Basics of Places III - Other Features

There are various items of furniture which you can buy from Cadfael's Furniture in Improbable Central and install into your Place. In order to do this, you must first build a 'Slot' in the room in which you want the furniture. Go to the 'Create Jobs' page and choose 'Expand Room' in order to set up the job to do this. If you buy an item of furniture before you have a slot to put it in, then it can be kept conveniently in your Place's inventory.

Slots themselves are invisible, only the furniture in it can be seen. So there's no need to worry about leaving an ugly gap if you build a slot before you put any furniture in it.

To build an expansion on a room takes 20 wood and 5 stone.

• Couch

A basic-looking couch. Sleeping on this overnight gives you a 6% Stamina boost. Weight: 40 kg Price: 6,000 Requisition and 10 Cigarettes

• Folding Bed

A lightweight folding bed for use in dwellings. When properly set up, this gives a 7.5% Stamina boost overnight. Weight: 15 kg Price: 7,500 Requisition and 20 Cigarettes

• Single Bed

A no-frills but well-built single bed. Grants a 10% Stamina boost when you sleep in it overnight. Weight: 80 kg Price: 10,000 Requisition and 30 Cigarettes

• Double Bed

Sleeping alone in a Double Bed will get you a 12% Stamina increase. Sleeping with someone else will get you a 25% penalty at first, which gradually changes into a 25% bonus as you get used to sleeping with that person. Weight: 80 kg Price: 20,000 Requisition and 50 Cigarettes

The above pieces of furniture, once installed in a room, give a link to press to obtain the advantages of using them. Both the name of the link and the description you get when using them can be customised, for the right price in cigarettes. Go to Cadfael's to do this. Note that furniture can be taken in and out of slots at will by the Place owner, or anybody who's been given the right key, so you can easily buy a bed and take it back at a later date for customisation.

The link appears in a seperate menu

• Teleport Beacon

A Teleport Beacon allows people to use One-Shot Teleporters to go directly to a specific Room inside your Place. They require cigarettes¹⁾ to continue to run. Weight: 200 kg Price: 50,000 Requisition and 200 Cigarettes

So what are these Page thingumies that you've been seeing in the list of jobs that you can create then? These really come into their own when combined with programs, but they have their uses on their own as well.

A Page can be built off an already existing room and is a sort of “sub-room”. What this means is best explained by example.

Suppose that you have a room that is decorated as a kitchen. It contains, amongst other things, a cupboard. You'd like players to be able to look in the cupboard. Then the most natural way to do this is with a Page. Build a Page coming off the kitchen. Decorate the page with the description of what they see when they look in the cupboard.²⁾ Title the Page 'Cupboard'. Then when the player enters the room, they will see a link labelled 'Cupboard.' If they click on this then they will get the Page description of looking in the cupboard followed by the description of the kitchen that they see in the main Room.

Note that the player is essentially still in the same room. The links leaving the page are exactly the same. The player can still look at any other Pages in the room without going back to the main Room, or leave through the same doors. The only difference is the extra text that you get on the page.

Notes:

• The links to see the pages from a room come in the same menu as, and underneath, the links to use any beds that might be in the same Room.
• When viewing a Page, the title that the player will see at the top of the screen is not the title of the Page but the title of the main Room. The title of the Page is the label of the link to see that Page.
• It is possible to not have the Room description after the Page description. To do this, go to 'Master Settings'. A list of all the pages that you've built will appear. This is where the option to show the Room text or not is chosen.
• The option to hide the link to the Page is also in 'Master Settings'. This can be useful in conjunction with programming.

Top Tip: Once your player has looked at a Page off a Room, they may wish to go back to just the Room.³⁾ There is no obvious way to do this. How do you make a way? Possibly the easiest way is simply to build a new Page off the same room, then name the page 'Look round room.' or somesuch, and decorate it to be entirely blank. All that will then show is the text of the main page, as desired.

Top Tip 2: You may not want your extra description at the top of the page, but underneath instead. This is not directly possible. The easiest way round this is to decorate the page with the entire description, the room description with the extra stuff at the bottom, and then set the page to not show the room description.

The cost to build a Page is 20 wood and 10 stone.

Once you've built a few Rooms and connected them, then you will have noticed that the links leading away from a Room are listed under several distinct headings. There's 'Explore this area' where the links to Pages and beds are (as discussed in the above sections on beds and Pages). Then there're are the links to move on to different Rooms which are labelled 'Explore Deeper' and 'Return'. You may prefer to have different headings for the lists of doors leading away from a room.

To do this, go to 'Master Settings'. Right at the top there is an option to change these titles, under 'Nav Headings'.

Useful Tip: If you change both headings to the same name, then they will amalgamated into one big list under that heading.

Basics of Places I - How to get started.
Basics of Places II - More stuff you can do with rooms and doors.
Overview of Places.