Things about playing Stoat Soup

This page discusses Stoat Soup's changes from the point of view of someone who who's never played the older versions of Crawl it is based on.

• There's no "Zot clock", but monsters spawn over time, and if you linger too long on a level, the spawns get steadily nastier. As an additional clock, you need to eat food (if you aren't a mummy); most species can eat flesh when hungry (use 'c' to chop up corpses) and it's best to do that and save food rations for when you don't have chunks of flesh to eat. A few species are carnivorous, and ghouls heal when they eat flesh.
• There's no "sourceless malevolence". All traps are on specific dungeon squares; you may spot them ahead of time, and then can kite monsters across them. Only the Zot trap can harm you if a monster steps on it.
• Some items you find may be cursed, but there are remove curse scrolls to let you take them off. Items aren't identified; you'll have to make best use of the limited supply of identify scrolls. An item of mundane appearance (like "a falchion") is at best uncursed +0.
• Ghosts don't hide in ghost vaults to be cashed in for XP later. They remember what killed them, and come into being to seek revenge on their slayer. They're neutral monsters, so they're not entirely safe to be around, but if you don't aggravate them they're useful allies.
• Willpower is known by its earlier name of "magic resistance", or MR.
• Several old species are still in the game, and one new one added - faerie dragons, a straightforward spellcasting species with a discount on spell MP costs.
• Various spells like Lee's Rapid Deconstruction can dig into rock walls.
• You can wear-ID amulets without serious consequences, because there is no major penalty for taking amulets off. Swapping amulets is fast, just like rings.
• Some spells are now "permabuffs", which last forever rather than having to be recast. Most of these spells were removed from vanilla DCSS, with their effects being given to items like gloves of infusion. Almost all these spells use the Charms school.
• Potions of brilliance greatly improve spell failure chances. When viewing information on a single spell, you will be told the failure chance and spellpower with brilliance.
• Wands need identifying to avoid wasting charges, either with identify scrolls or by zapping them with good Evocations skill. The Evocations skill also increases max MP just like Invocations. Phantom mirrors and boxes of beasts don't recharge; you can carry a stack of them, but evoking them uses them up.
• Draining temporarily reduces your skills, not your HP. You still don't permanently lose XP as a result of being drained.
• Piety stars go white at max piety (actually 199 so it doesn't flicker off with every piety decay).
• Two-handed melee weapon damage is increased. Smaller long blades and rapiers can "riposte", attacking an opponent who just missed you or whose attack you blocked. The kinds of weapons that want Strength or Dexterity are different; inspect weapons to see what they use.
• Chaos Knights remain Xom's playthings even after abandonment, so you can play the game with two gods provided you don't mind one of them being Xom. Various other gods are older or adjusted versions; the in-game descriptions are accurate.
• Malmutate is gone (save Mnoleg's melee), replaced with "Corrupt Body", a weaker version of wretched stars' ability.
• A hand crossbow is the smallest crossbow, not an endgame weapon. Bows, Crossbows, and Slings are separate skills. These launchers use ammunition - don't run out!
• You can only quiver ammunition and Throwing weapons, not spells or abilities. Sorry about that.
• Flying has downsides, especially that Airstrike does more damage against flying targets. Most sources of flight let you stop flying at will.

bold_brightens_foreground

If you play tiles, this bit doesn't matter.

There is a convention for terminal clients that bold black text is drawn in a dark grey. Unfortunately, this convention isn't universally respected, and if you have a terminal client that gets it wrong, you won't be able to see the things Crawl draws in dark grey, including important things like walls out of your field of view.

Crawl has an option, "bold_brightens_foreground", which if it is turned off instead draws these things in blue. This looks horrible but at least you can see what you're doing. In vanilla Crawl it defaults to being turned off. In Stoat Soup, it defaults to being turned on, because watching ttyrecs with the walls dark blue gives me a headache.

So, if you have this problem where you can't see walls out of your field of view, you'll need to edit your options to set "bold_brightens_foreground = false", or fix your terminal client.