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 has its own browser client with panels, a live map and a skill bar. The world is the same either way. This page covers what you see and what you can change about it.

The screen#

Everything arrives as text. A room prints its name, a description, the exits, and then whoever and whatever is in it. Combat prints a line per exchange. Channels and tells arrive as they are spoken.

Text is wrapped to your screen width, which the server asks a capable client for when you connect. screen shows what the game thinks your window is, and screen <width> <height> sets it by hand if the guess is wrong. settings display screen <width> <height> does the same with a floor of 40 columns and 10 rows. The game is laid out for 80 columns by 40 rows and never draws anything larger, so a bigger setting is taken as 80 by 40; a smaller one is honored.

Color is on from the start. colors prints the color codes the game knows, and colors list prints the full 256 color palette. If your client cannot show color at all, terminal unknown turns it off.

The prompt#

The main prompt is > and cannot be changed.

What you can change is the combat prompt, which replaces it while you fight. Its default is:

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

That is your health, spell points and endurance, then your adrenaline if you are a warrior, the condition of what you are fighting, and how far away it is when you are shooting at something out of melee range. settings combat prompt <format> sets your own, and settings combat prompt reset puts the default back. The tokens are:

Color codes work inside the format, so settings combat prompt %^RED%^$h%^RESET%^/$H hp is valid. The browser client hides the plain > prompt, because it draws its own input line.

The browser client#

The client at rogue-mud.com/play opens full screen. The game text sits in the middle, the command line at the bottom, and panels around them that you switch on and off.

Some things are there from the start. The Status Bar above the command line has bars for health, spell points and endurance, and one for your current target. The Skill Bar below it holds six to twenty four square slots, depending on the width of the window; the first twelve answer to F1 to F12, and each slot shows its skill's picture and sweeps through its cooldown. A small mini-map hovers at the top right; you can drag it, and its minus button folds it away.

The eye icon in the top bar opens the View menu. Click a panel there to cycle it through off, auto and on; auto means the panel appears only when it has something to show. Most panels start off, so a bare client is normal. The Quests tracker and the Guide open themselves during the opening chapters, and the cross on either closes it.

Left side

• 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 organizing, stacking and selling or dropping in bulk. Alt+I opens a larger character window with your equipment drawn on a figure beside your pack.
• Compass lists destinations. Choose one, then press Travel to walk there.
• Passives shows your class passives as cards. Click an unlocked one to equip it, and an equipped one to take it off.
• Crafting / Resources holds your crafting materials by discipline.
• Quests lists what you have accepted and what is left to do.
• Jobs shows the work you have taken from a job board.
• Mapper is the full map. It follows you as you walk and can be searched, exported and browsed by layer and realm.

Right side

• Buffs / Conditions shows every buff, debuff and effect on you with the time it has left.
• Cooldowns shows only what is on cooldown, longest first, counting down.
• Group shows your party with health bars, along with your pets, minions and heroes, and a button to invite.
• Comms is a chat window with tabs for all, chat, newbie, clan, guild, group, tells, says and religion. The box at its foot speaks on whichever tab is open.

The Guide panel answers "what should I be doing now?", the same thing the ? command prints.

The View menu also sets where the bars sit (along the bottom or down the right side), their size, whether the skill bar has one row or two, and whether the Status Bar, Skill Bar and an XP Bar beside your name are shown. The Tools menu holds a script editor for triggers, aliases, timers and keybinds, and Reset Layout, which puts every panel back where it began.

Settings worth changing early#

Nearly every preference lives under one command. settings on its own prints the menu, and each category typed alone lists its options.

settings display brief on shortens rooms to their name and exits. Turn it off to read full descriptions again. brief on and brief off do the same.

settings combat controls how much combat text you see. New characters start with every kind of message on. You can turn kinds off one at a time:

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, condition and party; the last of these hides the party health bars drawn under the combat prompt.

settings colors opens a picker for your channel colors, and settings colors reset undoes it. speakcolor <color> sets the color you see speech in. chancolors off takes color out of channel messages 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 colored. settings announce turns the realm's login, death and boss kill announcements on or off.

settings blind on is an accessibility preset: brief rooms, no color, simple lists everywhere and no decorative borders. It suits a narrow terminal too. Blind players already play Rogue. A character made in the game is asked about it at the start, and settings blind has further options, such as a short summary of each round of a fight. Triggers and soundpacks are allowed for blind players (help clients).

settings display timezone <zone> shows game times in your own time zone. settings display keepalive on stops a router that thinks nothing is happening from dropping an idle connection.

Reports and updates#

Four commands send a report to the staff, each opening the same small editor:

Type the command alone to start writing, or put a one line subject after it, as in bug the ferry ate my sword. Write your report a line at a time, then type a full stop on a line by itself to file it, or ~q to throw it away. A report can run to sixty lines.

bug list shows the bugs you have filed, with each one's number and status, and bug <number> shows one in full; the other three work the same way. A report starts as Open and moves to In Progress, Done or Declined, and if you are online when its status changes, you are told. You can file five reports in ten minutes and hold forty waiting at once.

To report a player's behavior, use report <name> <what happened> on one line. It goes straight to the staff, and report list shows what you have sent. Use earmuff <name> as well if you would rather not hear them.

updates shows the changes made to the game since you last looked, newest first, and the game tells you at login when there are new ones. updates <number> shows that many of the latest, updates 10-20 a range, and updates all everything. announcements shows the notices staff have posted; announcements realm shows the most recent realm news from the announce channel.

Fleeing, and what happened to wimpy#

Rogue has no wimpy command and no automatic escape at a chosen health level. flee tries to break off and run. Bind it somewhere you can reach in a hurry.

Other display commands#

map draws the rooms around you in text, reaching 6 rooms out in each direction by default; map 15 gives the widest view. Nothing draws a map above the room description automatically on telnet. The browser client adds its mini-map and Mapper.

alias <verb> <command> makes your own shorthand, alias lists what you have, and unalias <name> removes one. Inside the command, $* stands for everything typed after the verb, so alias k attack $* lets you type k goblin. $* is the only substitution. Aliases are saved with your character. The game's own short forms, such as the directions, l for look and i for inventory, are built in: they always work and are not on your alias list, and an alias of your own with the same name takes their place.

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