Building Standards

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PROJECTS FOR BUILDERS

For these projects, we'd like you to take on areas that we've loosely defined. Room names are largely placeholders to indicate our general thoughts on what should go into the room, so you can edit them - as long as you're making them more 'specific'. I.e., if a room's already got a quite specific name, try to work with it rather than change it, but generic names like "Trade Alley" are 100% up to grabs for changing.

You may have some rooms with pre-existing comments in the desc - these are meant as a general guide to help you envision what's there. Lean into them, but if the feel just seems wrong you have the freedom to go in a different direction.

While the room skeletons are already built out, you may find yourself thinking an area needs another room. It's okay to add on, just make sure you let us know what you added where.

Areas to Describe

District 1 - Staff will likely largely handle D1.

- The Commerce Hub
  • Feel: A middle-class mini-mall; a place for fun novelty shopping. Bright and cheerful, but slightly shows its age.
  • Rooms: 9 rooms. Can expand if you have ideas, but remember a full-sized mall is already in D3.
    • Three PC shops, each with a back room, plus:
      • The Commerce Hub itself: The big central room, design it as you please.
      • Hall of Autokiosks: A combination vending-machine-extravaganza + museum to the first autokiosks, with a few historical ones from alpha ported in as examples.
      • The Food Hall: A food court of easy, fast mid-scale eats.
- City Hall
  • Feel: Wealthy, bureaucratic, classy - not ostentatious, but the quiet seat of power.
  • Rooms: Currently 24 rooms, on three roughly identical floors of 7-9 rooms each. We'll want room for expansion if need be, especially on the ground floor.
    • First floor: General city bureaucracy rooms, including an auditorium for large meetings.
    • Second floor: MBC HQ, including the Governor General's offfice.
    • Third floor: IOB HQ, with offices, meeting rooms, etc.
  • The fourth and fifth floors are reserved for the Stellar Chamber project - those will be described separately.

- ACC Station

  • Feel: Practical, busy, utilitarian but lived-in enough to add some character.
  • Rooms: 13 rooms on 2 floors in first draft. Rune will want to work with you and potentially change the structure.
    • First floor: A public lobby, but the rest is mostly devoted to holding cells, interrogation rooms, etc. Also a parking garage with quick access to the vehicular airlock.
    • Second floor: A more ACC-specific lobby/break-room space with private offices and conference rooms.

District 2

- Pawn Alley
  • Feel: Grungy, crowded, low-class and a little sinister, but vibrantly alive.
  • Rooms: 8 rooms, though you can expand it some if you like:
    • Two rooms of Pawn Alley itself, a main street and an ending cul de sac;
    • A drugstore with a shady backroom;
    • A pawn store, a butcher's shop selling a lot of hunted/scavenged meat and animal parts, a laundromat, and a coffee shop.
      • We don't know yet what animals we'll have so the butcher's shop will probably need to be left a bit vague.
- Refinery Row
  • Feel: Greasy, oily - this is where the city's most industrial works are shuttered away. The reason D2 was made, to contain it.
  • Rooms: 7 rooms, but please do feel free to expand, especially on the plants:
    • Biochemical Plant - currently only one room + a rooftop, but could likely use expansion and definition of WHAT it produces;
    • Waste Management Plant - main room, sewage reclamation, + junkyard. Waste management in the Districts is typically very good, but treasures do end up in the junkyard sometimes, and scavenging is big there.
      • ICly, sewage is filtered through a lot of different subsystems and what would end up here would be a gigantic tank
    • Banerjee's Chop Shop - shop selling machine parts and other things reclaimed from the junkyard.
- Catwalk System
  • Feel: Makeshift, cobbled-together, dangerous parkour course over old maintenance walkways, rooftops, etc. Allows faster but riskier travel over D2, will have a lot of jumping/climbing when we get that working.
  • Rooms: 20 rooms at the moment - may need to wait until most of the areas UNDER the catwalks are described to fill in descs.

