## xNetHack 8.0 Changelog

This is a major version of xNetHack. It is based directly on xNetHack 7.0, and
is a fork off the vanilla NetHack 3.7.0 development version release.

The most recent vanilla commit incorporated into xNetHack 8.0 is 2abe156. Note
that because 3.7.0 is still in development status, xNetHack contains major
changes including new monsters, new objects, themed rooms, and other things
*not* documented in this file or other xNetHack changelogs. See doc/fixes37.0
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 However, the wiki page might be out of date; in case of
conflicting information, this changelog and others in this directory 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 3.7, and any changes
made in previous xNetHack versions, xNetHack 8.0 contains the following
changes:

### Gameplay changes

- Trappers and lurkers above are mindless.
- If hallucinating, a skeleton rattling its bones will not scare and paralyze
  you.
- Cost of several magic tools increased:
  - Magic horns and magic harps 50 => 200
  - Drum of earthquake 25 => 100
  - Magic whistle 10 => 100
  - Magic flute 36 => 144
- New terrain type "magic platform". This will currently only appear in special
  levels. It is effectively a hovering walkable space over open air. It cannot
  be dug down on or engraved on.
- The Valkyrie quest has received an overhaul:
  - All quest levels are redesigned to some extent; the locate and goal levels
    especially have received heavy redesigns, and the filler levels use new
    Lua-based level generators.
  - While the overall story of the quest remains the same (stop Lord Surtur from
    starting Ragnarok), the goal of the quest is changed - kill Lord Surtur.
    This may be a fine distinction, but the point is not to retrieve an artifact
    stolen from the Norn.
  - There is still technically a quest artifact: Sol Valtiva, the flaming sword
    wielded by Lord Surtur. It is a mithril two-handed sword, retaining the half
    damage and invoke for levelport provided by the Orb of Fate, but does not
    provide warning or act as a luckstone. It has +d3 to hit and +d5 fire
    damage, burning things it hits similar to Fire Brand. It is chaotic, but as
    a quest artifact, its alignment will change to match the player's if they
    are a Valkyrie.
  - In terms of monsters, the quest has many more giants and fewer fire ants.
    Insects no longer generate randomly over time.
  - The locate level, a broken bridge, is magically restored after Surtur is
    killed.
  - There is a throne in the goal level (and only one drawbridge).
- Valkyries start with a +1 spear or dwarvish spear instead of a long sword.
- Valkyries can now reach only Skilled in two-handed sword instead of Expert.
- Valkyries can reach Expert in spear, instead of Skilled.
- Enchantment is ignored when wishing for dragon scales.
- Artifacts created by naming retain the original material of the object.
- Vampires will not move onto sinks, including if they are shapeshifted.
- Foocubi gain a level when they drain one of yours, making future encounters
  less likely to go well for you.
- Magic portals are never hidden; they are readily visible like holes are.
- Gnomes generated outside the Mines may be carrying a few gems.
- Eating disenchanter meat while hallucinating will remove the hallucination
  instead of an intrinsic. If permanently hallucinating, this will break you out
  of it as well, similar to wielding Grayswandir.
- The Castle drawbridge may fail to close 20% of the time when using the
  passtune.
- The Castle drawbridge responds to passtune attempts 2 squares away from
  either of the two drawbridge squares, instead of only directly adjacent
  squares.
- Sleep spell level raised from 2 to 3 (which is what it is in vanilla).
- Kicking into empty air (which may strain a muscle) no longer wakes monsters.
- Anti-magic fields no longer deal HP damage when magic resistant. They instead
  drain additional energy the more sources of magic resistance and half damage
  you have.
- Corpses of monsters that cause petrification only grow green mold on them.
- Monsters that spawn with weapons get a free turn to wield them.
- Steam vortexes leave a trail of steam clouds behind them and burst into a
  medium sized steam cloud when they die. Canceling them prevents both of these.
- Add the #shout command, which lets you shout a string of your choice to get
  recorded in the game chronicle and livelog (which public servers may
  broadcast).
- Rangers at or above XL 10 automatically identify the enchantment of ammo that
  they pick up, provided they have at least Basic skill with its associated
  launcher.
- Exploding yellow and black lights affect all monsters immediately adjacent to
  them, not just the single target they are nominally attacking.
- The hunger intrinsic halves the nutritional value of anything you eat. It does
  not affect beverages, and other intrinsics that have fast hungering as a side
  effect do not cause this.
