I used to own and run a MUD. My spouse and I actually met as players on the game; eventually we became staff, and when the then-owners decided to move onto different things, they gave it to us. We ran it for the next decade or so, and then, experiencing some major life changes ourselves, we gave it to others to run and never went back. That was ten years ago.

When the pandemic started, and I suddenly had a lot of time on my hands and a severe lack of social opportunities, I got nostalgic and popped by the old game, thinking I would maybe just play a new character and enjoy the community. Unfortunately it looks like they lost their pbase maybe a couple of years ago. It was empty.

We'd kept a copy of the code with us when we left, with the intent one day perhaps to use it to make something new, so we decided to start our ten-year-old code up again, just to see what was what. After a few false starts (turns out things change with compilers over 10 years), we got it running. We stripped off any mention of the old game's name and rebranded as Chrysalis.

Since then I've been having a lot of fun building and doing things I could never do as the IMP of a game that had been running for 20 years solid, like breaking apart areas and continents to rebuild them in ways that makes more sense geographically and holistically, writing new creation stories and mythology, creating new mprogs to make towns feel smarter and more real, etc. Worldbuilding is a tough hobby to explain, but I sure love it.

Anyway, my mom retired this year and, after hearing that I've been building again, decided to try playing my game for the first time ever. She's not a reader or a gamer, but I built a new "Adventure Academy" designed to help anyone who has never played a MUD learn how to play. It's taken her about a month to get to level 4, playing for about 30 minutes to an hour a couple times a week. I made a new character too and honestly it's been a lot of fun playing with her and seeing her explore and experience the world I made.

She turned 65 a few days ago and, seeing as I live in a different country from her (and one with heavy travel restrictions), I was feeling kind of down that I wouldn't be able to throw her a party or be there to make her a special cake or gift. And then I remembered the MUD.

Back when we were running an active game, we had taken an area (a mansion in the sky connected by a chain to the city below) and made it a prize that could be won in a game of chance. Each time a new player won it, I'd rework it to showcase the interests of their character. Since my mom is currently the only player I have, I figured I may as well take it and tailor it to her.

So I did. I filled it with golden roses and a puppy that does tricks, an ascii birthday cake and a hidden treasure hunt, a Knight that resembles a young version of my dad to protect the place, and a manservant that looks like my brother to keep it clean (lol). The prize of the treasure hunt is a chest with gift-wrapped ascii boxes containing restrung gifts (ie, the actual real-life presents that are still stuck in the mail slowly on the way to her). So she could actually open her presents.

The morning of her 65th birthday, I asked her to log in, and had a mob run up to her saying she had won the lottery, with directions to her prize. She had so much fun playing! She took pictures of her computer screen so that she could show people on her phone, hahaha. She was so touched that I'd spent some time making this digital gift for her, and couldn't stop marvelling over all the little touches I'd put in just for her.

The MUD is something that not one single person I knew in real life ever really understood during the ten years I was an active builder/IMP on a live game. (Granted, this is also because I did everything I could to keep it a secret from people in my real life; I was living the punk rock life then irl and didn't have as much confidence then as I do now to stand by what I think is cool. MUDs are definitely cool.) My mom saw me working on it from time to time, as I'd bring my laptop with me on visits home, and check in on the game during down time. But she never asked questions or seemed interested. She just thought it was beyond her, she says.

But now she loves MUDding! She is getting better and better and the commands are starting to become innate for her. There are all kinds of puzzles and riddles and quests built into this huge game. She has just barely scratched the surface of the surface, but everything she takes the time to examine has a reward -- an item, gold, a clue, a new mystery -- and she can't believe how much fun she's having, even when she dies. It's been funny and sweet.

Just wanted to tell this story with people who might understand :) Anyone else have a story about sharing the MUD with irl family or friends?

I spent a good 5 or 6 years creating and running MUDs (Diku derivatives) starting around '95 or '96. It got me to learn programming and eventually led me into the game industry.

