The Angband team released a new version this past Friday, September 14. The last major release (3.3.0) was in July 2011, and there were 2 bugfix releases since. The team has also been working on a v4 release, but there’s no word on when it will be ready.
This new release has quite a few changes, most notably a new resizeable tileset (64×64) by Shockbolt, an artist who also designed ones for the ToME4 roguelike game (look him up at the deviantArt website). These are enabled by default when you start the game, along with the additional windows for information display. (The only other tileset I like is the one by David Gervais). Other changes include new monster pits and nests, torches now radius 1 light, slight changes to prices and monsters, more consistency for enchant/disenchant, consumables now stack as 40, no weakly cursed items, and lots more.
The tileset looks great, and has different pictures for each race/class/gender combination. It starts out set to 6×3 in the Options>Graphics>Tile Multiplier list and I suggest that you stay with 6×3 or 4×2, or 8×4 if you like them larger.
I’ve created 6 new characters and shall be posting about their successes (and failures) as the weeks go by:
Morgaine, the Dunedan Warrior
Werdna, the Gnome Mage (showing how Detect Traps appears)
Amli, the Dwarven Priest (in the Town)
Sile, the Kobold Rogue (about to learn a spell)
Amilon, the Hobbit Ranger (showing the character screen)
and
Percival the Half-Orc Paladin
(I only really noticed in this release, but Paladins get their spells in the same order every time, unlike priests.)
Some gameplay notes:
Cutpurses are quite annoying early, because if you are a melee character you usually cannot kill them in one hit. Get several in a row and your gold will be depleted rather rapidly.
ALWAYS Tunnel into quartz squares. Most of the time my characters can do it without a pick, and the gold you get will somewhat make up for the annoying cutpurse thieves.
Cave spiders are deadly when you are low level. As are louses (for a different reason). Never get into a room with them, you’ll very quickly be surrounded and then keep getting bitten faster than you can heal and kill them. In hallways they are much easier to handle. (spiders tend to travel in groups, so although they don’t “breed explosively” they can be quite dangerous)
what “breeds explosively” usually means
Try to avoid grey mushroom patches unless you’re in a big empty room. Their confusion (by spores) lasts fairly long, the safest way to remove it is to just Rest, which is not really possible if other enemies are within sight.
If you return to town and can’t see most of it, you arrived at night. Beware, many cutpurse and rogue types are in town at this time.
Upcoming:
There are indications that several variants have new releases coming soon – Sil, UnAngband, and FayAngband. Along with Quickband, I’ll be discussing them in future postings.
One Day, I Will Ascend 