My minions,

Finally the day of 1.6 has come, well, it's only beta but still, beta has come! ;)

You'll find all the downloads on https://te4.org/beta-test

Please, try to keep all bug reportings on ToME's official forums at http://forums.te4.org/ as it is hardly feasible for me to survey 10 different location for bugs.

The current DLCs will still work in 1.6 so you can test with those but they will each get a small update at the same time as the final 1.6 release to update how they process melee talents to be inline with the new 1.6 way.

Please do note this is *not* by any stretch of the imagination a full changelog. The 1.6 release contains so many changes and updates that it'd turn me mad organizing them into a semblance of changelog and it'd turn you mad reading it all.

The original unabridged log is about 3500 lines long.

One last thing for those new to betas; characters will NEVER validate in beta; that's normal and as usual importing characters across major releases is bound to not work all too well.

When a yeek exits the tunnels to the halfling complex and sees subject Z; a warning comes up from the wayist, urging you to flee

When a shader is missing, it'll use a default fallback (prevents loading game with missing DLCs/addons)

Classic UI can now cancel buffs by right-click

Load quickhotkeys prior to loading the game to fix hotkey ordering for "restart the same character".

Greatly revised celestial positive spells and a few negative ones

Disable fatigue for positive and negative energy

Updated/rebalanced some NPCs

Revised Defilers

Added an UI option to sharpen the map display, as requested by some

Removed max level on all fixed artifacts. Material level already restrains them. This prevents some artifacts being near un-obtainable on higher difficulties

Fixed an issue preventing users with a too long password from login in. Woops sorry :/

Cunning techniques revisions

Greatly revised Summoners

Buff Giant Leap

Improve Elemental Surge

Significantly revise 2H Assault

Fix NPCs shoving the player

Teleports now immediately maximize the AI's guess spread on your current location

Ethereal Form uses highest of Dex or Mag for its defense bonus

Rebalance Elemental Harmony

Revise many artifacts, egos, randarts and items

Revise Arcane Blade's Enhancement tree

Reduce Arcane Destruction damage and fix type to Arcane

Fix Glove display

Fix Adept causing infinite talent levels

Sustains will not disable at 0 Stamina or Mana anymore, as it is cumbersome and is easily prevented with a little regen anyway

Fix Slings not having a base speed

Add stairs up to Dark Crypt

Fix Elemental Harmony allowing self damage

Allow respeccing out of combat

Add a talent autouse for being out of combat

Multiple updates to combat damage log

Fix light radius letting Players (but not NPCs) see beyond their max vision radius

Resize and reposition how charges are displayed on effects

Several talents that move the player would not function at all or would behave unusually if auto-accept target was enabled.

Greatly revised inscriptions (runes & infusions)

Greatly revised the early game combat to make melee start less painful

Revise accuracy bonuses to have more impact and nicer breakpoints

Revise shield/glove combat table tooltips

Born into magic now actually gives 20% inc dam as advertised(up from 15%)

Change Stone Vines' and Rockswallow's damage to Nature and removed speed malus from Stone Vines

Revise some racial talents

Round most talent masteries to 0.0 or 0.3

Add many, many base character visual customisation options (beards, hairs, skin color, tatoo and so on)

Implement support for cosmetic & "useless fun" microtransactions

Revise Scoundrel and add it to the Rogue escort

Redesign the Vim resource (no more ability refund; Vim regeneration on any kill scales faster with Willpower and now also scales with target rank; Bloodcasting is now baselined in the resource allowing you to pay Vim costs with 200% of the cost as life)

Added an UI option to sharpen the map display

Fixed a bug preventing steamsaw/guns from generating as egos for randbosses (amongst other things) (yes fear the gunsnakes!)

Small revisions to Archmage

Update Worldly Knowledge to only include most of the currently available escort/quest trees

Remove defense penalty from block

Miscelanous revisions to many talents

Revise Antimagic

Major AI update, smarter, better, maybe faster

Fixed several screenshot issues

Randomly generated humanoid npcs now use the same cosmetic features available to players, randomly

Simplify SDL gamma calculation and restore default gamma on exit.

Levelup dialog shows variable parts of talent descriptions (like numbers that go up as you levelup) in green even at talent levels 0 and 5, to better see which values will evolve

Revision of Fears

Add a bonus to stealth rating for Armor of Shadows

Revise shops

Revise fixed bosses, now they can better levelup and learn new tricks too

Revise Wyrmics

Revise Afflicted

New scriptable map generator along with a variety of combinable algorithms for it

Revise Stealth

Revise Shadowblade

Ban Dreamscape entirely from NPC use

Modules Markers, IMPORTANT: Removed unpausing the game when using energy in engine.Actor:useEnergy as this was badly misplaced, instead superload useEnergy inside your own player class to do it, look at example's module Player class for how to

Tilemaps can be scaled, fliped, rotated; new Maze tilemap; Heightmap & Noise tilemaps can be normalized

Revise Prodigies

To celebrate nearly 10 years of ToME, a new awesomely drawn custom player tile that comes from the very early days of the game

Stun: Cooldown lock changed to half, damage reduction changed to 50%

Confusion: Interaction with confusion immunity removed

Increase the spawn level of the Melinda event to 30

Increase resting rate dramatically

Add 1 regen to Alchemist golem to reduce resting tedium

Remove Munitions from Archer and re-add Poisons

Remove useless trees from some classes

Remove melee retaliation from many NPCs

Zigur is now always present on the map but forbids entry to any magic user.

Various visual improvements

Updated the way NPCs (randbosses) are assigned character classes

Object requirements can now be any random flag of the wearer

High Peak levels become smaller towards the end (but keep the same number of foes inside)

Increased foes density in the Prides

Escort quests will now spawn in the Infinite Dungeon (between levels 5 and 40)

Fixed some Infinite Dungeon challenges

Nerfed patrols a bit

Revise Ghouls

Nerf life leech stacking

Can send talent links in the chat from the talent's right click menu or in the levelup dialog by pressing ctrl+l

Revise shops system

More Mummies! Rejoice!

Revise saves (saves against effects, not savefile!)

Revise archers

*NUMEROUS* fixes and updates to a ton of things (can I be more vague? probably but it'll be hard ;) )

A huge thanks to all those contributed to help make this release the biggest release ever!