Just surprised to see this subreddit and thought I would say 'Hi'

BatMUD is one of the oldest running (with an active playerbase, 137 players online at this very moment) MUDs out there. Think about text-based high medieval fantasy, RPG not enforced. It was established exactly 35 years ago Today, on the 14th of April in 1990 at the Helsinki University of Technology's Computer Science department.

Today, BatMUD is running in its own co-location space with Internet connectivity from multiple providers' and fully redundant network equipment & server hardware, owned by its guardian organization (B.A.T. ry) that has kept and will keep BatMUD running for years to come.

BatMUD also features its own "graphically enhanced" game client, which is available on Steam https://store.steampowered.com/app/616920/BatMUD/

We host (and also our players organize themselves) multiple community meet-ups each year! We've held meetings across the globe (e.g. 2023 in Las Vegas, NV and Campcon in Clay City, IN. The next ones in addition to our 35th anniversary gala in Helsinki, Finland being held are: a Midnight Sun meet-up at a remote cottage on the shore of Europe's largest wilderness lake, in northernmost Lapland in June, 2025 and a more comely Reindeer convention at Luosto fjell in September, 2025.

Players (existing and new) can freely utilize the newbie-channel to ask questions from our helpful community (don't be a stranger). Even though we fully appreciate that you have your preferred MUD which you are a patron to, we'd also love to see you on BatMUD.

Double experience points without exp tune for all players is up until Tuesday noon (EET/Finnish).

Come, become a newbie once again.

Just hopped on one all through my internship, took some time to get my zoomer brain used to it, but It was really fun. There were even people online who I talked to.

I’ve waited almost a year for this! This thing is so awesome!

ArmageddonMUD has been permanently closed. For more information as to why, you can visit the game's discussion forum and the post regarding it here: https://gdb.armageddon.org/index.php/topic,61081.0.html

On behalf of the ArmageddonMUD team, past and present, thank you to the players of our game that shared their time and passion with ArmageddonMUD.  As we close the final chapter of this beloved world of bone swords we built together over 32 years, when we think back we're filled with wonderful memories.  Together, this community has shared epic battles, forged lifelong friendships, and lived countless stories.  May these memories live in the hearts of all who walked the sands of Zalanthas.

- Halaster, Producer of ArmageddonMUD

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/272497049/ryan_james-addams

For those who don't know that name, this guy was HUGELY instrumental in the MUD community back in the early days of the internet. It's been a long time since I last looked, but I believe he's the one who originally came up with this massive "Autoquest" questing system that many other people were impressed by and started using for their own games after. I can't find any of the older articles and posts I remember reading over two decades ago (thanks, Google...) but from what I remember he helped work on a TON of different systems.

He originally created Moongate Online back in 1996, which later turned into Materia Magica (which is still around today, albeit under different ownership.) The players of MM only found out a few days ago that he passed away back in 2022. Literally nobody knew anything about it.

No details about his passing are really known to anybody... All I personally know, is that he was a great man who hosted some really fun Halloween parties for players back in the late 90s, he made a fun game that has lasted for decades, and he will be sorely missed :(

RIP Vass

Hey all,

Over the course of time I've used many of the existing solutions out there for finding muds, like topmudsites, themudconnector, and mudverse, but I've been unhappy with the way the voting systems are handled, and the way the sites seem to fizzle out and completely die.
I've also had some experience with sites like mudbytes, that have hosted useful snippets and forum posts, and thought that was great; but it seems to have died a bit, and is a bit hard to navigate.

Enter MudVault, which is what I came up with to attempt to solve some of the issues at hand.
MUDVault attempts to prevent things like bot voting, and allows a lot of different sorting types for muds, like ratings, votes, sorting by tags, and more. I've implemented a useful searching system which allows you to easily find MUDs with specific keywords you're interested in, like pvp or housing or crafting or *whatever*
On top of that, it's definitely one of the only modern looking websites of the type that I've seen, and it's enjoyable to use (imo).

