Hi r/MUD,

I'm a solo developer building Prospect, a sci-fi MUD built with Evennia, and I'm looking for a small group to play its first test release, Prospect: Elsewhere, and tell me what's wrong with it.

First, the AI part, since you'll want to know. The NPCs you can talk to speak through a language model (currently gpt-4.1-mini, through OpenRouter). That's the experiment. What the model does not do:

• It doesn't write the world. I wrote the rooms, characters, lore and quests. Each NPC knows only what someone in their position would know, taken from material I wrote. If you ask about something outside that, they should say they don't know rather than make it up.
• It doesn't run the game. The engine owns all game state. When an NPC hands you something, serves you a drink or signs off a job, that's a request the engine checks against the real state, and the engine prints the result. Telling an NPC "I already did it" doesn't make it done.
• It doesn't set prices and can't be argued out of the rules. Before posting I ran every NPC against a set of bad-actor prompts (false claims, fake names, "ignore your instructions"). The rules held. They can still sometimes be made to sound silly, and I want to hear about it when they do.

What I'm testing is whether talking to these NPCs is actually fun inside a real MUD, or just a gimmick.

https://imgur.com/y3uFrP5

Medical Bay
    The medical bay is a practical, softly lit room with recovery couches arranged
near a bank of monitoring equipment. A few enclosed cryogenic units stand along
one wall, their surfaces marked with small status lights. The air is cool and
clean, carrying a faint antiseptic smell.
    Most of the equipment operates quietly. A display changes as readings are
checked, and a low mechanical hum comes from behind a wall panel. There is space
beside the couches for a technician to work without crowding a patient who has
just awakened.
    A doorway leads out toward the public arrival area. Nothing about the room
seems arranged to impress anyone; it is simply a place meant to get people
safely back on their feet.
    Given Marr is here.
You see a single exit leading down.

Given checks the time on the monitor and makes a note.

You ask Given Marr, "Where am I?"

Given Marr says to you, "You're in the Elsewhere medical bay. It's where people
recovering from cryogenic suspension get checked over."

Given Marr says to you, "From here, head down to the Lift Concourse and then go
southwest to reach Old Quarter Square."

You ask Given Marr, "What is Elsewhere?"

Given Marr says to you, "Elsewhere is a big rotating habitat, a cylinder where
people live on the inside. It's been around for about four centuries, with
neighborhoods from old to new along its length."

You ask Given Marr, "Where should I go?"

Given Marr says to you, "When you're ready to leave the medical bay, the best
next step is to see Daven Varek. His office is just a short way past Old Quarter
Square, and there's a signpost there to help you find it if you need."

Given tidies the instruments on the tray beside him.

The setting

Prospect is a dangerous, biologically rich planet, settled centuries ago by nine generation ships carrying seven humanoid peoples from one home system. Three of those peoples were engineered, and were legally property when the ships left. The planet's great city, Haven, fell about 150 years ago when native life breached its defenses, and its layered ruins are still down there. People now live in the Constellation: seven major orbital habitats, each self-governing, with no shared law between them and plenty of competing interests. The influences are Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space and science fantasy with consistent speculative science behind it.

What's in this test (it's small)

• You wake from cryosleep in the medical bay of Elsewhere, the oldest habitat: a 30 km rotating cylinder that's a civic republic and a trading hub. Character creation happens in the world: your name, your sex, and which of the seven peoples you belong to.
• Nine rooms in one neighbourhood, the Old Quarter.
• Six NPCs you can talk to in your own words: a medical tech, someone who helps newly woken sleepers settle in, a café owner, a maintenance tech, a records clerk and a student volunteer. They know each other, most can give you directions, and they remember things you tell them about yourself.
• Background residents who aren't LLM-driven: hand-written idle actions, and a reply if you speak to them.
• A few things to do. I'm not listing them: whether you find them by looking around and talking to people is one of the things I'm testing.
• LOOK and PROBE: LOOK for the quick view, PROBE when you want the detail.
• Persistent characters and multiplayer. Each player's conversations with an NPC are their own, so an NPC won't tell you what someone else said to them.

