Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How to Play | Hacker News Reader

Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How to Play

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210 pointsniDistinct134 comments

MUDs may be history to most people, but at Iron Realms we still have five commercial MUDs running live with dedicated paid staff on each constantly working to improve the gameplay and enlarge the already massive worlds. Honestly, it's pretty surprising to me, as when I launched our first one - Achaea - in 1997 right around when Ultima Online launched, I gave us five years.

https://ironrealms.com

Are any particularly tuned to playing together in small groups or pairs?

My love of MUD/MUSE/MOOws largely around such experiences.

This is fun, thanks! Minor bug report, this asset is missing (404 - found it broken while creating a character): https://www.achaea.com/local/client_data/classes/psion.jpg?v...

As someone who was a volunteer Admin/coder for a while on a MUD during college (Fires of Heaven, yes based on the Wheel of Time) keeping a MUD going with paid staff in this age is incredible. Well done!

Former player of Achaea here (if anyone recognizes the name Soludra) -- can attest, the Iron Realms MUDs are top-tier. I tried to get into volunteering, but my work ethic wasn't really up to snuff at the time. Sorry ^_^;

Nothing to worry about, it happens! Glad you enjoyed Achaea. :)

Wait, so people not only still play, but also actually pay for MUDs?

OTOH, I managed to find the price list and seems to be quite heavily pay to win...

(context: I played Achaea without access to a source of cash)

Back when I played, you could buy "artefacts" with real money, but they were less "pay to win" and more "pay for convenience". They were definitely far more than mere cosmetic items, but it was more than possible to play without ever buying one.

Though I was always, always jealous when I saw somebody using wings. Those things took you to a kind of cloud teleportation hub where you could immediately jump to a number of places.

What was the code word... "Duanathar"?

Depends on the item. Some of them were quite powerful, but even then, generally you'd get a 10% edge or an ability from another class. And people would often have macros to unequip all their artifacts for a fair duel.

The Lasallian Lyre is named after my character, but strangely enough, I never mastered the timing to make the best use of it. (A playable class was later based on some fiction I wrote for the official history, which arguably the most impact I've ever had on a product vision...)

Never thought I'd see Achaea discussed on HN. It was a deep influence on me, though my active time was a lifetime ago. Hi, Sarapis! Figured you'd like to know that Achaea, and of course Avalon before it (you were... Orthwein?) really did have a long-lasting impact. These games have always been deeply participatory: player-run guilds, player-run cities. At least at the time I played, you literally couldn't even get class abilities without joining a group and inheriting its political positions, friends, enemies. And although there were PvE quests, the majority of the game was about conflict between players, at the level of people, guilds, cities. That's a far cry from the theme-park nature of modern multiplayer RPGs like WoW.

Thanks! No, I was Shaitan as a player in Avalon, then Lazarus as a god.

Glad you have such fond memories!

Yup, Duanathar. It was especially fun when the Clouds were strategically used during raids and skirmishes, people found a lot of creative uses for it.

I tried Achaea after I got too frustrated with MUME. What turned me off wasn't the way people could pay to avoid grind, but rather how you absolutely needed a client script for combat. If you didn't have some kind of script that provided automated reactions, PVE was really hard and you couldn't even consider PVP. And, of course, people who made the best scripts were charging for them.

That's true! I did very little combat overall -- I spent most of my time on the social side of the game -- but I did build a few of my own convenience scripts anyway, so the criticism is well-founded.

You can get by in PvE without anything overly complex, and it's honestly more fun to figure out how to deal with the damage and affliction patterns from individual monsters yourself than relying on an autocure system. (Achaea has strict rules on what goes beyond the line of "botting", too.) But yeah, PvP essentially required some automation to let you focus on tactics instead.

Yeah, I remember the rules about "botting", too. I don't know if they changed a lot since I played, but back then they basically amounted to "don't automate your character to farm while idle". In light of the pay-to-avoid-grind system, it didn't take me too long to conclude that the rules were pretty much "don't affect our bottom line, anything else goes".

Because botting is basically impossible for us to detect algorithmically (we're a tiny company and don't have the resources to engage in that kind of battle with botters), our line boils down to, "If we come and talk to you and you don't reply, you're not playing the game and that's not allowed."

It's the only standard for botting that works for us.

True, but not strictly true. I played with 100% manual attacks and cures, but made heavy use of color coding to recognize threats in the rapid scroll of incoming text. It wasn't any harder than playing a competitive puzzle game: recognize colors, make matches, try to throw sand in your opponent's gears and make combos faster than they can.

