Library: Work in Progress

This book should answer most of your questions and keep you alive for a while. The first thing you should know about this world is "Information is Power". Learn as much as you can about BatMud before charging into it head-on. I recommend you use the HELP command alot at first, as in 'help topics'. The help files are very useful, including (but not limited to)these: help stupid questions, help mud-faq-part1/2/3, help topics, help cheating, help weapons, help damagetypes, help events, help WIMPY, help alias, help builtin, help WALK, help prompt, and help when to ask a wizard. After that, use the CHANNELS which contain even more information, for they are live conversations and have many knowledgable listeners. The channels NEWBIE should get your full attention, so turn it on (newbie on), as well as WANTED, ALERT, and possibly BAT or CHAT. When you have a question you cant find the answer to in a book or a help file, ask to the channel by typing 'newbie how do I do this?' and you will see Yourname [newbie]: how do I do this? A lot of other people will see this too. With luck some can answer your question. For now ignore that some people talk like {newbie} rather than [newbie], it wont affect you yet. Try not to 'spam' the channel by asking the same question over and over, this annoys people. For now, don't ask questions on the Wanted or Alert channel. BEGINNING When you first appear, you will be in a room in a church by an altar. This room is called the CHURCH ALTAR for the rest of the book. You cannot do anything violent in here, or cast spells, or use skills, and niether can anyone else. It is reasonably safe to stay here. Whenever you enter the game, you will be here. EQUIPTMENT This is a combat-based Mud, so you will want armor and weapons. Later, when you have money, you can buy these, but for now, you will need to learn about DAMOGRAN. From church altar, go east, north, north. Saint Damogran's area is like the church, in that no violence is allowed. Saint Damogran is a stickler for politeness, so you must BOW to him (if you are not female, women must CURTSEY to him) by typing 'bow damogran' (or 'curtsey damogran'). If you do this correctly, Damogran will ask how he can help. Type 'list' to see what Damogran has in his storeroom, and you can ask for these. Ask by type or number, for example, if you want the weapon number 6 on the list, which is a steel stafff, you can 'ask staff' or 'ask 6' to get it. There is also the FOOD BASKET here, which you should take one or two items from but not all. Items taken from Damogran's place cannot be sold! Also, Damogran will only give you so many items in a given day. If you lose them, drop them, or they break, tough luck. However, you can give them back to allow yourself an extra item, so if you want, say, a dagger and you have a staff he gave you, you can give him the staff then 'ask dagger'. Damogran will not give stuff to the youngest of young players (guest, visitors, and level 1 players). Once you have stuff, you can WIELD weapons to arm yourself and WEAR armor to protect yourself. The larger you are, the larger weapons you can wield. At the lowest levels, you will have trouble with anything besides knives, daggers, and staves, so look for small things. Armor is NOT size-based, it is one size fits all, so you can wear anything you find. Sometimes you will get a message that 'This item is not tuned for you.' That means it is an item Damogran gave to someone else, not you. Since it wont do you a lot of good, you can drop it or give it back to Damogran. ADVANCING When you kill things, you get exp. Simple, eh? Once you have killed a lot of stuff you may be able to ADVANCE a level (become more powerful). From the church altar go east three times and south once. You are now in the advancement room, where you can type 'advance <stat>' and you will go up a level IF you have enough exp. The <stat> is the statistic of you choice, but I recommend wisdom/WIS for religious, intelligence/INT for magical, strenght/STR for nomads. Civilized people at low levels can advance just about whatever but dexterity/DEX and int/str are not bad choices. Use the COST command here to see how far you are from your next level (note: there is a prompt command that will do the same thing). Just south from here is the level quest/LQ room. Solving a level quest for a given level cuts the cost to advance TO that level by a lot. Not all lq's still work, by all means ask on newbie/read a book to find out which, and how you complete it. Level quests are HARD to do most of the time, but worth it. At higher levels you will learn to buy