Starving, selling items and point of the game.

[Wenex]

Hi everyone.

Let me say first that English isn't my native language, so I am sorry If I will say something weird or not understandable.

I started playing this game today and It's really great. I like it, but there's some thing that confusing me. (note that I have never played ASCII game before, so this kind of "menu" and "ui" is really confusing for me)

Soo my first playthrough. I died by starving. I was like "what happened" xD Where I can buy or find food? and is there any way to check how much I am starving? Any Food stat?

Second is selling items. Read some "help" notes and haven't find anything about selling items. Don't know how to do it.

The third thing is. What is the exact point of the game? I mean I know it's roguelike and it's exploring dungeons etc. But is there any "end game" features? Or you just exploring all time and this is the only thing you can do? Any quests or other locations than town, dungeon?

If someone could ask for these three things, I would appreciate that. And I am sorry for my English again.

And PS. What the heck is wrong with Random Question while registrating? Lol. I needed to type that in google to find answer, cmon! xD It wasn't even in any normal language.

[Derakon]

Hi Wenex, and welcome to the forums!

You can buy food from the General Store (the "1" in the town). You can also sometimes find Scrolls of Satisfy Hunger at the Alchemist's (the "5"). And there's food in the dungeon too. In a pinch, drinking potions will help you keep going a bit.

You'll know when you're hungry because the game will say "You feel hungry" and a "Hungry" indicator will show up at the bottom-left corner of the screen. If you don't eat food, then you'll eventually become Starving, which will occasionally paralyze you ("You faint from hunger!") and deal damage.

By default, the game runs in "No Selling" mode, which means that you get 0 gold for selling things to the stores. This can still be useful early on to identify unknown items (since stores automatically identify every potion, scroll, etc. that you give them). To compensate for the lack of money from selling items, you get more money from money pickups in the dungeon. The idea is to encourage players to spend more time in the dungeon, and less time accumulating useless crap to sell.

The end-goal of the game is to kill Morgoth, Lord of Darkness, the god who's behind almost everything bad that's ever happened on Middle-Earth (the rest can be largely attributed to either Ungoliant or Feanor).

The registration question is there to keep spammers out. Pav, the owner of these forums, doesn't have unlimited time to moderate them, and the forums are pretty old, which makes installing a modern anti-spammer system difficult. So we have the question instead.

[krazyhades]

EDIT: Derakon beat me to it!

GOOD LUCK AND WELCOME!

Starving: You'll notice at the bottom of your screen a color-coded text indication of your hunger status (full, hungry, weak, etc). The actual number of how hungry you are is hidden, so you just get an estimate from the hunger status text.

Selling items: Go into a shop (one of the numbers/doors to the buildings in the town above the dungeon) and use the drop item command (usually it is "d"), choose an item to drop, and the shopkeeper will make an offer. You can then choose to accept the offer and sell, or to reject and keep the item.

The point of the game is to kill Sauron the Sorcerer on level 99 of the dungeon, and then Morgoth on level 100. There will be no stairs down to level 100 until Sauron is dead.

Your English so far is very good.

Random question is a reference to the Lord of the Rings, because Angband uses a lot of monsters from Tolkien's writing. It is to trick computers, since many of the humans here know that line from the book from memory.

[Wenex]

Hi Wenex, and welcome to the forums!

You can buy food from the General Store (the "1" in the town). You can also sometimes find Scrolls of Satisfy Hunger at the Alchemist's (the "5"). And there's food in the dungeon too. In a pinch, drinking potions will help you keep going a bit.

You'll know when you're hungry because the game will say "You feel hungry" and a "Hungry" indicator will show up at the bottom-left corner of the screen. If you don't eat food, then you'll eventually become Starving, which will occasionally paralyze you ("You faint from hunger!") and deal damage.

By default, the game runs in "No Selling" mode, which means that you get 0 gold for selling things to the stores. This can still be useful early on to identify unknown items (since stores automatically identify every potion, scroll, etc. that you give them). To compensate for the lack of money from selling items, you get more money from money pickups in the dungeon. The idea is to encourage players to spend more time in the dungeon, and less time accumulating useless crap to sell.

The end-goal of the game is to kill Morgoth, Lord of Darkness, the god who's behind almost everything bad that's ever happened on Middle-Earth (the rest can be largely attributed to either Ungoliant or Feanor).

