Free a Silmaril from Morgoth's crown, then escape. A tense, stealthy, tactical game.

• About the game
• Keyboard controls
• Saving your game
• Tips
• New player's guide
• Playing in the browser

About the game

Sil-Q is quiet, tense and tactical. You are not a hero clearing the dungeon: you are sneaking into Morgoth's fortress to steal a Silmaril and get out alive. Most of the mechanics push you towards stealth and careful choices.

• You gain experience mostly by discovery: seeing new monsters for the first time, reaching new depths, and learning about items. Killing gives relatively little. Sneaking past a fight is often the better choice.
• Noise and light matter. Monsters can be asleep, unwary or alert. Your stealth, and whether you are carrying a light, decide who notices you.
• Songs (s) are your magic: ongoing effects such as staying hidden, healing, or making enemies afraid.
• Smithing at forges (0) lets you make your own weapons and armour.
• No town and no teleport scrolls. The only way is down, and you gradually lose the ability to go back up.

Keyboard controls

Essential keys

Saving your game

• Saving is automatic. Every save goes straight into this browser's storage (IndexedDB). The game saves on every level change, every two minutes while it waits for your next command, and whenever you switch to another tab or window.
• Ctrl+S saves and keeps playing. Ctrl+X saves and quits; reload the page (or press Play again) to continue.
• Reloading or closing the tab loses at most the last couple of minutes. The browser asks before you leave a running game.
• The page continues the character you saved last. The title screen's Open saved character loads another one by name; New character deletes the saved characters in this browser and starts over.
• When a character dies, the game returns to its title screen, where you can start the tutorial or a new character.
• Export save downloads your savefile; Import save loads one. Use them to keep a backup or to move a character to another browser or computer.
• Your window layout, zoom levels and window titles are stored with the savegame, in the same browser storage, and survive a new character.
• Private/incognito windows and "clear site data" delete the stored game. Export first if the character matters.

Tips

• Sneak past fights you do not need to win. Stealth mode (S) is a real strategy.
• Pick one or two skills and invest in them, rather than spreading your experience.
• Auto-explore (P) stops as soon as anything is in view and never opens locked or warded doors.
• The in-game help (?) has three short pages that are worth reading once.

Rules that surprise Angband players

• There is no town and no Word of Recall.
• Over time you are drawn deeper: your min depth rises, and you cannot return above it.
• No teleportation and almost no attack magic. Positioning, stealth and retreating are what keep you alive.
• There are only four elements (fire, cold, poison, dark). Resistances stack to 1/2, 1/3, 1/4 …
• Speed only comes in steps of 1 to 4. Normal speed is 2, so +1 means 50% faster.
• Races act as the difficulty level. The Noldor are the easiest, the Edain the hardest.

New player's guide

Your first steps

1. For your first game, pick one of the Noldor: they are the easiest race. Choose a house that suits your plan (archery, melee or songs).
2. You start underground. Explore carefully with P (auto-explore) or by hand, and look at every new monster with l. Seeing it already gives you experience.
3. Spend experience on abilities on the ability screen (Tab). Your first ability in a skill you have an affinity for is free.
4. Take the stairs down fairly steadily. Staying too long at shallow depths wastes time, and the game pushes you deeper anyway.

Finding your way

• Your character sheet (@) shows your min depth, the shallowest level you can still return to.
• M shows the level map and L lets you look around it.
• Morgoth's throne room is at 1,000 ft (level 20). Stairs usually take you 50 ft; shafts take you 100 ft.
• Taking many stairs in quick succession can leave you "lost" and send you somewhere unexpected.

Things to try

• Play a stealthy character and see how much of a level you can explore without waking anything.
• Find a forge and smith your own gear.
• Try the Song of Silence or a fear song to avoid a fight entirely.
• Exchange places (X) with enemies to pull off tactical moves (it needs the matching ability).

Staying alive

• Fight in corridors and doorways. Being surrounded is how most characters die.
• Monsters flee and regroup. Don't chase a fleeing enemy into a room full of its friends.
• Your light makes you visible. Sometimes it's worth putting it out.
• You die at 0 hit points, not below. Retreat early.

Playing in the browser

• Windows: the map fills the big window; Inventory, Monster list and Combat rolls are on the right; Messages and Recall along the bottom.
• Resize windows by dragging the gaps between them. The windows always fill the screen and never overlap; the game redraws them at their new size. Reset windows puts everything back.
• Zoom: A− / A+ on the Map title bar (shown on hover) change the size of the map tiles. Hover over a small window's title to show its A− / A+ buttons, which change its text size.
• Rename a window by clicking its title, typing a new name and pressing Enter (Esc cancels, an empty name restores the default).
• Keys: arrow keys, the numeric keypad or 1–9 move you; Shift + direction runs. Sil-Q has no mouse support: everything is on the keyboard, and Enter lists every command.
• Sound and music are off until you switch them on in the top bar. The effects come from Sil-Q's own samples and the Dubtrain Angband Sound Pack; the music is a single looping tune.
• Browsers keep a few shortcuts for themselves (Ctrl+W, Ctrl+T, Ctrl+N, and Cmd shortcuts on a Mac), so those never reach the game.
• If the game ever crashes, a message appears at the top; reload the page to continue from your last save.

About this version

• Based on Sil-Q 1.5.0 (sil-quirk/sil-q, tag v1.5.0, commit 09a53ab).
• Original source: sil-quirk/sil-q @ 09a53ab
• Our changes (X11 port, auto-explore, command menu, item menus, sound events, web build): memmaker/sil-q