Your First Mission

Your First Mission

This builds a small mission end to end: a patrol finds a letter, carries it back, a commander turns it into an order, and somebody accepts and completes it. It uses Core, Objectives and Intelligence. Half an hour, no scripting.

If you only want to know what one node does, go to the the node reference, once Objectives ships instead.

Before you start

Load any world with MCF enabled and press Play. You are in Game Master, and MCF is already running -- there is nothing to switch on.

1. Put the board down

The operations board is where orders and intel live. Without one, nobody can write anything.

1. Open the entity browser.
2. Find the operations board under MCF.
3. Place it somewhere players will actually walk past — a command tent, a room in a building. Six metres is the default reach.
4. Select it and open Edit properties. This is where the mission's tasking rules live:

Setting	What it does
Board use range	How close a player has to be. Metres.
Who may write orders	Everyone, squad leader and up, or commander only.
Open permissions	On means the rank check above is ignored.
Accepted orders in HUD	Whether an accepted order also shows in Arma's own task list.
Show closed orders	Whether finished orders stay on the wall board or come off.

Open permissions is off by default, so the rank check is live. For a first mission, before you have ranks sorted out, turn it on — otherwise the board will refuse to let you write anything.

2. Write an order

Walk up to the board as a player and use it.

The order form is a five-paragraph order — the same shape a real one has:

• Situation — what is going on
• Mission — what is to be done
• Execution — how
• Admin and logistics — what is needed
• Command and signal — who is in charge, what the callsigns are

Fill in a title and at least the mission. Press SAVE. You now have a draft, visible only to you.

SET LOCATION opens the map. The map moves under a fixed cross in the middle of the screen; you line the cross up with the place you mean and press FIX HERE. The order picks up a grid reference.

PUBLISH puts it on the board for the whole force.

3. Accept it and report back

As another player, open the board. The published order is there.

ACCEPT assigns it to you. If accepted orders in HUD is on, it also appears in Arma Reforger's own task list with its marker on the map.

BACK BRIEF lets you write, in your own words, what you intend to do. That goes back to the commander before you move. Real units do this and most mission frameworks skip it.

COMPLETE closes the order when the job is done. The entry in the task list goes green rather than disappearing.

4. Hide a letter in the world

So far the commander invented the order. Now make the mission produce one.

1. Place an intel object — a letter prefab with an MCF_Intel_CarrierComponent.
2. Right-click it and choose Edit intel.
3. Write a heading, a timestamp and a body. Apply.
4. Put it on a desk somewhere far from the board.

A player who finds it can read it where it lies, carry it back, and log it on the board as an INTREP. From there DRAFT FROM INTEL starts an order with the report's heading already filled in.

That chain — something in the world, carried by a player, logged, turned into an order, accepted, completed — is the whole framework in one line.

5. Watch it work

Read the log:

[MCF] ProximityTrigger init, radius=15 event=DeskReached
[MCF] ProximityTrigger FIRED, publishing DeskReached
[MCF] IntelSource DROP spawned at ...

If a chain stops, the log shows where. A node that never fires nearly always has a misspelled event name — see Troubleshooting.

6. Clean up between runs

Right-click the board and choose Mission data. That screen lists everything the server is holding — taskings, intel reports, device profiles — with a count that comes from the server rather than a guess from your client.

You can remove single entries, or clear a whole set. Clearing arms first and tells you what is about to go; a second click does it.

The same screen manages Arma Reforger's own save games: list them, load one, delete one, or take a manual save with a name you choose.

Where to go next

• Intelligence — every intel and tasking feature in one place
• the Objectives module, once it ships — the trigger and logic nodes
• the AI module, once it ships — making prisoners of the people you find