them. When you finally get to level 16 you will get FREE LEVELS. Until then, all levels are automatically put into your background, but now you will be able to join GUILDS, the classes of BatMud. Use the MAP command in town to find out where the various guilds are, and check them out. Not all guilds can be joined by all backgrounds, but they will tell you which you can enter. Note: at level 14 or less ALL guild information will say your background is 'wrong or incomplete', but this is NORMAL until you get to level 15. After that it means you cannot join. Also, some guilds prevent joining other guilds, so get a good idea which guilds you want to join the most before joining. Each background has a channel, use that when you hit level 15 to get some help on which guilds your background should join. ADVENTURING and GETTING IN A FIGHT You will explore outside of town. When you do start poking around, you will see monsters, and soon, you will get in fights with some of them. The idea, then, is to go to a place where you can get in a fight and live. Some good places: CS: center square, there is a big clock. There are pigeons outside which you can stomp. Also you can 'enter clock' where there are other monsters. Use the map to find center square, and make a note of it. Messengers: from CS, go west, west, south, west, up. There are pigeons here you can stomp too. Alchemist Garden: from CS, go west, west, south, east, east, east, south, east, up. The monsters in here are small and squishy too. Chapel: from church altar, go south into the church. There are small priests, monks, and adepts and such which are low level. Graveyard: This place should not be your first choice since the monsters are HOSTILE, that is, they attack you when they see you. They also cast spells for a lot of damage. If you enter, try to fight only one at a time and stick to spirits and skeletons. TONZE's MINES: this place RULEZ. At lower levels, find and kill black flies and butterflies (NOTE: there is a lq for butterflies), and some of the smaller looking things (grid bugs, orcs, and newts for example). At higher levels you willearn to love BABY BLACK PUDDINGS, and kill the other stuff. Do NOT try a black or brown pudding, a dwarf skeleton, or a beholder, at least not yet. Pa' Farm: west along the river is a farm you can enter. Find pigs, robins, swallows, squirrels, and other small stuff. Beware of humans (Pa and his family are evil insane) and HUGE bulls (which will make you a small uninformed smear). The Convent: west from Bat City in the hills. Nuns are pretty tough for newbies but you can do it about level 10, less if you get lucky with a spell. Nun clothing is worth a lot of money. There are other areas, like the newbie cornfields, sarku's temple, the newbie carnival, and of course DIGGA's and WANE's areas, but they are a good distance from town and are no longer worth it for low levelers to find. Once you get in an area, remember to LOOK at things which stick out ('you see a brown lever stuck in the wall'), and use the EXITS and PEER (direction) commands to see what is in the next room. Keep an eye on the water level, (the water here is up to your ankles/waist/neck or 'the water here is deeper than you are tall) because drowning sucks. Doors can be locked, the key is not always easy to find. Monsters are there to be stomped, some know it (the HOSTILE ones), some dont (these will only fight back) and some are quick learners, who react when you do a hostile spell or skill in the room (called going AGGRESSIVE). Learn to like passive monsters. If you have the skill CONSIDER, use it at every monster you see, and make a mental note which ones you can kill. Also look at a monster -- its description could have an important clue. You will also see if it is using any armor or weapons. One note of importance: if a monster has no worn/wielded equiptment but is carrying something, you will know...this leads to the practice of boxhunting/gemhunting (only killing monsters which are carrying something). In combat use the SCAN command to see how hurt your opponent is. Also use the skills KICK, BASH, and PUSH if you have them, and cast spells if you can. Note that a skill has a warm-up time, so hitting 'use kick at bunny' fifty times in rapid succession wont help you at all. Set your wimpy too...this will make you flee when your hps start to run out. Make sure you are WIELDING a weapon and WEARING armor, if you have any, since this makes you do better in combat. GETTING KILLED Yes, this will happen. STUN will be a cause of death too often, as it prevents you from doing anything for a while. Fortuneately low level