It's my pleasure to announce that KeeperRL Alpha24 is out! It's another big gameplay patch, bringing in many new features:

• Overhauled prisoner system. Enemies are explicitly tagged to be captured, and they retain their identity after becoming prisoners. Read more about the system here.
• Improved full control mode handling. Battles can be played in a proper turn-based manner. Read more here.
• Changes in mining: new challenges, and better progression. Read more here.

• Prisoners retain their identity and can join your side if tortured.
• Prisoners can be captured outside of player's dungeon.
• Player must tag specific enemies that are to be captured.
• Prisoners can perform work like crafting, if they have appropriate skills.
• Prisoners can escape if there are too many compared to fighter units.
• Most mineral veins are guarded by enemies like ants, dwarves and golems, who will attack when the player tries to mine the vein.
• As most minerals are guarded, geology tech is removed.
• Changed steel to adamantium, which is mined and not smelted from iron.
• Added 'quarters', which can be used to create mini-dungeons for selected minions.
• Added 'hard rock' tiles, which take longer to dig out, deeper in the mountain.
• Added iron and adamantine doors.
• Creatures have explicit intrinsic attacks, like fangs or fists that can be chosen via UI when attacking.
• Time system is changed to explicit turns and 'half-turns' for easier control during battle.
• Creatures only have 3 speed options: half-speed, normal, and double-speed. (speed attribute is removed)
• Creatures with double-speed perform their second move immediately after the first.
• Boulders don't wound huge creatures like dragons.
• Some villages have a chance to be generated on the 'bones' of others.
• Healer AI prioritizes healing creatures that stand directly next to an enemy.
• Increased spell damage of legendary minions.
• Added maximum range for bows.
• Decreased mana regeneration rate in free mode when mana regeneration option is turned on.
• Kobolds are stronger and have spears.
• Improved eating AI, minions will try to leave the pigsty after having eaten.
• Changed AI code involving swapping positions, creature's won't get in each other's way so much anymore.
• Made cooperative AI assign better positions when mining close to each other.
• Removed tech number limit based on library size.
• Minions respond immediately to the player manually changing their activity (including waking up).
• Minion wakes up when it is assigned new equipment.
• Added hand torches.
• Burning objects emit light!
• Improved logic of injuring non-living creatures, which fixes the problem of killing them taking too long.
• Added caps to how much of the basic stats dopplegangers can inherit.
• Added minimum turn requirement to some higher level immigrants, which causes more low level immigrants to be presented early in the game.
• 'Prioritize task' order makes an imp drop their current task immediately.
• Decreased the 'unavailable zone' width on the map border to reduce memory usage.
• Reduced amount of stone dropped by boulder to avoid generating free stone.
• Reduced amount of gold dropped by demon dwellers.
• Made minions do other tasks when there is nothing to craft.
• Statues cost gold instead of mana.
• Creatures and items are teleported out of inaccessible tiles.
• Added the ability to push away smaller creatures.
• Removed the 'stun ray' spell.
• Added 'demonology' tech that unlocks demon shrines.
• Hallucination effect also grants telepathy.
• Added baby spiders and blind children to giant spider's den.
• Vampire lord drops a scroll of darkness, which causes a creature to become permanently immune to sunlight.
• Ghost gets a 'touch of insanity' attack, which causes creatures to be hostile to everyone.
• Succubus gets a 'touch of love' attack, which causes creatures to become peaceful.
• Robe gives spell resistance.
• Added invisible alarm trap to castle.
• Added priest to castle.
• Pig corpses don't emit gas.
• All enemy creatures heal slowly over time.

• New UI for managing team members: adding and removing from team, changing move order.
• New UI for interacting with other creatures, like attacking, chatting, etc.
• Added creature status (leader/fighter/civilian) highlights and descriptions.
• Added tabs to view team members.
• Added new buttons for toggling and exiting control mode.
• Attribute bonuses from equipment and buffs are visible in the UI.
• Added a simple animation for when creatures are wounded or tortured.
• Limb losses are represented on HP bar for non-living creatures, which don't have health and have to be chopped into pieces.
• New sprites for the demon tribe.
• New buttons under the minimap to open world map or scroll to keeper's location.
• Boulders can be pushed using the mouse.
• Summoned creatures remaining 'time to live' is explicitly shown in the UI.
• Total inventory weight and maximum capacity is displayed in control mode.

• Endless mode highscore takes into account only time spent defending the base, and not wandering around.
• Optimized and fixed various issues with creature pathfinding.
• Optimized field-of-view calculations, which speeds up the game considerably.
• Optimized world generation.
• Stopped doppleganger from being able to consume itself.
• Doppleganger doesn't inherit effects granted by rings and other equipment.
• Fixed ancient spirit's spell attack.
• Minions pick up potions of melee, spell and ranged resistance.
• Chests and coffins spawn creatures further away if adjacent tiles are blocked.
• Reinforce wall order is removed when wall is marked to be dug out.
• Disallowed destroying bridges.
• Fixed digging orders persisting when tile was destroyed by someone else.
• Fixed trap removal and building floors under traps.
• Fixed 'sleep on torch' UI bug.
• Fixed level generation crashed caused by trying to place a blind creature.
• Fixed marking campaign base map as conquered when village is destroyed.
• Fixed drawing question marks on the main map.
• Fixed red dragon appearing on green dragon's place in the campaign.
• Increased female keeper spell damage to match the male version.
• Fixed issue with calculating influence area in campaign map.