Sources of HyperRogue: part IV

This is the fourth post in the series, about the lands from versions 8.x.

There is not much to say about Wild West. Revolvers, and hunting outlaws for bounties, are among the most common tropes in westerns. It does not really match the rest of the game, so it is available as the bonus land only.

Snowyowl0 had an idea on the HyperRogue forum about a land called "The Eternal Storm", which was a land with strong winds, and with Fulgurite as a treasure. I read what Fulgurite was — a mineraloid created when lightning hits sand, and also a nice reference to Fulgur14, one of the most prominent members of the HyperRogue community — and found it more appropriate for the land that I had rough idea for since some time, where you had to kill monsters by creating electric connections out of them. So that's how the Land of Storms was created. The monsters you created electric connections of had to be something metallic (so that it is a conductor), slow (so that you actually have time to create connections), and heavily armored (so that it cannot be destroyed in normal way). My first drawing of the Metal Beast created something like a Trilobite, and they remained like that. They were joined by Storm Trolls, since it was interesting to also have monsters creating conductible walls when they die.

Ivy was one of the first monsters unique to HyperRogue, but now I have invented a potentially more interesting variant of it, growing much more quickly. I found the Mutant Ivy work well in two cases: in a forest (where you could chop down trees to reach the root), and in the open space, where it moved only on hexagons. I have restricted the movement of the Mutant Ivy to hexagons outside of the Overgrown Woods, so we have both cases in the same monster. You could cut trees to get access to the root, but it was also useful to be able to restrict the growth by placing barriers too — so the Mutant Ivy was joined by yet another Troll. Thus, the Trolls in the Living Fjord, Land of Storms, and Overgrown Woods (and to lesser extent Red Rock Valley) are all primarily intended not as something that can kill you, but something that helps you — as we say with Princess Tehora, "the trolls only want to help". The Orb of the Overgrown Woods is the Orb of Luck, which notably loses some charges when you kill an Albatross, as a reference to the superstition that killing albatrosses brings bad luck, as suggested by simon_clarkstone.

And the hex-restricted Mutant Ivy grew quite nicely in the open space, covering everything nearby — this was used in a Yendor challenge, but also a special land, the Clearing, was created for it. Fighting an infinite monster gives me a very epic mental image, especially when you notice that, when you move towards the root, you actually destroy trillions of Ivy leaves with a single strike (even though the game does not count that). Giant Fox was an appropriate monster here — as a omnivore it could both eat the mutant fruits and attack the player character, and there were already some canines (I like reusing families of monsters, like birds and Trolls). Orb of Freedom is a reference to the description of the Giant Fox, which is quite hard to see, since it is hard to actually meet a Giant Fox — even though it has no special properties, in combination with the giant Mutant Ivy I believe that it actually makes the land much harder, so you won't actually meet them unless going for high score.

Haunted Woods are based on an idea of wonderfullizardofoz. The general idea, shape, and location of the Haunted Woods are taken directly from this idea. No specific ideas about monsters, treasures and terrain features were given, so I have decided to make it Haunted Woods, a forest filled with Ghosts, inspired by a card in the Dominion deck-building game, which also gives a mental image of being lost in the woods, and the treasure name is inspired by the most expensive card in the famous collectible card game Magic: the Gathering. The Friendly Ghosts created by Orb of Undeath were initially greenish, but in 9.2 they were recolored on tehora's request to match the Playmobil toy (video).

As I have mentioned, Snowyowl0 had an idea about a land called "The Eternal Storm" — the Land of Storms took the name and treasure from this idea, but not really the general idea (land with strong winds), or the monsters (crows and air elementals). Windy Plains are based on these remaining ideas. I wanted a treasure which would be carried by the strong winds, and a feather was a natural candidate yet again (after the phoenix feather from the Land of Eternal Motion). White dove feather as a reference to the song by Bob Dylan, Blowing in the Wind. Tehora helped with the color scheme.

