There are quite a few commands available to a player on a MUX. Only a few are neccessary to get along fine. Those commands are detailed in this lesson, Basic MUX. We will divide the commands into four categories.

The first category is help, news and bulletin board.

The command that will teach you any other command is probably the most important, so we will start with it; type: help. You will see what kinds of topics are available in help. For example, type help topics. This will show a list of various topics that may be of interest to you. Most of these you will not need to know, but they are useful if you become an advanced user later. If you are ever unsure of what any command does, type help <command>. It is very likely that there is a help file on it. Try it with commands we will try later in this lesson! Note: There are also some commands documented in +help and !help. These work exactly the same as help.

Help is a general reference on different commands, but another command, type: news is useful for getting information about the current theme on the game. There is much useful information in news. For example, type: news wizards. This will bring up a file that shows a listing of wizards and what they do on the game.

Help and News are virtually static information sources - they change very rarely. 3030MUX, however, is a dynamic environment - new things are constantly being added or changed to make the game better. The only way to keep up-to-date on these changes is to read the bulletin board. To see the help file on bulletin boards, including the commands to use them, type: +help bb. Every time you connect to the MUX, you will see a listing of unread messages on the different boards in the global system. Once you have joined a faction, you will also have another bulletin board system available to you. Ask someone in your faction how to use it, but it basically works the same as the global (for everyone) bulletin board system.

Now we will go to the next section to learn about online mail.