Dungeons and the automap

Open the automap with M. It starts empty in every dungeon and fills in as you look around.

§How rooms are revealed

The game checks what you can see five times a second. Each check looks along three lines:

1. Straight down from your eye, three units, to find the floor.
2. Along where you are looking, up to 30 units. The limit is deliberate: the game does not want big halls to be too easy to discover.
3. Along the floor between you and the wall you are looking at, in one-unit steps.

Each line is really three parallel rays, and a surface is revealed only when they all hit the same thing and agree with the automap’s own copy of the level. A closed door breaks that check: the automap copy of the dungeon has no doors, so the game’s real geometry stops at the door while the automap’s would fly on to the far wall. The two disagree, and nothing is revealed. Open the door and look through it.

§What the map remembers

For each dungeon the map keeps three things: what you have revealed, what you have visited on this run, and whether you have found its entrance. Rooms you have seen but not visited on this run are drawn in grey.

§What lives in a dungeon

Each kind of dungeon has its own table of 20 enemies, weakest first, and the game draws from the slots near your level. See where enemies appear for every dungeon type, the wilderness by day and night, town nights and building interiors.