Wildernesses are now defined using a global pool of template rooms, rather than information hardcoded in the source code. Hurrah! This means you can now create your own terrain types, or update/improve/fix/replace existing terrains.

The bad news is that creating a detailed wilderness location is not simple. This doc may either help you, or discourage you. It is all good. Don't break existing templates, as it will screw up existing wildernesses.

Don't delete any existing templates. We really mean this.

Contents

• Overview
• Display Traps and Attributes
• Configuration Attributes
• Custom wildernesses
• Caveats
• Known bugs and issues

Terraforming for Non-Deities

A basic wilderness terrain type needs 5 different blocks of descriptive text.

Name

Grassland

Room description

You are in an area of grassland

What it looks like from nearby locations

There is some grassland to the <direction>

What it looks like from distant locations

There is some grassland in the distance to the <direction>

What it looks like when a location is surrounded by this type of terrain

You are in the middle of an expanse of grassland

Every single type needs these. Additionally, descriptions can be improved if a location supports these additional descriptive strings:

What it looks like when there are several bits of this terrain visible to nearby locations

There are ponds <direction>

As above, but for distance locations

There are ponds in the distance <direction>

What it looks like when bits of the same kind of terrain adjoin each other

The river continues to the <direction>

What it looks like when you are flying high above the terrain

There is a forest far below you

Special cases also exist for certain types of terrain which have additional behaviours defined for them

What it looks like when you are underneath the terrain

You are underneath a bridge

What it looks like when you are above the terrain

You are in the branches of a tree in a forest

You also need to provide a little icon for how the terrain looks in the wilderness (mini)map, for example %% for prarie locations.

Each of these strings can be defined in two ways. The easy way is to have a single predefined string attribute. The complicated way is to use a lua trap, capable of returning different strings depending on the specific details of the room. This is used to display a freshwater wilderness location as a lake, river or pond depending on its expanse, and whether it flows or not.

Display Traps and Attributes

Attribute	Trap	Use
name	lua.wild_name	The name of the terrain to people in, under or over it, and in exit lists of adjacent locations
desc.internal	lua.wild_desc	The basic description of the terrain to people in, under or over it
wild.near	lua.wild_desc_near	Description of the terrain in an adjacent location	%s
wild.near.plural	lua.wild_near_plural	Description in an adjacent location which is itself adjacent to several instances of the terrain	%s
wild.same	lua.wild_same	Description when an instance of this terrain is adjacent to another instance of the terrain	%s
wild.same.all	lua.wild_same_all	Description when totally surrounded by instances of this terrain
wild.far	lua.wild_desc_far	Description of terrain when seen from a distant location	%s
wild.far.plural	lua.wild_desc_far_plural	Description when an a location can see several instance of this terrain in the distance	%s
wild.far.same	lua.wild_same_far
wild.far.same.all	lua.wild_same_far_all
wild.near.far	lua.wild_desc_near_far
wild.near.far.plural	lua.wild_desc_near_far_plural
wild.surrounded	lua.wild_desc_surrounded

Configuration Attributes

Of course there are various other important attributes used by the internals of the wilderness generator. If your template lacks theses, it will work oddly, or even not at all.

Attribute	Use
wild.short	This is the name shown in the map key, and what the form command expects as a terrain type. If you miss this out, you'll not be able to form this terrain.
wild.id	This number should be unique to your set of terrain templates. If two terrains share the same id, the last one read in will override all the others. This is handy for creating custom replacements for standard templates
wild.alt	The default altitude of a location. 0 for sea, 1 for beaches, 2 for ‘normal land’, 3 for hills, 4 for mountains etc. The altitude map understands altitudes up to 7
wild.map	The map symbol that shows up in the body of the map, and the map key. Should be a colourcode followed by 2 characters. Don't bother with a closing ^n colourcode.

Custom Wildernesses

I'll assume you've already read the wilderness dev doc, and have successfully created a wilderness for yourself. But this wilderness lacks a certain something... perhaps the sea is the wrong shade of pink. You can however override default wilderness templates, or add your own new templates to your wilderness without affecting any other wilderness in the game.

Create a new room to hold your templates. On the zone object associated with your wilderness, set the wild.templates attribute to be the id of this new room

The easiest way to create wilderness templates is to copy an existing simple one, like wilderness_ice. If you want to create an entirely new terrain type, you'll need to give your template a unique wild.id number. This cannot currently be done easily... you'll just have to go for trial and error. Starting at 30 or 40 is a good idea, so you won't have any weird effects if new global wilderness templates are added.

If you want to override an existing template (like the sea) set the new template's wild.id to be the same as the old template's. For the sea, this would be 0.

Now you must set all of the attributes and traps to fit your new design... I won't go into this in detail, you can work this out for yourself from looking at the template you copied and tweaking it until it fits.

Good luck with that.

Caveat Muppet

The wilderness templates are (or at least should have been) designed to work in sensible circumstances. If you make crazy terrain, you'll get stupid descriptions. This is not the fault of the coders.

Known Bugs

Single terrain types that can look like different things depending on circumstance (beach becoming a sandbank when surrounded by water, freshwater becoming a pond if only one location in size, or becoming a river if it is flowing, etc) can be confused by the describer if several instances of the terrain are visible at a time.

For example, imagine you are in a location, which has a river to the north, and a pond to the south. The describer will not understand they are different, and will combine the two, so you'll just see “There are rivers to the north and south.”. The descriptive text is taken from the first found location going in order north-south-east-west. You can avoid this by putting at least 2 locations between bits of terrain which behave in this way.