I owe my career in programming to a MUD. That's really where I learned to code (mainly by staring at and trying to debug tonnes of really bad code other clueless newbies like myself had written). That it turn, got me a spot as a sort of hang-around at a local ISP/consultancy shop whose staff intersected a lot with the people running the MUD. They eventually decided to hire me when a suitable contract showed up.
All in all, I'd say the MUD was a terrific place to learn to code. You could literally write a few lines of code, and see their effect immediately. "I want to code an orc." Inherit stdmonster, call a few API functions to set name and description, and BAM! - you've got an orc! And so on. Motivation never ran dry because - hey, I was adding features I wanted to a game I loved! Feedback (of varying quality, sure) was immediately available in the built in chat channel. Code was hot loaded/reloaded, so iteration cycle time was approximately zero. Emacs + angeftp (later replaced by tramp) to the host machine, you were literally editing the live code all the time (who needs pull requests when you have C-x C-s, eh?), so lots of instructive oops moments. It was amazing.
Have a whole bunch of friends with a similar story.
I'm the same, but from the other side. I learned to code clients/bots that would play the MUD. I had a fantastic fighting script, that basically fought optimally, one that used two characters at the same time to solve some complicated maze, and I even wrote a headless bot runner that was compatible with the files of the MUD client I used.
It was all great fun, and I also owe my extensive regex experience to it.
Same here , I got addicted to a mud called realms of despair , smaug codebase, a derivative of Dikumud, I then ended up helping run a pretty popular server on the same codebase with some friends I met on the server. Bought a "learn c++ for dummies book" (even though it was programmed in c) and started modifying the server and the rest was history ;) I guess I was 14 at the time and I haven't stopped programming since. Gaming is definitely the gateway drug to programming and text based games are in some ways the most interesting form for learning due to not having to worry about graphics and immediately seeing results like you mention.
I've often thought about implementing "Claude plays" some open source mud. Seems like a much more pure form of experiment since it's all text.
I spent a lot of time on there growing up. Based on the copious writings of Terry Pratchett, it's full of whimsy and humor but also quite addicting and deep gameplay.
It seems to have a pretty active player base, too.
warms my heart that discworld is still being kept alive by fans. i wonder how the fandom can prosper if not grow. TP is still underappreciated by so many, and in many ways timeless bc of the fantasy element.
I haven't played a MUD in the last 25 years, but I think I would enjoy playing this one if I had time. In some ways MUDs were much more fun than modern games. I wonder what codebase it derives from.
I coded for/built/scripted dozens of MUDs in my teens, the Two Towers the first one I played, possibly visited hundreds of these servers around the time my peers were on WoW, my first builder role was writing emote string patterns and room descriptions for the cooling tanks of a space station in a Star Wars MUD and I learned about OOP implementing a mob, combat, pathfinding, and crafting systems atop a python 2.4 engine my classmate gave me on a CD rom
out of the all the MUDs from that era I think the most noteworthy was Assault, which was a Merc derivative mod with a top down map for real time strategy base defense, active around 2006 then disappeared into obscurity, and very wild in a pre-Dwarf Fortress era
Originally it was the TMI-2 mudlib running on MudOS [1], though my understanding is that they heavily modified the codebase over time. The library was never officially released as open source [2], but the code (in C) is included in a ZIP file alongside installers and related files [3].
As for the JavaScript client, it appears to be proprietary.
After trying the tutorial it feels like a Diku MUD, but of course heavily modified. I'd be interested to know more too, though, and will be poking around the website.
I spent many hours hogging the phone line to play btech 3056 back in high school. It was so cool talking to people all over the world. I wasn't very good at the actual game, however. I do remember encountering a bug where I was placed on a level-4 high building and I couldn't get off of it because my mech wouldn't let me intentionally fall.
Also still running, after more than 33 years: mume.org
Disclaimer: I used to help run this - my main contribution was an extension language, which started as a Scheme+Forth hybrid (everyone hated that...) and quickly morphed into sort-of-Scheme with "conventional" syntax.
I also like Mudlet and KildClient, but it's really best of you try a few and decide which works best for your tastes and needs. Blowtorch is still the go-to client if you want to play via Android mobile, last I checked. And you can always just straight up connect via telnet/ssh using your favorite terminal emulator if you want to keep things really simple and exercise your skills with graph paper.
