GSNband History

Features of version 0.1.0 (finished 1.11.98, not released)

• Extended recall patch
• Blood of Life patch (a potion that allows you to cheat death once)
• Infravision mutation improves it by random amounts
• Golems have better histories
• Golems have -10 to speed (duh)
• Mages have trouble wielding anything but daggers and quarterstaffs
• Chaos Warriors have trouble wielding anything that is not chaotic. They start with a chaotic broad sword, though.
• Monks have two new techniques at higher levels (just liked their names, I guess)
• Chaos Warriors got better sensing (similar to rogues)
• 'great' replaces 'excellent' in many places (for consistency; the flag is called DROP_GREAT)
• Added a bunch of new monsters, mainly from Kamband (aquatic ones) - a few are from the M&M RPG series (golems mainly). 'x' are eXtra-terrestrial aliens; they may seem familliar, too... 950 monsters in total
• Unfair monsters (mainly at low levels - too powerful or too easy to farm)
• Monsters resistant (half damage) or immune (not 0 damage, just very little) to various types of weapons
• FHotA are not undead (why should they?)
• Monsters like Great Wyrm of Balance, who were both good and evil, are now neither (it would make no sense with the lack of factual player alignment). All paladins (except anti, of course) are good
• Monster spoilers now mention the AQUATIC, CAN_SWIM, CAN_FLY and the new flags
• Neutral sex (don't ask me what's the use...)
• Damage dice of arrows and weapons can get enhanced sometimes (O)
• Pernament protection from evil for priests at level 50 (O)
• Various classes get extra shots with various weapons (O)
• Monsters harder to hit in trees, extra vulnerable if swimming (O)
• "Seeker" sling bullets in place of peebles
• Chaos fog as terrain (may corrupt you, so beware!)
• Weird attacks (ego items only, no race has such an intrinsic) - more deadly compared to Kam
• Sanity (from Kam) - sanity draining also accompanies brain smashing, and may be inflicted by angry deities. Low-level monsters that cause insanity are considered unfair. Added ego-items of Insanity
• Rogues can steal money from monsters (from O), adjusted this to player's experience level
• Gods (from Kam), although without sacred and hated monsters. Praying can result in four outcomes: reward, "leave me alone", warning and deadly retaliation. Chaos Warriors cannot worship gods (they have their patrons). Gods code has been tweaked to make them less deadly if you neglect to sacrifice
• Thrown weapons - not fully implemented (O)

Features added in 0.1.1 (finished 6.11.98)

• Golems now have their starting speed penalty based on INT. INT of 18 eliminates the penalty altogether (but no positive bonuses are possible)
• Amber-specific monsters and uniques removed. Eldritch horrors and their spawn removed (except Cthulu and his minions, hmmm...) Monster list renumbered (849 monsters now)
• Artifacts returned to their original names. Dunedain come back in place of Amberites. "Straight Road" replaced the Pattern
• "Weapons of Valinor" replaced Pattern weapons
• Gods got the names of Valar. "God" replaced with "deity" to be non-sexist. The "Elder gods" are now the Deep Ones, culminating with Cthulu opposing Iluvatar
• Luck (from S). Luck influences saving throws and item generation, as well as the effects of praying. Luck is not generally known to the player (even when enlightened via the potion, was fixed in 0.1.2)
• Added the NOMISS, SAMESPD monster flags, HALLU, LOSE_LUC, HUNGER attacks (the HUNGER attack is currently not used by any monster)
• Better arena levels (floor is mostly water or chaos fog)
• Persistent dungeons (from K)
• Black Breath (saps experience and stats occasionally, can be cured by eating athelas). Weapons of Morgul now confer this
• Hunger shown in percent on the second player info screen (actually 99% means you're almost full, but it's called 'Hunger' for short. Sorry for the confusion)

Features added in 0.1.2 (finished 15.11.98)

