The Lantern Hall
Painting: an ancient lexicon open on a carved lectern in a dark chapel of books, glowing runes and symbols lifting off its pages like fireflies.
TermDigital term1980

Procedural generation

Creating game content such as dungeons, maps, loot or entire histories with algorithms rather than by hand, so each play-through differs. It descends from the random dungeon and treasure tables of early D&D.

Creating game content such as dungeons, maps, loot or entire histories with algorithms rather than by hand, so each play-through differs. It descends from the random dungeon and treasure tables of early D&D.

Origin

Rogue (1980) generated a fresh dungeon each game; later milestones include Diablo's randomized levels (1996) and the simulated world histories of Dwarf Fortress (2006).

Quick answers

What does "Procedural generation" mean?
Creating game content such as dungeons, maps, loot or entire histories with algorithms rather than by hand, so each play-through differs. It descends from the random dungeon and treasure tables of early D&D.
Where does the term "Procedural generation" come from?
Rogue (1980) generated a fresh dungeon each game; later milestones include Diablo's randomized levels (1996) and the simulated world histories of Dwarf Fortress (2006).

Nearby in the archive

Painting: a dungeon built from glowing amber terminal symbols on a black screen.

Rogue

Roguelikec. 1980

An @ sign descends through randomly generated dungeons drawn in ASCII, one life only, toward the Amulet of Yendor: the college-terminal obsession that named an entire genre.

Roguelikes

Digital genre1980

An @ sign, a dungeon that never repeats, and one life: the college-terminal genre named for Rogue, fought over in Berlin in 2008, and reborn as the indie roguelite.

NetHack

Roguelike1987

The open-source roguelike first released in 1987 and still maintained decades later: descend some fifty procedurally generated levels, retrieve the Amulet of Yendor, and die in a thousand inventive ways along the way.

Diablo

Action RPG1996

A roguelike dungeon crawl turned real-time over a weekend, Diablo sent players 16 levels down beneath a haunted cathedral, clicking through demons and loot, and invented the modern action RPG.

Dwarf Fortress

Simulation2006

Two brothers, one text screen of smiley faces, and a simulation deep enough to track every dwarf's liver and grudges: Dwarf Fortress generates whole histories, then lets you watch your fortress drown, burn, or go mad.

Loot & loot tables

General term

The treasure taken from defeated foes and explored rooms. A loot table is the list of possible rewards and their odds, a mechanism born in the random treasure tables of early D&D and perfected by Diablo's color-coded item drops.

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