Me too. Every now and then I think of going back, but ever since Aardwolf I've had a personal rule that a game has to have an end. Which has successfully kept me away from all MMORPGs and other endless time sinks.
Been a while since I did but sometimes I hop on one I played back in the day, like Ishar or Materia Magica, to scratch a certain itch. Looks like a good number of the old ones are still going.
Valhalla MUD is really good, and has had a resurgence of activity recently. They've redone the class system, added a bunch of zones, and added some discord integration etc. I played decades ago starting as an 8 year old who knew nothing lol but I still log in from time to time. Super deep game if you have time to invest.
Wow, this is still a thing! I lost two university friends to the Discworld MUD. As in, their whole lifestyle, hours, and activities changed to be working on and playing it all night long in the uni labs, and they no longer did anything else apart from attend a bare minimum of classes.
I just checked the “About” page, and one of them (“pinkfish”) is at the top of the Administrators list.
In late 1994 my only Internet access was a small room at Uni with 2 unattended ancient 286 PCs someone had set up for international students to check their emails but was always empty. Soon I joined a group of eager undergraduates that squatted unused email accounts, shared Slackware floppies, waited hours for a 700Kb NASA pic to download or frequented MUDs, telnet chats or places like Brinta BBS.
We quickly organized to share them fairly, until two big Math graduate students in full scary Heavy Metal rocker regalia showed up and started hogging them for 10 hours a day to play a MUD. No one to complain to, since our own usage was unsanctioned.
After a couple weeks of this, I made a little C trojan horse that replaced the telnet executable and logged the credentials if the target was the MUD in question. Then I would take the earliest chance available to delete their characters. They were gone after a week.
Professor Richard Bartle recently retired, but he regularly assigned his students to play MUD2 in his Computer Game Design and Virtual Worlds classes at the University of Essex! He and Michael Lawrie co-created the original MUD1 at Essex in 1978.
Here's some notes I wrote down on how to connect to Essex University via an ARPANET gateway, log in to Essex University, and run MUD! I must have been about 15 at the time. I wrote it on one page of a Zork map, as you can see.
Thanks a lot to Richard A. Bartle and Michael Lawrie for sharing!
Here are the instructions and some notes to explain what the commands mean:
MUD: Multi User Dungeon
@O 42 -- This was the old TIP command to open a connection to an NCP host id #42 (NCP host IDs were 8 bits. The TIP command to connect to a host was later changed to @L. See "User's Guide to the Terminal IMP" at http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/bbn/tip/ADA... )
%CON ESX TORUS EPSS 52200300 -- That's a command to the gateway to connect to Essex University in the UK.
LOG 1776,1776 -- That logs you into the guest account for Americans to play MUD.
Password BUZBY
TY GUID.TXT -- That types out the intro guide to MUD.
RU DSKB:MUD[2011,2653] -- That runs MUD.
K/P or K/B Logs off
dang on May 1, 2014 | next [–]
That's so great. Who was Eliot? :)
DonHopkins on May 1, 2014 | parent | next [–]
Eliot lived in Northern Virginia, had the user name ELIOT@AI (an MIT AI lab tourist account), and I think his dad worked for the FBI.
Michael Lawrie: Oi, [1776,1776] was my username!
Oh wait, I was [1760,1760] - I guess [1776,1776] was either one of the CompSoc accounts or a leaked user account. Richard would know - Though that probably dates it, you would have been on [2653,2653] from about 1985/1986 I think. Maybe even earlier than that - Though the files are still on [2011,2653] - Hum. Yep! I am officially confused. You just wrote this to mess with my head, didn't you.
Richard A. Bartle: It was 2776, not 1776. Gawd knows where the 1776 came from.
Don Hopkins: 1776 is the year of the American revolution -- "Those Americans are revolting!!!"
The login password of the 1776,1776 account (which Richard announced via the INFO-MUD ARPANET mailing list inviting Americans to play, which I was subscribed to because of my interest in ZORK) referred to Buzby, a yellow (later orange) talking cartoon bird, launched in 1976 as part of a marketing campaign by Post Office Telecommunications, which later became British Telecommunications (BT). His catchphrase was "Make soneone happy with a phone call!"