• Code brought into partial conformity with Z 2.2.1
• HURT_FIRE and HURT_COLD flags implemented. You will, however, only learn about the effects when casting a spell (not when attacking with a weapon of Burning/Freezing)
• Rings of Sustaining and Resistance
• Groo is a 'T' now, since he's a troll (I presume)
• You can no longer kick aquatic monsters in the ankle
• Bashing an altar unsuccesfully decreases your grace (if you have any) to prevent bashing abuse (bash, heal, bash, until the altar is converted)
• Better summoning traps, spiked pits may activate the Black Breath
• Spell blasts from angry deities now work correctly, but extracting of deity name for the tombstone doesn't (you get things like 'killed by a Player' or similar :)
• Luck level can be known via the Potion of Self Knowledge, which is *way* more common now (level 10 item), and can be bought in the alchemy shop, too (this is a provision for future frequent luck changes and the need for the player to check it rather regularly)
• Item hitpoints (from K), only base damage rolled with a weapon is substracted from HPs (prevents breaking of Daggers of Extra Attacks after one round of powerful blows); for warriors, this is additionally divided by two (making for the fact that warriors can't use much else to damage monsters, unlike magical classes)
  This means you can take around 50-100 hits with a weapon (better weapons usually get more average hits, but the progression isn't extreme). Of course the damage you do with those ~100 hits depends on your other equipment and stats
  Edged weapons are the best in this respect, followed by maces and polearms. To balance this, many monsters resist swords, while polearms can get unopposed through almost anything (including many high-level monsters)
• Scrolls of Repair, which can be bought in the alchemy shop, allow you to wonderfully renew your weapon (this *is* magic, after all...), so carry a supply of them just in case and check the weapon (the I key) sometimes for signs of overuse
• Tactics au ADOM, nine levels. Tactics influences AC, to-hit, to-dam, stealth and saving throws (tactics is changed by pressing 't' at the character screen)
• New cheat option, allowing the player to be invulnerable to physical and most spell attacks which reduce HPs
• Two new wizard options: outfit the player (gives some great goodies as inventory), and shuffle the stores. Assigned to O and S keys, respectively
• Better descriptions of skills (from J), separate description for each rating
• Added the one thing that always bothered me: spaces after each newline when processing monster descriptions, thanks to J
• Added two new quests made up by DarkGod and available in the elvish town of Angwil
• The SAMESPD flag is removed, the code calculating energy in melee2.c having repeatedly crashed the compiled Linux binary. Strange indeed!

Features added in 0.1.3 (finished 30.11.98)

• Code brought into partial conformity with ZAngband 2.2.2 (incl. the new quests)
• Scrolls of Enchant Item now work on those rings which have a pval
• Scrolls of *Remove Curse* can sometimes reverse the curse on an item (a Ring of Damage [-9] becomes a [+9]). The chance increases with your level, and the item must be cursed (trying to reverse an uncursed bad ring will not work)
• Returned to the old code for handling destroying of inventory items. Only weapons and armor need and will use the hitpoints now
• Potion of Extra Attacks! Now guess what's this for :-) It always works the first time, but may fail later...
• The Stone of Lore no longer gives pernament light
• The Weaponmaster will now give you the average damage a weapon does
• Clarified a bit what the "niceness" of a god means
• Stupid me! I've added the naming routine to a portion of the code which was #ifed out at compile time, so no wonder it didn't work! Now corpses are named properly
  No unnatural corpses will be generated (no legs of snakes, arms of potion mimics and so on)
  Eating corpses confers on you effects taken both from monster attacks and their flags. It can give you timed resistances, drain experience, restore mana, induce unpleasant things, and many others. I added a few new flags in RF9_ for this purpose
  Corpses are now a nice present for your deity (separate body parts may be valued less). This partially solves the dilemma of sacrificing your best finds to please your godly patron
  You can choke on food, so don't be a glutton (this has to be tuned out, high constitution would probably help avoid death from choking) - it induces vomitting and confusion anyway, even if you make a saving throw
• Flavored attacks (ie. colorful and sometimes plain silly messages when you hit a monster) - switched off by default
• A guild for Chaos Warriors - you can buy (draw, actually) mutations or have all of them removed for a hefty price. You can also make a chaotic weapon from any weapon that is not an ego-item already. Like with other guilds, those services are also available for outsiders, but for a considerably higher price
• Eol, Maeglin and Ar-Pharazon added in lieu of suspicious non-Tolkienian uniques (all are taken from O, Maeglin is downgraded and appears at a higher depth)
• I forgot to make Morgoth drop his goodies again... now corrected. Also removed the useless artifact drops from Amberites, and added Eol dropping one of his famous two swords (Arunruth or Anguirel)
• Weapon damage depends on player's strength and monster's AC. In extreme cases it can take ten times as much damage as normally possible! Warriors reduce the damage loss based on their level (not a fixed divider of 2)
• Super heal spells for Morgoth and Sauron
• A new 'precognition' power for mindcrafters (at level 30). Lets you know what OoD monsters and objects are on a level, without need for cheating. The working time is limited, so it's best to cast when changing levels. Note: the old 'precognition' power (detecting monsters and all), has been renamed to Awareness
• Undead start out at night

Features added in 0.5 (finished 25.12.98)