monsters rarely stun. You may also be hit by POISON, which will do a lot of damage over and over until you pass out and die. (there are spells and items which will remove poison, but they are expensive). But mostly you will die by simply being beaten to death by a monster or player. When you do die, you will be in HELL with all your equiptment (except for a few rare cases). In Hell, you have only three choices, of which only one is viable until you hit level 11 or so. PRAY gets you back to the church, but you lose all your experience. If you want something better, use the GHOST channel and ask for a ress, or a RESSURECT, or a reinc, or a REINCARNATION. Again, those last two choices are not used much by newbies, since the casters of these spells dont get much out of it. A ress lets you keep more exp, a reinc makes you start over as a new race and classs BUT you advance much faster, until you get as far as you were before. When you die you will usually get SCARS. Dont worry about it too much, but try to get healers to remove them for you when convinient. Scars affect your CHA/charisma which affects very few newbies. Death also lowers charisma. The HOSPITAL on the map has a place to restore charisma. HEALING After a fight some or all of your hps, sps, and eps will be missing. There are several ways to get them back. REGENing will work, you just sit there and heal. Not terribly exciting. Some rooms and items will vastly improve your regen speed. There are a lot of ways to get hps back. CURE spells, cast by healers and those of religious background, restore hps. This makes healers VERY popular. The space 2 steps east of the church altar, referred to (somewhat wistfully) as the newbie square/NS, usually has a pack of healers for you. You can find the hospital on the map, that's a lot of help. And you will learn the value of BOOZE, such as barrels of beer, which are like healing potions. Be cautious with beer, you can get ADDICTED to alcohol. Sps and Eps are harder to get back, although less so for high level players. Look for fires, either campfires or fireplaces, which are your friends. While we are on the subject, FOOD and DRINK are good ways to stay alive. Not eating and drinking cause obvious problems. Find fountains in town for water, food is a little more tricky but you can buy it in many places. MONEY Yeah! When you find more money than you can carry, you will want to dump stuff. HELP MONEY tells you which coins are more values than others. Make periodic deposits in the BANK on the map, so you dont have to carry it all. If you find things you can sell them at the shops, also on the map. Each store deals in different stuff, you will learn the difference. When you get higher levels, you will (a) be taxed when you enter town and (b) want to use the TREES which teleport you to other places. This means you will need to carry some money with you. Also there are some items you will want to buy in the various shops, so go visit them and LIST their goods. BEING POPULAR Everyone loves a good PARTY. When you a few friends band up the monsters go down easier. Check the help files for party info. Basically, put the TANKS (hit point high people) in front and the spellcasters in back. Make SURE the spellcaster stands behind a tank, not just in the row behind! (there is a differenct) This will protect your spellcasters and allow all the front row to fight without hurting each other (which ordinarily happens when two people fight the same monster). Parties automatically split the exp of kills no matter who lands the final blow. There are good books in the library on how to party effectively. LEARN TO PARTY. It is ESSENTIAL to upper-level adventuring. Your FRIENDS list(s) are lists you can make of people you want to see if they're on. For example, friends -a fred will add Fred to your friends list. from then on'friends' will tell you if Fred is on, how long, if he is busy, in a party, or idle. You can also make different friends lists (one for tanks, one for healers, one for thieves, etc). You can also 'tell friends message' to tell 'message' to everyone on your friends list. Check the help file. THE IMMORTALS 'friends -w' lists all WIZARDS, the immortals who code and run the Mud. DO NOT TAUNT THE HAPPY FUN WIZARDS. It is not good for you. Bother them only in cases of Mudwide catastrophe, like bugs in the game which are very flagrant (a room you cannot exit MIGHT qualify). Read 'help when to ask a wizard' and, when in doubt, ask a mortal first. If you see something you think is wrong, you can use the BUG command, like this: bug I see this happen (message) and I dont think it's supposed