Scenery is a property that directions and things can have. It translates to the I6 property “scenery”. Directions are always scenery; things aren’t scenery unless you make them so. Things that are scenery are usually fixed in place, but can be made portable, which isn’t useful unless you also unlist or tweak the can’t take scenery rule. A backdrop is usually scenery but a backdrop can be set to be not scenery.
Places being scenery plays a role:
- not considered for inclusion in “all” when taking, taking off, or removing
- not mentioned automatically in room descriptions unless it’s a supporter that has something that isn’t undescribed on it; it will be mentioned even if everything on it is concealed with “On the [supporter] is nothing.” which is less than great
- if you examine or search a container or supporter, scenery things inside them aren’t mentioned
- taking, pushing, pulling, turning all have rules blocking scenery
- counts as equivalent to concealed when you
list the contents of the [thing], not listing concealed items.; it does get mentioned if you omitnot listing concealed things - also considered in parsing and I’m not going to try to figure out exactly how.
An undescribed thing is supposed to be invisible to examining; that’s not a bug. I don’t think its use should be viewed as dodgy, though, as you’ve seen, 3.24 describes at as a “last resort”. The docs have stronger words against writing I6 inclusions, and I do that all the time.
It’s a property things can have. It translates to the I6 property “concealed” which is a little confusing coming from I7 'cause none of the things I7 means when it talks about concealment directly involve this property. The only thing that’s undescribed by default is the player. (You can make the player described and I7 will say, e.g, “You can also see yourself…”) If you change the player to another person, one of the things that happens is the previous player becomes described and the new player becomes undescribed.
Places undescribed plays a role:
- doesn’t get mentioned in room descriptions (via locale priority being set to 0), not even if they’re a supporter with stuff on it; however, they’re still in scope, and a player might be surprised by a disambiguation question referring to them
- an actor can’t go through an undescribed door: (“You can’t go that way.”)
- not mentioned when searching or examining a container they’re in or a supporter they’re on
- same as scenery, counts as equivalent to concealed when you
list the contents of the [thing], not listing concealed items.; it does get mentioned if you omitnot listing concealed things - also plays a role in parsing; I’m also not going to try to figure out how
Because undescribed things remain in scope, it shouldn’t be viewed as a way to keep something secret. Either leave the thing out of play altogether or use the Scopability extension to make it unscopable (or both!)
If I just want something not to be mentioned, I like:
For writing a paragraph about testthing2: now the testthing2 is mentioned.
but setting locale priority to 0 is just fine.