Original documentation by Peter Drake (Mundungus on PXO). Descent Chronicles uses this document with the owner's permission. This document was last modified on: Saturday, August 29, 1998 04:28 PM CDT.
Mundungus would like to thank everyone on the FreeSpace Developer List and all the folks at Volition for their help.

FRED is the mission editor for Volition's marvelous space combat game Descent: FreeSpace -- The Great War (also known as Conflict: FreeSpace outside the United States). FRED is quite powerful, but the documentation included with the game leaves something to be desired. This document is an attempt to address this minor shortcoming.

Due to the popularity of this document, I'm going to have to ask people not to mail me general FRED questions. I just don't have time to answer them all. If you have a question, join the FreeSpace Developer List and post it there. Someone on the list will probably be able to help you, and you might be able to return the favor.

This document is organized as follows:

1. Really quick start: A walkthrough that builds a playable mission as quickly as possible.
2. Building a more interesting mission: A walkthrough of building a real, polished mission.
3. Frequently Asked Questions: Problems that come up a lot.
4. Movement commands: Keyboard commands for moving the camera or a ship.
5. Mouse commands: Things to do with the mouse.
6. The toolbar: That row of buttons under the pull-down menus.
7. Menu commands: Commands from the pull-down menus: File, Edit, View, Speed, Groups, Misc, and Help.
8. Editors: Using the editors: Ships, Wings, Objects, Waypoint Paths, Mission Objectives, Events, Team Loadout, Background, Reinforcements, Asteroid Field, Mission Specs, Briefing, Debriefing, Shield System, Command Briefing, and Campaign.
9. Sexps: The joy of symbolic expression trees.
10. Tables: The numbers on the various ships and weapons in the game.

Strongly emphasized yellow text deals with non-obvious details. It can be difficult to find out what happened if you run into one of these deathtraps, so you may wamt to scroll through and look for them before exploring FRED on your own.

Emphasized (italicized) text deals with things that I don't yet clearly understand.