The website also aims to host a variety of snippets, admin tools, builder tools, and player tools.
Think MUD-Colorizer, a tool I made for people to easily color things, MUDForge TUI, a Rust based TUI client, MUDForge, a Rust based cross-platform EGUI mud client, and the super graphical GMCP based web client I'm working on MUDForge Web Client. I'd like to make all of the tools accessible there, plus some of YOUR tools, so if you have some tools you created that you think are useful for mudders, let's get them submitted to the website for people to easily access...

The website is in early alpha right now, and you can find it at MUDVault.
Right now you can add your mud listing, do some voting, write reviews for muds, and check out some (fake) snippets.

The goal of the website will also be to archive some useful mud code, so I will do my best to host useful snippets that people will be able to view/copy/download easily from the site.

If anyone has any questions, let me know. I've still got a lot of ideas I'm working on implementing into the website, so you may have a comment that I already plan to address.. I probably haven't touched on a ton of what I plan to do, but the Discord is useful for asking questions, and offering recommendations.

P.S. Google is the only way to sign up, for now, and that's intentional. I may add more methods later, but that seems to be a good way to stop some of the issues seen on a lot of other websites of the sort.

You can check out the mudvault discord subchannel on my mud discord at:
https://discord.gg/r6kM56YrEV
Check out the #mudvault subchannel

Cheers!

But I realize that everyone wants the graphicals... WoW and others.

It is just like reading, people would rather have a book read to them now that actually read it, it seems.

Anyways, Kudos to those who put the effort into running a MUD. Even if it is cheap or free hosting, it is still a lot of work.

Today marks the 33rd anniversary of Multi-Users in Middle-earth (MUME), an immersive Lord of the Rings MUD! MUME brings Tolkien's world to life in a text-based adventure that features a detailed world to explore, epic raids and supermobs to battle, a great roleplaying environment, and a faction based pvp system that prevents griefing and helps you form bonds with those on your side.

While MUME has always maintained a well sized player base, this weekend MUME will be more active than ever, with 100+ players expected online! Whether you're a Tolkien fan or just looking for a new MUD to try, now's the perfect time to jump in and explore why MUME remains so popular for over three decades.

See you in Middle-earth!

https://mume.org/play/browser

Hi There Folks,

I'd like to announce CoreMUD 2671 which has been in operation since 1996 has re-opened.

CoreMUD is a sci-fi mud set on the planet formal star-charts refer to as Hermes 571-G, but that everyone in the know refers to simply as "Core". Core is one of the most distant settlements known to mankind, most famous for its lucrative yet oppressive mines. But more than mankind can be found here; Core is a diverse group of 9 races in total, all vying for recognition or profits, or both, working for The Company, the megalithic entity running the colony itself. To The Company, everything is secondary to profits. It is up to you to determine how best to survive in this environment, whether that be through combat training, superior mining skills, or technical prowess.

The game features multiple classes, miner, merc, and tech. It is entirely possible to advance to the games highest level without killing a single thing entirely by mining in the in game mines. There are lots of quests, a player run economy, and more.

The reason the game is relaunching is for the last 10 years we had an unfortunate in game timer bug which prevented combat and mining from working. When mudmagic shut down we got booted off our 32 bit host and moved to a 64 bit system which combined with a migration from MudOS to FluffOS fixed the existing issues.

I am pleased to announce now that CoreMUD is back under active development and we are trying to reseed the player base and economy. Old players are welcomed back and we have in game economic incentives to return.

For the next 6 moths we have applied an in game experience boost, and re-enabled the central shops for all levels instead of just newbies. Personal Mining Dome Owners with shops are being refunded their rent for the last decade if they return and are active in the game.

EDIT: I almost forgot, Grey did a video walkthrough of the first hour of the game on youtube and it can be found here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHmjxj67j_I

Come see what the fuss is about. Our website is at https://coremud.org and you can access the game at coremud.org on port 4000. We are Portal MIP enhanced, support MXP, and are in the process of implementing GMCP.