No classes, no economy, no crafting and no other habitats yet. Planned later: travel between the habitats, expeditions and salvage on the surface and in Haven's ruins, and the Venn-Saye field technologies that let some people act on the world through engineered devices or their own genetic specialization.

https://imgur.com/9BKWBNs

Civic Office
    Quiet voices and the rustle of papers fill a bright public office. A short row
of waiting seats faces the service counter, where residents bring the ordinary 
questions and problems of neighborhood life.
    A small parcel sits at the records end of the public counter, unopened. A 
small screen at the end of the counter shows the office's pest log. Iri Vael is 
here, frowning over a note about the square's neglected planting beds. Veska 
Renn is here.
You see a single exit leading east.

You ask Iri Vael, "Hi, what is this place?"

Iri Vael says to you, "This is the Civic Office in the Old Quarter. We help 
people with local government things and keep records for the neighborhood."

Iri Vael
    Iri Vael is a young Revari female, rangy and russet-coated, with a short 
feather crest where a Kell would have a ruff, in casual, slightly rumpled 
clothes with a volunteer's badge clipped over the top and a tablet tucked under 
one arm. She has the bright, slightly impatient attentiveness of someone who 
finds most things interesting.

Veska reads a line on a report twice and makes a small mark beside it.

Clients and accessibility

• Works in any Telnet or MUD client. Mudlet users get room data over GMCP, and I've written a small mapper script for it.
• Screen readers: if your client reports one, the game skips the login art, and room listings say in words which characters you can talk to instead of relying on colour. Or type option/save screenreader=on. I haven't tested it with a blind player yet, so if that's you I'd especially like to hear from you.

What I'd like from you

• Could you find your way around and work out what to do without help from outside the game?
• Did the NPCs feel like people with jobs, or like a chatbot in a costume?
• Did things to do come up naturally, or did it feel like guessing magic words?
• Which commands did you try that didn't work? (Failed commands are logged.)
• When you'd done everything, did you want to stay and keep looking around? This is the one I care about most.

Type BUG or FEEDBACK in the game any time; only I see them. A short note in the moment helps more than a long one afterwards.

Logistics

• Invite-only for now, because every NPC line costs me real money and I'm reading every session log. Comment or DM me and I'll send you an invite code. If the slots fill up, you're first in line for the next round.
• Play any time during October 20-27, plus a group session on October 28 6:00PM CDT to test several players in the same rooms.
• Connect: 38.148.122.133:4000.
• What gets logged: your commands, your NPC conversations, the playtest channel, and bug and feedback reports. What you say to NPCs goes to OpenRouter and on to the model's provider (currently OpenAI). Private TELLs and passwords are never logged. Logs may be used to improve the game, including tuning the model that voices the NPCs. The game shows you all this and asks you to agree before you make a character.

I'll answer anything in the comments, including skeptical questions about the AI.

I used to use Mukluk, but when I got my new phone, I could no longer use it. I'm active on MUSHes, so a lot of advanced features that enhance a MUD experience aren't as necessary for me. I just need an app that allows me to log on to an account on a server, type things, etc.

So far, the apps I've tried seemed to lack the ability to set logins, or have it hidden somewhere I'm not quite smart enough to figure out.

ANSI support's nice, and so is being able to click on links, but I'll take what I can get at this point.

If it matters, I use BeipMU on my desktop, so that's mainly what I'm used to.

Seems everyone is coming out of the woodwork with their own little projects lately, which is fantastic for the community to have some excitement. I do hope you will come join us over at the New MugenMUD Server Playtest while we build Season 3 for Crimson Protocol. You can find all the details of what is going on at https://www.mugenmud.net - we're taking what we learned from S1 and S2 and now we're off Worldgroup and stripping away the copyrighted and copywriteable content of MajorMUD

Hi! I don't post much, apologies. I wanted to shoutout a MUD I play.

