My minions,

Finally the day of 1.6 has come, well, it's only beta but still, beta has come! ;)
You'll find all the downloads on https://te4.org/beta-test

Please, try to keep all bug reportings on ToME's official forums at http://forums.te4.org/ as it is hardly feasible for me to survey 10 different location for bugs.

The current DLCs will still work in 1.6 so you can test with those but they will each get a small update at the same time as the final 1.6 release to update how they process melee talents to be inline with the new 1.6 way.

Please do note this is *not* by any stretch of the imagination a full changelog. The 1.6 release contains so many changes and updates that it'd turn me mad organizing them into a semblance of changelog and it'd turn you mad reading it all.
The original unabridged log is about 3500 lines long.

One last thing for those new to betas; characters will NEVER validate in beta; that's normal and as usual importing characters across major releases is bound to not work all too well.

• When a yeek exits the tunnels to the halfling complex and sees subject Z; a warning comes up from the wayist, urging you to flee
• When a shader is missing, it'll use a default fallback (prevents loading game with missing DLCs/addons)
• Classic UI can now cancel buffs by right-click
• Load quickhotkeys prior to loading the game to fix hotkey ordering for "restart the same character".
• Greatly revised celestial positive spells and a few negative ones
• Disable fatigue for positive and negative energy
• Updated/rebalanced some NPCs
• Revised Defilers
• Added an UI option to sharpen the map display, as requested by some
• Removed max level on all fixed artifacts. Material level already restrains them. This prevents some artifacts being near un-obtainable on higher difficulties
• Fixed an issue preventing users with a too long password from login in. Woops sorry :/
• Cunning techniques revisions
• Greatly revised Summoners
• Buff Giant Leap
• Improve Elemental Surge
• Significantly revise 2H Assault
• Fix NPCs shoving the player
• Teleports now immediately maximize the AI's guess spread on your current location
• Ethereal Form uses highest of Dex or Mag for its defense bonus
• Rebalance Elemental Harmony
• Revise many artifacts, egos, randarts and items
• Revise Arcane Blade's Enhancement tree
• Reduce Arcane Destruction damage and fix type to Arcane
• Fix Glove display
• Fix Adept causing infinite talent levels
• Sustains will not disable at 0 Stamina or Mana anymore, as it is cumbersome and is easily prevented with a little regen anyway
• Fix Slings not having a base speed
• Add stairs up to Dark Crypt
• Fix Elemental Harmony allowing self damage
• Allow respeccing out of combat
• Add a talent autouse for being out of combat
• Multiple updates to combat damage log
• Fix light radius letting Players (but not NPCs) see beyond their max vision radius
• Resize and reposition how charges are displayed on effects
• Several talents that move the player would not function at all or would behave unusually if auto-accept target was enabled.
• Greatly revised inscriptions (runes & infusions)
• Greatly revised the early game combat to make melee start less painful
• Revise accuracy bonuses to have more impact and nicer breakpoints
• Revise shield/glove combat table tooltips
• Born into magic now actually gives 20% inc dam as advertised(up from 15%)
• Change Stone Vines' and Rockswallow's damage to Nature and removed speed malus from Stone Vines
• Revise some racial talents
• Round most talent masteries to 0.0 or 0.3
• Add many, many base character visual customisation options (beards, hairs, skin color, tatoo and so on)
• Implement support for cosmetic & "useless fun" microtransactions
• Revise Scoundrel and add it to the Rogue escort
• Redesign the Vim resource (no more ability refund; Vim regeneration on any kill scales faster with Willpower and now also scales with target rank; Bloodcasting is now baselined in the resource allowing you to pay Vim costs with 200% of the cost as life)
• Added an UI option to sharpen the map display
• Fixed a bug preventing steamsaw/guns from generating as egos for randbosses (amongst other things) (yes fear the gunsnakes!)
• Small revisions to Archmage
• Update Worldly Knowledge to only include most of the currently available escort/quest trees
• Remove defense penalty from block
• Miscelanous revisions to many talents
• Revise Antimagic
• Major AI update, smarter, better, maybe faster
• Fixed several screenshot issues
• Randomly generated humanoid npcs now use the same cosmetic features available to players, randomly
• Simplify SDL gamma calculation and restore default gamma on exit.
• Levelup dialog shows variable parts of talent descriptions (like numbers that go up as you levelup) in green even at talent levels 0 and 5, to better see which values will evolve
• Revision of Fears
• Add a bonus to stealth rating for Armor of Shadows
• Revise shops
• Revise fixed bosses, now they can better levelup and learn new tricks too
• Revise Wyrmics
• Revise Afflicted
• New scriptable map generator along with a variety of combinable algorithms for it
• Revise Stealth
• Revise Shadowblade
• Ban Dreamscape entirely from NPC use
• Modules Markers, IMPORTANT: Removed unpausing the game when using energy in engine.Actor:useEnergy as this was badly misplaced, instead superload useEnergy inside your own player class to do it, look at example's module Player class for how to
• Tilemaps can be scaled, fliped, rotated; new Maze tilemap; Heightmap & Noise tilemaps can be normalized
• Revise Prodigies
• To celebrate nearly 10 years of ToME, a new awesomely drawn custom player tile that comes from the very early days of the game
• Stun: Cooldown lock changed to half, damage reduction changed to 50%
• Confusion: Interaction with confusion immunity removed
• Increase the spawn level of the Melinda event to 30
• Increase resting rate dramatically
• Add 1 regen to Alchemist golem to reduce resting tedium
• Remove Munitions from Archer and re-add Poisons
• Remove useless trees from some classes
• Remove melee retaliation from many NPCs
• Zigur is now always present on the map but forbids entry to any magic user.
• Various visual improvements
• Updated the way NPCs (randbosses) are assigned character classes
• Object requirements can now be any random flag of the wearer
• High Peak levels become smaller towards the end (but keep the same number of foes inside)
• Increased foes density in the Prides
• Escort quests will now spawn in the Infinite Dungeon (between levels 5 and 40)
• Fixed some Infinite Dungeon challenges
• Nerfed patrols a bit
• Revise Ghouls
• Nerf life leech stacking
• Can send talent links in the chat from the talent's right click menu or in the levelup dialog by pressing ctrl+l
• Revise shops system
• More Mummies! Rejoice!
• Revise saves (saves against effects, not savefile!)
• Revise archers
• *NUMEROUS* fixes and updates to a ton of things (can I be more vague? probably but it'll be hard ;) )

A huge thanks to all those contributed to help make this release the biggest release ever!