

Lower piety gain.

Forbid reskilling from or into Fighting.

Make scrying fail proof and instantaneous.

Ashenzari: scale passive mapping density with piety.

Ashenzari on-sight item identification.

Reskilling: keep the same letters between the from and to menu.

Wrath: Reduces xp gain by 50%.

Allow Ashenzarites to cancel scrolls of remove curse.

Allow Ashenzarites to choose which piece of armour/jewellery to curse.

The good gods: Elyvilon, The Shining One, Zin

Shorten and tweak Elyvilon’s ^! description to fit in an 80×24 screen.

Don’t consume food/mp/piety when trying to pacify invalid targets.

Make TSO non-holy summon extension at most double the current duration.

Zin forbids shapeshifting spells and protects against Kirke’s pig spell.

Fix recite working through walls and squarelosish.

Make recite train more often.

Add a message when you switch from a good god to another good god.

Other gods

No stat boosts during Cheibriados penance.

Fedhas: Don’t blame the player for trees felled by monster-cast tornado.

Reduce the number of corpses from Kiku’s invocation.

Makhleb: Fix Lesser Servant summoning chaos spawn instead of hellwings.

Increase piety cost of Makhleb’s greater servant, since 1s were improved.

Fix Okawaru not accepting kills of holy beings.

Repair Xom’s potion of experience.

When Xom lifesaves you, clear stat_zero penalty.

Let His Xomminess grant you extra xp at level 27 (xp pool).

Don’t let Yred gift Eidolons anymore.

General

No instant divine retribution — many gods are abusable.

Don’t give experience or items for killing monsters from god wrath

Reduce the amount of unrands among god gifts.

Monsters

Bug fixes

Don’t crash on banishing dancing weapons; don’t abyss any kinds of summons.

Fix a crash when the player thinks the monster has a wand but it doesn’t.

Fix #2404: Disallow polymorphing monsters taking the stairs.

Fix #2927: crash when looking up ghosts in the db search.

Fix non-ghost spells not getting loaded.

Fix silence working on demons, orbs of fire, etc.

Fix #3750: coming into view messages ignoring mislead.

Fix shouting monsters not being announced.

Fix resurrected shedu being placed in bad places.

Fix #3718: grey draconians not floundering in deep water.

Don’t give a chance to hit rock worms in walls except in Zotdef.

Fix #3689: dual wielding monsters’ descriptions.

Mimics

Remove trap mimics.

Disable portal mimic generation for 0.8.

Prevent stair mimics from posing as branch stairs.

Don’t place downstairs mimic on branch bottom, and vice versa.

Make door mimics replace actual doors.

Make item mimics appear earlier, reduce both types’ rarity.

Don’t include unknown mimics in beam targetting.

Include item type in item mimics’ names.

Uniques

Disable Terpsichore, she’s not ready for 0.8.

Give Asmodeus a permanent ring of flames, replace greater demon with fire summon, remove bolt of draining.

Dispater: give LCS instead of lightning bolt, remove common demon summon.

Mnoleg: + AF_BLINK/AF_MUTATE attacks, -greater demon, -invis, +summon eyeballs, more hp.

Lom Lobon: give AF_ANTIMAGIC attacks.

Make Antaeus amphibious again.

Make the royal jelly stay on Slime:6.

Give Grinder AF_PAIN attacks instead of a weapon.

Give Pikel a whip of elec instead of pain.

Remove rF+ and rC+ from Nergalle.

Allow Ijyb to get high-tier wands in normal game.

Give Jory Mesmerise (new spell) instead of Cause Fear.

Adjust Roxanne’s casting messages, since she can’t move.

Other monster-related changes

Don’t give experience or items for killing monsters from god wrath or miscasts.

Revert monsters avoiding walking into clouds — the new behaviour was abusable.

Don’t cancel monster travels when player goes out of LoS.

Don’t make a monster at the edge of LOS leave a trail.

No elephants in D and Vaults, slightly reduce their frequency in Lair.

Announce all monsters “coming into view” at once.

Give the non-spellcasting random pan lords (10% chance) a guaranteed melee brand, and a chance of greater speed.

Restore monster speeds for Orb Guardian, Royal Jelly, Fiends, Storm/Golden dragon, Grater Mummy.

Tweak holy monster speeds: phoenix/blessed toe: 10, pearl dragon/shedu: 12.

Improve Cacodemons: -Dig, -Call Imp, +Energy Bolt, +Slow, +Confuse, + 3 levels rPois/Elec, extra attack, more health.

Green Death, Blue Death: remove call imp.

Give Eidola spells: Cause Fear and Pain.

Give giant orange brains Cause Fear instead of Polymorph Other.

Hunger attack takes 25% of your nutrition.

