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:

Town Square
Welcome to the town square. There is a fountain here and some benches to rest on.
Exits: north
You see a coin.
A town crier is here.
A goblin is here.

• examine name (or ex mobile) to read its description
• look name does 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 or look grizzled zombie picks the grizzled one out of a crowd of zombies.

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

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.

• 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 is 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.