District 3

- Street of Lights
  • Feel: Bright, colorful, commerce and electronics-oriented - not the classiest place, but plenty of wealth and energy.
  • Rooms: ~12 rooms - 4 actual "Street of Lights" rooms, and then several attached shops.
    • Arcade: A 4-story arcade, where each floor can specialize in different kind of games. Include VR stuff and wild futuristic tech as you wish!
    • A vehicle store that will sell cars/bikes - may end up needing expansion beyond its 1 current room
    • A tech crafting store - you won't be able to fill in the wares yet, but in general this will sell parts for improving/building electronics. A makerspace will be included.
    • An electronics store - probably the place where people buy whatever form of 'pda' we use.
- Mall
  • Feel: Blatantly commercial and highly manicured, especially on the upper floors. These should have very distinct feels to the separate spaces to cater to specific clientele.
  • Rooms: ~21 rooms across three floors.
    • Bottom Floor: 3 huge flagship stores.
      • Alamilla's Emporium of Possibility - A huge department store type place.
      • Market Hub - Another huge general store.
      • Supermarket - Gigantic supermarket. Main food selling location for most people.
    • 2nd Floor: Has two separate wings, each with three stores off of them, so:
      • Off of a Garden Courtyard: This is an area for fun. Toy store, music store, sports store;
      • Off of some other courtyard: An area for fashionable shopping. Accessories store, glasses store, makeup store
    • 3rd Floor: Similar 2-wing design:
      • Off of a Neon Corner: An area for cutting edge stuff. Programming store (sells programs), techno fabric store, and a new agey kinda shop.
      • Off of a little Coffee Shop: An area for cozy things. A home decor shop, kitchen equipment shop, houseplant shop
- Trade Alley (Rename Me Please)
  • Feel: A little more old-timey, an area that focuses on more 'trade' jobs - i.e., woodworking, mechanics, lapidary, etc. Still plenty of tech and machinery, but less digital.
  • Rooms: 11-12 (MERLIN hall is already described)
    • Arms and Armory - Weapon/armor shop, with a shooting range and a workshop for making armor.
    • Votech Hall - A school for vocational technical learning - machining and mechanics, primarily. Has a classroom and a machine shop, but you can expand.
    • Craft Corner - West side of Trade Alley, has a woodworking shop (upstairs luthier) and a lapidary shop (upstairs jewelry store, mostly simple stuff
- Festival Grounds
  • Feel: Just imagine your local fairgrounds, basically. A space for public outdoor events.
  • Rooms: Only 4 at the moment - a big track field for athletic competitions; an open meadow; an exhibit hall; and a big stage.

District 4

- University
  • Feel: Elite, polished, new, full of money.
  • Rooms: 13. One central courtyard, with six branches. One branch is just a big atrium for a social space that leads to an auditorium for any events. The other branches are 5 schools. Each school branch is 2 rooms, the various schools having one big 'general room' meant as a study hub with a lot of classrooms and the like existing in the background.
    • School of Medicine - One of the wealthier ones, CyGene sponsored of course.
    • School of Engineering - Also wealthier.
    • School of Agriculture - AHB-sponsored. Not as posh but there's still clear money backing it.
    • School of Natural Sciences - Chemistry part is well-supported - the rest less so.
    • School of Liberal Arts - The newest yet most makeshift wing - covering a huge number of things not covered in the other schools. Clearly stretching their funding.
- Hospital
  • Feel: Busy, clean, still a little bit primitive by Earth standards but with a lot of money behind it.
  • Rooms: 11 on Floor 1, which is almost all public. 9 on Floor 2, which is basically CyGene-locked.
    • Floor 1:
      • The east wing is for inpatients (3 hospital rooms + lobby);
      • The west wing is for emergency/treatment (1 OR, 2 treatment rooms, 1 lobby);
      • The north wing just leads to a cafeteria and a CyGene-locked supply room.
    • Floor 2:
      • An upstairs lobby is accessible to anyone but every door beyond it is CyGene-locked.
      • East wing is a training space - classroom, medical library, VR practice suite.
      • West wing is a lab space - autopsy room, chemistry lab, cold storage.
      • Between them is a break room.

