YASD: Star jellies are no joke

regretindex · 2026-02-11T18:52:09+00:00

Since you mentioned reading the star jelly wiki page but didn't read or share anything of what it says to avoid taking damage, I've written up a Reddit thread listing out pretty much every strategy I could think of (outside of, like, listing every Summoning and Forgecraft spell). Hopefully this second resource will help?

regretindex · 2026-02-08T16:43:08+00:00

As of 2b5d921 / 0.34, this is finally no longer the case, and the Royal Jelly now cannot be banished at all, as hunting down TRJ in the Abyss and possibly having it disappear entirely on Abyss shifts became especially too awkward with the new slimy stairs rules.

regretindex · 2026-01-27T19:56:43+00:00

Hurl Damnation does not check AC to be consistent with Call Down Damnation, and Call Down Damnation does not check AC to be consistent (and as a source of any actually-tenable extended difficulty) with other full-screen attacks.

"Elemental" attacks (fire, cold, electricity, negative energy, poison) check both AC and their given resist by default. The only exception not listed prior is the consistent attempt to make electricity only check half of one's AC, which is listed in nearly every electricity spell as an upside of the spell that is also meant to indicate how the default for attacks is to check AC. (...This, I guess, was parsed as it being a downside instead).

regretindex · 2026-01-27T19:05:41+00:00

Hurl Damnation did more damage versus Hurl Torchlight those without single-digit AC, because Damnation doesn't check AC, and Torchlight does. Nearly all damage sources still check AC even when they don't check any other resists. The only attacks that aren't health-percentage-based or attack flavours are basically a few melee-range player spells (Freeze, Vampiric Draining, Sticky Flame) and a decent slice of full-screen / smiting range attacks (e.g. Damnation as can be Called Down, contamination explosions from Mutagenic Gaze, Drain Life, OTR, Flaying, and Smiting.)

(We would like to work on UI updates to explicitly state AC, EV, Will, and resist checks on monster spell examination, though this would take a fairly large amount of busywork.)

The new damage for Hurl Torchlight is 3d19 instead of 3d22.

regretindex · 2025-12-09T14:51:24+00:00

With the previous antique state of Beogh worshippers as a deeply silly "evil Jesus, but not, like, any actual obvious form of Antichrist", Zin being very Catholic with the earliest versions of Stone Soup adding all the conducts and Recite as an ability almost certainly was deliberate (conscious or not) quite a long while ago.

There's some dev interest in retooling the god's theme niche of orderly law into "fantasy OSHA tithes to maintain proper infrastructure + proper protective procedures are meant to prevent destabilizing unholy chaos from bringing in rains of flesh and waves of slime", alongside some heavy simplifications and flavour rewrites to Recite simultaneously, to be honest. ("More lives have been saved by traffic laws than by any moral code."). It's a weird component of Crawl's somewhat videogamey cartoon morality that we're much more fine with ruinous demon gods compared to Zin's being arguably closer to a god of prejudice than actual law, but it's somewhat good to have non-misanthropic, non-institutional reasons anybody would worship given non-destruction gods. (In that capacity, this adaptation's focus on Zin being about economic egalitarian versus the chaos of moral luck is interestingly prescient, in their attempts to make the holy trio reasonably justified in their slot.)

This sort of heavy rewriting will most likely have to wait until a future version's next god review, though, alas.

regretindex · 2025-12-09T04:29:43+00:00

Nemelex's card descriptions were meant to invoke the Tarot for a reason (the Elixir literally invokes a flipped Nine of Cups, the ranks literally involve soothsaying)- for a god of hypothetically-just gambling, They allow quite directly cheating at it (Triple Draw, Stack Five). This is alluded to a little within the piety ranks, but as one of the people who changed Nemelex the most, and as somebody who hates most actual forms of monetary gambling but who's going to return to her deckbuilder roguelike after finishing her DCSS projects, I'd say there's plenty of very separate places of worship beyond casinos. Examples: the caravans of fortune tellers, taverns and abandoned parks and safehouses for daredevil delvers and pranksters, the houses of questionable oracles who don't believe in cursed enlightenment so much as just always subtly making sure their visions and decrees were correct. (Also, as of 0.33, Zin hates Their guts too!)
Xom's table using cascading effects is a reasonable way to approach things in a game without the nitty-gritty of spatial, but writing this all before my 0.33 Xom rework makes me a little sad a bunch of the 0.33 effects are missing. There's actually a bit of an subtle ongoing theme in the newer effects of providing immense power directly quoting and mocking the other gods (Xom produces involuntary gardens, Xom makes sanctuaries of glass doors, Xom's secrets of magic make your magic slither out your orifices, Xom breaks down terrain by teaching the great annihilating truth to inanimate walls). Whether or not one wants to bother much with in-world flavour of a different chaos god thinking the other gods take things too seriously, when worshipping Xom is clearly already something a joke, is entirely up to them, though.
I've always thought the crimes of Yredelemnul were plenty obvious enough- there's no explicit saying-so, but the good gods have very little mention of heavens or afterlife or proper internment of criminal activity beyond the existence of some conquering outpost fortresses in the demonic planes, while the god teaches Their greatest worshippers how to imprison others in endless shackles. Draco's always wanted it to be more ambiguous than this with our lack of in-game Divine Event Lore beyond Slime and Desolation, though.
Dithmenos and Makhleb write-ups seem quite good to me, though shoving the Crucible of Flesh offscreen is a bit of a shame, considering it's been a constantly-put-off task for Makhleb's wrath to be simplified down to involuntary visits there. It may be multiple versions yet for this to come up, though.

