This will probably be my last post here about the project, so I wanted to say thank you to everyone in this community.

When I first started, the game was called Angband Reforged because it was directly inspired by Angband. Over time it grew into its own project with its own identity, and because of that I’ve rebranded it. The influence of Angband will always be there, but I felt it was time for the game to stand on its own.

Over the few months I’ve learned an incredible amount, and a lot of the feedback from this subreddit directly shaped the direction of the game.

Some of the bigger additions since I first shared it:

A complete UI overhaul focused on readability while keeping the traditional roguelike feel.

New character creation with animated class previews, relic selection, and much stronger visual presentation.

Major improvements to sprites, town environments, shops, and overall atmosphere.

Expanded progression through unique relics that change how runs play.

Better monster behavior, combat feedback, spawning, and countless quality-of-life improvements.

An optional online layer with persistent accounts, global chat, server-wide announcements for notable achievements, and multiplayer social features—all designed so the core game remains a single-player traditional roguelike first.

One of my favorite additions has been seeing players share discoveries in global chat or watching server announcements appear when someone finds a rare artifact or reaches an important milestone. It adds a sense that you’re exploring the same world as other adventurers without changing the core roguelike experience.

I also want to thank everyone here who took the time to critique screenshots, question design decisions, suggest improvements, or simply encourage me to keep going. Those comments genuinely helped make the project better.

I won’t be posting updates here anymore since the game has moved beyond being an Angband-focused project, but I wanted to stop by one last time to say thanks to the community that helped get it started.

I hope I’ve managed to carry forward at least a small part of what makes Angband such a special game while building something that can stand on its own.

It currently still has plenty of Tolkien lore and is still inspired by Angband, so if you’d like to keep playing feel free to find it here

https://busterbuildslab.itch.io/wand-or-steel
https://gamejolt.com/games/wand-or-steel/1077619

Thank you all, and happy delving.

Using the k-commend, I accidentally squelched a whole category of item that I want to see. The only way now for me NOT to ignore it is to discard ALL squelch settings (using capital-K). That is highly impractical.

Is there a way just to alter the one squelched item type to be visible again?

**Big progress update on my Angband-inspired roguelike!**

Been heads down for a while and wanted to share some of the bigger improvements that have landed recently.

The goal has always been to modernize the feel of a classic roguelike without losing the depth and tension that make games like Angband special. I’m trying to improve the presentation and accessibility while keeping the gameplay true to its roots.
I’d love feedback from fellow roguelike fans—especially on the new art direction and UI. What are the biggest quality-of-life improvements you like seeing in traditional roguelikes without making them feel “too modern”?

Thanks to everyone who’s given feedback so far. It’s been incredibly helpful and has shaped a lot of these changes.

Try it out here: https://busterbuildslab.itch.io/angband-reforged

So... I was bored and started playing a few angband variants after several years. And I can't for the life of me, figure out how to keep alignment good for a priest or pally. I think you get penalized for killing good creatures. But in the dungeons, everything attacks you.... so unless I'm just running away all the time, it seems really tough to sty "good." I never really cared about it before, just kill everything. But I'm wondering if there are tips on how to stay on the "good" side.

Big hug to all them *band players and developers that like it real and stay loyal to Sir Robert Alan Koeneke, may he Rest In Peace. I cannot, will not, watch my beloved genre being utterly, rudely, shamelessly desecrated by AI.

​

I also wanted to have my own variant. Wanted to eat corpses on my variant. Wanted to be able to perform rituals on the blood puddles monsters were leaving on the floor when slain. Of course, none of that existed on Angband. So I started a long painful journey to learn C.

My journey has been on for years. Nothing automatic. No questions to artificial intellislop to flatten the cobbles for me to walk dragging my soft testicles on the ground. No.

I asked those who preceeded me. Read tons of lines of code to try to decipher how they worked. It has been years now.

​

I'm still learning. Still cannot figure out how to please guys like u/SkyVINS who want control by arrows, or tiles. Cannot figure out how to make sound to work.

​

I'm in my past-mid-forties now. Will keep on learning my slow way, dragging my testicles on a rough patch of broken glasses and crying blood and whatever someday is the result of my journey I will be able to look at it and feel proud of myself.

​

This is a farewell. If anybody wants to check on my humble human work, the page on itch will be there. I can be reached by email, mastodon, bluesky.