The registration question is there to keep spammers out. Pav, the owner of these forums, doesn't have unlimited time to moderate them, and the forums are pretty old, which makes installing a modern anti-spammer system difficult. So we have the question instead.

Thanks for the answer.

And I didn't meant why this question exist, I know it's anti spam question, but why it is that hard to answer. I needed to search that on google and wiki to find answer, lol xD

So starving and selling problems solved, but could you tell me more about the game itself? Does it only have two locations? Town and dungeon with multiple levels or it's more if you progress further. Other towns or maybe locations like forests etc?

[Wenex]

Random question is a reference to the Lord of the Rings, because Angband uses a lot of monsters from Tolkien's writing. It is to trick computers, since many of the humans here know that line from the book from memory.

Haven't read Lord of the Rings xD Anyway, thanks for the kind words. Trying to practice my English everyday ^^

[Derakon]

So starving and selling problems solved, but could you tell me more about the game itself? Does it only have two locations? Town and dungeon with multiple levels or it's more if you progress further. Other towns or maybe locations like forests etc?

The base game, a.k.a. "Vanilla", only has the town and dungeon. There are many different variants of the game (these days you'd probably call them mods, but they're standalone programs in their own right), and the variants have a lot more, well, variance. Many of them have multiple towns and dungeons, sidequests, extra races and classes, etc. The top suggestions right now are probably FAAngband and PosChengband, but there's tons more.

[krazyhades]

There are special levels that have sometimes unusual rules, such as being made out of special brown indestructible rock (like the kind at the borders of normal levels), being made out of dangerous open caverns instead of rooms connected by thin hallways, etc. Sometimes a level (especially deeper levels) will have a specialized mini-dungeon in it (called a Vault), filled with both monsters and treasures that are more powerful than would normally be available at that depth. Remember, the deeper you go, the more dangerous it becomes...but the rewards get much better too!

If you open your character sheet ("C", I think), and then hit the spacebar, you will be able to see all of the attributes that your character can acquire over the course of the game, usually from wearing powerful items. Almost all of these are good for you. Your main challenges in becoming more powerful are gaining levels (max character level = 50), finding items and potions to increase your stats (STR, DEX, etc) to the maximum allowed for your race, and finding items that give you access to as many of the protection abilities as possible, while still doing good damage and having high speed.

Speed is very important in the mid and late game. When you are faster than something, you will sometimes be able to move twice in a row against it, to flee or fight. When a monster moves faster than you, watch out! Among the most dangerous situations in the game is having a fast monster spellcaster getting a lucky chance to cast two spells in a row before you can respond.

[Wenex]

The base game, a.k.a. "Vanilla", only has the town and dungeon. There are many different variants of the game (these days you'd probably call them mods, but they're standalone programs in their own right), and the variants have a lot more, well, variance. Many of them have multiple towns and dungeons, sidequests, extra races and classes, etc. The top suggestions right now are probably FAAngband and PosChengband, but there's tons more.

Thanks for the suggestions Will check them out.

[Raajaton]

It looks like your questions have been answered already, but just to satisfy my own curiosity, what was it that got you interested in trying Angband? It's probably reasonably safe to assume that the majority of people currently playing Angband, and other ASCII rogue-likes, have been into the genre for a long time. We probably don't get too many players who are completely new to the genre, so I'm interested to found out how any new guys get introduced to us.

[Mondkalb]

I would suggest to stick with Angband for a while until you have some understanding about how the game works and how to manage dangerous situations.
FAangband is more difficult than Angband in some ways; the wilderness levels are harder with groups of monsters, the resistance system has more variety in items and is harder to master than in vanilla Angband. Also, there are more magic classes and a skill system.

I think Angband is the ideal game to learn about roguelikes and a good starting point to explore the variants later on.

[Lionmaruu]

I boy, I absolutely loved the OP post, that is the kind of perspective pretty much everyone around here, veterans on the game, have long lost...

We tend to ignore how cryptic the game can be, while it HAS an online help system, the game is still pretty hard to figure out.

The thing I really loved about Sil is the tutorial level, I think something like that for Angband is more than welcome.
Maybe even an "oriented" first delve, like a set of quests that will make people look for features they would probably ignore, for example:

Search for a necessary resistance before descending to level "X" (like res poison)


I cant really imagine how many players Angband probably lost because they couldn't figure out what we take for granted.