• First of all, fixed the dreaded "turning High Mage" bug, which, as it turned out, appeared when using staves
• Some features from ZAngband 2.2.2d added (including slower regeneration and less vampiric draining for badly mutated characters)
• Started working on the new magic system, in which fire, air and earth based magic replaces chaos, sorcery and nature, respectively. Water is left in lieu of trump (unfortunately). Arcane magic is also rethought. Life and death remain unchanged
  See the ../lib/help/magic.hlp file for details
• Priests and paladins get a random minor god to start with, and some starting grace (influenced by WIS)
• Restored items of *Slay* /Foo/ to their vanilla glory
• Roguelike command for sacrificing/god info (^O)
• Fixed a bug with negative price for branding weapons in CW guild
• Fixed running through and near to trees
• Fixed removal of mutations (some messages were out of place)
• Scrolls of Nothing can no longer be sold in shops
• Fixed a stupid bug with some options not being saved
• Barbarians (and only they) also get hasted when using the Berserk innate ability. Spells and random berserking do not confer this
• No sensing while berserk (by spell, mutation or racial ability)
• Recharge service in towns works once per day - this is now explained
• Fixed problems with some bad mushrooms being sell-able
• Regularized the attacks hounds have (always 1 or 2 bite attacks and 2 claw attacks)
• Smart monsters will not get scared while the player is confused
• Timed blindness and confusion resistance, combined as an effect in the Potion of Clear Mind (as requested by Chris Weisiger)
• Gods will only reward you for converting altars if you're pious enough. Unsuccesful bashing is rather bad for your alignment, to prevent bashing abuse
• Gaze and touch of death applied to some monsters (stay away from those beholders, now...) Undead races and golems are immune
• Timed ego properties of a weapon; all branding spells now use this. Branding code is fixed to preserve to_h/to_d bonuses, if greater than zero. The whole thing is a huge hack; the timeout value is used (basing on the fact that a weapon should not be both artifact and ego). Damaged items cannot be branded (or else it would be a repair spell too)
  Branding in guilds will give you pernament brands, though
  *IMPORTANT POINT* - you cannot sell weapons thus enchanted in shops, to prevent making fast money!
• Stoning attacks (only in melee) - you will get stoned in 5 turns (or as much as there are given as monster "damage", but setting this over 5 is not particularly sensible)
• "Stoning bolts" as one of the Earth spells (doesn't work on uniques and some (mostly nonliving) monsters). Other monsters may still resist, and *you* may get hit with the reflected bolt. You have been warned
• The game reacts to phases of the moon, like NetHack. On a full moon, your luck will always be positive; on a new moon, always negative. On Friday 13th your luck might be very, very bad...
• Mixing potions as one of the Water realm spells. The downside is that (a) there are not very many combinations presently, (b) order matters (mixing A with B is not the same as mixing B with A), (c) this can be abusable to a certain extent (if you're patient enough)
• Flooding area as one of the Water realm spells. Monsters which cannot swim will start to take damage by drowning (uniques can't die by drowning, though, but nearly all are able to swim)
  This is an experimental feature, and quite buggy to boot. Monsters are not very smart and will happily continue on drowning if they're "chasing" you through a wall
  There is a problem with monsters which don't move. Although some are able to blink away, most (eg. mimics) will die on the spot. But you can always kill a mimic with a missile/spell attack, so drowning it is all too similar
• "Transfer Life" is a spell that allows you to empower your weapon with some of the effects monster attacks and properties have, via their corpses. In the True version, brands are pernament. Note that if a monster has, say, only one elemental attack of four, the chance of getting it as a brand is 1/4
• Corrected the graf-new.prf file, to display proper monster tiles (not all monsters have tiles, as for now - this is rather annoying at moments)
• You cannot target non-hostile monsters
• A lot more monsters (including some baby/young dragons) have the HURT_FIRE or HURT_COLD flag
• When resting, your character will try to repair his wielded weapon. How fast s/he can do it depends on their DEX
• Warriors can buy a random slay/kill brand in their guild

Features added in 0.6 and 0.6b (finished 15.1.1999)

• Added most of the things present in ZAngband 2.2.3 (note: the 'vanilla town' option can be requested with the -t command line parameter. DON'T restart a game without this switch if you started one with it, or vice versa (and I mean it! Make a batch file/script. You have been warned)
• Pet commands are assigned to the P key (^P in roguelike keyset)
• Support for X11 tiles (the 8x8 ones) has been taken from Angband 2.8.3, but is rather broken at present.
• Automatic Roman numbering of your characters. When you die, a counter of successive generations is incremented and the next character you roll has it added to their name as a Roman numeral (for example Foo XXIII). Some people find it a method to distinguish the 'descendants' of a character.
  This feature is #defined in config.h, and is not compiled in by default
• Friendly uniques now have their own set of sayings in friendly.txt. Most of those were contributed by D.Stage (dstage@u.washington.edu) and Ethan Sicotte (slit@maine.com)
• Variable letters and colors to represent the player, depending on race/class (instead of the default white @)
• Fixed an unwanted interference of timed ego items and their activations, resulting in loss of ego after recharging time has elapsed
• Arcane branding spell now makes timed weapons of Slaying rather than Trump ones
• Fixed Petty Dwarves' histories
• Fixed Eol, Maeglin and their swords once more, to be more in accord with actual Tolkienian narrative
• Fixed a stupid bug which caused finishing of "find artifact" quests by wielding or picking a normal weapon
• Horns, beak, tentacles and the like mutations decidedly ruin your charisma level
• Beastmen and Vampires got their stat bonuses (DEX and INT) improved, at the expense of worse luck
• Fixed the Create Water spell, which produced a crash
• Creating small floods with weird attacks now gets a proper description
• ?=/(|$# monsters no longer cry out in pain
• No zero scores in the high score table
• Detecting traps detects traps on chests
• Detecting doors detects locked doors
• Reworked some GOOD/EVIL flags on monsters (there are good dragons too now)
• Three more types of dragons in dragon pits (bronze, gold, pseudo)
• Dunedain are more prone to get the "resist serious damage" mutation
• New Dunedain classes (ie. those not in vanilla) now have proper tiles assigned
• Pernament ESP and temporary ESP combined let you see dumb monsters
• Fixed a few water spells, disabling ability to flood deep lava, stairs and quest features
• The O command always displays the god info. W is used for 'W'orshipping (sacrificing). In roguelike keyset they're resp. ^O and ^G