​

This post is NOT to talk crap about guys vibe coding, out of the scope of it. You want it the easy way and folks can enjoy it? Fine to me. Just not for me. That is my culture and my mindset. Like bellybuttons, all of us have our own. Farewell Angband subreddit. Hope the AI crutch never fail to you. Thank you to everyone who has supported my crappy human work. Will carry fond memories of this sub in my heart for a long time.

​

Jose Machete.

Angband was one of my favorite games growing up, so I started building my own modern take on it.

Angband Reforged keeps the classic roguelike foundation but adds new visuals, classes, progression systems, and quality-of-life improvements while trying to preserve the spirit of the original.

Would love any feedback from longtime Angband players if you’d like to check it out.

Link: https://busterbuildslab.itch.io/angband-reforged

I can't stress enough that people should check out the Deephold link below - This is a really original take on Angband. Give it the support it deserves, lots of effort has gone into this and it is great work. Give it a try, I got a fighter to lvl25 on my first try which has me hooked. Warning, the Arena escalates in difficulty after each fight and will catch you out.

Deephold is the result of an experiment to explore what it would be like to play Angband through a no-grid "dashboard" interface.

100 floors. 600+ monsters. 140 artifacts.

Free. No ads. No logins.

https://deephold.io

Hello everybody! Uploaded and ready for grabbing (and enjoying) it's the latest version of my little big Zang project.

Several newly added features, including the unglorious, ungodly, diabolical, Blood Rituals.

Along with the praying, the zcreaming, the slamming doors (which can be triggering random traps) and some others, the Variant is step by step going into role-playing and immersive gameplay. Overly re-designed loot system, magic and combat too. Thank you and hats off to u/SnooKiwis8861 for the priceless help and support (and patience).

Please, check out the machete_readme.txt for learning the keybindings to those added features. Unleash always at your own risk. 😉

A number of bugs have been smashed too!

Thank you again to everybody for the kindness, the support, the downloads, the love.

ZMAngband VI.06

Evening, everybody! As title states, V.22 is up and ready for grabs. Glad to say the bug that was making the game crashing when some targets were attempted to reach, is gone. One kind player helped me with a proverbial savefile that captured the exact moment in which the crash was about to happen, and that was the final push that was needed to locate and smash said bug. Looting system has been re-designed to not being that shameless giving to the player, thanks fellow redditor /snookkiwis for the heads-up.

Magic has gotten a buckle up too, now, all casting Classes have their favourite magic school in which they will perform better than others.

The font provided with the game, 9x15XB.fon, has gotten a bit of polish around the edges. Win users might have to right-click on it and 'install for all users' as admins to get it properly displayed. On Wine for Linux there is no need for further action.

Thank you everyone for the support! Much appreciated!

ZMAngband V.22

Hi.

I encountered my first huge vault, formed a bit like one inner heart and two arcs away from it. It had a bunch of hard monsters. Uniques, Great X Wyrms, eye drujs, time hounds, etc. Too many to Teleport away. How do you approach it? I try to use Destruction, but that just removes all treasure too.

To be fair, I think my speed was too low at +9 (potion of speed ran out mid way).

Missed "superb" treasure, at least one monster dropped an artifact as a consolation prize.

What do people think about the idea of adding a feature that provides you with a pop-up the first time you see a new monster type?

I added this feature to my own game so that I could more easily spot out-of-depth monsters and uniques when I am grinding the mid-game. When I am mid-game, I tend to fall into a bit of a flow that doesn't always pay attention to what I am up against. I added this feature to my own game so that I could more easily spot out of depth monsters and uniques when I am grinding the mid game.

I tend to switch it off in the early game as there isn't that much of a risk of being one-shotted then but it has saved my bacon many times mid to late game.

I have also added additional "Discovery" notifications for artifact drops in case I am not paying attention.

Hello there my fellow 'banders. Has been four months since I made a post here with a release. And as I update the game quite consistently, but did not want to clutter the sub, today, being my birthday, I thought it would be a good chance to both updating the Variant and post about it here =)

Please read the machete_readme.txt, for if you have not been following recent updates, it packs a lot of stuff, and less bugs too.

Thank you bunches to everybody supporting, downloading, and enjoying this humble project.

ZMAngband v.9

Hey everybody, we are releasing a new version of Sil-More.

We have a major UI overhaul and some new gameplay features for you!

1. Full mouse support for desktop.

We have redesigned all of the menus to support mouse controls and added multiple new ways to perform actions. You can path via clicks, see descriptions via right clicks, etc.

