This page is a cheatsheet for new or old mud builders, specifically tailored to BoxMUD. Box is not the same as other muds. It's original code. There are things you will need to read here even if you've built elsewhere.

I've tried to put this in order of what you are likely to want to do first, and need to know first. The files are short.

I'm always adding to this. I'll put announcements up on the board in the build port when there are major changes.

• The Building Rules List
  

  PLEASE READ THIS and memorize it or print it and post it on your wall or something. It will help you make your building much better.
  

• Describing Yourself and Other Things

  Pet peeve time. Don't doublespace after periods in any desc. It just makes ugly rivers of space through text. Your English teacher was wrong.

  Note that you should make descriptions one long line in BoxMUD. See the page on setting lines for more info.

  Any time when you're in the description editor, you get help by typing:
  .h
  commands
  .h help .e end .s show .d delete .dl # delete line number # .r # str replace
  line number # with str .i # str insert str before line number # .t toggle newline state

  Here are some pages with info that all new builders should read:

  • Setting your description
  • Setting your short (imms only)
  • Setting lines in descs and setting line wrap

• Navigating the Mud

  Here are a few topics that should help:

  • BoxMud vnums and area-vnums, explained
  • The GOTO command

• Saving

  The mud saves the item you are editing when you end editing or explicitly type save. This means you don't NEED to save an area. Unless you are paranoid. I type save every so often anyhow.

• EDITORS, general info

  The main editors are rooms, objects, and mobs: redit, oedit, and medit, respectively.

  When you're in an editor, you can do some, but not all, of the usual commands that you can do outside of the editor. You can use echo, gossip, look. But you can't do anything that conflicts with the editor commands, and you can't use a few commands that confuse the heck out of the code. Like quit. And... goto was causing problems. If you think it might confuse the code or you, type end first and then do the command.

• REDIT

  The next few links contain info on using redit, the room editor.

  • The Basics of redit. Information on building rooms, including a little decryptology on the exit commands.
    
  • About Resets. All you wanted to know about resetting objects and mobs in rooms and on objects and mobs, except shop stuff.
  • Building Shops. All the current information on how to build a shopkeeper, a shop, objects for the shop, and set up the resets for it.
    
  • Extra, Directional, and Night Descriptions.

• OTHER EDITORS, MEDIT and OEDIT:

  The medit and oedit editors are similar to redit. They edit mobs and obs respectively. Get into the editor and type help; it'll give you a list of commands. For consistency across all editors, the "keyword" is what you type to interact with the object, the "name" is what you see when you interect (x gets "name"), the "short" is what you see when you it's in a room, and the "long" is when you explicitly look at it. For mobs and objects, "long" is edited just the same way the room description is. See The Building Rules List
  for specifics.

  Here are a couple pages on specific topics in these editors:

  • Object Types
  • Create Weapon Tutorial

• THE *OTHER* OTHER EDITORS:

  There are some other edit commands.

  • socialedit or sedit. In socialedit, the hardest part are the variables. Briyer (that's me) mostly adds the socials, with a few done by Sabriel (like YAR). If you want some added, collect up a few suggestions and post a note on the boards. I tend to do them in batches. Since this is MY cheatsheet too, I'll add a ref to my sedit cribsheet.
  • helpedit or hedit. hedit edits help files, pretty straightforward. For example, to add something to the motd, you can type hed motd. Then just use .i to insert the entry at the right spot.
  • skilledit or skedit. Don't muck with skilledit. It's mainly just to edit the prereqs for skills. It's for our coder.

• STAT:

  stat apple
  Syntax: stat [mobile/player/object]
  Some of these aren't implemented, or are spotty.

• The Admin Stuff
  • SHUTTING DOWN AND RESTARTING:

    (This doesn't currently work. Currently, Box is in debug mode.
    Keel gossips, 'Also, if you want to check stuff like that, use shutdown.'
    Keel gossips, 'The MUD's set up via a .bat file, so it'll just come right back up.')

  • (un)MAKING SOMEONE A BUILDER:

    grant playername builder
    revoke playername builder