## xNetHack 4.0 Changelog

This is a major version of xNetHack. It is a fork off of the vanilla NetHack
3.6.1 release, and is also based directly on xNetHack 3.0. See doc/fixes36.1 and
doc/fixes36.2 for the devteam's changes.

The xNetHack page at the NetHackWiki, https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/XNetHack,
attempts to describe these changes in a way that's better formatted and more
friendly to players. However, it might be out of date; in case of conflicting
information, this changelog and others in this folder are more up-to-date than
the wiki page, and the commit messages are more up-to-date than this changelog.

On top of any changes made by the NetHack devteam on 3.6.1, and any changes
made in previous xNetHack versions, xNetHack 4.0 contains the following
changes:

### Gameplay changes

- Remove the scroll of amnesia. In its place, create the scroll of water, which
  behaves mostly like UnNetHack's scroll of flood, except it will never create
  a pool underneath the player. It costs 200 and takes 4-7 ink to write. It is
  unblankable except by acid.
- Also from UnNetHack, random graves may have a scroll of water placed on them,
  and the epitaph is then "Apres moi, le deluge."
- Remove mind flayers' amnesia. They still drain Int.
- Monsters created along with rooms will never generate on top of stairs.
- If the player enters a level on a spot where there is a monster, always
  displace the monster away. (Previously this only happened 50% of the time,
  and the other 50% the player was moved.)
- Monster groups, small and large, now have their sizes fuzzed a bit.
- Most create monster sources will no longer create groups of monsters.
- Add polyinit mode: you begin the game permanently polymorphed into a monster
  of your choice. This is a non-scoring mode like explore mode, and can be
  combined with explore mode (and wizard mode of course). To enable, set
  OPTIONS=polyinit:[monster] in your config file.
  - You can polyinit to anything except player monsters and uniques. Any other
    monsters are fair game, but if you can't polymorph into one in a normal
    game, it's not officially supported. Beware of crashes.
  - In polyinit mode, you will never leave bones.
- Extrinsic sources of fire, cold, and shock resistance provide immunity to all
  items in your inventory from that type of damage.
- Eating mimic corpses no longer breaks polyselfless conduct.
- Tourists now begin the game wearing low boots (walking shoes).
- Martial arts attacks now always include skill damage bonuses, instead of
  randomly not getting them 75% of the time.
- Several more tools are now eligible to receive non-default object materials.
  Mostly these are instruments: all whistles, harps, flutes, horns, and bugles.
  Lanterns and lamps are also now eligible.
  - Horns use their own new list; everything else made eligible uses a separate
    new "resonant" list.
  - Several items are renamed due to containing materials in the name:
    - "wooden flute" -> "flute"
    - "wooden harp" -> "harp"
    - "tin whistle" -> "pea whistle"
    - "brass lantern" -> "lantern"
    - "silver bell" (for the Bell of Opening) -> "engraved silver bell"
  - Boomerangs, while not a tool, are also eligible; they receive the same
    materials as bows.
- Slight tweak to the object material probabilities for bows.
- Weapons made out of bone can hit shades (they don't get any bonuses though)
- Silver-hating has been refactored and generalized into any-material-hating.
  - Behavior for silver itself is NOT changed: all silver haters still hate
    silver and it still sears them for d20 damage.
  - Other material hatred does not cause searing, it causes pain and flinching
    but does only d6 bonus damage, and the player can touch and use items made
    of a material they hate (unlike silver, which if the player hates it will
    be unhandleable.)
  - Elves (including elvish players), nymphs, and all i-class monsters now hate
    iron (including crashing into iron bars).
  - Fungi, Pestilence, and anything else with a disease or rotting attack now
    hates copper.
- Copper antimicrobialness resists sickness: for each piece of copper armor you
  wear, you have a stacking 20% chance to not fall Ill when you would have
  otherwise.
- Object material densities have been overhauled because the "ultra realistic"
  ones did not make for good gameplay. They are now arbitrary units that will