Features added in 0.6c (finished 29.01.1999)

• Changed the way gods are handled. Right now, you only have grace, which increases with offerings and decreases with time (albeit very slowly) and prayers. Different levels of grace will yield certain effects on you; when you are pious enough, you have to find an altar and get crowned, and get a nice (or not) artifact.
  Deities were reduced to six in number, and so were altars. Altars are more rare - roughly one in five levels, but sometimes there can be two on a level.
• Priests and paladins are likely to damage WIS (not CON) when over-exerting from lack of mana
• Vault type is printed when cheat_room is on
• Some new vaults (mostly the greater ones) designed by Chris Weisiger
• Scythes of Slicing are vorpal
• Added the whisper/yell patch by Jon D. Boehnker (jboenhker@aol.com)

Features added in 1.0beta (finished 21.02.1999)

• The player has an alignment! The good/neutral/evil nature of our @ is directly linked to the god they worship (when changing gods they change alignment), like in NetHack. Alignment + good charisma may cause some of the weaker monsters (but no more than 50%) of your alignment to be created friendly (does not apply to uniques, questors and summoned monsters)
• Black breath handling is broken and will be removed eventually
• Some races start with a specific alignment, some without any (marked '-')
• Extensive changes to monsters' flags (also see below): coins and Q's no longer animals, yeeks good, drastically reduced the number of evil animal monsters
• Star signs have some interesting influence on the character (not completed)
• Fixed a bug with *identification* of charging artifacts
• Fixed floating numbers being rounded at the beastmaster's
• CTRL-V will print features (compilation options) the game was compiled with. Mainly for me checking the ARCN state
• Fixed automatic weapon repair to adjust it to player's DEX. Now you need to have DEX of at least 13 to be able to repair anything, and even then you have only 1/10 chance each turn to improve it by small amount (warriors repair at double rate). The amount repaired with each try increases exponentially as DEX rises higher. Having DEX of 18/200 or more makes all repair checks succeed
• Removed the S-Lang scripts support - no longer developed by RR
• Reworked the final scoring routine. Now includes penalties (percentage modifiers) for having mutations, except for beastmen and CW
• You are no longer notified about monsters using phase door/teleport when blind
• New "metric" option allowing the game to display things in kilograms and centimeters instead of pounds and inches
• Smart monsters don't pick up cursed objects, and no monster will pick up the corpses of its kin
• Fire/plasma breaths can turn floor and most features into shallow/deep lava, respectively. Cold/ice breaths can freeze lava into floor again
• dded monsters' vulnerability to electricity, acid and poison (poison for quylthulgs, acid for plants and some mechanical monsters, elec for some water monsters)
• RES_STON can be used to mark monsters resistant to stoning (other than mimics/undead/constructs). Mainly needed to protect the cockatrices...
• Vaults have min/max level constraints (most are without any, though). Max level of 0 translates to max level of 127
• Corrected a fatal bug with Create Water spell once again
• 'War Branding' spell now does actually inflate/deflate damage dice of a weapon
• Fixed a bug with number of items on floor when blind
• Added skill numerical ratings beside descriptions, for easy orientation.
• Added some "likely mutations", if the player is of evil alignment. Discover for yourself :)
• Lowered exp penalties for H-Giants (30%) and H-Titans (100%)
• Fixed breaking random artifacts. Some (rarer) items now have the NOBREAK flag, which means they'll never get damaged in melee.
• Rings of Sustaining/Resistance fixed weight, random high resistance for the latter
• New, better rules for damaging weapons: 1) each total loss of HP results in to_hit, to_dam, and damage dice/sides (sometimes) being reduced, 2) after that the whole 'breaking' process starts again, 3) using a scroll of repair will restore lost dice and change minuses to 0, if not cursed, 4) the items are not marked as damaged in any way, they're just slightly deteriorated (the message you get reflects this).
• Fixed bug with ARCN and newly created savefiles
• Yipee! At last! Away with the ugly numbers in r_info and the neccesity of updating all your quests when renumbering monsters! Now you can (and indeed must :) give the full name of the monster in quest data. The name must EXACTLY match the one in r_info.txt (case is irrelevant), or else nothing appears
• Added some monsters and nice items courtesy of Paasi Huttunen
• Bull Gates can no longer appear in the dungeon or outside, thus solving problems with the M$ quest

