Admin Tooling

The tools at a Game Admin’s disposal take some time to get used to. The tools can range from being easy to understand to requiring a few hours to understand.

​

Admin Menu

The Admin Menu can be opened by pressing F7 or using the button bar at the top. The Admin tab contains useful actions for general admin use. The Adminbus tab gives you control of many things—including spawning entities, tiles, or decals, as well as running/stopping station events. The Atmos tab lets you modify the atmosphere for the current grid. You shouldn’t need to use this when regularly admining. The Round tab lets you control the flow of the current round. You can start, end, or restart the round using this menu. There are equivalent commands for all of these. The Server tab lets you shutdown/restart the entire server, or toggle OOC/LOOC. This is only available to admins with the proper flags. The Panic Bunker tab lets you toggle settings for the Panic Bunker, such as enabling or disabling the Panic Bunker, automatically enabling or disabling the Panic Bunker, count deadmined players, and showing the reason why the Panic Bunker is enabled. You can also set the minimum required account age or overall playtime to bypass the Panic Bunker. The Player tab lets you view all of the players in a round. You can also toggle the Player Overlay here, which draws some basic information (username, character name, is antag) over all players in-game. The Objects tab lets you view all of the grids, maps, and stations in the current round, including their name and Entity IDs. You can also teleport to an object or delete it from the tab.

---

​

Verbs

​

Admin Verbs

There are multiple admin verbs available. These are all fairly self-explanatory.

• Clone: Clones the targeted player’s current entity.
• Erase: Deletes the targeted player’s entity from the round. Useful for removing a character from a round entirely.
• Mark: Places an entity into the $marked variable, a list of entities, replacing its prior value. This can be used in tandem with other toolshed commands to replace the need to type entity IDs.
• Message: Opens the ahelp window targeted at the player.
• Open Admin Notes: Opens the user’s notes. You can also open a player’s notes by typing “adminnotes username” in the console.
• Open Player Panel: Opens a panel with the targeted player’s information, such as their username, and if they are whitelisted. The panel also includes their total playtime, notes, bans, role bans, and shared connections. The admin verbs are included in the Player Panel.
• Teleport Here/To: “Teleport Here” will teleport the targeted player to your current position. “Teleport To” will teleport you to the targeted player’s current position.
• Freeze stops them from moving or interacting until they are unfrozen by an admin.

---

​

Debug Verbs

The debug verbs are primarily for debugging, but are also very useful for normal admins.

• Control Mob: Gives you control of the entity regardless of whether the entity is sentient or not.
• Delete: Deletes the entity. Requires you to confirm the deletion.
• Edit Solutions: Opens a panel that lists the current reagents in the entity. This includes reagents in their bloodstream or temporarily in their bloodstream. You can modify the solutions and reagents in the tab.
• Export Sprite: Exports the entity’s sprite. You can locate your exported sprites in the Space Station 14 folder location > data > Exports
• In Range Unoccluded: Checks to see if the targeted entity is occluded or not (if there’s a structure between either of you).
• Make Ghost Role: Makes an entity a Ghost role that dead players can request.
• Rejuvenate: Fully heals an entity, removes any temporary reagents in their body, and resets the entity’s temperature. Only use when necessary.
• Set Outfit: Opens a panel with preset outfits you can set a player to wear. Some outfits may include extra items. This verb is useful for running events or respawning players.

---

​

Smite Verbs

Use sparingly. These smites can range from minor inconveniences to severely affecting a player’s round negatively.

---

​

Admin Help

The Admin Help menu can be opened by pressing F1, by using the Player Actions Panel in the Admin Menu, or by using the Message admin verb. Upon opening the Admin Help menu, you will see a tab that looks like the image above, but may contain a larger list of players who have logged into the server regardless of whether they are online or not. If the server restarts, the list will be reset. Different icons may appear to the left of a player’s username. Sword: The player is an antagonist. White Circle: The player is online and playing in the current round. Half-white Circle: The player is online and in the round, but currently idle. Empty Circle: The player is offline.

• Admin Only: Checking the option will make your messages sent to a player’s ahelp only visible to other admins.
• Bwoink: Checking or unchecking the option enables or disables the ahelp message sound for the player. This does not apply whenever a normal player ahelps.
• Ban list: Opens a tab containing all of the player’s bans and information on the ban.
• Notes: Opens a tab containing any notes about the player, including their bans.
• Kick: Kicks the player from the server.
• Ban: Opens the Banning panel with the target’s username autofilled.
• Respawn: Sends the targeted player to the lobby. Does not delete their character.
• Follow: Makes you follow the targeted player.

---

​

Admin Logs

The admin logs menu shows you all interactions that have occurred during the round, as well as which entities and players were involved. It can be opened in the Admin tab of the Admin Menu, or right-clicking on the entity, clicking ‘Admin’ then ‘Entity Logs’, which will instead show you logs that are related to the targeted entity. The far left menu lets you filter by log type. The second-from-the-left menu lets you filter by the player/entity who was involved in the log. The top left Round spinbox lets you change which round you’re looking at, though this rarely needs to be done except for retroactive ahelps. You can filter by log impact at the top, though this is rarely needed if you know what you’re looking for. You can view the actual log data on the far right menu, and search for logs. If the log you’re looking for doesn’t show up, try hitting refresh (you’ll likely need to do this when changing which player or log type you’re looking for). If it still doesn’t show up, press Next and wait for a couple of seconds. The Pop out button pops the log menu into a separate OS window. Useful for saving some space on your main monitor, but will sometimes break when running under steam’s overlay.

