Hi, crawlers! Hope everyone’s been enjoying the holiday season as much as we have. Here’s the latest, most festive changes from trunk:

Characters: Whisper ‘Farewell’ when you leave, Legolas: High Elves are no more. (This is, of course, part of the crawl dev team’s newly “straight edge” lifestyle.) Ogres’ apts have been adjusted: their Maces and Flails apt has been lowered, and in compensation, their spellcasting skills have been increased to -1 across the board. Deep Dwarves’ wand recharge ability has been replaced with a self-healing ability that has a chance of decreasing their max MP whenever it’s used. Mummies’ Spellcasting apts are now +2; formerly -1. The demonspawn Augmentation effect is 25% less dramatic.

Items: To avoid miskeys, the letter keys can no longer be used to wield or throw useless items unless the * key (‘display all’) has been pressed first. Breadswingers can rest easy, as other selection techniques, e.g. {@w1}, are unchanged. Wands of heal wounds, teleportation, and hasting have discharged their last zap. They’re removed. We removed them. Hence: no more zapping. Wand and misc acquirement have been merged into one category, ‘evocables’. Nemelex wrath reclaims all decks, instead of merely sabotaging them.

Monsters: Hill giants and two-headed ogres have merged into one big two-headed monster. (I’m not sure what happened to the third head.) ‘Hill giants’ will be seen no more, and two-headed ogres take their place, becoming significantly nastier in the process. Monsters should no longer, very rarely, appear to be random strange colours in console. This bug was first reported at least three years ago; thanks to johnny0 for finally figuring it out and creating a fix! Monster white draconian breath can now be resisted by AC.

Per popular demand, Sandblast now consumes stones directly from the inventory. As part of the change, it no longer functions without ammo, and large rocks can’t be used at all. (Earth Elementalists get more stones to compensate.)

Slime:$’s walls no longer collapse entirely when TRJ is slain; instead, only newly-added transparent sections will be destroyed. It seemed a bit too mean to take out the entire thing, even for us.

In the spirit of helping new players, the autofight_stop default is now 50, up from 30.

For the first time in nearly two years, acquirement and god gifts can now produce helmets. Oops.

Followers of the Shining One can now summon golden dragons.

Trees will appear angry, when appropriate.

You can no longer rest while on fire.

You can no longer learn spells that no longer exist.

Happy crawling, and a happy new year in advance! Here’s to many more.

(P.S.: take the survey!)