Let’s talk about tradeskills!
We’ll have six tradeskills at launch, in two categories: Custom Design and Item Creation.
Tradeskills in the Custom Design category are Fashion, Cuisine, and Jewelry, while the Item Creation category has WeaponMods, ArmorMods, and ShipMods.
In the Custom Design tradeskills, you’ll be creating design patterns for clothing, food/drink, and jewelry that are completely custom, meaning that you’ll write all the descriptive text for them. Then, you’ll submit them for admin approval which must be granted before you can create items from those patterns. There’ll be a one-time cost in credits to buy a license to use these tradeskills, similar to some of other other games, due to the fact that the admin have to hand-approve your patterns. These are the tradeskills favored by those who enjoy and are good at descriptive and evocative writing.
On the other side, we have Item Creation, where tradeskills make items that aren’t customized in the same way. Typically, these are items that would be mass produced because they get used up a a lot. High-volume vs. custom creation. Our initial Item Creation tradeskills are all mods (modifications) for weapons, bodyarmor, and ships that grant bonuses or maluses of various kinds to those things.
However, you can’t just create one out of thin air – you need to earn the knowledge for each mod first, by finding and reverse-engineering mods that get dropped when hunting NPCs. Reverse-engineering them will provide you with some % of the knowledge needed to make that mod going forward, as well as some parts specific to that mod.
Once you have 100% knowledge of that mod, you can start crafting that mod, using the parts. (Important to note that, of course, crafted mods can’t be reverse-engineered. Only dropped mods can.) Once you run out of parts, you’ll need to obtain more, which is how we’ll enforce some scarcity in the system, so that everyone isn’t always running around with the best mods. Mods will also be used up regularly, creating opportunity for diligent crafters.
And that’s what we’ll have for crafting at launch!
Of course, we’ll be adding many more crafting skills post-launch, and have tossed around ideas from custom drug crafting (you too can be a space scumbag!) to crafting entire buildings for other players to use as housing. But, Starmourn will end up being far more expansive than what it is at launch, and what seems like a good idea now might not once we start getting feedback from people after we launch.
We’ve put up the first video showing off our space flight in Starmourn. Enjoy!
I’m happy to present to you a short interview with Laura Martz, Starmourn’s lead builder for the last 16 months or so. Although almost everyone who works for Iron Realms started out as a player of our games, we reached out to the wider MUD community when hiring a lead builder, and although we had some great candidates apply, Laura got the position and is killing it!
Let’s let her tell you about herself and her building activities in her words:
She’s quite the builder, and has taken more than a few heads with that axe.
Matt: So, Laura, tell us about your background in MUDs.
Laura: I first stumbled onto MUDs in 2005, when I logged onto Armageddon. As I’m an avid reader, writer, gamer, and roleplayer it was love at first permanent death. I started staffing and building there not long after I started playing, and did that with semi-regularity until last year, when I was hired by Iron Realms Entertainment. I adore maneuvering through code challenges mixed with the descriptive nature of a world that relies more on imagination than something as limited as rendered images. Creating a place that players can enjoy has always been a deeply fulfilling hobby…and now, occupation. I’m really fortunate! Writing for Iron Realms is really the best job ever. And, until graphics cards catch up to my awesome brain, I doubt I’ll ever leave text-based gaming as a primary source of entertainment in my life.
Matt: What was your favorite part about building for Armageddon?
Laura: Finding new ways to challenge myself to make areas interesting was (and still is) one of my favorite parts of building. I like making areas feel lush and alive and surprising. So… secret hideaways, easter eggs, scripts to handle npc behavior, interesting maps. In Armageddon, when I started building, most of the world was well established, and so areas were much smaller and more detailed. My goal was always to evoke an experience for the player, tell a story they’d want to fill in the gaps of – whether that is with a crumbling shanty or a noble’s estate. I’m bringing all of that to Starmourn, and having a great time.
Matt: How are you finding building on Starmourn to be?
Laura: Completely awesome. There’s a lot of amazing features for builders, from custom exits to elevations to instances to hacking to props to datashards to the quest system to progging… the sheer amount of creative tools we have at our disposal to make areas multi-layered and immersive is fantastic. They’re all fun to play with and fit together in different ways. I love IRE’s graphical mapping system, which was a new experience for me – and I could not live without it, now.
Matt: What’s your favorite part of building?
