Declarations

A declaration is a name a mod claims under its own id. The host qualifies it, checks it where it is used, and refuses an undeclared name at init — never mid-session as a handler that quietly does nothing. There are exactly six kinds.

The six kinds

Kind	What it is	Declared in	Addressed as
signal	an announcement to whoever subscribed	protocol.proto: a message carrying option (ironlark.signal)	author:mod/signal/<name>
request	an awaited ask, answered by the mod’s server half	protocol.proto: an rpc inside service Server	author:mod/request/<name>
archetype	a recipe for an entity — a scene or a shape, plus flags	mod.toml: [[declares.archetype]]	author:mod/archetype/<id>
hook	an input entry point of the mod’s own, bindable by the player	mod.toml: an object in [declares.client] hooks	author:mod/hook/<name>
sound	a shipped audio file	mod.toml: sounds = [...], the file beside it	author:mod/sound/<name>
entity	one live instance in the world	never declared — given at runtime with set_id	author:mod/entity/<id>

Two files split the work by what a name carries. A name with a payload type — a signal, a request — lives in the protocol schema, where the type is defined; the declaration sits on the payload type itself. A name that is data the manifest holds everything about — an archetype’s flags, a sound’s file, a hook’s bindings — lives in the manifest.

entity is the exception both ways: instances are minted at runtime in numbers no file could list, so nothing declares them, and the id is free-form within the owning mod — the bundled ironlark:freeroam stamps each player’s body player/<session>, and a / in the id is how a family is scanned (find with a prefix). It is the only kind whose name the owner invents live.

A schema name is written CamelCase and declared in its manifest spelling: the message Pressed declares the signal pressed, and SwapLivery would declare swap-livery. Manifest names are already in that spelling — lowercase, digits and hyphens. Hook names are code identifiers instead (underscores, no hyphens), because each one is the handler’s own name.

Your own names are bare; the host writes the id

A mod never writes its own full id. Your code says pressed, button, press — and the host, knowing who is calling, makes that <your id>/signal/pressed and so on. A fork of your mod automatically publishes under its own directory instead of yours, without editing a line.

With the Rust SDK the names are not even strings: ironlark::protocol! turns each schema declaration into a type carrying its own registration (Pressed::observe(...), Advance::respond(...)), and ironlark::declares!("../mod.toml") mints one item per declared sound and archetype (protocol::sound::Press, protocol::archetype::Button), so a name the manifest does not carry cannot be spelled at all.

Borrowing another mod’s name

A name that carries a : names something the caller does not own and is taken exactly as written — the one place a full id appears in a mod’s source:

• An archetype: spawn "ironlark:buttons/archetype/button" as the string it is. What you spawn is yours to move and remove; its interact and contact events still go to the declaring mod. See Ownership.
• A sound: resolve "ironlark:buttons/sound/press" to an id, then play it. See Sound.
• A signal or request: the name resolves the same way, but the payload needs its type too — so a borrower imports the owner’s protocol.proto by its install path and compiles against the owner’s own definition, never a copy. The bundled watchman borrows freeroam’s positions fact exactly this way; The protocol schema shows the real lines.
• An entity: never. Instance ids are scoped to the mod that set them; another mod’s instances are reached through what the world reports — spatial queries and contact — not by name.

A borrowed name is checked like an owned one: a name nobody enabled declares is refused where it is used, naming the missing mod — never a handler that quietly does nothing. The bundled freeroam leans on that deliberately, so a baseline-only install still starts; everyone else states the owner in [needs], which makes the owner’s presence and version something the session enforces before anything loads.