The line "X snaps his fingers in front of you" still makes my adrenaline pump for an instant o_o

Iron Realms games are pay to win enough to make every publisher jealous. Though they are some of the most involved/integrated communities of players/developers/tool-makers in likely any game at the moment.

The combat system in Achaea was always so fascinating to me in terms of balance, but back when I was still playing it I was on bad dialup or satellite internet, which gave me a pretty big disadvantage against other people.

Oof, yeah, relatively low ping is important. Not like FPS important, but still important.

Same. It really amazes me how cool combat was in a game that was purely text. Even if it was almost a decade since I played a lot of it. I remember it fondly and still recommend it if for nothing else but novelty.

The hundred or so debuffs and the concept of truelock still fascinates me. If a new, (more graphical perhaps) game dared to come even close to that I'd be so happy to give it a spin.

Woah, Sarapis! I've seen MUDs discussed here on HN before but never Achaea. I wouldn't be who I am today without having played that game. Thank you for so many years of fun.

You're welcome, and that's really cool to hear.

Since you run the place, I'll state here that it would be nice if I could look at your web site and decide if I'm interested before being hit with a pop-up window asking me to sign up for a newsletter.

How do I know if I want your newsletter, if I haven't figured out what your product is? Window closed. Sale lost.

This site is by no means unique in this practice.

And? Just because the practice is prevalent doesn't mean it's absolved of criticism.

What sale? If a newsletter popup prevents you from actually looking at the site, you really need that time machine back to 1995.

Newsletter popups are obnoxious and unnecessary. Why can’t they just be a link on the page instead of a popup?

Yeh I have had made this point and had it changed on some of the sites I work on - immediately popping up a call to action is counter productive.

It might also hurt your SEO as well

Fair point, and you're right.

Way back in the day (1985) I was figuring out how to do timeslicing on a 4MHz Z80, and once I had it working on multiple terminals I slung a simple MUD on it (Shades). Connecting it to a couple of modems (this was the days when BB's were the thing) got people playing, at which point British Telecom's Prestel/Micronet decided they'd like to run it on their system.

The demand was sufficient that it kept crashing the entire national network, and one of my prize memories from back then is the night I was working late in this huge multistorey BT building (Baynard House) in London stuffed with big cabinets filled with computers and modems, and as I was huddled over my little Z80 the double doors burst open and the shift leader stormed in, shouting "There is NO WAY I'm going to put up with your system taking down the entire network". So I looked down my little Z80 box, then looked up at the seried ranks of GEC computers in their 48U cabinets, and did my best to puzzled, in a "Who, little ole me?" kind of way.

Ok, so it was 1200 baud max per user but we did get up to 128 users spread over 2 Z80s, each with 256Kb bankswitched RAM and 2Mb hand-made RAM disks.

The rest of it is a long story but it's still around [0] and I know a few people on here remember it (fondly I hope - though I do still feel guilty about those bills!).

[0] http://games.world.co.uk/shades/

Thank you for sharing, awesome read!

Pre-90s dial-up MUDs sound fascinating to me. Do you know of any others?

Check out MUD1, which eventually became British Legends on CompuServe and was rather popular in the late 80s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD1

Hi Hazeii

LTNS I remember playing on shades (TG and Prestel) and going to some of the meets with Cuthulu (we both worked for Telecom Gold / Prestel)

I was Mouser on Shades I believe

Hi! Those meets were great fun (though one or two did get a bit out of hand :) )

Just logged and checked, your account is still active on Shades. Quite a few of the old names log in from time to time, maybe we'll have to organise a virtual meet one of these days.

This post is great. I love MUDs so much. I fell in love with them in the late 90s when I was finishing up high school. My favorite MUD was A.V.A.T.A.R., which I think is still around. (Update: I checked. It's still there!) The best part of a MUD is, like the article says, the multi-user aspect. It was an MMORPG before it was cool!

Whenever I learn a new programming language, my go-to project is to write a MUD from scratch. I try to make my area loader compatible with the Merc/Diku codebases, so I can start off with a fully realized world. I'm in the middle of writing one in Go. It's pretty dang fun, and there are sooooo many things to make that you really kind of never finish writing.

If anyone reading wants to check a MUD out, just type this into your terminal:

telnet avatar.outland.org 3000

(I have zero relation to Avatar other than being a fan/player.)

It's free, it's fun, and it's easy! The author of this article links to a bunch of ways to find new MUDs, if you enjoyed Avatar, there are tons of different kinds of MUDs, different themes, and so on. Enjoy!

Wow, that’s a blast from the past. I played on that MUD for a couple of years in the mid to late 90s. Never got too far, but had fun playing.

