or The Short History of Blinking in Zot.
The last version with Centaurs was 0.25, so why did I play 0.18 instead of jumping ten versions from 0.15? There are a couple of reasons: this was a time of rapid changes and big improvements, so it’s worth exploring this stage of DCSS’s evolution in more detail. Another reason is Pakellas: it would be a crime to not revisit this god. And finally, it was one of two old versions where you could control blinks on Z:5.
Old versions had the -cTele status, which prevented controlled teleports and turned controlled blinks into random blinks. Several places had this restriction, including the last floor of Elven Halls, Abyss, Labyrinth, and Zot:5. Until 0.17, scrolls of blinking gave you controlled blinks on Z:1-4, but became random blink scrolls on Z:5 and during the orb run.
-cTele was removed in 0.17, so 0.17 and 0.18 were the only old versions when you could control your blinks even on Zot:5, but not during the orb run. And then the dark ages came: you couldn’t control blinks throughout Zot from 0.19 to 0.25. 0.19 was even worse than 0.16: there was no status light on the HUD warning you about translocation restrictions. Everything looked exactly like in 0.18, but when you got in trouble and tried to blink away, you got a warning message about your blinks being uncontrolled.
Neither the removal of Orb’s translocation restrictions nor the removal of Controlled Blink spell are mentioned in the 0.26 changelog. But being able to control blinks in Zot and even on the orb run was an enormous change. This has changed again in 0.34, when we got fuzzy blinks on Z:1-5 and on the orb run.
So, let’s get back to Centaurs. I had 7 of them left, mostly mages. Interestingly, only 3 of them ended up as full-time bow users. Some relied on other weapons, but I was surprised that Centaurs could be decent spellcasters too. Like this CeCj (use crawlmorgue / fuckaibros to access this morgue) with 38 int who did a lot of blasting via spells. Centaurs had -1 apt for most magic schools and a -3 Spellcasting apt, which is not great but not terrible either. And having fewer MPs is well compensated by lots of HP and your ability to reset fights. A couple of my centaurs used polearms and axes, because they found a good melee weapon before finding a bow. But no matter what background I played, one thing was constant and inevitable: kiting.
There’s a whole genre of cinema, where it doesn’t really matter how a specific movie starts. It could be about a helpful plumber or about a pizza delivery guy, or it could start with someone getting stuck in a washing machine. After a while, roughly the same thing happens. Similarly, all my Centaurs did a lot of kiting regardless of weapon choice and background. It was an essential tactic in the early and mid game, but my chars were furiously kiting even in the Depths.
A D:2 worm, an early ogre, a hydra that was peacefully sleeping around a corner - they all are free XP if you have a reaching or ranged weapon and enough space for kiting, even if your corresponding weapon skills have exactly 0 XP invested in them. This is quite tedious and not fun, but it saves your consumables, so you do it again and again.
I’m not 100% anit-kiting. When playing a Spriggan, it somehow feels more organic and less tedious. Probably because you can deal with a bunch of scary but kiteable monsters by just stabbing and/or hexing them. Also, it’s easier to exclude and ignore sleeping monsters if you’re a quiet and stealthy Spriggan.
Compared to 0.15, which I played a lot recently, 0.18 is more balanced with respect to the amount of consumables. But this has some negative consequences. The early floors have fewer curing and heal wounds potions. Remove curse scrolls are much rare: you could easily find your first scroll only on D:4. Additionally, enchant weapon and enchant armour scrolls no longer uncurse items. The brands of monster weapons are IDed on sight, so you don’t have to worry about a surprise kobold with a distortion dagger. But this might make you think that it’s fine to ignore the old “don’t ever equip unidentified items” rule, which would be a big mistake. There’s nothing worse than being stuck with a -2 weapon on the first floors. All fights take 2-3 times longer, you need to constantly kite and stairdance enemies. It would be faster to start a new char than to suffer this for 2-3 more floors. And all that is because you wanted to check a glowing dagger on D:1!
