Basic Guide to Places II : More stuff that can be done with rooms and doors.

A smorgasbord of extra things that can be done with your Place once you've got the hang of the basic building, in no particular order. Find the thing that you're interested in doing and read that.

Would you like players to be able to talk to each other in your dwelling? The chances are that you do, in at least one room. This is easily done. Go into your Place, and look for the button 'Master Settings' at the bottom of the menu 'Keybearer Options'. This will take you to a list of the rooms in your Place¹⁾. For each room there are options for Chat. 'Disable' (no chat space at all) 'Single' (One story channel to chat in) or 'Dual' (A story channel and also a banter channel). If you have a banter channel, then you can also choose where it is available from, its scope. You can have it locally, (in that room only), place-wide (the same channel is shown in all rooms in your place with place-wide banter set) or globally (this is the same banter channel which is shown in outposts. Guests can happily carry on chatting away with their friends in completely different parts of the Island.) There is also an option for each room to show a list of who else is in the same room.

You can also set rooms to show weather conditions graphics in the same way that you get in outposts and some map squares. Again, this in Master Settings and in fact is fairly self-explanatory.

When you first build a door from room A to room B, the name of the link shown in room A is 'room B' and vica versa. This might not always be what you want. For example if all that a player can see in room A is an old oak door, and they don't know what's behind it. To relabel your links, go into your Place, then 'Master Settings' under 'Keybearer Options'. This will take you to a list of rooms in your place, and then underneath this at the bottom of the page, a list of doors. Find the door that you want to rename and you'll see an option for 'Customize Link Text'. Click here and follow the instructions.

It is possible to lock doors and then issue keys to people that you'd like to have access. To do this you have to be in one of the two rooms that it connects, then the option to lock/unlock the door will appear down the left hand side. If you want to lock the front door to the whole building then this option is right at the top of the 'Master Settings' page.

To issue keys, go to the 'Key Management' button under 'Keybearer Options'. This will first take you to a list of all the keys out there already, and gives you the option to retrieve them if desired. From here click 'Cut a new Key'. This will take you to a page with a range of different key types to choose from, depending on whether you want to allow somebody access to a room, allow them to unlock a door to allow others access, or give them various other permissions. The ability to set up a new job, the ability to access your inventory, etc.

Once you've got a room with several doors coming off it, then you might want the doors to be listed in a particular order, not necessarily the order that you've got. This is easily done. Go to 'Master Settings'. There is a list of doors in your Place at the bottom, and each one has a little box marked 'Sort Order:'. Give each of your doors a number in the order in which you want them to appear in, lowest to highest. This is the order in which they'll appear in the room.

Top Tip: If you have say five doors coming off your room, don't just number them 1,2,3,4,5, number them in multiples of ten - 10,20,30,40,50. This will make things easier if at some future date you want to add a new door somewhere in the middle. Suppose you want a new door between the third and fourth existing doors, then it's easy to simply label this door 35, rather than having to shuffle all the other door numbers around to fit it in.

Sometimes you'll have multiple interconnecting rooms, and you'll want to order the doors off them in all of the rooms. In this case a door's number will control the door orderings in each of the rooms that it connects to. This can get complicated to organize, and in fact there are some combinations of door orderings that just aren't possible. In one special case however, there's a simple trick that can be used.

Consider the case where the order that you want your links in in various rooms depend on some sort of natural ordering of the rooms themselves. This might happen for example if you have several landings on a staircase, and you want players to be able to get from any one to any other one. Then it would be natural to have the links going in the order 'Go to first landing.' 'Go to second landing.' and so on.

In this case, in order to give your doors numbers that will work in each room, give the rooms numbers instead (nominally, write them down on a piece of paper) then for each door, give it the number obtained by adding together the numbers for each of the rooms that it connects. So in the above example involving landings on a staircase, give the landings the numbers 10,20,30,40,50 (for five landings). Then for the door from the second to the fourth landing give it the number 20 + 40 = 60. All your doors will now come out in the right order.

Basic Guide to Places I - How to get started.
Basic Guide to Places III - Other Features
Overview of all Place related wiki pages.