Help Menu

The help menu consists of scrollable categorised help pages that would ideally explain everything a new survivor needs to know, as well as any information the game can’t convey clearly in an immersive way.

Categories

Each category is made up of a json object which for mods can be placed anywhere but for vanilla should be placed in /data/core.

Field	Description
"type"	(required) must be "help"
"order"	(required) integer, where this category should appear in the list relative to others from the same source, with 0 being first. Must be unique per source (Every mod can start from 0). Each mods categories are appended to the end of the list per their load order.
"name"	(required) string, name of the category, can use color tags
"messages"	(required) array of strings, each string respresents a new line seperated paragraph containing information for this category, can use color tags and keybind tags. Seperated mainly for ease of editing the json as \n lets you add newlines within strings

Keybind tags

The keybind tags here use a different syntax than elsewhere for now. Keybind tags take the formss_keybind> where keybind corresponds to a keybind id, most of which are found in [keybindings.json](/data/raw/keybindings.json) and are automatically colored light blue.

Special tags

<DRAW_NOTE_COLORS> and <HELP_DRAW_DIRECTIONS> are special hardcoded tags that can be found in help.cpp. <DRAW_NOTE_COLORS> displays a list of all the color abbreviations to be used with overmap notes. <HELP_DRAW_DIRECTIONS> displays the hjkl and numpad movement directions in a nicely rendered way. The movement directions have 3 binds by default with the above keybind tags not letting you specify which to use so unhardcoding it would result in a messier drawing.

Example

  {
    "type": "help",
    "order": 0,
    "name": "First Category Name",
    "messages": [ "A useful tip.", "<color_red>Some scary warning.</color>", "A list of three keybinds.\n<press_pause> lets you pass one second.\n<press_wait> lets you wait for longer.\n<press_sleep> lets you sleep." ]
  },

Which will be displayed as: