We have a wilderness, or overworld, system, of creating large outdoor areas, that are modelled as a grid, and sophisticated support for patching either hand-coded zones, or specific objects, into them.

Viewing a wilderness

You can use the 'bigmap' command to see a map as big as possible for your screen.

Wandering around without let or hindrance

Simply go to an air-above location. E.g. goin @wild_20:20+3.

Form, alt, flow here will affect the location below. The desc and stuff of the above location will not be updated, but that's ok.

Patching a zone in

Firstly find the zone object. For example, wilderness_zone for the livingstone wilderness. If you type 'wilds', this gives a list of currently loaded wildernesses.

Then, decide where you want to patch in. For example, you might want @wild_10:10 to be patched in. So, then set wilderness_zone's "10:10" property to the location you want to make it.

When an exit to 10:10 is then next generated (you can force an update by 'form now' in the room you want the exit to be regenerated in), it will instead be pointed at whereever you pointed it at.

NB return exits from your room back into the wilderness will have to be created manually

Decide what exits you want to be allowed from the wilderness to your loc. For example rsf_1 is only accessible from the east. This is accomplished by doing BarWest, BarSouth, and BarNorth on the location.

If you want your patched in area to be described, set the "landmark" property on it. For example, ocean_1 has "landmark" set to "a small building, jutting into the sea", and this causes "To the west, you see a small building, jutting into the sea." to be shown to the east of it, and "Far in the west, you see a small building, jutting into the sea." two to the east.

Editing Wilderness

The "form" command is used to change the wilderness location you are currently in to a particular terrain type.

A list of terrain types is given should you just type "form". To make a location be a road do "form road" at it, to make it be swamp do "form swamp". This will update the desc and the exits of this room and the four adjacent rooms.

"Form now" in a room to force a change.

After you've made a river/bridge you might want to do "flow south" or similar, this will make the river flow south. :)

Forming Blocks

If you want to form a lot of locations that happen to be in a rectangle or in a circle, you can!

For a rectangle, go to the northwest corner, then use 'formrect', e.g. formrect 10 1 road, will make a 10 location road to the east, and formrect 10 20 sea will make a 10x20 sea.

Formcircle can be used to make circles. See its help for more details.

Airless/Not Airless and Global Temperature Changes

If the Airless flag is set on the wilderness's zone, then all wilderness locations will end up Airless. Likewise, Hot, Cold and TempExtreme will get copied.

Saving the wilderness

Wildwrite (for short wildw) will save the wilderness. Changes to the zone object about patching will need that zone saving.

Making objects start in the wilderness

Displace them there and unreset them. That's all.

Making an "in" exit from the wilderness

Make it elsewhere and then see above.

Making a new Wilderness

Use the 'makewild' command.

Making new terrain types/adding stuff

Er, add it to the bug tracker ;).