BatMUD Ship's Paths

Introduction

Using paths is essential to navigating your ship around BatMUD. In a nutshell, paths are an autopilot for your ship. A navigator and a captain's cabin are required to use paths. You need the cabin because you need to be able to store your maps, and you need a navigator, because they are the ones who read and create and manage your maps. The level of navigator is important because the higher level navigator you have, the more paths (and maps) you can store. You can store 10 paths and maps times the level of your navigator, so a rank 6 navigator can let you have 60 different paths, and 60 maps *per bookcase* in your captain's cabin. Also the higher the rank of your navigator, the easier it is for him to create new maps for you to use. High rank navigators are very expensive, but buy the absolute most you can afford, it'll save you alot of frustration further down the road, and probably spending money later on a higher ranked one anyway.

Maps

Making maps (or getting them from other players) gives you waypoints that your navigator can use to cruise around Batworld. Having a comprehensive set of maps will make your sailing life alot easier. Jeskko's Google Maps hack shows all of the major "standard" waypoints, and the paths that I'll list later, will use their naming convention.
To make your own map (waypoint), you will need a blank map in your bookcase. To get blank maps, simply "bookcase insert scroll" with any scroll, and it'll convert to a blank map in your bookcase. To actually create it, your ship has to be secured, and if possible, the cargo hatch or gangway to be lowered. Being able to do that last step drastically increases the chance that the map will be made successfully. Of course, in the middle of the ocean, this isn't possible, so the chance of failure goes up (along with the sense of frustration). A higher ranked navigator will fail less often than a lower ranked one. Anyway, after you have secured your ship and (optionally) lowered your gangway, simply do a "ship survey yourmapnamehere". Each map in your bookcase has to have a different name.

Paths

As I said earlier, paths are an autopilot for your ship. The paths have the same restrictions to movement as the cruise command does, that being, a maximum of 3 waypoints times the level of your navigator. For instance, a rank 6 navigator can have a cruise or path with up to 18 waypoints. Setting up paths is easy, but the syntax in the help is rather obscure, and one of the options is just useless. The useless option to the paths command is 'sail'. Since you can't switch from sail to cruise inside the path command, its useless. If you could switch, it'd be nice, but you can't so you probably won't ever use this option. Anyway, you cannot start a 'cruise' path from 'enclosed spaces'. Basically any non-outworld room, however you can in the middle or end of a path sail into and out of those rooms. First lets look at some basic paths. These are all based on Jeskko's map's waypoint names, so if your maps are named differently, just substitute your maps names for the locations. To make a path, just do something like:
paths add mypath cruise waypoint1,waypoint2,waypoint3
It's also a good idea to put sailing directions into the harbour after the final waypoint. This will allow you to sail directly into the harbour, and not have to worry about player pirates sinking you as you sit idle just a couple of moves away from safety.
Here are a list of paths that you can copy and paste to make your paths between the continents.

Laenor to Desolathya
cruise daerwon,desolathya-lucentium1,desolathya3,windhamkeep,1 *nw,2 *w

Desolathya to Laenor
cruise windhamkeep,desolathya3,desolathya-lucentium1,daerwon,2 *se

Laenor to Furnachia
cruise daerwon,laenor9,laenor8,laenor7,laenor-furnachia,furnachia1,furnachia2,2 *e

Furnachia to Laenor
cruise furnachia2,furnachia1,laenor-furnachia,laenor7,laenor8,laenor9,daerwon,2 *se

Laenor to Lucentium
cruise daerwon,laenor-lucentium,lucentium1,2 *s

Lucentium to Laenor
cruise lucentium1,laenor-lucentium,daerwon,2 *se

Laenor to Rothikgen
cruise daerwon,laenor1,laenor2,laenor3,laenor10,rothikgen1,2 *se,1 *e

Rothikgen to Laenor
cruise rothikgen1,laenor10,laenor3,laenor2,laenor1,daerwon,2 *se

Desolathya to Lucentium
cruise windhamkeep,desolathya3,desolathya-lucentium1,desolathya-lucentium2,lucentium1,2 *s

Lucentium to Desolathya
cruise lucentium1,desolathya-lucentium2,desolathya-lucentium1,desolathya3,windhamkeep,1 *nw,2 *w

Furnachia to Lucentium
cruise furnachia2,furnachia1,laenor-furnachia,laenor7,laenor8,laenor9,laenor-lucentium,lucentium1,2 *s

Lucentium to Furnachia
cruise lucentium1,laenor-lucentium,laenor9,laenor8,laenor7,laenor-furnachia,furnachia1,furnachia2,2 *e

Desolathya to Furnachia
cruise windhamkeep,desolathya3,desolathya-lucentium1,laenor9,laenor8,laenor7,laenor-furnachia,furnachia1,furnachia2,2 *e

Furnachia to Desolathya
cruise furnachia2,furnachia1,laenor-furnachia,laenor7,laenor8,laenor9,desolathya-lucentium1,desolathya3,windhamkeep,1 *nw,2 *w

Desolathya to Rothikgen
cruise windhamkeep,desolathya3,desolathya2,desolathya1,laenor-desolathya,laenor3,laenor10,rothikgen1,2 *se,1 *e

Rothikgen to Desolathya
cruise rothikgen1,laenor10,laenor3,laenor-desolathya,desolathya1,desolathya2,desolathya3,windhamkeep,1 nw,2 *w

Lucentium to Rothikgen
cruise lucentium1,laenor-lucentium,daerwon,laenor1,laenor2,laenor3,laenor10,rothikgen1,2 *se,1 *e

Rothikgen to Lucentium
cruise rothikgen1,laenor10,laenor3,laenor2,laenor1,daerwon,laenor-lucentium,lucentium1,2 *s

Thats it for now, I'll refine this some later, but this should give a general idea of how paths work and give you some basic paths to be able to use.