Mobiles — mob for short, the old MUD word for anything that lives and moves — are the world's creatures and characters: a shopkeeper, a town crier, a goblin, a mouse, a shambling zombie. Friendly or fierce, they are all mobiles. They are not items: they stand in rooms, you can look at them, and (soon) they will move about, talk, and fight. Builders make and shape them; the commands mirror items but use mob.

Seeing them. When you look, any mobiles in the room are named after the items:

The Origin
A featureless point from which Mossworld grows.
Exits: north
You see a coin.
A town crier is here.
A goblin is here.

Looking closely.

• examine mobile (or ex mobile) — read its description
• look mobile — the same

As with items, you can refer to a mobile by any word of its name or its keywords, and adjectives disambiguate — look grizzled zombie picks the grizzled one out of a crowd of zombies.

(Fighting them, trading with them, and watching them wander, are coming.)

Making and shaping mobiles needs the worldbuilder, implementor, or admin role. The command is mob (mon and monster are aliases).

Make one. A mobile is born in the room you're standing in:

mob create goblin

ref below is the mobile's keyword or its number (id); you edit mobiles in the room with you.

Name and describe.

• mob ref name new name — rename it
• mob ref desc text — set the examine text players read

Data fields. A mobile's stats, flags, and behaviour live in its data, with the same typed values and editor as items:

• mob ref data field value — set a field (true/false → flag, numbers → numbers, else text; empty or false clears it)
• mob ref data — list the mobile's data fields

Useful fields:

• data keywords word word… — extra words to refer to it (e.g. data keywords grizzled thistle, so two zombies can be told apart)
• data hp n, data damage n — stats (no effect yet; combat is coming)

Reactions. A mobile can react to what happens around it. The first reaction is overheard speech:

• data react_say phrase — what it says when someone speaks nearby
• data react_say_chance pct — the chance, in percent (default 100)

The classic example — a zombie that mutters for brains one time in ten:

mob create zombie
mob zombie desc A shambling corpse, jaw slack, eyes empty.
mob zombie data react_say brains
mob zombie data react_say_chance 10

Now, whenever anyone speaks in that room, there's a 10% chance:

Cindy says: anyone here?
The zombie says: brains

A friendly mobile works the same way — a town crier who calls out when folk gather and chatter. (More reactions — greeting arrivals, responding to attacks — will follow.)

Remove a mobile. mob destroy ref — takes it out of the world.

• Mobiles are a separate kind of thing: item commands never touch a mobile, and mob commands never touch an item. (To edit a mouse that's a mobile, use mob mouse …, not item mouse ….)
• Mobiles live in rooms; they aren't picked up or carried.
• They share the look and keyword systems with items, so describing and naming them feels the same.

See also: All about Items, How to Play, How to Build.