to. This way the wizards can get to it when they have the time. Odds are it is not a huge bug, but report really wierd stuff if you have reason. There is also the TYPO command, which works like this typo the word 'bugbaer' should be spelled 'bugbear' or whatever. Typo messages, like bug messages, are the best way to bring a matter to a wiz's attention unless it is of immediate and dire mudwide consequence. If you get the message 'Your sensitive mind notices a wrongness in the fabric of space' that means something is wrong for sure. Use the bug command and tell where you are and what you were doing when the message happened. You might also use a channel or two to tell people what happened (this could be a case where the alert channel is the one to use). MUD ETTIQUETTE There is more to being popular than just partying. If you consistantly do stupid or annoying things, the other players (most of whom can grind you into powder) will object violently. These are things to avoid doing: -- talking or using channels in ALL CAPS. ITS LIKE SHOUTING! -- 'stealing kills' which means entering a room, with someone in it, and killing a monster in that room. If someone gets to a monster first, ask their permission to kill it, and respect their answer. -- also if there are items on the floor in a room with someone in it, such as a corpse or money, ask them if its theirs before taking. -- do not use the [alert] channel for reasons other than important emergencies. -- spamming, repeating the same message over and over in a short time span, is wrong. -- do not use 'look' at other PLAYERS unless they look at you first, for some players are paranoid about thieves and will kill you first and ask questions later. -- never demand anything. You are a newbie, no-one will listen. -- and most importantly of all, do not finger or tell a wizard unless you are VERY sure it is important. ALIGNMENT For most newbies align doesnt matter but for RELIGIOUS it does. The 'cure' spells are for good players only, and the 'cause' spells are for evil only. Your alignment changes when you kill monsters, and killing good things makes you turn evil and vice versa. Learn which monsters are good and evil by asking on the religious channel. Or cast the spell detect alignment. CORPSES When you leave a monster's body lying about, it can GET UP AND KILL YOU! Thats right, I'm talking about UNDEAD which are evil aggressive monsters. Undead are very hard to damage and, worse, will wander around into other areas and kill the players in there. If players find out you are leaving corpses around, they will ALSO find you and kill you. This will not be fun. GET RID OF CORPSES. (a) carry them (b) 'dig grave' with a shovel (c) use a skill (fresh pants) spell (preseve corpse) or tinning kit (a tinning kit costs 800 gold pieces, and turns corpses into food). But just dont leave them there! STRANGE ITEMS Sometimes you will find an item on a monster and say 'Huh?' for it will not be a weapon, armor, or gold. These items include (but are not limited to): BOXES are money storage units which are always found locked and are like small safes, in that they are both heavy and hard to open. The best thing to do with a box is use the Wanted channel to ask for a 'box opener', who is a strong person who will pry open the box. Boxes are almost always trapped with deadly force: electrical charges, clouds of gas, poison needles, or maybe the box will explode into a million pieces. When opened, the box will have a lot of money of a random type. Some boxes carry a million mowgles! Remember to thank the box opener and give him/her a fair share. GEMS are smaller items with a random value. If you find 'a shiny topaz' or 'a damaged alexandrite' it is a gem, which can be sold for anywhere between 6 and 6000 gold (depending on quality and mineral). There are over 500 kinds of randomly generated gems, you will learn to distinguish what is a gem and what is some other wierd thing. SCROLLS are spells on a piece of paper. 