I spent the weekend gathering dungeon maker tokens and having a peak at dungeons to get a basic idea of how mobs will work. I've learned a lot of What Not To Do with mobs and decorating through this little adventure. I got a ton of tokens and used those to buy up the Poet's Palace layout along with the other layouts I didn't have and a bunch of mob spawners! I won't be using a lot of the items that come as part of kits, I will be using house items, because I like house items and well let's face it, I have a ton laying around atm!
But this contest is not entirely just about decorating. It's about creating an adventure, a dungeon that's not just pretty and cool to look at, but makes you want to come back and see more and more. So I will be adding a little bit of flare and flavor text and I promise you it'll be an adventure. I'll get more into the story behind the dungeon later, but first, let's take a look at what we have to work with.
Poet's Palace 1 - Dungeon Maker Dungeon Layout
Hallway!
Biiiig Rooms for placing mobs all over the place.
Top Room with two small side rooms
A nice little gardeny area!
So that's what I've got to work with, but for this project, I'm gonna be covering the walls and floors so that you cannot tell it is in the poet's palace dungeon. You might be asking why, but...well there's a lot of space and I honestly don't want to use the layout given to me for this project. Since there's no blank island, I settle for doing my own thing this way!
Working with the dungeon maker is a bit of a pain, but once you get used to doing certain things it won't be so bad. You can use the layout editor to move things around, but there can be a couple of problems with that. note that I am working off an older version of the layout editor and this may have been fixed recently. be sure to check for an updated layout editor if you plan to use it!
For this project, my theme is Night and Day/Light and Darkness/Sun and Moon, which is why I have named it Of Dusk and Dawn. I am going to blend a lot of colors and ideas to create the vision I want to do this theme. I've already got the story/quest in mind for this place, but I'll reveal that later!
So when you go into the dungeon there will be some items already placed. You can leave these there, move them or even pack them away. They do count against your items count, but they do not appear in your inventory when picked up.
Let's go over a couple of things first.
How To Access/Create a Dungeon of your own:
Go into your character window. There is a Dungeons tab. Click it. There is a Create Dungeon button. Click that! It will pop up with a window where you can select your layout. You get a preview of the layout first. You have to name it before creating it, so get a good one!
Once you've selected your layout design and typed in the dungeon name, simply hit Create! And viola under your dungeon tab you will now see a dungeon listed! It is not published yet, you will have to enter it and then you can publish it.
To enter your dungeon just select it from the dungeon tab and hit Edit. This will zone you into the dungeon!
When you enter you can use /house and hit the pack all button. This will remove all objects currently in the dungeon into your dungeon toolbox. You'll still be able to access them, just they are put away!
Your toolbox will have all your mobs, bosses and dungeon furniture including house items that may be in your inventory as well. You can sort them, search for things, place things and pretty much do whatever you want with it! You can save layouts, load layout and edit them with the layout editor.
Note that you cannot enter a dungeon from inside a house. You cannot zone into a guild hall from your dungeon. You cannot use marketboards or your house vault while inside a dungeon. You will have to exit/leave the dungeon before you can do any of that! I have not tried it, but am pretty sure guild hall doors will not work inside a dungeon.
There are two objects, one of which you may wish to place before you start. In your toolbox there is a dungeon entrance and exit. I like to place my Dungeon entrance after I get a few things up and going. It works like a house entrance but you will have to right click to leave the dungeon. /house will bring up this window as well.
So for my own project I started with getting some walls and floors going in the first room, to play with, experiment and get my dungeon going.
The floors were a bit tricky. The layout editor doesn't like dungeons completely, so sometimes it takes a few tries to get things how you want them. note that there is and is not a moving box. You can pack things int he moving box with the editor, but there is no physical box to get them from. To get lost items back, you'll have to find them in your toolbox and hopefully select the right one. I recommend working with a small amount of items to start and watching your /loc to get an idea of where your items are located.
For my dungeon, I decided to add in a front room that won't have any mobs so that players can get oriented before diving right in. One of my main complaints is that people seem to pile mobs right at the beginning, giving players no room to get settled and have a "safe spot". I put this spot in an area where the floor is actually above a circular space, so when you first zone in you end up under my floor. Ooops!
I fixed that by placing my dungeon entrance on a place where my floor and the actual dungeon floor meet, which allows people to zone in without being under my floor, so if you do floor coverings, just be sure the entrance of your dungeon is on solid ground.
The room after this I did up in half black, half white and currently with a dome ceiling in blue.
I'm not sure what I am going to do with the hallways yet, but I left them mostly open for the time being, creating a doorway that hides most of the original decor, but meshes well with my decor.
Those two rooms took me about 4 hours to do up with a couple of mishaps. I found out you cannot craft inside a dungeon, so you'll have to zone in and out unfortunately. Park yourself outside a storage home or guild hall you usually craft inside and it won't be much of a problem!
Well, that's one room covered, I'll post more as I go along. Enjoy!
No comments:
Post a Comment