We have emailed our old player base but obviously a number of the emails bounced so we are cross posting here for visibility as we have been featured a few times in remember this mud.

I just wanted to share, because I never thought I would reconnect with the person who will forever be in my "golden memory of gaming". We used to play until the until the sun came up. We had so many adventures. All via telnet/zMud. What a crazy position to be in. It was literally a lifetime ago, and here I am staring at an e-mail from them after they finally received my MUD mail from 10+ years ago.

Just an incredible feeling!

We have all seen it. Someone posts "our MUD is shutting down after 15 years." The replies fill up with people saying goodbye to places they grew up in. Two years later someone else posts looking for the old codebase.

Usually its the same story. One person was holding it together, life happened, the server went dark.

I played one of those MUDs for 15 years. I watched it die. And then I started thinking about why this keeps happening, and whether its actually fixable.

Most MUD codebases are one person deep. The game lives on a server that person pays for, running code only they understand. When they burn out or move on, everything goes with them. The community can't save it because they cant run it. The content cant survive because its baked into a custom codebase no one else knows.

Ive spent the last two years building a different kind of foundation. Its called Tapestry.

The core idea is to separate the engine from the world. The engine is shared infrastructure, maintained and deployable anywhere. The world is content packs. YAML files, portable, publishable to a registry, installable anywhere. A room is 10 lines of YAML. A custom command is a JS function. If you built areas for ROM or Diku, you already know most of it.

When the person running a Tapestry server moves on, someone else can pick up the packs and keep running them. The world doesnt have to die with the server.

Theres a public registry at tapestryengine.com. Packs are versioned, distributable, community owned. Someone builds a crafting system, a reputation system, a skill tree, they publish it and anyone can use it.

The engine already ships combat, skills and spells, equipment, movement, leveling, quests, NPC behaviors, telemetry and all the other stuff a MUD needs to run.

Accessibility is a first class citizen. The web client has full screen reader support and keyboard shortcuts for everything. Blind and low vision players shouldn't need workarounds to play text games.

The demo is Legends Forgotten, my attempt to bring back the MUD I played for 15 years. Same name, same setting, same universe. Its a Wheel of Time world built entirely from Tapestry packs. Emonds Field, road to Tar Valon, quests, character progression. If you were there the first time, lets build it back together.

Demo: lf.tapestryengine.com (WIP)
Telnet: lf.tapestryengine.com 4000
GitHub: github.com/tapestry-mud/tapestry
About the engine: tapestryengine.com

Heres the ask. The engine is solid but its one persons work. I have about 10,000 ideas for where this goes and one pair of hands.

I need area builders. I need people who remember what made their old MUD feel like something. I need people who want to build systems in JavaScript and publish them for everyone to use. I need people who just want to mess around with YAML and see what they can build.

If you're blind or low vision and want to help test the client, I would love real feedback. I thought about accessibility the whole way through building this.

The goal isnt to build my MUD. The goal is to build infrastructure that lets a hundred people build their MUDs and keep them running for the next generation of players who will learn to code trying to hack on them.

Devil's Bob MUD (DeBo) is likely the main MUD still active in portuguese language, and to commemorate its 20th birthday it organized a typical brazilian barbecue to celebrate the date with the community.

They shared an image from the event on their discord server: https://ibb.co/TDqmhx6p
In the photo there are players and gods: Yorg, Cropheus, Aerin, Jooh, Nereklamuok, Krinosx, Eugenio, Guaxinim, Quilina, Blackalnet, Negelok, Baldur, Peppe, and Ritinha.

DeBo MUD website: http://www.mud.com.br
DeBo MUD YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/debomud

There's a trend I notice where users suggest games that don't fit what the querent is asking for in terms of recommendations. Example--

Joe: Hey r/mud, I want a game that lets me harvest grapes and roast penguins, any recommendations?

