Mudlet Manual

Welcome to Mudlet, a modern MUD client for GNU/Linux, Windows and Mac OSX that offers all the tools to get the most out of your gaming experience.

Throughout this document we hope to familiarize you with the basic aspects of Mudlet, from the interface to its very powerful and feature rich scripting backend The main focus in the development of Mudlet has been efficiency and performance, but we also try to make it as easily accessible as possible. However, keep in mind that this is a complex piece of software with a large set of tools that does require some deeper understanding of the underlying principles. To use Mudlet in any meaningful way, you have to take a closer look at the technical section in this manual.

If you are not familiar with using modern MUD clients in general you should also take a look at the general introduction to MUD clients section at the beginning of this manual. You are welcome to ask questions on the forum of our website. If you find a bug, please let us know.

Watch the introductory Mudlet 1.0 screencast by Vadim Peretokin.

To connect to the MUD of your choice, click on Connect. !

Mudlet offers a vast array of standard features to automate or otherwise improve your gaming experience. These include, but are not limited to:

Scripting allows the user to create automation utilities (triggers, aliases) with the Lua scripting language. The possibilities of what can be achieved by using this technique are, practically speaking, endless - ranging from teaching the client how to heal your character in combat for you to creating a fully automated robot (known as `bot`s) that will completely take over the control for your character (especially useful for completing repetitive, rudimentary tasks).

Effectively speaking, it is possible to create an AI (Artificial Intelligence) that does everything you can do in a MUD. Even more so, the program will be able outperform you in almost every routine operation. The difficulty of creating such a program depends on the task it has to perform: gathering loot being very easy, walking through a dungeon and leveling you character being moderately easy and socially interacting with other real people being outrageously difficult (see A.L.I.C.E.). In the end of the day, you’re teaching your client to process information and act the way you consider best suited. Because scripting is so powerful, it can give you a competitive advantage that some people consider it unfair or even cheating. As of the moment of this writing (2 November 2008), this sort of automation can be best observed in commercial massively-multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG), known as gold-farming or power-leveling. The basic idea is creating a system that will raise your character to the maximum level and gather in-game currency in the process, both of which can be effectively exchanged for real-world currency. The spread of the above aspects can have much more far reaching consequences than just being unfair, such as inflation, loss of balance in terms of game-mechanics or, ultimately, a complete crash of in-game economy. For more information see the paper "Simple Economics of Real-Money Trading in Online Games" by Jun-Sok Huhh of the Seoul National University. For these, and various other, reasons the administrators and owners of the corresponding virtual worlds can forbid the usage of automation tools. A failure to comply can result in suspension or deletion of the user’s character or account for future denial of service. By including scripting support in Mudlet, we effectively give you the ability to create and utilize AI tool-kits, however, we do not endorse or promote the usage of these systems if it’s prohibited in your MUD. Keep in mind that by cheating you can lessen the quality of gameplay for both, your fellow players and yourself.

The following part of the guide is written for new beginners in scripting. If you’re coming over from zMud or cMud, you may move on to section two.

Variables are containers for data. In Lua, they can store numbers or words. You can use variables to store important information like how much gold do you have, or have them remember things for you.

The syntax for making a variable remember a number is the following:

Or to make it remember some text:

For example, here we’ll set the myhealth variable to number 1345, and the myname variable to Bob:

You can also do basic maths easily, for example:

To concatenate strings together, you can use the .. expression:

To send a command to the MUD, you can use the send() function. Data inside the quotes is sent to the MUD.

For example, the following code sends the command to eat bread:

If you’d like to include variables in the send command, you need to prefix and suffix them with two dots outside the quotes, like this:

To echo (show text to yourself) you can use the echo() or the insertText() function. For example, the following code will display Time to eat dinner! on your screen:

If you’d like to include variables in your echo, you concatenate the value of your variable to the text:

The aliases are the most basic way of automating the gameplay - you can use aliases to shorten the amount of typing you do. For example:

Alternatively, you just create an alias that would do this all with a single command - for example, quest.

To get started, go click on the Aliases button in Mudlet, and then on the Add one. This will make a blank alias for you, which we’ll now fill in.

The Alias name field is optional - it’s mainly used for the alias listing that you see on the left as an easy way to distinguish all of the aliases. You can just name our alias test for now. The Pattern field is where you put your regex pattern to describe on what command that you are typing in the command line, your new alias will spring into action. Let’s say, we want our new alias to send the command "say hello" whenever we type "sh". The regex pattern would be "^sh$". Then we put "say hello" into the substitution field. After you have saved and activated your new alias "test", whenever you type "sh" Mudlet will not send "sh", but "say hello" instead. We call this substitution process alias expansion.

