Angband 4.1.0
 

Angband 4.1.0 is officially complete. It is available on rephial.org, and here are direct links to Windows build, macOS build, source zipfile, and source tarball.

This has release has been a massive team effort by many people over a long time. The wonderful community on these forums has been a big part of that team. This is your game, I hope you like it.

This version has the first major gameplay changes since 3.5.0. Some of these changes have significant impact on the game, and affect longstanding parts of the game quite radically. Given that aver 750 individual changes have been pushed to the main game repository since the last release, what is presented here will be more of a summary than a detailed changelog.

Traps

• The general philosophy is that all players will hit traps at some time
• Magical trap detection has been removed, except as a spell for mages
• Active searching has been removed
• Characters have one chance to detect a trap, on seeing the grid it is on; this chance is dependent on searching skill
• Traps are either physical or magical, and there is a corresponding split in the player disarming skill
• Many new traps have been introduced, and old ones amended
• Traps are placed almost exclusively at corridor intersections or other chokepoints
• Trap density in vaults is reduced by 75%

Identify

• ID is now "rune-based"; once an object property is recognised once, it will always be recognised on all future items
• The only forms of magical identify are scrolls and the mage spell, both of which identify a single unknown rune
• All scrolls, potions, mushrooms are identified on their first use
• Most wands, staffs and rods are identified on first use, the main exceptions being when they affect monsters and are tested in the absence of monsters
• Ego item names become known once all the relevant runes are known

Player knowledge

• Changes to previously known terrain outside the player's field of view (doors opening, etc) are no longer immediately known by the player
• Secret doors are now always found on stepping adjacent (or at a distance by the mage spell)

Dungeon generation

• A new generation algorithm has been introduced, and appears roughly as often as the classical generation algorithm
• There are many new vaults in the new algorithm, and also new room types - huge rooms, rooms of chambers, and interesting rooms (like small vaults)
• There is also an infrequently occurring generation type, the "moria level", which features large rough-edged rooms and many orcs, trolls and ogres
• Lava has changed from being a visual curiosity in town in 4.0.x to being generated in the dungeon; it will burn those without fire immunity
• Another new type of terrain has been introduced: passable rubble, which behaves like regular rubble except it can be walked through

Monsters

• Monster breaths are now cone-shaped starting at the monster, instead of being indistinguishable from ball spells
• Monster pathfinding has been improved (mostly), with monsters tracking explicitly by sight, sound or scent
• The relationship between player stealth and monsters waking has changed

Random artifacts

• Lights, rings and amulets are now fully randomised instead of based closely on the standard special artifacts
• The artifact set generation algorithm has been changed so that random artifacts no longer correspond to individual standard artifacts, but rather are generated so as to get a statistically similar distribution
• Calculation of object power has been simplified
• Generating a set of random artifacts now actually writes a data file like artifact.txt, which can be used for future games

Curses

• Sticky curses have been removed completely
• A large number of new curses have been introduced
• Items can have multiple curses
• Curse removal targets individual known curses on items
• Failed curse removal causes an item to become fragile
• Fragile items have a chance to be destroyed on future failed curse removals

Status effects

• Monster status effects have been redone to rebalance reliability and effectiveness, so that they may actually be interesting to use
• New types of status-inducing spells and magic devices have been included

Other

• Much more detail has been moved out to text files in lib/gamedata
• Many underlying code improvements

Nice!!!! Congrats to all you devs <3!!!!

my favourite change:

Awesome - thanks to you and all developers for all this great work.

Great stuff :)

Excellent---onward to a better future.

This looks very,very interesting. Thanks guys!

Nice to see this out. 1st "bug" - rings of the mouse are free when they show up in the BM

2nd - the curse where weapons turn on you, doesn't show up when I inspect the weapon
3rd? - fired a sling pebble at a door that was out of light radius (closed as far as I know). It turned into a blank square

Glad to see the FA-ing of V continues apace. Please add Crows of Durthang/Udun next, and maybe storm of the night and Udun-spells for the late game?
Another thing that would be nice, given that moria type levels are already on their way in, would be adding theme levels. Those are always such great fun.

Great. Trying out now. :D

First thing noticed: There is now sound (yes, I have sound enabled in options)

Great to see this officially launched! And wow, I've been keeping up with the incremental changes in the nightlies for so long I'd forgotten just how much of this was all-new for 4.1.

Kudos!
Feature request: Make it easier to count the number of kills it takes to reach each CL, by including total kills in the "Reached level N" messages. This idea is inspired by Sky's thread about low HP in a starting character. I find recording this info helpful, but I usually forget.
And with this feature there's the possibility of a "pacifist" style Angband competition.

Love the Identify changes
 

The old identify system really used to bug me. It seemed like I could never identify all of the stuff I found. This still looks like it's a possibility, but at least I'll get partial identification on things that have runes I've seen before. Very cool!

Awesome! Now to test it.

- Did you really remove the priestly identify spell or just forget to list it ?