Give clinging to geckos, giant mites, cockroaches and demonic crawlers.

Allow fake rakshasa to use weapons and armour like real ones; don’t hide equipment of Mara and rakshasa.

Rework monster rElec levels.

Set the xp for vanilla orcs to 3.

Remove bears, replace with grizzly or black bears where appropriate.

Boost monster ghouls’ health and damage.

Reduce electric eel accuracy slightly.

Make Fiends and Pit Fiends use regular spells rather than abilities.

Give vampires blood.

Give Ophan high intelligence.

Convert shedu’s main attack to kick instead of claw.

Allow raising trapdoor spider zombies.

Always remove the mold when fungal colony is destroyed.

Add a message for monsters casting Trog’s Hand.

Spells

Bug fixes

Fix #3650: Don’t spend turn/MP when aborting the berserk spell.

Fix placing Fire Storm on a wall.

Don’t allow cancelling out of chain lightning with ally prompts.

Guarantee IOOD placement on tiny levels.

Correct the colour of LRDed glass.

Don’t display a success message when aborting sublimation of blood at full mp.

Books

Remove Summon Hydra from the Book of Summonings.

New spellbook, book of zoology: summon butterflies, sticks to snakes, call canine familiar, ice form, summon ice beast, summon hydra.

Move Silence from the book of Maledictions to War Chants (replaces Haste).

Add IOOD to the book of Power.

Other spell-related changes

Tornado changes for 0.8: pure Air, 80% damage, negative spell enhancer.

Disable Tukima’s Ball as a player spell.

Remove the Stonemail spell.

Allow Sticks to Snakes on javelins, disallow on steel/silver stuff.

Death channel spectral monsters are not abjurable.

Invisibility becomes pure Hex.

Silence becomes Charms/Air.

Brand spells go back to being Charms.

Simplify low spell success adjectives: Merge Cruddy and Bad into Very Poor (now 5-30%).

Make poison clouds all lightgreen.

Apportation targetting: allow cycling with +/-.

Don’t destroy the rest when apporting part of a stack.

Don’t destroy items apported if at the item limit.

Don’t rot while under Death’s Door.

Fix spells being unaffected by antimagic in some cases.

Items

Bug fixes

Fix #2722: crash when accessing a buggy deck’s description.

Fix 2535: “stasis identification check.

Fix scroll of fear not being use-IDed properly.

Fix placeholders in Xom’s book gift names.

Remove nutrition from kills with vampiric weapons.

Fix #3614: wizmode creating “cards” not working.

Fix an out-of-bounds assertion with unknown rings of sustain ability.

Fix #3441: inventory actions occasionally affecting the wrong item.

Fix #3319: Don’t prevent butcher swap with temporary distortion brand.

Fix #3217: equipping sInv artefact not reactivating autopickup.

Fix #3682: Identify brand of vampiric and holy artefact weapons when wielding fail.

Fix throwing nets becoming “stuck” after a monster pushed past another monster trapped in a net.

Prohibit flame-branded missiles from entering trees and wax.

Filter scrolls of (old) paper out of the item knowledge screen.

Cards

New card for decks of Wonder: the Alchemist, transmuting some of your gold into health and magic.

Don’t let high-power common/rare Experience card be better than legendary.

Fill the Potion card effect list with potions that are useful in battle.

Make the Torment and Experience cards a little rarer.

Improve the Hammer card at low power.

Reduce the maximum duration of Pentagram, Dance, Foxfire and Bones cards.

Tweak the weapons created by the Dance card at low power.

Other item-related changes

Remove crystal balls of fixation.

Nerf the speed brand. Damage reduced to 90%.

Reintroduce item stat loss prompts.

Prompt before wearing or wielding a known-cursed item.

Remove misleading messages about weapon str/dex weighting.

Warn when equipping armour with a penalty caused by low strength.

Don’t let the vorpalise weapon effect destroy potions or scrolls.

Correctly mark amulets of controlled flight useless for Kenku above xl5.

Identify rings of sustain ability if they block stat loss completely.

Don’t allow using crystal balls if they are guaranteed to fail.

Don’t corrode ammo by clumsily bashing jellies with it.

Don’t let antimagic work on priests.

Don’t acquire manuals or sage to utterly useless skills.

Make acquiring rods of striking less likely.

Obsidian axe bug fixes. Add +Lev to get across obstacles.

Improve rods of striking: 1d5 -> 1d8.

Make default books ‘:’ again, use different glyphs for detected items on Windows.

The Dungeon

Bug fixes

Fix #218: Place upwards and downwards escape hatches in all isolated Orc bubbles.

Fix returning from portals to Pan clobbering the level.

Don’t place steam near fire out of bounds.

Fix door restrictions being ignored when calculating travel paths.