Features added in 1.0 (finished 1.03.1999)

• Completely reworked wilderness, now size 16x19. A new town, Zul, added in the mountains of the north (courtesy of Brent ''RaBiD'' Diana)
• No random quests for unfair monsters if the option is off at startup (if it isn't, and you switch it off later getting sick of S-T Distortions, strange things might happen if such a quest was rolled. You have been warned)
• Invisibility implemented. It burns LOTS of food, so be careful not to starve. Invisibility spell added to Air realm. Transparency effects implemented, similar to ADOM's.
• Use of Artifact Creations scrolls can be cancelled without losing the scroll
• Greatly reduced Water spells costs/fails for mage types
• Changed vanilla_town option to be asked at startup
• Inventory slot (quiver) for ammo
• Monsters can hit traps (quite unbalanced and buggy for now). Smart monsters can disarm traps. Flying monsters are unaffected (not compiled in by default)
• Reworked critical hits; made maximum probability dependent on class as well as on weapon weight/level. More types of critical hits, with *EARTH SHATTERING* giving as many as 10 times the base damage. This gives warriors which use heavy weapons an extra edge against tough monsters
• Lowered the percentage of mountains in hilly terrain - the game hung sometimes, being unable to find a place for monsters
• Final score computation method totally reworked. See the FAQ
• Tombstone will now mention death from paralyzation
• You can only sign up for quest when your level is half the quest danger level. IOW you must reach level 2 to do the first quest (Thieves' Den)
• Tired of making up new player names over and over? Want to save your high score list from monotony? The game can give your character a random male or female name if you do not provide it yourself. Over 800 male and 400 female names (see {m|f}_rnames.txt in lib/info). Feel free to expand this

Features added in 1.0b (Finished 6.03.1999)

• Mostly minor bugfixes: prevent spawning infinite arrows, fix trouble recalling from wilderness, tweak a few monsters, lower cost and value of items giving bonuses to speed, rework Wands of Striking/Storms (appear earlier), fix metric weights in shops, fix druid quest again

Features added in 1.1 (Finished 30.03.1999)

• k_info no longer needs number indexes, like r_info. However, the downside is that some objects have the same names, which leads to confusion when pre-placing objects in a quest or giving rewards. To avoid this, names of Rings, Amulets etc. of Teleportation (the bad ones) have changed. Had to move money to the beginning of k_info, since money objects start and length is defined as constants. Do not add new types of money above the basic 18. You have been warned
• Added the ability to pre-place monsters in vaults, marking them with a, b... j in the order given on the M: line. Added some new 'typified' vaults.
• Fixed the generation of preplaced ego-items in quests (see eg. the M$ quest for loads of junk crowns and cloaks)
• Two-handed weapons; unlike Angband64, you do not gain increased damage from wielding a one-handed weapon with two hands; this is just for realism
• Reworked tactics: descriptions more grammatical, modifiers shown on top line, only influences fighting/AC (to prevent warriors from getting too good save throws, especially at higher levels)
• Entering level with random quest will inform you how many monsters are still there (this only applies to soft quest rules)
• Startup options accesible via the = key when creating character. Unfair monsters moved there, as well as added ironperson options and damage_items
• Ironpersons start with more food and light (does not apply to scrolls of satisfy hunger)
• Tweaked frequency of objects in alchemy shop - ?oRepair and !oSK are more frequent, at the expense of ?oSH
• Food rations in the dungeons are rarer and only appear singly (ditto for slime molds). In general, players, especially ironpersons, are forced to be more dependant on corpses (or scrolls, but these are rarer as well, see above), or spells
• Fixed a bug with game crashing after recalling back to the city of Zul
• Added a 'dimension door' spell for monsters (teleport to player). Monsters which have both blink and dimension door will try to 'hit 'n run', if smart
• No more than seven Nazguls can be created. This does not apply to pre-set Nazguls in quests (although it is not recommended to do so)
• Amulets of Anti-magic really are helpful now (generate a radius-3 anti magic sphere)
• Game is able to parse 8-bit characters correctly (eg. in player names), and display date high scores according to current locale date format
• Vastly expanded the number of terrain grids items may be dropped on. You will be notified about stairs and altars hidden beneath piles of stuff.
• Expanded the list of uniques' crimes with over 100 entries from a list by malagigi@aol.com. Some of the are rather humorous...
• Fixed bugs with many quests (thanks to Steve Fisher's inquisitive investigation of the topic
• Monster recall info now makes extensive use of newlines, making it way easier to read (and find the info you need). Monsters with long descriptions, like Morgoth, may cause part of the info to be omitted, though
• Player can be sensible (intrisically) to fire/cold/elec/acid. You take double damage from the appropriate element in all cases. Nothing short of complete immunity can eliminate this
• Ent race added, replacing Sprites (I never liked them anyway). +5 to speed, see invis, slow digestion, sensible to fire, can grow trees as intrisic abil
• Added artifact descriptions and the code that shows them during *Identify*

