The Wilderness

Angband is played in a single dungeon beneath a single town. ZangbandTK is played across a generated overworld, and the town stands on it.

This is the change that most alters how the game feels from the first turn. You begin, as in Angband, on the down staircase in the middle of town, surrounded by shops. But the town does not end in a wall. Walk to its edge and you keep walking, out into whatever country the world put there.

Note

The world work is done: the world generates, towns stand in it with their shops and services, roads run between them, dungeon mouths open on it, and there is work to be had in the towns (see Quests). What is still narrower here than in Zangband is narrower by choice or by shape rather than by being unfinished, and is listed under Where this is narrower than Zangband at the end of this chapter rather than being quietly omitted.

The world

The world is a square grid of blocks, each 16 by 16 grids. At the default size of 129 blocks across — Zangband’s own — that is a world of 2064 by 2064 grids, some two thousand times the area of an Angband town. You will not walk to the edge of it by accident.

Every world is generated from a single seed, fixed when your character is created. That seed decides everything: where the sea is, where the mountains are, where your town stands. Two characters made from the same seed walk the same world. A character always returns to the world they were born in, because the seed is stored in the savefile and the world is rebuilt from it rather than saved.

That is the reason the world can be as large as it is. What the savefile keeps is the seed, where you are standing, and the handful of things that genuinely cannot be recomputed from a seed: what you have dropped, which named monsters you have wounded, and where you have been.

Terrain

Each block has a position in a three-dimensional space — how high it stands, how settled it is, and how orderly. Terrain follows from that position rather than being chosen at random, which is why the world comes out looking like a place rather than like noise: coastlines run, forests mass together, and mountains form ranges.

The seven kinds of country, and roughly what each is made of:

Terrain	What you find there
Ocean	Deep water. About a quarter of the world, as in Zangband. See Deep water — it is crossed, not walled off.
Shore	Sand and shallow water, with grass behind it.
Grassland	Open grass, scattered trees. The easiest country to cross.
Forest	Mostly trees, with clearings.
Swamp	Water, mud and scrub. Slow going.
Wasteland	Bare earth, rubble and rock.
Mountains	Rock, broken by passes.

Deep water

Deep water is not a fence. You can wade into it, as you could in Zangband, and what stops you is weight rather than the water.

Carry no more than half what your strength allows and you keep your head above it and cross freely. Carry more than that and you begin to drown, a little each turn, for as long as you stay in — and the game asks you to confirm before you step in. Anything that lets you float over the ground carries you over water as well, at no cost and no matter what you are carrying.

Do not count on it to break pursuit. A monster that would drown keeps out of deep water, so wading does shake off the things that merely walk. But two large groups of the imported bestiary are unbothered: the ones that swim cross deep water without being fish, and the ones that fly cross anything at all without touching it — the flyers are the larger group of the two, and a raven or a dragon will come over the water after you as though it were not there. The counts are in lib/gamedata/monster.zangband.txt, as CAN_SWIM and CAN_FLY; between them they cover a couple of hundred creatures, which is not a rounding error you can wade away from.

Only true fish are barred from the shore. A shark cannot follow you onto the beach, and neither can a kraken — but a lizardman swims and walks, so the waterline is a line both ways only for the things that live in the sea.

Rivers and lakes

Rivers rise in the high country and run downhill to the sea, and they wander on the way rather than ruling themselves across the map. A river is six or eight grids across with ragged banks, deep in the middle and shallow at the edges, so crossing one is a decision rather than a step: wade it lightly loaded, or go round, or find where it narrows.

Lakes sit in hollows inland. There are not many — four are attempted per world and any that would have reached the coast is abandoned rather than moved, so a world with a lot of coastline has fewer of them.

Towns are never built in water, though they are often built beside it.

Roads join the towns. A road is routed rather than drawn straight: it takes the cheapest way across the country, so it runs down the valleys, keeps out of the swamp and goes round a mountain instead of over it. It keeps to the land as well – two towns on either side of an inland sea get a causeway, but that is the exception the sea is opened for, not a short cut across every bay.

Every town is on the network. The roads are laid as a spanning tree over the towns first, so there is always a road out of the starting village and following roads from it reaches every other town in the world; then any two towns within wild:road-dist blocks of each other get a road directly between them, so settled country ends up with a network rather than a single thread. About one block of the world in a hundred carries a road.

If you are lost, find a road and walk along it. It goes somewhere. Towns and Services covers what you will find at the other end.

Travel

You walk. There are no travel commands and no map transitions — the wilderness is one continuous surface, and you cross it a step at a time as you would cross a dungeon level.

