Bigger changes/more important stuff to know:--------------------------------------------* Added 50(!) brand new, handcrafted "bonus" floors! One is always chosen randomly from the pool some floors before every boss, so if you get to the final boss, you'll have found 5 of these. They hold useful treasures if you manage to get that far, deeply out of depth items and sometimes much needed Sages etc. But those treasures are guarded by powerful monsters and sometimes a very evil level design. You may need to use potions/wands to get around the guards, but the rewards usually help greatly with the coming boss battle. I hope you have fun exploring these and perhaps trying to find some of the hidden treasure stashes too, but be careful, some of them are real death traps if you aren't careful.* Gaining a level takes you to a new screen now with a new character advancement option that you can use to further specialize yourself, or perhaps balance out your weaknesses. Also, now you gain random extra stats only every other level.* Added an advanced start option in the character creation. Players who feel the first 10 floors are too easy can skip them with this option, but their starting items are worse than what you'd have if you'd played through from the beginning. For example you don't have any magical items.* Changed the targeting system when shooting/throwing: Now if you have a target already, you shoot at it without going through the targeting interface, if you don't, you naturally go through it still. There's a new command 'f' to change the target if you already have one, but don't want to shoot at it.* A cursed piece of armor prevents you from equipping/unequipping the piece of clothing underneath now, and to compensate the evilness of this, all cursed pieces of equipment degrade at a much faster rate* Rebalanced all monster damages. Buffed the damage a bit in floors 1-20, nerfed in 20-40 and in 40-50 it didn't change much, taking into account the nerfs to player's stat calculations. Now you can actually die earlier too if you get into a bad situation, and the difficulty spike after the 20th floor isn't as sharp.* A new command: Cycle quick skill (key A). It changes your quick skill to the next known skill without opening the skill menu, thus using combo skills (like piercing+double strike) is faster.* When praying, you now first sense whether you'd get an answer from the Goddess by praying, and if you would, you can choose to pray or not to pray. You can check your relation with the Goddess this way as you travel deeper (you need more sacrifices deeper) without an altar and without using up your possible prayer. You can also now choose whether you'd like a full heal or full uncursing of your equipment during the prayer.* You can now choose your starting weapons, each training has two choices* Added a new dungeon feature. It looks like a red + and isn't dangerous* Added another prepared skill slot for buffs. For example Wild Regeneration and Inhuman Reflexes use this slot. So now you can dodge with Inhuman Reflexes and use offensive skills at the same timeSmaller changes/less important stuff to know:---------------------------------------------* Fixed a bug with weapon swapping that allowed a shield+2 handed combo* Fixed a small bug that showed sages that weren't there when looking* Improved the monster AI in certain situations* Changed prepaid resurrection's cost calculation. It depends on max depth now, not character level* Changed the derivation of some stats (like dodge); level means less now, the main stats more* Added diminishing returns to certain key stats* Buffed all monsters' dodge* Added new higher level skills: -Desperate strike/shot, more damage+hit while low on health -Mad strike/shot, hits twice with a higher crit chance, but may confuse you -Wild rage, increases damage, dodge and to hit, but drains SP and temperature drops/raises faster -Passive thrown weapon expertise, increases thrown damage *At the same time changed all old passive skills' level requirements to 12* Added a few new monster abilities, and changed the squeezing special, which I wasn't satisfied with* Also changed and added existing abilities to other monsters* The maximum number of smiths per floor is now 1. The same applies to altars* Items with unknown BCU status are shown as gray in pick up screen too* Nerfed how much level affects certain things like to hit and armor to balance out other additions* Nerfed the damage bonuses from str and dex if they exceed 20* You can no longer use skills while confused* Stat screens *should* (the code is a mess) show the effects of ailments/rings/tactics/etc. now* Buffed the wild regeneration skill's amount of healing* Buffed vampiric strike/shot's amount of healing; it's now 10% of your max HP* Also decreased vampiric strike/shot's SP cost and stat requirements a bit* Decreased multi strike/shot's SP cost a lot* HP/SP