URTHFALL

The Descent So Far

2026-06-12 · the Urthfall team

Urthfall began as a question: what if a roguelike took Gene Wolfe's Urth 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 very Wolfean ability to lie 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 Alzabo, which eats minds and taunts you in the voices of the dead, guarding the stolen Claw of the Conciliator.

• 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 Wolfian Language 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 Wolfean 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 Claw.

NetHack and the Book of the New Sun

2026-06-12 · the Urthfall team

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

The genre

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 on Urth, 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 book

Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun (and the wider Solar Cycle) is set on an Urth so old the sun is dying and the past is indistinguishable from magic. Its hero, Severian, is a torturer's apprentice with a perfect memory and a deeply unreliable voice. Almost everything in that world is a gift to a roguelike designer:

• Decayed super-science as "magic." Wands become scavenged energy

weapons — a tarnished pistol, a frost projector, a fusil. Scrolls become salvaged pages: a leaf of the brown book that maps the level, a shard of Father Inire's mirror that teleports you. Healing comes from a blue gem that works when it wills — the false Claw.

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

mana, because on Urth memory is the most contested thing there is.

• People as monsters. Half the dangers on Urth are just other people —

peltasts, Vodalarii, monomachists, the starved Ascians 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 Claw, the Alzabo, Saltus. The objects and places are Wolfe's:

the Claw of the Conciliator as the thing you descend to recover; the Alzabo, the beast that devours minds and speaks with their voices, as the guardian; the salt mine beneath the town of Saltus as the dungeon.

We've kept the names as Urth's own — mursid instead of rat, phial of theriac instead of healing potion — because the words are half the mood. But we also know not everyone wants to learn a vocabulary to play a roguelike, so the Wolfian Language toggle is there from day one.

If this post does its job, you'll go read the books. That's the highest thing a game can ask of its inspiration.