What the game keeps live around you is a window onto the world: nine blocks by nine, or 144 grids square. This is not a boundary you can see or reach. When you come within sight of the window’s edge, the game quietly rebuilds it centred further along, and you carry on walking — you should not be able to tell it has happened. Your position in the world is what the game tracks; where you stand in the window is worked out from it, so scrolling cannot move you.

The one edge you can reach is the edge of the world itself. It is not walled. The land runs out into open sea some way before it, so what you find at the end of the world is more sea, running away past the point where the map stops. You can look out over it. You cannot sail it.

What lives there

The wilderness is inhabited, and how dangerous it is depends on one thing: how far the law reaches. Orderly country is quiet. Lawless country is not, and the worst of it is as dangerous as the deep dungeon.

Your town is not placed at random. It stands in the most orderly ground the world has to offer, and because order spreads by contiguity, the country around it is orderly too. So the first hour is survivable, and the danger climbs as you walk away from home rather than waiting on the doorstep. If you want to know whether you have gone too far, the answer is usually that you have, and that you noticed a little late.

How much lives there is a separate question, and depends on how much the land can support: a lush valley teems, a waste is bare. More things are abroad at night than by day.

The town’s own people stay in the town. Beggars, drunks, urchins and the like belong to the streets they were born on, and you will not meet them ten miles from anywhere.

The sea is inhabited too, and by its own kind. Piranha and swordfish in the shallows, then barracuda, hammerheads and white sharks, and out in the deep the things that eat those: killer whales, giant squid and the krakens. They keep to the water and nothing else keeps to it with them.

Two things about the sea are not like the land. It is never tame — the danger of open water does not fall away near an orderly coast, because law is a measure of how well a country is policed and nobody polices the sea. And it is never empty in the way a waste is: the emptiness of the land is measured by what it can grow, which says nothing about what swims.

None of it can reach you on the sand. The sea is dangerous to enter, not dangerous to stand beside.

Monsters cannot swim, so deep water is a reliable way of breaking pursuit.

What you leave behind

Drop something in the wilderness and it stays where you dropped it — for a while. The longer you leave it, the likelier it is that somebody has come along and found it, and how long that takes depends on where you left it. A sword dropped outside a busy town is gone by morning. One left in a waste may lie there a good while.

It is a half-life rather than a deadline, so most things go early and the occasional one survives a remarkably long time. If you leave something valuable in the wilderness and mean to come back for it, come back soon, and remember that “soon” means something different in settled country.

What you are carrying is yours, of course, and so is anything you are standing on when the world scrolls beneath you.

What you wounded

Ordinary monsters are not remembered. Walk far enough away and the country is repopulated rather than resumed — which amounts to the same thing as the ones you left having recovered and moved on, because that is what they would have done.

Named monsters are remembered — if you hurt them. Bring a unique to within an inch of its life, walk away, and it is still out there: the same one, still hurt, though it will have healed by the time you find it again and it will not be where you left it. It will also be awake and no longer afraid, so the second meeting is generally worse than the first.

One you never touched is not remembered, and does not need to be. It is indistinguishable from one the country rolls up fresh, and remembering it would only pin it to wherever it last stood — which, if it had been following you, is your elbow.

One consequence worth knowing. While you are underground, nothing is holding that unique’s place in the world, so it is free to turn up in the dungeon instead. If it does, it is no longer in the wilderness, and the world quietly forgets it was ever there.

The world map

Press M on the surface and you get the overhead map of the world: one character per block, drawn from the same terrain the ground is drawn from, so what the map calls forest is what you walk into. Towns are picked out in white, and @ is you. Direction keys scroll it; ESC closes it.

The world is 129 blocks across and a screen is eighty columns, so the map pans rather than shrinking to fit. Squeezing a hundred and twenty-nine rows into twenty-two would lose the coastlines, which are the thing worth looking at.

It shows only what you have seen. A new character knows the country around their town and nothing else, and the map fills in behind them as they travel — a block is sixteen grids and you can see twenty, so walking through a block reveals it and its neighbours. What you have uncovered is saved with the character.

In the dungeon, M is the level map as it always was. There is no sky to see the world from down there.

What you know

You know your town. You have lived in it, and it is on your map from the first turn, all of it.

You do not know the world. Angband hands you the whole of the town level as soon as you arrive, which is fair when the town level is all there is; doing the same here would hand you the coastline, the forests and the mountain ranges before you had taken a step. So beyond the town’s edge the ordinary rules apply — you learn the world by looking at it, and daylight lets you see a long way across open ground but tells you nothing about what is behind the trees.

