Welcome to the first of my quick guides on how to use my mod – MistZombie’s Quest Helpers (MZQH) which I built so admins can enhance quest designs on their own servers by working on top of Pippi dialogue/event frameworks.

I’m not sure how useful the mod would be on other frameworks like Tot as I do not use those, but MZQH itself no hard dependency on Pippi, so feel free to give it a try.

Further mod documentation is available on the Discord, so make sure to give that a visit as well!

For this first guide, I will show you how to set up a basic Thrall NPC that greets you with an emote using the mod.

Step 1: Create an invisible dialogue Thespian, and a Thrall to act as an NPC

Pippi Thespians are functionally great and fundamental to designing dialogue logic, but are quite limited in their visual appearance/customisation. More importantly is that MZQH cannot work directly with Thespians due Pippi being a completely separate mod.

We will instead use the trick of a Thrall pretending to be thespian. You can achieve this effect by placing the Thespian in front of the thrall, then making it invisible by equipping the Thespian-Skin [Invisible] item from the Exiles Extreme mod. The result should be something like below:

Quite convincing, isn’t it?

Step 2 – From the Pippi admin panel, create a Kit containing the MZQH item you want to make use of

In the Pippi Admin Panel -> Kits

Here I have added the mod item Emote Trigger – NPC Squirm which will make the NPC I am talking to perform that emote when added to the player inventory.

Step 3: In the Mushi editor for the Thespian, give the kit to the player when you want the emote to play

We use kits to because they have an odd (and useful!) quirk that the item does not appear in the player HUD when distributed to them, which we definitely want for better immersion. You also don’t need to worry about removing the item, as that’s done automatically by the mod.

Here’s how a simple implementation looks:

That’s it! This creates an NPC that will perform an emote when you talk to them!

Bonus: Playing an emote even before you talk to the NPC. Because they’re that eager to see you.

To do this, we will make use of Pippi’s TZone tool (spawn it from the Admin panel).

Place the TZone in front of the NPC we just created. The Emote Triggers work based on proximity and direction the player is facing in relation to the thrall, so make sure you position it appropriately.

In the TZone menu, create a new TPerform event with the following configuration:

Basically, we are quite simply adding a kit to the player inventory as soon as they enter the TZone.

IMPORTANT! Unlike Thespians, TZones require that the player receiving the items are qualified to receive the kit. The simplest way to ensure this is to set the Enabled and Hidden flags on the kit to true in the Pippi Admin panel (Hidden because we don’t want it appearing in the /kit command menu).

Save and try it out! The Thrall will play the emote as soon as you approach them:

As you can probably imagine there’s a ton of ways you can use Pippi to distribute these items to players. Combine them with QuestFlags, Variables etc. and use your creativity to achieve even greater effects!