Lich

. . . the thing for people who like this sort of thing

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New User Guide

(edit: Due to popular refusal to read this guide, many of the things that this guide tells you how to set up have already been set up.)

After you get Lich installed and logged in, this page might help you figure out what to do next.

The usefulness of Lich comes from the scripts that it runs. With these scripts, the features of Lich are virtually endless. For new users, this can make the commands to control Lich also seem endless and mysterious. However, Lich only has a handful of built-in commands. These commands are used to start, stop, pause, unpause, list, trust, and distrust scripts; and a help command. Let's take a look at the help command.

For now, you can ignore the ;exec, ;e, ;execq, and ;eq commands. They may be useful to you when you start writing your own scripts, but this tutorial won't cover writing scripts. You can also ingore the ;send commands, since they're rarely used.

That leaves us with only ;force, ;pause, ;unpause, ;list, ;kill, ;trust, ;distrust, and their variations. Any other command that starts with a semi-colon is assumed to be the name of a script that you want to start.

When you download Lich, it comes with only a few scripts; the most import of which is probably the repository script, since it allows you to download all the other scritps. Lets get started by trying to use the repository script.

That's probably not what you expected to happen, but here's a good time to explain the trusted script system. Anyone using Lich can write a script and upload it to the repository, and Lich scripts can do basically anything any other program on your computer can do. While you can (and should) read each script you download to make sure it won't try to do bad things to your computer, most users are either unwilling to do this or unable to understand the code well enough to know if it's going to do something good or bad. That's where the trusted script system comes in. By default, no scripts are trusted until you indicate that you trust them by typing ";trust scripename". A script that is not trusted is limited in what it can do. For example, it cannot read or write to any file on your computer that it wants, and it can't create internet connections. It can, hovever, do whatever it wants with your character in game. While there haven't been any malicious scripts on the repository yet, I still recommend reading scripts before you use them (they're stored in plain text in the scripts directory where ever you extracted the Lich zip file).

The repository script needs to connect to the Lich server to function, so it needs to be trusted.

Now we can get a list of files in the repository. Any command that starts witha semi-colon and isn't a built-in Lich command is assumed to be a script name. Anything that comes after that script name is passed to the script that's being started, and it's up to that script what it does with it. In this case, we'll pass "list" to the repository script, and it should show us a list of scripts.

There are too many scripts, so I've only shown a few here. You might be wondering how you're supposed to know that you can pass "list" to the script, or what other things you can tell the script to do. Most scripts have their own help message that you can read by passing "help" to the script.

Another way to learn about scripts is using the repository info command. For example, if we see go2.lic on the repository and wonder what it does:

This sounds like a useful script, so lets download it. We know from the repository help message that we can download scripts using ;repository download FILENAME.

Now we can start the go2 script, but we don't know how to tell it to do what we want it to do, so we'll start with ;go2 help

One of the built-in targets for go2 is "bank" (which you could find using the ";go2 targets" command). Lets go to the bank.

Foiled again! As you may have noticed in the ";repository info go2.lic" message, go2 requires a map database. The map database isn't included with Lich by default because it's fairly large, changes often, and there's four of them (one for each game instance). You may already know how to get the map database from the ";repository help" message or the ";repository info go2.lic" message.

Now, lets try to go to the bank again.

There's more than one bank in the game, so how did go2 know which one we wanted to go to? When using a built-in target, go2 just goes to the closest one.

Suppose we wanted to take a longer trip, like from Wehnimer's Landing to Ta'Illistim. There's a built-in target "town", but that will only take us to Town Square Central in Wehnimer's Landing, since that's the closest one. We have a few options here to get us to Ta'Illistim. If we already know the room number (188 for Ta'Illistim, Hanging Gardens), we can use that (;go2 188). However, you don't actually need to memorize any room numbers for go2. If you were in Ta'Illistim previously and saved a custom target (;go2 save illistim=current), you could use that (;go2 illistim). You could use ";go2 targets" and look though the built-in targets to find the room number there. You could look up the room number using narost (more on narost later). Or, when in doubt, you can just type ";go2" and put where you want to go after that.