One of the biggest new features is a round character action menu that you can open by clicking on a character. We also tried to make actions more context-sensitive. For instance, if you right-click on rubble, it will be cleared. If you right-click on a monster, you will see its description.

Our goal is for you to be able to play completely without a keyboard.

1. Full touch redesign with multiple control presets.

Again, we have looked into all menus and made them touch-sensitive. We have created 3 movement presets for you to choose from, and a tutorial to help you decide.

They are: a classical touch panel on the side, invisible movement corners, and a radial wheel for movement. We did our best to make it possible for you to play in the way you like the most.

Also, the wheel character menu is present here as well.

1. Mini-map and View menus.

The mini-map is currently pixel-based, so you can zoom and move wherever you want via mouse, keyboard, and touch gestures. The View pane can zoom in whole-number steps and move via mouse drag. This drastically eases looting and monster tracking.

1. New flavor system.

Now, even if an item is not identified, you can guess from the text whether it is evil orcish gear or noble elven gear. All items and egos now have text descriptions.

1. New light management system.

Light has been moved to supply, and the number of carried torches is restricted. Lanterns, on the other hand, are now easier to manage, with a shared oil pool.

1. Audio improvements.

We have added OGG support for smaller file sizes. We also added new sounds and polished the old ones, so the game should feel better and sound better while you play.

We hope, guys, that you will like the new ways to play Sil-More.

P.S. Also, we have created an itch.io page for the project, so if you want to support us, please do!

Another great piece of news is that we have started a Google Play internal test for Sil-More. If you want to participate, please DM me!

https://github.com/k0rtesss/Sil-More

How long will it take for that bastard to regen so I can kill him proper?

this is not faked.

this is a genuine randomized item on the ground.

at dungeon level 6.

Title

I wonder if I'm the only one who does this.

I mean editing things like the Priest spell "Light of Manwë" to being "Light of Varda" (Manwë is the King of the Sky and Wind, Varda's the Queen of Light) or changing the description text of the "Blessed" property to read "Blessed by the Valar" instead of by the Gods (as the only God in Arda is Eru, and he's pretty hands off unless you're really close to breaking everything).

Still trying to figure out how to reconcile the fact that you can apparently find Gurthang twice though (Mormegil was a title given to Turin because of Gurthang's black blade). I think this is the only artifact that's duplicated under 2 names (it's not like you can find Narsil in addition to Anduril)

Are there any others that folks do? I'm genuinely curious.

I am new.to angband and got low strength on my first character, I would still like to play with them and be able to fill my inventory. So I wanted to ask if there is a parameter you can change in one of the files in the gamedata folder to increase carry weight?

Right now, my Tulwar of Gondolin (2d4) (+10, +10) isn't doing too much damage. Can I use Enchant Weapon To-Dam, Enchant Weapon To-Hit, and Enchant *Weapon* to get it to possibly (+20, +20)?

Playing ver 4.2.6-98

Lvl 26 Hobbit Ranger

Max Depth 1300' (L26)

I last played Angband in a year that started in "1" and now I'm trying to get it working on my Mac laptop so I can play with my son. Ctrl- and Shift- mods work fine for the four arrows on the keyboard, but obviously I want to be able to easily move diagonally. I have a Bluetooth numeric keypad and while that lets me move around, the shift and Ctrl modifiers are ignored, so I can't run or spin around (etc) using it. Any thoughts?

...after the battle. Blood soaked floor. Carcasses of giant snakes, their bodies thick as elephants' legs, scattered all over. In the middle of the room, a Mindflayer, Paladin of Death, wielding a whip, dripping poison and enveloped in magical frost...

really, are you telling me you cannot understand what monsters these are? or that you could confuse one icon with the other?

Have gotten this message twice now, on two separate mage runs in Vanilla Angband. What does this mean?

Edit: I got it running! Well, Google's AI did, mostly. Thanks again to everyone who made suggestions.

I built a portable version using Cygwin: https://gofile.io/d/2GcuuT

This should theoretically work on any Windows PC. Let me know if you give it a try!

Original post:

https://github.com/NickMcConnell/AngbandPlus/tree/Diabloband

Sounds super interesting. I'd love to give it a try even if it's in a very early stage. I've been trying for hours to figure out how to compile it for Windows using MSYS2 (having never done any compiling before) but the most I got were some error messages. No idea if the code itself is broken or I'm doing something wrong, or both.

If anyone has successfully played this and has more info, has a working Windows version, or might be able to make one, I'd greatly appreciate it.