Set your colonists work and pay them for it. Quest givers stand wherever you put them, players take jobs by clicking them, and everything they do towards a job is counted as they do it.
Part 1 — the player’s side
Worth watching first even if you are buying it, because it is what your players will see.
A player wears the quest HUD and walks up to a quest giver. Clicking it lists what that giver has for them. Taking a job puts it on the HUD and on their own quests page on the website.
From then on it tracks itself. Chop the tree and the objective ticks green and drops to the bottom of the list; craft the plank and that one goes too. Nothing to claim and nothing to press.
A star on a quest giver means ready to turn in. No star means keep working. Turning in pays CXP and coins, and often unlocks the next job in the chain.
Part 2 — what comes in the box
Four objects: the quest HUD, a quest giver, a custom quest item, and the quest server.
The HUD is copy, mod and transfer — hand it out freely, let players resize it, put it in a starter pack. Only the scripts inside are locked.
The quest server — optional, and what it buys you
You do not need one to run quests. What it does is let you give things away.
- Second Life objects. Drop them into its contents — they must be copy and transfer to you — and a quest can hand one over. Because they are copyable, you can give out as many as you like.
- In-game items. Send coins, materials, anything from your own inventory into the server from its web page. These are counted down as they are given. Run the stock out and players stop being offered that quest, so keep it topped up.
It is also where turn-ins land by default — though you can point them at a storage chest instead. A community storage is the interesting choice: everything the colony’s quests bring in pools where the colony can use it.
One server is enough for a region.
Custom quest items — actions the game does not have
Sometimes the job you want is not a thing SL Colonies does. Reading a tome. Petting a cat. Picking an apple off a table.
Rez the custom quest item, take the scripts from inside it, and drop them into any object you like. Then long-click it, set name and set action.
The name is free text and does not have to match the object — useful for hunts, where twenty identical props each report something different.
Built-in actions are refused. Try to make one that fires on gather or kill and it answers invalid action, you are not allowed to use this action. You cannot quietly redefine what gathering means, which is what keeps everyone’s quests honest.
Those scripts are copy and modify, so one item can be duplicated across your whole build.
The quest giver
Same idea: rez the box, take the scripts, drop them into whatever you want players to walk up to.
It is deliberately not animesh. An animesh figure makes people right-click and choose Touch to interact, every single time. A quest giver should answer a plain left-click, so it goes in ordinary mesh instead.
Long-click it for the usual owner menu — reset, rename, security — then configure to open its page:
- Name it, for your own reference and for the website list.
- Interact distance in metres. Five is the default; raise it if it stands behind a counter.
- Location, with a teleport straight to it — useful once you have a dozen.
- Add quests, from everything you have written.
Then tick GIVE and TURN IN. This catches everybody once: a giver with neither ticked shows nothing at all. A giver can hand out jobs, accept them back, or both — so a job can be taken at the gate and turned in at the storehouse.
Writing a quest
Everything below is on the website, under my quest system, which also lists your givers, your quests and your server.
1. The basics. Name, whether it repeats, and the cooldown in hours if it does — an hour for an errand, 168 for something weekly. Then the description, the line the giver says when it offers the job, and the line it says when the job is done. Last, where turn-ins go: the quest server, or a storage chest you nominate.
2. Who may take it. Any profession, or one in particular. A minimum level in that profession. A minimum stat.
3. What must come first. Another quest, finished. This is how you build a chain.
4. What they must be carrying to start, and whether it is taken from them when they accept.
5. What they are given on the way in — from the quest server. Coins for a job that means buying something, or a tool for a job that needs one.
6. The objectives. The meat of it. Pick an action — cooking, gathering, grinding, collecting, pressing, ploughing, planting, ageing, basket weaving, near enough anything the game does — and either any or a named item, and a count.
Read the count carefully: cook five means five cooking actions, not five items on a plate.
Custom actions appear in the same list, under custom.
7. What is taken when they finish, and what is given.
What it pays
You do not set the CXP and coins. The system works them out from the quest’s own complexity — what you asked for, how much of it, and what it cost the player to do.
Ask somebody to cook one of anything and it is worth about two CXP and six coins. Ask for five cooks and five gathers and it is worth around thirty CXP and eighteen coins. Anything you hand over from the quest server is on top of that.
A note on other people’s recipes
Prerequisite and objective lists carry the system’s own items plus the ones you created. They do not carry recipes invented by other players, and cannot — a quest cannot require something only somebody else knows how to make.
The product page is here: https://slcolonies.com/treasure/quest-system