She has also helped a lot with the Rose Garden — here is her story: "There were multiple sources of idea of Rose Garden — probably the most personal land in the game. The earliest I recall was when Zeno made few buttons and fridge magnets with HyperRogue theme. I told him that HyperRogue lacked in a land that would have been incredibly light, pastel, sweet and pink. A bit disturbing and psychedelic. I do not remember who came first with the exact name of Rose Garden — probably me after Zeno told me about one of his favorite roguelike monsters — the nicely smelling rosebush from Alphaman. I got extremely excited with that idea, even more because I personally dislike roses, so they made perfect "monsters" for that land. And then I populated Rose Garden with False Princesses and Princes — a delicate reference to "The Little Prince" by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and the related Polish song by Kasia Sobczyk. There has been already lost Princess/Prince, that was a real love of our Rogue, but... how to love only one person, when there are many other appealing? This loosely reflects my personal demon, too — to me every other girl would be a better match for Zeno. Digging further in the love-theme, we introduced the Rose Beauties and Handsome Gardeners who would be "too pretty to be killed" — I suggested them during a walk in the break during our friends' doctoral defenses. Actually, the suspenders of Handsome Gardeners were inspired by the outfit of one of our friends on that day. I liked Rose Beauties, because of association with my original understanding of The Sick Rose by William Blake. The very first time I heard this poem in Protagonist's song (thanks KosGD!) it triggered an image of an extremely beautiful but coldhearted evil lady, that nobody expects to be dangerous (of course, many years later I encountered so called "proper analysis" of this poem, but I reject it!). Gardeners tend to be "default lovers" in fairytales — e.g. we thought about Muzzy in Gondoland where the Princess ran away with a Gardener — a cartoon from our childhood. And the last fun fact — when I urged Zeno to create new appearance for Rose Beauties our first attempt ended up as the new look for Witches... And the tiling for that land was prepared to satisfy my moaning that Zeno made a great tiling for Galápagos, and Rose Garden had an inherited one. The initial orb's name suggested by Zeno was Orb of the Skunk and I strongly disliked it. We spend reasonably too much time discussing it, and eventually ended up with Orb of Beauty with the same effect, although motivated differently (gives you stunning appearance, not stink)."

In roguelikes such as Zaga-33 and Ending, the concept of "parity" is crucial — if you have four way movement on a chessboard, and skipping turns not allowed, it is predetermined whether you hit the monster first or it hits you, unless you find some way to disrupt the parity. IMHO games centered around parity get old quite quickly, but I have found it quite fun in Crypt of the Necrodancer — as you have to deal with parity only for a very small number of monsters here — so I have decided to do a bit similar in HyperRogue — have a single land based on parity. The usual HyperRogue tiling has no parity, but it could be recovered by forbidding movement between hexagons, or even better, using another tiling equivalent to such a rule. The intended solution to the problem of killing an incorrectly aligned monster has been influenced by the CotD solution. When showing an early draft to Fulgur14, with trees, lakes, and monsters temporarily named Sloths, he has noticed that the "warped tiling" actually had straight lines, and suggested that they could be used for shorelines — which was a very nice idea, so it turned into a Warped Coast. A new sailor creature was required (after Pirates and Vikings), and Ratlings (from ADOM) were chosen, because of the association of rats with ships and pirates. Their suspiciousness of enemies who do not move was a result of my e-mail discussion with Michael Brough, the author of Zaga-33, about the parity rule. In the first version, the land was solved far too easy by killing Ratlings on a sea boundary, so we have decided with tricosahedron that Ratling Avengers would be created when a player tries to abuse that strategy — and Fulgur14 and tehora wanted them to have capes, because Avengers always wear capes. Corals are a reference to the crochet coral reef project.

Also, the Crossroads IV were created, to reuse the straight line separating Warped Sea and Warped Coast in other situations. Wonderfullizardofoz had this idea too.