10+ man groups every day multiple times a day still going on. Lot of fun! I started back in Aug 2019 and haven't put it down since.

MUDs were transformational for my life. I was an often lonely kid growing up with ADHD and a love of video games. I got into MUDs in 94 when we got our first PC right around my freshmen year of high school. I loved AD&D and this was the closest you could get on a computer. I became obsessed and learned Linux because they had the C compilers and Unix was how you hosted MUDs. I taught myself C with “C for dummies” vol 1, and 2, K&R C book, and Beej’s guides to networking, just released around that time. As well as learning every in and out of the CircleMUD code base, a Diku mud derivative. I spent a good chunk of my high school life building a MUD that got pretty popular (50+ users on the weekends). Coding new systems, learning creative writing. This led to me getting real jobs in web app dev in 98. The rest is history. I learned how to fix gnarly memory leaks with my own memory allocator and tools like libefence. Taming memory leaks meant my server could stay up longer, etc. I learned about graph theory, other algorithms, multi user networking. I never considered how hard or easy any of this was. It was just what I was obsessed with, so the difficulty had no real bearing on my mindset. MUDs gave me so much and for that I am grateful.

pretty much same, esp the gratitude and the c

My MUD of choice was DiscworldMUD (http://discworld.starturtle.net/lpc/), based on the works of Terry Pratchett and which has been actively developed for nigh on 30 years. The setting is wonderfully flavorful and the world is huge and lovingly detailed. It's such great fun to get lost in one of the giant towns and see what you stumble across.

Check out this map of what its biggest city, Ankh-Morpork, looks like: http://dw.daftjunk.com/Ankh-Morpork.png (external maps are a great aid for new players, the in-game map only shows your immediate local surroundings, so keep this site bookmarked: http://dw.daftjunk.com/ ).

I used to wake up at 4-5am to play DiscworldMUD before school.

I had at least one character in every guild and each time waking up fresh in the mended drum was like being born again.

Doing "The Run" as an assassin was just the right amount of stress and excitement and when your Wyrm sword finally stops being limp as a warrior.

Having player-character witch friends you could call to fly in on their brooms and drop off healing potions for you was old-school-cool.

I've been a gamer all my life, but nothing will, or has ever compared to the experience of playing the Discworld MUD. It's been 15+ years since I played so I don't know if it's still there, or what it's like now, but I'll never go back.

I was really, really into DiscworldMUD for a while. I played as a wizard, and had so much fun casting brassica oleracea ambulata on NPCs, then watching the cabbage follow them around. Then I'd equip Collatrap's Instant Pickling Stick and zap it into coleslaw, which I would feed to my loyal chicken. I'm not sure whether that accomplished anything, but I thought it was hilarious.

I obviously found the game very enjoyable and memorable. If I had more free time, I'd love to pick it up again someday.

Here’s a little plug for my first and only MUD I ever seriously played: VikingMUD

https://www.vikingmud.org/

Viking started out in the good old days on MudOS, and later moved to DGD, after an extremely long porting process. Both drivers implement the LPC language, but DGD is a lot more minimal in what it provides out of the box, and has a few concepts that MudOS doesn’t, like an easy way to save the state of the running game, and dynamic recompilation, so you theoretically should never have to reboot the MUD.

I still remember making my first character into a wizard at level 20, and playing my first character up to max player level (29). A lot of the old items have been supplanted by newer stuff (Great Hammer of War and Anduril, I will miss you!), but it was still a fun game last I played. I don’t think there are many players online anymore, but I’d love to see the game revived.

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

https://mud.fandom.com/wiki/LPMud

https://mud.fandom.com/wiki/LPC

https://mud.fandom.com/wiki/MudOS

https://muds.fandom.com/wiki/Dworkin%27s_Game_Driver

i didn't realize that MudOS didn't have runtime compilation. i thought all LPmuds had that. it was the feature that i miss the most from newer programming languages, and it's a reason why i still prefer pike (which is based on LPC) and old languages like smalltalk and lisp which also offer that.

You can recompile an object in MudOS, but only new clones of that object get the recompiled code.

oh, i see. that was good enough for most cases though, but it doesn't help if players stay connected for long and keep objects from updating.

i agree, that's a good feature to have. smalltalk does it, and i think lisp too.

open-steam, a development platform written in pike solved that problem by implementing proxy objects which would point to the actually compiled object which can be replaced by pointing to a new version.