  hopefully preserve some realism while still making for good gameplay.
- Object material prices per aum have also been updated, but only for gold,
  platinum, and mithril, all of which have been made more expensive.
- Object material AC has one slight tweak: MINERAL is reduced by 2 points.
- Some base materials have been changed to make life easier for elvish players:
  Runeswords, and therefore Stormbringer, are now metal.
  Athames and therefore Magicbane are now metal.
  All amulets, and therefore the Eye of the Aethiopica, are now metal.
  The Mitre of Holiness is now silver.
- You can now refresh your memory with a spellbook whenever you want, rather
  than forcing you to wait until it dips below 10% retention.
- Implement player-as-an-Archon blinding gaze attack (code by Pavel Braginskiy)
- Silver items can corrode, and bone items can burn.
- The Barbarian lower filler and goal levels are replaced.
- The chance of a successful artifact wish is now 1/(# of artifact wishes + 1).
  This means that randomly generated, named, and gifted artifacts do not count
  against your chances. However, unsuccessful wishes still count against you.
- The chance of a god gift on a sacrifice is now 1/(10 + 2 * gifts^2).
  This again means that randomly generated, named, and wished-for artifacts do
  not count against your chances.
- Sokoban luck penalties for jumping, hurtling, and dragging yourself via
  thrown ball are removed, since none of them can actually be cheated with.
- The spiders-spinning-webs feature introduced in 1.0 ascended to vanilla, and
  has been backported from there so that xNetHack's version now behaves the
  same as vanilla.
  Additionally, shopkeepers will also clean up webs spun in their shops.
- The SLASH'EM feature in which corpses in the taint-risk stage can
  spontaneously morph into living F monsters has been ported.
- Force bolts (from the spell and the wand of striking) will smash through and
  destroy iron bars in their path. If the bars are set nondiggable, they do not
  interact with the force bolt.
- Melee combat now awakens monsters in a radius dependent on the size of the
  attacking monster. This is reduced but not eliminated for a stealthy player,
  and does not affect other types of combat.
- Make the rne() function not care about experience level. It now caps at 10
  regardless of the player's stats.
- Port FIQHack's charged ring initial enchantment math. The main thing is that
  rings now use rne(2) instead of rne(3), making high enchantment more likely,
  and zero enchantment extremely unlikely.  The math on whether the enchantment
  is negative also uses a new formula. In general, blessed rings are very
  likely to have positive enchantment, cursed rings are very likely to have
  negative, and uncursed have positive enchantment about 2/3 of the time and
  negative about 1/3. The formula for uncursed rings is slightly tweaked.
- Demon lords are made hostile if you wield Demonbane, as well as Excalibur,
  when they are generated or they approach you.
- Archeologists begin the game knowing all varieties of worthless glass.
- Ghosts are overhauled: while idle, hostile ones will turn invisible, and they
  will then try to follow you invisibly and make themselves visible when
  adjacent, which will scare you and freeze you for three turns if you didn't
  see them beforehand. They can then turn invisible in another 2d8 turns. Their
  1d1 damage is removed, meaning they cannot hurt you on their own.
- Additionally, ghosts are now incorporeally immune to all of the same things
  that shades are. Just like shades, objects that are silver, bone, blessed or
  artifacts versus undead will hit them. However, silver does not cause silver
  damage to ghosts.
- Ghost stats are also changed: their base level is brought down from 10 to 4
  (mainly to knock down their hit dice; they should be hard to land a hit on in
  the first place but not actually be a tank once the player has something that
  can hurt them), their speed is increased from 3 to 5, their AC is increased
  (making them *easier* to hit) from -5 to 5, and their magic resistance is
  increased from 50 to 80.
- Silver items are now corrodeable.
- Pets will no longer eat shapeshifter corpses unless starving or unless
  tameness is so low that they are about to go feral.
- Croesus' two-handed sword is gold, and he also gets either a chain mail or