Fulgur14 had the idea of a gravity-based land with infinite trees. I think he has suggested apples as treasure, as a reference to the apple which, according to the legend, fell on Isaac Newton's head and thus influenced creation of the theory of gravity. But how to name yet another land of trees, after Jungle, Dry Forest, Overgrown Woods, and Haunted Woods? I remembered that Manic Miner, a classic platformer from 1983, had a level named Endorian Forest. The theme is a result of merging all three themes — Manic Miner's Endorian forest (EF for short), wizardry theme of Ivory Tower, and the theme of research. The land is named Yendorian Forest, as a reference to EF and the Wizard of Yendor in NetHack. EF had green (stable) and red (crumbling) branch platforms, and thus the Yendorian Forest has strong and weak branches. Sparrowhawk is simply a bird who likes to catch prey on trees; tehora did not like using the default bird shape for them, with their "shanks" sticking out, so she was forced to draw a new shape. It is not completely clear what the creatures in EF were supposed to be (probably EF is a reference to the Endorian Forest in Star Wars, and the creatures would be Ewoks, but still, they look different), and how they look from the above — tehora interpreted them as wearing hats similar to ones worn in ancient Aztec reliefs, so that's what we see in HyperRogue. Their bright saturated colors are also a reference to EF. Their name is a reference to Isaac Newton's gravity research, and "infinite trees" in their description are one of research subjects in theoretical computer science.

As mentioned in the first post in this series, originally I had a different idea for the main quest in HyperRogue — every place in the world had environmental/civilizational parameters (temperature, humidity, whatever) which slowly changed as you travelled, and you had to find the location with specific parameters, and probably come back. I did not have a precise idea about how to implement this, and I found that even simpler ideas are fun enough in the hyperbolic plane anyway. At that time, I had no good idea about how to develop this, but when I have mentioned this in that post, I thought that it would be fun to try this now, with all the new experience. I wanted slow creatures whose properties would adapt to the changing environment as you were travelling. This reminded me of Galápagos — tortoises in different islands have different properties to adapt to their environments, which was noticed by Charles Darwin during his Beagle trip, and contributed to the theory of evolution. The land could be called "Land of Tortoises", but Galápagos means "tortoises" in Spanish, so it is better. The text message you get when you find a Baby Tortoise ("Aww, poor Baby Tortoise.") is a reference to Penance, the roguelike webcomic.

A long time ago, Fulgur14 had a idea of a worm-like Dragon, who would be killed by damaging all its segments. I wanted to implement Dragon Chasms some time ago, but the idea for generating it (horocyclic chasms) turned out to be more appropriate for an archipelago, so Caribbean was created instead. Environmental parameters introduced for Galápagos had another application, of creating procedurally generated height maps — so I have decided to create Dragon Chasms with a new algorithm, where chasms were based on such a heightmap. It was quite lucky that Galápagos and Dragon Chasms were created together — I had no idea who would steal Baby Tortoises from their families, and how the Dragons could do anything evil despite being so slow — and making the Dragons steal Tortoises solved both problems! Fire Elementals were added as a simple monster to complement the Dragons — they were already in the Elemental Planes and they should appear somewhere else, and Dragon Chasms sounded appropriate. One bad thing about that is that all other Elementals are very strong in their lands (but weak in the Elemental Planes), and Fire Elemental is still rather weak in the Dragon Chasms — maybe something will be changed in the future. The Orb of Domination has its own story... when we have been showing HyperRogue to one of our friends a year ago, he went to the Desert, and he said "Wow, a Sandworm! Is it possible to ride it?!". It was high time to actually implement Sandworm riding.

This is all in HyperRogue 8.x. The next episode will be about HyperRogue 9.x, and it will take some time — it is still not known what will be there! :)

HyperRogue 9.2: 3D hyperbolic animations!

HyperRogue 9.2 is released on Steam and itch.io!

This is again a release with no new lands -- however, it includes several upgrades aimed at making HyperRogue look more like a modern game.

