FrogComposband 7.0.peppermint
 

The new version is available here, with the source code, precompiled Windows full game (without the source code) and precompiled Windows .exe. (Windows users who download the .exe should also download the source code, but not the full game, which would be superfluous. Windows users who download the full game won't need to download any other files.)

Save files are unidirectionally compatible between 7.0.strawberry and 7.0.peppermint; that is, you can upgrade from strawberry to peppermint mid-game and not experience any weirdness, but you can't downgrade from peppermint back to strawberry. (Lite-town players may experience some moderate weirdness in upgrading; but given what a mess lite-town was before, they'll almost certainly experience more weirdness if they don't upgrade.)

Many thanks to everybody who played 7.0.strawberry! Whether positive or negative, your feedback makes the game better, in ways that wouldn't be possible without your help. And even just playing without saying a word helps; there's no substitute for looking at a game or a dump, and seeing what people do and how things work in practice.

The major items on my to-do list for 7.0.mango are 1) adding new personalities (and bringing back the removed Lazy personality), and 2) looking into importing content from PosChengband-R (requested so far: coffee-break mode and the Alchemist class). All requests, suggestions, bug reports and constructive criticism are very welcome.

Thank you, Sideways, for your time and efforts making new version!

Regarding stat scramble: Vanilla now has a temporary stat scramble effect. It might be worth stealing that to replace the permanent scramble effect from nexus breath.

Having played a good deal of PCB in the past, this variant is a breath of fresh air, especially with the Quests and such! Excited to dive deeper into this!

Sorry if this is a noobish question, but what are the differences between FrogComposband, and Composband? Just different branches of development or different goals entirely?

Thank you for this next version!

There's more than one way to look at that difference. The change logs here and in the 7.0.strawberry release thread show one kind of difference, though not all the changes listed are differences since there's been a fair bit of cross-pollination between Composband and FrogComposband.

That's the small, detailed picture - "this variant has this thing and this thing that the other one doesn't, at least yet" - but in the bigger picture, too, there are certainly differences in design philosophy between me and Gwarl. We both add new content that's inspired by all kinds of things - mythology, other games, popular culture, unpopular culture etc. - but Gwarl is usually more faithful to the original content, whereas I like to give things my own angle, use parodies, mash-ups, hidden references and added jokes, and only seldom and grudgingly go for the straightforward copy.

I'm much bigger on adding new options than Gwarl is. We also have very different views on game balance; Gwarl likes to make big changes that tilt game balance - almost invariably in the direction of making the game easier - which is a direction I try to avoid. Almost all of my balance tweaks have been (and will be) attempts to stop either players or their items from being too powerful; I think overpowered things make the game both unbalanced and less interesting. (I also buff monsters a lot more than nerf them, whereas Gwarl now actually feels some of his own creations are too tough and wants them nerfed.) Very few of my changes have been in the direction of making the game easier; even the options I've added that let players avoid some types of negative effects (like never_forget, no_scrambling or no_chris) are quality-of-life options rather than difficulty options.

Gwarl's much bigger on adding new dungeons than I am; I've tweaked existing dungeons and added dungeon guardians, but I haven't added any completely new dungeons and don't have any immediate plans to (right now, of course, both variants have the same number of dungeons anyway). Gwarl is also more interested in things like vault and room templates, and more likely to change them or add new ones going forward.

Gwarl, I'm sure, would give a different account of the differences :)

Sweet, thanks for the clarifications! I'm really digging how you and Gwarl work on these variants separately, but there also seems to be some healthy borrowing and/or melding of ideas. Excited to see what comes next :)

Personally I'd prefer that approach over deactivating stat scrambling entirely.

"no_chris", "chrissing"... To be honest, I find these denominations rather unfortunate. To avoid misunderstandings and bad blood, I recommend we just call it dungeon-teleporting, or DT.

Wish I had more time for playtesting all those forks and variants that recently got updated... edit: and Vanilla 4.1 as well.

If I were to add temporary scrambling it would be in addition to, rather than instead of, permanent scrambling - the same way the game already has both temporary and permanent polymorph. Temporary scrambling in V is just a mild annoyance to the player, the same way monster-induced temporary polymorph in FrogCompos is; using it as an outright replacement for permanent scrambling would be replacing a dangerous attack with a nondangerous one.

Dungeon teleport is quite a mouthful :) I don't mean any disrespect to Chris, but his name takes a lot less time to say. (The option does already describe itself as "Nexus attacks never teleport to another dungeon.")

I'm not sure I'd consider ?crafting doing that an outright bug; but it's certainly a user-unfriendly mechanic to allow the player to attempt crafting when it's doomed to fail. I should probably either only allow crafting on single items (except with ammo) or allow crafting on multiple items and then destroy the spares.

I'm still quite confused about the differences between PosChengBand, ComPosBand, and FrogComPosBand. Sorry...
Is there any readings for these details? :o

Nope. You can read the changelogs of each variant, and in most cases, of each release of each variant. But compiling a list of easy to understand differences between hundreds of different variants each having up to a few dozen releases is impossible to manage in a Human lifetime. (The amount of time required would be enough time for a thousand more releases to come out and the work would continue to grow with time.)

If this sounds like an exaggeration, click "Ladder" at the top. :D