NetLogo has numerous primitives. If you are an absolute beginner to NetLogo, it may be overwhelming to look at the dictionary page and figure out where to begin. We compiled this list to help you get started with the very first 11 primitives you should learn to begin creating your own agent-based models in NetLogo.
to and endto and end are essential for creating custom procedures in NetLogo. to begins a procedure, and end concludes it.
Procedures are used to create smaller blocks of code that do specific things, and will simplify and break up your code. Simply add all your code within to procedure-name and end. You can then use these procedure names elsewhere in your code. Keep in mind that except some special keyword primitives (e.g., globals, turtles-own), all of your code in the Code Tab should exist within a procedure or NetLogo will show an error.
You can also use to and end to define procedures that will run when a button is clicked in the interface tab. Many NetLogo models have at least two buttons: setup and go, which run the code of the corresponding procedures in the Code Tab. If you would like to learn more about how to create such buttons, you can watch the video tutorials in this website.
turtles and patchesturtles and patches are two of the three main agent-types in NetLogo that we can use to create our models. Accordingly, each of these keywords also function as reporters that give us a randomized list of all the agents (called an agentset) in a model at any given time. We commonly use these primitives with the ask primitive to make our agents do things.
create-turtlescreate-turtles is how we make new turtles in our NetLogo models. Turtles are independent mobile agents in NetLogo. We mainly use turtles to model agents (e.g., people, animals, objects, institutions) that move around and interact with other or the world around them (i.e., patches). We can create any number of turtles in a model.
Read more about create-turtles
askask allows us to make agents and agentsets do things. This is how we accomplish almost all actions in NetLogo; for agents to do any action, we must ask them to do so using ask. We use ask to make turtles change the way they look, move around the world, interact with each other, remember past events, make decisions based on their environment and so on. We also use ask to make patches change color, remember custom values (e.g., pollution, temperature), and interact with other patches and turtles.
forwardforward makes a turtle simply move any units on a straight path. It is an indispensable primitive to create Netlogo models with agents moving around in all directions such as cars moving on a road, birds flying in the air, or electrons moving on a wire. If a turtle is heading east and we ask it to forward 1, it will move 1 unit to the right. We can use any number with forward such as forward 0.01, forward 3, or even forward -1, which would make the turtle move backwards.
rightright makes a turtle change its direction (i.e., heading) any to the right. In other words, it makes a turtle turn right.
ifif is used to conditionally run a command. If you want a portion of code to run only if a certain check passes, you would use if. For example, if you want turtles to move only if they are standing on a red patch, you could use if to say:
setset is used to set the value of a certain variable. A variable is a certain characteristic or value that belongs to an agent or the model. Each variable has a certain value, which can be changed. For example, turtles have the variables color whose value could be red, yellow, blue, etc., and xcor, and ycor whose values could be any coordinate of the world. This can be used for any type of variable: turtle variables, patch variables, locally defined and globally defined variables. set is used to change the value of a variable.
clear-allclear-all is used to clear out everything in your model. This is usually used in your setup procedure, to start your model off with a clean slate. clear-all clears any turtles and links, resets all variables, and sets patches back to black.