• Three dimensional view. How would the world of HyperRogue look if viewed from above? You can witness this yourself now! See legs of monsters, when looking from an angle, sides of walls, and chasms. For hyperbolic geometry nerds: this view is roughly accurate if we assume that the surface is actually an equidistant, not a plane. ("Roughly" because formulas are not yet perfectly adjusted for stacking items (e.g. Dragon riding or climbing Red Rock), and sizes of objects are arbitrary.) The 3D view is the default setting now, if you have saved your configuration in an older version, you have to set the "wall display mode" and "monster display mode" to one of the 3D modes.
• Movement animations. Monster movement is animated now. You can watch these dogs run! Also particle effects when things are destroyed.
• Sound effects. When a dangerous enemy such as an Eagle comes, you can hear it now! There are also sound effects when you fight, colelct items, and in several other situations. Some sound effects are still to be recorded :)

As usual, the full changelog and further minor updates are reported on the Steam forum. Mobile versions will be updated later. Enough talking, let's play. Have fun!

Hydra Slayer 18.0

Hydra Slayer 18.0 is released on Steam and itch.io!

Hydra Slayer is a roguelike with a unique combat system, based on old matematical puzzles. The highlights of release 18.0 are the following:

• A new player race, the Atlanteans. Most characters in Hydra Slayer would meet vulture hydras, who grow one head for every wound they deal to the player. The Atlanteans have been cursed by the gods, and this will happen for all hydras. Will you be able to turn your curse into an advantage? The curse significantly affects the equipment and strategies to use, especially in the first 12 levels. Thanks for Patashu and Nick for the idea!
• Evolving hydras. They start to appear after level 25. Their resistance to the given weapon material is increased by one after each attack. These are inspired by a (slightly trollish) post by IchigoMait.
• Previously, each level below Level 12 contained just one special hydra (not counting bloody or dragon variants of standard colors) -- since there are 9 types, some of them will appear just a few times. The new version changes this -- some levels will replace one of the standard ones with another special, and some will almost lack normal hydras and include most of the special types instead. Challenge levels now tend to have two special hydras per level too.
• One new exotic weapon -- I will leave that for the players to find :)
• New special graphics for scythes (Atlanteans start with a scythe), hecatoncheires and monkeys. Thanks to tehora for requesting these!
• Removed some exploits. It is no longer possible to enhance the titanic club easily with the Reforging+Ambidexterity combo (thanks to vo3435 for abusing this). A tighter limit is placed on using time-daggers on mushrooms.
• Some features have been added to help with "head draining" attacks (all hydras for Atlanteans, Vultures for all characters). When fighting head-draining hydras, the number of wounds caused by the hydra's next attack is given in the UI. For other hydras, when you select your shield, "+1" is displayed for the hydra whose damage is reduced by your shield. Also, you can now press 'w' in the hydra description, to view the amount of wounds the given hydra would deal for every size. Enchanted Mersenne Twister (when trying to roll a 'good' number of heads) will now take into account that extra heads could be drained.
• In the cheat mode, shift+H can now also summon equipment.
• Minor bugfixes: better display of the in-game achievement screen, capital letters accepted in the scores menu, better handling of the app going out of focus, the generation of Giants' weapons in challenge games, crash bug with Vulture + Ambidexterity + Knowledge/Growth, using Twister even though runes are active, inexact calculation of wounds in the PoK algorithm by head drainers, 'use count' for traps, dragons attacking in a wrong direction on non-orientable levels, number of stunned heads is no longer displayed in the PoK hint for large hydras (the algorithm does not care about them anyway), potion of knowledge correctly counting wounds for shadows, capital letters accepted in the scores menu

Have fun! Small updates will be posted on the Steam forum first.

HyperRogue 9.1

HyperRogue 9.1 is released on Steam and itch.io!

There are some gameplay fixes, and numerous user interface improvements. There is a new "land", but it is not a part of the normal game, but rather a separate Halloween mini-game, where you play on the surface of the jack-o'-lantern, and fight typical Halloween monsters, such as witches, undead, and demons. This is very different from the usual game of HyperRogue because you play on a sphere -- which is (in some sense) the opposite of hyperbolic plane! While HyperRogue is that everything is infinite, the sphere has severely limited space of just 32 cells. Collecting Treats will summon new monsters, and bring you magical Orb powers. You have to manage your limited resources to be successful here.

