The Getting Started guide and the How-To guides will probably help with many questions!

But, if you prefer a FAQ to reading tutorials and guides…

• If you have a question, the fastest way to get answers would be to make a thread on the forum (Places in general, Programming Help, or Feedback and Development.
  Or you can add it in here, by clicking the Edit This Page button at the top.
• If you can answer (or improve an answer to) a question here, please do!
• If you have seen or can think of questions that often get asked, and you know how to answer them, please add them here too!

Please don't be shy or hesitant to vandalise edit the Wiki. If you can improve things to help others, awesome. If you would like to ask something, that's awesome too! Your questions are important too. If you didn't understand something, it's because it wasn't explained well enough, or the explanation wasn't easily-enough findable. Places are a big project, with lots of things to learn; and Programming, especially, is hard!

In Places, new rooms work differently to how they did in Dwellings. When you make a new Room, now, it sits in limbo, not connected to anything, until you make a connection!

The simplest way to connect to a new room is to build a Door. Go to the Set Build Jobs menu, select New Door, and then select which two rooms you want the door to link. You can set doors between any two rooms in a place - and each room can have doors to as many other rooms as you want!

You can also make a Program that will connect one room to another. The Introduction To Programming guide is a good place to start researching these.

Doors cannot be deleted.

However, they can be both locked, and hidden. In the 'Master Settings' menu, you can do either or both.

If you happen to notice that you have set a door you didn't want while it is still under construction, you can delete the build job. But sadly you can't get back any of the materials or stamina you've put into making it.

Rooms can't be deleted. Sorry, no refunds, again. But you don't have to do anything with a room if you don't want it: it can stay as an 'Undecorated Room' with the default description, and as long as you either don't make a door to it, or, if there are existing doors, hide them. Nobody has to know.

And, well, you may later think up something to use it for!

Again, Pages can't be deleted. But you don't have to have that distressing 'Undecorated Area' link showing - you can go to 'Master Settings', again, and select 'Hide' on the navigation link.

Again, you may think of something to use the Page for later. Spare Pages are very useful for programming: you can use its description text from somewhere else in the Place with a 'Show Page' or 'Add Page Access'. Remember, too, that each Page comes with a grid for programming in, which could also be used from elsewhere with a 'Run Program' contraption.

Programs don't actually do anything if they don't have anything in them! So just take the Contrivances and Contraptions back out of it, put them back into the building inventory, and you're fine. If you never put any in at all, then skip that step. You're already fine.

You can rename it back to “blank program” or something if you feel like it.

You're right. The master setting to hide the room description doesn't work in this situation. What you need to do is to put a 'Hide Room Description' Contraption in your program, right next to the 'Show Page' Contraption.

The 'Hide Room Description' master setting only has an effect if the page is reached by clicking on a link to get there. If the page is shown by a program, then that setting is ignored, and the room description is shown underneath. To counteract that, you have to use the Contraption instead.

Why is programming set up like this? Why this extra complication? Well there're very good reasons. The Show Page Contraption doesn't care where the page is, it could be anywhere at all in the Place. All it does is to go and get the decoration for the given page, and display it. For organisational purposes, it's probably better to build the page off the room that you're displaying it from. You're less likely to get confused about what you're doing and make mistakes. But it's really not necessary.

What this means is that you can use the same page from many different rooms in your Place. Suppose that you're trying to build some sort of text adventure game, complete with 'Look' and commands, using the 'Partial Commentary Match' Contrivance. (If this example is a little beyond you, don't worry too much. For the moment just bear with it as an example of why the 'Show Page' Contraption is designed the way it is.) You can expect people to try looking at things that you haven't built a response for. Instead of having the generic 'Command Not Recognised' message, you can have the program sideline to your own page “What are you trying to look at?” Instead of having to build a “What are you looking at?” page for every room in your entire Place, you only need to build one, and have your “look” programs all pointing there.

Maybe that's a little advanced for you at the moment, but when you get there, you'll be very glad of the extra flexibility that the 'Show Page' Contraption gives you by working this way. The minor downside is the use of one extra Contraption when you use it and don't want the page showing underneath, and that's a small price to pay.

Contrivances check things; Contraptions do things.

The way I remember it: ContrIvance is the IF; ContRAPTION is the ACTION.

Contrivances are wooden; Contraptions are metal.

Contrivance is the conditionals - IF - is related to Would; is wood.
Contraption … has an A in it, which Metal does but Wood doesn't. ¹⁾

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