1.7 Syntax

Throughout Aetolia's help files, you will find commands you can enter into the game referenced as a syntax. In general, most things you see in capital letters is something you can type into Aetolia as a valid command, however, especially when it comes to abilities, the syntax can get a bit more complicated and start looking quite confusing.

If you are using a screenreader, this file can be a bit daunting. We recommend you try the helpfile HELP SCREENREADERS. That is, literally, type "help screenreaders" without the quotes.

Syntax examples in Aetolia follow a fairly simple convention when it comes to showing you what you can do. Let's examine the following example:

 * THROW <item> [direction] <AT|TO> <target>

Anything written in capital letters is an absolute literal and needs to be included as is within a command. In the above example, this means you must use THROW as your first word within your command in order to successfully throw something.

When you have something written in lowercase, this means you can replace the word with an option of your choosing, usually related to the word described. For example, when we look at the next part of the above syntax, <item>, this means you can specify an item of your choosing such as APPLE.

The next thing you should consider is whether a syntax word is surrounded by either < and > or [ and ]. A word surrounded by < and > means that it is a required argument, and cannot be skipped. When you look at <item>, this means that an item is absolutely required in order for the command to be valid. However, should a word be surrounded by [ and ], this means that the argument becomes optional, and you don't need to supply a word. Using the example above, this means that [direction] becomes completely optional to you, should you wish to throw your item in a direction of your choosing. Both, THROW APPLE WEST AT VARIAN and THROW APPLE AT VARIAN would be completely valid.

The next part becomes a little more complicated, as you begin to apply multiple rules at once. The syntax <AT|TO> is written with capital letters, so this means that it needs to be literally as specified, and since it's surrounded by < and >, this means that it's a required part of the syntax, and not optional. But what about the | character? When you have a pipe (|) character, this means that you are given the option of two possible words you can supply in your command. In the example <AT|TO>, this means you can supply either AT or TO as a part of your command to the game. You can also get a variant of this in the form of [AT|TO], which means that while you would need to supply either AT or TO for it to be a valid command, you can also supply nothing since it's optional as designated by [ and ].

This pretty much covers basic syntax convention translation in Aetolia. Here is a list of valid commands that you could input based off the example above:

 > throw apple at varian
 > throw pear to galleus
 > throw chair west to severn
 > throw knife north at hansel

If you're still lost on how all of this works, ask one of our players! Any of them would most likely be more than happy to help you.

Want some more examples to examine? Here's a list of really complicated ones, although we'd realistically split them up into multiple syntax examples for you:

 * TELLS[ON|OFF]
 * DATE <month>/<day>/<year> [hour]
 * UNWIELD <LEFT|RIGHT|item>
 * GET [amount] <item> [FROM <<item>|DRAWER <#> OF <furniture>>]

See also: HELP BASECOMMANDS, HELP SKILLS.