Sinister Guide

From LSWiki

Work in Progress

Introduction

This is Sinister Stair's newbie guide, in the same tradition as the venerated Newbie Ramblings. This guide differs in that it's written for players who are already familiar with muds and their conventions, but are experiencing Lost Souls for the first time.

I have played literally hundreds of LPmuds and Dikus and administrated two (Hero & Hero II, Batmud); and Lost Souls has one of the steepest learning curves. This is the page I'd send friends from other muds, to give them the crash course in LS.

Differences

Some of Lost Souls's commands don't behave as you'd expect them to on other muds. The most significant are:

• alias - Works as you'd expect, but the syntax is set alias <alias> to <commands>
• brief - This isn't a toggle; instead, you need to specify brief or verbose
• nickname - This isn't a substitution, but rather renames how you see things. Nicknames don't have to be unique (and, FYI, you can embed color codes into them).

• depiction - LS is displayed in a Diku style by default; if you prefer the LP style, this is what you want to tweak.

Must Know

Commands or topics that you absolutely must know about Lost Souls:

• info - Perhaps the most important command, this gives you OOC information on how to interact with trainers, item command words, etc.
• lens - Clear lenses [of insight] are used to identify cultures, races, people, special items, etc. For example, if you see a "red-eyed shadow-creature" and identify it, you may then recognize it as "Sinister Stairs, neuter nyloc."
• memorize - After you identify something, you'll want to memorize it so it saves. If you ever reach your memory limit, you can always forget unnecessary.
• attack preference - Sets your attack priority (e.g. weapon very high, punch low) or disable attacks you don't want to use (e.g. kick)
• defense preference - Sets your defenses (e.g. block with shield, not your hand)
• keep and keep points - Crucial for saving your items. I need to add more info here.
• affiliation types - Maps out what guilds/affiliations can join one another.
• specialties - Determines your skill maximums.
• brief combat - Personally I even find brief combat too verbose. I'll post my tt++ combat substitutions below.

tt++

I use the tintin++ client and have most of the world mapped. I'll include my mapfiles here, so others can use it, along with my combat substitutions, guild triggers, etc.