Mudlet uses Perl regular expression aliases. Regexes are a special way of matching patterns of words. For the beginners it is enough to think of them as a general way to specify the words itself and their placement within the line. For basic alias it is enough to know that the character ^ symbolizes the beginning of the line and the character $ symbolizes the end of the line. If you want to make an alias "tw" that sends the command "take weapon", you don’t have to care about placement or pattern matching in general. All you need to do is fill "tw" in the field called "Regex" and type "take weapon" in the field called "substitution". Then you need to save the new alias by clicking on the "Save" icon in the top middle. The symbol for unsaved items disappears and makes way for a little blue checkbox. If this box is checked the alias is active. If the blue box is empty, the alias is deactivated and will not work unless you press the "activate" toggle padlock icon. Now you are ready to go. Type "tw" in the command line and press the enter key. Mudlet will send "take weapon" to the MUD. Alias as basically, a feature to save you a bit of typing - much like buttons which will be described in detail in section two of the manual. To learn more about more complex aliases have a look at section 2 of the manual.

Triggers are an automation feature offered in all MUD clients. They help you respond quicker a particular situation and generally make things more convenient for you since you need to do less manual work as your triggers will do the hard work for you often times. This helps you concentrate more on the important aspects of the game and lessen stress. The way a trigger works is simple: You define some text that you want to trigger some action. This is called the trigger pattern. When the trigger "sees" this text in the MUD output, it’ll run the commands you’ve told it to. Example: Whenever you see a bunny, you want to attack it. You type "bunny" in the data field titled "add to list" and then either press the enter key or click on the little + icon next to the input line to add this word to the list of texts this trigger fires on. Now you type "kill bunny" in the field called "send plain text". Then click on the save icon to save the trigger and activate your new trigger (= blue checkbox icon in front of the trigger name in the trigger tree on the right side is checked). When the trigger is active each time the word "bunny" will appear in the MUD output, your trigger will issue the command "kill bunny" automatically as long as it is active. When you want to stop hunting bunnies, you can simply select the bunny trigger and then click on the padlock icon to deactivate the trigger. The trigger will stop firing until you re-enable it again via the padlock icon. If you lock a group of triggers or an entire trigger branch, all triggers in this branch will be locked until you remove the lock again. The locking starts from the root of the tree down to the end. As soon as a lock is met the trigger engine will skip the locked branch. Locking and unlocking branches is one of the most common actions you have to take care of when playing. You turn on your defensive triggers when engaging into a battle and you turn them off afterwards, or you turn on your harvesting triggers only when you are going to harvest.

You can also set up a trigger to gather the scimitars, gold or whatever the skeletons could carry around with them. Since we do not know what the loot is, we will need to set up a trigger to match the line and take whatever was dropped. Examples:

The skeleton drops_ is the generic segment of the line, the loot itself varies. Thus, we need to tell the client to take_ whatever the skeleton dropped. We do this by setting up a so-called regular expression:

The expression (.*) matches any characters that the client receives between The skeleton drops_ (NB: notice the blank at the end) and the full-stop. matches[2] simply transfers the first matched text fitting the search criteria into the output (matches[1] contains the entire matched text, matches[2] contains the first capture group. More on this in section two of the manual).

Now, let’s try making a trigger that would gather the loot from anybody:

In this case, any time somebody, or something, drops something else, or someone else, the client will pick it up. Note that we used matches[3] instead of matches[2] this time, in order to pick up the second match. If we used matches[2], we’d end up picking up the skeleton’s corpse.

If you’re playing a MUD in English, you’ll notice that these triggers probably won’t work due to English syntax. Compare:

Chances are that you’ll see the later a little more often. If we used our old RegEx, the output would look something like this.

Most MUDs can’t handle determiners, such as articles (i.e. a, an, the) or quantifiers (e.g. five, some, each), in user-input. To match this line we could either create multiple triggers matching every possible article or a regular expression filtering out these words:

Once again, note that we’re using the third match (matches[4]) this time. NOTE: Certain other languages, with a morphology richer than that of English, might require a somewhat different approach. If you’re stuck, and your MUD-administrators don’t prohibit the use of triggers, try asking on the corresponding world’s forums.

For more information, see the chapter Regular Expressions.

