Using Arduinos with Ethernet Shields and MQTT

Hello everyone. First, I will start off by stating I have done my diligence in searching for someone else’s postings that I could use to roadmap my project, with no success…

So, I will start with, I KNOW someone has to have done this before me. I have a couple UNOs, and a MEGA, with W5100 shields(and planning to add a NANO in for ATS Status Monitoring, but that’s future) that I have setup with STEverything library(Smartthings), and everything was great there. But now…I am trying to eliminate my cloud dependencies, and going to table my ST hub as a disaster HA in the event i lose my HASS server.
I have been looking into MQTT, installed MQTT alongside HASSOS on a sandbox server with the same hardware I use at home, to go thru and self teach myself in a non production environment. I can get the pub/sub test templates to work on my tester uno, but I need a bit of guidance getting the coding on the Arduino side to read the topic and when the value matches the coding, it triggers said pin for relay control.
I have tried applying ESP8266 codings, minus WiFi Libs, with no success. Does anyone have a working code that I can use to get me running on how the relation between pub/sub messages and having Arduino code react to correct received message?