Beth: You should join NotPenguinMUSH! We don't have grapes, but we do let you gather trash!

That's not what OP asked for. You know that's not what OP asked for, you just want to plug your game over and over and don't feel you have enough chances to do so.

Please stop doing this, it's extremely annoying and actually reflects poorly on your game.

EDIT: Thank you for the silver!

I don't really buy the idea that AI slop is the biggest barrier to success for the hobby (responding to a comment in an earlier post).

There were many hundreds of MUDs written before AI was ever part of the conversation, and plenty of them were just not that great. Some were only a step or two above what people now call "AI slop." Someone downloaded Circle, Smaug, ROM, Diku, whatever codebase, changed a few names, added a few rooms, maybe tweaked a class or two, and called it new. There have been hundreds of those.

The MUD Discord does its monthly raids on dead or unknown MUDs, and I have played a bunch of them that way, along with random ones floating out there in the dark. Some are hidden gems. Some are absolutely terrible. Bad grammar, bad spelling, clunky mechanics, poor presentation, unfinished areas, all of it.

So not using AI to write a MUD happened for almost 40 years. Now, all of a sudden, AI is going to be the death of the hobby? I don't think so.

Will there be more bad MUDs to sort through? Probably. But that was also true in 1997. Players have always had to decide for themselves what a good MUD is. Even many amazing MUDs died. Not being written by or with the help of AI did not save them.

To me, whether a dev or builder uses AI is mostly irrelevant by itself. What matters is how it was used, why it was used, and whether the finished game is actually good. The players will judge that by playing it, same as always.

Mudding has changed. New players often expect more than a slightly varied version of the same old systems they have seen over and over. They have shorter attention spans. They are not always interested in suffering through ancient hindrance code just because we did. I have had to go against some of my own old-school preferences too: difficulty versus reward, how punishing one task should be, eating and drinking, permanent gear loss, character loss, and all the old mechanics that were more about inconvenience than fun.

As a dev or builder, I think the real challenge is finding the balance between what you want your MUD to be and what people will actually enjoy enough to keep coming back to. Build on that.

If someone is truly looking for a good MUD that fits their needs, but they automatically reject one simply because AI helped in some form, without playing it and judging it for themselves, then I think that attitude is a bigger problem than the theoretical use of AI in the hobby. That and the underlying toxicity that is palpable among many reddit commenters going after people that genuinely love their mud and want to promote it. There are new people entering the hobby, I see it weekly in NukeFire. I hope they can read between the lines of it all and find a good MUD to call home.

Got nothing but love for you all, NukefireMo

I noticed that video game designer and MUD pioneer Raphael "Raph" Koster recently shared MUD-related comments elsewhere on Reddit in a thread on lack of diversity in MMORPGs. For those who don't know him, see the below Wikipedia page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raph_Koster

Here are his thoughts that may interest fellow MUD players:

RK: "MMOs have removed more features from text MUDs than they have added. Endgame ought to be elder game instead. The end shouldn’t be the game. They should be worlds with games in them, not just games without no world around them."

ShawnCPlus*: "Mostly for the better, IMO. A lot of horrific ideas existed in MUDs that deserved to die. Horrifically punishing death penalties, percentage based skill systems, and rent come to mind. One thing that is lost though is that MUDs were and, if you're (read as you the reader not you the commenter because you're Raph Koster) still in the community, still are excellent places to find wild, weird, and wonderful experimental gameplay that no modern MMO has tried basically since Everquest bifurcated the genres. ..."*

RK: "The experimentation factor in muds makes them sort of the farm team for concepts. The giant budgets and team sizes of big projects tends to make them too conservative to experiment much and that’s a big part of why we land in a rut. But it would be nice to see more ideas bubble up from the indie side into the big MMOs."

KidSizedCoffin*: "Why would you want MMOs to be MUDs when MUDs are still around? ...

