0.6.0-beta1

These are the changes since the preview release, 0.6.0-pre.

For the full list of changes since the last public release please consult the changelog in the repository.

New things to do

• Noberik has a cellar problem: the small town's armourer asks you to clear whatever nests below his shop; a starter fight for a hero the valley's other two errands both assume you've already had, and he also tells you where to get an orc-slaying sword (Todin's forge) while Ozorick's errand is open.
• There are wolves between the village and the city, the one stretch of the western road that had nothing in it.
• Three abandoned mines, and the artifact at the bottom of one: Forlorn (gems, galleries), Forsworn (poor iron, square adits, collapsed shed), Forfeit (silver, wandering veins, walled compound), five to ten levels each, sites and the Eye's mine shuffled per game, restoring the three random dungeons cut in the Lua move.
• You choose a god when you make a character: Tiamat or Marduk, asked with race and calling; previously every unnamed offering went to whoever regarded you best, which from your first kill was always Marduk, and clerics/paladins were assigned a god by race. And the gods introduce themselves: each states its nature and demands on the selection screen, and @ names your patron and how it currently regards you.
• The gods care how you kill, not how much: ordinary fights now credit nobody; Tiamat is offended by killing the fleeing or harmless and still pleased by undead, Marduk pays double for cruelty alone; the two now earn within a tenth of each other where Marduk earned eleven times as much.

Skills

• Healing can now be learned: High Priest Aphilius teaches it for 500 gold, because every calling but the ranger starts with it and a ranger without it does not come back.

Magic and combat

• Curing poison now cures poison: broken in every released version: poison was laid on at ten turns per dose but relief was counted in single turns, so a cure removed a tenth; a 200-turn snake bite was worth 20. Both halves fixed, and a cure now lifts the whole dose including what is still working its way in.
• Cure disease likewise - it rolled for how much to take off and fell short three times in ten; now takes all of it.
• Seeing the invisible is a yes or a no: it was a hidden quantity weighed against how invisible the target was, so a ring worth ten could never reveal a dread invisible by twelve to twenty, and the sheet graded both in the same vague words; one ring is now the whole answer.
• You feel an invisible creature before it strikes - a chill for undead, a sense of someone for anything else, which is time to reach for a potion.

What you are carrying

• Identical rings, armour and weapons no longer heap up. Arrows, potions, scrolls, books and food still stack.

Fixed

• Ozorick thanked you and paid out for a victory in which every guardian who was to carry the sword died; he now says what became of his command and the errand fails instead.
• A finished quest vanished from the log while the giver was still waiting to hear about it; the log now keeps open, finished-but-unreported, failed and completed under headings.
• The dwarven city's gate guard was peaceful and cowardly, set on nobody, fleeing from things faster than itself, with fewer hit points than the goblin warmasters one level up.
• The 26th line of a long list was labelled [Z], which also closes the list, so it silently could not be picked.
• Your purse could switch off the burden system permanently: MoneyOp kept a phantom gold weight nothing else agreed with, floor pickups never entered it, spending to zero withdrew all of it, and once burden drifted below zero no loot could ever slow you again.

Amended

• God mode gained a third key: ^I for spectator mode (nothing sees you, nothing pursues, a creature that blunders into you stops)

0.6.0-pre

These are the player-visible changes between the last public release 0.5.8 and this preview release. A lot has changed under the hood, too!

New things to do

• The beginner's dungeon can be finished in one visit - Beelzevile was unscratchable and one-shot most characters, so the Elder's quest could only be closed much later; the caves now work as a descent, Magnush is a real first boss (he was weaker than the bandits outside and died in two blows, now lives long enough to use his healing spell and potions), and the demon is beatable by using the fact that he is slower than you.
• Bring Brida's daughter home - Rotmoth holds Giana in a cave east of the village for 150 gold; pay or refuse, she follows you out and stays in the village, and Brida rewards you. Started by the original team, existed only in fragments, now playable end to end.
• Clear the old road east - Elder Gridor's second errand, timed for when the five forest brothers are a fight you can win; he also tells you one of them took Brida's daughter. Jorgus and the thieving teacher are not part of the bargain.
• The bandits at the bridge say so first - they call out from the trees on the last square from which turning back is free, and villagers warn you if you ask; they only shout at someone about to cross.
• Caves that look like caves - rounded chambers joined by cut doorways, lakes where they won't split the level, outlines that wander off the grid; the Small Cave is built this way, smaller and wetter.
• The dwarves cut their own road - the six levels to the dwarven gate are mazes now, a different pattern per level, twice as deep north to south, by a new public-domain generator from Kusigrosz.
• A tower with an upstairs, and something to look at from it - Yohjishiro's tower has a true second floor above the same ground, holes showing the real valley below, windows you can see but not walk through, and a flock of her sheep grazing outside that she will know about if you harm one.
• Shopping multiple items - P itemises the bill with prices, total and purse; settle piece by piece, (unpaid) marks in the inventory, part-paid heaps say so, and the shopkeeper blocks his doorway until you pay.
• Everything you own on one screen - worn items stay in the inventory with a (worn) badge instead of vanishing to the equipment screen.
• Ground that isn't flat - per-cell variation in brightness, hue and saturation so floors read as ground and trees as wood; greys and water stay put, and it can be turned off.
• Use the whole terminal instead of a fixed 80×25, following resizes, with menus recentring and lists re-flowing.
• The achievements screen remembers everything you did: previously it named four things; every quest now carries its own line saying what became of it, and the same list goes to the memorial file.
• Resting ends when you are rested: ~ sat out all five hundred turns regardless; it now stops when HP and power are full, and the manual no longer calls it a debugging command.

