Avanor

Lineage

No parent: Avanor is its own C++ code, inspired by ADOM (RogueBasin lists ADOM as its influence; the official site calls its interface “ADOM-like”). First release 28 November 2001; open-sourced under the GPL in 2003; 0.5.8 in May 2006 was the last original release. Joachim de Groot revived it in September 2025 (LuaJIT, sol2, cereal); this port is based on his 0.6.0.

See the family tree (under ADOM, as an inspired game). Sources: RogueBasin, avanor.sourceforge.net, the upstream README.

Credits

From the game’s credits and README.

Trivia

• The official site describes Avanor as a “(not so) quick-growing roguelike game”. (avanor.sourceforge.net)
• Avanor went open source in the week of 30 July 2003; 0.5.6 and 0.5.7 followed that August and December. (avanor.sourceforge.net)
• In September 2005, after almost two years’ break, a Win32-only development version appeared in which the world was described by Lua scripts; it was “still not playable”. (avanor.sourceforge.net)
• The site’s last news, June 2006, promised that 0.6.0 “will be available soon”; the 0.6.0 you play here came from the 2025 revival. (avanor.sourceforge.net, README)
• RogueBasin recommends DOSBox-X over DOSBox for the DOS build: without long file names the help menu is unreachable. (RogueBasin)
• RogueBasin puts a game at 4–6 hours. (RogueBasin)

What's unique

• A valley, not a pit: an overland valley with towns and NPCs, and many small dungeons off it (caves, a rat cellar, a volcano, a wizard’s dungeon, a dwarven city, three abandoned mines) instead of one deep dungeon.
• Quests: NPCs with dialogue hand out quests; the demon Beelzevile waits in his dungeon.
• A living world: creatures go about their business without the hero; the game even has a demo mode that runs the world with no hero in it.
• Two gods: Tiamat and Marduk, who watch what you kill.
• Everything in Lua: since the revival every creature, item, location and quest is a Lua file in world/.

Code dive

• Language: C++17, about 50,500 lines in 182 files, plus about 12,500 lines of Lua in 86 files under world/ (counted with wc -l in our tree). Licence GPLv2+.
• Original platform: DOS, Win32 and Linux text consoles; the original bundled Lua 5.0 and its own save format.
• Revival: sol2 for the Lua binding, cereal + Zstandard for saves, a MonsterBuilder fluent interface for creatures, enum classes throughout; --demo, --test, --seed and --god on the command line.
• This port: Emscripten build with DawnLike tiles, separate windows, an Enter command menu, H explore and > walk to the stairs, saves in IndexedDB. Source: memmaker/avanor, upstream jaydg/avanor.

Stats

Counted from world/*.lua at our base 20a0f59.

Manual

The game’s own HTML manual (Kay Dekker’s, updated by the revival), copied from the game’s manual/ folder: quick start, keys, tactics, test modes. Licence: GPLv2+, as the game.

Getting started

1. Open the game and create a hero: race, profession, name.
2. Explore with H; > walks to the nearest known stairs, a second > goes down.
3. Walk into monsters to fight; i opens the inventory, pick an item for its actions.
4. Talk to the people of the valley to get quests, and buy supplies in the shops.
5. The Enter key lists every command; the game’s help page has the keys and saving.

Help

We found no walkthrough. Rules of thumb and more:

• Read the manual’s tactics and quick start pages.
• The keys are close to ADOM’s, so ADOM habits carry over.
• More: RogueBasin (and its reviews page), the original site, the revival on GitHub.

Cheats

The revival has a god mode (--god): a thousand extra hit and power points, the choice to carry on after death, and three extra keys (^F light the level, ^W jump anywhere, ^I go unnoticed); see test modes. It is a command-line option, and our browser build starts without options, so it is not available here.

• Save scumming: Export save / Import save on the game page.