Wildcards from triggers are stored in the matches[] table. The first wildcard goes into matches[1], second into matches[2], and so on, for however many wildcards do you have in your trigger.

For example, you’d like to say out loud how much gold did you pick up from a slain monster. The message that you get when you pick up the gold is the following:

A trigger that matches this pattern could be the following:

And in your code, the variables matches[2] will contain the amount of gold you picked up (in this case, 16). So now to say out loud how much gold did you loot, you can do the following:

Here’s an example by Heiko, which makes you talk like Yoda:

What it does here is save the first word, the second word and then the rest of the text into wildcards. It then says rest of the text first, then the first word and then the second word.

To highlight something in the MUD output, make a trigger and use the "highlight trigger" option to highlight the matched trigger pattern.

Optionally, you can also make use of the bg() and fg() functions in scripting to highlight.

Keybindings, or hotkeys, are in many respects very similar to aliases, however, instead of typing in what you want to be done, you simply hit a key (or combination of keys) and let the Mudlet do the work.

Now you just have to listen, or rather read, carefully and hit either F1 or F2 to claim that prize.

Another practical use for keybindings would be creating a so-called "targeting system", which is especially useful for grinding down armies of pumpkin-men in MUDs without auto-attack. See the Variables chapter for further details.

Timers, as the name suggests, can be used to execute a specific command at a certain time, after a certain time or once every so often.

Mudlet lets you play several simultaneous MUD sessions. However, currently we have the restriction that you cannot use the same profile twice. Consequently, if you want to play three characters on the same MUD at the same time, you need to make 3 profiles with 3 different names e.g. ernie@avalon.de, bert@avalon.de etc.

Mudlet has a split screen. If you scroll up in the MUD text screen (or any other mini console window), the screen will split in two parts. The lower part will follow the MUD output while the upper part will stay focused on your scrolling. This way you can read easier through old passages without missing what is going on at the moment.

Split screen can be activated via the scroll bar, page up / page down keys or the mouse wheel. Scrolling back to the end will close the split screen automatically. A click on the middle mouse button will close the split screen immediately as well as pressing control+return on the keyboard. The size of the 2 parts of the split screen can be modified by dragging the separator bar in the middle with the mouse. Split screen usage is necessary when selecting text in order to copy it to trigger editor e.g. when making triggers. If you don’t use split screen when selecting text, new arriving text will upset your selection.

Mudlets command line is especially designed for MUD and MUSH playing. It aims at reducing the amount of typing by using autocompletion and tab completion schemes that are optimized for typical MUD playing situations. The command line offers tab completion (TAB key with or without shift) and autocompletion (cursor up and cursor down keys).

Press on the little button with the blue folder with the green arrow icon on the lower right side of the command line to turn on plain text logging. Click again to stop logging. This will inform you about the file name and path of the log file. If you want to log in color you can chose to log to files in html format, but note that due to the nature of HTML, these log files tend to get very large quickly.

Log files can be found at the mudlet home directory in your profile directory. To get the path to your mudlet home directory you can run a script like this one:

Log files are stored in "<mudletHomeDir>/logs". Each profile has its own <mudletHomeDir> path. Log files have a similar naming convention to the autosaved profiles: date#time.txt or date#time.html

Mudlet supports XML packages that can be imported and exported while playing. You can find a package section on the forum at http://mudlet.sourceforge.net where you can download demo packages or ready made packages for your MUD or upload your own packages to share your work with other players. A package can contain anything ranging from a single trigger to hundreds of button groups, trigger groups aliases - in other words, entire "systems".

To import a package, open the script editor and click the import icon, select your xml package file and import it. Package files might be compressed to save space. If the file is compressed, you’ll need to uncompress it before importing it. The imported package will be stored permanently in your profile when you safe the profile. If you don’t like the imported package, delete its components manually or simply don’t save the profile. Then the new content will be lost on restart. Good packages will be organized in such a way that they will be easy to update or remove.

Packages are nothing else, but profiles - or parts of profiles that can be exchanged, imported and exported between your own profiles and between different players. From a technical perspective a package and a profile xml file are the same thing.