growth per level gets smaller the higher your max HP/SP is to nerf 300 hp dwarves* Blood flows when you hit monsters critically* Changed the first boss floor slightly* Monsters that cause frostbite take more damage from fiery attacks now, and resist cold* Freezing/boiling is a bit more forgiving now, no more instant -1000 hp* The Inhuman Reflexes skill costs only 10 SP now, earlier being 15 SP* Balanced Piercing strike/shot again with increased requirements and SP cost* Slightly nerfed Brutal strike/shot, but decreased its SP cost to 13* Decreased Double strike/shot's SP cost to 13 too to balance it with Brutal* Dropped the Knockback skill's SP cost and requirements* Also dropped the Dash skill's SP cost to 10 and changed Wild Regeneration's requirements a bit* Max hp is shown correctly in the mortem when the player dies with a frostbite* The number of found altars/sages/smiths is shown in the mortem now* Prepared weapons are shown correctly in the mortem too. Polished the mortem a bit* Added more stat info to the mortem as well* The quick skill is now automatically set to your starting skill at start* Added a message for dodging attacks. Previously dodges were reported as misses* Added a message for weak attacks, you/monsters 'scratch' the target when dealing low damage* Trying to move somewhere makes you now struggle away from immobilization too* Changed some texts so that they would make more sense* Added a new potion* Added 2 new weapon/armor prefixes* Added another page to the stat screen with more info there* Changed the stat screen's way of showing damage. Now it's the actual damage range, excluding tactics* Changed the random number generator* Split ring of increase lethality into two: ring of damage and accuracy* Split ring of increase defense into two: ring of evasion and protection* Made the ice pools deeper (7, 10, 13 foot instead of 4, 6, . Only the flavor text was changed* 1H/2H (one handed/two handed) is shown for weapons in the inventory screen too* The game warns you when your equipment are about to break down (durability = 1)* You can see the % you're carrying of your maximum capacity in the player stat screen now* Increased prepaid resurrection's cost slightly, reduced potion identify's and arrows' cost* Sages sell food now. Note: it's more cost effective to buy heating instead of the portable food* When looting an item from a frozen corpse, the game now informs you the item's name* Quick move follows corridors now even when there are turns if there's only one possible direction* Stairs are now drawn in brown if you have found a sage/smith/altar in the floor they lead into. This makes finding the sages/smiths/altars easier later* You can now change pages in inventory and skill screens by pressing up/down if the currently selected item/skill is on top or bottom of the list* When moving deeper, you are now informed if you haven't sacrificed enough to get an answer there even though it was enough on the previous floor* And a lot of the usual small polishing that doesn't deserve its own entry
* Changed the fluff texts of advanced start to something more atmospheric* Slowed regeneration slightly* Added timestamps to mortems* Added the base bonus modifiers of weapons/pieces of armor and clothing to the equipment screen* Fixed a small bug in quick running* The skill learning screen shows skill descriptions and requirements next to the selected skill now* You can now quick move using shift+direction (normally would be 'w'+direction), but this currently works only with the default *numpad* directions. For example shift+numpad 6 = quick move east. This also might not work on all Linux terminals.
Here I am again after another slight delay, now with the final 1.04 release for Macintosh as well. Thankfully the beta version was surprisingly bug free, not much was needed to get it to the final shape. The version info serves you if you want specifics of what was changed, or if you didn't check the beta release, here. One addition I'll mention though: quick run works now with shift+direction with numpad directions. However, this might not work on all terminals, Windows works, but at least not all Linux terminals work. I'll look into that more next time, but at the moment I've drained my programming juices and it's not vacation anymore so I can't be bothered.Feedback is always, always, always accepted with great appreciation, so if you like the game and would like to see 1.05 some day, drop me some text. The preferred way is the contact page since Hotmail drops mails into bit-nothingness sometimes, but if you want to risk the small chance, I'll gladly accept emailed feedback as well.The next version won't be coming out anytime soon, not surprisingly. A year, maybe more, I'll have to think of some game changingly cool feature for next time I think. For now I wish you luck in the depths and let you head to the downloads page, see you!