My favorite mud was Frontier Mud - not sure when it went down. Back in college I was writing an LPMud called MirrorMud that featured a mystical mountain. You'd appear to finish your quest to the mountain top, but then when you'd return to town, the description of everything and everyone around you would be different, and evil, almost like everyone had been replaced by evil versions of themselves. I was playing with lex and yacc to make parsers like the Swedish Chef parser, so that any other player's speech would be re-parsed live to look evil (without their knowledge). Meanwhile, from the perspective of the other players, a player returning from the mountain would have his speech re-parsed (without his knowledge) to look delusional or drunk somehow. The idea is that you'd need another quest to put things back to normal, and in the meantime all the players could have fun messing with the people returning from the quest. That was about as far as I got, because one of the campus administrators found the mud running on my account and deleted my files. Argh campus administrators!

Sounds like a great and very creative idea for a game! Shame it never saw the light of day.

Multi Undergraduate Destroyers was the acronym I heard attributed to it

Back on topic, I learned a little while back that Diku's source code appeared online, and while digging up some relevant supporting links, I just learned today that they have created Diku III which uses HTML and websockets: https://dikumud.com/

The journey of that source code into my modern eyes is meaningful to me because at the time I was playing MUDs, I didn't have enough programming chops to understand the C source, but now I can have enjoyment from the nostalgia and from the source

I give Gemstone III and Dragonrealms full credit for my current typing speed. And I remember setting up a local TinyMUD instance for my friends on the school network then creating all sorts of weird items and creatures to mess with them.

It's funny... These games largely didn't have graphics (you could argue some of the more advanced interfaces like with Simutronics stuff did). Yet I have vivid memories of specifics places, creatures, items, etc from my experiences. A true testament to the power of imagination.

I miss the old days of DR so much.

Sadly, both it and I have changed. It's just not the same now for me. I've tried going back, and I've tried to find other things to recapture that feeling, but it's just not happening.

I had a lot more patience with repeatedly hunting the same thing in DR than I do now. I discovered it through Microsoft Gaming Zone back in the day.

Gemstone is still going strong! There were over 1000 characters logged in at times during the recently-concluded festival.

It has profited a lot from a pay-to-be-uber kind of model. You can level up just fine with ordinary gear, but people pay as much as $25000 (in equivalent game currency )for the most expensive items auctioned nowadays.

Does anyone remember the intermud system ? https://muds.fandom.com/wiki/InterMUD

Back in the day we hooked all our muds together so people could communicate across realities.. things were more open back then.

For sure! There even is an everything-old-is-new-again iteration of that called Grapevine.haus

GrapeVine is great!

As one of the most annoying kids in the CD/LPMud scene I am likely still responsible for more MUDs being banned from InterMud than anyone else - I would wiz just about anywhere I could to stalk and occasionally harass friends and enemies alike. (The name Moles has been banned on most remaining CD muds since 1994.)

The one place they could never ban was the TMI/MudOS development MUD - I don't even remember what it was called, but looking at what the folks from there are doing today... boy, I should've spent a lot more time actually trying to get to know them instead of bugging the people I played with elsewhere.

Old-school MUDs are alright, but I'd love to see a modern reinterpretation of them that rethinks the interfaces and offers more democratized tools.

For instance, I'd love rooms that could be populated with sounds, images, environmental effects, day/night cycles, and text effects. This would be purely ornamental and could be done in a way to support backward compatibility with text-only views, as I'd want to keep this fully accessible to the blind.

I'd also love better tooling for designers and writers to easily make quests, objects, and NPCs. Ideally a library of templates and then the writer/designer can fill in the details. Think no-code or low code tools like Hypercard/Airtable/etc that empower artists, writers, and designers, not just engineers.

Finally I'd love to see interfaces that support mobile/touch devices, not just keyboard. Short quests in narrative games like MUDs are a great match for mobile devices, but this requires breaking out of the CLI/terminal mindset that originally bore these games. Of course chat can still be keyboard based, but typing in commands on a mobile device is a dead-end.

If there's serious interest in this I'd be happy to offer some further design guidance

I've done just that a few times with some side projects, but never anything I released. One in C#. One in Node. One in Racket (I liked that one the best). It's definitely fun, and I found it helped push the application architecture into a good direction for being decoupled and maintainable.

I only just learned that MUDs exist from this article, but I've wanted to create some kind of collaborative RPG thing since forever.

I'd love to collaborate on something if you're interested

I always wanted to make a graphical mud type engine where users could upload their own character models and the focus would be on role play instead of combat. I thinking with three.js it’s a real possibility to realize.

This is Minecraft with MCMMO

http://defend.avalon.today/

i am interested in creating an audio-only MUD. (like what an audio-book is to books). keep the text, but get a narrator with a dramatic voice. add sound effects, different NPC voices, voice input.

