Product Description
AngbandOS is a turn based game where you control a brave adventurer trying to rid the land of evil. You will start the game weak and inexperienced, but as you play you will gain stronger abilities and find powerful equipment to aid you on your quest.
The Basics
The main game window shows a top-down view of the area around your character. Your character is represented by the ‘@’ symbol, and will usually be in the middle of the screen. The things around you are also represented by characters of various types. Generally, letters represent monsters and non-letter characters represent items or terrain features.
You play the game by moving around using the numberpad keys. Moving over an item will pick it up, moving into a monster will attack it, and moving into a building will enter that building to interact with its inhabitants. Moving into other things will usually result in the game trying to guess what you want to do with the thing, for example moving into a door will try to open it, and moving into a trap will try to disarm it.
There are many more commands that you can use; for casting spells, disarming traps, using items, viewing your map, and so forth. Pressing ‘?’ will display a list of these commands. However, moving around is the most fundamental way of controlling your character.
The Aim of the Game
To win the game, you must complete fifty quests, each of which involves killing one or more monsters. Half of these are fixed quests that always involve the same monsters and always appear in the same places, and the other half are randomised when you start a new game. These quests are distributed through twenty locations; including sewers, caves, dungeons, and towers. There is no fixed order for you to visit these locations and complete the quests, although some areas are far more dangerous than others so you will need to learn roughly how powerful you need to be for each of these locations by experience.
Getting Started
There are a large number of races and classes in Cthangband, which require different play styles. To start with, you are advised to play a human warrior. This is neither the most powerful nor the weakest of the race and class combinations, but it is the easiest to get the hang of while learning the basics of the game.
When you start your first game, you will begin in a town. The other inhabitants of the town may be dangerous, so it is best to avoid them while you visit the shops to buy equipment and then either enter the town’s sewers or leave the town into the wilderness in order to start adventuring.
You will have started with some basic equipment, enough to start adventuring immediately if you prefer. Press the ‘e’ key to view the equipment that you are wearing/wielding, and the ‘i’ key to view the items in your backpack. Generally, items in your equipment list will have an ongoing effect on your abilities, and items in your backpack will not; although many types of item can be used directly from your backpack for an immediate effect.
On the left hand side of the main screen you can see a summary of your character. Pressing ‘C’ will show you your full character sheet, similar to the one that you were shown on character creation.
Try exploring with your character (the first level of the dungeon is almost certainly safer than the wilderness for a first level character – press ‘>’ when standing on the dungeon stair to go down). Remember that using the ‘l’ command to look around takes no game time, so it’s always safe to do that wherever you are.
You can press ‘?’ in game to get a quick reminder of the commands available, or go to the commands page in this manual to get a more detailed list of all the commands and what they do.
Some Basic Game Hints
Here are some quick hints to get you started…
- Remember that Cthangband is a turn based game. Don’t panic and hit keys quickly (especially in combat). Take your time.
- Make sure you always have food to eat. Starvation can make you weak and even kill you.
- Having a light source is essential. Running out is pretty much a death sentence.
- Don’t fight in the middle of rooms where you can be easily surrounded. Try to draw monsters into doorways and corridors.
- Rest often. Exploring while badly injured is just asking to get yourself killed.
- Unless you are on a special level, you lose nothing by retreating back up the stairs.
- It may look like there are a lot of things (damage types and conditions) that you need to resist, but many of these won’t start being necessary until you get to harder/deeper areas.
- The difficulty of monsters around the entrance to a dungeon are a good indication of how hard the dungeon is going to be.
- Quaffing unidentified potions or reading unidentified scrolls is incredibly dangerous, but if you’re going to die anyway it might be worth a shot…
- Farmer Maggot might moan a lot, but he’s also rather rich.