ZangbandTK

Zangband was one of the great Angband variants. A wilderness to cross, towns to visit, mutations, pets, chaos patrons, and a bestiary drawn as much from Roger Zelazny's Amber and H. P. Lovecraft's Mythos as from Tolkien. Its development stopped in 2005, at 2.7.5-pre1.

Angband's did not. It is now at 4.2.6, with twenty years of better level generation, a data-driven architecture and a proper object property system that Zangband never had.

ZangbandTK puts the first on top of the second. It is not a port: Zangband's 2005 codebase is not what is worth preserving. Its character is.

What is in it

• A wilderness — 2064 grids square, generated from a seed and never stored. Terrain follows from height, population and law; danger follows from law alone. Deep water can be waded and drowned in, the world ends in open sea, and what you drop in the country stays where you left it until somebody finds it.
• Towns and dungeons — several towns, differing in size, in who lives in them and in which trades they hold, joined by routed roads; thirteen dungeons, each with its own depth range, its own inhabitants and its own kind of treasure. Six building services, including an inn that sells a night's sleep and the dreams that come with it.
• Zangband's lethality — every monster carries 73% of Angband's hit points and 50% of its armour class, the measured difference between Zangband 2.7.5 and the Angband it forked from. Both dials sit in a text file if you disagree.
• 1013 monsters, 387 of them imported, including the princes of Amber and the Mythos deities. 51 artifacts, among them Grayswandir and Frakir. 16 ego types, with vampiric, vorpal and chaotic weapon mechanics Angband has no equivalent of.
• Nine races and every class Zangband has — Amberite, Beastman, Yeek, Draconian, Mindflayer, Vampire, Golem, Sprite and Half-Titan; the Monk with unarmed progression, the Mindcrafter with psionics, and the Chaos-Warrior sworn at birth to one of nine Lords of the Courts of Chaos.
• Seven realms of magic where Angband has four, adding Sorcery, Chaos and Trump. A hundred and ninety-two workings in twenty-four books, chosen at birth and permanent. Sorcery has no attack spell in it, Chaos backfires, and Arcane is bought outright in town.
• Ninety-six mutations. Chaos changes you, permanently and rarely for the better. You do not choose them, and getting rid of one is hard: the rarest potion in the game, a building only great cities have, or another mutation cancelling it out.
• Pets — three sides rather than two, nine orders given as a standing policy, mana upkeep charged on the sum of your pets' levels, and four of them follow you downstairs, where Zangband left them behind.
• Quests and virtues — all six of Zangband's quest kinds, and eight of its eighteen virtues, moved by what you kill, spend and spare and read by the Lords of Chaos when they hand down a reward. Zangband tracked virtues for seven years and never once read one.

Status

Playable, and most of the way built. Ten of the eleven milestones are done; nightmare mode is the one that is left. A Tcl/Tk front end, reviving Tim Baker's original ZangbandTK interface on Tk 9, is planned for a later phase.

This build has not been played through by anybody but its author. Expect bugs, and please report them. Savefiles are not compatible with Angband or Zangband, and never will be.

macOS is the delivery target and the only platform the game is played on. Windows, Linux, Cygwin, MSYS2, DOS, the Nintendo DS and 3DS, and WebAssembly are built by CI on every push, but none of them is played through, so builds is a stronger claim than works. Source, manual and build instructions are at zangbandtk.com.

Credit

This project is the smallest part of the work it depends on.

Angband — Ben Harrison, James E. Wilson, Robert A. Koeneke, and everyone who has maintained and developed it since, currently led by Nick McConnell. Zangband — created by Topi Ylinen, maintained by Robert Ruehlmann and the Zangband DevTeam. AngbandTk and ZAngbandTk — Tim Baker, who between 1997 and 2001 wrote the Tcl/Tk framework, tile engine and interface that a later phase of this project intends to revive. Roger Zelazny, whose Chronicles of Amber gave Zangband its princes, its Pattern and its Trumps, and H. P. Lovecraft, whose Mythos gave it everything waiting at the bottom of the dungeon.

Released under the Angband licence — non-commercial distribution, the same terms Zangband itself carried.