Tangaria

New digging tool added: a spade. All new characters now got it free of charge! Did you know the difference between spade and shovel?

At the same time prices at other digging tools adjusted 😉

p.s.
Vendors reporting about temporary shortage of digging tools in shops.

Backpacks of new brave adventurers would be a bit heavier with food on start of their journey… They would definitely need additional ration as it’s hunger outside of warm tavern!

Also yet another World of Recall scroll (or even two!) could be found in your pockets – maybe it would help you to run from death one more time..

At the same time, lands appeared to be more cursed than ever: you would find really powerful items not so often as before.

Finally we got setup which you could install with a few clicks and play with precustomized client! It installs shortcuts for two main versions of the game to desktop:

1) ‘Tangaria sld’ — fullscreen with Shockbolt tileset; windows/fonts could be easely customized with mouse;
2) ‘Tangaria’ — classic multiwindow client with Gervais tileset; to customize it – look into mangclient.ini. This client could be used together with addon.ahk (to hide windows’ headers and reassign system keys).

Please note that you could use any tileset in any client. And you also could use much more custom graphic modes and even play in 3D with NotEyE – more datails in FAQ 🙂

Ring of escaping was quite powerful for ranged users.. At the same time I like their mechanics and instead of nerfing their power, I’ve added one funny thing.. you are welcome to discover it!

*Battle-scarred veteran came to the ‘Floating Log’ tavern and came close to you*
– Yoa’ve heard a rumour? It seems that when you try to escape something, it could follow your fears even more fiercely…

From now on players can find the same true artifact only once – you ID an artifact by moving on it or picking it up, then you cannot find it again.

Info for new players: there are two types of artifacts – true artifacts and random artifacts (randarts). True artifacts are unique items, which could be possessed by one player at once; when it found by someone, others can’t find it before it would be lost again. Randards is a powerful RNG items; which are not unique and that’s why they could be stored in player’s house (true arts can’t).

Note from PowerWyrm: sometimes you can still find an artifact again – if another player generates the level and hasn’t find the artifact, it can appear and if you recall on the same level, you can find the art before the other player.

There is very interesting topic about in-game food system @ oook, so I’ve made my 0.02$ there by writing an article Roguelike gamedesign: food problem

In short: current food system in ‘regular’ mode is not bright. To make it more interesting we would try an experiment by removing food from provisioner shop. It fits in lore alright – war with Morgoth made bag of gold cost less than bag of wheat. Food is rare and you should find it to survive.

Don’t worry, guys, there are plenty of food in the dungeon, stolen from fellow townies by orcs 🙂 You just need to put some effort to get it (and you would meet a lot of interesting situations and adventures in process!).

Vigor mushrooms are now available in BM (Black Market) under ‘always’ flag. Their price increased x4 (200 -> 800), from 600 to 2400 gold. It’s temporary measure, having ‘always’ stuff in BM is wrong, such items should be semi-rare, but for now no other flags available (more are comming). 

Next change is more important – Magic Mapping (MM) & Detection Monsters from items become nerfed – it’s radius heavely reduced.

Why MM is imba right now?

1. MM removing huge part of one of the most important parts of roguelike genre – exploration. Especially at mid-end game when everyone could afford MM magic.
   Beauty of exploration is based on lvls RNG. You _should_ never know what to expect after you turn a corner, what’s lay after you enter next door. You could have certain sneak peek (that’s why MM is still in the game, but with small radius), but you shouldn’t know too much. Playing without MM brings to the game new feelings – so players would try to search for hidden rooms, passages & etc.
2. It’s all came from Angband (which came from Moria.. ). As I wrote in previous post about shops’ rebalancing, Vanilla ‘Angband’ got limited stock refreshing in stores, so you can not buy 99 MM scrolls or bunch of staves at wish, so MM is kinda balanced there in compare to MAngband and PWMAngband. So having artifact with MM on activation in vanilla gives you real advantage; in online roguelikes you would rather be frustraded with such artifact property, cause of endless flow of MM util items. Having cheezy ‘MM on demand’ is wrong.
3. And at the end.. Please note that almost all major RPG or even roguelikish-ARPG (Diablo, PoE etc) do not give player endless possibility to MM ‘at will’; exploration is one of the foundamental RPG mechanics.

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Why we rebalancing shops? Because current balance based at vanilla Angband in which shops got static stock for 10000 turns, so resources are limited to Angband’s player. But they are limited only for one player and it’s pretty alright to have all the shops only for yourself even without restock. As we got a lot of players at the server and all of them needs different items, we have to redesign this gameplay system by adjusting  shops refreshments and prices. Currently players had to wait a lot of time near BM doors to buy consumables and it’s quite grindy gameplay. At the same time prices for some items are too cheap…

Previous tiny attempt to rebalance (yesterday) was focused on XBM (expensive black market) price rearrangment , but it seems that it’s wrong approach, cause x15 prices isn’t right for ‘regular’ items (pots&teleport scrolls), it’s alright for vanilla Angband with limited stock refreshment, but not for multiplayer. At the same time we do not have possibility to use ‘normal’ (which appears from time to time) stock in BM (glitch?), so we got to use ‘always’ flag there. For now (as always, experimental):