Table of Contents

Create Your First Content

This page is the beginner starting point for Moongate content authoring.

It is written for someone who already has a running shard root, but does not yet understand how Moongate templates and Lua scripts fit together.

These guides assume:

  • your shard root is ~/moongate
  • the server is already configured to run with --root-directory ~/moongate
  • you can log in to the game with an account that can run in-game admin commands
  • you have the template validator installed as moongate-template

Important path rule:

  • when you are authoring your shard, edit files under ~/moongate/templates/** and ~/moongate/scripts/**
  • when you are reading examples inside this repository, the bundled defaults live under moongate_data/**

Learning Path

Follow the guides in this order:

  1. Create Your First Item Template
  2. Create Your First NPC Brain
  3. Create Your First NPC Template

That order keeps the dependency chain simple:

  • the item guide teaches template structure without Lua
  • the brain guide teaches Lua behavior without mobile JSON yet
  • the NPC guide connects the two worlds by binding ai.brain to the Lua table you just created

What You Will Use

The hands-on guides use only commands and flows already documented and present in the repo:

  • moongate-template validate --root-directory ~/moongate
  • .spawn_item <templateId>
  • .add_npc <templateId>

To keep the first pass deterministic, the guides tell you to restart the server after editing tutorial files instead of leaning on hot reload or single-file reload commands.

If You Only Care About One Topic

After The Tutorials

Once you finish the hands-on path, the deeper reference material is here:

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