Exporting items or groups is also easy. Select your item or a group containing many items or subgroups and then click on the "Export" button. You’ll be prompted for a file name and that’s it. Package file names should end with ".xml" to make import easier for users on all platforms. You can send your cool trigger, buttons, timers etc. to your friends or use them in another profile of yours. Exporting your good stuff is strongly recommended as it makes MUDding more enjoyable for everybody. Share your knowledge and help others! Mudlet stores your saved profiles as XML files in your home directory under "<mudletHomeDir>/current". To get <mudletHomeDir> run a script like this:

To export your entire profile e. g. to make a backup on a flash drive, use the "save profile as" button. You can export packages of a trigger branch, alias branch, function key, scripts etc. by clicking on a folder in the tree of the particular item in question and then click on the export icon. You’ll be asked to give a filename for your package. You can export arbitrarily complex structures by moving them into a folder that e.g. is named after the package you’d like to make.

If you have written a nice set of triggers, buttons, scripts etc. or maybe even a fully fledged "system" of some sort and you want to share it with others, you can make a nice packages that other people can import with a single mouse click. The recommended procedure to make a large package that contains groups of all sorts of items e.g. trigger groups, individual triggers, scripts, buttons, aliases etc., is to export the entire profile with "save profile as". Then create a new empty profile e.g. with your package name. Don’t give a server or port name in the connection dialog and "connect". Mudlet will load the new empty profile although you are offline. Open the script editor and import your previously exported profile and then delete all items that are not part of the package that you are making. Finally, make a folder (group) that is named after your package name and version number e.g. "Johnny’s curing system 12-3-2009" and move all respective items into this folder and repeat the same procedure for all triggers/aliases/scripts etc.. This will make it much easier for other people to import your package and stay updated if you release a newer version. Then save your profile and use the "save profile as" button to create your package.

Using Variables in Mudlet

One of the major design goals in Mudlet was to integrate scripts and variables into triggers/aliases/buttons etc. as seamlessly as possible. The usage of variables in Mudlet is distinctly different from the other major clients, as native Lua scripting has been integrated into Mudlet from the ground up. As scripts are so closely intertwined with the core of Mudlet, variables do not need any special treatment as in other clients i.e. there is no need for code such as:

In Mudlet, the above code translates into:

If you define a variable in any given script in Mudlet, be it a trigger, a button, an alias key, an event handler, a free function, etc. It can be used from within any context without any special getVariable() type of function or any special variable symbols, such as @myVar etc.. In Mudlet all variables are native Lua variables. Each session (= profile/connection tab) runs in its own dedicated Lua interpreter. Consequently, all scripts of a profile are compiled into the same Lua interpreter and thus their code runs in the same variable space. All scripts from another simultaneously opened profile will not interfere because each profile uses its own Lua interpreter.

To give you an example: Let’s make a little trigger that counts how many monsters you have killed. Each time you have made a new kill, the trigger matches on the kill message and runs a little script that increases the amount of kills by one each time the trigger fires - in other words, each time you kill a monster and the kill message is sent from the MUD. For the kill counter we declare a variable and call it myKills. This variable is going to hold the number of kills we’ve made so far. The script will look like this:

Then we add a little alias, a button or a keybindings that executes another little script that prints your current kill statistics on the screen. The attached script would look like this:

Let’s get back to our example. The trigger script expects myKills to be a number so you have to initialze the variable myKills to 0 before running the script for the first time. The best place to initialize variables is in script script outside of a function definition as this code is executed when the session is loaded or if you compile the script again after you have edited it. To do this click on the "Scripts" icon and select the standard script "My Global Variable Definitions". If you are using an older version of Mudlet or a profile that doesn’t have this script item, simply click on the "Add" icon and make your own script. You can call it whatever you want to. Add following code to initialize your new variable myKills to a number and set its value to 0:

Whenever you edit this script, it will be recompiled and the code will be run as it is not part of a function definition. This is the major difference between trigger-scripts, alias-scripts etc. and script-scripts. Script-scripts can contain an unlimited amount of function definitions and also free code i. e. code outside of a function definition - code that is not enclosed by function xyz() …. end. On saving the script the script gets compiled and the free code is run instantly. All other item scripts, i. e. trigger-scripts etc., secretly define a function name for the script and thus the script is not free code, but function code. When a trigger fires Mudlet calls this invisible function name to run the script e.g. trigger738(), button82(), alias8(). This means that if you define variables inside a trigger script the variable will not be defined before the trigger runs for the first time. However, if you define this variable as free code in a script-script the definition becomes available immediately on script save. Now, whenever you add new variables to your variable definition script, the script gets run and your old variables will be reinitialized and reset to 0. This will be no big problem in most cases as you won’t work on your systems while really playing in most cases. To solve this problem you have two options:

First option: Add a script group (a folder) and add a new script item for each variable you define. This way, editing a variable definition will only reset the edited variable and none of the others that are defined in different scripts. This has the added advantage that you have a nice graphical overview of your defined variables.