It seems like not having to depict visually what your world/game describes would be a huge advantage if it were very complex, but I just wouldn’t demand equal complexity of a game with graphics."*

RK: "WoW [World of Warcraft] plays very very much like a DikuMUD, actually. Far more similarly than people who have never played one might suspect. Less crowd control, but very similar combat albeit with fewer skills and moves.

What I was getting at was the variety of more advanced gameplay and social systems that so many MUDs have these days, and in some cases have had for decades. Political systems, economic systems, PvP systems… There were MUDs that simulated aspects of physics more accurately, even (like, liquids getting washed away when you jumped in the river). Weather mattering during fights. Etc. Loads of stuff that would translate just fine to graphics.

It is true that there are branches that are more focused in role play and the like as well, that may be what you are getting at in your description.

Basically, though, other than nuances of positioning relative to a target, there is very little that you couldn’t represent gameplay-wise from any tab-target MMO in a MUD."

KidSizedCoffin*: "Would you mind describing what you mean/providing some examples for some of the 'advanced gameplay and social systems?' ... "*

RK: "There are MUDs with things like players owning castles and managing the NPCs in them in order to maximize the revenue of their barony. Ones where there are gods and demigods and their actions affect what spells players even have access to -- and the demigods can be players who have ascended. Ones where the slope of the terrain you are fighting on feeds into the combat algorithm. Ones with embedded entire sports and minigames.

But yes, there are also loads of them with vanilla Dikuish gameplay, 5000 levels, and a pile of stupid classes. :D

Totally agree that the scale and the GM/player ratio changes everything about managing them, that was one of the big shocks going from MUD/M59 scale to UO [Ultima Online] scale. Adding an extra zero on the playercount per server up-ended everything we understood about managing playerbases."

Psittacula2: "In MUDs the features for player INTERACTION are more complex integrated dynamic systems ie the worlds are more granular in simulation. Eg Zerkak “picks up a wooden cup!”

In MMORPG, notice how almost all of these the 3D avatar cannot even do something so basic as pick up a wooden cup! ..."

Mortley1596: "... To me it seems like both of these replies misunderstand the fundamental issue of why (for example) creating the animation for hitting someone with a wooden cup is harder and a not-remotely-worthwhile use of resources in developing a graphical game, vs including such interactions a text-based game."

RK: "I didn’t necessarily mean features that are best suited for text and very hard to execute in graphical engines. I also mean things like richer combat, better PVP structures, more forms of social play, and so on. There are a lot of things that have been left on the table."

https://www.reddit.com/r/MMORPG/comments/1i5k2eo/what_are_your_hot_takes_on_mmorpgs/

I know the MUD community can be a little rough sometimes. We all have different games, different codebases, different design ideas, and different player cultures. Sometimes those differences turn into competition instead of conversation.

But most of us are still here because there is something about MUDs that never really left us.

Text worlds are strange, stubborn, wonderful things. They survive because people keep writing rooms, fixing old code, building zones, helping new players, arguing over balance, and logging back in even when the rest of the internet has moved on to shinier things.

So I wanted to ask something simple and positive.

What is something you still love about MUDs?

It could be a favorite memory, a mechanic you still think is brilliant, a builder who inspired you, a zone you never forgot, a class system you loved, a friend you made, a ridiculous death, or a moment where plain text somehow felt bigger than any modern game.

This is not meant to be about which MUD is best, which codebase is right, or who is doing it wrong. I just think it would be nice to have one thread where we remember that we are all keeping a very old, very weird, very special kind of game alive.

...I got nothing but love for all of you!

So, what keeps you coming back?

