Voracious card indexer
From Discworld MUD Wiki
The voracious card indexer can be purchased from the T-shop.
A voracious card indexer costs A$150, it looks like: This large paperback book has a glossy black cover with a simple gold rectangle design printed on it. It looks like one of those prototype revision books from the Unseen University, designed to hoard, collect, sort, index and display all kinds of useful information to be reviewed at a moment's notice. This one apparently didn't turn out quite right, however, as it only seems to be interested in collecting trading cards. It is currently closed and contains no cards at all. The voracious card indexer is about a foot long and about nine inches wide. It is made of paper.
Help file:
Card Indexer Discworld player help Card Indexer
Name
Voracious card indexer - put your prized card collection at the mercy of a malfunctioning
magical artefact.
Syntax
evaluate <card> with <indexer>
add <card(s)> to <indexer>
sort <indexer> {alphabetically|by border}
view card <number> in <indexer>
view cards in <indexer>
view <indexer> stats
view creator list {in|from} <indexer>
view detailed creator list {in|from} <indexer>
extract <card> <number> {from|in} <indexer>
extract cards {from|in} <indexer>
open <indexer>
open <indexer> to page <number>
turn page of <indexer>
turn <number> pages of <indexer>
turn <indexer> to page <number>
close <indexer>
assimilate <card> - USE WITH CAUTION! - Modify a card's text to the most up-to-date version for
that particular creator
Description
A magical card album that would like nothing more than to amass a full set of Creator
Collector cards. You can add cards to the indexer, sort and view them, extract them if
you want to trade them, and get a report from the indexer on which cards you have
collected so far.
How does it work?
First of all, an important note about the voracious card indexer: This indexer does not
physically store your cards in its pages; instead, it stores a representation of them,
including the name of the creator, the border type and the type of colouration the card
has.
Adding a card to the indexer will allow you to view it, sort it, and even extract it once
again as a physical object, but the object that you extract will be a "brand new" card
with the same creator, border and colouration. This means that the following
(non-exhaustive) list of attributes will be lost:
- remembered places
- identifications
- writing
- labels
- deludes
- enchantment
You will be reminded of these conditions whenever you use the "add" command to add cards
to the indexer.
Furthermore, the card indexer is only interested in storing the most "up to date" text for
each card. If it determines that a card you are offering it is an older version (i.e. the
text doesn't match what would be generated from doing a quest today) then it will inform
you that this is the case and the card will NOT be added to the indexer. As mentioned
above, the card's CURRENT border will be preserved, so cards with the same text but a
different border will be accepted by the indexer.
If you still wish to add an older card to the indexer, you must first use the "assimilate"
command on the card and confirm that you understand what will happen. Essentially, the
card's text (other than the border) will be modified to look as if it had been freshly
generated today, using the most up-to-date wording. Any out-of-date text and/or typos
will be replaced. Once this is done, you can use the "add" command as normal to add the
card to the indexer.
With that explanation out the way, the other functions of the voracious card indexer are
fairly self-explanatory:
The "sort" command lets you decide whether to sort your collection alphabetically, or by
border.
"Extract" will let you retrieve a card from the indexer.
The "View" Command
The "view" command can be used with a variety of arguments to see more information about
your colletion:
"view cards in indexer" will show you the full description of every card on the open page
of the indexer "view card 3 in indexer" will show you the full details of the card
labelled as [3] on the open page of the indexer
Using "view indexer stats" will display a wealth of information regarding your current
collection. It includes how many unique creators you've found, what kind of borders the
cards have, what colour variants the cards have and of course the grand total of how many
cards you have overall.
"view creator list in indexer" will give a quick, alphabetical list of all the creators
for whom the indexer holds at least one card.
"view detailed creator list in indexer" will give an alphabetical list of all the creators
for whom the indexer holds cards, as well as an indication of which borders and colour
variants it has. The next section explains how to read the output of this command.
The detailed creator list
When you use the 'view detailed creator list in indexer' command, the resulting output may
look confusing at first. This section explains what the letters in square brackets mean
about the cards in your collection:
The first (lowercase) letter indicates the border type as follows:
[b]lack, [c]rispy, [f]aded gold and wrinkled, [s]ilver or [g]old.
The next two uppercase letters indicate a special colouration (no uppercase letters means
there is no special colouration):
[RT] (rainbow text), [RN] (rainbow name) or [CN] (coloured name).
As an example, if you had three cards for Kake, one with a black border and plain text,
one with a silver border and a green name and one with a silver border and full rainbow
text, the output would look like this:
Kake [b, sCN, sRT ]
Happy collecting!
