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.

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Highlights

• New species: Gnolls
• New god: Wu Jian Council
• New spell: Borgnjor's Vile Clutch

Branches, Environment

• 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.

Character

• 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 shortblades, longblades, and axes.

Gods

• 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.

Interface

• 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.

Items

• 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.
• Rods of lightning 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

• 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.

Spells

• 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.