Quickband

Angband in twelve levels

Date of birth≤ 2005 v1.05 announced 8 Aug 2005; this is 2.0.6

CreatorAntoine on top of NPPAngband by Jeff Greene and Diego González

LanguageC ~191,000 lines

PlatformWindows, Unix/X11, Mac also a Nintendo DS port

Lineage

Angband → NPPAngband → Quickband. 1.x was built on an older NPPAngband; 2.0 was rebased on NPPAngband 0.5.1 (itself from Angband 3.1). See the family tree.

Played here: Quickband 2.0.6, from the AngbandPlus archive, fork at memmaker/quickband.

Credits

Antoine	Author and maintainer
Jeff Greene, Diego González	NPPAngband
Buzzkill	UT32 tile support (2.0.6)
The Angband team	Everything underneath

Trivia

Antoine’s pitch: the game takes “just a few hours to complete”. (rgra, 2005)
2.0 “dealt with all incidences of Sauron, Morgoth, One Ring, Grond and Iron Crown in code”: the final bosses are Lurtz and Saruman. (QuickChanges.txt)
Stay at high level with lots of artifacts and the game gives you “prods to hurry up”. (QuickChanges.txt, 2.01)
Low Charisma makes enchanting unreliable, and high Dexterity gives speed. (QuickChanges.txt)
2.0.5 introduced “the notorious wand of wall building”. (QuickChanges.txt)
A reviewer: “if I ever get the urge to play Angband, I will play Quickband instead”. (Do While Compiling, 2012)

What's unique

12 levels: Lurtz waits on level 11, Saruman on 12. Kill Saruman to win.
Everything is compressed: fast levelling, good items early, more monsters per level, quick level feelings.
Racial knowledge: Elves identify bows by feel, Dwarves armour, Hobbits slings, Gnomes wands.
New classes (Barbarian, Berserker, Sage) and races (Maia, Sprite).

Code dive

C, about 191,000 lines in 83 files, NPPAngband’s code base (Angband 3.1 era).
Data in text files in lib/edit: monster.txt, object.txt, quest.txt …
This port: WebAssembly with a canvas frontend, UT32 tiles, sound and town music, auto-explore (H), an Enter command menu and an inventory cursor.

Stats

Thing	Count	Notable ones
Races	13	Kobold, Maia, Sprite (new in 2.0.5)
Classes	11	Warrior, Mage, Priest, Rogue, Ranger, Paladin, Brigand, Druid, Barbarian, Berserker, Sage
Monsters	~704	Lurtz the Uruk-Hai Captain, Saruman of Many Colours, Wormtongue
Object kinds	371	plus 115 ego types and 131 artifacts
Vaults	58
Dungeon levels	12

Manual

The in-game help (NPPAngband’s, with a tutorial) is on the site: read the manual. The Quickband changes are listed in QuickChanges.txt; ? opens the help in the game.

Getting started

Open the game; a Dwarf Warrior or Half-Troll Berserker is forgiving.
Buy Cure Light Wounds potions and Phase Door scrolls in town.
Go down. Levels come quickly, so does danger.

Help

No walkthrough exists. The help has a tutorial (tutorial.txt). Tips:

Stair-scumming is limited; fight the level you are on.
Get resistances before Lurtz (11) and Saruman (12).
Dragons breathe often and have more HP than in Angband.

Cheats

NPPAngband’s debug mode: Ctrl+A, confirm, then a debug key (wish, jump level, create item …). The character is marked as a cheater. (cmd0.c; not tried here)