Rooms (or entire Areas) may be assigned to players or clans with special properties determined by builders.

Player- or Clan-Owned Property

There are many options to creating player-ownable or clan-ownable property.

Property Seller

In order for property to be transferred to players/clans, there should be a GenShopkeeper in the area with the rooms to be sold. The shopkeeper does not need to be in a room that is for sale, merely within the same area as a room that has one of the appropriate area/room properties applied to it.

The distinction of who may own the property (player or clan) is determined by the vendor who sells the property. If the vendor is flagged to sell player property, then when purchased, the purchased room will be signed over to the player. If the vendor is flagged to sell clan property, then the available rooms will only be visible for sale if the player has the appropriate clan permissions to purchase property, and any purchased rooms will be assigned to that player's clan.

The optional RENTAL flag may be used to charge the owner that amount of rent per MUDMONTH. This fee will draw from any bank account of the appropriate currency for the assigned owner.

If the area is subjected to tax from some area law (or parent area law), then the owner will be subject to paying those taxes, either directly to a tax collector (and you may pay up front), or indirectly through a bank account of the appropriate currency type. If the taxable amount exceeds the value of the property, then the owner will be notified via email (if notifications are enabled) a week before the property is confiscated. Failure to pay past-due taxes before this deadline will result in the property returning to the vendor for resale, with all the contents of the rooms, room titles, descriptions, etc being reset to pristine conditions.

• Room type is the only parameter not reset by confiscation, so if a player built a WOOD ROOM on a PLAINS ROOM, the vendor will sell the property as a WOOD ROOM.

Room Layout

Different properties allow for a variety of room layouts to be sold.

Single Room

Prop_RoomForSale will make only the room with the property available for purchase. It cannot be increased in size through building skills. This property is ideal for creating apartment-style rooms.

Grouped Rooms of Static Size

Prop_RoomsForSale will make only the room and all adjacent rooms (and all adjacent to those, etc) with the property sell as a single unit. This property works ideally for selling prebuilt houses or townhouses.

Grouped Rooms of Increasing Size

Prop_LotForSale, Prop_RoomPlusForSale and Prop_LotsForSale all allow some mechanic for purchasing rooms that can be increased in size.

• Rooms will organically grow in a tree-format, only connecting to the previous pre-established room, unless the GRID parameter is enabled.

Room Plus For Sale

This special property makes only the base room for sale, but additional rooms may be created using the appropriate building skills with a DIR flag ROOM code recipe. In basic CoffeeMUD this is only the Excavation ability, which allows you to buy a single cave room, and expand it with excavation without purchasing the new rooms (but still owning them).

Lot For Sale

This property makes an adjacent room in each cardinal direction whenever the owned room is first built on with a TITLE or DESCRIPTION command. The adjacent rooms will be owned by the owner of the original room. It is ideal to set an upper limit on this using Prop_ReqCapacity so your areas don't grow to unmanageable sizes.

Lots For Sale

This property makes an adjacent room in each cardinal direction whenever the owned room is first built on with a TITLE or DESCRIPTION command. The adjacent rooms will be unowned, and only available for sale to the owner of the original room.

Entire Area

Prop_AreaForSale is useful for a builder to assign an area to a player or clan. In general, I do not recommend this functionality, since automating it means that the owner will also own the vendor of the area.

Notes

• It is often useful to limit your players maximum home size by adding the Prop_ReqCapacity affect and appropriate parameters to any room type that can be expanded upon. The new rooms will inherit this affect from the parent room, and the continuous grouping of rooms will determine if any additional rooms can be built beyond your room limit within the Prop_ReqCapacity. It is also useful to limit the total number of items in one room...to prevent players from cluttering your mud up with a bunch of trash.
• Be very clear to players what types of rooms they are purchasing. Provide some sort of signage or scriptable to indicate how their new real estate will perform (how does it expand, if at all, how many items can you store in it, how many rooms can your lot exapnd to (if at all), does it expand in a tree format or a grid foramt, etc).