0.26

Version 0.26: This article may not be up to date for the latest stable release of Crawl.

0.26 is a version of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. It was released on January 8th, 2021.

Highlights

• New species: Palentonga.
• New background: Delver.
• Food and hunger are removed.
• Swamp has many new monsters and other changes.
• Spells, wands, and abilities can be quivered, fired, and autotargeted with an extension of the ranged quiver/autofight interface.

Monsters

• New Swamp monsters:
  • Will-o-the-wisps, unearthly gases that launches powerful Foxfires.
  • Goliath frogs, licking foes from afar with their acidic tongues.
  • Eleionomae, swamp nymphs that travel through and heal from trees.
  • Bloated husks, filled to explosively bursting with putrescent gas.
  • Bunyips, fast-moving, hard-hitting, screaming mysteries.
  • Fenstrider witches, terrifying hex-hurling toxic sorceresses.
• Bog bodies cast much more powerfully and have a stronger cold attack.
• New (?) monster: boulder beetle, rolling quickly to deliver huge hits.
• Insect glyphs have been reorganized.
• Pikel's slaves have been rethemed to lemures. They now disappear upon Pikel's death.
• Spiny Frogs are renamed Cane Toads, for a more authentic Australian experience.
• Pandemonium lords' possible spells and melee flavours have been expanded. They can now sometimes generate a ring of dangerous clouds.
• Monsters' blood scent and web sense have been removed.
• Crocodiles, porcupines, hippogriffs, and hungry ghosts are removed.
• Monsters don't forget about the player while the player is off level.
• Most plants, fungi, and other plant like things that don't attack now wither in 3-5 turns after they're hit. The exceptions are bushes and briars.
• Monsters that formerly had rot-inducing melee attacks now have drain attacks.

Character

• Hunger (and eating) are removed.
• Drain now temporarily reduces max HP instead of skills. Rot no longer exists as a mechanic.
• New species: Palentonga, six-limbed scaled mammals with a rolling charge.
• Deep Elves' Bows aptitude is increased to +3.
• Kobolds now have the Nightstalker 3 mutation, reducing LOS and providing bonus stealth. (Demonspawn can no longer gain Nightstalker.)
• Ghouls heal on kill instead of by eating chunks. They also no longer rot over time.
• Centaurs are removed.
• The Charms skill (and the Skald background) are removed.
• New demonspawn mutations: sharp scales & big brain.
• Transmuters no longer start with arrows, and Wereblood replaces Sticks to Snakes in the starting book.
• The Wizard background is renamed "Hedge Wizard", gaining a dagger and a less int-focused set of starting attributes. The Conjurer background takes Wizards' old attributes.
• The Assassin background is renamed "Brigand".
• New background: Delver, starting on D:5 with a variety of escape tools.
• Artificers now start with better defensive skills, no weapon skill, and a club in place of the short sword and short blade skill.
• Banishing monsters grants full XP.
• Contamination decays three times faster.
• Wanderers have a chance to start with any of the misc evokers.
• Evocations skill no longer grants MaxMP.

Items

• New scarf ego: Shadows. Scarves of shadows reduce line of sight by 1; this stacks with other LOS altering effects; as well as act as a negative spell enhancer.
• New weapon ego: Spectral. The spectral ego appears on giant spiked clubs, quarterstaffs, lajatangs, and two-handed randarts of any base type. On hit the ego spawns a spectral weapon to fight along side the user whose strength scales with Evocations skill.
• New boots ego: Rampaging. Boots of rampaging cause the wearer to take an extra step for no cost---only when moving in the direction of a foe. The rampaging ego can also appear on any kind of artefact armour.
• New misc evocable: Condenser Vane. A condenser vane is an XP-charged evoker that creates clouds around hostile monsters (skipping allies). The cloud quality scales with evocations.
• New item: potion of attraction, which pulls nearby enemies closer.
• Unrandart Changes:
  • The Salamander Hide Armour no longer gives *Rage, it now is a fire spell enhancer with rF++, rC--, flame cloud immunity, and a ring of flame clouds effect.
  • The ratskin cloak is changed from +Rats to *Rats, spawning rats when the player is hit.
  • Wucad Mu no longer provides evocable channeling. Instead, with a chance depending on evocations, it refunds the MP cost of the spell. There is a chance of confusion or intelligence drain (which scales on spell cost and evocations skill) when a spell is refunded.
  • The cloak of the Thief is changed from +Fog to *Fog, creating fog when the player is hit.
  • The Majin-Bo loses Archmagi, and instead gives a chance for any cast spell to be vampiric, healing the caster for damage done to living creatures.
  • The shield of Resistance is now a +2 kite shield {rF++ rC++ MR++}.
  • Glaive of the Guard now has both the spectral weapon and electricity egos. It no longer has sInv nor +Rage.
  • Cloak of Starlight gains *Dazzle, which sometimes dazzles foes like the Dazzling Flash spell on successful dodge. It no longer has rElec and rC+.
  • The Sword of Power is now +5, vorpal, and sometimes fires a powerful but low-accuracy damage beam with a chance based on the player's current HP.
• Phantom mirrors and boxes of beasts now recharge with XP.
• Wands of polymorph now show what monsters might become when targeted.
• Amulets are now slow to equip (like armour), and many amulets no longer have attunement logic. Faith, Regen, and MPRegen retain their swap drawbacks.
• Bardings are merged into a single item type.
• Staves of earth deal higher damage, but with the shrapnel effect of being affected 3 times by AC. Staves of conjuration deal bonus irresistable damage that checks AC.
• The full contents of item piles are revealed on sight.
• Potions of stabbing, wands of clouds, and staves of energy, summoning, and wizardry are removed.