Laura: Honestly? Spreadsheets. I love producing a lot of stuff at once, and I couldn’t do it without google sheets helping me plan out a hundred npcs at once (for example) or a bunch of prop tables for environments. As for actual inside-the-game building…ugh, really tough to say. The fact that there’s so many different things I like to do keeps me hopping, though. Once I churn out a bunch of rooms, writing npcs starts to seem really appealing, and when that’s done, I’m all excited about progging, or quests, or some other aspect.
Matt: Can you describe the rough mental process you go through when designing an area?
Laura: I think of it like getting a seed of an idea that I nurture into growth step by step. It might be as simple as a couple of key words (for instance ‘abandoned spacestation’), which I then need to flesh out. I’ll look at images and inspirational artwork, read our extensive wiki, ponder where in space it’s located and what the spacestation’s original purpose was and what it may have looked like when it wasn’t abandoned, ruminate over key locations in the area (a medbay, crew quarters, a charging station for bots), consider what sort of NPCs I’ll need to create (roaming, glitchy, old security bots, motionless laser turrets). I also think a lot about what players will actually be able to do in the area as far as quests and such go. I’ll jot all this stuff down as notes in a file, work out a map on graph paper (I have a lot of graph paper maps in my house right now!) and when it comes time to actually coding and building things out, the process is really easy and fast.
Matt: What’s your favorite area that you’ve designed and built so far on Starmourn?
Laura: This is the toughest question that there is. I have built a lot of areas in Starmourn, and I love something about all of them. Benu Wen, the W’hoorn homeworld, has one of my favorite monsters in the game (a three-legged poisonous tripod-like dinosaur called a tridactyl), and I love how the lower gravity makes all the trees spindly and tall. There’s an area on the surface of the planet Song I designed that is devastated by nuclear destruction and filled with mutants. I love nuclear devastation AND mutants! Oldtown, in Scatterhome, is a creepy, half-flooded labyrinth of ruins deep in the asteroid, filled with roaming Bushraki gangs. I love ruins, labyrinths, and gangs! Gunurash III, the Krona homeworld, is near and dear to my heart, as it was the first area I worked on and I love its giant bug monsters and rocky, arid harshness. This is a really hard question, Matt. 😛
Matt: What kinds of things do you like doing when you’re not working on Starmourn? Do any of them influence your building work?
Laura: I’m an avid reader, and I love digging into new sci fi to help keep my inspirational synapses firing. So yeah, my hobbies actively influence my work on Starmourn. My favorite (sci fi) authors include Neal Stephenson, Kage Baker, William Gibson, James S.A. Corey, Rosemary Kirstein (finish the Steerswoman series, lady!!), Vernor Vinge, Kurt Vonnegut, Liu Cixin, Becky Chambers, Scott Westerfeld, Marissa Meyers, Ian McDonald and…well, many more!! I absolutely love fantasy as well, but my tastes have run more towards science fiction for several years now. As previously mentioned, I’m a big gamer as well, with an embarassing amount of hours invested into Minecraft and Terraria.
Matt: What do you think players are going to like best about the areas in Starmourn?
Laura: The sheer variety. We have every conceivable sort of environment anyone could possibly want to visit/do battle in with their character. Want a lava planet? We have it. Want a water planet? We have it. Want forests? Yes. Frozen forests? Yes. Frozen oceans? Yes. Deserts? Yes. Mountains, beaches, lush valleys, airless moons, yes. Sailing ships, spaceships, shipyards, space stations, shuttles, budding colonies, established towns, peaceful farms, factories, populated asteroids, unpopulated asteroids, corrupt megalopolises, ruins, shining spires…we have it all. You’re going to love it. You’ll never want to leave.
Matt: Thanks Laura! And thanks for reading, folks. I hope you feel a tiny bit more connected to our hard-working team than you did before! In a couple weeks, I’ll do an interview with Justin, our producer, as well.
Although we recently released some details on the basics of the starship system in Starmourn, maybe you’re wondering what ‘space’ looks like in a MUD?
Wonder no longer! I just put up a page showing a screenshot of space, some info on how big it is (very) as well as the first map of Starmourn Sector! Check it out.
I’ve just put up a page with a lot of info about the basics of starships. You will definitely want to check this out, as it’s by far the largest information release on starships we’ve done so far.
More info on them is coming, including shots of space and ships flying around!
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