- Engraving with a wand of probing or wand of secret door detection produces a
  unique message and identifies the wand (assuming it has a charge to expend, as
  is standard).
- 1% of tigers drop a tiger eye ring when killed.
- Dwarves get a +1 alignment bonus when they chop down a tree.
- Jumping boots automatically identify themselves when worn.
- Iron-hating monsters will avoid stepping on spaces with iron chains.
- Several Minetowns have been changed, some of them significantly.
  - Town Square (minetn-2): Minor tweaks to widen most of the 1-wide vertical
    paths.
  - Alley Town (minetn-3):
    - Random gnomes in locked houses replaced with random "a" monsters in
      unlocked houses, plus one free-roaming random "a". These will not generate
      groups.
    - Two random [stacks of] slime molds.
    - Food shop chance is now 50% instead of 90%.
    - Wand shop chance is now 80% instead of 30%.
  - College Town (minetn-4):
    - Has a wider alley opposite the temple.
    - Tool shop chance is now 30% instead of 90%.
    - The room across from the food shop is a little bigger, and is often a 3x2
      scroll shop (always if there is no tool shop, and 10% if there is one.)
  - Bustling Town (minetn-6):
    - As an experiment, the shops can appear in any room of the correct size for
      that shop. There are still a guaranteed 3x3 general store, 3x3 tool store,
      3x3 lighting store, and 2x3 food store, but the 3x3 shops can appear in
      any unoccupied 3x3 space, and the 2x3 shops can appear in any unoccupied
      2x3 space.
    - The surrounding area is mineralized, and may contain gold and gems -
      probably not *many*, given the small area of solid stone available, but it
      can now.
  - Bazaar Town (minetn-7):
    - A much wider variety of shops can generate - armor, weapon, ring, scroll,
      and wand shops in addition to the general store, tool shops, and food
      shops that were previously possible. However, there is a moderating
      algorithm now that ensures there won't be games that get all of these, nor
      none of them.
    - Shops can appear in more rooms; any of the "ordinary" rooms that allows
      for a shop with 4 items is eligible.
    - Only one of the two possible food shops is guaranteed to have
      vegetarian-friendly items.
    - The nymph is moved to a different room, and there is also a nymph in the
      room containing the 3 monkeys.
    - Two additional doors for greater mobility: in the side of the room
      containing the 3 monkeys, and a secret one on the room containing the
      sink.
  - Frontier Town (minetn-8): Aiming to make it feel more like a frontier
    boomtown. Fortunately for the player, prices aren't jacked up how one would
    expect them to be in such a town.
    - Now works like Bustling Town, with a map overlaid on a cavern fill instead
      of rooms and corridors.
    - Chance of a tool shop is now 100% instead of 90%.
    - Chance of a food shop is now 50% instead of 90%.
    - There is now an overall 24% chance of a 3x2 potion shop. (Guaranteed if
      the other two non-guaranteed shops don't generate; 20% if at least one of
      them does.)
    - Two fewer watchmen. There are only 2 plus the captain.
    - Either a cursed touchstone or an oil lamp is in one of the non-shop
      non-temple buildings.
    - Three normal gnomes are replaced with normal dwarfs.
    - The gnome lord in a building has a 50% chance of being replaced by a
      roaming dwarf lord.
    - One fewer gnomish wizard in the temple.
    - The surrounding area is mineralized, and may contain gold and gems.
- The Master Assassin is now poison resistant.
- Rock trolls are petrification resistant.
- When a watchman yells about you picking a lock, the door no longer becomes
  trapped.
- New artifact, the Apple of Discord. It is a chaotic golden apple that can be
  invoked to toggle hungerless conflict (as with Big Stick), and makes conflict
  (from any source) nearly unresistable for monsters if you are carrying it, are
  currently chaotic, and have been crowned as a chaotic. It can be eaten, giving
  you permanent intrinsic hungering conflict.
- New Big Room variant, a large bridge spanning an expanse of water or a chasm.
- If you are petless, djinni from potions and lamps will never be created tame
  and break your conduct.
- Mark demon lord lairs, the Archeologist upper filler level, and the lower half
  of the Monk quest as unmappable - but only if the local villain (the demon
  lord whose lair it is or the quest nemesis) has never been killed or is
  present on the level. If they have been defeated at least once and are absent
  from the level, those levels can then be magic mapped.
- Items made of gold (besides gold coins) now act as a magnet for curse items
  effects, and will be picked first before any non-gold items. The player cannot
  drop, throw, or do anything else to make cursed gold items leave their
  inventory, making them act like loadstones. They can, however, still be stolen
  by leprechauns or other monsters. Remove curse effects will lift the curse
  from all gold items in the player's inventory, even with an unskilled spell or
  uncursed scroll, regardless of whether they are wielded or worn.