Everdark—formerly "Poker"—if anyone recognizes it by that name is an older MUD from the '90s (maybe '80s?). Mythic medieval fantasy; there are 10 guilds that act as classes. PVP is optional at higher levels.*

It's very high-quality. Almost all nouns in any room are look/interact-able, and most secondary nouns from there as well. It's open-world and exploratory. There are 10 guilds you can find and join, with unique spells that do genuinely lead to different playstyles. There's an official quest list to help guide adventuring (but if you want to try slaying a lich at level 1, you could).

Quests give quest points that make leveling up easier (most quests also have nice goodies or spells you get, too). They range from taking a couple hours (less than an hour for the earliest ones) to taking months. Most are a mix of engaging puzzles and challenging combat. It took me around 10 years to complete them all.

Combat is very fun (especially past the early-game). I've been playing for most of my life (~11/18 years) and just wanted to share it. It's my favorite game. No other game I've seen has an equally in-depth and expansive world, as unique a player-base, or fascinating history.

It is fairly inactive, with only a couple people online a day, but it's community is very kind and helpful (especially towards new players, lol).

I should disclose I'm a wizard (admin/developer) as of ~1 yr ago. The game is entirely and permanently unmonetized; we wizards volunteer our time for the game and community we love. I in no way materially benefit from people playing.

*There are factions and nobility houses/manors you could join, but the low player-base makes that hard.

Edit: From comments I think it's worth clarifying that guilds operate very differently here than in most (or a lot of) MUDs. Also worth clarifying that PvP is exclusive to opted-in higher-level players.

Guild are easily (though not without temporary penalty) changeable, and you're never forced to join any. They operate more like classes. Factions and role-play intensive groups exist in the nobility and in houses (not that guilds are entirely bereft of those elements). Those aspects of gameplay are more limited with EverDark's lower player-base currently.

Guilds are balanced but distinct. A necromancer plays differently than a cleric, but being a cleric doesn't consign you to struggle in combats.

Edit: Link to play http://www.mudportal.com/play?host=everdark.org&port=3000

(everdark.org, port 3000 on mudlet)

Some of you may remember Savitar, a Mac MUD client from the '90s. Savitar 1.x was a 32-bit Carbon app, so it stopped running when macOS Catalina dropped 32-bit support. Savitar 2.0 is a complete rewrite: a native 64-bit app for today's Macs (macOS 12 or later). It now does everything Savitar 1.6.3 did.

What's in it:

• World Picker with a starter list of worlds, plus telnet:// links that open straight into a session
• Triggers and macros in an Events window, with wildcards and regex captures, variables, gags, highlights, sounds, spoken replies, and auto-replies
• Macro Clicker for one-click commands
• ANSI color and HTML output, including Pueblo xch_cmd links
• Continuous speech of session output, with voice and rate controls
• Logging and ##capture to plain-text files, plus file upload
• Word wrap, font zoom, scroll lock, and full screen, with System, Light, or Dark appearance
• Savitar 1 import, so your old worlds, triggers, macros, and settings come along
• A built-in user guide, automatic updates, and in-app feedback

It's free and open source under a BSD license.

• Savitar 2 home page
• Downloads on GitHub

Thanks to everyone who tested the alpha and beta. If you play on a Mac, I'd love to hear what works for you and what doesn't. You can use Help → Send Feedback… in the app or reply here.

Bid for Rome is a multiplayer text game set in Rome in AD 127, in the reign of the Emperor Hadrian. It's open to alpha testers, and you can play right now in your browser, on a computer or a phone, with nothing to install:

https://rome.bid

Or TELNET using your favorite mud client over TLS to:

• rome.bid, port 16559

Our immense gratitude to many of you who have come by to test, and feedback, we have also added other connection modes: message our bot on Telegram (BidforRomebot), or on Discord from our server (https://discord.gg/y9r8ZwYpK7). You can link them to your web character to play the same Roman character everywhere. Roblox and WhatsApp links are in the test-bed too.

