Words you will meet#

The words these pages use, each in a sentence or two, with where to read more. Come back here whenever one of them stops making sense.

The world and what is in it#

Object. Anything placed in a world: a box, a door, a lamp, a whole house made of pieces. Objects are what you build with. See What scripts are.

Region. The world you are standing in, as the server runs it. world in a script means this region. See world.

Terrain. The ground itself. You can read its height and reshape it with brushes. See world.terrain.

Blocks. Cubes on a one-metre grid that live alongside the terrain, for things that are dug and placed piece by piece. See world.blocks.

Player. A person in your world. Every player has an id that never changes and a name they can change, so you save things under the id. See players.

Owner. Whoever an object belongs to. A script acts with its owner's authority and nothing more. See Permissions.

Tag. A label on an object that any script can look for, like "streetlight". Tags are for scripts; names are for people. See Talking between scripts.

Contents. The items an object carries inside it: sounds, models, animations. A script names them, and they travel with the object when it is copied. See Naming a sound.

Scripts#

Script. Instructions you put inside an object. The object then does what they say. See What scripts are.

Luau. The language scripts are written in. See Luau in an hour.

Module. One of the nine tables a script reaches the world through, such as self, world or players. See The nine modules.

self. The object the script is inside. Most scripts start with it. See self.

Event. Something that happens: a click, someone walking in, a timer going off. A script hands the world a function to run when it does.

Handler. That function. self:on_touch(function(player) ... end) gives the world a handler for clicks.

Slice. One short burst of a script running: one event being handled, or the script being loaded. Between slices a script costs nothing. See How scripts run.

Refusal. What a call hands back when it cannot do what you asked: nil and a reason in plain words. Nothing crashes. See Limits and refusals.

Edit mode. The mode you build in. Clicks there select objects instead of reaching their scripts, so to try a script you leave edit mode first.

Remembering things#

Variable. A name for a value while the script runs. It is gone after a restart or a save, so anything you need later goes in a store.

Store. Memory that survives a restart. There are three: self.store for one object, world.store for the whole region and players.store for one person in this world. See Saving data.

JSON. A way to write a whole table as text, so a store, which only keeps text, can hold it. See json.

Moving and showing things#

Vec. A point in space, or a direction: three numbers, x, y and z. See vec.

Tween. A change that happens smoothly over time instead of all at once: a door swinging, a lift rising. See self:tween.

Dynamic. An object that physics moves: it falls, it can be pushed, it bounces. Turn it on with self:set({ dynamic = true }). See Object properties.

Spawn. Making a new object appear from a script. Spawned objects are temporary and gone after a restart. See world:spawn.

HUD. Anything drawn on a player's screen: a health bar, a score, a menu, a shop. See Menus and HUDs.

Socket. A place on a body where a held object hangs: a hand, the back, a hip. See Sockets.

Updated 17 October 2026