Web client

The web client at play.icesus.org lets you play Icesus in a browser with nothing to install. It works on desktops, phones and tablets, and with screen readers. Besides the game text it shows your health, your party, your fight and your surroundings, and it has hotkeys and triggers built in.

If you prefer a separate program, see the other MUD clients.

Getting started

Open play.icesus.org. On your first visit a welcome screen asks what you want to do:

Create a character opens the character builder, where you choose your race, background and profession before you enter the world.
Play takes you to the login prompt. Type your character's name, then your password.

If the connection drops before you log in, the client tries once more after two seconds. After that, or once you have logged in or typed quit, a Reconnect button lets you connect again.

The screen

Top bar

Game time: the hour, day, month and season in the game world, with an icon for dawn, day, dusk or night. Type time for more, or help calendar.
How many players are online and how long the game has been up since the last reboot.
Your latency (the delay between you and the server) and whether you are connected.
Hide panels / Show panels folds away the character and party panels to give the game text more room.
Settings (the gear), Help and Menu, described below.

Character panel

Your name, title and level, and your posture when you are not standing (resting, sleeping, sitting).
Hunger, thirst and drunkenness, shown only when they matter.
EXP bar: your progress toward the next level. At level 100 it shows progress toward your next advancement point instead. Experience you gain floats up from the bar.
Money: the silver you carry, and after it your bank savings. Gains and losses float up as they happen.
Divine Favor: your standing with your deity. When it is clickable, it opens the guild resources panel (see below) with your standing with each of the nine.
Carry: how much weight (kg) and volume (L) you carry, as a share of your limit. The numbers turn red above 90%; carrying too much slows you down.

Party

When you are in a party, its name and members show on a three-by-three grid that matches the party formation, each with a small health bar. The leader is marked. Hover over a member for their HP, SP and EP.

Hotkey bar

Your hotkeys appear as buttons: click or tap one to send its command. Edit keys opens the hotkey editor and Triggers opens the trigger editor. Both are explained below.

Effects and cooldowns

A row of badges shows what is affecting you: bleeding, poison, stun, burning, wounds, death sickness, stealth (moving silently, hiding in shadows, invisible) and running karma boosts. Hover over a badge to learn what it means and what to do about it. Skill and spell cooldowns show on the right and count down until you can use them again.

Bottom bar

Casting bar: the spell you are casting, how far along it is and your casting speed (CPS).
Vitals: HP (hit points), SP (spell points) and EP (endurance points), with PSP (psionic points) for psionicists.
Guild resources: guild-specific reserves such as Righteous Fury, Vitae, elemental bonds and charms. Details opens a panel with the full figures, your soul fragments, your charm abilities and your standing with the nine.
Activity: "IN COMBAT" (or "FLEEING" and the direction) with a health bar for each enemy showing their condition, and a badge while you are busy using a skill.
Momentum buttons: when you gain momentum, a "Use ..." button appears. Click it to use the momentum. Hover over it to see where the momentum came from (combat, mining and so on). See help momentum.
Location: the room's name and area. A Safe Room badge means no fighting here; when it turns green and says Inn, you can leave game and keep your equipment.
Exits: a button for each exit. Click one to walk that way.
Command line: type commands here and press Enter or Send. The arrow button beside it recalls your previous command, and the compass button opens the direction pad (see Phones and tablets).

Game text

The game text keeps the game's colours, and web addresses in it are clickable. If you scroll up to read, the client stays where you are and a Latest button shows how many new lines have arrived; click it to jump back down. Each command you send can show as its own highlighted line, so you can find your place (see Settings). Passwords and trigger commands are never shown.

Hotkeys

Bind your most used commands to F1-F12. Click Edit keys, type a command beside a key (+ Add gives you the next free key) and save. On Mac laptops, where the F-keys may need the fn key, Ctrl+1 to Ctrl+9 work for F1 to F9. You can have up to 12 hotkeys, and they are saved on your character, so they follow you to any browser.

The hotkey editor also has Show help tooltips on hover, which turns the explanations you see when hovering over parts of the screen on or off. They are on by default.

Triggers

Triggers send a command when a piece of text appears in the game. Click Triggers or type #trigger, and write one trigger per line:

You decide to try a combat maneuver => battle -m kick

One trigger can send several commands once you set a command delimiter with set delim ;;. A line of game text fires only the first trigger that matches it. Like hotkeys, triggers are saved on your character.

The Triggers page has the full guide, the limits and the rules for what triggers may and may not do.

Settings

The gear button opens Settings. These choices are saved in your browser, so set them again on another device.

Top panels: show them (the default), hide them, or Auto, which hides the character and party panels on small or short screens. Vitals, combat and effects stay visible either way.
Keep hotkeys visible when panels are hidden.
Game text size: from 8px to 18px. The default is 9px on phones and 14px on desktops.
Wrap game text to fit: turn it off to keep wide maps and tables lined up, and swipe or scroll sideways to read them.
Show my commands in the game text.
Buttons to open the hotkey and trigger editors once you are logged in.
Show connection details: technical information about the connection, useful when reporting a problem.

Help and Menu

Help lists the first commands to try (look, help newbie, help) and links to the beginner's guide, the Player's Handbook, this wiki, password recovery and the accessibility guide.

Menu links to the world map, your saved character builds, the reincarnation planner, Legends, the forum, Discord, Icesus Creator and the Icesus home page.

Links from both open in a new tab, so your game stays connected.

Keyboard shortcuts

Key	What it does
Enter	Send the command you typed
Up / Down arrow	Previous / next command from your history
Page Up / Page Down	Scroll the game text
End	Jump to the newest game text (when you are not typing)
Escape	Close an editor or the direction pad, otherwise go to the command line
Numpad 8 / 2 / 4 / 6	Move north / south / west / east
Numpad 7 / 9 / 1 / 3	Move northwest / northeast / southwest / southeast
Numpad 5	Look
Numpad - / +	Move up / down
F1-F12	Your hotkeys
Ctrl+1 to Ctrl+9	Hotkeys F1-F9

Phones and tablets

The compass button beside the command line opens a direction pad with the eight directions, up, down and look. Directions you can take from the room are highlighted, and special exits are listed below the pad. You can still try the other directions.
Swipe the exit and hotkey rows sideways to reach more buttons.
Auto panels and a smaller text size (Settings) leave more of the screen for the game.
The keyboard opens only when you tap the command line. Buttons you tap leave it as it was.

Screen readers

The client is built for screen readers: new game text is announced, a skip link leads to the command line, and every control is labelled. Type screenreader in the game to turn on screen reader mode, which shortens room descriptions, cleans up the formatting and hides visual-only parts of the client.

Browse mode in a screen reader takes over Escape, End, Page Up, Page Down and the arrows, so screen reader mode adds these:

Key	What it does
Ctrl + /	Go to the command line
Ctrl + End	Jump to the newest game text
Ctrl + Up / Ctrl + Down	Scroll the game text (from the command line)

The numpad and F-key hotkeys work as usual. More in the accessibility guide and help screenreader.

Tips

Click anywhere in the game text to get back to the command line. After you copy text with Ctrl+C, the cursor returns there too.
The client tells the game it has a very large screen, so long texts arrive without "more" prompts.
The connection stays alive when the tab is in the background.
help webclient in the game has a shorter version.