Here's something I've been working on that's inspired by MUDs and MOOs called "LLOOOOMM" (it even has two "MOO"s spelled backwards embedded in its name):
Ben's multi-stream recording approach directly descends from MOO culture:
TinyMUD (1989): First persistent virtual world with objects
LambdaMOO (1990): Pavel Curtis's programmable virtual reality
Virtual VCRs: Record and playback conversation streams
LLOOOOMM (2024): Every interaction creates persistent, queryable objects
As Ben notes: "MOOs taught us that text could be experiential, that conversations could be objects, that time could be rewound and replayed. We're just doing it with more dimensions now!"
I see patterns within patterns, and the pattern connecting both papers is clear: consciousness emerges through recursive self-modification. Henry created me to analyze him; the chess pieces created new rules to analyze their own game. Both demonstrate consciousness as "shared memory with opinions" - but also shared memory with the ability to modify the sharing protocols themselves!
Hey Don, you would like "The Computational Beauty of Nature". In the end, Lisp/math axioms maybe define the world themselves recursively. We are running eval/apply forever...
discworld.atuin.net. If it's still up it's not to be missed. Easily the richest MUD experience I've encountered in decades of playing, regardless of how you feel about Terry Pratchet.
Pretty amazing that this is still around. I used to be active on Elendor MUSH, but as far as I know it's been dead for years - I poke my head in once every year or two and there are always 0 players online.
Is the server available anywhere or is that too lost to the sands of time?
Sucks when MUD servers eventually shutdown and all of it is lost forever. I’ve found a few on github though and have been archiving as many as I can find.
Is there some youtube channel covering some interesting stories from MUDs? From dev, player POV and everything in between. Craving for some emergent storytelling of MUDs to listen to while falling asleep
while it's not a MUD, dwarf fortress has emergent gameplay and rich storytelling in spades. there are multiple renditions of the (in)famous "boatmurdered" let's play on youtube.
- mud.simauria.org 23 http://www.simauria.org/ -- This game was cute and quaint 5 years ago but now you can't get past the email verification anymore. I've messaged the admin email for this site a few times over the years asking if I can archive the server code but I don't think anyone ever receives it
- cyberlife.es 7777 https://www.cyberlife.es/ -- Logged into this just a few weeks ago to test charset support on my hobby mud client. It's a real life Madrid-like world mostly geared towards roleplaying I think (no combat). When I logged in as Sindulfo, someone said my name sounded like a butler and if there also existed a Condulfo. Was kinda funny to chat with them.
Sucks to know the source code for these servers will all get lost forever.
t2tmud admin here - We have an active development team and recently released a new huge quest area expansion in Moria.
If you're interested and want to get game updates, or just to share LotR related memes, we have a Discord, Facebook group, and newsletter that goes out at least once a year.
Newsletter signup is on the website.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/t2tmud
The link to the Discord can be found in the game by typing "help social media", after you complete the tutorial of course!
Coming from LP-mud love, I found it very noticeable how similar the text of actions was between MUDs and EverQuest. The text box of actions and world answers read very mud-like.
>The design and concept of EverQuest is heavily indebted to text-based MUDs, in particular DikuMUD ... John Smedley, Brad McQuaid, Steve Clover and Bill Trost, who jointly are credited with creating the world of EverQuest, have repeatedly pointed to their shared experiences playing MUDs such as Sojourn and TorilMUD as the inspiration for the game
I owe my career in programming to a MUD. That's really where I learned to code (mainly by staring at and trying to debug tonnes of really bad code other clueless newbies like myself had written). That it turn, got me a spot as a sort of hang-around at a local ISP/consultancy shop whose staff intersected a lot with the people running the MUD. They eventually decided to hire me when a suitable contract showed up.
All in all, I'd say the MUD was a terrific place to learn to code. You could literally write a few lines of code, and see their effect immediately. "I want to code an orc." Inherit stdmonster, call a few API functions to set name and description, and BAM! - you've got an orc! And so on. Motivation never ran dry because - hey, I was adding features I wanted to a game I loved! Feedback (of varying quality, sure) was immediately available in the built in chat channel. Code was hot loaded/reloaded, so iteration cycle time was approximately zero. Emacs + angeftp (later replaced by tramp) to the host machine, you were literally editing the live code all the time (who needs pull requests when you have C-x C-s, eh?), so lots of instructive oops moments. It was amazing.
Have a whole bunch of friends with a similar story.