The Halloween mini-game can be activated from the main menu. In it, you can press 'o' to try the spherical variants of the usual lands of HyperRogue. You can also try elliptic geometry, which is obtained from the sphere by considering the antipodes to be the same point -- and there is no real difference between Mirror Images and Mimics in this geometry :) In general, HyperRogue now lets you compare the hyperbolic phenomenons to their spherical counterparts. After Halloween, the spherical/elliptic geometry and the Halloween mini-game will be available in the "Euclidean/elliptic mode" in the special modes menu.

Other changes include:

• Major overhaul of the user interface. Most of this has been actually done in patch 9.0i. The new menus should look better, and adjust to the screen size better (especially mobile). The color dialog has been improved, and it is now used when you edit the colors of your character. Most numerical options are replaced with subdialogs when you can enter the numbers directly, or adjust them with arrows or sliders; and some help is provided for some of the less clear numbers. In 9.1, additionally pressing F5 or F10 while in good game won't stop immediately (ESC screen will be shown first).
• Improvements to the Prince(ss) quest. Some bugs were fixed (jealousy did not work, monsters tended to just stay in place after hitting the Princess -- now they ignore her while she is stunned, and also the stun time is extended). If you have saved the Princess successfully, but she dies later, you can revive her with Orb of Love after you collect 20 $$$ more.
• Orb power is now drained after the monsters move, not immediately after the movement (so Shielding at 1 charge will still defend you for the next turn, and Aether at 1 charge will let you move once more) -- this should be much more intuitive, especially with Orb of Time. Also fixed some bugs with Orb of Time (Thorns or Aether were considered to be used even though they were not). Also fixed Ghosts and Rock Snakes, who did not work correctly with Orb of the Shell/hardcore mode.
• Knights of Camelot now quote Euclid, Lobachevsky, Gauss, and Escher.
• As a reference to Deadly Rooms of Death, Goblins are now afraid of energy swords, and won't step on cells adjacent to them.
• You can now change the projection quickly by pressing number keys. This is useful on the sphere, and also if you want to see the different models of hyperbolic plane quickly. 1 (orthographic or Gans model), 2, 3 (stereographic or Poincaré), 4 (gnomonic or Klein).

As usual, there will be probably patches -- changelogs are reported on the Steam forums first. Have fun!

NotEye 8.4 + Hydra Slayer 17.1

Necklace of the Eye, the roguelike frontend and display library, and Hydra Slayer, a roguelike based on mathematical puzzles, have been updated!

This update brings the following:

Hydra Slayer update

Hydra Slayer has been updated to version 17.1. This means that features which were previously available only in the paid version on Steam are now free. These features include: random challenges, traps, a new type of equipment (orbs), animations of flying heads, music, and lots of bugfixes and interface improvements. See here for details about version 17.0, and for the further updates. Of course, you still need the Steam version for typical Steam features such as online achievements, leaderboards and trading cards, and new features planned for the future will get in the paid version first!

LuaJIT

NotEye now uses LuaJIT instead of the standard Lua. This greatly improves the performance.

Better support for Unicode

NotEye is now better at handling Unicode, that is, characters outside of the standard ASCII. Thus, when using a font containing all Unicode characters, for example, Hydra Slayer can now display the appropriate symbol √ for Eradicator, and Brogue can use the Aries symbol ♈ to display grass (previously this was possible only with fonts supplied with Brogue). Probably there are still some cases where this does not work as well as it could -- see NotEye's GitHub repository for further developments.

Better support for Linux terminals

One of strengths of NotEye (compared to Libtcod) was always that a NotEye game could work in a system terminal -- this makes it easier to communicate with software such as ssh for remote playing or screenreaders for blind people, and is the preferred way of playing text roguelikes for some people. NotEye 8.4 improves this somewhat. Modern Linux terminals do support 256 color palettes, or even TrueColor -- the newest version of NotEye can use this, thus, if you are playing Brogue on such a modern terminal, it should look just like the graphical version, with Unicode symbols and truecolor lighting. Secondly, using this feature was somewhat complex -- in version 8.4 it is sufficient to set the environmental variable NOTEYEEXTRACONFIG to consoleout_curses() (for the traditional Curses output), consoleout_16(), consoleout_256(), or consoleout_truecolor() (these three options work only in Linux for now). Previously ADOM and Hydra Slayer had special scripts on Windows for enabling the console output -- using an environmental variable makes these scripts simpler.