- The Quest can be entered at experience level 1 if you have never gained a
  level.
- Flaming, freezing, and shocking spheres all have an explode-upon-death attack
  like a gas spore's, but of fire, cold, and electricity type respectively, for
  the same damage as their active explosion attack.
- Gnome and dwarf monarchs will only pick up valuable gems, ignoring worthless
  glass.
- Gnome and dwarf nobility occasionally generate with a touchstone; 5% chance
  outside the Mines and 1% inside it.
- Cursed potions of gain level work in Sokoban (except on the topmost floor),
  and always make the hero appear on the downstairs of the level above. This
  incurs the usual cheating penalty.
- Clumsily throwing a weapon not designed to be thrown abuses Wisdom.
- Intelligent monsters will pick up keys and lock picks so that they can use
  them on doors.
- The cursed potion of gain ability when quaffed will raise your lowest ability
  score by one point by stealing the point from your highest ability score,
  rather than doing nothing.
- A number of major demons (horned devil, erinys, vrock, bone devil, nalfeshnee,
  pit fiend) are now capable of flight.
- Major demons generated at level creation time in Gehennom no longer have an
  80% chance of generating asleep.
- Non-silver-base items never randomly generate as silver in Gehennom.
- Green slimes can hide on the ceiling.
- New cold trap, which appears only in the Cocytus branch of Gehennom. It deals
  4d8 cold damage to non-cold-resistant creatures, and may strip intrinsic cold
  resistance from the affected creature.
- Interacting with a foocubus gives 20+3d20 turns of intrinsic cold resistance.
- Ice devils' cold sting can either strip their victim's intrinsic cold
  resistance like cold traps, or slow them down like a slowness attack.
- Bribable archfiends will now demand valuables from your inventory as part of
  their bribe. Giving them items reduces the amount of gold they want.
- New "doomed" intrinsic, which treats you as if you have -10 Luck. Your base
  luck still exists, but is suppressed. It reverts to its underlying value when
  the doom is lifted (minus losses from good luck timing out). The only thing
  that can prematurely lift doom is the throne effect that would otherwise give
  a wish.
- It is now possible to become intrinsically blind. This is separate from the
  blind roleplay birth option. It can be cured via casting cure blindness,
  prayer, invoking the Staff of Aesculapius, or putting on the Eyes of the
  Overworld.
- New monster spell Dark Speech, which only archfiends can cast. It inflicts one
  of the following five effects:
  - Remove a random intrinsic, as with a gremlin but without requiring it to be
    night.
  - Inflict d40+100 turns of withering.
  - Inflict 8d6 psychic damage (4d6 if deaf) and confuse and stun you.
  - Make you intrinsically blind (see above).
  - Grant you d2000+500 turns of the doomed intrinsic (see above). If you were
    already doomed, the timer is not modified and you lose two Luck instead.
- New monster giant fly. Has low health, but is fast and has a 2d8 bite. Appears
  only on Baalzebub's level.
- Gehennom's length, structure, and appearance is overhauled:
  - The main branch is now 10 levels long, counting the Valley of the Dead and
    Moloch's Sanctum, and containing four special levels and four randomly
    generated levels in the middle.
  - All eight archfiends are present in their own lairs, none of them in the
    main branch.
  - The level below the Valley is the gateway to Gehennom proper, which is
    guarded by Cerberus, who is now undeferred. Vlad's Tower is also accessed
    from this level.
  - Cocytus, an icy hell, branches off a few levels in. Asmodeus and a random
    lawful demon lord make their homes there. Being in the branch causes cold
    damage to you each turn if you are not cold resistant. Normal monster
    generation is restricted to major demons and cold-resistant monsters.
  - The Wizard's Tower is its own branch rather than being embedded into filler
    levels.
  - The fifth level of the main branch is the Stygian Marsh, containing the
    entrance to Shedaklah (Juiblex's and another chaotic demon lord's branch).
  - The sixth level of the main branch is the City of Dis, inhabited by a number
    of demons and containing the entrance to the Citadel of Dis, the lair of
    Dispater.
  - Below Dis, there is an entrance to the Abyss, which contains the lairs of
    the other chaotic demon lord and another branch to Tartarus, where
    Demogorgon lives.