There are a few audio games like this on Amazon’s Alexa platform. When I was looking at it a couple of years ago, there was a level a framework for building them with such narration. I don’t know how you’d work in the multi user angle though.

the framework would need to be designed for that. i'd separate audio handling from actual game logic, so that you can plug in any game logic you like.

you have voice input that gets parsed and interpreted (and also shared with other players, like any voice chat) and you have audio output, that can be called up like any text messages in a MUD: play this narration. play this sound, etc...

code wise i'd call narration and speech like language translation: say("hello traveller") would call up the audio file that contains "hello traveller". then have the audio team go through all text bits like a translation team does.

I've actually been thinking about this and working on prototypes for years. The scope always spirals out of control. It started out as mobile-only game, migrated to web tech, current iteration is for VR...

In MUD the text interface gives impression that anything is possible. Even if you are using same 10 verbs for 99% of interaction, there's still illusion of so many actions and verbs to be discovered. Any idea how to capture this magic on mobile interface?

MUDs are great, and I think the gameplay of the best ones is still untouched by modern MMORPGs. Implementing new features, scripting new interactions, and so on takes much less work after all, being text based. You also have incredibly rich text descriptions, and the lore can get very deep as a result. Many hours of my youth were spent playing and hacking on various MUDs. I added MCCP to CircleMUD for example, and honed most of my C skills on MUD code bases.

I think there's a game type somewhere between today's MMORPGs and MUDs that can bring some of these features and text based interactions to an MMO. For example, I started prototyping a game a last year that was old school cyberpunk-ish style where you had a console that you can interact with a internet-like network, and this console let you do a lot of the mud-like text interactions and automation, but there was also a part of the game to visualize and let you interact with the network without the console.

I've been making a thing called Tentacle Typer for the last 6~ months I'm hoping it'll be a basis for something like you're describing eventually. I've created lots of systems that can enable it. Prolific content creation is the largest mountain to climb as an indie solo :)

Right now it's very single player.

https://twitter.com/LeapJosh/status/1366083915946094596

Chanced upon MUDs as a millennial due to the Discworld novels and the Discworld universe, spent my childhood laughing and playing in Discworld MUD, RIP Terry Pratchett

http://discworld.starturtle.net/lpc/

I played that in the early 90s, my gf at the time was addicted to it and was a admin/creator and worked on the world of the gnomes.

Who was that? ^_^ I was a fluffy creator around then, discworld terminology for a visiting mud creator via the old inter-mud system

her name was Chrisom (I think thats what she used on there )

Lawks!

WoTMUD, the Wheel of Time MUD, is something I sunk so, so, so many hours into in the 90s. It’s still around too, and was officially sanctioned by the late Robert Jordan himself. Had/has the most intense and fun PK/PvP of any online game I’ve ever played. Played it a bit again during the pandemic and surprisingly still holds up as fun some 25 years later.

https://wotmud.info

I also spent much of my youth on Wotmud. :)

I used to spend quite a bit of time on the #emacs Freenode IRC channel, but then discovered Discworld MUD, which is like #emacs on steroids: more NPCs (though less advanced ones), more puns (not a fan of those personally, but they create an amusing atmosphere), more locations. It can be quite a time sink, but indeed a fun one. I'm finding it rather strange that those are not more popular, and would recommend to try them too.

Wotcher!

I've only played a little with MUDs, but I believe they are due to a big comeback as AIs like GPT-3 gets cheaper and more convenient to use. The possibilities for human vs AI interaction and also worldbuilding are endless.

I don't know about a mud comeback per se but I think this comment is very on point. There even was a mud (Written Realms I think?) that got into the GPT-3 beta. They have some interesting blogs on their experience.

Another MUD alumni here.

Solace MUD (Dragonlance-based MUD), first a player, back in school times, and then a core developer, in uni/grad. Maintaining a messy 100k-lines C codebase without proper skills for it was a challenge on its own and taught me quite a lot. Good times...

(still have the codebase lying around somewhere and the folks on the forums are still asking to revive it from time to time...)

MUDs (MOOs specifically) were super formative for me. Learned to code from playing with LambdaMOO and helping develop Sindome (www.sindome.org)

If anyone is interested in a modern / updated LamdaMOO server check out ToastStunt: https://github.com/lisdude/toaststunt

Another MUD (and MUX) alumni here, used to play a lot of 3 Kingdoms ( still up at http://3k.org/ ) using TinTin ( https://tintin.mudhalla.net/ ) and TinyFugue ( http://tinyfugue.sourceforge.net/ ) as clients. Also played lots of MUX, specifically BattleTech 3065 ( still up at http://btmux.com/ ).