- Pleasure Garden

  • Feel: Luxurious, indulgent; this is a place to relax in beauty. A lot of rare imported Earth plants, specifically. You can feel free to add any interesting sci-fi touches you want too.
  • Rooms: 4 at the moment, though you can expand -
    • Entryway botanical garden
    • A greenhouse
    • A rose garden
    • An orchid garden

Crafts to Assist With:

Tailoring

- Needs additional recipes beyond shirt and pants to cover a wide arrange of possible wear locations - note items can only be assigned to one wearloc.

- Needs additional bolts of fabric. Lean heavily into sci-fi ideas like interesting synthetics, but you can certainly include fabrics woven from Artemis native plants as well.

Hydroponics

- Needs additional plants defined with their stages and products. Check with Vraska.

BASIC STANDARDS

Desc Length:

3-5 sentences - you can go longer for a very complicated or unusual room, but if it's too long, consider putting some details on items instead so people can look at them separately.

Desc Style:

Person: Third person (so don't use 'you').

Spelling: Uniform American spelling throughout - use color, theater, center, etc. The one exception is "grey" because that just sounds way better than "gray".

Tense: Write all descriptions in present tense (i.e., "Slate tiles stretch across the plaza", not "Slate tiles stretched across the plaza.")

Contents: Focus on giving a general feeling of the area, the most obvious features, and adding some details to make it lively and interesting. You CAN include items in the descs in the same way you can in Untold Dawn right now.

Desc Examples:

D1 Pedestrian Airlock (#140)

A graceful glass dome rises about ten meters in height here, the light of Artemis's sun dimmed by smoky grey hexagonal panes overhead.  Foot traffic flows smoothly in two separate directions, black-tiled floors ringing with the constant footsteps of those exiting east toward Callysto Crater or west into the great domed City itself. The two streams of humanity are neatly divided by a great cylindrical column of clear glass, serving as the centerpiece of this space. Within it, an ancient fossil towers nearly all the way to the ceiling: blackened ribs protruding from a jagged nest of obsidian flakes, as if caught mid-eruption from volcanic earth.

M.E.R.L.I.N. Corporation - Craft Hall (#216)

   This vast hall is the heart of tailoring on Artemis. Rows of MERLIN workbenches line the floor, each paired with a cloth dispenser that whirs softly as fabric slides through mechanical arms. The air carries the faint scent of ozone and synthetic dye, the ambient chatter of tailors weaving through the mechanical drone. Above it all, the company's emblem - a sharp cyan sigil etched in chrome - casts a cold, white light across the room, glinting off mannequins half-dressed in prototypes of workwear and urban uniforms. Representatives of the MERLIN Corporation move between stations, clipboards in hand, observing and advising those who come here to rent their devices.

SETTING THE MOOD

We want things to have a cyberpunk-esque feel - technology embedded heavily in daily life, neon lights, colorful graffiti, profound contrasts between the rich and the poor.

But we also want to make them reflect the reality of life on Artemis. The city is multicultural, with a melting pot of different Earth influences. When you name NPCs or create restaurants, for example, consider looking all across the world for inspiration.

And Artemis itself has its own specific influences. For example, you can think about how people might use abundant local resources like obsidian or quoraja wood to decorate. You can create novel local resources too - but be sure to run them by the staff!

Living in a domed city is also very different from living in an open one. Space is at a premium, so people are very good at maximizing their use of vertical space as well (i.e., rooftop and window gardening, Murphy beds, etc.) Feel free to build UP rather than OUT, as long as it makes sense with the map.

Sample Building Materials

You're not limited to this list, but it'll hopefully be helpful guidance:

Limestone bricks - Most of D1 and D4's buildings are probably made with these. D1 because it was easy with all the dug-up limestone - D4 because it was classy.

Obsidian - There's tons of obsidian around, so it can be used as a decorative element in all kinds of ways. Smoky obsidian glass might be used for lower-quality windows, for example, whereas normal clear glass would be used for better ones. But decorative objects or inlays of obsidian would be distinctly higher-class.

