Basic Guide to Places I - How to Get Started

So, you've been traveling around the island, and stumbled across various houses, stores, and wildlife preserves on map squares. And you're thinking that maybe you'd like a place to call your own, too. Problem is, you have no idea how to get yourself a sweet little place to play with. LOOK NO FURTHER!

There's a handy building called Suzie's Hardware. Enter the store.

This will cost you 100 cigarettes. If you don't have a 100 cigs, either adventure in the jungle, or donate, until you do.¹⁾

Travel to the map square you want your Place to be on. There will be an option in the left-hand menu to plant a stake.

There is room for four places on each map square with buildable terrain. (If there are already four Places on that square, you'll have to choose somewhere else.) Buildable terrain includes grass, beach, jungle, stone and snow, but not water or swamp.

Well done! You are now the proud owner of an empty plot. Go inside and have a look. It will tell you that you need 100 wood and 50 stone for the initial construction. This brings us on nicely to the next step.

Aside from land stakes, Suzie also rents out three handy toolkits. These include:

This kit will allow you to cut down logs ²⁾ on Jungle mapsquares. Sit on a jungle square with a carpentry kit, and you should see a little link in the sidebar 'Chop Down Wood'. The rest is self explanatory.

You need 100 logs to build your Place. Once you have these 100 logs, then the carpentry kit is also needed to build them into your Place. There will be a button to press inside your Place, the same place in your Place where it told you how much stone and wood you needed. Your Place will also have an inventory where you can keep any spare logs for later use.

This kit allows you to carve chunks of rock out of Mountain squares and install them in your Place. You need 50 stones ³⁾ to build your Place, in the same manner as for logs. Like logs, stone can be stored in a Places inventory.

Note: Each toolkit costs a cig a day. If you do not have enough cigs, adventure in the jungle or donate. Also, make sure that you have plenty of stamina before renting one, and time until the next NewDay when the kits disappear again.

Great. You now have an 'untitled Place' consisting of 'a small, plain, undecorated room.' You want something a little more interesting than that?

Inside your Place, down the left hand side, you will see a menu of 'keybearer options'. Top of that list is 'Job Creation'. Click here and you will find a list of possible jobs to choose from. Choose 'External Decoration'.

This brings up two input boxes. The first small one is for changing the name of the house - the name of the little link in the sidebar that people see when they're travelling around and travel through the square with your Place in it. The other, big space, is for the external description, that big wodge of text at the top of the page that tells travellers what they're looking at when they find your Place. Type your name and description into these boxes and press submit.

Hint: Seeing as the box for the description isn't that big, it's a good idea to type it out in a text editor first, then copy and paste. That way, when you make mistakes, they're a lot easier to find and correct, and there's much less chance of accidentally losing them.

Pro tip: If you'd like to display out the player's name or weapon, type in, instead of a name or name of a weapon, “[pcName]”⁸⁾ or “`w”⁹⁾, respectively. Those phrases should turn into the name and weapon of the contestant who views them.

Your place is not actually decorated yet. You've just set the job up so far. This is where the third of Suzie's kits come in.

Rent a decorating kit from Suzie and take it up to your Place along with plenty of stamina. Enter said Place. In the links on the left sidebar you should now see a link 'Show current jobs in this Place' under the menu 'Help with Construction'. Click here and you'll see the decorating job ready to be done. The amount of work it takes to complete a decorating job is dependent on how verbose you were with your description. Go for it.

You should, by now, have some idea of how to do this. Click 'Job Creation' and this time pick 'Decorate a Room'. Enter your chosen description for the inside of your first room and the job will appear under 'Show current jobs in this Place'. If you've still got some stamina left over from decorating the outside then you can use it on this as well.

It's worth while having a little think about what you want to do first. If you've built a nice home for yourself and then decide that you want to have a front garden first, then rearranging everything is an annoyance. ¹⁰⁾

Once you have the main structure up, you'll probably want to make it bigger. Remember that 'Job creation' button? Go there again and choose the 'New Room' option. Once you've choosen and verified, then this job will turn up when you look at the 'Show current jobs in this Place', the same as that decorating job, if you remember.

It takes 60 logs and 20 stone to build a new room. You've done this sort of thing before, and should be used to it. The logs need a carpentry kit, the stone needs a masonry kit.

Once built, your new room needs connecting to the Place. Create a job again, and this time pick 'New Door'. This build job needs ten wood.

Select which two Rooms the Door is to link; for your first room you can only select room1 and room2, but once you have three or more, things can get interesting - any two rooms can be linked by a door, and you can build as many doors as you want!

Now you just need to decorate it, exactly the same as for the first room.

It's very easy to get carried away with the building, “I want a library here, and a kitchen there…” but without the descriptions fully written down. Then ending up with a whole bunch of undecorated rooms and finding it hard going to write anything for them. Writing a good description can take some time and effort. It may be worth it to write the descriptions first, and then build rooms to put them in. See this page for decorating ideas and tips.

You can now get out there and build a Place. It can be a castle, a zoo, a homely cottage or anything else you can imagine and write. Remember: Suzie's in IC for supplies. Carpentry for logs from Jungle. Masonry for Stone from Mountain.

Once you've got the hang of this, then have a look at some of the following for more cool things that you can do.

Basic Guide to Places II - More stuff that can be done with rooms and doors.
Basic Guide to Places III - Other Features
Overview of Places.
Places - How to program