Preferences
This is a guide on the various preferences available in HellMOO, which allow plays to customize their experience of the game.
Viewing Preferences
A simple readout of the various preference categories can be accessed with the @prefs command, which will produce something like this:
Category Description display Visual / display related settings. gameplay Settings that affect gameplay behavior. mail Mail system settings, 'help mail'. misc notifications who Settings to tweak 'who' behavior.
From there you can view specific preferences within categories. If you wanted to see the gameplay prefs, for example, you would type:
@prefs gameplay
That then gives this list:
Preference Value Description autobarge off barge into illegal places without confirmation autoeat off automatically eat when hungry autofight on keep attacking once begun autosmell off auto-smell when entering a room autosmoke off automatically smoke cigarettes/blunts in your inventory defendhome off defend your home when not connected followleader on automatically follow party leader hints on show hints every so often opendoors on open closed doors automatically as you walk tersefight off reduce combat spam by not showing swings, etc unlockdoors on unlock locked doors automatically if you have the key wears on enable wearing messages
Changing Preferences
Most preferences are binary; they can be "on" or "off". Change them with this command:
@prefs <pref> is <on/off>
Using 1/0 instead of on/off also works. HellMOO sets default preferences on every character that is made, and the default set is pretty universally helpful. However, if a preference is not to your liking, it can be changed as above; all the prefs in the other categories work the same way. Thanks to the descriptions included in the @prefs readout, the various options are also self-explanatory. Beware, however, that a significant percentage of prefs are broken, outdated or entirely non-functional.
Popular Preferences
Below are some popular preferences to toggle, with explanations on the rationale behind them:
- @prefs followleader is 0. This is almost essential, and disables a strange relic of the Party system which often gets people killed.
- @prefs showdesc is 0/@prefs shownudes is 0. Players who are more interested in HellMOO as a "game" than as a "world" tend to turn these on. Showdesc 0 cuts all the fluffy descriptions of tiles, leaving only the important objects, while shownudes 0 gags the "nude" descriptions of NPCs and players, which serve no practical purpose and can be very lengthy.
- @prefs autosit is 0. This is absolutely essential for Hideous Freak mutants; it stops characters from automatically sitting down after a certain time has passed. Normally, this brings out a destress effect, but for freaks, it will gradually stress them instead.
- @prefs checkpoint is 0. This disables the regular messages on server checkpointing, which serve no real purpose.
- @prefs hidejobs is 1. This automatically hides jobs that have been totally maxed out from the job readout. In the early game, it can be satisfying to see the grayed-out entries of finished jobs, but by the midgame it gets very spammy.
- @prefs analstress is 1. This disables the game's default behavior of only reporting stress changes in higher numbers. Without this pref, it's easy for stress to sneak up on you.
- @prefs hints is 0. This disables the occasional hints that the game offers. Since hints trigger every time you enter their tile and tell you the same thing over and over, most experienced players find them annoying.
- @prefs singlecolumn is 1. This makes your character's inv readout display in one column down the screen, which some players find much easier to read than the back-and-forth default.