Concrete - Likely a lot of cheaper buildings, especially in D2 and some parts of D3, use concrete instead of limestone.

Slate tiles - The default pedestrian outdoor flooring when nothing too fancy is called for.

MolecuFlex - A self-healing dark flexible material used for making highways.

Chromex - An alloy of primarily steel combined with multiple other metals, tempered to be lightweight, flexible, and strong. The Hab/Expeditor was largely made of this, it seems like, so panels from that might have been repurposed for makeshift structures (especially in D2). Prettier versions of this might be used alongside high-quality glass for cutting-edge, corporate buildings.

Area-Specific Details

D1:

The oldest part of the city. Built to be comfortable, pleasant, and somewhat utilitarian. The central plaza is floored in slate tiles, and most buildings are made from limestone bricks. However, some buildings (like City Hall) are on the much fancier side, while others may be a bit humbler. The vast majority of the city lives here in some nebulous middle-class state

D2:

Built explicitly for holding industrial facilities and the waste treatment plant, D2 is not pretty. People were not originally intended to live here, so the infrastructure for them is poorly supported. Think rusty catwalks, lean-tos and shanties, and even spaces carved out of the rock. Kinda go wild with grease, smog, and nooks and crannies. Note that the existing area carved out of the rock (beginning at #522 and going north/east/up) is a generally criminal area.

D3:

Built as the civic heart of the city, it has huge variability between its zones. The Street of Lights is full of tech and futuristic things - think Akihabara, Tokyo, Japan for inspiration. But the more explicitly Civic Alley (please rename this for me) is a lot more low-key with a focus on culture, and then the Trade Alley area (also please rename this) is more industrial.

D4:

D4 was built for the rich elites who were awoken at the end, so it should be absolutely gorgeous. Hearken back to classical Earth architecture and snobbery, but feel free to add some wild sci-fi inspiration too. The theme is luxury for the elite.

City Layout Notes

The city is made of four huge domes, interconnected by a network of tunnels, subways, and roads.

Each dome consists of one gigantic central plaza, which is four rooms in game - so D1 Northeast, D1 Northwest, etc. From these plazas, there are side streets and alleyways arching off in different directions.

D1, D3, and D4 are free-standing domes, while D2 is more like a half-dome, sloping down from the top of the cliff. This means D2 has some rooms built into the rock itself, and more verticality, especially at that back wall.

BUILDING COMMANDS

Getting Around

Welcome to mooWorld! You have some very basic commands you'll want to know.

First off, to avoid getting lost:

@teleport <me or ID> to #ID to get around. ID can be a person or a place. You can't do @teleport me to Rune, for example,

@find has a lot of uses - @find <person> will give you their ID and their location, for example. See help @find for more. Note that you can't find rooms by name, though, so you might need to refer to our map or use @addroom below.

@exits to see the full details of the room's exits.

@sethome sets the room you're in to be your 'home'; you will always log in there. @home takes you back there.

@addroom <name> saves the ID of the room you're in right now to a list you can see at any time by typing @rooms.

Basic Concepts

Everything in the beta is an object, defined by properties. Items can always be referred to by their number, such as #140 - the D1 Pedestrian Airlock Room. The # is required!

The qualities that define how objects work are typically inherited from their parents.

For example: Every room in the beta is a member of the class $rp_room, which means that among its parents it has object #104 (Generic Roleplay Room). You can refer it to it as being a $rp_room or having #104 as a parent interchangeably, in this case; parents that you use a lot can be defined as classes. Having #104 as a parent means a room comes pre-defined with certain qualities and coded logic, usually in the form of verbs (commands people can do within the room) or properties.

The command @parents #id shows you every parent object that is influencing a specific thing (person, place, or item). So if I type @parents #140 - which is the D1 Pedestrian Airlock Room - I'll see Generic Roleplay Room (#104) listed.

And @kids $rp_room shows you every room that's in the game. This IS spammy!

