Interface

The screen, the prompt, the browser client's panels, and the settings worth changing early.

Rogue works in any terminal or MUD client, and it also has a purpose-built browser client with panels, a live map and a skill bar. The world is identical either way. This page covers what you see, and what you can change about it.

The screen#

Everything arrives as a stream of text. Rooms print a name, a description, the exits, and then anything living or lying about in them. Combat prints a line per exchange. Channels and tells arrive as they are spoken.

Text is wrapped to your screen width. The server negotiates that automatically with clients that support it, and screen shows what it currently thinks your window is. screen <width> <height> sets it by hand if the guess is wrong. Width is accepted between 40 and 250, height between 10 and 100.

Colour is on by default. colors prints a swatch of the sixteen standard colours and the bold and reset codes; colors list prints the full 256-colour palette. If your client cannot cope with colour at all, terminal unknown strips it out entirely.

The prompt#

The default prompt is a plain >. That is all it is, and players cannot reconfigure the main prompt.

What you can configure is the combat prompt, which replaces it while you are fighting. Its default is:

HP |$h/$H| SP |$g/$G| EP |$i/$I|$A $C

That is your three resource pools, health, spell points and endurance, followed by your adrenaline if you are a warrior and the condition of whatever you are fighting. settings combat prompt <format> sets your own, and settings combat prompt reset puts the default back. The tokens available are:

Colour codes work inside the format string, so settings combat prompt %^RED%^$h%^RESET%^/$H hp is valid. In the browser client the plain > prompt is deliberately hidden during combat, because the client draws its own input line.

The browser client#

The client at rogue-mud.com/play opens full screen. In the middle is the game output, at the bottom is the command line, and around them sit panels you turn on and off as you like.

Three things are always present. The Status Bar sits above the command line with labelled bars for health, spell points and endurance, plus a bar for your current target and how much of it is left. The Skill Bar is twelve slots mapped to F1 through F12, each showing its skill's artwork and sweeping through its cooldown. And a small mini-map hovers at the top right; it is draggable, and its own minus button collapses it.

The rest are optional. New characters start with all of them switched off, so if the client looks bare, that is why. The eye icon in the top bar opens the View menu, where each panel cycles through off, auto and on. "Auto" means the panel appears only when it has something to show.

Left-hand panels

• Character is your sheet: stat bars, experience, guild, clan, religion, background, age, hours played and your last fight.
• Inventory is everything you carry, with weight, click-to-look, and buttons for organising, stacking and bulk selling or dropping.
• Passives shows your class passives as cards. Click an unlocked one to equip it, click an equipped one to take it off.
• Crafting holds your crafting resources by discipline.
• Quests lists what you have accepted and what is left to do.
• Mapper is the full map, which follows you as you walk and can be searched, exported and browsed by layer and realm.

Right-hand panels

• Conditions shows every buff, debuff and effect on you with its remaining time.
• Cooldowns shows only what is currently on cooldown, longest first, ticking down live.
• Group shows your party with health bars, plus your pets, minions and heroes, and a button to invite.
• Communications is a tabbed chat window: all, chat, guild, group, tells, says and religion.

The View menu also chooses whether the bars sit along the bottom or down the right side, and whether they are small, medium or large. The wrench icon opens tools, including a script editor for triggers, aliases, timers and keybinds, and a Reset Layout option if you make a mess of things.

Settings worth changing early#

Almost every preference lives under one command. Typing settings on its own prints the menu.

settings display brief on shortens room descriptions to just the name and exits. It is a good idea once you know an area, and a bad one while you are still exploring it. brief on and brief off do the same thing directly.

settings combat controls how much combat text you see. New characters have everything switched on, which is right while you are learning and noisy once you are not. Individual message types can be silenced:

settings combat own_miss off
settings combat foe_miss off
settings combat npc_miss off

The full set is own_miss, foe_miss, player_hit, player_miss, npc_hit, npc_miss and condition. settings combat all switches everything back on.

settings colors opens an interactive picker for your channel colours, and settings colors reset undoes it. speakcolor <colour> sets the colour you see speech in. chancolors off strips colour out of channel message bodies if you find them busy.

settings inventory, settings buffs, settings skills, settings score and settings wealth each change how that display is laid out and coloured.

settings blind on is a single accessibility preset: brief mode on, colour stripped, simple list layouts everywhere, and all decorative borders removed. It is worth knowing about whether or not you use a screen reader, because it also produces the cleanest possible output for a narrow terminal.

settings display timezone <zone> puts game timestamps in your own time. settings display keepalive on stops idle connections being dropped by a router that thinks nothing is happening.

Fleeing, and what happened to wimpy#

Rogue has no wimpy command. The mechanic exists, and every character is created with it set to trigger at twenty per cent health, but there is currently no player command to change it.

What you do have is flee, which attempts to break off and run. It is worth binding somewhere you can reach in a hurry.

Other display commands#

minimap on draws a small map of your surroundings each time a room description prints, which is useful for telnet players who do not have the client's mapper. minimap on its own reports whether it is running.

alias <verb> <command> makes your own shorthand, alias lists what you have defined, and unalias <name> removes one. Inside the command, $* stands for everything you typed after the verb and $1, $2 and so on for individual words, so alias k attack $* lets you type k goblin. Aliases are saved with your character, and you already have several: l for look and i for inventory are set up for you.

score prints the full character sheet, summary a longer one, stat your seven attributes, status your current conditions, and hp the one-line version of your three pools. gear shows what you have equipped by slot, worn the same with inventory numbers, and who everyone online.