This is the re-working and updating of Dark Halloween which "broke" with Quest 5.80...
(Still being play tested and tweaked and re-play tested and re-reworked and re-re-played and... well you get the idea...)
I've got a question...
I've got a room description with a {once:} which works, but I also have the regular room description for after entering the room.
Is there a {not once:} command?
(Testing as I'm asking this...nope...)
Any ideas for NOT showing the regular room description on first entry???
This is what the room description looks like.

Central room
Just as you step into the room, everything goes pitch black!!!
You trip over something and land flat on your face and hear the flashlight slide, spinning, somewhere across the room. Great!!! Here you are, in a strange house, no idea where you are... and your flashlight is somewhere on the other side of the dark room. Just as you are about to get up, you notice a faint glow across the room. You freeze, which is rather easy to do in your cold, wet clothes, when you hear a scrapping noise, and watch the spinning light as your flash light spins around as it slides back to you... And stops right between your hands!
You grab the flashlight and quickly pan it across the room except the room is empty! All you can see is the doorway to the west and the one to the east. Looking around, you notice another door, behind the stairs, which leads out the back of the house.
You enter the central room where the grand staircase rises to the second floor. There is also the doors to the north, east and west.

The last line it the "not first" room description that I want to suppress on first entry.

Hello!

I haven't used this, but I just found it in the documentation:

{once:text}
Displays the text only once. The text will not be printed on subsequent occasions.

{notfirst:text}
Does not displays the text the first time it is printed; the text will only be printed on subsequent occasions.

https://docs.textadventures.co.uk/quest/text_processor.html#text-adventure-mode-and-gamebook-mode

Notfirst!!!
I thought there was something like that that I read somewhere, thanks!!!

Yeah...

It's dis-anti-counter-intuitive. once and notfirst

It's dis-anti-counter-intuitive. once and notfirst

Almost as bad as firsttime and otherwise.

I mean, firsttime and notfirst would kind of make sense, but…

You DO have a thought there... Change the core code maybe?
Just replace "once" with "firsttime".
Or to make more sense... firsttime and notfirsttime...

Change the core code maybe?

once we changed the source code, the people who created games notfirst would be oll korrect; otherwise, the firsttime game authors would have broken games.

...unless maybe we created a notonce alias for notfirst and a notfirst alias for otherwise?

I think this is like what happen to my story here...
Quest 5.75(?) I did:
if bowl.finish=True then "you finish off the soup."
But in Quest 5.80, "finish" became a command and I couldn't use it like I did.
If I can get a few logic sequence bugs worked out, I may be able to post this today.

YAY!!! Done!!! (I hope) and ready to be played!!!
The new, revamped The House on the hill.
https://textadventures.co.uk/games/view/ytxcboq5uug1zlu4q6sbvw/the-house-on-the-hill