20.6 Housing Servants

(See also: HELP HOUSING, HELP HOUSING SUMMARY, HELP REACTIONS)

Once you've built your house just the way you want it, with all of its rooms
and doors and secret dungeons, it's time to populate it with some denizens. You
can populate your house with a variety of denizens, and even customise the way
those denizens will react to the events going on in your house.

Types of Servants
-----------------
The basic types of servants that you can hire for your house are: butler, maid,
cleaner, steward, cook, waiter, servant, worker, and page.

 HOUSING HIRE <servant type>
  - Hires a servant. All servants wander aimlessly through your house.
  - Servants cost 75,000 gold to hire, but they do not charge any upkeep.

 HOUSING FIRE <servant>
  - Fire a servant that you no longer want to wander your house.
  - There are no gold refunds when firing servants.

Servants cannot leave your house under any circumstances. They are also very
weak, and will not be very helpful in defending your house if you are attacked.

Customising Your Servants
-------------------------
You can customise the looks of your servants. The first time you customise a
servant after it has been hired will be free. After that, you must pay 75,000
gold to make any changes to the servant.

To note, servants must follow the guidelines set out in HELP CUSTOMISATION and
HELP STYLE. In particular, be aware that descriptions must not change the basic
nature of the servant: a steward must remain a steward, and a cook must remain
a
cook. 

When customising a house servant, you must first decide upon all of the changes
that you will make. These are stored on the denizen, but will not take effect
until you explicitly apply those changes to the denizen. This allows you to
change all of the aspects of the denizen as you like for your first free
customisation.

If you fire a servant that has had its free customisation set, you will not be
able to set the free customisation on a new servant. Your house can only
effectively have as many free servant customisations as its maximum number of
servants.

 HOUSING CUSTOMISATION SET <denizen> APPEARANCE <text>
  - Sets what you see when you INFO HERE in a room, and also what the denizen
    looks like when it takes action.

 HOUSING CUSTOMISATION SET <denizen> DROPPED <text>
  - Sets the denizen's description that you see when you LOOK or GLANCE in a 
    room.

 HOUSING CUSTOMISATION SET <denizen> EXAMINED <text>
  - Sets the denizens's description that you see when you PROBE it.

 HOUSING CUSTOMISATION SET <denizen> ENTER <text>
  - Sets the denizen's message that is displayed to the room it enters when it
    moves.
  - Use the special variable $dir to automatically expand the direction from
    which the denizen is moving.

 HOUSING CUSTOMISATION SET <denizen> LEAVE <text>
  - Sets the denizen's message that is displayed to the room it is leaving
    when it moves.
  - Use the special variable $dir to automatically expand the direction in
    which the denizen is moving.

 HOUSING CUSTOMISATION SET <denizen> DEATH <text>
  - Sets the description that will be shown in the room when the denizen is
    dead.
  - Don't worry, like most other denizens, your house servants will come back
    to life in your house after a short time.

 HOUSING CUSTOMISATION SET <denizen> GENDER MALE|FEMALE
  - Sets the gender of your servant.

 HOUSING CUSTOMISATION SET <denizen> WANDERER ON|OFF
  - Sets whether your servant will wander your house or stay in the room.

 HOUSING CUSTOMISATION APPLY <denizen>
  - Apply the full set of changes that you've been working on to the denizen.
  - This action will be free if your denizen has not been modified from the
    base appearance it has when it is hired, otherwise it will cost 75,000
gold.

 HOUSING LIST SERVANTS
  - See a list of the servants you have hired for your house, as well as
    their current locations.

You can also customise some of the actions that your denizens can take in
reaction to certain events around them. See HELP REACTIONS for more
information.