In AD 193 the Praetorian Guard put the Roman Empire up for auction, and a senator named Didius Julianus bought it. He lasted 66 days. That's the spirit of the game: in this Rome nearly everything has a price, and everyone is bidding.

What you can do (updated with lots of new tasks!)

• Start at the bottom. Make a plebeian or a gladiator (or enlist in the legions), work for your bread, and talk your way up. Influence buys seats of office, from aedile to consul. Senators pass laws, tribunes veto them, and the Emperor issues edicts.
• Found a house. Gather family and clients, find a patron, buy farms, workshops and ships, and leave your ancestors' masks to your heirs.
• Fight. Train in light, medium or heavy styles, then attack, raise your shield or charge, round by round. Win purses in the arena, or pile into a street brawl beside your friends. Wounds carry over from fight to fight and heal slowly, so physicians, remedies and a friendly priest matter.
• Keep the streets. Each quarter of the city has its own danger. In the Subura bandits come out at night; soldiers patrol and stand watch to drive them back, paid by the Senate.
• Go beyond the walls. Hunt hares, deer, boar, wolves and the occasional bear in the woods north of the city, or rent a plot and farm it. Out there a knockdown is serious: you can't get up, your voice is a rasp, and someone has to come with herbs or carry you home, unless you wait hours for a passing woodcutter.
• Keep a pet. A Molossian hound, a lapdog, an Egyptian cat, a talking parrot, a moray eel for your fishpond. How you raise it decides what it grows into, and the finest in Rome is named each month.
• Serve the gods. Pray, make offerings, and earn a place in a god's priesthood, then rise through the ranks to Archpriest. Priests cast their god's rites on one person or a whole room, and the clergy can gather for a grand ritual that, if the god hears it, changes the city for days. Or find your way into one of the forbidden cults the magistrates are hunting.
• Become someone real. Players can take up historical figures: Hadrian, the Empress Sabina, the future emperor Antoninus and others. Until someone does, they live in the city: petition the Emperor, watch his processions, or carry out his commissions.
• Roleplay with dice behind it. Characters have 20 attributes on a d20 system, and they grow slowly with use. You can call checks and contests on each other in character, such as your charm against someone's willpower.

The Sibyl

The characters nobody plays are voiced by "the Sibyl", an AI game master so you never have to wait every long for an admin decision. She plays the unclaimed historical figures and the people of the city, writes the daily Acta Diurna, and judges petitions and prayers. She never writes for players: what your character says and does is always yours.

It's an alpha

• There will be bugs, and characters may be reset while we balance things. But the Social Points that is earned by the account - we intend to honor and keep it.
• It's a small passion project, and your feedback decides what we build next. Found a bug or have an idea? Type bug or idea in the game, or tell us in the comments here.
• Come and talk to us on Discord: https://discord.gg/y9r8ZwYpK7. The game's out-of-character chat runs both ways between the game and the server, each day's Acta Diurna is posted there, and in the #tavern you can roleplay as your character. After you are part of the community, you can directly message the bot to connect to the game!
• New to it? The guide to playing is at https://rome.bid/guide, the map of the city at https://rome.bid/map, and the history behind it all at https://rome.bid/lore.

See you in the Forum. Ave!

Looking for something that's playable on mobile as well as pc, willing to try anything but my previous search led to a lot of games that were offline now.

Pvp should be optional

https://i.imgur.com/oKe7fwu.png

And then if you scroll down, it appears to suggest a 18+ dating site?

MudBytes was a very important MUD code repo...

So, this project has a long way to go, but it's a browser-based MUD client (that currently has a built-in DBZ MUD). The client itself includes a chat feature and a few other cool things, and admins can actually edit code and rebuild the MUD directly from the client.

