Salt and Sigils
2026-06-13 · the Urthfall team
The first release, Citadel of Salt, was a world and a way down into it. This one — 0.0.2, Salt and Sigils — is about what happens once you're down there: the weapon in your hand, the numbers behind your character, and the hundred small frictions that stand between a player and the game.
Sigils on the blade
Weapons now carry an elemental brand. A blade can be fulgurite (it arcs), sunfire (it sears), cryic (it bites cold and sometimes freezes what it strikes), mercurial (it finds the killing angle more often), or azothic (it corrodes). A brand rides the weapon itself, not its type, so the page of branding you find can turn an ordinary spadroon into something with a temper.
And in the deep dark there are three weapons that were never ordinary: Sunwrack, Stormneedle, and Rimefang. Each already burns with its own nature, wears its own name, and cannot be re-forged into anything else. They are rare. You will be glad of the day you find one.
Three numbers instead of one
Until now a character was, mechanically, mostly Strength. Now there are three. Strength still swings the blade. Dexterity makes you harder to hit and your thrown knives truer. Wits deepen the memory a thaumaturge spends on rituals. Each calling starts with its own spread — the guild-less are the nimblest hands in the dark, the seers the most capacious minds — and you can sharpen them further with what you find.
It is a small change that does a large thing: it gives the three callings distinct shapes, and it gives us somewhere to grow.
The hundred small frictions
A roguelike lives or dies on its texture, and most of this release went into texture you'll feel without naming:
- Your inventory letters stop moving. Drop a potion and pick it back
up and it is still c. Worn gear sits at the top of the screen. = lets you rearrange the rest by hand.
- Long messages wrap now, across two lines, with a
--More-- prompt
when the dungeon has too much to say at once.
- Every art lives on one screen (
a): the passive ones show their
numbers, the usable ones show whether they're ready. p buys, z casts, Z zaps.
- Fast travel stops for danger, not for every doorway.
- Monsters behave a little more like themselves — bats flit, and a
crossbowman would rather give ground than stand and trade with you.
- And Ctrl-C, or the quit link in your browser, will always ask first.
Your game is saved either way.
None of it is glamorous. All of it is the difference between a game you tolerate and one you sink into.
What's next
The attribute system is a doorway. Beyond it on the roadmap is the thing we keep circling back to: a town. Shops to spend gold in, hands to hire, portals that take you out to other dungeons and back again. The draught of sagacity that raises your Wits is already written — we're holding it back until there's a counter to buy it across.
Until then: the salt mine is open, the sigils are lit, and the Sapphire of the Sun is still ten floors down. Go and get it.
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.