Viewing/Changing Properties

Properties are kind of the life-blood of setting things up. They're basically the variables where specific information gets stored, which allows builders to really flesh out the world once coders write logic.

@show #itemID to see the properties of any given item.

@set #itemID.property to "whatever" to change most properties.

A few properties do have special commands, for ease's sake:

@describe #itemID as "whatever" to set a description.

@rename #iotemID to "whatever" to change an item's name.

Room Creation, Step by Step:

STOP!

Before you build any rooms, type:

@build-option dig_exit $rp_exit

@build-option dig_room $rp_room

These will set you up so any new room you make defaults to an rp_room type and the exits to rp_exit types. It will save you so much annoyance. That said!

Making A New Room

You may not have to do too much of this, but it's ok to expand on the existing rooms if you've got good ideas in mind.

@dig creates a new room and, potentially, exits to it. review help @dig in-game for details, as you can make a room without exits, a room with one-way exists, etc.

But for a short version, @dig direction1,dir1alias|direction2,dir2alias to "New Room Name".

@dig west,w|east,e to "District One - Northwestern Plaza"

District One - Northwestern Plaza (#153) created.

Exit from District One - Northeastern Plaza (#147) to District One - Northwestern Plaza (#153) via {"west", "w"} created with id #154.

Exit from District One - Northwestern Plaza (#153) to District One - Northeastern Plaza (#147) via {"east", "e"} created with id #155.

IF for some reason your rooms are not rp_rooms or your exits not rp_exits, you can fix it with:

@chparent #roomid to $rp_room

@chparent #exitid to $rp_exit

@chparent #exit2id to $rp_exit

Set a Room Description:

@describe #roomid as "Description Here"

This is pretty easy, huh? If you forget the room ID, you can use:

where, if you're there;

@kids $rp_room, to see a list of every rproom and name in-game;

@addroom <name> #number, to remember a room in a list you can see with @rooms;

Setting Up Exits:

This is largely just done through setting certain properties. Note, if you forget an exit's ID, @exits in a room will show you.

Here is exit #142, which appears in the room as:

The truly massive dome of District One is accessible via the western airlock (west).

Looking at the properties of it with @show #142, we see the four I set, using @set #exitID.property to "words here":

long_description: "The truly massive dome of District One is accessible via %n."

begin_move_emote: "%N joins the queue waiting to depart through %t."

move_emote: "With a soft hiss of recycled air and a blast of UV decontamination, %N slips through %t."

arrive_emote: "%N steps through into the dome of District One."

How does this look in game?

Silver joins the queue waiting to depart through the western airlock.

With a soft hiss of recycled air and a blast of UV decontamination, Silver slips through the western airlock.

District One - Southeastern Plaza

You can go east (east) from here.

You can go north (north).

Silver steps through into the dome of District One.

Pronoun Substitution

If you're writing exit messages, you're going to want to sub things in. For example, a standard exit message is "%N begins to move toward the %t."

help $string_utils:pronoun_sub has a list of all of the pronouns, which is pretty intense. A shorter guide:

Names

%N for the person doing the action (Like @ on old UD);

%t for the target of the action - the exit name, for example;

%d for the direct object - not likely to be used in exits but in some potential crafting messages;

%i for the indirect object - ditto as above;

%l for the location where the action was performed - fills in the room name, if for some reason you need that.

Pronouns

%s: subject; he/she/they

%o: object: him/her/them

%p: possessive, dependent: his/her/their. I.e., it's his/her/their <object>

%q: possessive, independent: his/hers/theirs. I.e., "the <object> is his/hers/theirs."

%r: reflexive: himself/herself/themself

Making Items:

If you want to put in an item into a room, it's pretty simple too:

@create $rp_thing called "name here"

You may then want to @addalias <shorter name> to #itemID. For example, @create $rp_thing called "a fossilized leviathan" will need @addalias leviathan to #itemid for 'look leviathan' to work.

Drop the item in the room.

Describe it using @describe as you please. If you would like this item to have any special coded function, make a note of that to present to Rune.

You can do @set #itemID.integrated=1 to make it integrated.

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