Mossworld is a world you can explore right in your browser. You type a command, press Enter, and read what comes back.

• Go to mossworld.ca.
• Create an account (or sign in). Your user name is your character name.
• You're dropped straight into the world.

You can also use telnet or a mud client like TinTin++:

• not secure: telnet mossworld.ca 4000 (this is insecure because the password is sent in plain-text)
• secure TLS: openssl s_client -connect mossworld.ca:5443 -quiet
• Recommended: use a mud client like TinTin++ (command line unix) or zMUD (windows). They support TLS and have nice features.
• Mudlet, Mushclient and Blightmud are all good modern clients. I think Mudlet is cross-platform.

Anyways, when you get in to Mossworld, the bar (prompt) at the bottom is your command line. On the browser client it shows connected as yourname; click that to open a menu (Settings, Help, Log out). In the telnet/tls/mud client it shows a prompt like “> ”.

You can change your prompt; try typing “help prompt”. In general, you can type “help” for help on game commands.

The first time you enter, Mossworld walks you through making a character — one choice at a time. Just type the letter shown and press Enter:

• a profession — Adventurer, Fighter, Wizard, or Woodsman (see Classes)
• a race — Human, Elf, Dwarf, Halfling, or Cat (each starts at a different age)
• an alignment — lawful, neutral, or chaotic
• a parting gift — a camping knife, a torch, a magic key, a handful of coins, a riverstone jewel pendant (+5 hp), or nothing

Then you step into the world. You can review all of it any time with stat.

Had second thoughts? While you are level 5 or under you can re-pick your class or race with setup class (or setup profession) and setup race — you'll be walked back through that one choice. It isn't free: re-picking drops you to level 1 and wipes your trained skills and ability scores; your skill points reset to a fresh level-1 pool to spend again. Prefer a clean slate? setup restart (also setup all) is a complete do-over — back to level 1 with skills and abilities wiped, then creation again from scratch (same level-5-or-under rule). Either way, your gear and coins are always kept and you stay right where you are — no relocation, no fuss. After level 5 your class and race are locked for good.

You can also swap your parting gift with setup gift (level 5 or under). Because a fresh gift is free starter kit, it isn't given away twice for nothing: you must either trade in the gift you still carry or pay 5 silver for a new one. If you have neither, you're told so and keep what you have. (Gender and zodiac can be changed any time with setup gender and setup cz, at no cost.)

Rooms join up by the four compass directions:

• north, south, east, west — or just n, s, e, w

If there's no exit that way, the game says so. Some rooms are closed (under construction) and can't be entered yet — you'll be told when you bump into one.

• look (or l) — the current room: its name, description, exits, and what's here
• look person — size someone up: name, level, race & class, and how they describe themselves
• exits (or ex) — just the exits
• glance target (or gl) — a quick read of how badly a creature or person is hurt, without their full description (glance alone checks yourself)
• who — who is online right now
• zones — the world's areas

Items are the things you find in the world — a coin, a lamp, a sword, a sign. When you look, items on the ground are listed, one inline or several as a list:

You see a coin.

You see: a coin a sword a brass lantern

Picking up and dropping.

• get item (or take item) — pick something up off the ground
• drop item — set it down here
• get all — scoop up everything on the ground that isn't fixed in place (this skips fixed things; to loot a corpse, name it: get all corpse)
• inventory (or inv) — what you're carrying (things you've worn or wielded show under eq, not here)
• coins — pick up or drop money: get gold, take 3 gold, drop 5 silver (gold, silver, copper)
• donate item — give an item to the donation room; it poofs onto the floor there for someone else to claim

Looting containers and corpses. A slain creature leaves a corpse you can rifle, and some props (chests, sacks) hold things too. A corpse stays where it lies, so you loot it in place rather than pick it up:

• look container – see what's inside first (look corpse)
• get item container – take one thing out (get sword corpse, get necklace chest)
• get all container – empty it, items and coins together (get all corpse)
• get coin container – just the money (get gold corpse, get 3 silver chest)
• put item container – the reverse: tuck something you carry into it (put sword chest); put all container tips your whole loose inventory in

You may write from or in if you like (get ring from corpse, put ring in chest); it reads the same. Plain get all with no container named only sweeps loose items off the floor, so a fixed corpse must be named.

