Web portal — for game designers

/admin/design/* is the content cockpit. Designers iterate on items, creatures, quests, achievements, classes, races, spells, phases, dungeons, calendar events, loot tables, localisation strings and mods without touching the operator-facing realm / account / patch surface.

Design vs admin

The designer tree is gated by the same gm_level >= 3 extractor as admin, but the layout is separate so a designer focused on rebalancing items doesn't have to navigate around realm admin and vice versa. Both share the database browser when an entity isn't covered by a dedicated page.

Game-scoped vs cluster-scoped

Most designer surfaces are scoped to a game (cluster.games.id). The page picks up the active game from a header dropdown; switching the game switches the catalogue. A few entities (mods, base content, i18n strings) are cluster-wide and operate independently of the selected game.

What's in this section

• Items — item_template editor with full tooltip preview.
• Creatures & NPC AI — creature templates, smart AI scripts, NPC personalities for the LLM bot.
• Quests — quest templates, objectives, rewards, chains.
• Achievements — achievements + categories + criteria.
• Classes & races — chrclasses + chrraces editor including starting spells and skills.
• Spells & talents — spell_template + talent trees.
• Phases & rollout — content-phase pipeline + per-realm overrides.
• Dungeons, raids, BG & arenas — dungeon templates, raid lockouts, BG / arena maps.
• Calendar & seasonal events — recurring events (Hallow's End, Brewfest, Children's Week) + ad-hoc operator events.
• Loot & profession tuning — *_loot_template tables + recipe tuning across professions.
• Localisation strings — every translatable string (in-game, GlueXML, web).
• Mods & base content — modular content authoring workflow + cluster.base_content baseline.

Iteration loop

1. Edit an entity in the designer surface. Changes go to the draft / staging tables for the active game.
2. The patch builder (under admin) groups draft changes into a patch.
3. Patch flows draft → published → preload → active; on active, the world workers reload the affected tables in place and the next character to interact with the entity sees the new value.

No restart required for typical content edits — the world workers listen on the patch-scheduler NATS subjects and hot-reload the affected world.*_template tables as patches activate.