If you thought it’s gonna be about the Slow spell or about stones, there’s a surprise for you: it’s not. This is about shopping trips.
The history of modern DCSS is a history of streamlining. Even though Crawl began as an anti-NetHack game, early versions had a lot of features more suitable for a Fantasy Dungeon Simulator 2000. A whole bunch of game mechanics existed because of “realism” or maybe because other similar games had them.
The whole shopping process as it exists now made more sense in old versions:
- you couldn’t carry a hundred potions in your inventory because of the weight limit, but also because you could lose all of them due to item destruction.
- The inventory limit existed, and most players used item stashes, so trips back and forth didn’t feel out of place.
- Enemies respawned over time, adding a bit of spice to shopping trips.
Over the years, tedious, repetitive, and unfun elements were chopped off. But sometimes these removals created or elevated the remaining unfun parts of the gameplay. Shopping trips peaked on the unfun scale during 0.21 - 0.25, when monsters had stopped respawning, but food still existed. When all permafood was merged into one inventory item - rations - it was the worst: you had to pay a ration for each and every long trip, which was annoying even when you had 40+ rations in your inventory.
A few recent changes affect shopping trips too: on one hand we have antibacktracking changes for Xom, on the other, the removal of the piety decay, which was the last relevant cost of long trips. But if the former change is supposed to be only a temporary measure, everyone knows there’s nothing more permanent than a temporary fix, so we could be stuck with that for a couple of versions.
Some time ago, there was an AmaZot Prime idea on Reddit or old Tavern (unfortunately I can’t find the origin and the author): let Gozag to deliver items from far away shops to you. Now we have unlimited inventories, so it’s possible to put a purchased item directly there, allowing the use of this feature even when flying above lava or deep water.
This change wouldn’t affect regular/Xom’s Bazaars, which are the only exciting kind of shopping trips. The shopping list correctly handles items from disconnected branches like Bazaars or Pan already, so exiting them clears the corresponding items from the list. Similarly, the ctrl-o screen already allows browsing all visited shops and easily adding their items to the shopping list. Most of the pieces are here, and the only remaining change is to allow the shopping list to function as a shop. Dungeon shops could work the same way they do now, and people who prefer to travel to them could still do that.
To summarize: in 99% of current games, shopping trips are completely safe, boring, and cost-free, unless you’re playing a turn-count game. They only interrupt the game flow and waste turns, so it feels like a good time to get rid of them. We could even have some flavour messages for delivery imps, complaining about traffic and low pay by Gozag Corp.