But the number of positive changes is still overwhelming. The very first thing you notice is the autorest. After several months of playing old versions, it feels like magic: instead of repeatedly pressing 5 and checking that you have full HP and MP before resuming exploration, you just press o. You don’t have to zap-id wands, as they are identified on pickup. And you get new wands of acid and iceblast, which replace some attack wands like wands of fire and cold.
It took me 631 games and 10 months of crawling through old versions, but I finally got to a version with Irradiate. This iteration of the spell is kinda dangerous: two casts in a row could give you yellow contamination without a warning, which is a reliable source of bad mutation, but still! And there’s Yara’s too. Spell books are a bit more common early on, and you’re more likely to find something useful in them, because a bunch of boring spells got removed.
The hunger system has become less annoying too:
- all edible chunks stack;
- there are no more rotten chunks, which just wasted your inventory slots previously;
- ambrosia, honeycombs, cheese, and sausages were removed;
- a billion different fruits were merged into one “fruit” item;
- inedible chunks replaced poisonous chunks, so you don’t have to equip a rPois item for eating them;
- the command for chopping corpses got a hotkey for ignoring inedible corpses while previously you had to manually select
yornfor each corpse in a stack.
Also, you don’t have to sacrifice corpses any more!
The Depths got a bunch of new monsters and became much more interesting than its initial revision in 0.14 and 0.15. There are juggernauts, spark wasps, iron giants, entropy weavers, and everyone’s favourite, caustic shrikes. The branch became scarier and more fun, but also much more XP-dense.
Pakellas was as ridiculous as I remembered. To recap what this god was about: you received two wands, two evokers, and a rod. Pakellas blocked your MP regen, but provided MP on kills; any excess MP was gifted as potions of magic. The capstone ability allowed supercharging a wand or a rod, which gave them extra charges. Two active abilities let you recharge wands and temporarily increase the power of an evokable.
Piety gain is pretty fast even if you use the abilities, so you get to 6 stars in early Lair. All rods are useful in this version, but quite rare: normally you could find only a couple of them in a 3 rune game. Getting a bunch of evokables early on is obviously strong, but the real power comes from the wand recharging ability. In one game, I used it 140 times, which gave me 250+ extra wand charges and allowed spamming wands in each and every non-popcorn fight. Quick Charge requires both MP and piety for recharging wands, although it felt like the real bottleneck was MP, since I stayed at 5-6 stars of piety most of the game.
All this was absolutely unbalanced and a bit tedious, as you had to constantly recharge wands in between fights. Because otherwise Pakellas would drown you in MP potion gifts and your piety would be wasted. This made Pakellas the third aa god after old Sif and Yred: their a abilities were kinda tactical, but you usually spammed them between fights as well.
A few old DCSS mechanics negatively affected Pakellas: without wand stacking the inventory pressure was even more noticeable. There was no quiver, so spamming wands was less convenient. Also, some rods had a ridiculous food cost, so fully discharging, say, an iron rod could bring you from Satiated to Near Starving.
Finally, 0.16 - 0.18 had a bunch of other improvements and new things, big and small:
- Ru and Gozag were added.
- We got ambrosia potions, phantom mirrors, and Lici’s favourite amulet type, Harm.
- Targeters of wands and spells finally show the chance to defeat MR.
- Weapon descriptions mention the skill level for reaching min delay.
- Stairs get auto-marked if you’ve seen the other end.
- Box of beasts are finally not useless.
- Ranged ammo brands were removed.
- Orc became a two-floor branch instead of having four floors. S-branches have four levels instead of five. This hasn’t affected the average duration of a 3 rune game though, as it was compensated by the Depths requiring a bit more time.
- Spiders got new icons that are actually visible on dark floors.
- The
item_slotoption was added, so you don’t have to reassign scrolls of identify toimanually ever again. - More menus got icons.
- WebTiles became blazingly fast thanks to the addition of the
use_animationsoption. - Also, there was something important, which I’ve noticed only after two hours of playing 0.18: the square LOS.
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