Rebuilding Zangband on a modern Angband#
Zangband was one of the great Angband variants — a wilderness to cross, towns to visit, mutations, pets, chaos patrons, and a bestiary drawn from Roger Zelazny’s Amber and H. P. Lovecraft’s Mythos as much as from Tolkien. Its development stopped in 2005, at version 2.7.5-pre1.
Angband did not stop. It is now at 4.2.6, with twenty years of better level generation, a real 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.
Note
Status: feature-complete but for one milestone. Everything Zangband is known for is in — the wilderness, the towns and their services, thirteen dungeons, the bestiary, mutations, chaos patrons, seven realms of magic and pets. What is left is nightmare mode, and the polish that turns a working game into one worth standing behind. Features is the honest inventory, and every release so far is still marked a pre-release. Development happens at GitHub.
Start here#
What is in the game now — the wilderness, the bestiary, the lethality — and what is still to come.
The real game, compiled to WebAssembly. Nothing to install, and it saves where you left off.
A disk image for macOS, zips for Windows, an AppImage for Linux — or two commands to build it from source.
The manual, in four parts. Start with the demonstration if roguelikes are new to you.
What changed in each version, by milestone. M0 to M9 are complete and M10, pets, is all but done. M11, nightmare mode, is the last.
What makes it Zangband#
Three things, in the order you will notice them.
Monsters die sooner, and so do you. 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. Fights resolve in fewer turns, in whichever direction they were going. How Balance Differs is the full account.
There is a world, not a staircase. A wilderness 2064 grids square, generated from a seed and never stored, with the town standing in it and roads out of it. 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. The Wilderness covers it.
The bestiary is not Tolkien’s alone. 387 monsters imported from Zangband, including the princes of Amber and the Mythos deities, alongside 51 artifacts and 16 ego types. Monsters and Objects have the detail.