[Wenex]

It looks like your questions have been answered already, but just to satisfy my own curiosity, what was it that got you interested in trying Angband? It's probably reasonably safe to assume that the majority of people currently playing Angband, and other ASCII rogue-likes, have been into the genre for a long time. We probably don't get too many players who are completely new to the genre, so I'm interested to found out how any new guys get introduced to us.

It's seriously a long story. But it started from games roguelites like Binding of Isaac, Teleglitch or for example Rogue Legacy. Then I started looking for roguelikes and with each game I played I was more interested in this kind, so I looked more depth into roguelikes - to the point where it started. Then I found Nethack. After Nethack I found Moria and ADOM. And now I found this one, Angband. I decided to stay on this one a little more, because of the custom tilesets, which doesn't confuse me as the ASCII xD game looks smiliar to the Tales of Maj'Eyal and ToME is probably my favourite one from all.

That's how I get here

[Timo Pietilä]

Hi everyone.

Let me say first that English isn't my native language, so I am sorry If I will say something weird or not understandable.

I started playing this game today and It's really great. I like it, but there's some thing that confusing me. (note that I have never played ASCII game before, so this kind of "menu" and "ui" is really confusing for me)

Soo my first playthrough. I died by starving. I was like "what happened" xD Where I can buy or find food? and is there any way to check how much I am starving? Any Food stat?

Second is selling items. Read some "help" notes and haven't find anything about selling items. Don't know how to do it.

The third thing is. What is the exact point of the game? I mean I know it's roguelike and it's exploring dungeons etc. But is there any "end game" features? Or you just exploring all time and this is the only thing you can do? Any quests or other locations than town, dungeon?

If someone could ask for these three things, I would appreciate that. And I am sorry for my English again.

1) you get food from shop 1 (general store), dungeon and also some potions and mushrooms nourishes you a bit. Elvish waybread is the best food item in the game (cures poison, heals you a bit, doesn't weight much, can't be destroyed by elements, nourishes you more than rations)

There are also spells that satisfy hunger (all spellcasters get it) and scrolls that do that same. At the bottom of your main screen there is a status-line which shows if you are hungry/stunned/poisoned etc.

2) Enter a shop and drop thing there. If shopkeeper accepts that item it is sold. You can't sell weapons in armory, armors in general store and so on. Also game defaults to "no selling" which basically means that items "sold" are basically given away for zero gold. You might get some benefit from that so that shopkeeper does ID the item if he accepts that at all. You might be able to buy it back then.

3) Point is to kill Morgoth at dlvl 100 or 5000' depending which way you set the game to show your dungeon level. Each level is 50' down. Before you can do that you need to kill Sauron at dlvl 99 (4950').

And PS. What the heck is wrong with Random Question while registrating? Lol. I needed to type that in google to find answer, cmon! xD It wasn't even in any normal language.

What, you don't speak sindarin? Darned mortals...

Lets see if I remember this correctly "Pedo mellon a minno". Say friend to enter. So password is "mellon". Pedo = "say, speak", mellon=friend, "A minno" = "to enter" (to go inside to be literal).

[Raajaton]

It's seriously a long story. But it started from games roguelites like Binding of Isaac, Teleglitch or for example Rogue Legacy. Then I started looking for roguelikes and with each game I played I was more interested in this kind, so I looked more depth into roguelikes - to the point where it started. Then I found Nethack. After Nethack I found Moria and ADOM. And now I found this one, Angband. I decided to stay on this one a little more, because of the custom tilesets, which doesn't confuse me as the ASCII xD game looks smiliar to the Tales of Maj'Eyal and ToME is probably my favourite one from all.

That's how I get here

Well then, welcome! Enjoy the ride! ToME is definitely one of my all time favorites as well, though when I play Angband, I can't play with tiles. I've spent far too many hours playing with ASCII that when I look at the tiles, I have no idea what anything is.

Good luck with your journey. I've been playing for almost 15 years at this point, and still working on my goal of beating the game with every class. 5/6 so far, and, not to jinx it, have a fairly promising run going with the 6th atm.

[Rydel]

If you play Tales of Maj'Eyal, you should be able to get Angband fairly quickly - TOME was originally an Angband variant, so they have a lot in common, though TOME was one that change a lot of stuff.