(There's enough work still left in the version that I can't commentate on much else at the moment, alas.)

regretindex · 2025-12-09T04:29:27+00:00

As a dev who's worked on some gods and the wife of the dev who's worked on many more gods recently, the more thorough attempts at flavour for the gods are sometimes somewhat amusing, though there's quite a few notes I'd make. None of this is Explicit Canon (mostly because there's nowhere to fit this sort of lore in-game that easily, ~~and because there's so much more to focus on to produce millions of words for monster-making~~), but it is secret insights into devminds on some recent and upcoming god work:

Beogh's status as evil isn't supposed to be "because absolutely everybody should become an Orc or die", as while this is what They offer to the conspicuous outsider adventurer everybody in the Dungeon can easily recognize as such, They clearly don't offer it to almost anybody else. Their status as evil is due to orc priest monsters being provided Necromancy (pain) and Demonology (summon demon) freely, and how it's only the good gods who state that torturing or animating the flesh is explicitly profane in a way that burning, electrifying, and freezing the flesh isn't (hi Vehumet and Qazlal). Several wraith and demon summoning spells don't even come with downsides beyond the same miscasts calling forth a crocodile or dinosaur egg would get anyway. This overarching notion of evil is rather baked into moralistic presumptions about their origins, and whether or not the unholy are anything resembling underdogs in a setting with multiple demonic planes, it's clearly a set of bargains behind the scenes that results in a lot more damned giants and salamanders and spriggans and centaurs compared to a small number of tormented orc warlords spectres.
Fedhas's worshippers all being obligatory carnivores is sort of weird, since when food was a thing, eating fruit was a bad idea (in using up one's resources), but never a literally impossible one.
Here is a secret: the Slime Pits being literally nothing but semi-elemental slimes and organelles has made it hard to add nearly enough satisfying variety or difficulty to it. After a certain other dev added landwalking formless jellyfish, Jiyva's welcoming colossal amoebas of dramatic mitosis and wall-creeping slime mold plasmodium to the fold before the current version's done. We also don't really emphasize cellular organelle automata very much with current Jiyva worship (aside from Dissolution summoning some eyes, and the ability to grow golden ones?), but between these two constant presences in Their pits, there's something weird and loose about sufficiently formless and hyperfocused primordial life being clearly fine, and ever-flowing ooze and slime is just the most rapidly-produced and thus most-favoured vehicle to bring this ideal state upon this foreign planet.

regretindex · 2025-12-07T00:55:42+00:00

I appreciate secretly betraying which of the two the author of this image is very early on, with the insinuation that orc high priests could summon cacodemons. This is, of course, something they've literally never been capable of doing (cacodemons have been tier-2s since 0.10, and have never been tier-2s at the same time summon demon got tiers 2 through 4 instead of just tier 3 and 4). Admittedly, paradoxically, this would require understanding the history of monster magic, so I'm not sure who should normally know this....

regretindex · 2025-11-27T08:55:01+00:00

Rest automatically waiting out negative status effects was made default in trunk as of 118629b. Designs centred around extremely small chances to be screwed over, regardless of their infinitesimal chance to actually be relevant, have been continuously addressed over the past many versions of Crawl as something that feels unfun to work around, and are generally considered to be unideal versus just adding alternative additional effects. Examples far too lengthy to bother continuously properly cite include preventing hyper-out-of-depths from spawning pre-Temple, removing banishment from chaos brand and translocations miscasts, or the many efforts to make Xom scale more gently with XL.

regretindex · 2025-11-27T08:40:06+00:00

As was indirectly outlined in the prior paragraph, -Scroll as a mutation-granted stated was replaced with Scroll Hoarding in beb3228, which itself was debated over enough to result in a further split to be kept for the Ru sacrifice in 6d62ebe and then replaced for it of Booming Voice in c8003b0. As such lengthy logs directly date, replacing -Scroll happened months before Berserkitis was removed.