Since Ta'Illistim isn't a built-in or custom target, go2 searches the room title and description of every room in the database, and gives you a list of any matching rooms. If you see Ta'Illistim, BriarStone Court on the list and decided that's the place to be, just type ";send 1". However, if you don't like any of those options, you'll need to kill the script using ";kill go2", or ";k go2" for short, or ";k" for ever shorter since go2 was the last script started.

Lets move onto the Lich chat script, lnet. This script will also need to be trusted, because it connects to the Lich server.

LNet can be a great source of help to new users, but its mostly unmoderated nature can also be pretty harsh for new users. Your first time starting the LNet script, you'll be tuned to only one channel depending on which game you're playing (Prime, Platinum, Shattered, or DRPrime). These channels are generally pretty tame. The LNet channel is much more active, and at times is much more offensive.

One thing you may have noticed is that most of the LNet commands don't start with ;lnet. This seems to go against what we learned earlier, since ;chat isn't a built-in Lich command and it doesn't start a script named chat. Even the commands that do start with ";lnet" don't actually start a script, because the lnet script is already running. While the LNet script is running, it makes these commands work. If the LNet script isn't running, you'll see Lich trying to start a script named "chat" (or whatever) and failing to find one.

The LNet script provides more features than just chat. You can use it to locate other players and see their room number. If you use a spellup script like waggle to spell up other people, it will try to use LNet to see what spells the other person currently has and how much time they have left. By default, LNet rejects requests for location, spells, skills, info, health, and curent bounty. If you would like to allow these things, use the ";lnet allow" command.

You don't have to be tuned to any channels to use these features or private chats.

Most people want LNet to be running all the time, and they don't want to have to start it themselves every time they log in. Luckily, there's a script for that. When you log in, Lich will look for a script named 'autostart', and if it exists, Lich will start it. Lich happens to come with one such script whose purpose is to start any scripts you tell it to start.

If you want a script to start on only one character, just omit the "--global" option.

Another script you'll likely want to autostart is the repository with "download-updates" passed to it.

Now the repository script will start at login and know we want to download updates, but we're not done yet. We have to tell it what updates we're interested in. It's a good idea to have the repository script update itself, since that's where all the other updates will come from. It's also a good idea to keep the map database up-to-date since the game often changes and can break the map database. For the same reason, data files like spell-list.xml and gameobj-data.xml should be updated. You can also have the repository update the main Lich program and any scripts you like.

The last script there is infomon, which I haven't talked about yet. The infomon script keeps track of a lot of things about your character such as: spells, stats, skills, banks, and more. The ;magic and ;banks commands won't work without infomon running. Actually, most scripts won't function without infomon running. It really should be part of the main Lich program, and will be eventually. For now, it's a good idea to keep it running and updated.

The other script we haven't talked about is alias. The alias script, as you might except, allows you to create aliases. For instance, instead of typing out ";chat on code " and then typing a message to send to the code channel on LNet, you could create an alias so you only have to type "code " and your message. The alias script must be started before any aliases work, so it's another script that should be started at login.

And now, on to narost. The narost script pops up a window and shows your current position on map images, if there is one. This script needs to be trusted so it can load the images from your hard drive.

If there is a map image for your current location, narost should have found it and showed it to you with a circle around the room that you're in. As you move around, the image and circle will follow you. You can look at the title bar of the window to see the room number of the room you're in. If you click on a room on the map, narost will start the go2 script and tell it to go there. You can right-click for some options, such as showing other maps.

You can also pass a search string to narost when you start it, just like go2. While go2 will give you a list of matching rooms, narost will just show the map for the first matching room. This is often good enough to answer the common question "What map is so and so on?"

By now, you should have a pretty good idea of how to find new scripts, download them, figure out what they do, and how they're used. For more help, you can ask questions on LNet or the forum.