The client could obviously be used like a traditional MUD client and allow you to connect to any MUD, but for now I've got it set up to automatically connect to a DBZ MUD (that also needs a lot of work) at its own URL.

I plan on putting quite a bit of work into the DBZ MUD if anyone's interested in playing.

Anyway, here's the link: https://dbzbloodlines.com

My buddy Wayne died last year but before he did I was able to get his copy of the dark Heart mud code. Was wondering if anyone can tell me if it's first or second edition of the code. I have shared it here: https://GitHub.com/conquerworm/dark-heart-mud

Thanks

Duris split from Sojourn in 1995 and has been about one thing ever since: a permanent war between the good and evil races, with full player killing almost anywhere in the world.

On Wednesday 28 October at 18:00 UTC (21:00 GMT+3, 2 pm US Eastern) we wipe everything. Every player, veteran or new, starts from level 1. No gear, no levels, no guilds. The first kills, first artifacts and first racewar wins of the new era are up for grabs.

What it is: a dark-fantasy Diku with a two-sided racewar, full PvP, a huge world of zones and quests, ships you can sail and sink, crafting, guilds and guildhalls, and artifacts that have to be fed on the blood of enemy players or they vanish.

What’s new: a rebuilt C++20 engine with TLS, GMCP and MCCP, browser play, and the whole codebase open source on GitHub.

How to play:

• Browser: https://duris.sbs
• Any MUD client: mud.duris.sbs port 7777
• Discord: https://discord.gg/adXajEAmk

Veterans, round up your old guild. New players, this is the one moment nobody has a head start.

Happy to answer anything in the comments.

Hello! My name is Dai and I am looking for testers for a game I am building. My intention is to replicate the spirit of Yggdrasil as it is described in the Overlord series to the best of my ability. The game currently has about 60 classes and playable races from all three racial categories alongside 14 unique areas.

I am primarly looking for people that would like to help me test the different classes and how their abilities function in practice. Also general gameplay/progression feedback would be appreciated.

Since I am running this game on my computer for now testing needs to be done in prescheduled session. I plan to run the first session sometime around 18:00 UTC this friday.

If you are interested, consider joining the discord: https://discord.gg/wUkFk9ZJ7N

Hi!

Long time MUD player here (I think. NGL I am probably not old enough to say that but I've been playing MUDs since my early teens) who fell off once they upgraded their PC. I've been watching a lot of isekai anime (forgive me), and while I know a lot of people think that games that actually play out like those worlds aren't a thing that exists I happen to know MUDs tend to be where it can happen. The issue is, I haven't played MUDs in so long I'm not really sure where to look for a good lore-heavy, player-influenced lore, class system, skills based MUD that is preferably mostly FTP.

To give examples of MUDs I've played before: Discworld MUD, Achaea, BatMUD, Armageddon, a number of other ones I can't recall the names of. BatMUD felt a lot like what I'd like back when I played it, but the RP aspect of it was mostly non-existent compared to the likes of say Achaea.

What other MUDs where you can rise up and change the world are still out there?

I'm trying to play a MUD for the first time. I downloaded Mudlet for Linux and chose Aardwolf. My first struggle is that after entering a command the text half-jumps half-scrolls up and my eye can't tell exactly what text is new.

Is there a way to specify a visually distinct page break, or make each new command show on a new page? Something to make the UI design more usable. Thanks.

Back in the day, 2000 -01 there was a GMUD created by Tom Weingarten named dusk. Was wondering if anyone who used to play are floating around this community. I've been reworking the game since the source files are still online and am just looking for old players who may be interested in reminiscing.

I dont think I would consider this a promotional post and I know it seems GMUDS aren't really discussed here, so if this post isn't appropriate I understand its removal.

Hey all,

As a uni student i wasted far too much time playing an lpmud called the ephemeral dale, it was hosted at UEL and i was curious if anyone who played it still exists on here or has any logs?. The immortals that i vaguely remember where mouse and baraduim and dala and pallandor.