Features added in 1.2 (Finished 08.05.1999)

• Expanded mindcrafter class, uses foci like in Psiband, has some toggled powers that need mana to upkeep and automatically switch off if it runs out.
• Monsters can be poisoned (weapon or spell). Uniques tend to recover quickly. The poison brand now does x2 damage only (x4 against vulnerable monsters) in compensation for that.
• Secret doors can be locked (50% chance); door state is determined upon finding.
• Quests may be marked as 'one-run' - once you exit them, they are no longer available, and you get no reward (currently Thieves Den, Vapour, Orc Camp, Spawning Pits).
• Druid quest changed to chasing out a hostile necromancer, moved his hideout too.
• Moved vanilla_town to the startup options screen.
• If show_labels is on and items can be damaged, weapon/armour status will be displayed in {} for quick inspection, except if the item never breaks (which will help to quickly sort these out).
• Dragon scale mails never break.
• Allowed ammo to be fired from the backpack if quiver is empty.
• Golems have -2 to DEX.
• Chainsword now gives -2 to DEX.
• Food which makes you vomit gives no nutritional benefit.
• Explicitly warn the player when branding failed because of lack of weapon wielded, but only when alert_failure is on.
• Fixed game crashes when haggling, shopkeepers saying trash etc.
• Inscribing an object with !! will notify you about it being recharged.
• Smart monsters won't waste time slowing you over and over.
• Rangers learn monster stats more quickly.
• Arrows and bolts fired by monsters (but not magic missiles) may now miss if your AC is very high compared to monster's.
• Players get more mana now with an INT above 18/10, since the internal tables have been reworked. It evens out at higher levels/INT. Especially important for mindcrafters.
• Fixed obsolete help text when choosing magic realm(s).
• Now includes RR's main-com.c (a dummy interface used to dump info about savefile on stdout, useful for running competitions).
• (Chaos) Warriors actually get to pay for the branding service in their guilds.
• Increased number of possible shopkeepers for each shop to 10.
• Increased shopkeeper purses to 32-bit, but the maximum one is 150K currently (BM, a very unattractive personage).
• Increased guild service prices to 32-bit.
• Added easy_sensing option, originally by Tim Baker.
• Scroll of Hardening will make unbreakable any weapon that isn't so already. Rather rare and costly.

Features added in 1.3 (finished 15.06.1999)

• Game engine updated to match Z 2.2.5 (mostly). Two new quests
• Player ghosts implemented, will drop a randart, great item or money if slain (depending on depth)
• It is possible to log game notes and your progress in a log file called after your character's name; use the ':' command to append a note to the file. You can also use some 'metavariables' (refer to command.txt for the gory details)
• Finally added the wand and rod stacking patches from OAngband
• Revised monster-trap reactions, trap-setting monsters are immune, monsters don't fall into traps in vaults
• Changed monster, object names to start with lower case, except uniques. Changed scroll syllabes to uppercase in exchange
• Differentiated money types, adding new ones like nickel, iron or brass, to eliminate duplicate names (problems with .prf tile assignments)
• Added shafts which can move you a few levels up/down and thus greatly reduce the tedium of diving and getting back. There will be only one type of shaft on a level - or possibly none. Shafts can also be used to bypass random quests
• Jason Ellis and Lars Helgeland pointed out some anomalies with xp for killed monsters
• Recharging timeout of rods is now read from the object's pval
• Golems have very lousy starting magic devices skill
• Fixed powers info for mindcrafters
• Coloured spell info displays
• In inventory and equip listings, *identified* items have indices displayed in yellow
• Weapons can have more interesting properties (eg. two-handed swords are base +3 to hit, +3 to dam)
• Changed the way in which weapons are displayed (now it's like 'a mace (+4, 2d4+2)'
• Rogues can no longer backstab with 2H weapons, nor with maces and such. That leaves light swords and spears (other polearms are 2H) for the task
• Better reactions of monsters when hit
• Adapted the monspeak patch by Matt Graham
• Rogues get +1 to stealth every 5 levels, monks and rangers - every 10 levels
• Fixed bug with failed completed quests