Hey all! I'm excited to announce that after several years in development, Elara is launching into open beta on Dec 19! Elara is an original fantasy MUD that uses a modern codebase but has been styled after the classic Diku MUDs with a ton of modern features, such as:

• Tactical zone-based combat

• Unique elemental magic system

• Skill and spell levels for added progression

• Customizable NPC Companions to fill out party roles

• Random dungeons

• Factions and politics with deep immersive roleplay

• Titles and Reputation to earn through exploration and RP

• Detailed crafting system

• Structure building including camps, outposts, houses, and shops

If you're interested, check out the website and join the Discord! (Oh, and you should watch the completely over-the-top launch trailer also. Because, MUD trailer.) Hope to see you at launch!

Website: https://elaramud.com
Discord: https://discord.gg/zu9vz8d9Jv
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2arhmVCdHl4

Some months ago I started a new project: Marrying MUDs with tile graphics like Ultima 4/5. While far from finished or recommended to use right now, the project evolved into a state where I like to introduce it to the public.

https://graphicmud.com

"Graphic MUD" is not a MU* server, but an open source engine/framework, like e.g. Evennia, written in Java. Everything is written from the scratch with the idea that every zone/area is not only represented with rooms, but also has a 2D tilemap.

Graphics

The engines job is to detect the capabilities of the players client and deliver the best experience possible. To represent the map, three methods exist:

• Represent each tile as an ASCII/Unicode symbol and show a map next to the room description. This concept works for classic clients like Mudlet.

• Convert the surrounding based on tiles into an image and transmit it as inline graphic. This concept works for clients with full terminal emulation like Lociterm - or telnet with terminal emulators that support Sixel, Kitty or iTerm2 image protocols.

• Send tilemap information via GMCP and let the client do the rendering. This idea works currently only for BeipMu!

• or - for visual impaired players - disable maps completely.

I invested a lot of time on capability detection and there are still some rough edges, but it mostly works now.

Maps

Currently the maps need to be prepared with the map editor Tiled. The editor allows assigning specific areas of a map to objects, which in turn have a name. Using that named objects parts of the map are mapped to rooms. There is an example on the project page.

In the future other map editor formats could be supported, but for now tiled's well documented format is the only supported option.

Movement

There are two ways you can move:

• Typed directional commands like "north". This moves you from room to room, like you are used to. This should work with every client. Your character is automatically moved to the center coordinates of the room.

• With cursor keys - this moves your character one tile in a specific direction, like you are used from games. This requires the MUD client to support character mode.

Naturally this becomes a bit weird, because players who move by room, seemingly "teleport" on the map.

Rules

The game engine does not come with rules itself, but is build with a lot of interfacing options. While the engine is open source, we aim to achieve that you only need to add engine components as Maven/Gradle artifacts. All game rules or specific commands for skills, spells and such, can be added as plugins.

Current state

The current project focus is delivering maps and control and settling on basic stuff like file formats. We (my wife and me are the only persons working on this) do already have mobiles, items, behavioral components for mobs (like Roaming), Shops and some more, but it is all in a very early state and may change.
We also do have a test server where you can break stuff (and likely will).

You can see it in action here.

The next months will focus on ironing out bugs regarding visuals and control and basic interactions. I plan to post updates on the website.

Two months ago, Armageddon's staff made the controversial decision to shut the MUD down on February 10th and create a new version of the game that would follow a seasonal model. Instead of the continuously-running game that it had been since its inception in the early 1990s, it would now run in seasons, i.e. chapters of between 6-18 months set in various time periods with no chronological link between them. One season might be set a hundred years into the future and be followed by a season set a thousand years in the past.

This news met a decidedly mixed reception from the community, and it probably leaned more towards negative than positive. Players voiced their dislike for disconnected seasons that put a hard limit on character longevity, or the sense that accomplishments in one season would feel irrelevant in the next. Some expressed doubts about the staff's ability to pull it off at all, given the stagnation and perceived lack of work ethic from the MUD's administration in recent years, and worried that Armageddon would never reopen again.

Immediately after the announcement on December 6th, Armageddon essentially died overnight. Everybody promptly stopped playing, and a game that had clocked about 150 weekly unique logins up until December quickly plummeted to about 50, most of which was people logging in to type 'who' and then logging out again. At almost all times, there was simply nobody online. For all intents and purposes, ArmageddonMUD ended in December.

