# Random Room Contribution Guide
Random rooms are a system in place to add life to the dark and dirty maintenance areas on various stations. They come in multiple sizes and shapes and offer a variety of things to find while exploring maintenance.

The goal of the random room system is to make it enjoyable to venture into the more dangerous parts of the station, maintenance, to find things you may need, while also removing meta knowledge from some maps. One round the space may be filled with a trove of tools and supplies useful for repairing the station, the next round it might be filled with monkeys.

# How to get started
To create your first random room you are expected to already have your local copy of the Goonstation repository set up and have downloaded your mapping program of choice.
We recommend StrongDMM version 2.

Once you're set up creating a new random room is as simple as creating a new map file in the size room you want. Example would be 3x3, 3x5, or 5x3, the current existing random room sizes.

Next you name the file using the following naming system: `roomname_###.dmm`
The ### signs can be replaced, or omitted, with numbers to change the rooms spawn weight. The default weight is 100 and does not need to be defined.
Example: yourroomnamehere_75.dmm would mean your room has a lower chance than normal to spawn
Example 2: yourroomnamehere.dmm would have the default chance to be spawned as it does not have a differing weight defined.

Now you'd begin mapping your random room out to your heart's desire.

The next step is to ensure you place down the following area on your room, covering it entirely: `/area/dmm_suit/clear_area`
This area ensures it does not clear the area of the station it is spawning it so it is powered and is labeled correctly in the station.

Lastly you would place the random room file in the appropriate subfolder for the size category it is in. Random rooms are currently stored in the `/assets/maps/random_rooms` folder.

# Testing your room
Spawning your room in to ensure everything is the way you want it can be done easily. On your own local server, as admin, use the Build Mode "Load Area" tool and select the **bottom left** tile of the space you are spawning the room in. Then simply navigate to where your room is located and it will spawn in.

# Room Design Principles
For a random room to be accepted into the pool for the game to choose from, it must adhere to the following principles. While certain rooms may break these principles, a room that does so should be rare and not seen often.

A random room creator should:
* Avoid placing dense objects or wall mounted objects in the four main cardinal directions, as this is where doors to access the rooms typically are.
* Avoid placing very rare or powerful items, including adventure zone items, in the room
* Make the room seem like it's something that could have been created by the crew during a normal shift, hidden in maintenence. This means it shouldn't look too out of place on the station
* Ensure the room is lit as desired. Having no lighting is perfectly fine, but if you want a room to be well lit make sure you have enough lighting.
* Use the appropriate spawn weight for what your room contains. As a rule of thumb, no rooms should go over 100 spawn weight. Rooms that contain semi-rare or very useful items (Such as insulated glove spawns or harder to find station weapons) should have lower weights. Additionally, rooms that seem out of place in maintenance (Example: tree_80.dmm) should have lower spawn weights as well.
* Ensure the random room file is formatted in the TGM format.
* Not include a changelog entry for the random room(s) pull request.