Features added in 2.0 (finished 25.08.1999)

• Game engine updated to match Z 2.2.6 (mostly). One new quest (Old Castle by Shayne Steele)
• Monsters have less HP (Morgoth has 10000) and smaller AC (Morgoth has 60, but it's not the max)
• Therefore, attacking routines are softened to rely more on skill and less on magical to-hit bonuses. But base skills are reduced, so that the (internal) value rarely exceeds 100 for really powerful warriors
• Changed the way in which allowable weapon weight is calculated. Now it is weighted (excuse the pun :) - 2/3 from your class allowance and 1/3 from your STR. That makes for example priests with STR 18/140 just barely able to lift maces of disruption, and don't you ever think about wielding Grond without penalties!
• Introduced 'scalar time' and an Elvish calendar. The 32-bit time variable is enough for over 136 years of gameplay (a little short of a loa...). Also added two wizard commands (+ and -) to help test the calendar (move a year forth/back) Also, the player has a birthday. A generous luck increase is allowed for when the birthday date coincides with the calendar's date
• Better food balance: slow digestion hard to get, rations more expensive, scrolls of satisfy hunger rarer, service at inn hardly appealing...
• Added weight to corpses, different body parts have different weight ratios, and eating corpses confers nutritional benefit (or possibly not...) based on weight AND current decay state
• Added decaying corpses in pack/on floor, status affixed to description
• Ents have better histories
• Blood of Life is hopefully harder to come by (3750' base depth) and ten times as costly, should it appear in the BM
• Flattened certain bonus curves in tables.c (+ to-hit, to-dam from STR etc.)
• Reduced possible bonuses to rings of: damage, accuracy, slaying, acid, fire, ice by 5-6 on average. Same with excellent weapons and armour (sc. random artifacts) bonuses
• No more digging with weapons or bare hands! Exception: monks of at least level 30
• Treasure veins are rarer
• Feanorian lamps appear around 1000' and provide pernament radius two light; artifact lights moved deeper (Phial to 1500')
• Quest number limited to 10; quests only occur between 3000 and 4000 feet and tend to be particularly nasty; you can avoid them using shafts, though
• Poison now does more damage per round the more you are poisoned. Healing potions (except potion of life) no longer cure poison. Poison resistance doesn't fully protect against poison in 1/3 cases (1/9 if double), but if resisting the poisoning is reduced by 6/6+d6 (50-87%). You still take the equivalent physical damage (except from breaths)
• Allowed each game item to have different bonuses (or penalties) to player stats via a S: line; the old STR...CHR flags are still needed
• By a mismatched W: line, corpses could appear on floor and in monster drops, often flagging the level as special... the current corpse handling is like stuffing dirty socks under a bed, but it works most of the time
• Cursed items cannot be activated
• Reorganized part of the status line to display various conditions like bless, protevil, timed infra, timed invis etc.
• Moved preserve, maximize and autoscumming modes to startup options
• Added the 'fractal caves' patch by Steven Fuerst; makes dungeon rooms more convoluted, if bizarre. Fractal caves are optional
• Added the 'labyrinth rooms' patch by Mark Kvale (later integrated into SF's patch)
• Upped intrisic ability damage for imps, klackons and kobolds, as well as for the spit fire/acid mutation
• Added new tower recharge handling from Z
• Elemental breath attacks downgraded, others upgraded (plasma, sound, chaos)
• Moved some options around because the fifth set grew out of its size
• Added confusion, poisoning and stunning to show up on monster health bars
• Added multiple bolts and balls (randomly showered) to possible spell forms. Changed the spells Fiery Shower (Fire), Call the Abyss (Water) and High Voltage II (Air) to use them (some artifact activations, too?)
• Bug fixed: amount of rooms generated was not randomized
• Bug fixed: unwearable amulets
• Bug fixed: unbreakable weapons were breaking
• Bug fixed: Pisces sign had no effect
• Bug fixed: HURT_FIRE and HURT_COLD displayed no message
• (Obscure) bug fixed: easy_disarm and easy_floor were colliding with each other
• Finally (?) squashed Klingsor quest bugs

Features added in 2.01 (finished 16.09.1999)

• Added the grid flag system from Pernband to f_info.txt.
• Fixed problems with leftover CRs in text files.
• Decaying corpses in floor stacks are now handled properly.
• Gave main gauches a small AC bonus, reflecting its shield-like purpose.
• Chaos blades, BDSMs and CDSMs give resist confusion.
• Added a new Ironman option to always generate 'arena' levels.
• Updated the 'fractal caves' patch by Steven Fuerst (two new random vault types).
• Bug fixed: using wands et al. reset the calendar.
• Bug fixed: night did not fall at town.
• Bug fixed: logging metavariables didn't always work.