Referring to things — keywords. You never have to type a full name. Any word of an item's name works, and builders can add extra keywords. Every word you type must match, so adjectives disambiguate:

• get coin, get penny, get copper — all find a copper coin
• get copper coin — picks the copper coin over a gold one
• exact matches beat partial ones, so get coin won't grab a coinpurse

Looking closely.

• examine item (or ex item) — read its description; checks what you carry first, then the room
• look item — the same, but the room first (handy when you and the room both have a lamp)

(On its own, ex — like exits — shows the room's exits.)

Wearing, wielding and holding.

• wear item [where] — put on clothing, armour, or a shield. Most items know where they go; you can also say where, e.g. wear ring neck to wear a ring on a chain.
• wield item — wield a weapon in your main hand.
• offhand item — wield a weapon in your off hand.
• hold item — hold a talisman, orb, or trinket. If the item is only a light source, hold lights it for you instead.
• light item — hold a light source aloft. It has its own slot, so a torch you light stays lit even when you take up a shield, an off-hand weapon, or a held item.
• remove item (or rem) — take anything off and put it away.

Your main hand and your light are independent slots. Your off-hand spot holds just one of: an off-hand weapon, a held item, or a shield — taking up one frees the others.

• equipment (or eq) — everything you're wearing and wielding, by position:

You are wearing:
  <used as light>     a brass lantern
  <worn around neck>  an amulet
  <worn on finger>    a gold ring
  <wielded>           a sword
  <held>              a runestone

Self-storage — Bill's lockers. Off Moss Avenue you'll find Bill's Self Storage, a room of personal lockers. Anything you stash there is kept safe and stays put — through logout, death, even a server restart — until you come back for it. Bill charges a flat 1 copper for each access (one item or a whole armful, same price); reading your locker list is free.

• store item — stash something you're carrying
• store all — stash your whole loose inventory at once (worn gear stays on you)
• find item or find # — take one thing back out, by name or by its list number
• find all — pull everything back out
• list (or list page) — see what's stored, 10 to a page (free to read)

Your locker holds up to 20 items for now, and these commands only work while you're standing in the locker room.

Mossworld has monsters, and not all of them are friendly. Start a fight with kill target (or attack); a Fighter who knows the skill can open with hit target instead, for an edge on the first exchange. From there blows are traded automatically, round by round, until one side falls — or you break away with flee. Not sure you want the fight at all? consider target (short con) sizes it up first, from “you have the clear advantage” to a flat warning to walk away, based on how the creature measures up to you.

Whether a blow lands pits the attacker's accuracy against the defender's armour: better armour, and out-levelling your foe, make you harder to hit (and them easier to hit). Damage comes from the weapon — bare fists do little, real steel does more — so a wielded weapon is worth carrying. Some fighters also learn to dodge — a trained chance to sidestep a blow entirely, so an attack that would have landed simply misses. If you like to watch your foes weaken, turn on set glance on and a short read of how hurt everything you're fighting is prints at the end of each round.

Win and you earn the monster's experience, and score l remembers which lands you've earned it in. Lose and everything goes dark… you come to back in the Tourist Center with a single hit point, no worse for it but a little wiser. A few rooms are sanctuaries where no violence is allowed — good places to catch your breath.

Tougher foes are easier with friends: form a party to fight together, share the experience, and split the loot. See Parties.

A wizard fights and travels with spells rather than steel. Cast one with cast spell: cast heal to mend wounds, cast affliction target to lay a wasting curse that gnaws a foe each round, cast energy shield or cast magic bubble to ward yourself, and cast blink dir or cast teleport creature to move. Every spell draws on your mana and, once cast, leaves a brief beat where you can't act. A wizard has the whole spellbook from level 1 — what matters is how deeply each spell is trained. Even a non-wizard can cast a spell they've learned if they carry something that grants mana (Wizzy sells a wand and a hat that do). The full list is in Skills.

Your hit points, mana, and movement return on their own over time — 1 point of each every 30 seconds — but only while you are both fed and watered. Let your food or water run dry and recovery simply stops (there's no starvation damage) until you eat and drink again, so keep a little of both on hand. There's nothing to do but wait: duck into a sanctuary where no fighting is allowed, catch your breath, and you'll be back to full before long. Wizards lean on this most — a spent mana pool refills at that same steady trickle, so a hard fight is often followed by a short rest. See Food and Drink.