  plate mail, which is also gold.
- Chameleons will no longer turn into too-high-difficulty forms. This goes for
  other shapechangers too - but only in their failure cases where they turn
  into random monsters. For instance, sandestins will still pick a nasty form
  6/7 of the time even out of difficulty, and doppelgangers will still pick
  nasties or player monsters if they are out of difficulty. Chameleons' special
  case for animals, however, no longer allows it to select out-of-difficulty
  animals.
- Revert 3.1 change that did extra fuzzing on monster group sizes. Monster
  group
  sizes now are the same as vanilla again.
- Corpses of F monsters will never have mold grow on them.
- Blessed wands will wrest 1/7 of the time, and uncursed 1/23 of the time,
  instead of 1/121 (cursed still wrests with this frequency).
- A few doors in Vlad's Tower are now iron.
- MAJOR wand of wishing changes: it will turn to dust when it runs out of
  charges (so no wrest wishes), it will explode when recharged, and it will no
  longer generate randomly. Instead of a single wand at the Castle, however,
  there are multiple ones scattered throughout the later game:
  - One (0:2) wand in the Castle chest.
  - One (0:1) wand in Vlad's chest.
  - One (0:1) wand in the Fake Wizard's Tower that has no portal.
  - One (0:1) wand on the space occupied by the Wizard of Yendor.
  - One (0:1) wand in the northeasternmost room of the Sanctum.
- Make spellbooks' weight dependent on their level. The weight is 30 plus 5 per
  spell level, so the overall range is 35 for a level 1 spellbook up to 65 for
  a level 7 spellbook.
- Dwarf lords and dwarf kings that generate with dwarvish ring mail have a
  25%/50% chance of that mail being guaranteed mithril, if it wasn't already.
- Positively enchanted, worn bone armor will intercept a incoming level drain,
  losing one point of enchantment in the process.
- Bone's relative material AC is decreased from 6 to 4 (on par with wood).
- Naming artifacts no longer breaks illiterate conduct.
- Wielding a spellbook will no longer bring the Pw cost of the spell below its
  base 5\*level value, though the halving effect otherwise still works.
- Make gnomish wizards, kobold shamans, and orc shamans telepathic. Their
  corpses may now occasionally convey telepathy (infrequent, unlike floating
  eyes).
- The corpse of any casting monster now follows the same logic as newt corpses
  to make the player regain some energy and maybe gain a point to their max.
- Genociding green slime while turning to slime stops the sliming
- Incorporate Malcolm Ryan's brewing patch, ported to NetHack 3.6. This enables
  you to dissolve fungi corpses in fruit juice to ferment them into various
  other potions:
  - Green mold produces acid (NOT healing as in the original patch).
  - Red mold produces booze (NOT sleeping as in the original patch).
  - Brown mold produces sleeping (NOT booze as in the original patch).
  - Yellow mold produces confusion.
  - Violet fungus produces hallucination.
  - Additionally unlike the original patch, you cannot ferment an entire stack
    of potions with one corpse, and fermenting a shop-owned potion makes you
    pay for its original cost.
- Mold will not grow on a corpse when the corpse's spot is occupied by some
  other creature.
- Buff war hammers into a two-handed weapon that does 2d6 to small monsters and
  2d8 to large.
- Significantly buff Ogresmasher: it now deals d8 extra damage to all monsters,
  and has heavy critical hits, which crush and instakill small or tiny monsters
  and disable medium or larger monsters.
- Change Dragonbane from a broadsword into a dwarvish spear.
- Change Demonbane from a silver long sword into a silver mace.
- Port Fourk's change to the Sceptre of Might: it is now the Priest quest
  artifact instead of the Caveman quest artifact, and confers drain resistance
  when wielded instead of magic resistance. Instead of conflict, its invoke
  power is the same energy boost provided by the Mitre of Holiness, which is
  removed. The new quest artifact for Cavemen is Big Stick, a club that confers
  stealth when carried, magic resistance when wielded, and +d5 to hit and +d12
  versus all monsters. Its invoke power is hungerless conflict, as the Sceptre
  used to provide.
- Fire and Frost Brand are now short swords that can be twoweaponed with each
  other.