Downloads

Download NotEye+Hydra Slayer, or NotEye+Brogue. Have fun!

Hyperbolic geometry in HyperRogue: an update

The post Hyperbolic geometry in Hyperbolic Rogue was extremely outdated -- it explained only the hyperbolic properties in HyperRogue 2.0, and commented about the Euclidean mode, but there were tons of new hyperbolic features added to the game since then. I have updated this post with new findings. Enjoy!

HyperRogue 9.0: swords, trolls, and krakens

HyperRogue 9.0 is released on Steam and itch.io!

And, since this is a major version, HyperRogue 8.3j can now be downloaded freely from the website! In comparison with the last free version (7.4), HyperRogue 8.3 includes new special modes (heptagonal mode and Chaos mode), some new ways of presenting the hyperbolic world of HyperRogue, and more than 10 new lands based on various themes, unique mechanics, and properties of hyperbolic plane.

Android and iOS versions of HyperRogue 9.0 should be available soon -- and with some new features too (shmup mode, leaderboards and achievements via Google Games in the iOS version, local scores in the Android version). Stay tuned!

And now, the new features of HyperRogue 9.0...

A long time ago, the Kraken Depths were a trade route. But then, Krakens have risen out of the depths. Many trading ships sank here, together with the treasure their carried. Legend says that you can uncover the secret of a magical weapon spell somewhere in the depths... Kraken Depths are remotely based on the idea of phenomist in the ideas thread.

Completing the Kraken Depths yields Orb of the Sword -- which creates a magical energy sword on a cell adjacent to you. This energy sword moves with you, but you cannot rotate it -- it simply remains at the same angle, slashing all the monsters it passes through. In the Burial Grounds, mastering Orb of the Sword is crucial for excavating the treasures and defeating monsters there. Although the strangeness of angles is probably the most well known property of the world of HyperRogue -- for example, the sum of angles of a triangle is less than 180 degrees -- the Burial Grounds are probably the first Land where understanding this well is important.

Trollheim is unlocked by killing a member of each of 6 subspecies of Troll available in the game. In this kingdom of Trolls, you fight large groups of them, and then find your way back to their treasure caches -- bodies of slain Trolls will be helpful, but you can easily get confused!

HyperRogue 9.0 also introduces turn-based multiplayer. Players take their turns simultaneously -- first all players make their choices (by using separate sets of configurable keys), then the move is performed unless it leads to death of any of characters. Sooner or later, probably a bad situation will happen -- one of the character would die no matter what they do, the characters separate and are unable to rejoin, or one of the players simply wants to leave for some time. In this case, a character can leave the game world, until one of the suitable Orbs is used to restore them. This plays slower than the normal single-player turn-based HyperRogue, and for this reason we think that the shoot'em up mode works better in multiplayer -- but turn-based multiplayer is still fun :) Additionally, the game now supports up to 7 players (not sure whether it is still fun, but why not support this?), and specific stats (kills/treasure/deaths) are counted for each player.

There were also many improvements to the user interface -- many of these were inspired by Alan Malloy's videos:

