Rummage - I Spy and Seek-and-Find Scenes for RPG Maker MZ, Made From Your Own Items and Characters

I Spy scenes made from your own items and characters.

Rummage is a plugin for RPG Maker MZ that composes seek-and-find scenes out of what your project already has. I Spy scatters the items, weapons and armour in your database across a surface the plugin draws (a dragon's hoard, a merchant's cloth, a tavern table, the forest floor, a beach at low tide, an alchemist's bench, a sunken wreck, a library desk), buries them in drawn clutter, and writes their names on a parchment for the player to find. Crowd fills a market square, a fair meadow or a quay with your characters walking about, and asks the player to find one person by face and costume.

No scene to paint and no object to place. Every scene comes from a seed, so a chest, a stall or a search can be different every time or the same every time. The list is your own names: "Find: Potion, Ruby Ring, Brook Trout".

Every listed thing can be found, and Rummage proves it. It samples each one's outline, counts how much nothing drawn above it covers, and moves the clutter until enough is in plain view (80%, 66% or 52% by difficulty). A click only counts on a part that can actually be seen, so a player never "finds" something through the coins on top of it.

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⚠️ Compatibility — the question you actually have

Tested against RPG Maker MZ with the stock scripts unmodified, verified by running the plugin in the real engine rather than only in tests.

Plugin Manager order:

1. RummageCore.js — Rummage model: composes seek-and-find scenes from your database and proves every target can be found.
2. RummageDraw.js — Rummage renderer: draws the surfaces, the filler, your icons, the ink and the lens. No image files.
3. Rummage.js — Rummage: I Spy and seek-and-find scenes composed from your own items and characters.

This order reads sensibly in the list and nothing depends on it. Rummage.js finds the other two the first time a scene opens, so any order works, including Rummage.js first (the order the in-engine tests load them in).

It patches no core RPG Maker method at all, so there is nothing of anyone else's for it to collide with.

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I Spy

• Eight surfaces, more than forty kinds of clutter, all drawn in code: coins, chains and dragon scales in the hoard; dice, cards and corks on the tavern table; oak, maple and birch leaves, acorns and mushrooms on the forest floor; shells, kelp and sea glass at low tide; corked potion flasks, herbs and crystals on the alchemist's bench; rivets, coral and rope on the wreck; paper scraps, quills and wax seals on the library desk.
• Your icons, drawn crisp: whole-number scale, a dark outline and a contact shadow, so they read on a busy ground. No two records sharing an icon or a name ever appear together, so "Find: Potion" has exactly one answer.
• Filter what is hidden: items, weapons, armour or all, or a notetag. <Rummage: fish> lets a fishing hut ask for fish only; <Rummage: skip> keeps a record out.
• A magnifying lens follows the mouse at 2x. Finds are ringed in red ink and struck from the list; misses get a small ink cross. A hint makes one unfound thing glint. When time runs out, whatever was missed is ringed in paler ink.

Crowd

• Three grounds with a back row: timber-framed house fronts and striped market stalls with their wares; pavilion tents, bunting and hay bales; moored boats, the quay edge and its cargo. Nobody walks behind the back row, so a stall is never drawn over a person.
• Your own characters: every actor with a character image, plus any sheet from img/characters you list. Up to 80 walkers keep apart, wander, pause and step aside from in front of the person you are looking for.
• Lookalikes: some walkers wear the target's own sheet in other colours, each checked to differ visibly from the original, so the costume alone is not the answer. A recolour changes the clothes only: faces and hands keep their own skin tones.

Into your game

• Two plugin commands, I Spy and Crowd, and script calls for both. Things to find (1 to 12), difficulty, surface or ground, time limit, hints, seed.
• Results written before your event continues: seconds, found and misses into variables, a switch ON when everything was found, an optional common event, and CSAF.Rummage.lastResult(). A count of every icon the player has ever found, for a collection or an achievement.
• Mouse, touch, keyboard and pad. On a tall portrait screen the parchment moves below the scene.
• Saved with the game in one small record.

Light on the frame

Measured in the real engine with the frame gate on the heaviest cases: the Dragon Hoard at 12 things on hard with the lens moving every frame at 5 draw calls a frame, and a crowd of 80 walkers at 7 draw calls a frame. The I Spy scene is drawn once while it settles in and never redrawn; the only texture upload in play is the clock, once a second.

What's in the download

• RummageCore.js, RummageDraw.js, Rummage.js: readable, unminified JavaScript.
• Readme_for_Users.md: every command, notetag and parameter.
• LICENSE.txt: use it in unlimited commercial and free games.

The store images show Rummage running in the real MZ engine with icons and characters made by Core Systems Asset Factory (no stock RPG Maker art).

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From the same studio

• Jigsaw ($9.99): jigsaw puzzles cut from your own pictures, as a minigame.
• Pendant ($9.99): spot-the-difference from your own pictures.
• Rebus ($9.99): picture word puzzles from your own art and database.
• Sapper ($7.99): minesweeper over one of your own pictures, every board solvable without a guess.
• Unveil ($7.99): claim the board to reveal a picture, Qix-style.

AI disclosure: the code and the graphics in this product were produced with AI assistance. No sounds and no authored narrative text ship with it.