Once the graphical MMORPG came out and folks started to have broadband and their own computers MUD/MUX usage dropped a ton. The MUD/MUX games were much better setup to play from your shell account on your university lab systems at the time. Even today I'm bummed a MMORPG BattleTech never came out that rivaled the 3065 MUX experience.

I too was on btech 3065 back in the day! Good memories of hanging out with people from all over the world. My dad got really mad when I hogged the phone line for hours.

I often wonder if the MUD and/or the interactive fiction genre is set for a bit of a renaissance now with the arrival of absolutely stellar natural language recognition systems. Some of the chatbots I've interacted with are mind boggling, and tied to a massive shared world of objects in a MUD/MOO-style I can imagine a lot of potential.

MUDs have always had natural language recognition in the form of other players. The interaction is realistic because it's real.

That said, NLP could widen the already broad possibilities of interactions with NPCs.

MUDs were great, and they were partially responsible for me being able to work up my knowledge, experience, and confidence to start up a career in software engineering. I learned a lot from trying to make my own MUDs (from using ROM 2.4, some tiny codebase called CVagrant, and from scratch), as well as a little bit about Linux.

This is all aside from playing. I somehow convinced many of the right people in middle and high school to play a Tolkien-based MUD with me. It was really great back then, but I don't play any more nor does anyone I know. There are only a handful of MUDs that have the playerbase to make them interesting.

Also, I'm not sure if it's still the best place to browse what MUDs exist, but many can be found on http://www.mudconnect.com/.

Tolkien's Lord of the Rings was a huge influence on fantasy and MUDs. I don't know which one you used to play. I used to play MUME (currently at https://mume.org/ )

My brother still plays sometimes. He has a lot of friends there. Sometimes they have over 30 people on at the same time! Heh. It used to be hundreds.

Genesis, the first LPMUD founded by Lars Pensjö in 89', is still up and has huge Tolkien-based domains and guilds.

A good friend of mine was really into Carrion Fields [0], back in the 90s early 00s. Amazingly, it is still around! I also played for a while, mostly doable even on the slow internet connection we had at the time (good ol' 14/28k at best). It was amazing how big and popular some of these were, before Everquest/Ultima/WoW made such ideas really mainstream.

Anyway, I did enjoy playing it, though big multiplayer games weren't quite my thing, it was fun to have a friend to play with. He had lots of online buddies through the MUD. For me, it got me further into coding as I worked on modifying a MUD of my own, but I can't remember the codebase I started with.

[0] https://www.carrionfields.net/

By which name do you wish to be mourned?

I learned C and OO programming on LPMuds, and wrote my first reasonably large, widely-used software that I believe was used on a few different sites: hands.

When I helped launch a new MUD (name lost to time) I was disappointed at how poor the out-of-the-box support was for syntax like "take bag from chest".

Unfortunately my software engineering skills were non-existent, so I'm sure when I finally retired from MUDding there were still plenty of bugs, but I have vague hopes my code is still floating around out there. If anyone sees the name "Wolflord" in LPC code related to game object handling, please let me know!

Hey those kinds of rad handles are making a comeback. You should consider adpting Wolflord again

- gota, previously NukeBombz

What replaced them?

Back in the early 90s MUDs were very popular among Chinese universities and many were developed at the time. I was too young at the time so didn't get the chance to play any of them.

For whoever played MUD long enough (say a couple of years), what do you think modern MMORPG is missing from MUD and is implementable? By saying modern MMORPG I'm refering to any MMORPG starting from Ultima Online.

My first mud experience was TFE back in the 90s at uni and I tanked psychology because of it. I decided to learn how to make my own (incidentally how I ended up in software engineering!) which never had a single player but 30~ developers for a period of 2-3 years hacking away on areas.. MUDs were the original community-coded-projects!

I have OFTEN considered the idea of writing a new MUD with the intention of bringing in a whole new realm of users to the genre but have never really worked out how to make it viable (I cannot see anyone funding a team to build a MUD startup)

I have some ideas though.. I think telnet is too intimidating for new players. The barrier to entry is too high. They need to work on mobile, they need to probably be some kind of browser-based experience with font styling and the lightest touch UI beyond the old '>' prompt.

If anyone's keen on dropping some coin I have 30 years of thinking on the subject and would happily leave my day job ;)

So I have been running a PbP ("Play by Post") Pathfinder game at Paizo.com during the whole lockdown situation. This is basically a D&D-type game played standard forum posts - play episodically (normally, players post once a day and then the GM posts what happens and repeat). I love the approach for the expression it allows. Players and gm can riff off each other's writing, etc.

