POWDER is a roguelike game, which is not a port of an existing roguelike. It is built around replayability and long term ergonomics, not short term learning.

Release notes:

While some maintainers may make a special Christmas Release that has neat features that provide joy and happiness to their players, the 094 Christmas Release had no interesting new features and a serious game crashing bug.

In penance, I have been running the stress test for a day now to hopefully avoid a similar embarassing release.

Now for the good news: ><0|V| has his chosen quest level created. This was no small feat as it also required numerous new tiles to support it. Note the presence of a new artpack with this release. As a bone to those of us that rarely get as deep as level 20, the weapon damage has been adjusted slightly. This is most noticeable with maces and clubs which will now be comparable to shortswords and longswords. Hopefully edged weapons won't be such a no-brainer any more.

Changes:

Your armour now longers glows $B1, but instead the correct colour.
Scrolls of remove curse and enchant weapon are no longer scrolls of crash the game. Not only are they fixed in particular, but the underlying problem has some sanity tests so errors like this in the future should just result in bad grammer.
Can now load bitmaps that are taller than necessary as custom tilesets. This ensures that we will have forward compatibility with larger tilesets of the future.
Maces and clubs are made slightly more powerful, giving them the same average damage as their corresponding edged weapons: shortswords and longswords.
Thrown knives to hit bonus raised slightly so they can be more equivalent to thrown daggers.
While spears are meant for throwing, for a two handed weapon to have the same attack as a one handed longsword is embarrassing. They have been slightly powered.
“..looks like your funeral” style messages now have “. ” after it.
Creatures casting force bolt will no longer target themselves.
Fix rare case where you could start the game standing on another creature.
When you are fetched by another creature, the map will scroll and FOV update immediately.
Correctly save RNG state when building monsters inside of rooms, this ensures if populateRoom is invoked early in the map building it doesn’t change the RNG seed for the rest of the map. This saves about 300 bytes per level for saved games for many map types.
Climbing back up the stairs after winning the game will not trigger the win message again. (Clare Boothby)
Changing levels will not display the new level as black if a long message requires your input prior to the full level change.
Description text is given for lava, water, acid pools so those who first encounter them can e’x’amine them before jumping in.
Unchanging prevents turning into a lich or ghast.
Creatures with unchanging will no longer be tamed by Bind Soul.
New level honouring ><0|V|. This is an optional level reached via a dimensional portal on level 20. If a creature teleported onto a trap that killed it, the game could crash. This has been fixed. If a creature is killed by zapping its own wand, there is no longer out of bound reads when determining if the wand should be ided. Stress test mode is accessible without needing a custom buld in a similar manner as Wizard mode.

Thanks to cid2mizard / http://www.dev-fr.org for the news.

http://www.zincland.com/powder/index.php?pagename=release