• In previous versions, keyboard movement was somewhat risky -- sometimes it was hard to tell which key moves where. As shown on the screenshot above, HyperRogue can now display arrows -- these correspond to movement keys.
• Cleaning the kill list: first monsters, then parts, then friends. As for monster parts, the number of Dragon/Kraken parts destroyed is now counted, and Mutant Ivy kill count now counts only ones killed directly (for consistency with normal Ivies -- the counts were not right in the Clearing anyway, where the actual counts would reach billions easily)
• some mechanics were not appropriately explained in their descriptions: auto-triggering Orbs (Flash/Lightning), targettable Orbs (it was not made clear that they cannot be targetted at too close or too far ranges), auto-explore radius for the Minefield
• More information about lands. For land with unlock requirements, the progress of unlocking is shown. Also it is clear which lands are not available in special modes, and which quests are optional for Hyperstone Quest.
• The option to show heptagons did not work in some lands, and was confusing in some other lands -- now, it marks heptagons with dots (as it previously worked in the Red Rock Valley)
• version number now always shown in the bottom left corner (useful when you watch recordings of HyperRogue)
• A slight change to the Minefield: you can now mark mines by hovering over a cell and pressing 'm'. This also happens automatically if you know all mines adjacent to some cell. Marking mines prevents your allies from going there, and gives you a warning when you try to step on a marked cell. Cells where a monster moved, or cells with items, are marked safe (and mines set on items explode immediately now, so you can always be sure that cells with items are safe).
• Warnings. The checkmate rule works well to protect you from most stupid mistakes, but there are some mistakes where it does not help because the actual death would happen on the next turn -- like stepping on a known mine, or moving under attack of a Kraken, in a boat (this does not kill you immediately, it just destroys your boat). Such moves could be fatal or not, and it is hard to check what is the case -- for example, if you step on a mine while escaping from an adjacent Water Elemental, the Water Elemental will catch up and extinguish the fires immediately -- so only a very basic check is made, and you can ignore the warning by repeating the action.

Fixed bugs in gameplay:

• Crystal Sages, Dragons, and Fire Cultists can attack all targets now (not only the player)
• fish could not go through sunken items
• fixed the bug with Orb of the Fish not letting one to stay in place in Cocytus
• Orb of Time did not work with Orbs of Aether and Thorns
• Shadows now actually attack (previously they only affected the checkmate rule)
• no more burning/sinking/falling messages for the Shadow
• The log file now mentions if the game was played in pure hardcore mode
• mouse can now step on mines (without triggering them)
• the Orb of Lightning did not reflect off walls correctly
• improved pathfinding for monsters -- it seems they no longer act strangely in tight corridors
• Crossroads IV no longer appear in incomplete Rlyeh
• allies were not killed by Rosebushes
• Bomberbirds did not explode when killed by Rosebushes
• in the Shmup mode, monsters are now less likely to get stuck
• Ghosts no longer fall off cliffs and die
• Yendorian trees are now burned by lightning (also Orb of Storms is now marked as dangerous there)
• Rich Metal Beasts killed by Orb of Storms now also produces Fulgurite in shmup
• movement to Orb of the Shell is now possible even if under attack
• some monsters with non-standard movement abilities moved unpredictably (i.e., based on the internal representation) -- now they move randomly
• fixed a bug with Ocean generation in the pure heptagonal mode
• Water Elementals now destroy manned boats in the shmup mode
• Sharks (except Demon Sharks) now suffocate when stranded on land
• monsters at unstable locations in the Ivory Tower can now falling into dangerous terrain, or into other monsters attacking them
• adjusted temperature and livecave value of some monsters
• Friendly Ghosts no longer ride boats; they are generated from Dragon and Pikeman kills

Other fixes and minor features:

• a new icon!
• added a leaderboard for the heptagonal mode
• replaced Servant (from the Ivory Tower) with Familiar, and added Familiar as the seventh choice for the player character (no gameplay changes), also changed the music in the Ivory Tower
• new graphics for Eggs, sadly they are not triangular anymore
• pressing Shift now cycles in the reverse direction in more contexts (shift+N to reduce the number of players, shift+M to go back in conformal models)
• display colors in char config; also the movement star color can be configured now
• bugcounts and minecounts are no longer displayed when you are in a menu
• the menu for selecting the score to display works better now: some Orbs which were there are removed; pressing keys no longer does weird things, but rather allows you to search for a specific entry (just like in the Map Editor)
• two new models added to the conformal menu (the models are not conformal, but they fit there)
• translation fixes: conformal models' names, Dragon description, Polish translation
• not crash on very long pathnames
• improved wall display in Hive/Dragon
• draw multiple Flash effects
• quit from menu sends achievements
• graphical effect for the Orb of Beauty
• Unlocking rules were not shown for Crossroads II
• 'chop down' used for trees

As usual, there will be probably patches -- changelogs are first reported on the Steam forums. Have fun!