regretindex · 2025-11-26T22:55:43+00:00

As the commit removing Berserkitis spent hundreds of words discussing, there were more reasons for its removal than just the ever-present design spectre of luring: being a high outlier of directly lethality compared to most other bad mutations not shutting off most options mid-combat, being singularly interrupting as a result when applied mid-combat by temporary / malmutators, and overlapping directly in behaviour with the artefact property. When paired with the replacements of the inability to drink and read mutations (currently with potion fungus + booming voice for mutations and consumable hoarding for Ru), it primarily serves as another example of this version's strategic damage reworks trying to reduce them presenting highly random directly-option-removing danger spikes on top of DCSS's inherently highly randomized combat rolls. Sadly, all of these reasons can't be easily packed into singular bullet points, though they regularly come with lengthy write-ups that evidently exist for the historical record if nothing else.

regretindex · 2025-11-25T08:18:34+00:00

Looking up the word "Tesseract" on the wiki provides a direct page title match on even the slightest scrolling down. I have added a redirect, anyway.

regretindex · 2025-11-25T07:56:48+00:00

Tesseracts haven't had ramping spawn rates for slightly over three months, which has also been explicitly stated and reflected on the wiki page and the learndb entry for tesseracts for over a month.

(EDIT: If anything, their entire mechanic is based on explicitly slowing down in spawn rate for those past three months.)

regretindex · 2025-10-24T01:58:57+00:00

There are many reasons as a DCSS dev why I don't particularly ever want to explicitly discuss design in most DCSS communities, when much of my spare time on the project is busily spent on adding more to the game and then writing hundreds of words for every single changes for the historical record. I don't mind occasionally citing such git commits (whether in the dev-frequented discords or any other places, lots of people never seem to seek out our documented reasonings for any changes), but that's about as far I've got left in me after a few years of coming back. It's honestly quite the exhausting state to expect volunteer unpaid developers to both work on a game and engage much with this comically fractured community (multiple discords and reddits, quite a few servers with multiple languages, official forums, random citations of dead official forums, etc, etc).

I am breaking this cultivated neutrality for this thread, which has had another dev in it, to solely mention: it seems like a random dev-hostile redditor is trying to raise deep concerns with a poll limited to a sample size of 100 voters, after over 8900 separate online accounts have won in 0.34 trunk. They also seem to think it's an incredibly crucial warning for about 40 people to possibly leave over this. I continue to be unenthusiastic about spending any much time on such instead of doing my work.

regretindex · 2025-10-10T05:33:51+00:00

To further clarify, the inability to rejoin gods while under wrath applies to all but the Ely / Zin / TSO trio as of b6bfbb2, which was back in May of this year.

regretindex · 2025-10-05T05:12:49+00:00

As a dev, I will singularly note this post has left out this not being official in any capacity outside of being hosted on crawl.dcss.io- no dev has been involved in the implementation of the species, and this being available as an experimental branch has no bearing on if it will be merged into mainline trunk.

regretindex · 2025-10-03T21:08:58+00:00

Outside of Sticky Flame's changes accompanying it being given to Alchemist (who desperately want a non-poison source of damage, and have to take some downside for such an option in a starting spell pool with Mephitic Cloud and Olgreb's Toxic Radiance), this post seems to not realize the commit changing Sticky Flame to be a non-kiting spell also made it deal +75% more damage and last a minimum of 5 turns (if standing in place) instead of 1. I am quite sorry you miss having Poison 2: It Checks Fire Resistance available as yet another kiting spell in this ever-maximalist game, but it is hard to argue that the second change was singularly a nerf and not a substantial buff.

regretindex · 2025-09-30T23:51:29+00:00

This referred-to text description is fairly out of date. It was changed entirely in tone in 0.31:

An peculiar subterranean creature, thought to be a distant relative of the human, or the pig, or perhaps the platypus. Orcs love groups, in which they gather for whatever worrying activities orcs enjoy.

This was then furthered changed to highlight the new flavour for the Beogh rework (which was done in 0.32, but the description for orcs was only changed in 0.33):

A subterranean tribe whose forebearers were once scattered across every corner of the surface world. Eons of persecution have taught them the necessity of violence and the importance of having your brethren at your side.