Second option (more advanced): Change the variable initialization to only initialize the variable if it hasn’t been initialized before, thus keeping the values of previously defined variables. This would look like this:

In Lua all undefined variables are initialized to the value nil. The value nil is not the same thing as the number 0 or the empty string "". What it means is that a variable that has the value nil has not been declared yet and does not exist. If a variable does not exist, it cannot be used as its value is undefined at this point. Consequently, increasing the value of nil by one is impossible as the variable doesn’t exist yet and will lead to a Lua error. The above script simply checks if the variable myKills has been defined yet and if it hasn’t, it will declare the variable and set its value to 0. === Lists Having variables that hold a single value is the most important usage of variables, but very often you’ll like to define variables that hold a list of values e. g. a list of your enemies, a list the items you are currently carrying etc.. To define a variable to be a list you need to declare it to be a Lua table. Let’s declare the variable myEnemies as a list containing the names of your enemies:

You can now add new enemies to this list by calling the Lua function listAdd( listName, item ) e.g.

To print the contents of your enemy list on the screen you can run this script

Now let’s make a little alias that adds a new name to your enemy list when you type "add enemy " followed by the name of the enemy e. g. "add enemy Peter" Open the alias editor by clicking on the alias icon. Click on the "Add" icon to add a new alias. Choose any name you like for your alias e.g. "add new enemy" and then define following pattern for the alias: ^add enemy (.*) Then add this little script in the script editor below:

Save the alias and try. Alias are explained in detail below. Another way to declare a list is to define its values directly.

To remove an item from the list you can use the function listRemove( listName, item ). === Saving Variable Values to Disc Having statistics scripts that last as long as the session lasts is a nice thing, but it makes more sense to write the variables to disc and reload them when you play the next time. To do this you have to save your variables. Mudlet has 2 ways to implement variable persistence. First, you can tell Mudlet to save all of your variables on exit automatically and ask Mudlet to automatically restore them when the session gets reloaded the next time you play on this profile. Second, you can take care of saving your variables yourself and reloading them yourself. This gives you more control and will be the preferred solution in bigger systems.

To be continued …

Alias are triggers that operate on user input. Mudlet uses hierarchically ordered powerful Perl regex expression alias. We have explicitly chosen not to offer multi condition alias, alias chains or the same trigger types the trigger engine offers because this would be way over the top and is simply not needed for alias expansion - although it should be noted that the processes are closely related, except that aliases, i.e. input triggers, operate on a different data stream, namely the user input stream, whereas triggers operate on the MUD output data stream. The only real difference between output triggers and input triggers is that input triggers can change the input stream they work on, whereas output triggers cannot change the stream itself - output triggers can change what is printed on the screen as a result of the stream, but they cannot change the stream itself. This is a fundamental difference and a deeper understanding is key to getting to grips with Mudlets alias engine. When you enter a command on the keyboard and press enter or return, the text that you have typed in the command line will be forwarded to the alias unit, i. e. the input trigger unit, in form of the Lua variable command. This variable will be matched against all active alias in the hierarchy unless access to an alias branch is locked by the user or by a script. If an input trigger matches, it will intercept the user command and the original command will be ignored. Upon a match the clear text command is being send as a command to the MUD in replacement of the original command, if a clear text command has been specified by the user and the attached alias script is being executed. However, the initial command that the user has typed in the command line will not be sent unless you do this as part of your script. Consequently, if you want your input trigger to send a command to the MUD, you’ll either have to specify a clear text command for simple cases or send commands via the attached alias script e.g. send("kill monster"). You may argue that you feel that it is unnecessary work to be forced to send a command replacement yourself, but this very fact makes our alias system way more powerful because it gives you complete control about what is happening. Why is this so? The initial user command is being held in the Lua variable command. When this value changes within the alias unit processing chain, the initial user input that the input triggers work on can be rewritten and changed in the process. Consequently, you can substitute the user input step by step - or alias by alias - without that anything happens as far as sending commands is being concerned unless you explicitly decide to do so.

The example in the diagram above shows 2 matching aliases, but only one of them sends commands to the MUD - and only if the player is healthy enough to attack the opponent. The other alias that matched the user input (enemy) choses a fitting opponent and sets the variable enemy accordingly, otherwise it issues a warning that attacking one of the available enemies would be too dangerous.

