Monster distribution.

[Fink]

This isnt news to many people at all, but I never really properly thought about the distribution of monsters in the game. I loaded up the _r file in Berendol's  BAE and took a screenshot of the monster list by depth. What a crazy distribution it is. Hey Berendol, do you know if Vanilla 3.0 and later will work in BAE (presumably I would need to convert it to a text file first)? I'm curious to see how all the new monsters look.

Ah, actually, Jug has converted a bunch of the new monsters for IronMAng hasn't he. I'll take a peek at that.


Ah that worked. Here is a side by side comparison, for fun, of vanilla Mangband on the left, and Iron Mangband on the right.

It's cool to see both new monstes (I believe some more Wyrms are in), and also a little more appearing in the empty areas lower.

[Warrior]

Yep, Ironman has all the new monsters. Very tough.
Important stuff to pay attention to is of course all the new D's but also the P's can be a surprise. Greater titan moved from 2300 to 3300.
As well as stuff like the mimic chests and all the new eyes of various kinds.

[Fink]

When you think about it, there really is room for endless variety using existing features. Should you ever want to do so, you could easily fill up the lower reaches of the dungeon with new monsters.

Say, a p who has a high tendency to both teleport you to the p, and summon hounds. Yikes! On that note, is it possible for a monster to in effect aggrivate monsters? IE, a monster that has 1 in X chance of casting aggrivate monster (that is, waking up other monsters).

Hm. Is it possible to slipstream in stuff like the added monsters that Jug has sorted out for Ironman into an existing instance of vanilla Mangband?

[PowerWyrm]

Of course it's possible... SHRIEK does that, and even haste the baddies  :)

[Fink]

I guess, in both cases, I mean "possible" in the "possible without a big rewrite of stuff" sense.

[Berendol]

It's not possible to use the newer monsters with vanilla 0.7.2. We've both done independent work on the implementation and it was a good afternoon's work to get them all in.

The reason is that a few of the monster flags and abilities just aren't implemented. If you tell it to ignore them (which is -not- the default IIRC.. it'll crash) then all you get is weak watered-down mobs. Who wants that when you can have a real challenge?

Ah, BAE. I love that program. They named the files differently in the newer Angbands - you load "lib/edit/monster.txt" instead of "lib/game/r_info.txt". I know I tested it out with everything including MAngband, BMAngband, Angband 3, ToME, ZAngband, and a few others, so have fun!