Angband 4.1.0

[Nick]

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

[joemaro]

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

my favourite change:

A new generation algorithm has been introduced, and appears roughly as often as the classical generation algorithm

[fph]

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

[Gwarl]

Great stuff

[getter77]

Excellent---onward to a better future.

[Malak Darkhunter]

This looks very,very interesting. Thanks guys!

[wobbly]

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

[Philip]

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.

[Mondkalb]

Great. Trying out now.

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

[Nomad]

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.