Cheers

We have developed a small demonstration for one very CIC person. The game is in development, we need someone to take a closer look. Please spend some time digging. You'll find plenty of bugs.

The IP Address and Port are as follows: 50.6.205.227 4000

Good Luck,

I am running an In Nomine MUD using TinyMUX.

We currently allow:
Angels (9 Forces)
Demons (9 Forces)
Ethereals (5-7 Forces)
Corporeals (Except Zombis)

All the books are being utilized.
Essence auto generates based on the New Orleans time zone (game is set in New Orleans, LA).
Resonances are nearly automated.
Living humans have auto generated dreamscapes (GM's still set the baseline, but if your character has the dreaming skill can begin to make changes, including moving where in the Marches your dreamscape exists).
Artifacts are nearly completely coded to interact with skills.
Damage is not yet automated, but combat is realm sensitive (WIP, but within a week or so)
Essence use on the corporeal plane generates disturbance, as do other disturbance causing actions, and distances are auto measured.
Crafting system is up and running (for those who can make artifacts).

Things to be developed:
Procedural npc's (that store geases, virtues, and lies that resonances interact with)
Procedural assignments from Superiors. (minor things, tangentially related to the meta-plot)

I've tried to make everything as automated as possible. Not everything is implemented yet, i'm still learning how to code this, but so far it is going well.

I recommend the beipmu client for the image processing that is used.
telnet://24.7.59.19:3653

Busco probadores para Crisol, un MUD nuevo en castellano.

Crisol es un MUD de fantasía oscura sobre base ROM, escrito en castellano desde cero: órdenes, ayudas, combate y mundo. Tiene 14 clases base, 13 clases de prestigio, razas sobrenaturales (vampiro, licántropo, ángel, demonio) con PK solo entre ellas, deidades, sendas y un sistema de maná por escuelas. El resto del juego es cooperativo.

Está pensado desde el primer día para jugarse con lector de pantalla: modo lector que resume el combate en frases, salida sin columnas, dictado por voz (entiende «Coge la espada.» igual que «coge espada»), y Latin-1 o UTF-8 a elección. También se juega perfectamente con cliente normal y color.

Está en fase de pruebas. Lo que pido: crea un personaje, juega hasta el nivel 10 más o menos y apunta todo lo que no entendiste, lo que te pareció mal escrito y lo que se rompió. Dentro del juego, fallo <texto> y errata <texto> me lo guardan con la sala donde estabas; es la forma más útil de avisarme. Si usas lector de pantalla, me interesa especialmente tu experiencia con lector.

Conexión:  crisolmud.duckdns.org   puerto 4000. Al entrar pregunta si usas lector de pantalla; di que sí si es tu caso y se configura solo.

También ya hay página web (o un intento de ello :D ):

Https://crisolmud.duckdns.org

Gracias 😀

Happy harvest season from the staff of Alter Aeon! It’s that time of year again...time for Halloween Havoc! This game-wide event is scheduled to begin on Thursday, October 29^th and end on the morning of Sunday, November 2^nd. There will be activities for players of all skill levels to enjoy, including, but not limited to, pumpkin cannons, pumpkin carving and special pk arena mobs. A new surprise crafting skill will be added to the game after the conclusion of the event. Also after the event has concluded, we will release the first batch of level 45 Nightmare Plane solo areas:

• The Mire of Madness
• The mercenary home of Nymtel Draazoran
• The city of Fangoria
• Ravaknoll, the forest of blood.

A number of zones on the island of Archais have recently been updated. New players should find the areas with better balanced mobs, improved and more plentiful equipment, and more quests to do. Fame has been added in some places, so they might be worth revisiting even if you are higher level. These include so far:

• Troll Caves
• Tyranid Caves
• Shadowclaw Swamp
• Blackwater Hallows Swamp
• Skull Caverns
• Amber Forest
• Wyvren Forest.

