URTHFALL

The Descent So Far

2026-06-12 · the Urthfall team

Urthfall began as a question: what if a roguelike took the dying earth seriously — not as set dressing, but as mechanics? On Urth the "magic" is decayed super-science nobody understands anymore, which maps almost too neatly onto the oldest roguelike puzzle of all: you find a thing, and you do not know what it does until you try it.

This first release, Citadel of Salt, is the foundation.

Where it came from

The engine is a fork of rlikec, a from-scratch C99 roguelike with its own HTTP/WebSocket server, its own crypto (SHA-1/SHA-256/HMAC/PBKDF2 and base64, all written from the RFCs), and a goal-driven bot harness that plays the game through the real key interface to keep the three classes inside a 40–65% win band. No engines, no frameworks, no dependencies beyond libc, pthreads, and ncurses. We kept all of that and rebuilt the content on Urth.

What's in 0.0.1

• Three callings. The Lochage is a city officer who picks a kit at

the armory — a spadroon and the transparent shield, or a halberd that strikes two tiles away. The Guild-less works from the shadows: a knife in the dark for triple damage, and the dying-earth conceit of lying to the world itself — humans take a disguised guild-less for one of their own, and a false memory can talk a guard down entirely. The Thaumaturge is a seer of the Cumaean's line whose rituals are paid for not in mana but in memory.

• A bestiary of Urth. Thirty-one creatures, from the mursids of the

middens to man-apes of the mines, notules, zoanthrops, Ascian soldiers who speak only in propaganda, and — at the bottom of the salt mine — the Mnemophage, which eats minds and taunts you in the voices of the dead, guarding the stolen Sapphire of the Sun.

• Systems with teeth. Class skills bought with gold (gold finally has

a job); directional throw and a quiver you can fire on a keypress; fast travel; a riskier early game; and an overworld first level — an open green surface dotted with brush you can push into but not see through, hiding ambushes on the way down to the mine mouth.

• Play it anywhere. Solo or four-player co-op, and the browser and SSH

clients are interchangeable — they join the same games and see each other live. It's live behind TLS at urthfall.net.

• A Archaic Names toggle. On by default you get Urth's own words; a

switch in the options gives you plain "rat" and "healing potion" names for a more traditional game.

What's next

Identification is the big one — unlabeled phials and pages, learned by use or by a page of naming, with a dying-earth twist where some items are mislabeled until you trust them. After that: a town level and a gold sink, enchantment and Urth-themed weapon brands, a developer wizard mode, and a standalone local build for offline play. The roadmap lives in the repo; this blog will track it.

The mine is open. Bring back the Sapphire.

NetHack and the Dying Earth

2026-06-12 · the Urthfall team

Every roguelike is a conversation with its ancestors. Urthfall's are two: a genre of games and a genre of fiction.

The games

NetHack is the patron saint of "you don't know what it does until you try it." Its unidentified potions and scrolls, its objects with hidden properties, its willingness to let you ruin yourself with a cursed item you mis-read — that texture of risk through ignorance is the thing we most want, and it's why identification sits at the top of our roadmap. From Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup we took the quality-of-life that makes a deep game playable: autoexplore, sensible travel, a UI that respects your time. Angband taught us about descent and escalating bestiaries; Brogue about restraint — a small, legible set of systems that interact in large ways, rendered in honest ASCII. Urthfall tries to sit where those meet: NetHack's mischief, Crawl's convenience, Brogue's clarity.

The fiction: the Dying Earth

The other ancestor is a mood. The Dying Earth is a strand of far-future fantasy where the sun is failing, civilizations have risen and fallen past counting, and the deep past has decayed into something you can only call magic. Jack Vance gave the subgenre its name and its sardonic wit; Gene Wolfe and others carried it somewhere stranger and sadder. It's the perfect setting for a roguelike, because in a world of forgotten super-science everything is unidentified:

• Decayed science as "magic." Wands become scavenged energy weapons —

a tarnished pistol, a frost projector, a fusil. Scrolls become salvaged pages: a leaf of an old book that maps the level, a shard of a broken mirror that teleports you. Healing comes from a blue gem that works when it wills — the counterfeit sapphire.

• Memory as a resource. The thaumaturge's rituals cost memory, not

mana, because on a worn-out world memory is the most contested thing there is.

• People as monsters. Half the dangers in the mine are just other

people — peltasts, forest outlaws, monomachists, starved soldiers who can only speak in approved slogans. That's why the guild-less can talk past much of the bestiary, and why a disguise is a real mechanic.

• The Sapphire, the Mnemophage, Saltus. The thing you descend to recover; the

beast that devours minds and speaks with their voices, as its guardian; the salt mine beneath the town, as the dungeon. The names are Urth's own — half the mood is in the words — which is also why the Archaic Language toggle exists for players who'd rather read "rat" and "healing potion."

Future releases may reach beyond the dying earth into other classic science fiction and fantasy. For now, the sun is going out, the past is unreadable, and there's a stolen relic somewhere in the dark. That's enough to descend for.