Phantasmal Site > Phantasmal Tutorials > Administration > Setting Up

Setting Up a Phantasmal-based MUD

You might wonder how this is different from the other Setup Documents. The difference is that those will tell you how to create your own game on top of Phantasmal. This one will tell you how to start using unmodified Phantasmal so you can play with it.

Downloading and Installing Phantasmal

For a non-bundled release, you're going to need to read the documentation and follow it. You're also going to need to install DGD and get it working, which involves reading even more documentation. I know, that's unfair and unreasonable in this day and age. Do it anyway. Or, you can pick up the bundled release of Phantasmal. It's much more grab-and-go.

Even if you use the bundled version you'll still need to unpack it successfully and run the install script (NOTE: install script may not be finished, you may need to change one line in the .dgd file by hand).

You can find either one at the Phantasmal SourceForge project.

After You've Installed Phantasmal

The first thing to do after you've run the server, then telnetted to it from a console or MUDClient, is to make an admin account. It's easy. The MUD asks you "login: ". You respond with the name "admin", then pick a password. Hey presto, you're the administrator with full power. Now log out (with the quit command) and log in again with another username. Any name, any password. Log this one out too, then log in as admin again (dizzy yet?). Use the same password you gave admin last time. Now you'll give your new account some privileges -- if you called him "foo" then you'd say "%grant foo access" and "grant foo / full". Note the spaces before and after each word, including the slash.

With me so far? From here on out, if you get messages that say you can't do these things without being an administrator, or that permission is denied, or if Phantasmal just doesn't recognize any of the commands starting with % or @ for certain users, it pretty much means you did something wrong last paragraph. The exception is stuff you really shouldn't do like trying to delete files from the /kernel directory. Operations like that will tell you you can't, and you can't. Don't.

Now let's build some rooms and objects. Trust me, you'll love it.