Still, what I'd be curious about I'd be curious about whether there are systems that allow something like a fusion of the most "manual" approach of PbP and an automatic system like a MUD? For example, allow players to interact with a room but have their interaction stop when they leave and then allow the GM narrate. Or things like that? Anyone know any software/sites like this that exist?

There is a cool sort-of PbP-mud hybrid server called AresMush. You would have to code the Pathfinder rules yourself most likely, though it's possible someone has done so. I think Ares is written in Ruby fwiw.

Cool stuff, any hybrid gives me something to think about, thanks a lot.

And PS, I'm not wedded to the complex Pathfinder rule system to any degree really. I mention it primarily for context.

I was once a builder on Steve Jackson Games[1] Metaverse MOO[2] until it sadly went away[3] about 25 years ago. I was "paid" with my first real access to a *nix system. Some may remember me as a blue gelatinous cube named Quiver...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jackson_Games

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOO

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/19961226202638/http://www.io.com...

Back at Argonne National Lab in the 90s/early 2000s we had “Waterfall Glen”, a MUD that you could almost get work done in. Actually, because there were NPCs and it was extensible, it was probably easier to get work done there than in Slack/Teams.

Saw no mentions here of “Talkers”, the very early 90s precursor to Discord or Slack.

The early talkers were similar to MUDs with most of the complex game machinery stripped away, leaving just the communication level commands – hence the name "talker".

https://h2g2.com/edited_entry/A1010106

Early Talkers included Cheeseplant’s House, Elsewhere, Surfers (ewtoo), Foothills, Tower, Resort. World, etc.

Some are still online, here: http://list.ewtoo.org/

I just tried one — login worked, last logged in April 2003. That means that site has been online ~30 years.

I spent probably too much time playing https://www.realmsofdespair.com/ in college.

I'm just young enough to have missed the time where muds or Ultima online were most popular.

In the late nineties, I distinctly remember internet cafes and the rise of Everquest which was inspired by diku mud. You had a bunch of young people playing console games, some mtg players, some pc players, etc.

Good times, it makes me sad for kids these days where mobile games are mostly gacha p2w slot machines.

I really enjoy MUDs and I have played them off and on for many years. I first got into Achaea when I was in my teens!

The thing that always ends up turning me off from them though is the roleplaying aspect. I know for some people that is the main draw, but I've never had any interest in it. Does anyone know of any active MUDs that don't have any roleplay requirement?

CircleMUD is how I learned to program when I was ~12 - open source code I edited, compiled, learned how to debug.

DartMUD has made me much of who I am. I can’t point to a single other influence that has had such an impact. You should visit and see what beauty permadeath, unrestricted pk, and strict in-character only interaction can bring, if you’re interested in MUDs. But be warned, you may lose yourself in it.

How many of you rushed home from school to get your daily turns in? One that I played (maybe called Dikumud?) had some turn based aspects that would reset everyday. Would fly to my room after the school bus to fire up the modem and the IBM clone PC to get connected and get my action in!

I'm actually surprised that I don't remember any turn-based elements from any of the many, many M*'s I played given the strong relation to traditional RPGs - the only big time-based event was when servers reset.

Archmage (magewars.com, probably the first really big browser game) was the first game I remember waiting for my next turn to be available on. Apparently there's a "reincarnation" of it running today. https://wiki.the-reincarnation.org/Archmage

Anyone here played Ancient Anguish?

Yup - huge fan 20yrs (!!) ago. Great community with plenty of players back then. I still log into my main character every couple of years just to check they’re still going.

Yep. Build several popular areas for it and it triggered my love of programming

Yes and it was simultaneously a fantastic experience and a waste of time.

I say a fantastic experience because I played lots of people from around the world, some of whom I eventually visited in their home countries. I also improved as a developer. It was a great thrill one day to meet a friend-of-friend who loved some of the code I'd written.

I say waste of time because I spent endless hours in my early 20s glued to a telnet session. In retrospect I would have been better taking up a pass time that let me meet people in person. I've been better at avoiding addictive games since.

I was introduced to MUDs in 1998 by a friend who was super into them. I wasn’t big on the role playing/fantasy genre, but I learned C in Middle School do I could code areas and get admin/Wizard access.

Dimensions MUD thought me to code and build my own toys.

Still playing: http://icesus.org -- they recently added interplanetary travel to the celestial bodies. Sadly, most players are currently at max level, not many new people around...

Any ideas on a mud experience that would work in a co-op after work setting?

Would be awesome to experience an interactive story like this with your colleagues!

