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I'm implementing placed items in my remake tonight (https://apotheos.is) and I have a question on spawn frequency.

I think that in MajorMUD they spawn whenever the game restarts (for cleanup etc).

My game doesn't have or need cleanup in the way that MajorMUD has it. I could certainly spawn placed items whenever a room loads after restarting the game but since that could be 5 times a day or go several months without happening depending on how frequently I bounce the server that seems pretty lame from a gameplay perspective.

So I guess I have two questions:
1) Is my understanding about how placed items work in MajorMUD correct?
and
2) Given that I don't have the same constraints as MajorMUD how often should I spawn placed items? Keeping in mind I have freedom to do whatever I want, so it could be a fixed interval e.g. every 12 hours, or randomly e.g. each room randomly spawning its placed items sometime between 6 and 18 hours after the last spawn etc.

Do you think it would be good to just experiment with that and going with what feels good?

Probably going with rooms attempting to spawn placed items every 18 hours.

Ran into an interesting quirk with the locket quest though in that that quest pretty heavily relies on things happening at cleanup. The placed item is the aged desk with the drawer hanging open. When you look at the drawer a textblock removes the aged desk, sticks the locket it your inventory, and sticks an aged desk without a drawer hanging open in your inventory... but that's too heavy so it falls into the room. That version of the aged desk has the flag to delete at maintenance and that's how the desk swap at boot works. So with my system of not really having maintenance I'd end up with two aged desks (one with drawer and one with out) when my placed item code spawns the next one.

The easiest thing for me to do would be to have rooms do all the things majormud did at cleanup every x hours. I don't really like that but I might like it more than doing the logic the way I want and then having to comb through all the data trying to think of how the various del@maint things may or may not interact with all the various textblocks etc.

Do what most games do without a restart, use midnight as the trigger for the "cleanup" period, it's a start of a new day and all.

In my mud like game I added a day and night, each day cycle was 12 hours, and the dawn is when I ran my "cleanup", the start of a new day. So I ended up with 2 "cleanups" in my game.

But your thinking on how maint works with the placed items is correct, mud will scan a room if that item is not there in the room it adds another if it can. (limiteds) It will also run thru that room and see anything with 0 cost, del@maint, or remove@maint and remove that item from the room. I'm betting they do this check before the sweep so it can re-add items like the desk.

There is a lot of these items in the game peppered thru the realm for cool effects to add to area's description. (Skulls/heads are the most popular)

Now with all that said have a suggestion, if you do implement this idea, maybe add the ability to use a value of the place items, so allow items to take longer to regen. So if a an item can respawn everyday, or it can take 3 days to respawn adding some randomness to it. But not sure if you are tweaking the mechanics or trying to preserve it 100%