Hi, crawlers! Here’s the latest changes from trunk:

It’s now possible to make progress through the Abyss via murder. Killing monsters will eventually generate an exit from the Abyss; further kills will generate stairs down, if you’re looking to fetch the abyssal rune before leaving. The speed at which this occurs depends on the XP value of the monsters killed and on your current level, so a single kill at very low level will often generate an exit.

Large abominations have some extremely cool new tiles, thanks to CanOfWorms. Check them out the next time you take an Abyssal jaunt!

Hellfire is now Damnation. It no longer melts ice armour or triggers Dith’s fire conduct, but is otherwise unchanged.

Explosions can now ignite trees; Fireball, for example, can now ignite trees with its explosion, not just with the center of the fireball itself. The Rod of Ignition can also now burn trees.

New option: autofight_warning, disabling autofight (tab) if successive commands are received too quickly. Should be helpful in cases of lag or accident.

Monsters should be less likely to ‘flip-flop’ between emerging from behind a corner to take pot-shots at the player & retreating back behind that corner.

Ally AI will no longer lock up when ordered to attack a monster that’s invisible to them.

D:1 gnolls no longer have a chance of spawning with a pile of throwing nets.

The ‘roused’ and ‘battle-frenzied’ monster status effects have been removed and replaced with Might. This is mainly a simplification and should have relatively little impact on gameplay, with the possible exception of spriggan druids’ death effect; the latter’s duration has been shortened to partially compensate.

Status effect descriptions have been moved from the manual to an in-game lookup tool, ?/s(T)atus. Existing descriptions have been reworded & clarified, and more have been added.

To reduce visual clutter, the tile_show_demon_tier option is now off by default, meaning that demon tiles no longer have pentagrams added.

Tar:7 should be somewhat more threatening to any character who worries about packs of shadow fiends.

Zot:5 no longer has a 1/3 chance of spawning extra-huge numbers of traps.

Some of the easier wizlabs have been buffed; the Cloud Mage has a nastier spellset and more friends, and Cigotuvi’s Monster is now a mutant beast, not a tentacled monstrosity.

Maxwell’s Etheric Cage now multiplies received magical contamination, rather than intermittently generating chunks of contamination.

Ongoing spell effects (r/dMsl, delayed fireball) are now removed after forgetting the spell.

Tukima’s Dance’s power multiplier has been reduced.

Player breath weapon ranges have been belatedly adjusted for squarelos.

Ru’s Sacrifice Courage now gives a penalty to slaying, rather than giving a bonus to damage.

It is no longer possible to use Pakellas to supercharge non-evocables. Relatedly, you can no longer create +72 clubs.

It is no longer possible to unequip a Fragile item without destroying it. (By putting it in your quiver and tossing it away.)

Happy crawling!