Overall Start to Finish Castle Building Guide

Before beginning, review ALL castle helpfiles. Check help castle help, help castle guidelines, and Matreya's building style guide. Familiarize yourself with some of the castle commands.

Consider your zone concept or idea you'll work with. Check help zone wishlist if you need ideas, think about zones you like to explore, or the kind of zone you wish existed.

What is your zone story? Coming up with this early on will help you to make a zone good for exploring. It does not need to be known 100% from the start as you can fill in holes or flush it out later, but you need enough to know how you will need to plan your layout and rooms. Writing your area view for the zone may help. Remember, you can always edit and change it later as needed.

Map your zone layout. You don't need to map out EVERYTHING but you should have an idea how the majority of the zone will be. Adding a small number of rooms or a small area can be done later. Dig out your rooms according to the map. Numbering the rooms on your map to the vnums of the rooms as you dig is helpful.

Mapping your zone out before digging also helps to keep from having strangely linking rooms that don't make spatial sense when exploring. It will also help you to keep your planned rooms within your requirements, a minimum of 100 rooms and maximum of 200 rooms. You can also keep in mind what your zone purpose will be. If you want people to explore the zone, then you may map out something more interesting to explore. If you want people to quest or go levelling in the zone, then you may map out something that's easier to navigate more quickly.

Have ideas for mobs or objects? Don't worry, you can make a preliminary list of mobs and objects you want to make and where you want them to go before you actually build them. This isn't necessary immediately or in full, but you can create a list if you have the ideas for them already.

Write your room descriptions. Check Matreya's building style guide, the appropriate building guide, and the room sector tips. If you need help on this part, feel free to ask for help and brainstorming ideas from staff. You can also relook and explore zones for inspiration and ideas on how to write room descs or the kinds of things to include. (Directly stealing, however, is not okay.)
If you have plans for more rooms rather than less or you find writing room descriptions to be especially frustrating or tiring, feel free to take breaks or break your rooms up into chunks. Aim to complete only a few at a time. Take a break to quest or roleplay. Alternatively, if you have ideas for mobs, objects, and extra descriptions, you can take a break from writing room descriptions by adding the mobs, objs, and extra descriptions in your finished rooms.

Build your mobs! Check the appropriate building guide, help zone wishlist for needed mob alignments, the mob description tips guide, and mob by sector guide. Don't forget to also check help castle guidelines for the restrictions and rules on mobs in castles.
It is better to build too many mobs than too few. You do not want to make up for the number of mobs with resetting many of the same mob. A good rule of thumb is that you should not have more than five copies of any one mob, although this is not set in stone. You can make mobs that are very similar, that is OK. If you need help coming up with more mob ideas for your zone, feel free to ask for help and brainstorming from staff.

Build your objects! Check the object description tips guide and the appropriate building guide for help on writing the objects. You can check help zone wishlist for ideas on what equipment is needed. Don't forget to also check help castle guidelines for the restrictions and rules on objects in castles.
Objects can be objects that add to or explain the zone story, add to the feel of the zone, and equipment or other good gear or items to entice people to the zone. Additionally, you can write extra descriptions in the room (the ones you see with "look around"). If you mention an object in the room description, you can add a physical object to match it.

The higher the intended average level of your zone or the "better" the good gear, the more difficult it may be to obtain. For instance, you could require someone to kill a mob or complete a moderate to difficult task to obtain a good item in a mid-level zone but simply buy it in a shop, kill an easy mob, or complete an easy task to obtain a less worthy or low level item.

Build your extras! These are things that are not required for an accepted castle zone but can greatly add to zone's quality, people's interest in exploring or visiting the zone, and what the zone brings or adds to the game in general. The only "extra" thing you are required to write is your area name and area view, if you have not done so already.
These extras can also include extra descriptions, adding actions to mobs, obj actions to objects, view the past descriptions, use of LML, and building your zonequest.

This can be more challenging to do, so ask, ask, and ask for help as you need! Both staff and experienced castle builders (chat 1001) can aid you in the mechanics of this part. Help extra features includes a list of some available extras you can use.

You can think about what kinds of actions or object actions that you enjoy finding or interacting with in-game. Are these actions you would like to see in your castle? Take a look at the mob actions and object actions guide on the website to see what is available to you. Sometimes simply seeing what is available can give some ideas or inspiration on what you want to do.

Have an idea but not sure how to make it happen? Don't be afraid to ask for help!

Proofread, proofread, proofread. I mean it! Read through everything! Room descriptions, mob descriptions, object descriptions, and anything else you've written. Astaria's grammar and spelling guide can be helpful in determining common problem areas and how to proofread. If you are uncertain about anything, feel free to ask for help.

Edit any grammatical or spelling errors you find. "Castle check" will show you if there are any major obvious problems with any of your objects, such as something being obviously out of spec. If anything shows, you will need to edit those as well.

Double check against ALL castle helpfiles listed in help castle help. Check help castle guidelines. Do you meet everything required? Check Matreya's building style guide. Is what you have built in line with the guide? If the answer to any of these is no, fix it!

Proofread AGAIN based on last minute checking. If you fixed or added anything, proofread it. Was there anything you didn't proofread the first time? Proofread it this time.

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