tbaMUD Continued development of the CircleMUD core

Let me start by saying there is absolutely no reason to remove all the stock zones unless your server has a ridiculously small hard drive or memory. It will not speed things up and it will not make things easier. The only possible benefit is if you have OCD and must have things perfectly ordered. I guarantee if you try to do this with zero experience with the World format your MUD will not boot. Besides all the errors that will make your MUD unbootable you will also lose all the example triggers, boards, postmasters, banks, shops, etc. which the helpfiles and TBA zone reference. There are 470 free zones in tbaMUD. Even with a dedicated and motivated building staff it will take any MUD years to use all of them.

My recommendation, and the easiest way to remove stock zones, is to simply remove all links to the zones you don't want players to use. To do this the only thing you have to do is change the mortal start room to one of your new zones. In the eyes of the players the stock World will no longer exist and they will have no way to gain access to them. Now the TBA tutorial zone and all the example triggers and special procedures are still there for reference. Plus, no errors, and no headaches correcting all the errors generated by removing the World. I think I'm done with my rant. This question comes up a lot and aggravates me because new admins waste their time and energy on doing something completely pointless. But, I know they will keep doing it ;-P So....

Here is what you need to do.

Pick the zones you want to keep, I recommend leaving zones 0, 1, 12, and 30 for the least problems. You MUST have a 0/1/12/30.wld/mob/obj/zon/trg/shp file for that zone WITH something in it. An empty file won't allow you to boot. Open up the index files in each directory and delete everything but the zone you want. i.e. lib/world/wld/index repeat for the other directories. Now enter Cedit and go to the rooms option and change your room vnums to whatever you like, the MUD won't boot without an existing mortal start room, default 3001.

Next reboot and start creating your own World.

You might get a few errors, such as:

SYSERR: Attempt to assign spec to non-existant mob #1503
To get rid of this "grep 1503 spec_assign.c" and remove this assignment.

No associated object exists when attempting to create a board [vnum 4096].
You need to delete the boards from lib/etc/boards/ and modify boards.c and boards.h. Again "grep 4096" *.[ch] to search for this vnum in all of your .c and .h files to remove the reference.

Fizban created a patch to remove the World for tbaMUD 3.54. Check it out here.
Please let me know if I left anything out and I will update this post.

Only issue I have with that isn't a HD space/RAM or performance related issue at all, it's the cluttered zlist and trying to pick out at a glance which zones you're actually using.