Builder Reference

Audience: Builder Status: ✅ Ready

Everything you need to build a world in TelosMUD without writing Go. A builder is someone who connects to a running TelosMUD and authors content — rooms, mobs, items, abilities, classes, races, quests, and the rules that bind them — as data in content packs, with sandboxed Lua for behavior. This is the section landing page; it orients you and lays out a learning order through the eight Builder pages.

What is a builder?

The engine hardcodes no game. It supplies mechanism — a runtime, a parser, combat and effect resolution, persistence, networking — and every piece of flavor is content you author. That’s the pillar (see Overview), and for a builder it means: the stat list, the damage types, the classes and races, the abilities, the loot, the whole map — all of it is yours to define in YAML and Lua. You don’t recompile anything; you author a content pack and the running MUD loads it.

Concretely, as a builder you can:

  • Lay out zones, rooms, and exits, and populate them with mob and item prototypes and resets.
  • Define the rules primitives a game needs — attributes, resources, damage types, wear slots, combat profiles.
  • Author abilities and affects, loot tables, crafting recipes, progression tracks, classes/races (as bundles), and chargen flows.
  • Attach behavior with sandboxed Lua — scripted mobs, spells, world-event reactors, display sheets.
  • With staff rank, inspect and hot-reload a live world from inside the game.

Where to start (learning order)

Read these roughly in order — each builds on the last:

  1. Trust Tier Model — how builder/admin powers are granted and applied. Start here so you understand what a “builder” can do in a running game.
  2. Builder Commands — the in-game command surface, and the staff verbs (stat, reload, pull, holylight, …) an elevated session gains.
  3. Pack Authoring — the content-pack format: the directory tree, how files are discovered and merged, and how a pack reaches a running world.
  4. Pack MUD Settings — the pack.yaml manifest and the MUD-level knobs a pack controls.
  5. Pack Entity Reference — the exhaustive field-by-field schema for every entity and def-table. Your primary lookup while authoring.
  6. Pack Lua Scripting — how to add behavior with Lua: the sandbox, the handle/global API, and self.state.
  7. Pack Lua Hooks — the catalog of every hook, reaction, trigger, and event your Lua can bind.
  8. Building Instanced Zones — authoring private, runtime-minted copies of a zone (the dungeon/party case): the instanceable opt-in, the one Lua verb that enters one, and the list of things that deliberately do not work inside a copy.

From authoring to a live MUD

Content is authored in an external, versioned repository, validated in CI, and installed into a running fleet by a director-coordinated pull and hot-reload — no in-game editing of canonical content. The builder-facing overview is Content Packs Intro; the operator mechanics (versions, CI, pull/reload) are in Content Pack Operations.

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