Trees are the one piece of terrain here that Angband had no equivalent for: you can walk into them, and you cannot see through them. Standing in a wood you see your own surroundings and very little else, which is the point of a wood.

And it matters what time it is. Daylight is what reveals the country; at night you see as far as your lamp and no further, so the world stops being a map and becomes a corridor. The status line says Day or Night while you are above ground — Angband never said, because in Angband the surface is one town-sized level and the difference hardly signifies. Here it is the difference between seeing where you are going and not.

Day and night

The whole cycle is 10,000 turns, half of it light and half of it dark, so night lasts 5,000 turns from the sun falling to the sun rising. Get caught out at random and you are looking at about 2,500.

That is 5,000 turns of yours, at normal speed. The world keeps its clock in game turns — 100,000 of them to the cycle — and a character at normal speed acts once every ten. Being fast does not shorten the night; it shortens your share of it, so at +10 speed the same night costs you around 2,500 moves. Being slow costs you more.

The clock runs underground. Only the message and the relighting are held back while you are below; time itself passes at the same rate wherever you are. So a long dungeon trip changes what you climb out into, and surfacing into darkness after going down in daylight is normal rather than a fault.

Waiting it out is not realistic — 5,000 turns of resting is not a plan. That is what the inn is for: it sells you a bed only after dark, and takes you straight to dawn for 25 gold. See Towns and Services.

Leaving the town

Through a gate. There are four, one on each side, and each is two tiles wide with a door on it.

The town is Angband 4.2’s town, entire: the same clearing, the same streets, the same shops, ruins and rubble, and the same rock standing around it. That rock earns its keep in a world in a way it never had to as a level of its own. It is what keeps the wilderness out of the market square, and it is what stops you seeing half a county from the staircase.

What ZangbandTK adds is the gates. The rock is closed up everywhere else — the clearing used to break through it wherever it happened to reach the edge, leaving ragged holes several tiles across that anything could wander in by — and four deliberate gateways are cut instead, at the ends of streets rather than at corners.

Open a gate and walk through. It swings shut behind you shortly afterwards, unless somebody is standing in the doorway, so the road home does not stay propped open for whatever was following you.

Zangband’s own towns were walled and moated, with locked gates. That is not being copied: it is what Angband 2.8.1’s town looked like, which is the game Zangband was built on, and 4.2 has replaced it with something better. What is taken from Zangband is the part that is actually a Zangband idea — that the town stands in a world you can walk out into.

Going down

The down staircase in the middle of town works exactly as it does in Angband: stand on it and press >. It leads into the shallowest dungeon there is, so that a new character has somewhere to go from the first turn.

It is not the only way down. Dungeon mouths are scattered across the world, drawn as a > like any staircase, and each leads into a dungeon of its own with its own range of depths. Exploring the Dungeon covers what that means; the short version is that a dungeon has a bottom, and getting past it means finding another one. Roads help: most mouths open on or near a road, because a dungeon nobody can find is a dungeon nobody uses.

Coming back up puts you where you went down. The world remembers where you left it, so a character who walked three days into the hills before finding a way underground comes back up in the hills, not in the town.

It remembers what you had explored, too. The surface is taken down while you are below and rebuilt from the seed when you return, and what you had learned of it is carried across that — including across saving and reloading while you are still underground. A character who walks into a town, goes down the stairs and comes back up a week later finds the town as they left it, not blank.

Where this is narrower than Zangband

Stated plainly, because a manual that only describes what works is not much use for judging what to expect:

Two kinds of townsfolk are missing, and were always missing. Of Zangband’s six, four are built; the elf, dwarf and lizardfolk types exist in its own source only as unused constants, so there is nothing to port and nothing was lost (DEC-31).

Dungeon character is broad rather than particular. Each dungeon has its own depth range, floor, shape, inhabitants and kind of treasure (see Exploring the Dungeon), but the inhabitants are named by the kinds of creature that live there — trolls, wraiths, vortices — rather than by individual monsters. Zangband set a habitat flag per dungeon on each of its nine hundred monsters; this says the same thing in a dozen lines per dungeon, and covers the monsters Angband brought as well, but it cannot say that one particular creature belongs in one particular place.

The terrain is coarser than Zangband’s. Zangband distinguished about thirty kinds of country, including impassable jungle, snow and lava; ZangbandTK currently has seven. Snow in particular implies a climate axis the parameter space does not yet carry.