Greg's Random Angband Artifacts

This project was inspired by work done by John May, whose original artifact scrambler can still be found in the two files artefact.h and artefact.c.

For those of you who don't already know, Angband now has a new maintainer: Robert Rühlmann! Angband 2.9.x (as well as the older 2.8.5 beta) includes a slightly modified version of my random number generator. If you're using 2.9.x then you don't need to install the randart code separately -- you already have it!

However, the integrated random artifact generator code in Angband 2.9.x does not include the standalone randart program for debugging. If you want to run this program to create sample random artifact text files, you need to grab and apply this patch. It's only been tested on Linux, and not extensively, so use at your own risk.

The last historical release of the random artifact generator is version 0.6.2, which can be found here in tar.gz source code format, or here in zip source code format. You will need to have the Angband 2.8.3 source code on your system. My random artifact generator uses parts of the Angband source code to do some of its work.

You can look at the README file by clicking here. The CHANGES file is here.

Thomas Harris reports that on the Acorn (and possibly other platforms) it is necessary to use my_fopen instead of fopen when compiling this code. If you have trouble with finding file due to non-Unix-compatible directory separators, this change may help you.

Robert Rühlmann has compiled Angband 2.8.3 for DOS using version 0.6.2 of the random artifact generator. You can download it here.

The previous release of the random artifact generator is version 0.6.1, which can be found here in tar.gz source code format, or here in zip source code format. You will need to have the Angband 2.8.3 source code on your system.

Robert Rühlmann has compiled a DOS-386 version of Angband 2.8.2 with randart 0.6.0. You can download this here. Robert says: "I have also added a status-display 'random artifacts on/off' on the character-screen and an option to switch the random artifacts on for characters created without random artifacts."

Version 0.6.0 is still available here in source-code format. You must have the Angband 2.8.2 source code on your system for that version to work.

Version 0.5.1 is still available here in source-code format. You must have the Angband 2.8.1 source code on your system for that version to work.

Terry Godman has compiled a 0.4.1 version for the Acorn. It can be found here.

I might have missed some precompiled versions of randart; if so, I apologize. Please mail me if you have a precompiled version of randart, either in vanilla Angband or a variant, and would like to see it listed on this page. Usenet news is, unfortunately, becoming a less reliable means of communication these days (especially for me).

Here's a list of unimplemented features/changes that people have requested:

• Disallowing +3 attacks weapons.
• Offering the four elemental resists as a 'package' for armor parts.
• Offering acid resistance plus a high resist as a 'package' for armor parts.
• Maintaining a correlation between artifact names and basic item types -- e.g., having Sting always be a sword-type weapon. (Note: this is now academic, since I use Sheldon's random name generation code.)
• Ensuring that all items have at least some useful power(s) added; this is related to out-of-depth base item type choices.
• Ensuring the generation of artifact-based poison resistance below 2000'. Moreover, ensuring the existence of a certain quantity of each different power, roughly matching the same number of instances of that power in the regular game.
• Disallowing cold immunity on weapons with fire brand, and probably fire immunity on weapons with cold brand.
• Considering the item's level when selecting powers.
• Generating artifacts to fill the empty slots in the a_info.txt file. (This would require careful selection of level and rarity figures, and of course such items would not have activations.)

Note: I do not promise to make all these changes, or even any of them. I just wanted to put all the requests in one place, and this looked like a good spot.

You can reach me at greg@wooledge.org.

Back to my homepage.