---

​

Admin Notes

Admin notes give admins a way to store information about a user when a ban would be too harsh a punishment, or for archival of observed behavior in some instances. Notes can be hidden from the player if necessary. Notes can be edited (and show their edit information), and can be deleted if the note is no longer relevant. Admin notes are visible by default for six months, then gradually become less visible until they are no longer visible at the end of those six months. You can hover your mouse over the note to make it easier to see. The note will never delete itself unless it is not a permanent note. If you want the note to expire and automatically delete itself, you can uncheck ‘permanent?’ and choose when the note should be deleted. Notes can be accessed using the Admin verb category, at the bottom of the AHelp menu, or by typing “adminnotes username” in the console.

---

​

View Variables

View variables is a very, very useful tool that allows you to view all marked variables on every component that an entity has, as well as modify some. Useful for debugging, but also has great use for adminning as it allows you to add or remove arbitrary components, for example OwOAccent. Further explanation of how to use View variables (VV) is given below. A couple of things to discuss about how SS14 works before the VV menu can be useful to you: Be careful when editing or deleting variables. Sometimes, when you delete certain variables or edit specific parts of a variable, the entity may break altogether or crash the server. For example, editing the AttackRate setting in the ‘MeleeWeapon’ component to be an extremely fast rate can crash server. If you are unsure whether editing or removing a variable may cause issues, experiment in a localhost server! The ‘Transform’ and ‘MetaData’ components cannot be removed via toolshed or view variables.

• An ‘entity’ is an object in game: walls, players, projectiles, items, etc. Each entity has a unique EntityUid corresponding to it, which is the number you see at the top left next to the entity’s name or when you right click them. In the example above, the entity’s ID is 99901.
• Each entity (generally) has a prototype ID, or the ‘type’ of entity it is. This is the MobObserver string you see at the top left. This is also found if you right click an entity.
• Entities have components, which give some kind of behavior to the entity. The component for a ‘player-controlled’ entity is ActorComponent, for a weapon it is MeleeWeaponComponent, for damageable objects it is DamageableComponent, etc. You can dynamically add and remove components whenever you want.
• The game is separated into ‘client’ and ‘server’, with some shared stuff between them. Client is what’s running on your computer, server is what’s running on the game server.

Typically, you’ll want to view the Server Components list, as you can add/remove/modify components there, and every client will see the effects. I recommend that you simply try and use the VV menu to get a feel for how it works. It’s a little daunting, but once you get the hang of using VV, you’ll be able to fix problems afflicting an entity and try new ideas with less trouble.

​

VV Tips

• Press enter after modifying a variable to save its value.
• Some variables may look non-modifiable, but there may be a modifiable version of them further down the list.
• TransformComponent holds the entity’s position, rotation, etc.
• Grids (the station) are entities too, and their components can be changed
• You can modify the zoom on the client-side EyeComponent to see further.
• MindComponent contains information like antag roles, jobs, objectives, etc.
• An entity’s name/description can be changed using Server Variables, or on the server-side MetaDataComponent.

---

​

Game Console

---

The console can be opened using the tilde ~ key, unless rebound. Any player can open it, but I’m just mentioning it here in case you were unaware of that fact. Commands can be run by typing the command and then the arguments, like any shell. Important client logs will show up here as well, so it’s useful for debugging. Use the list command to list all available commands, and the help <command name> command to view instructions for the command.

​

Useful Commands

---

​

SS14.Admin

If you’re an official Space Wizards :tm: Admin, you can access the online admin panel at https://ss14-admin.spacestation14.com/. Log in using your SS14 account. Third-party servers can also set up this panel for themselves using the repository, so that’s why this information is here and not secret. The Bans tab at the top is the most useful. This shows all current bans. You can search by active bans or total bans for any player. This menu shows PII (personally identifying info) such as HWID and IP, so do not ever reveal this information to others. You can see the ban time, reason, and when it expires. You can also check ban hits, or whether someone attempted to join and was denied because of a ban, as well as what username/IP/HWID they tried to join with. Useful for detecting ban evaders. You can also unban users on this panel. The Role Bans tab shows all current role bans. You can search by name, ID, HWID, role, IP, or the banning admin. This menu shows PII (personally identifying info) such as HWID and IP, so do not ever reveal this information to others. The Players tab lets you search by username, IP, HWID, etc, for any user. Contains lots of PII, so be careful when sharing this information. You can click on Player Info to the far right of the player’s name to view their PII, play time, characters, notes, bans, and rolebans. The Connections tab shows you the most recent connections to the servers as well as information for each connection. The Logs tab shows you actions that have occurred. You can search by a date range, text, server, round, player, type, and severity. The ‘logs’ time is almost indentical to the game logs, except you can search logs per day instead of only by round number. The Characters tab shows you all characters a player has currently saved on the server. The Whitelist tab shows you all current whitelisted players.

​

Admin Ghost

You can turn yourself into an aghost using the Admin Menu or by using the aghost command. Admin ghosts are special observer entities that replace your ghost’s name with your username, have hands, can interact with any object ingame, and have all access. You also spawn with a Satchel of Holding and an Admin PDA. You can return to your initial body whenever, as long as the body is still in the round.

​

Deadmin / Readmin

If you want to play the game normally, it’s recommended that you deadmin using the deadmin command. If you want to perform admin duties again or need to use your powers in a certain situation, use the readmin command.