For an input trigger to match the command text the same rules as explained above in the trigger section apply. However, to simplify matters there is only one alias type. As alias are not performance critical we could reduce the amount of trigger types to just Perl regex as this type can do it all and performance is no issue with alias as the amount of data is much less. Even if you type like a madman you’ll never get close to sending the same amount of text to the MUD than the amount of text the MUD sends back to you.

What does it mean that a regex is true or "matched"? A trigger or an alias fires - or executes its commands/script - when the text matches the pattern of the trigger or alias. In most cases this means that the text contains the trigger/alias pattern. If the regex pattern is reen then a text "The green house" will match because "reen" is contained in the text. More complex regex patterns can also hold information on where in the text a certain pattern must occur in order to match. ^tj only matches when the letters "tj" occur at the beginning of the text. Consequently, a text like "go tj" would not match. Regex patterns can also capture data like numbers, sequences of letters, words etc. at certain positions in the text. This is very useful for MUD related scripting and this is why it is explained below.

Let’s get back to alias. We start with a simple example.

We want Mudlet to send "put weapon in bag" whenever we type "pwb". Consequently, the pattern is pwb and as the task is so simple it’s enough to enter "put weapon in bag" in the send field. Then we click on save to save the changes and activate the alias by clicking on the padlock icon. Then we leave the trigger editor and test our new alias. After typing "pwb" and pressing return Mudlet will send the command "put weapon in bag" to the MUD.

Let’s move on to a more complicated example that is needed very often.

We want our script to automatically put the weapon in the correct bag as we have many bags and many weapons. The pattern stays the same. ^pwb The ^ at the beginning of the line means that the command starts with pwd and no other letter in front of this. If we define our pattern more clearly, the pattern will match less often. Without the ^ the alias will match and the alias script will always be run whenever there is the sequence of letters "pwd" in your commands. This may not always be what you want. This is why it’s usually a good idea to make the pattern definition as exact as needed by being less general. The more general the pattern, the more often it will match.

Back to our task: The pattern is ^pwb. Let’s assume that we have defined 2 variables in some other script. The variable "weapon" is the weapon we use and the variable "bag" is the name of the bag. NOTE: In Mudlet global variables can be accessed anywhere from within Mudlet scripts - no matter if they have been defined in a trigger script, in an alias script or in a key or button script. As soon as it’s been defined it somewhere it is usable. To make sure that a variable is local only, i. e. cannot be referenced from other scripts, you have to use the keyword local in front of your variable definition. Back to our alias: Pattern is:[,#b0e0e6]^pwb Script is:

Depending on the values of our variables Weapon and bag the command "^{pwd" will be substituted with an appropriate command. To set your weapon and bag variables we use 2 more aliases: Alias to set the weapon:} uw (\w)+ Script:

To set our bag variable: Pattern:[,#b0e0e6]^set bag (.*)

Now let’s go back to our initial problem. We want an alias to put our current weapon into our current bag. But what happens if we are in the middle of a fight and absolutely need to sip a healing potions because we are close to death and cannot take the risk that the bag may be too full to take the weapon? We want to upgrade out little alias to take into account that the bag may be full and chose an empty bag instead. To do this we set up a trigger that detects messages that indicate that the attempt to put the weapon in the bag failed. In this trigger we execute this little bag-is-full-detection-trigger Trigger Pattern: (type substring) "Your bag is full." script:

This detection trigger will set the variable bagIsFull to true as soon as it sees the message "Your bag is full.". Then you know that you have to use your spare bag to take the weapon.

Now we have the tools to write an improved version of our little alias script:

The next example is one of the most common aliases a tell alias: Pattern:[,#b0e0e6]^tj (.*) Script:

Sadly, Jane is your fiancée and the one thing she is a vegetarian and absolutely hates all words that relate to meat. Luckily, you know enough about aliases by now to make her believe that you’d never ever even think about meat. So you head to your global function script (any script item will do as long as you define your variables outside of your function definitions. See the scripts chapter below for more information. In your script "my global functions" you add a Lua table containing a list of all of all words that a vegetarian might hate. For example:

Now you can upgrade your tell-jane script to automatically search our tell for all words that Jane might not like. In case such a word is found we substitute the entire tell with "How is the weather?".

Unlike alias that define patterns that match on user input, triggers define patterns that match on MUD output. In other words, triggers react to text that has been sent by the MUD, whereas alias react to user commands that have been typed into the command line.