Dig

[The Crazy Animal]

I was just thinking what if we added an additional way to hide things in the game.

Two commands:
Dig: Digs a hole
Bury (item): covers the item over in the ground.

The way it works is that buried items act like they are hidden but are masked with the text ?The ground looks like it?s been disturbed?. After searching and finding that text and in order to find out what is buried there you then have to dig for items. When digging for items it will automatically pull a random item from the current buried list for that particular room.

Note ? This command would require a shovel of some sort or perhaps certain other items like a pick-axe that could also have the ability.

[ZLemur]

Love the idea. Should let people without tools dig though, just at a FAR higher failure rate. Its not like the ground would be hard again soon after burying the item.

[The Crazy Animal]

Love the idea. Should let people without tools dig though, just at a FAR higher failure rate. Its not like the ground would be hard again soon after burying the item.

Well digging with out tools might depend on how it was to be coded...

I was thinking about other stuff that could be done with dig too like hiding doors and stuff...

[DeathCow]

Seriously?  Have you guys played majormud?

[The Crazy Animal]

Seriously?? Have you guys played majormud?

hehe ya what about it.. I thought it could make somethings more intresting... plus animals like to bury stuff and dig it up later :p

[The Crazy Animal]

uhh.. He is talking about how there is already a Dig feature in the game..? With shovels and such.

I know there is, but you could do more with dig then just a random textblock funtion to pull items out of thin air.

[The Crazy Animal]

Btw the function in MMUD is dig grave not just a general dig command.

Muds dig function:

Code Select Expand

dig grave:checkitem 1415 1114:message 2673:adddelay 4:random 9121
dig up grave:checkitem 1415 1114:message 2673:adddelay 4:random 9121
7532?53%23

The first random links to this:

Code Select Expand

2:takeitem 1415:message 2703
30:random 9122
50:random 9123
70:random 9125
90:random 9126
100:message 1431

7532?53%23

Which then contiues to set randoms setting the chances for what items your going to get just like in the chest textblocks.

What I'm talking about is different it just opens up a bunch of options in ways to do stuff. Its a given that it is similar in the simplest essence. That because it's what gave me the idea however if you want to look at it that way it still would be a better/more enhanced version of the same game mechanic...

Ideas for its use:

You get a map that tells you the supposed location of a smugglers cache. You get to the location and it?s location ends up being in the middle of a forest. After gathering up the clues and doing some searching you find a spot where the ground has been disturbed. Now normally using mud coding the surprise and mystery would be over. However At this point you don't know if its going to be a door going down or a buried chest or if you simply missed the spot and found someone else?s stash. So this game mechanic can be used to build a little added suspense.

You go to an alchemist to get a potion. He tells you that you need to go get him some ingredients. One of the ingredients is the root of the dangerous thrasher bush (which is similar to an animated tree). Rather then using the normal game mechanics of pick root or kill the tree and it drops it you need to dig the roots up while the tree is still alive. Something like this increases the risk of the mission and encourages some out of the box thinking. How are you going to deal with the tree that wants to kill you while you?re digging? Can I put it to sleep, Can I get someone else to distract it while I dig up the ground looking for some root pieces.

Crossing it with the tombstone final death idea: A couple of the necromancy rituals could requires a body for its completion. The more powerful the character that the body belonged to the lower the difficulty is to do the ritual or the more powerful the effects might be. So each time a player gets re-rolled and they get a tombstone we place a body that has an ability value equal to the level of character in the corresponding grave. The necromancer can then go dig up a re-rolled character or use the pool of default bodies provided at the start of the game. What type of rituals I an talking about:

Necromatic Armour: By using the body of a corpse the necromancer is able to amplify their dr by magically grafting the corpse?s skin over their own.

Animate Dead: By using the body of a corpse the necromancer is able to create a zombie minion whose power is roughly equal to the power that corpse had when alive.

Rotting Flesh: By using the harvested skin of a corpse a necromancer is able to curse a character into a decaying state.

Cannibalize: By consuming the body of a corpse a necromancer is able to temporarily increase there stats based on the variable attributes on that corpse. So a corpse of a mage might yield higher results for mana and spellcasting. While the corpse of a warrior might provide strength and health bonuses?

There are more uses for this type of game mechanic too.

[ZLemur]

Quick and to the point:

Can be dynamic enough to use during cleanups to dynamically hide items.

1st Cleanup: Hide/poof items as per usual.
2nd Cleanup: Untouched small items begin to get buried in the dirt. Coins, daggers, gloves, boots etc.
3rd Cleanup: Untouched larger items get buried. Long swords, leg/torso armor etc.

IF the idea of item quality/degradation gets implemented, being buried could accelerate the rate at which an item's quality is reduced.

[manihooni]

i like this this one.
i'd assume magical items would not degrade but maybe tarnish?
might have to take to an NPC to see if the sword you dug up is just a piece of rusted crap or is it "magically delicious?

[The Crazy Animal]

i like this this one.
i'd assume magical items would not degrade but maybe tarnish?
might have to take to an NPC to see if the sword you dug up is just a piece of rusted crap or is it "magically delicious?

The idea of degrading items is that they would be in a bi-directional dynamic state so they could be repaired as long as they are found before they hit the zero mark when they would poof. In the case of magic items I think we were leaning more towards having them degrade at slower rate which would have a variable dependency on the magic level of the item.

The current condition that the item is in would be apparent to the user by looking at its description.