Travelling Shop/Tracking
Finding the T-Shop
The easiest way to find the current whereabouts of the shop is by joining the Tshop Spotters club and then listening to its club channel. If a club member is riding the shop at any given time, they will periodically announce the stop where it can currently be found.
If you don't wish to rely on the club, you can always idle at a known T-Shop stop and wait for it to arrive. Be prepared to wait for a long time, should you choose this method.
- One stop that seems to turn up more than statistics suggest is the one at Brown Islands. It could still take a couple hours.
Colour or sound triggers
Colour or sound triggers for the chats produced upon the shop's arrival and departure will help you react faster in order to get inside the shop, or leave it, before it takes off to its next stop. You should check your mudclient's documentation for details on how to set up a trigger, but the messages to highlight are as follow:
From the room just outside the T-Shop
- Arrival
-
Greasy sparks crawl over the <direction> wall, and a door silently materialises.
- Departure
-
The door in the <direction> wall flickers, and vanishes. A few lazy worms of fire remain on the wall in its place, but they quickly wink out.
From inside the T-Shop's main room
- Arrival
-
You suddenly notice a door where there wasn't one before. This must mean that the shop has arrived at another place.
- Departure
-
The door out of the shop surreptitiously loses itself amongst all the junk and, with an almost imperceptible lurch, the shop resumes its journey.
From the upstairs room
- Arrival
-
The wall-to-wall stars disappear and the room returns to normal.
- Departure
-
There is an almost imperceptible lurch and suddenly the room is filled with a wall-to-wall universe. You take that to mean that the shop is on its way again.
Useful commands
Posting the entire inventory to a talker channel
If you are going to report the shop's current inventory, try to be as precise as possible. There is a special syntax for the list command which only works inside the T-Shop, and that will give you a brief list of the shop's inventory as a comma-separated list, instead of the usual shop inventory format. This allows for easy and fast copy&pasting of the whole into the channel where you want to announce it.
The syntax is: list brief
Checking the T-Shop's current stop
From inside the T-Shop's main room
open door;look door
This is equivalent to stepping outside the shop.
Example:
[desert island]
@ The ocean encompasses this area, which is little more than a sandbank. It's circular in shape and
| a solitary palm tree marks, more or less, mid-centre of the island. Passing gulls make occasional
T screeches overhead.
There is a doorway in the south wall leading into a curious shop.
It is a hot secundus autumn's evening with almost no wind and a beautifully clear sky.
There are four obvious exits: clockwise, anticlockwise, enter sea and south.
Wreck-Me-Own-Boat Thursday is standing here.
From the upstairs room
look window
This will give you the short description of the room outside the shop, as listed in T-Shop Stops.
Example:
Through the collected dust and grime on the window, you can just make out a desert island.
