Achaea Combat System — Developer Documentation

A reference for how combat works in Achaea, Dreams of Divine Lands (Iron Realms Entertainment), written so it can be reused to build combat modules — curing systems, offence assistants, affliction/limb trackers, and the like.

The emphasis is systems and mechanics first: the goal is to capture the model a combat module has to implement, not to be an exhaustive in-game encyclopedia. Where exhaustive data is useful (the affliction→cure table, the GMCP message catalog), it lives in the docs/reference/ tables listed below.

Implementation guidance targets the Mudlet client (Lua), since that is where the mature open-source systems live, but the mechanics and the GMCP data model are client-agnostic.

Who this is for

Developers who already understand the basics of MUDs and want to build software that plays, assists, or analyses Achaean combat. Familiarity with the game as a player helps but is not assumed; each document defines its terms.

How the documentation is organized

#	Document	What it covers
00	Combat overview	The big picture: what combat is, how you win, why automation exists
01	Vitals & resources	Health, mana, endurance, willpower, essence, reserves
02	Balance & equilibrium	The timing core: action balances and the curing balances
03	Afflictions	The affliction model: categories, stacking, locks
04	Curing system	Cure types, per-balance queues, priorities, automation
05	Defences	Defensive states, raising/maintaining, stripping
06	Limbs & kill mechanics	Limb damage/breaks, prone, locks, instakills
07	Class archetypes	Systems-level survey of the classes and their win conditions
08	GMCP combat protocol	The data feed: Char.Vitals, Char.Afflictions, etc.
09	Mudlet implementation	Consuming GMCP, triggers/aliases, module architecture
10	Curing-engine design	Building a curing engine (patterns from Svof/ACP)

Reference tables

• Afflictions & cures
• Herbs, salves & elixirs
• GMCP message catalog
• Native server-side curing & queue

Reference implementation: src/Legacy/ bundles Legacy V2.1, a real Mudlet server-side-curing orchestrator. It's mined throughout these docs — especially the native server-side reference — and used to validate the curing, defence, and lock material.

SOURCES.md lists every external source used, with URLs.

A note on accuracy

Achaea is a live, continuously balanced game. Specific numbers (cooldowns, break thresholds, venom timings), individual abilities, and even cure mappings change over time. This documentation is grounded in current authoritative sources (the AchaeaWiki, official game help, the Iron Realms GMCP specification, and open-source systems), but a combat module should treat in-game HELP files and the live GMCP stream as the ultimate source of truth and avoid hard-coding values that the game now reports directly (e.g. the server-recommended cure attached to each affliction in Char.Afflictions).

Every document cites the sources behind it. Anything that could not be fully verified against a primary source is flagged inline as [verify].

See docs/domain-accuracy-notes.md before editing any combat fact — it holds the running correction log, the verified-vs-[verify] ledger, and the recurring domain traps (notably the three different things called "rage": battlerage, battlefury, and the knight rage cure).

Status

Complete (v1). All the documents and reference tables above are drafted from live research (May 2026) and cross-checked against a real Mudlet system (Legacy V2.1, bundled in src/Legacy/). Detail-sensitive values that could not be confirmed against a primary source are flagged inline as [verify]; the natural next step before building on them is to spot-check those against in-game HELP / AB files on a live character. Suggested deepenings: reading the Svof/ACP source directly for line-level engine details, and capturing a real GMCP stream to confirm exact Char.Vitals fields for your character's class.