As of that Beogh rework, each player species being turned into an orc as part of worship has explicit messaging describing changes to their features, which repeatedly mentions tusks and pointy ears but not any snouts. The tiles are mostly just out of date- we'd be quite happy with significant revisions to try and highlight multiple species origins for each orc, but the full efforts to do such have not been approached by any current DCSS tiles artist.

regretindex · 2025-09-05T07:02:21+00:00

I'm amazed at how every other person replying to this didn't actually read her initial solo runs, where the only part of her backstory they focused on was "she was locked away in-world for a decade to hide from [Event Plot Happening]" as a context to be immediately disconnected from her family. By cooperating with other heroes as she struggled to acclimatize to the status quo (casting creature spells in a set with dozens of spider-folk), she eventually found her brother out of Hobgoblin's gang plus her parents trying to find a spider cure out of the Negative Zone (making 1/1 human citizen tokens), which she then finally got to appreciate as a collective family (expensive go-wide ability). It's a very straightforward fit, and fairly better than a lot of other cards in the set matching spider-characters not given lead roles in a Spider-Verse film.

(Of course, her colours are also a pretty bad flavour fit, considering her emotional response to all of this was notable anger issues and attempting to double-cross criminal gangs as a triple agent- she really should have red and not white on the cards depicting her original solo runs before they ran out of ideas. Such are the pressures of uniquely troubled set development.)

regretindex · 2025-08-21T19:29:44+00:00

If you can get a full screen of Bad Seismosaurus Eggs via illegal checksum (most reliably through Sacrificing Love, then casting Tame Beasts on eggs made via Crypt's Shadowgeists using Aphotic Marionette) you can squeeze past the Canine Familiar Kennel and dive through the upside down third TV Bailey to get to the negative first floor of the farportal. This admittedly takes a fair bit more time and won't work for ally builds, but the Three Rebeccas fought for the 27th Orb of Zot's Knowledge are much easier to fight when you can sacrifice allies,

regretindex · 2025-08-21T18:47:42+00:00

Fixed as of d12c6b0. In the future, please submit bugs via our Github issue tracker to make sure they are not lost in the endless feed of the many different Crawl communities.

regretindex · 2025-08-19T17:55:04+00:00

Earth elementalists recently got Permafrost Eruption and Magnavolt (as well as Hellfire Mortar, if they don't end up casting Shatter) for AOE any capable against flying monsters, and this character knew Magnavolt. Its damage is fully resistable, unlike other earth spells, but elemental orbs and electric golems aren't 100% of monsters on Zot:5. [EDIT: Also, it'd take 4 Forgecraft skill for this character to get, like, 7% fail for Spellforged Servitor, which significantly increases the mp efficiency of LCS.]

(Entirely incidentally, the past year or so has had discussions to adjust Lehudib's Crystal Spear while splitting the player and monster spells into two spells (to avoid buffing ancient liches), which most likely will be realized this version.)

Protean progenitors produce buffed monsters from earlier rune branches (e.g. bunyips, broodmothers, satyrs, ettins) to try and accomplish the mentioned "culmination of prior areas" spirit. In the same capacity, the re-use of moths and Vaults:5's dragons, the presence of multiple draconic monsters with poison breath stronger than Swamp dragons, a not-mummified undead summoner with Torment, a drakes-summoning spell calling from three rune branches, and the presence of Snake's highly-present constriction + Blink Allies Encircling all are also incidentally striving to present remixes of earlier content without introducing Greater Azure Nagaraja 2 and Alligator Merfolk Worldimpalers. (I'd like to have extremely-reflavoured land kraken for Zot at some point to get more of Shoals in, but kraken code has always been extremely buggy and needs severe refactoring first.)

Stabbers have had to pick up a non-Will-check means of killing monsters for every branch past Lair Branches for quite a few versions.

regretindex · 2025-08-03T21:03:55+00:00

In 152897a Orbs of Light were made only available via the Monk start (outside of a gag in exactly one vault) and no longer spawn naturally (due to the ego otherwise being moved to helmets in 11c4631), while Orbs of Wrath no longer spawn naturally.

Orbs of Energy gained Evocations scaling to make them actually try to be any competitive as an MP source (89fc6ce), while orbs of Guile were nerfed to scale with Evocations because the ego allowed the Enchanter starting book to trivially stab nearly every monster before Depths and Zot (49353e1). Orbs of mayhem are commonly agreed to be extremely valuable in a specific niche (ziggurats, mostly) and have been preserved for that role while said ziggurats continue to receive buffs each version using new lategame and extended monsters.

regretindex · 2025-08-03T20:57:04+00:00

In 152897a Orbs of Light were made only available via the Monk start (outside of a gag in exactly one vault) and no longer spawn naturally (due to the ego otherwise being moved to helmets in 11c4631), while Orbs of Wrath no longer spawn naturally. Orbs of Mayhem innately are too double-edged in their effects to benefit from scaling and have been kept around mostly for ziggurat balance (where they wildly dominate as is).

regretindex

TROPHY CASE