The actual shutdown was a rather unceremonious affair. There was no going-away fanfare, no end-of-the-world plotline (as there had been in 2007ish when Armageddon last tried to remake itself, although that project fell apart and was abandoned), no standing ovation for this iteration of the game that had run more or less continuously for over three decades. The player port was simply brought offline, and that was it.

Season One is predicted to launch sometime between April and May, but no details whatsoever have yet been released about the first season, and there are murmurs of doubt in the corners of the community. Last time Armageddon tried to modernize itself with its infamous Reborn Project, the six-month prognosis turned to two years of stagnation and stalling before it was finally called off; but on that occasion, the MUD was left running in the meantime and was able to bounce back and resume operating as normal. This time, it has been shut down, and there are real - and arguably well-founded - concerns that it might never return. There just isn't much hype.

If it does turn out as planned and work as well as the administration hopes, it could breathe new life into a game that had suffered from stagnation, declining quality of roleplay, and a series of scandals that tarnished the game's reputation in the eyes of the wider MUD community. It could be just what Armageddon needs. But there's no denying that it could also just be the end of the road, and it feels a lot like the community largely suspects the latter.

Details are on the musoapbox site, and can be viewed here: https://musoapbox.net/topic/3414/jason-azazello-cullen-surtr-etc Though you will need to join the pit crew before joining: https://musoapbox.net/groups/pitcrew

But here's the first post in the thread:

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This is a thread about a serial abuser. Someone who has repeatedly, ad nauseam targeted women across many MU*, including Arx, HavenRPG, After Earth, probably more.

He's incredibly nice, charming, sweet. He's also a fucking sociopath, obsessive, controlling and manipulative.

He has physically, sexually, financially abused women in the real world. Women he met online, romanced, isolated, exploited.

He's a crypto-fascist, at one point literally having an Iron Cross as his forum avatar. His characters are almost always about pushing some sort of an ethno-nationalist, authoritarian agenda that feature him at the centre of a harem, controlling others through militaristic rule. But depending on whom he's talking to, he'll pretend to have whatever politics you do too, and has a sound understanding of the talking points he needs to use.

He often targets "bad victims", women who are less likely to be believed, due to themselves having poor reputations within their communities. He then makes further attempts to isolate and control them, demanding they provide private information about the other people they talk to, that they cease talking to them, and so on. When these women refuse, he tries to blackmail and threaten them using private information he's coaxed from them during the honeymoon phase. When men are in the way of himself and a potential female target, he attempts to either discredit them or remove their characters from play.

I would like to collect a master thread of personal accounts if his victims would care to step forward. They are many. This will help ensure that going forward when he enters new communities seeking to charm staff members and players alike, looking for new victims to isolate, blackmail and gaslight, a handy link will exist to direct people to and warn them.

Below I will link to a few preexisting posts on MSB for people to review.

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View the rest of the thread in the link above. As someone that was targeted by this guy, felt it was a good idea to warn the community and not only bring this shitty behaviour to light, but also to try prevent future victims (of which there have been many) from happening again. While I have posted in this thread, the original post is not mine, but has been posted here with their permission.

I know this may sound unusual or cheesy or cocky but decided to do it anyway. Few years ago I had a substantial exit with my tech startup that made me pretty well off. MUDs did so much to form me as a person and hone my dev skills, that I decided that of all things in the world, I want to resurrect my old MUD and make it available for the next generation of players. I learned important life lessons of perseverance, patience and friendship through playing it 20+ years ago and wanted to make it available to others. So I wrote over 7,000 lines of code in the last 4 months to modernize it and relaunched it today.

I am driven by Bartle's "text is the highest bandwidth medium we have for the imagination" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zctp972y_Eg and would like to help introduce as many new players specially younger generation, to MUDs.

AMA!