'look at scroll' tells you the incantation, such as 'siwwis mof' or whatever. Use the Wanted or Magical/ Religious channels to find out the spell on the scroll. When you 'read scroll' you will activate the magic, at yourself. Most scrolls carry defensive or miscellaneous, rather than offensive or travel, powers. WANDS are sticks that can fire off a spell at another target, several times. A wand will have a pair of numbers (3/100 or the like) behind it. The first number is the number of remaining charges. The second number is the percent of the wand that is ready to fire. You can only use a wand if the first number is more than 0, and the second number is 100. Some wands will have an obvious effect, like the 'wand of fire' but some will be mysterious 'an ivory wand' and you have 3 choices: sell, identify, or experiment. Playing with unidentified wands in crowded rooms could make you unpopular, so at lower levels you may wish to sell the wands. POTIONS are flasks with colored liquid. Monsters rarely carry these but should you see one, check if it has a label. Drinking unidentified potions is very risky, but potions are like scrolls in that the effect applies to you and is not often offensive. Potions of healing effects are very popular, and the potions which remove poison are very much in demand. SAVING ITEMS/REBOOT Every 12 hours (not exact) the mighty ARMAGEDDON THE GAME CRASHER will appear. When he does, he will announce the coming of the REBOOT. This means the mud will shut down for a while, then start over. You will be forced to quit when this happens. It also will destroy all equiptment (but not money) you are carrying, plus killing all monsters and items in the mud world. The reboot happens at midnight and noon EET. You can 'tell damogran boot' to see when the next reboot is coming, and you can use UPTIME to see how long the mud has been up (when uptime gets close to 12 hours, the reboot is imminent.) As I mentioned, reboot will kill all your stuff. There are three ways to preserve your stuff: (1) the RENT ROOMS on the map cost 3000 gold per 24 hours. If you have an item that is very valuable, you might consider renting a room. Put your items in the basket and CLOSE the basket, and they will be preserved over the reboot. (2) CASTLES can save stuff in CHESTS and SAFES. However these cost a lot of gold (over 300 thousand in gold) plus need guards to deter theives, so you will need to wait on that. (3) CRASH RECOVERY can occur if the mud crashes, or dies for a reason other than scheduled reboot. There is a good chance that any items you are carrying will be retrieved, but not 100%. ADVANCED NEWBIEDOM At higher newbie levels, you will be able to do other areas effectively. Some upper newbie areas: DIGGA's: Get there by transport, or by following this path: from CS: go east 8 times, walk east, east. This will put you under the huge oak tree. Go east, walk east (you will be in 100-acre-woods), go east. Walk south 4 times, walk west four times (you will be on a town). Walk west, go west onto a road. Walk south, go south, there should be a bard here. Walk west, go west, go west, walk southwest, go southwest. You are now at the entrance of Digga's. Find the park where there are bunnies, frogs, ducks, ants, fish, deer, and some tougher monsters. These monsters tend to carry food. Yum. At the entrance is the shovel dispenser. 'insert coins' to pay 100 gold for a shovel, which can be used to bury the dead. Also the command 'newbiehelp' can be used at the shovel dispenser to get useful stuff. There is a mountain and a town (Raven) in Digga's. Ignore them for now. WANE's MOUNTAIN: the entrance to Wane's is just southwest of the entrance to Digga's. The higher you go on the mountain, the tougher the monsters. They will not have food. This is a large place, you can usually find monsters there. Sarku's Temple: Transport here. This is way out in the middle of nowhere, but the junior priests, guards, worshippers and recruits can be killed. Sarku's Cornfields: A very popular spot, but full of hostile monsters and even more full of high level players. The skeletons, orcs, and mantisses are about the same strength and not too hard, the barbarians (which wander) are tougher. All will be killed by a single acid arrow spell. The trolls and monks are tougher and hit much harder. This area is good for levels 20 and up soloing but not usually worth partying. The Chessboard: transport here. The white pawns are an acid arrow kill, while the black pawns are noticably stronger. For your own safety do NOT go to the far south or north end of the chessboard under any circumstance. Use the 'peer' command to tell yourself how close to the north edge/south edge you are. Once you are an advanced newbie you should have a purpose to advancing. You should focus on one thing at a time, like the skill 'attack' or 'long blades'. Remember that once you hit level 16, skills and spells cost money and experience to advance. This is perfectly normal. I do NOT plan on adding guild descriptions since they will change relatively soon, and I want this book to be useful before and after conversion. For the same reason I leave out specific level quests. Shinarae Lluminus the Lightning Mage

Login to BatWeb

Forgot your password?

Library: Work in Progress