Everything below sits on top of the stock ROM 2.4 package. Some of it replaces a
stock system outright; most of it is machinery that simply is not there in a vanilla
Merc/ROM tree.
The overworld
A room in Solar Eclipse is not always one place. Sixty-two of them carry a terrain
map — a 25 × 15 grid — and every character and object standing in such
a room also carries an (x, y) coordinate inside it. Two players in
the same room are only really together when their coordinates match, which is why
looking prints a drawn map of your surroundings rather than a paragraph. Exits between
cells are not written down by a builder at all: they are synthesised from the terrain,
so a mountain wall blocks you because it is a mountain, and walking off the edge of one
map drops you onto the neighbouring one. It turns overland travel into something you
navigate rather than something you type through.
Promotion classes
At level 120 a character can return to their guildmaster and type advance.
The guildmaster names whatever is still missing — mastered skills, permanent stat
floors, proof that you have been somewhere and done something — and when nothing is
missing you take your class's promoted form and the whole mud is told about it. Eleven
of the thirteen classes have a promoted form, each with its own trial, its own new
skills and its own reputation award. This is the long game, and it has a
section of its own.
Remorting
A hero who has run out of things to prove can type remort and start again.
You keep your name, your money, your standing and your skills; you lose seven eighths
of your vitals and go back to level one, and you get to pick from a wider list of races
than a first-life character ever sees. Skills carry across lives at the lowest level
any class you have been learns them at, so a second-life character is weak but strangely
capable, and a promoted class's benefits stay on the record — the choose
command is how you pick which previous life's promotion you want active.
Reputation
Sixty-eight categories track what your character is actually known for, from
helper to new discovery to species poacher, each with its own
key and its own running total. Reputation is not experience and cannot be ground: it
accrues from the breadth of what you do, and it is spent at a trader on top of the clock
tower. High enough totals unlock equipment that refuses to be worn without them, entry
to certain places, the right to keep more than one pet and the right to store items up
to level 201. Cheating and jail time take points away.
The autoquestor
A questman in the Grunting Boar Inn, south and east of recall, will hand any character
of any level a randomly generated quest scaled to them: kill something, fetch something,
carry a letter, escort someone home, find a word buried in a room description, or
assemble a collection. Quests pay quest points, gold and occasionally practices, and
quest points buy a shelf of rewards that exists nowhere else in the game. It is also,
quietly, the best tour guide on the mud — questing at low levels teaches you repop
timers, day and night cycles and overland travel without anybody having to explain them.
Details are in the quest section.
Mining, materials and forging
Ore deposits are scattered across the world, each holding up to four different materials
on a quality ladder. With a shovel or a pick and the mining skill you dig them out; with
a prospector's help you find them in the first place. What comes out of the ground is an
alloy, and what an alloy is for is a forger — a mobile who will appraise, refine,
combine, melt and finally forge your materials into a weapon or a piece of
armour whose quality depends on how much and how good a material you brought.
Twenty-odd forgers work different material sets across the world, so the good recipes
are also a geography problem. See the mining section.
Rune stones and rune words
A rune stone is a lump of material that will hold exactly one spell. You get one by
killing something, you teach it a spell by casting that spell at it while it lies on the
floor, and you spend it with fuse — welding it into a weapon so that every
blow the weapon lands re-casts the stone's spell at whatever it hit. The charge runs
down with use and then the stone evaporates; there is no unfusing. Every weapon has at
least one rune slot and some have more. The warlock's cabala layers a second system on
top, inscribing rune words along the paths of the Tree of Life.
Gems and sigils
Gems come in twenty types and ten grades — tiny, small, medium, large, rare, flawless,
perfect and upward — and serve as both portable wealth and crafting stock, since a
hundred gold weighs four times what the equivalent gems do. Sigils are the other half
of the ornamentation system: an object that cannot be worn on its own but is
attached to a normal piece of equipment, lending its affects to whoever wears
the host. Most of the great quest rewards are sigils, which is how a character ends up
wearing more than the sixteen slots ought to allow.
