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Welcome & Tips
Welcome to the builder's guide! If you're reading this, you're probably looking to contribute content to CE or one of its successors, so let me start out by saying THANK YOU! By adding content, you're helping players around the world discover the magic of Shadowrun and the joy of being part of a hobbyist community.
If this is your first time building on any MUD, we recommend getting familiar with the On-Line Creation (OLC) system. It's a menu-based system that gives you a list of fields to fill in for each thing you create (e.g. rooms, objects, etc).
If you're already familiar with OLC systems, the Technical Guide section of the Builder's Guide index lists the currently-available editing tools. You can click into those headings for info on how to use each tool.
Remember that you can GOTO <vnum> for any room you've built in your zone! This is a quick way of getting around.
When building, it's critically important to start with a clearly defined theme and minimum viable area. If you simply dive in and start building without knowing what you want to accomplish and what it will look like when it's done, you run a very high risk of writing yourself into a corner and burning out. Thankfully, this is pretty easy to pull together!
A theme can be something as simple as "a sprawling jungle full of old-growth trees and predators", "a creaky abandoned factory full of rust and pitfalls that's been taken over by a local gang", or "a sterile cubicle farm, clean and discomforting". It's just there to guide you on what elements are most appropriate to include in your area.
The minimum viable area (MVA, aka MVP) defines the minimum set of rooms, mobs, etc needed to make your zone 'fun' (which is something you define). Having a MVA/MVP lets you know when your base area is done, after which you can choose to expand on it as desired.
While this isn't required, many of our builders see more success when they map out their zone before they start building it. This can be on paper, on a draw document, in a spreadsheet-- wherever works best for you. This helps with visualizing and understanding your zone, which makes explaining it to others and laying it out in the game much easier.
All you have to do is draw boxes for your rooms, draw lines between them for exits, and add a little information about them. "Sewer pipe with aggro rats", "dojo with head of sect", etc is just fine.
"If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter."
We recommend minimizing the rooms/objects/etc you use to tell your story. For example, while it can be realistic to have a 20-room-long winding path in your zone, players are likely to speedwalk through that path, so you'll have written 20 winding-path descriptions for little benefit. Instead, we advise writing only a few rooms for your path and conveying its length through the descriptions.
This also applies to adding those extra nooks and crannies to areas. In our opinion, starting with the smallest area that will still be fun (aka minimum viable product or MVP) and building that out completely is the way to go. You can then add side rooms and other cool concepts once you have a solid core of completed work to extend from, or alternatively decide that you're done with this particular area and want to switch to the next cool concept.
We've added an AUDIT command to the buildport that will run checks for common issues on your area. By running it early and often, you can adjust your build strategy to match what the game expects, saving you from going back and making many changes later. When you're completely done with your zone, you can AUDIT SUBMIT to flag it for official review.
We have zones with canon items and template mobs that you're encouraged to reference. If you want to use a canon item without changing it, you can reference its vnum directly, or you can clone it to your zone if you want to edit how it looks. This saves you time on re-entering the same data.