Features added in 2.02 (finished 6th November 1999)

• Codebase updated to Z 2.3.1 minus nightmare mode (you're not playing GSNDooM!). That includes conical breaths and Tom Morton's fake artifacts patch,
• Added a new main-gcu.c from Angband 64, including sound (*.wav) support and a much better approximation of console colours.
• Varying weapon and missile skills for each class (daggers, swords, hafted, axes, polearms, 2-handed (swords), slings, bows, x-bows, throwing).
• Object and monster flags are now 64-bit, doubling their capacity.
• Some former 2H weapons are now 'could-2H' weapons. It means that if you use such a weapon and a shield, all damage you do in melee will be halved.
• Pack monsters how have a 'number of appearing' as an XdY roll, which progressively reaches the maximum as you go deeper.This leads to a dungeon that is a little bit less crowded.
• Added resistances to gravity, inertia and force. Typically for mindcrafters.
• Added cold and fear aura to objects, fear aura to monsters.
• Open levels may be filled with dark chasms where there are no corridors.
• Fixed slowed/hasted monsters a bit.
• Fixed FORCE_DEPTH to disallow the monster on any level but its base one; fixes Sauron/Morgoth problems (especially in ironperson mode).
• Water breaths added for some monsters (water hounds should NOT cast water bolts!).
• Added the random name generator from Cth and made a shot at providing Entish names.
• Added 'the foul and ancient stat curse' to some objects...
• 'Gate' type spells have explanatory messages.
• Changed some of the quest rewards to be more useful.
• Weapons of life au Pernband, BUT considerably weakened - they now add from 5% to 50% to your max HP.
• Simplified the character screen and threw out the three 'Ben' table modes. In anticipation of all the new item flags, there's no place to show everything... Also redesigned the three remaining screens, so that there is more place for player flags.
• Bug fixed: rings of stealth are now useful.
• Bug fixed: monsters can no longer walk on chasms.
• Bug fixed: quest monsters can't be cloned any more.
• Also there is support for double monster alignment (evil vs. good and chaotic vs. lawful), but r_info wasn't updated yet except for town people.

Features added in 2.03 (finished 20th December 1999)

• Game engine mostly matches Z 2.2.8.
• New system for traps and all the traps originally found in A/64 (some have no effect yet).
• Monster recall uses colours for some parts.
• Six new and terrible curses to offset the advantages of powerful items. Can also appear on random artifacts, but permacurse and TY_CURSE have been made rarer. Suggested by Luc French on zangband@onelist.com .
• New flag system for corpses, neater eating effects, corpse info is included in monster spoilers (courtesy of Ed Cogburn).
• Prices of food items made less stringent & new item types added. Undead races also get slightly better nutrition from corpses.
• Also cut down the price of rings and amulets of SD.
• Dragon scale mails have had their recharge time decreased tenfold.
• Fixes to quest and vault files (including a wrong monster name in the 'Unholy altar' thematic vault).

Features added in 2.1 (finished 21st February 2000)

• Real polymorphing with useable monster abilities. Unbalanced? You tell me. Polymorph staffs and traps.
• Scrolls of super genocide make you the master of life and death of entire races. At least until you polymorph into a genocided one.
• Made monster spell flags 64-bit, adding room for 96 new spells.
• DooM monsters from Zce and associated spells.
• Added 256 colour support to -mx11 and -mxaw. Not #defined by default (warning: DON'T use -mgcu after you have compiled it in!)
• Colours changed for -mgcu, the terminal patch by KJ is no longer necessary.
• Added panel centering on player.
• Less powerful vorpal blades (this one from Z).

Features added in 2.11 (finished 1st March 2000)

• Auto-destroying objects extends to objects on floor.
• Fixed the 'humans have been genocided' message to be more generic.
• Ten new vaults by CW.
• Fixed monsters not being extinct properly.
• Fixed monsters remaining extinct and traps remaining indentified when the same savefile was used again.
• Fixed pointer problems when eating; removed all gods and alignment code. This was never stable anyway...
• Made the GHB unique. This was not strictly necessary since it has the NOPOLY flag, and also UNFAIR, but it finally eliminates the chance of a GHB pit (don't start telling me you love 'em!).

Known bugs

• Items which weigh 0.1 lb do not show up properly when metric measurements are on (the last digit is surpressed, leaving 0.0(5)).
• Luck has to be improved. Luck sustain item flag added but not used (hobbits have their luck sustained intrinsically, though).
• When stoned, you have some turns to attempt to recover, but stoned monsters die instantly.
• One player reported problems with entering the bookstore. This hasn't been replicated so far.
• If you're playing a class with two elemental realms and use a spell which conjures a spirit/elemental, only one of your classes will be used (in the order air, fire, earth, water). Eg. if you have Air and Water spells and summon an elemental from the Water book, an air elemental will appear.

© 1997/98 by Robert Rühlmann, rr9@thangorodrim.net