Make Appealing Guides w/ Rentry for Honkai
How to write appealing rentry pages for use on discord, and how to integrate it into the /honkai3 ecosystem.
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Introduction
Rentry is a markdown pastebin service, it uses Markdown to render rich text that can be shared online. It's easy of use makes it convenient for making guides quickly. You might ask, why would I want to use rentry over Hoyolab. This is a valid question, and I think it deserves an answer. Hoyolab allows you to build a following as a content creator, comment, like and share the posts you love. But It's far from ideal for writing informative guides. It forces you to make graphics or videos to convey complex tables, graphs or charts. Rentry is a natural choice in the discord environment, it supports a more complete form of Markdown than discord, which is how you format your text in discord. It's no nonsense layout is ideal for pure information.
First impressions
The first thing any user will probably see for your rentry is the discord embed. It has 3 major elements, the Title, the Description, and the Image. These are auto generated by rentry as <metadata> and discord interprets it to generate a preview of the page. We can manipulate rentry's generation to force a preview we want. You might notice it matched the first 2 lines on this page, and that isn't an accident.
The first 2 lines are followed by a excess number of a special character, know as a zero width character. Normally they can be hard to work with, but if you Edit at the bottom of this page, you'll be able to see them quite clearly. The will look like the text below, but this is just a visual representation. zero width characters cannot normally be seen so easily. You can use more or less of them, more is safer, on the chance you use to few you may have text bleed after your description in your embedded link. After that, you just need to link back to the new home page https://rentry.org/honkai3, or somewhere obvious, so the users don't have to work too hard for it.
Finally, it will use the first image you link in your page as the preview image for the rentry. I've been using my Discord emotes while testing this, but any statically linked image should do the trick. As long as it's the only image, you can even link it at the end of your page. Try to get a resolution of atleast 100x100, square is probably the best shape.
Making a Table of Contents from Scratch.
Rentry allows you to generate a table of contents quickly with [TOC] read the How section to find out more. This is the third tab in the Editor. Sometimes this type of Table of Content's just doesn't cut it. We can use a very hand trick with headers to make internal links. It also allows us to control the order and the name. We can only use internal links like these to headers, try to keep headers succinct when using this method.
Custom Table of Contents
Header 2
Header 3
Header 1
Information Organization
Using headers we can break down topics
Into sub topics.
This also allows use to link things using our fancy TOC. But there are other ways to organize information. In the How we learn all about these. We ordered and unordered lists, we have tables,
- We have
- ordered and
- unordered
- lists
- fancy boxes
- to show off
As well as horizontal breaks.
In addition to the above,
there are multi line quotes
Such as these.
We can even give important info.
And hard to miss warnings
Because #readingishard
We can even generate rich tables see How for more details.
| Table | of | info |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 |
| 4 | 5 | |
7 |
8 | 9 |
Close a table with a blank line, otherwise you can get some funky results.
How to make it look good. 
This section needs work. 
This is a pretty subjective part of the guide. But there are some obvious things to avoid. Limit your use of headers to the essentials, and keep their name simple. ##Generial Signets, ###Kevin 1. Use justification when it's expected. While you could righthand justify your whole sheet, it's not what the users expect. Rentry has limited emote implementation, you can use them almost anywhere. :sunglasses: I used a lot of the green elements like the quotes and !!!note info boxes to make it look better with the dark reader plugin for screenshots. But now that I have the embeds sorted, I feel like exploring a bit more. Have fun with it, and remember it can always be changed later.
They just added Highlight formatting. ==Highlight==
Making the list
With the efforts of myself and other authors, we are attempting to link together lose bits of information into something more complete. If you're interested in adding a guide to our index, you can use this guide as a crash course. We will not be linking guides to other platforms but if it is recreated on rentry we will link that happily, you can even link to the original guide in your post. We're hoping to collect many very generalized guides to enrich the player experience. The real draw for me to rentry is the collaborative effort. It's painless to edit a rentry, and it can be done anonymously.
Write a rentry for anything related to Honkai. As long as it's informative, it's worth sharing. You could make tier list, you can make a dorm comfort guide, so long as the info is the most correct version it can be (within reason). We won't add any guides that are wrong, or obviously incomplete to the list.
Publishing
- New guides will need to meet the minimum of having a link to /honkai3 for it to be accepted.
- When choosing an edit code, don't use something like a normal password, make sure it's easy to remember and something you can share.
- If you make a custom URL, try to make it topical. And don't use bad words that will get deleted by Ai-Chan.
- Get in contact with myself – TencentDimepiece (SinsOfSeven#3164) – or Boba boba#8849 so we can get it added to /honkai3
- Write guides inline with the Honkai Impact Offical discords rules. No excess profanity, no explicit or extreme content etc. Don't be a jerk, ya' know.
I won't tolerate troll submissions.