- Archfiends are overhauled to make fighting them more interesting:
  - Dispater is very defensive-minded, and tries to avoid getting into melee
    combat with the hero. He has a special spell selection that are not direct
    attacks, which includes two new spells for teleporting away from the hero
    and entombing the hero in boulders and walls. He still summons nasties to
    distract the hero. He also gates in pit fiends 50% of the time.
  - Juiblex can split himself in two, and also splits reactively like a pudding.
    Killing him while there are clones of him on the level makes a random clone
    become the "real" one. When angry, he will produce ooze-like monsters from
    his body. He is now speed 6 instead of 3, and can hide on the ceiling.
  - Asmodeus can now cast three spells; the main one is his signature powerful
    cold spell, but he can also cast cure self at lower HP, and he can cast dark
    speech (see above). Cold resistance no longer entirely negates the cold
    spell; it reduces its damage to a quarter instead, and can now freeze items
    in your inventory.
  - Baalzebub constantly spawns giant flies from his body, and when threatened
    can burst into a swarm of flies and reform some distance away. He also has a
    poisonous sting attack.
  - Geryon has a large herd of quadrupeds on his level, and draws power from it.
    His damage and regeneration are proportional to the current size of the
    herd. His speed is negatively proportional to the size of the herd, meaning
    he gets faster if the herd is thinned. Killing a monster in his herd causes
    him to warp in and attack.
  - Yeenoghu wields a powerful flail (which is named Butcher, but it's not an
    artifact), and pursues a strategy of all-out attack, never fleeing or trying
    to escape. His physical attack can swat your wielded weapon out of your
    hands.
  - In addition to his existing abilities, Demogorgon has a bite attack that
    induces withering and can cast dark speech in addition to the usual magic
    spells.
  - Orcus has two additional spells: a blight spell that induces a large amount
    of withering, and a disenchant spell that drains and negatively enchants
    weapons, armor, rings, wands, and magic tools. He also uses a modified spell
    list with several of his spells behaving differently from usual:
    - Touch of death, stun hero, and drain strength bypass any magic
      resistance you have.
    - Summon nasties creates undead rather than random nasties.
- Archfiends that you do not take care of by killing or bribing them to stay out
  of your way apply debuffs during the ascension run:
  - Asmodeus makes your Pw regenerate one-third as fast and prevents cursed gain
    level from lifting you up a floor.
  - Baalzebub makes deadly illness kill you in half the time, strips any
    intrinsic poison resistance you have every so often, and makes tins and food
    go rotten 1/7 of the time.
  - Geryon reduces your carrying capacity to 75% of its usual value.
  - Dispater halves your HP regeneration.
  - Yeenoghu halves your damage reduction from low AC.
  - Juiblex reduces your speed to 75% of its usual value.
  - Orcus applies a fluctuating penalty to spellcasting Pw cost, and causes
    attempted writes of otherwise known scrolls and spellbooks to fail 35% of
    the time.
  - Demogorgon triples your natural hunger rate.
  - Monsters spawn on the upstairs of your current level during the ascension
    run. The rate at which they spawn depends on how many archfiends you took
    care of.
- Wands of wishing are again redistributed through the late game:
  - The Castle wand now only gives one wish, due to being much closer to Vlad's
    Tower.
  - Vlad and the Wizard's Tower top floor still have one wish. However, there
    are no longer wishes in the fake wizard tower (which no longer exists) or
    the Sanctum.
  - Three randomly chosen archfiends guard a wand of wishing. Juiblex never
    does, but any of the other seven might.
- Ice and bone devils are now lawful rather than chaotic.
- Demons cannot be frightened by showing them their reflection.
- Levelporting no longer works in Gehennom (besides from the Valley, which does
  not let you levelport beneath it.)
- Barbed devils have a 2d4 passive physical attack.
- Bone devils have the ability to summon a skeleton every so often.
- Non-obvious gameplay changes from vanilla, introduced by its merge:
  - The Monk quest provides spinach tins in a couple places.
  - Goblins and hobgoblins no longer have poison resistance, as in vanilla.
  - Demonbane no longer confers warning, but can now be invoked to banish demons
    and is the first sacrifice gift for Priests. It is still a lawful silver
    mace.
  - Carrying a lizard corpse on new moon no longer confers any passive
    protection. Cockatrice and chickatrice hisses will begin petrifying you 100%
    of the time during new moon regardless of whether you have a lizard.
  - The amulet of life saving grants 60-170 HP depending on Con, rather than a
    flat 100 HP.
  - The gas clouds on the Plane of Fire are smaller.