Good point. I just forgot it - it's still in Godly Insights. Also didn't mention Unbarring Ways under traps.

Maybe rings of the mouse are actually valued at 0.
Will check on the treacherous weapon curse.
The pebble one is interesting - I guess it's a bug, but if you had some way of knowing the pebble had gone through the door it wouldn't be.

Ssh! I don't think anyone else had noticed...

Where's my storm of unmagic!! It even made it into poscheng!

Great job on getting 4.1 out the door. Looking forward to where things go from here. (That means you're not allowed to give up yet.)

Still waiting on trees, water, swamp, desert, wilderness, neutrally aligned "p", special levels, quests, .... So many things that make FA great! :D

Congratulations, Nick, and all the Development Team!

Congratulations! I'm really looking forward to playing this.

nice effort guys, way to go~!

I did!. ;) There was a cursed whip, that summoned demons sometimes.

Adding my thanks to the already long list. Now I can clear down all my nightly installs and replace with 4.1 (and get ready for the next load of nightlies)

Congratulations!
 

Congratulations to the whole devteam, and especially to Nick, for successfully bringing this new version to the world!

Thanks Nick, and all the people who contributed! :D

Many thanks to Nick and everyone else who helped for your continuing hard work on Angband!

Thanks to Nick and everyone! This looks amazing!

My first cursed item...a steelskin torch that makes me hallucinate. Awesome!
I squelched so many ego weapons thinking they must be the problem. Never thought about the torch. FAngtastic!

I've been out of the loop for a while now, but I want to congratulate Nick & co. for another release!

Ah...first run this year and killed by a brown beetle. It's okay - it's still Angband!

so after playing maybe 20 characters, i feel that my main issue with angband is to overcome the early game. i just find it very boring, but i also know that it's an issue that many roguelikes have, but with angband the boredom is higher for me at least. I really love many things about the game but for it repeats itself so fast. For me the floors are too huge, it kind of takes so long until the next meaningful situation.
That's of course a newbie speaking :) The experienced player has probably found ways to overcome this by playing better than i am.

Anyway i felt like sharing this here, also because i love to see that you are embracing change in the game, so maybe that feedback helps.

Thanks for all your work on Angband people!!!

In before Pete recommends diving past the early levels. :)

@joemaro--HINT: you are really, really not expected to clear levels. In early levels, the game mostly consists of finding the down staircase. And yes, clearing levels is a common newbie error. Later on, clearing levels becomes actively dangerous, not just boring. You have to actively try to find interesting targets.
Edit: @derakon haha! I feel this really belongs in the help pages.

Loving it!
 

Just a quick note to say I haven't played much other than an old 3.x version I had for years and in the last few days I switched to 4.1 and wanted to say thanks to all who put it together.

Really loving the changes from cool level layouts, awesome rune system, happy s button that isn't getting hammered on full time, and graphics (who knew graphics and animations in an ansi game would resonate in 2017!)

Still sucks to die too!

Cheers,

P

Belated congratulations! :) I've only tried one character so far, but I'm mostly sure all the major changes make sense. No selling by default, simplified search for traps and secret doors, rune-based identification... All of these make the game more streamlined while maintaining the fun IMO. Only I'm rarely tempted to use cursed equipment, but that's fine with me. So far I'd only like to suggest that, when you spot a trap, the game should tell you what kind of trap it is, so you can estimate at once how dangerous a disarm attempt would be.

By the way, I also appreciate that you leave open whether food rations contain meat or not. I think this can be quite an important role-playing aspect - even more so as even some of the dark ones prefer a meatless (and bloodless) diet [1] [2].

I liked the cursed items. My favorite to wear are Steelskin. 20 extra AC is nice early on when electricity vulnerablity doesn't matter, and later also very welcome when you have electricity immunity. I also like that there is always the chance that you may find something to remove the curse with if it's an item you really want that has a curse. Sometimes wearing a helm of seeing is worth the poison curse. I agree, 4.1 is quite nice. And I also love the level layouts. I have an idea for a level layout from Doom 1 that I'd like to try to realize at some point. It's been itching at me for a few months now. I'm just not sure how I'd go about drawing it. Maybe I'd just edit the original doom map that and save a screenshot.

Here is a doom map made by Emil Brundage that I think has some interesting ideas that could be incorporated into Angband (some already have been in a "convergent evolution" sort of way:

https://doomwiki.org/w/images/1/1c/N...t_E3M5_map.png

Here is e3m5 Unholy Cathedral map from which I'd like to develop a level idea for angband:

https://doomwiki.org/w/images/thumb/...doom_map20.png

Basically the idea is a level that is a giant circular outer corridor (or corridors) or rooms and corridors that make up a giant circle and then there are passages and rooms/caverns inside the circular area. I'm not suggesting make a carbon copy of E3M5, but use it loosely as inspiration for a circular layout.

Reminds me a bit of Morgoth's level in Sil.