I'm down to one missing object in the patch I'm trying to get to work... thanks to the help I've had here and reading 'all the things' again and again.

I'm missing one final object that operates only on messages (so no ~) Has one inlet and an outlet.

[count n]

I've searched in 'all the places' including the docs for pd extended but can't find it.

I can guess its function might be to take a bang at the inlet and count from 0 - n-1 outputting the number at each step as fast as possible. Not sure if the bang has to be pressed n times before resetting or if sending bang causes the counter to just increment on its own after a single event.

So I will implement this myself if I can't find it and see if this does the trick. But if anyone has seen this or knows if my guess at its function is then please let me know. It seems that counting up to a number when receiving a bang is so basic a concept it should exist already in a library so I'll look around first.

@Paul-Freeman It was an abstraction too..... luckily......
count.pd
and.....
count-help.pd
It is mentioned in the Meta, but not obvious without looking inside, that you can send in a [reset( message to reset the counter.
It sends 0 on the first bang, so quite often it is followed by a [+ 1] in a patch.

The easiest way to search for these things is to download extended from here...... http://puredata.info/downloads/pd-extended
You don't need to install it, and you can search through the folder to see what was available and from which library. If what you are looking for was an abstraction then you can just copy it into the folder containing your patch.
There was another count (also an abstraction) that banged a right outlet when "done".......
David.

@whale-av

Ah yes, thank's David, you are right, I should have just grabbed extended and picked it out of there.

Thanks for the tip, teach a man to fish and all that