  - The potion of speed confers 40/100/160+d10 turns of temporary very fast
    speed, depending on BUC, instead of a fairly short duration.
  - The chance of objects generating eroded, erodeproof, or greased now matches
    vanilla's (1/80 erodeproof, 1/80 recursive chance of erosion, 1/1000
    greased).
  - Themed rooms with interesting shapes but no unusual terrain or contents now
    can use the vanilla "themeroom fill" system which allows them to get various
    room-shape-agnostic fills.
  - The "buried treasure" room now uses vanilla's approach of putting an
    engraving potentially anywhere on the map that indicates a buried treasure
    in the themed room.
  - Orcs no longer automatically get a cap of Skilled in scimitar (which is now
    lumped into saber skill).
  - The Tutorial branch is present. As in vanilla, you can disable start-of-game
    prompting for a tutorial by adding "OPTIONS=!tutorial" to your config file.
- All remaining random maze levels (namely, those between Medusa and the Castle)
  have been removed. These levels will instead generate regular dungeon floors,
  like they previously had a 20% chance of doing. Special levels that explicitly
  use mazes as part of their generation (vibrating square level, Catacombs, a
  couple Big Room variants) are not affected.
- When a Lua script errors out and fails to load completely, the level will
  generate as a big empty space instead of a random maze.

### Interface changes

- Engravings now properly use the new vanilla glyph system. There is one glyph
  per type of engraving (except graffiti, which has 3 glyphs). There are new
  tiles for each new glyph.
- When hallucinating, squeaky boards now appear to be chickens, and squawk
  instead of squeak.
- #holidays extended command which displays which holidays tracked by the game
  are active.
- Cold rays and explosions render as bright blue instead of white, to
  distinguish them from lightning.
- Item encyclopedia lookup from the inventory is now an item in the menu of
  things you can do with an item you select when looking at the inventory, under
  'l', rather than the default behavior.
- Quantum mechanics are given physicist names when farlooked, or "Dr. Science"
  if cancelled. (Similar to coyotes, not like nymphs or foocubi.)
- Steam vortices' engulf attack produces "boiling" messages rather than
  "burning".
- When you begin the game in polyinit mode and using the tty windowport, the "Is
  this ok?" prompt before launching the game is always shown, and displays the
  monster you will be polyinitted into.
- Detect unseen is no longer a messageless effect. You now get messages about
  revealing one or more secret doors, corridors, traps, or monsters.
- Farlooking a monster will show if they are fleeing.
- Farlooking a monster that you can see will show if they are wearing armor
  and/or wielding a weapon.
- New option in the terrain menu to show spaces on the current map that you have
  visited.
- Paranoid "throw" option is expanded to cover throwing weapons and
  weapon-tools not designed to be thrown (in addition to the existing check for
  throwing ammo without the proper launcher), such as throwing a sword, club, or
  polearm. If you have the option turned off or choose to throw it anyway, a
  message announces that you "clumsily" throw it.

### Architectural changes

- Usage of the term "demon lord" to refer to any of the two demon lords and six
  demon princes has been changed to the collective term "archfiend" to remove
  ambiguity.
- Fuzzer logging is now a compile-time switch, and is off by default, rather
  than being a silent user of CPU in all regular games.
- Struct rm has increased by 1 byte.
- Artifacts now have their material (either something specific or "use the base
  item's default material") encoded in the artilist array rather than hardcoded
  in artifact creation.
- The nommap level flag is now 2 bits long.
- Implement a system in which a spellcasting monster can cast from a special
  list of spells rather than just casting any spell at all.
- Add a function find_boss() that returns the boss of the current level and
  whether it's their lair level or merely in their domain.
- The corrmaze level flag and its associated behavior are removed.
- Add a struct to the global context that tracks information about archfiends
  and princes (called "archfiends" collectively in the code): how many of them
  are present, whether any of them have escaped the dungeon, and if they are
  designated to have a wish this game.
- When a monster class (but not a species) and an alignment is specified in a
  des.monster Lua command, it will generate a monster of that class with that
  alignment in its statblock, rather than a minion of that alignment's god.
- Add functions percent() and rnf(), for writing conditionals whose semantics
  are "an X% chance of this" or "a X in Y percent chance of this", and avoiding
  obtuse rn2 statements.
- ceiling_exists() is no longer a function. It is back to has_ceiling(&u.uz).
- Award an extended achievement for killing every archfiend.
- Move the logic of choosing a special fruit name for a holiday into a new
  function maybe_festive_fruit().