Dragonrealms was awesome, however I didn’t have a CC so I had to restart from scratch every seventh day or something.

I loved playing on MUDs in the 90s. My friend and I were wizards on one that was called Shadow something-or-another. It was awesome to be able to script new adventures and play online with friends as a kid in middle school and high school.

Shadows of the mind?

No, iirc it was ShadowGate, but not that ShadowGate

Plug of my favorite MUD growing up which still is running https://alteraeon.com

Had lots of fun running my own modified DikuMUD for a while. It’s a great outlet for creative writing.

I am the maintainer of FluffOS, (www.fluffos.info), a mud game engine. MUD is my entry point to programming and I thought I can continue work on making MudOS better.

If anyone would like to get in touch, please join Gitter.im/fluffos

I played a Transformers MUSH when I was a teenager. It was great fun and some great memories with friends I’ve never met IRL. It’s a sort of play that becomes culturally less acceptable after a certain age.

Writing a MUD was both how I learned to code, and how I met my wife. I can’t think of a single other thing that had more impact on my life than that one, fantastically fun, project.

I'm still living with the former admin of Puzzlebox, an aggressively weird sci-fi social/RP MUCK. Ending up on there definitely shaped my life.

I've posted this before, but I figure I'll share the story again.

I was a big player of MUDs back in the 90s. I probably spent way too many hours staring at green text (when I should have been studying), but I wouldn't trade those hours for anything. Some of my best computing memories of that era are from playing various MUDs, and even 20+ years later I still keep up with some of the friends I met in the games. Some were even at my wedding!

Many of the MUDs I played on are sadly long gone, but a few are still around. I still connect every so often and chat with folks, maybe do a little light RP. Some of those same friends I've been playing with, on and off, for since the early to mid 90s. Even though we're scattered all over the world, it feels like we grew up together. I suppose, we kinda did.

The connected player base is just a fraction of what it once was. Which always struck me as odd, seeing as how there are massively more people using the Internet now than there were in the 90s. Even accounting for cultural changes and technology moving on, it always struck me as there should be enough new people interested in the old ways to keep the population level, but alas that doesn't seem to be the case.

I'll go walking around the old worlds, remembering the epic battles involving dozens of players and hundreds of NPCs. These days, most spaces are almost completely abandoned. If you've ever seen the music video for Sting's song Fields of Gold [0], it captures the mood of walking around the old rooms perfectly. It seems like just yesterday we were all having a grand time RPing, but everyone's gone now.

Towards the end of 2005, one of the MUDs I had played on quite a bit from the mid 90s on decided it was time to call it a game. I had been with the game through multiple server moves over the years, but the player base just wasn't there anymore.

So on the last night, a handful of us gathered one last time. I thought it was going to be a bit like a funeral, but it ended up being a whole lot of fun. We spent hours that night reminiscing about old plots, talking about old characters, remembering all the good times we had spent together, and swapping contact information. Some of us had been playing together for years; it almost felt like we were saying goodbye to a dear friend in the best way we knew how.

Most of us were there until the final minutes. We all raised our [virtual] glasses in a toast. Then, the lights went out, the server shut down and the game was no more. In retrospect, it reminded me of the final minutes of Babylon 5 [1].

I stopped playing a lot in the late 90s when I left for college. I would still connect occasionally, but I just didn't have the time to devote to it like I did when I was a teenager. In the intervening years, Warcraft, Second Life and other MMORPGs sucked most of the people I played with away, and I could just never get into either. They're kind of overload for me, and, frankly, just not very interesting. For some reason, my brain just works best with the simple text and freeform world that MUDs provided.

Games like these are by definition social constructs. They take on a life of their own. And like all things, the end will eventually come. But rather than mourn its passing, I prefer to remember all the good times and treasure all the friendships that I made (many of whom I still keep up with to this day). The game may be gone, but the memories will always be with us.

Walking around the old worlds is sad, true. Nostalgic. But also some happiness. I'm glad I got to be part of that era, and glad for the friendships I made.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLVq0IAzh1A

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znNciln7qwY

Brings back memories! I used to play on a MUD called Melmoth back in the 90’s in college.

And this is how I find out that macOS no longer includes telnet.

Found out as well.

brew install telnet

...and then I jumped into a MUD.

Anyone here play BatMUD?

Lars and most of the other original people in the LPMud scene were heavy BatMUD players. :)

I played around 96-98. After that I continued hanging around as a wizard (coder) for a few years. Created some areas and relaunched the Barbarian guild (For Groo)

-Runeaxe Tuneaxe

atlantis.edu:1984

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