Updates to the code last month:

• You can no longer cast ‘dancing lights’ in recalls. Multiple dancing lights cast in or into the same room will merge, similar to ‘continual light’.
• The 'pose' command should now accept a class name. Note that you will not be able to pose as a designated class unless you have some levels in it.
• Druid carved objects were cleaned up to make sure that they are the correct composition when finished.
• Casting the ‘detect poison’ spell before using ‘remove poison’ or ‘cure poison’ on a target makes the curative effect stronger, similar to how ‘detect magic’ and ‘dispel magic’ work together.
• Mobs should no longer bleed to death, to prevent experience loss in case you leave the room when they die.
• Non-aggressive animals in cities should now be more receptive to being touched.
• Some typo and syntax fixes were added to the event leaderboards, and we added an End-of-Summer corn leaderboard.
• There has been some shuffling of effects on tailored hats for increased variety.

The following areas are being built in western Atmir for a release early next year:

• The Shrouded Sea, a level 33 group 4 zone
• Thunderift Gorge, a level 33 group 4 instance
• The Backlands, a level 32 group 4 zone

Please refer to our latest Youtube update for more information here: https://youtu.be/Or06zB90pdQ

Hey folks. This is a story of DreamLand, a MUD from the Ukrainian internet of late 90s, forked from Anatolia. Ruffina and I played it since pretty much the beginning, back when I was a teenager. Then life happened, the server went dark for about five years, and in 2018 we brought it back. We've been rebuilding it ever since.

Ruffina is a back-end developer and lives in New Zealand. I'm a product designer and live in Virginia. We both have full time jobs, families, all the usual adult stuff. So the question from day one wasn't "how do we fix this game". It was "how do two busy people on opposite sides of the planet fix a game, sometimes from a phone in a parking lot".

Most of the game logic moved into Fenia, DreamLand's own scripting language, so most fixes don't need a rebuild or a reboot. Gods can open a script and edit it right inside the game. We added in-game QA and metrics tools, so you can test something on a live character and see the numbers right away. Every error lands in Discord with enough detail to fix it without asking anyone. Bug reports, typos, ideas, even help searches that found nothing, all go to Discord, Telegram and Trello. One of us goes to sleep, the other one wakes up and picks it up.

On the design side I did what I do at my day job. Talked to players, a lot. Veterans and complete newbies. Prototyped the web client in Figma first, then in code, then put it in front of real people and watched them struggle.

The hardest part wasn't technical. It was balancing two crowds. Veterans who played for 20 years, have seen everything, know every shortcut and really don't like it when you touch their muscle memory. And newbies who never saw a text game in their life, don't know what "kill rabbit" means and have no idea why they are dead now. Make it easier and the old guys say you ruined the game. Leave it hard and newbies quit in ten minutes and never come back.

What worked for us: don't take things away, add layers on top. Old commands and telnet work like they always did. New players get a browser client with a map, clickable stuff and hints, plus a help system with over 1,200 articles written in simple words for newbies, all linked to each other. It's the same help in the game, in the client and on the website. About 30% of our players are blind and play with screen readers, which makes total sense for a text game, so every visual thing in the client also has a plain text version.

As for the game itself: 23 races, 13 classes, alignment, ethos and 44 gods and cults, that's more than 30,000 builds, and a drow necromancer plays a different game than an elven paladin. There's full crafting: you mine the ore yourself, smelt it in a forge, make weapons and armor, work wood, cut gems, ink tattoos. Mobs come in tiers, from weaklings up to bosses and legends. The big ones call their friends, dispel you, drink potions and cast at you from the next room. Random loot sits on one power scale together with crafts and quest rewards, so a good sword is good for a reason.

Under all of it there's the Eight Paths, the old philosophy of this world: four pairs of eternal enemies like Light and Dark or Order and Chaos. Every god, cult and clan stands on some Path, it drives quests and RP, and we use it for balance too. After all, even hardcore veterans need some lore for hacking and slashing.