Clans and player killing
Clans are opt-in, consequential and territorial. Joining one is done through a clan
leader, each clan has halls of its own, ranks and subranks, and clan equipment that is
noticeably better than the ordinary gear of its level — the compensation for being
permanently flaggable. Player killing is gated to particular days, so the risk is a
calendar as much as a choice, and a clan sigil can be taken from a body and worn by a
rival. There is a fake-clan mechanism too, for characters who would rather not advertise
who they answer to.
The arena and the coliseum
Two consenting players can challenge and accept their way into
a formal death match: both are moved into one room, everyone else bets on
the outcome, and the loser is restored rather than killed. The coliseum is the other
fighting venue and it is solo — fight buys you a bout against a scaled
opponent, and five wins there is one of the things a warrior's promotion trial asks for.
The capture system feeds the same rooms: kill things with a capture weapon, fill one of
ninety-two recipes held by the monster trainer, and you get a purpose-built boss to face
one at a time.
An actual economy
There is one auction lot in the world at a time and everybody can see it, bid on it and
heckle it. Beyond that there is a bank in the Grunting Boar Inn that pays compound
interest every tick you are logged in and will change silver for gold at a surcharge;
player-owned shops in the Solaris Bazaar that stock seventeen kinds of goods;
player-owned houses bought outright with gold, complete with keys and titles; rent boxes
and hotel rooms leased by the day; and thirty storage mobiles across the world who will
hold things for you indefinitely.
Poaching and trophies
When something dies it leaves a corpse that remembers what it was, and
poach <corpse> <part> cuts a trophy off it — a hide, a
horn, an eye, a tooth. The part is rated for quality by the skill of the cut, and
trade sells it to a poacher who wanted that particular thing. It is a
parallel income stream to looting, and a reputation category all of its own, in both
directions: there is a species poacher tally as well as a payout.
Pets, taming and training
A character can own up to ten pets — bought from pet shops, captured from the wild, or
in the ranger's case built out of monsters they caught. Pets follow you, recall with
you, take orders, are saved with your character and can be inspected with
petaffects. A promoted ranger can train them further: bash, dodge, parry,
sanctuary and more, at the travelling circus east of Solaris. Reputation is what buys
the right to keep more than one at a time.
Traps
Two separate trap systems run at once. Area traps are laid by builders and aimed
squarely at players: they fire on opening a door, entering or leaving a room, or
examining the wrong object, and they cripple, blind, poison, entangle or restrain as
well as damage. Ranger traps are the other kind — entrap builds a snare, a
spiked pit, a poison net or an entangling vine out of what is lying around, and only
mobiles trigger them. A ranger's detect trap and detect danger are
the answer to the first kind and a requirement for their promotion.
Limit breaks
Take enough punishment — a hundred times your level in damage — and your limit break
becomes available for one use. Every class has a different one, they are announced by
the limit command, and the counter does not survive a logout, so a limit
break is something you earn inside a fight rather than something you save up. The mage
drops a meteor, the warrior pins a victim so their group can beat it, the ranger unloads
every malediction at once with no saving throw, the warlock reads a spell straight out
of somebody else's head and casts it back at them.
Games inside the game
There is a real deck of fifty-two playing cards you can draw from, deal round a table
and read as poker or blackjack hands — and a promoted thief deals themselves a hand
mid-fight and turns it into damage. There is a complete fifteen-by-fifteen Scrabble
implementation with a hundred tiles, premium squares and the fifty-point bonus for
playing all seven. There is a casino in New Thalos that only thieves can enter. All
three are things you can buy your way into with quest points.
Guarded doors and scripted worlds
Nearly a thousand mobiles in the world carry the guard bit, standing in a room and
deciding who may leave it and in which direction — checking for a key object, a class, a
level, an alignment or a place you have not been yet. It is the cheapest access control
the world has and it is everywhere. On top of that, three separate scripting engines run
continuously: mobiles, objects and rooms each have their own triggers, their own command
sets and their own evaluators, which is why the world reacts to being walked through
rather than merely sitting there.
Building and living in it
The whole world is editable from inside the game through a full online creation suite —
area, room, mobile, object, shop, reset and program editors — so areas are written by
players who were promoted into builders, not by someone with a text editor and a
restart. For everyone else there is the comfort layer: MXP for clients that speak it,
aliases, a built-in pager, speedwalk strings for people playing over bare telnet, a
hundred-plus configurable toggles, and copyover, which reboots the server without
disconnecting anybody.