0.21

Version 0.21: This article may not be up to date for the latest stable release of Crawl.

0.21 is a version of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. It was released on January 5, 2018.

Highlights

The rate at which unique Pan lord levels appear in Pandemonium is increased.
Transporters now have a 'landing site' that indicates their destination.
The Hellbinder and Cloud Mage Wizlabs have been revamped to give greater and more varied challenges as well as improved loot.

New species: Gnolls, with extremely high aptitudes for all skills, but an inability to focus: Gnolls always train all skills equally, regardless of whether they have the requisite items or spells.
Ogres now have better aptitudes in short blades, long blades, and axes.

New (temple) god: Wu Jian Council
- Grants free 'martial' attacks from certain movement actions:
  - 0*: Moving toward an enemy triggers 'Lunge', which attacks the enemy and does extra damage.
  - 1*: Moving between tiles adjacent to a monster triggers 'Whirlwind', which attacks all adjacent foes and 'pins' them, preventing one turn of movement.
  - 2*: Moving against solid obstacles triggers a two-turn Wall Jump, moving two tiles in the opposite direction and attacking any adjacent enemies. This ability can also be triggered via an (a)bility, and the movement- based mode can be disabled using `wall_jump_move = false` in your rc file for more careful play.
  - 3*: Active 'Serpent's Lash' ability, granting two free movement actions, of which any martial actions will never miss.
  - 5*: Active 'Heavenly Storm' ability, creating opaque clouds and increasing your martial prowess while you continue to use 'martial' attacks.
  - Piety is gained through defeating foes.
Gozag Potion Petition no longer offers haste/berserk potions for species that can't haste/berserk.
Zin blocks 100% of mutations at 6* piety. At that piety level, potions of mutation now only remove mutations and don't cause piety loss.
Zin no longer has a mutation removal one-time ability at 6* piety.
Makhleb's Minor Destruction has slightly lowered range, and Makhleb's Major Destruction has slightly increased range.

Players can now set training targets for skills.
- Press = on the skill screen, select a skill, and enter a skill level.
- Training of that skill is disabled when it reaches the specified level.
Water species except for merfolk autoexplore/travel through shallow water.
Diagonal shift-running now stops properly at doors.
Draconian players now show their hat tiles in Tiles/WebTiles.
New 'tc_forbidden' RC option to set color of squares forbidden by travel.
New xp_by_level morgue table to track XP sources on a per-level basis.
New -force-map objstat/mapstat option to always place a given map on each level.
New objstat fields for tracking monster numbers/XP from vaults.
Many new tiles for artefact weapons and monsters.

Wands of the same type merge charges upon pickup and wands have no cap on charges.
Wands identify charges upon pickup and are destroyed when their last charge is used.
Items in a doorways no longer prevent closing doors in most instances.
- Items get pushed out of the doorway when the player closes the door.
- Doors refuse to close only if the items would fall into deep water or lava.
Potions of mutations remove fewer mutations on average and are a bit rarer.
Fan of gales now disperses clouds at the user's location.
Un-equipping an item currently giving you invisibility now gives extra contamination.
Lightning rods XP-recharge even when only partially used and only grant a power bonus for shots over consecutive turns.
Scarves are never made as artefacts.
Wands of random effects include malmutate in the set of possible effects.
Permanent food has been simplified.
- Rations are now the only type of permanent food, replacing bread and meat rations, fruit, and royal jelly.
- Ration item generation and well as the herbivore and carnivore mutations have been balanced to keep available nutrition the same as before.
- Fedhas abilities that formerly required a piece of fruit instead require two rations.
Removed:
- Wands of confusion and lightning.
- Scrolls of recharging.
- Mutagenic chunks.

Monsters no longer spawn after level-generation in most places.
- This also eliminates the "super OOD" timer that could generate exceptionally hard monsters after a long time on the level.
- The number of monsters created during level generation is increased slightly to compensate.
- Pandemonium and Abyss are unaffected by this change.
A fraction of the monsters generated with a level are created awake, but never near stairs.
Air elementals now have a Vortex ability, which creates a short-range, short-duration tornado effect.
Player ghosts have normal speed regardless of species, never have a chaos ego on their melee attack, and no longer generate in portal branches.
Pandemonium lords can no longer have the Shatter spell.

New spell: Borgnjor's Vile Clutch (L5 Necromancy/Earth); calls forth undead hands from the earth over a smite-targeted area to constrict hostile monsters. Appears in the Necromancer starting book, the book of Unlife, and the book of Dreams.
Shatter's damage has been simplified to use one of three dice values for susceptibility, and can now slightly damage insubstantial monsters. Intrinsic player/monster susceptibility takes precedence for damage over flight status.
Lee's Rapid Deconstruction now gives each material type a fixed explosion damage and size that doesn't increase when a wall is destroyed.
Removed:
- Control Undead.
- Cigotuvi's Embrace.