Branches, Environment

• Swamp's levels are now smaller, and many weak monsters no longer appear.
• Crimson and shadow imps are now much less common in the Dungeon. White imps and ufetubi take their place.
• Shadows and wights no longer appear in the Crypt spawn list, replaced with flying skulls, necromancers, and wraiths.
• Spider is now quiet.
• The malevolent force of Zot will find players that tarry far too long in one place.
• Gauntlet monsters now generate awake, and those other than the minotaur don't pick up loot.
• Net traps are now permanent and the nets always mulch.

Spells

• The Charms skill and school have been removed.
• Ozocubu's Armour is now Ice only, Swiftness is now Air only, Death's Door is now Necromancy only and Level 9. Excruciating Wounds is now Necromancy only, prevents unwielding your weapon for the duration, and applies a Wizardry penalty as well as noise.
• Battlesphere is now Conjurations only, and its targeting has been adjusted to work with all Conjurations school spells other than Servitor.
• Song of Slaying is now Transmutations and renamed Wereblood; the noise is reduced somewhat.
• Animate Skeleton and Animate Dead creations now have strength scaling with spellpower; Animate Skeleton has a power cap. Both creations have a shorter lifespan. Additionally, these spells can't be cast if corpses are not nearby.
• Animate Skeleton now animates the nearest skeleton, and does not require you to stand on the corpse.
• Frozen Ramparts has its effect end upon player movement.
• Death Channel spectral things have a shorter duration and fade if Death Channel expires.
• Infestation scarabs have a shorter duration.
• Vampiric Draining's damage is no longer limited by how much it heals.
• Eringya's Toxic Bog now places bogs in all squares within a range of 4 where there is no adjacent solid feature.
• Beastly Appendage now melds helmets and boots, and gives two levels of both Horns and Talons (octopodes keep their tentacle spike) instead of randomly choosing.
• Irradiate now checks monster AC but does slightly more damage.
• Alistair's Intoxication prompts when nothing in view can be affected, always applies Vertigo when successful, and has a higher power cap.
• Conjure Ball Lightning's scaling with spellpower has been simplified.
• Beam spells and wands no longer have their range reduced by hitting things.
• All temporary allies dismiss when you leave the level.
• Translocations miscasts now inflict -Move which prevents walking in addition to translocating.
• Aura of Abjuration, Darkness, Infusion, Recall, Ring of Flames, Shroud of Golubria, Spectral Weapon, Sticks to Snakes, and Summon Butterflies are removed.

Gods

• Gozag no longer gives a free potion petition on worship.
• Nemelex's deck gifting begins at higher piety.
• Nemelex' Shaft card is removed, and the Exile card no longer has a chance to self banish.

Interface

• The "quiver" feature is generalized and can now hold spells, evokables, and abilities. The fire interface can be used to target any quiverable action, and quiverable actions can be autofired via shift+tab/p. Existing autofight ranged settings such as autofight_throw are generalized to handle new quiverables. The ] key swaps between the two most recent quivered actions. See the options guide for more information on new and updated options: autofight_throw, autofight_stop, automagic_stop, fail_severity_to_quiver, launcher_autoquiver, fire_order. See the manual section 4, subsection "Attacking and firing" for a summary of the relevant key bindings.
• Launchers can now be fired independently of the quiver; use v to target (like reaching weapons) or regular autofight commands to autotarget.
• Static targeters are added for spells and abilities that indicate which cells will be affected, along with a new option to configure which of these are shown while casting, force_targeter.
• Player wand damage, spell damage, and spell accuracy is now displayed in the UI.
• Viewing a monster with xv now shows to-hit chance with your current weapon.
• Monsters' spell damage is shown in xv.
• Examining cells with multiple interesting things now gives a selection menu.
• The "view stack/pickup key" ; can be pressed twice to force autopickup even in unsafe situations.
• The ^x view description is now available from all targeting prompts, and when used while targeting lists valid targets in range.
• Any floor can be annotated from anywhere in the ! interface.
• Spellpower is now displayed as a percentage of max spellpower.
• Macro updates: Macros/keybinds can be viewed via the ~ menu in-game. RC file keybind settings support escape codes.
• Updated uption: travel_open_doors now has a setting that tries to avoid opening doors during autotravel.
• New option: travel_one_unsafe_move. Setting this option to true causes auto-travel to make one move towards its goal before conducting the usual safety checks.
• New option: monster_item_view_features. This is a regex list option, features that match patterns on this list will be displayed in the ^x view description.
• New option: always_show_zot. When enabled, the remaining time until Zot finds the player is always shown, rather than when there are only 1500 turns left.
• New options: tile_overlay_col and tile_overlay_alpha_percent control the appearance of the message window in local tiles.

Lua

• Three new hooks, chk_ability_choice, chk_spell_choice, and c_message can be used to answer the ability and spell menu prompts and to react to messages.
• A new api is introduced for targeted fire of spells, items, and abilities as a less brittle alternative to sending keys. See lua functions: crawl.do_targeted_command, spells.cast, item.fire, you.activate_ability, you.quiver_valid, and you.quiver_enabled.
• Other new functions: you.memorise (memorise a spell by name), spells.power_perc (get spellpower for a spell as a percentage)