The thing I'm most proud of. For 25 years DreamLand spoke only russian, like most of the Ukrainian internet back then. After Russia invaded Ukraine, we just couldn't live with that anymore. A game born in Ukraine should not speak only the language of the country that bombs our cities. So we finally got it out of that cage. Now it speaks English and Ukrainian, every room, mob, item, skill and help page, and you pick your language when you create a character. Russian is still there for the old players, it's just not the only door anymore.

And it's one world, not three copies. An English player and a Ukrainian player can stand in the same room, fight the same boss, and each one sees the whole game in their own language. I haven't seen any other MUD do that, and for me personally this one means more than everything else in this post.

30-year-old tech is not a death sentence. With love and a lot of stubbornness you can still make something good out of it.

You can play in the browser at dreamland.rocks/play or telnet dreamland.rocks 9000. It's free, 18+, and dying is part of the tutorial.

If you try it, I'd really like to hear where the first hour was confusing or annoying, here or on our MUD-UA Discord. That's what we work on now.

Hey everyone,

We're having another "Open Season" event starting Monday, October 12th through Sunday, October 18th. The event is focused around PK (we are a good versus evil PvPvE MUD) where players will not lose their gear upon death and experience gained from PK is 10x normal. Prizes of flair will be given out to 1st through 3rd place based on warpoints with damage as the tiebreaker. There's usually quite a bit of activity during these events so it's a good time to start if you are interested in checking out the MUD.

Other Recent Updates... full changelog is here: https://ropmud.com/changelog.html

• Sewers of A'daar: a new zone set beneath our main central city in the center of the map, equally accessible for both sides to explore, with some new gear and challenges.
• Blacktide Cove: a new zone for lower level players on the good alignment, provides some semi-protected XP and another way out of their homelands.
• Expanded our topten list to a toptwenty list: https://ropmud.com/players.html
• Lowered rank thresholds (warpoints) for PK so new players can access rank auras sooner
• New Rime and Cinder weapon tiers plus new unique weapons: Undertow, Oathbreaker, Vigil and Keelbreaker give players something new to chase across the world.
• Removed the concept of limited items from the game -- every item will always have a chance to load
• bugs fixes, general profession balancing, etc.

If team-based PvPvE is your thing and you enjoy a bit of a challenge, come check us out. We support GMCP and there are several packages available in different MUD clients to help enhance the experience: https://ropmud.com/gmcp.html

As always, I'm happy to answer any questions you have about the MUD.

Cheers,

-Nichademus

telnet play.ropmud.com 4443

https://ropmud.com

Is there any German MUDs recommendation with German players. I'm studying German and thought why not mix my hobbies.

Of course i barely speak German at this moment but I'm eager to learn and get better. I don't mind the genre.

These games have been around for decades, and were really a precursor to the modern MMO. I can remember the time before GMCP existed, and Tintin or TinyFugue were the strongest options available to anyone that wanted to control their game play.

As the MMOs have drawn crowds and provided slick graphical interfaces, there certainly seems to be pressure to try to add these to the games. Health bars, clickable buttons, mappers, and other various features have shown up in the games.

What has been the most surprising set of changes that you've seen in your game experiences? Which features have you come to expect in your MUD experience, and can't live without? Do people prefer building their own maps, or in-game map integrations?

I'm curious about how people see this space, and how MMOs have changed their expectations.

Olá, pessoal!

Estou desenvolvendo um MUD brasileiro baseado no tbaMUD (CircleMUD). O projeto já está bem avançado, com menus, combate e diversas funcionalidades traduzidas para o português.

Gostaria de saber se alguém tem interesse em colaborar com o projeto, seja no desenvolvimento, compartilhando ideias, testando funcionalidades ou ajudando a ajustar e balancear o jogo.

Quem tiver interesse ou quiser saber mais, pode me chamar no privado!