Features#

ZangbandTK is Angband 4.2.6 with Zangband’s character rebuilt on top of it. This page is the honest inventory: what is in the game now, and what is not.

Base

Angband 4.2.6

Platform

macOS on Apple Silicon

Playable

Yes

Savefiles

Compatible with neither Angband nor Zangband, and never will be

In the game now#

Zangband’s lethality#

Every monster carries 73% of Angband’s hit points and 50% of its armour class. Monsters die sooner and are easier to hit, so fights resolve in fewer turns — in whichever direction they were going.

Those numbers are measured, not invented. Across the 450 monsters that Zangband 2.7.5 and Angband 2.8.1 have in common, Zangband’s carried a median 0.73× the hit points and 0.50× the armour class of the release it forked from. See How Balance Differs for the full account.

A wilderness#

Zangband’s defining feature, and the largest piece of work in the game so far. A world 2064 grids square, generated from a seed and never stored, with the town standing in it and roads leading out.

Terrain follows from height, population and law; danger follows from law alone.
The surface is one continuous sheet that scrolls as you walk, not a set of discrete levels.
Deep water can be waded into, and drowned in.
Rivers run to the sea and lakes sit in the hollows.
The world ends in open sea rather than in a wall.
What you drop in the country stays where you left it until somebody finds it, and the world forgets what you left in time.
A unique you wounded and walked away from is still out there, still wounded.

Monsters, objects and magic#

389 imported monsters, including the princes of Amber and the Mythos deities. 1013 in total.
51 artifacts, including Grayswandir and Frakir.
18 ego types, including (Vampiric), (Chaotic) and (Trump Weapon).
Three weapon mechanics Angband has no equivalent of: vampiric, vorpal and chaotic.
The Ancient and Foul Curse, with its cascade intact.
Random object abilities, pit themes and vaults.

See Monsters and Objects for the detail.

Tunable without a rebuild#

The balance dials live in lib/gamedata/constants.txt and take effect on restart:

lethality:hit-points:73      # percent of base monster hit points
lethality:armor-class:50     # percent of base monster armour class
melee:vorpal-chance:6        # a vorpal weapon cuts deep on one blow in this many
melee:vorpal-multiplier:2
melee:chaotic-chance:7       # a chaotic weapon discharges on one blow in this many

Setting both lethality values to 100 gives behaviour identical to vanilla Angband 4.2 — a supported configuration, and a useful comparison.

Not yet#

Named here because a features page that lists only what works is a sales brochure. Each of these has a manual chapter already scaffolded, which is filled in when the milestone lands.

Feature	Milestone	Chapter
Multiple towns and services	M5	Towns and Services
Quests	M6	Quests
Mutations	M8	Mutations
Virtues	M8	Virtues
Magic realms	M9	The Realms of Magic
Pets and allies	M10	Pets and Allies
Nightmare mode	M11	Nightmare Mode

Multiple dungeons are also still to come.

A Tcl/Tk front end is planned for a later phase, reviving the original’s interface on Tcl/Tk 9. There is an irony in it: the original ZangbandTK supported Windows and X11 and never supported macOS at all, so the Tcl/Tk front end will be the new port when it arrives, not the other way round.