Exploring and Death

Death is a huge part of any MUD.  On SlothMUD, you can expect to die once in a while (or rather frequently if you are a tank-type character).  On Sloth, you'll die once your hit points reach into the negatives (0 hp means you are stunned until you regenerate 1 hp).  -1 and -2 hp usually means you are stunned but would recover in time.  -3 hp is the slowest death, as you'll be mortally wounded, slipping away into death very slowly.  Once you reach -10 hp, you are considered DEAD!  And this begins a timer (I believe it's around 5 minutes) before you eventually corpse (and cannot be brought back to life).  Until level 20 in any class, you do not lose experience for dying.  After you reach level 20 in any class, you will begin to lose a percentage of your experience on death (and a possible level loss as well - but this is rare in any case).

When you are mortally wounded/dead, you cannot speak, take any action, and most commands are locked to you.  You do have 3 commands available (who, where, and quit!).  Quit! means that you proceed directly to corpsing by choice and who lets you know who's online.  The where command allows you to know if someone has reached the area you died in, so you can tell if someone is coming for you or is nearby you.

In the old days, you were disconnected from the MUD when you died and you would have to re-log in.  With a recent code change, you remain connected to SlothMUD but you will appear at the log-in screen and you have to log-in from there.  You'll come back at the recall point of the continent you died on with 10 hp and whatever mana/moves you had left.  You will not have gold or equipment - those remain with your corpse.  Now, you'll have to retrieve your corpse in order to get your gold and equipment back (and do it fast if the mob loots, so you can get most of your equipment back and then finish the mob off later to get the rest of your equipment back).  Once you've reached your corpse, you have a series of options - get all corpse, get corpse, or carve corpse several times before getting the corpse.

Exploring is also very important on any MUD and with exploring usually comes death if you bumble into a mob that's aggressive and doesn't take kindly to you entering its lair (especially if you're wandering around on the non-Valkyre continents).  With that in mind, it's very important to know two commands: flee and recite recall.  Flee is not 100% successful and you can fail on flees.  You can also try to flee in a specific direction by specifying it, such as "flee e" to flee eastwards if possible.  Recite recall is oftentimes the first alias that a player makes on the MUD as "alias rr recite recall".  It recites a recall scroll, but if you don't have one in your inventory, it does nothing.  Recall scrolls crumble and disappear once used, so you'll have to buy more recall scrolls at the scribe shops scattered around the mud's primary recall towns and some mobs.

Mobs are generally not aggressive to you until you reach level 4 or so.  The more levels you gain, the less protection you get from being a new player.  Mobs will eventually start remembering you and will attack you again when you enter the room if you had previously fought them and then left the fight via flee or another method.  For extra fun, this is usually what happens when you die at a mob and try to get your corpse again (the mob will attack you, while you are naked).  So it's generally a good idea to be very very fast in looting your corpse and fleeing back out.  Or you could use the druid shapeshift skill to shift into the ferret form which most mobs will not attack, in order to loot your corpse.

Perhaps the most important part about retrieving your corpse is actually knowing/remembering where you died!  You'll have to remember where you went.

Also, a majority of the MUD has been explored by others and documented with maps that have been posted online.  But most maps won't tell you how hard the mobs are or if they're aggressive, so you'll still have to learn about a lot of the MUD the hard way or by asking other players.

[Written 12-Feb-2010]