### Interface changes

- When you kill the Wizard of Yendor, the livelog prints where you are in the
  dungeon.
- If you die while stuck in creature form, your actual death reason is shown,
  and the "while stuck in creature form" is recorded in the while field of the
  xlogfile.
- The livelogging patch is extended to include arising from the dead or slime
  as a sentient copy of the monster. This is a livelog flag of 0x0200.
- The #terrain command works while hallucinating, confused or stunned.
- Cursed scrolls of remove curse no longer give "You feel like someone is
  helping you", since they don't practically uncurse anything.
- The spell menu now shows the exact number of turns of spell memory you have
  in the "Retention" column, rather than vague percentages.
- When a potion of oil fails to dilute in water, give a message and identify
  the potion.
- Usual update of more gravestone messages, random engravings, and shirt
  messages.
- Easter egg when you read a dwarvish ring mail.
- Suppress "Unknown command 'foo'." messages in the dumplog.
- YAFM when you break an identified wand of nothing.
- Demon lords that ask for bribes now indicate their displeasure when you come
  to them with no money (previously, they just silently attacked).
- All demon lords, the Riders, Vlad, and the Wizard of Yendor all have a unique
  multiline message that prints when you encounter them for the first time.
- All wands that print an unambiguous message clue to their identity now
  automatically type-identify when engraved with.
- YAFM when you sit on a towel.
- YAFM when starting or restoring a game while hallucinating.
- Peaceful monsters are now underlined by default in both the tty and curses
  windowports. It is controlled by the boolean option "underline_peacefuls"
  (defaults to true).
- Slightly more flavorful (ha) message when you get regurgitated on account of
  slow digestion.
- You no longer get additional score for reaching a deeper dungeon level than
  45. This is mainly so that true min-score can be achieved in any game.
- Track survivor as a full conduct. It exists as the 20th least significant bit
  of the xlogfile conduct field (0x80000).
- Give a hint message after feeling more confident in your skills that you
  should use #enhance to enhance them.
- If you hit the letter of something in your inventory while viewing it
  normally (not at a prompt), it will open the encyclopedia for that item.
- The wizweight option is changed to "invweight", now defaults to on, is now
  accessible outside of wizard mode, and when enabled will show the weight of
  items in your inventory.
- The 'i' inventory command now shows how full your inventory is, both in terms
  of weight/carrycap and n/52 items.
- YAFM when hallucinating and you observe a monster grow up.
- Neutral sacrifices disappear in a cloud of smoke instead of a burst of flame.
- Reenable YAFM in the list of vanquished creatures if you die while
  hallucinating.
- Tiles are now supported again.

### Architectural changes

- Remove all (now dead) code relating to amnesia.
- Add a makemon flag for suppressing the creation of monster groups.
- Enable LIVELOGFLAGS in the sysconf. Livelogging is still disabled by default
  in config.h.
- Fix two critical bugs in the selection_do_grow code.
- Since there needed to be two distinct calls to identifying a wand via
  engraving, break out that small bit of logic into its own function
  engraving_learn_wand.
- Refactor both instances of ghosts scaring the player into one scary_ghost
  function.
- Most checks in the code for PM_SHADE are replaced with noncorporeal() checks.
- Split steal_it into itself and really_steal, which contains the actual logic
  for the player stealing from a monster.
- Add peaceful monster glyph offset to the display code, and all the other
  corresponding macros and defines that go along with that.
- Refactor rndmonst to require only a single pass over the monsters array to
  select its monster, removing the need for a rndmonst_state cache.