• score (or sc) — your character sheet: level, abilities, gold, alignment, equipment and more
• score l — your level and experience: how much you need to level up, and the lands where you have earned the most
• stat — a quick one-line health check (your hit points and movement)
• playtime — how long you've played

Your character can learn skills — profession abilities like a fighter's knack for landing the first blow. Each skill is a proficiency from 0 to 100%: at 0% you don't have it, and the higher it climbs the more reliably it works. You raise skills — and your raw abilities — by spending skill points at a trainer: a guild master who teaches one profession's skills. You earn 1 skill point every level, and start with a pool of 5 — Adventurers, the generalists, start with 7.

Stand with a trainer of your profession and:

• train — list what this trainer can teach and its cost, plus the skills you already know and their percentages
• train skill — spend a point to raise that skill's proficiency; train it again to push it higher, up to 100%
• train ability — spend a point to raise an ability such as str or con by one

For example, a Fighter at the warrior's guild learns hit with train hit, then trains it again to sharpen it. Trainers keep to their guild halls, and your score sheet shows the skills you know and the points you have left.

• sethome — make the current room your home (in the main cities, Mossworld and Mosgaard)
• home — recall to your home
• recall — teleport to the fountain

sethome, home and recall are a low-level convenience — all three stop working past level 10. After that you travel on your own two feet, or reach for a scroll: Wizzy sells a scroll of home (1 silver — recall to your set home) and a scroll of sethome (10 silver — set your home where you stand), and those work at any level.

A wizard has ways of his own. cast blink dir darts him in a straight line up to ten rooms (handy for skipping a long corridor or the monsters in it), and cast teleport creature folds space to the nearest creature he names — both only where he could actually walk. And a wizard's cast recall never expires. See Skills.

• say message — speak out loud to everyone in your room
• shout message — shout to everyone in your zone (your whole area, not just the room)
• tell player message — a private message to someone, anywhere in the world
• emote name — act something out: emote wave shows “yourname waves.” (short: me, em)
• who — who is online right now

Channels are named chat rooms you opt into. Type channels to see what's available, join name to start listening, and leave name to drop one. You talk on a channel by its number — 1 Hello! sends to your channel 1 (often general). The numbers are yours: they count upward over the channels you have joined, in your order, so two players may number the same channel differently. Reorder yours with ch # #.

Parties. Band together with party invite player to fight as a group, share the experience, and split the loot — up to four of you. Full details, and the built-in Party chat channel, are in Parties.

Chat mode. In the browser, press Tab or Esc to flip between command mode and chat mode. In command mode you type commands the usual way. In chat mode, plain text goes straight to whoever you last spoke to — your last say, tell who, or channel — so you can just talk without prefixes. A line starting with / still runs one command (so /look looks, and /1 Hello chats on channel 1). Flip back any time, or use /chat and /command.

Set with the set command:

• set desc text — a short line others see when they look at you
• set verbose on / off — show or hide tutorial/assist hints (off by default)
• set glance on / off — in combat, a one-line condition read on your foes at the end of each round (off by default; recolour it below)
• set armor modern / traditional — how armour reads on your score sheet (a plain bonus, or classic descending armour class)
• (To recolour the game's text, see Colors just below.)

Recolour the game's text with setcolor. Colors apply in the browser and over telnet, and are saved to your character.

A color can be a name (yellow, orchid, cyan — any CSS color name, plus tangoplum and medicalplum), a hex code (#ad7fa8), or three numbers r,g,b (173,127,168).

• setcolor category color — colour a category
• setcolor category off — back to its default
• setcolor — list every category and its current colour
• setcolor list — print your scheme as /setcolor lines to copy, paste, or share
• setcolor save name / setcolor load name — save your scheme under a name and switch back to it later (either with no name lists your saved schemes)
• setcolor remove name — delete a saved scheme (your active colours are left alone)

Every element in the room view has its own slot, so roomname, roomdesc, and exits are independent — recolouring one never touches the others.

For example: setcolor roomname yellow then setcolor roomdesc medicalplum.

• help — the basic command list
• help topics — extra help topics available to you
• quit / logout — disconnect. Both ask you to confirm (y / N) first, so a stray keypress won't drop you. (There's no q shortcut — q is quaff.)

Shaping new rooms and zones needs a builder role. See How to Build, All about Items, and All about Mobiles.