Random Monsters

With a werewolf here and goblin there.

Using the RandomMonsters behavior.

Introduction.

Once upon a time there was a sleepy little mud, with sleepy little areas, filled with sleepy little mobs, that waited around in the same old room, day in and day out, only to have players come and kill them over and over again, with brazen belligerence, because the same mob would always reset in the same place, every single time.

That was before the RandomMonsters behavior. Now players are stepping lightly and coming equipped with a healthy dose of respect for your areas and well they should, because they never know what fell beast, what nightmarish fiend, or what cuddly vorpal bunny lay just around the next corner. All this because you, the builder, have unleashed the power of [dramatic pause (dun dun dun daaa)] [echo] The RandomMonsters Behavior. [/echo]

All silliness aside, the RandomMonsters behavior can really spice up a tired old area, and it's fairly simple to implement. Keep in mind that it can be added to either the entire area, so that any of the mobs on our list can appear in any room, all over the whole area, or can be added at the room level, so that the mobs will only reset in that room(s), but which mob will appear from the list will be picked at random. For even more fun, you can mix and match. Your area can have one randommonsters file for the whole area, and several other monsters list that can be attached to several individual rooms. But lets cover the basics first and leave the advanced topics for a later date.

These are the steps that I followed to set up my first area with RandomMonsters:

I’m assuming you have read the randommonsters information here:

http://localhost:27777/behaviors.cmvp

or if you do not have a CoffeeMud server running at the moment,

http://coffeemud.homeip.net:27777/behaviors.cmvp

From there I created a room off on its own within the area I was making. In that newly created, detached room I created all the different kinds of mobs I wanted to pop up within the area. After I did a Save Room and a Save Mobs, I exported the mobs to a cmare file with the export command like so:

• • export room mobs c:\areas\monsters.cmare

Writing file...

File 'c:\areas\monsters.cmare' written.

Now I have a Monsters.cmare file in my c:\areas directory. For this to work, the path to this file must be a sub-directory of the coffemud resource folder. You can set the path under resource to anything you like, but for ease, I'm just going to use the resource folder for this example. At this point I moved the monsters.cmare file to my Coffeemud resources directory. From there I went into the mud grinder, and chose modify {chose your area from dropdown list} then edit {area}. Now down near the bottom of that page you will find the behaviors dropdown. In there is the randommonsters behavior. Selected RandomMonsters, then in the text directly to the right of our RandomMonsters dropdown, I entered the behaviors parameters, like so:

min=10 max=20 chance=75 minmonsters=1 maxmonsters=10;monsters.cmare

I clicked finished, and then I went back into the mud.

From there I typed:

load resource monsters.cmare.

To check of its loaded you can:

list resources.

If it's not in the list and all else fails, you can shutdown and reboot the server. At this point I had random monsters from my list popping up around my area. If you follow those steps it should "Just Work(tm)". And one last tip, don’t get rid of the room with all the mobs that you created. Leave them there all cozy like in that disconnected room in case you want to modify them or add to the monsters.cmare later. But do add NoTeleport, archon only and such to the room so players are not accidentally popping in there when they use gate or teleport spells.

As always, hope it helps,

Jekar (Formerly known as Gary Mix)