Mapper Fundementals: Practical guide to exploration, note taking and movement

The mapper is a powerful tool to get around the world and take notes about its various areas. In this guide, we’ll be covering basic exploration, note taking and movement with the practical application of mapping out useful items in the various manor zones. Items, especially potions, in these manor shops are not enumerated by commands such as “potsearch” and thus we need to build our own database.

Requirements: Aardwolf MUSHclient with the mapper plugin. Links to downloads, documentation and source repos located here.

Manor Areas:

• Manormount
• Manorwoods
• Manorville
• Manorsea
• Manor1
• Manor3
• Manorisle

Exploration:

• Run to one of the manor areas
• Explore as much of the area as you possibly can.
  • Don’t worry about stopping at the shops right now or missing exits here and there, the mapper is keeping track of the rooms and their exits.
• After you feel that you’ve searched as much as you can for the area, type “mapper unmapped here”
  • This will show all rooms in the current area that have an unmapped exploration and the direction of the unmapped exits
  • The mapper text output is interactive! You may click on a row and this will take you to the room in the record.
  • More detail may be found by typing in “mapper help exploring”

Shop enumeration:

• Now that you have a fairly complete map of the area, type “mapper shops here”
  • This command will list out every shop in the area. The text output is also interactive!
  • Iterate through each shop. When you find something useful or interesting, take a note per the instructions below!
  • More detail may be found by typing “mapper help searching”

Note taking:

• When in the shop with an interesting item, type “mapper addnote”.
  • A dialogue box will pop up to enter a descriptive note for the room
  • More detail may be found by typing in “mapper help searching” and “mapper help utils”

Getting back to a room:

• Now that you have a few shops with notes, you may list them back out using “mapper notes manor”
  • When running the “mapper notes <area>” command, the <area> parameter searches all areas containing the expression.
    • e.g. “mapper notes manor” will search all areas containing the word manor
  • The text is interactive! If you’d like to get back to a room, just click on the record.
  • More detail may be found by typing in “manor help searching”

This guide should provide a foundation for general exploration and providing additional context around the mapper’s capabilities and other plugins which leverage the mapper, such as Search and Destroy, in order to spark further research of the mapper and its extensive capabilities. With this knowledge, this article intends to expand your ability to explore zones, take notes and build out faster and more accurate pathing for quests, campaigns, and global quests. Happy mudding!