Make troves handle manuals correctly.

Fix the portal short timeout messages for unnannounced portals.

Fix wizmode-blinking (xm, &b) asserting in the Abyss.

Other level-related changes

No banishment from hell effects.

Don’t enable cTele by quaffing Elf fountains.

Shrink the hall of blades, guarantee a single rare weapon with a brand.

No potion troves for mummies.

Increase the chance of bleeding on walls.

Give troves more loot items again.

Add a note when entering a Pan Lord level.

Let Zot vaults spawn more often.

Don’t block off branches with grates.

A wizmode command (& ^R) to recreate the current level.

ZotDef: no Abyss with Lugonu.

Malign Gateway as a hell effect.

If the Abyss has been wizmode-mapped, update the map on Abyss shifts.

Various glyph changes for features.

Give a message when a Golubria portal on the level closes.

Disable _many_pools in Crypt.

No more darkgrey walls/floors in Geh:7 or Gloorx.

Let Abyss and Pan entrances overwrite vaults to make them truly guaranteed.

Add two new Spider portal vault maps by 7hm.

An awesome Crypt end by evilmike.

Replace Wiglaf with Norris in Sprint 1.

Interface

Bug fixes

Fix a crash when reloading a game after restart_after_game.

Fix #3535: Buggy movement keys for Windows consoles.

Fix #3609: autoexplore stopping with no monster in sight.

Fix multidrop with monsters in sight.

Fix #3709: travel failing to start if standing right next to a cloud.

Fix items not being announced when revealed by opening a door.

Fix #2930: stash search results not being coloured correctly when matching item heaps.

Fix #1184: Limit tagged block display’s lines to screen size.

Fix #3700: sprint map menu offering you to replay tutorial.

Options

Change the explore_stop option to use greedy_pickup_smart by default.

New travel_key_stop option for whether keypresses should interrupt travel/resting.

Default easy_exit_menu to false.

Make all keyhelp menus respect the easy_exit_menu option.

Mantis #1282: Make autopickup_no_burden default to true.

Other interface changes

Stop autoexplore when sensing a previously undetected monster nearby.

New background choice layout, grouped by category.

Autofight: fire at nearest enemy if wielding a ranged weapon.

Don’t ranged autofight through walls/glass/scryed walls.

Don’t start the game if terminal is smaller than 80×24.

Don’t print wielding effect when switching back from butchering.

Display “-) Unavailable” if you cannot wield/quiver anything.

Better error messages for (M)emorisation. (#3665)

Mantis #1839: Treat clearing annotation prompt as “safe”.

Mantis #3727: When placing a single exclusion on part of a gate, exclude all of it.

Mantis #3112: Mention any skeleton vampiric feeding leaves behind.

Tiles

Bug fixes

Fix #3730: inventory crash at some resolutions.

Fix #3772: Don’t crash when pressing odd key combinations.

Fix #3643: kraken simulacra causing crashes in Tiles.

Fix #3764: crash when drawing disconnected tentacle segment tiles.

Fix #3596: Don’t fire at friendly monsters when clicking on them.

Fix #3596: “Unknown command” when mouseclick-travelling.

Fix #3703: pickup by mouseclick on player icon not taking a turn.

Fix #3810: mouseclick movement working during the stat prompt.

Fix manuals being mouseclick-readable while “brainless”.

Fix mouseclick travel internally using the vi keys.

Fix #3255: real staff tiles displayed in the undiscovered items list.

Fix #3356: clearing the map having no effect in Tiles.

Fix #3516: LRD exploding in odd tiles in the Elven Halls.

Partially fix #3358: re-init tile flavour on Abyss shifts.

Make wyvern zombies use the dragon zombie tile.

Upgrade weapon tile when fixing a temp. brand with ?vorpalise weapon.

Fix #3639: Slight tweaks to the player naga tiles.

New/improved tiles

Curio: Ilsuiw, necromancer, wingless Grinder.

Denzi: silver star, pillar of salt, Ashenzari altar, fire bat, Darkness spell, Leda’s Liquefaction spell tile, chardump command tile, arena icon, wingless shadow imp, pressure plate trap.

dolphin: jumping spider, shark.

Omndra: wall blood spatter.

Porkchop: phoenix.

purge: eye of devastation.

XuaXua: glowing mold, death ooze.

Add a tile for liquefied floor.

Use !heal wounds icon (rather than !healing) for the wand of healing.

Apply Tornado’s colour scheme to Tiles, as well.

Remove omndra’s cauldron title screen, not fitting with the rest of them.

Also various documentation updates and description fixes that I won’t bother listing in detail.

As always, bug reports are highly welcome. After all, the stable version 0.8 is at stake. Thanks in advance!