Skills

• Tactics finally improves: it could never pass 4 because nothing counted your practice; landing and parrying blows now both count.
• Halflings know how to dodge.
• Create Trap and Climbing are described in the manual: both worked, neither was written down, so Climbing was undiscoverable.
• The duplicate Archery skill is gone: ranged weapons already used the weapon skill system; Archery was a second layer predating it.

Magic and combat

• The villagers are mushroom farmers, and now they look it - pale rather than sunburnt, long spears rather than pitchforks, goodwives armed too, and a little harder to kill, since once the demon dies they walk past the snakes and beetles four times a trip for the rest of the game.
• Sandals made you easier to hit than bare feet: plate, chain and ring mail reduced defence, seven weapons came out less accurate than they should, and wood/stone/iron/bronze/brass each carried a hidden penalty; a dice-notation conversion begun 1 January 2004 was never finished, and 43 entries are now completed the way the rest were.
• Every blow you strike counted twice: any weapon without fire or frost, and every claw and bite, dealt double its dice for the whole modern history of the game; fights are longer now and are the fights the monsters were built for.
• And now a branded weapon is worth carrying, because the doubling skipped brands, a sword of Fire did no more than a plain one.
• Resistance no longer betrays you at the top: fire resistance past 100% inverted, so complete immunity took full damage while half-resistance took half.
• Backstabbing could be raised and did nothing, the detection code having sat inside a comment block for the whole modern history; it now triples damage against something unaware or that cannot see you, starts near one in ten and trains on hits only. Humans start with it, and vampires have it maxed and are invisible.
• The schools of magic mean something now: school advancement was commented out, so every caster knew all five equally and none ever improved; learning your first spell opens a school, casting trains it, and rank lifts every spell in it. # shows your progress.
• Draining life now drains it - the spell did damage only; half now goes to the caster, making spectres and vampires meaningfully harder.
• Every corpse granted Strength regardless of what it was; snakes give poison resistance again, salamanders fire, and the sickening ones sicken.
• A weapon too heavy for you now costs damage as well as accuracy, with both penalties shown on the character screen.
• A monster chooses its spell by what the spell is for, rather than from a list of five written into the engine.
• Seeing the invisible is a yes or a no. A hidden quantity weighed against the target's invisibility meant a ring worth ten could never reveal a dread invisible by twelve to twenty, and the sheet graded both the same; one ring is now the whole answer.

What you are carrying

• Your inventory now lists what you are wearing, marked (worn), and drop, give and sacrifice leave worn pieces out.
• Identical rings, armour and weapons no longer heap up: a heap is the wrong shape for something you wear one of; arrows, potions, scrolls, books and food still stack.

Fixed

Things that used to lose your belongings:

• Items no longer vanish when picked up into a stack of the same kind.
• Dropping items, and picking exactly one item off a pile, both work.
• Thinking better of a sacrifice puts the offering back instead of picking up the pile you were standing on.
• Corpses you are carrying rot at the proper rate.
• Loot, the royal treasure room and the Eye of Raa all work again.

Things that used to crash the game:

• A long-standing family of use-after-free crashes: swapping places with a companion, summoning, blinking and teleporting, a target dying mid-blow, an eaten corpse's delayed poison, and item stacks merging.
• Talking to Roderick while a hand was empty.
• Praying for divine escape: Marduk's teleport moves the effect's target, and nothing ever filled that in for a spell or prayer, so it read from nothing; it moves the caster now.
• Using an item, learning an alchemy recipe, and targeting past the map edge.

Things that simply did not happen:

• The bard's dog was never created.
• Ranged spells and missile animations.
• Herb bushes never spread.
• Dwarves were given the gnome's starting skills.
• Creatures sacrificed the clothes off their own backs as useless junk.
• Reading the high score table, writing recipes, the backspace key, and the status line.
• Beating the orc war party was never acknowledged, the achievements screen wanted thirty orc deaths and only twenty orcs have ever existed.
• Unidentified scrolls carried the same labels in every game: the nonsense names were rolled once at program start, before the game had a seed.
• Unread spell books always looked the same: looks were handed out in listing order, so burning hands was the old tome in every game ever played.
• Every prayer a god answered was also called unheard: a 2003 fix for a different problem dropped the else.
• Two spell books had no name for the thing itself, so your pack could list "silver decorated" with nothing decorated in sight.
• Rings and amulets of acid and poison resistance protected you from fire instead, as both carried a copy of the fire ring's resistance, so 300 gold bought nothing new and neither acid nor poison was resisted.
• Armour of slow digestion did not slow anything; it now halves how fast you get hungry.
• Helmets, body armour and cloaks were never found enchanted, as they were built in an order that asked whether the item counted as armour before deciding it was, so half the slots you wear things in have never in any version produced anything but plain gear.
• Unknown rings and amulets were never unknown: a ring was named after its enchantment rather than its look, so the ring of protection was the white ring in every game ever played, and the name did not even match the colour it was drawn in.

Things that went quietly wrong the longer you played:

• Guards, smiths and kings abandoned their posts for good - rousing a group against an attacker unleashed every member and nothing ever leashed them again; the anger wore off, the wandering did not.
• Ahk-Ulan's errands outlived Ahk-Ulan - the machine-parts request stayed in the log for the rest of the game, and the kill-Roderick line stayed whether or not you had already done it.
• What lay at your feet was announced again every turn you stood still, burying everything else during a long read; a 2003 fix for the walk command dropped the did-you-move guard.
• Collecting Torin's reward cost you the credit for earning it - the gas pump's 5000 points were only ever paid to players who never went back to claim their reward.
• A quest you had finished disappeared from your quest log while the giver was still holding ...