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

Milestone M4. The world generates, the town stands in it, and you can walk out of the town and back into it. Several things stated in the Phase 1 requirements are not here yet, and are listed under What is not here yet 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. Nothing about it is kept in the savefile except the seed and where you are standing.

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.

Nothing else can swim yet. Monsters treat deep water as terrain that will kill them and keep out of it, which makes water a reliable way of breaking pursuit. Zangband’s swimming and aquatic monsters are recorded against the imported bestiary and waiting on the flag to drive them.

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 are not yet built. There is a stub of road through the town, and it goes nowhere: a road connects one town to another, and there is only one town so far. That arrives with the rest of the towns.

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 a block’s width of the window’s edge, the game quietly rebuilds it centred further along, and you carry on walking. Your position in the world is what the game tracks; where you stand in the window is worked out from it.

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.

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.

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.

Leaving the town

Follow a road out. There is no gate and no transition — you just walk.

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 a way out on each of the four sides, cut through the rock where a road would meet the town: at the end of a street, not at a corner.

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 >.

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.

What is not here yet

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

One town, and one way underground. The world holds a single town and the single staircase in it. Several towns of differing size and character — carrying different stores, so that a frontier village is not a city with the same eight shops — several dungeons with their own depth ranges, and the buildings and services that go in them are all milestone M5.

No overhead map. There is no way to see the world except by walking it. The map display is M5.

Roads go nowhere, as above — they need somewhere to go.

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.