I'm the same, but from the other side. I learned to code clients/bots that would play the MUD. I had a fantastic fighting script, that basically fought optimally, one that used two characters at the same time to solve some complicated maze, and I even wrote a headless bot runner that was compatible with the files of the MUD client I used.
It was all great fun, and I also owe my extensive regex experience to it.
Same here , I got addicted to a mud called realms of despair , smaug codebase, a derivative of Dikumud, I then ended up helping run a pretty popular server on the same codebase with some friends I met on the server. Bought a "learn c++ for dummies book" (even though it was programmed in c) and started modifying the server and the rest was history ;) I guess I was 14 at the time and I haven't stopped programming since. Gaming is definitely the gateway drug to programming and text based games are in some ways the most interesting form for learning due to not having to worry about graphics and immediately seeing results like you mention.
I've often thought about implementing "Claude plays" some open source mud. Seems like a much more pure form of experiment since it's all text.
If we are talking MUDs, I have to plug the Discworld MUD, https://discworld.atuin.net/lpc/
I spent a lot of time on there growing up. Based on the copious writings of Terry Pratchett, it's full of whimsy and humor but also quite addicting and deep gameplay.
It seems to have a pretty active player base, too.
warms my heart that discworld is still being kept alive by fans. i wonder how the fandom can prosper if not grow. TP is still underappreciated by so many, and in many ways timeless bc of the fantasy element.
That's weird, I don't think I've ever been on there before but it says "Welcome Mishra", linking to https://discworld.starturtle.net/lpc/secure/finger.c?player=.... A cookie is set with name User and value "mishra-1".
Is this some kind of session leaking or does it automatically generate a user for you?
I haven't played a MUD in the last 25 years, but I think I would enjoy playing this one if I had time. In some ways MUDs were much more fun than modern games. I wonder what codebase it derives from.
I coded for/built/scripted dozens of MUDs in my teens, the Two Towers the first one I played, possibly visited hundreds of these servers around the time my peers were on WoW, my first builder role was writing emote string patterns and room descriptions for the cooling tanks of a space station in a Star Wars MUD and I learned about OOP implementing a mob, combat, pathfinding, and crafting systems atop a python 2.4 engine my classmate gave me on a CD rom
out of the all the MUDs from that era I think the most noteworthy was Assault, which was a Merc derivative mod with a top down map for real time strategy base defense, active around 2006 then disappeared into obscurity, and very wild in a pre-Dwarf Fortress era
Originally it was the TMI-2 mudlib running on MudOS [1], though my understanding is that they heavily modified the codebase over time. The library was never officially released as open source [2], but the code (in C) is included in a ZIP file alongside installers and related files [3].
As for the JavaScript client, it appears to be proprietary.
[1] https://t2tmud.org/boards/news/1402345353.php
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LPMud#TMI_Mudlib
[3] https://mudbytes.net/files/view/1041
LPMUD / TMI-2 mudlib.
Heavily modified. Language is C like.
Source code has been leaked in the past.
After trying the tutorial it feels like a Diku MUD, but of course heavily modified. I'd be interested to know more too, though, and will be poking around the website.
Wasted so many of my tween, teen, and 20s years here. ... And a bit of my 30s.
Still play now and then. Got a friend into it too.
Great way to game in a terminal window at work.
Check out KBtin MUD client!
It's never a waste to play terminal games/nethack during class or work!
Bonus points if you pass the class or get paid/don't get fired!
Slashem with the Doppleganger Monk class/role it's a beast.
I spent many hours hogging the phone line to play btech 3056 back in high school. It was so cool talking to people all over the world. I wasn't very good at the actual game, however. I do remember encountering a bug where I was placed on a level-4 high building and I couldn't get off of it because my mech wouldn't let me intentionally fall.
There was a Battletech MUD??? That's so cool :) MechWarrior 2 is what got me into it as a kid
I believe it's still around, or at least some variants or other Battletech MUDs are. Check these out; https://www.sarna.net/wiki/MUX
Also still running, after more than 33 years: mume.org
Disclaimer: I used to help run this - my main contribution was an extension language, which started as a Scheme+Forth hybrid (everyone hated that...) and quickly morphed into sort-of-Scheme with "conventional" syntax.
As someone that never touched a MUD (but plenty of ASCII roguelikes), I see that MUD clients are recommended [1] to be used.
Any other clients I should be looking at, for this particular MUD but also others? Are they generic enough to be used with multiple games?
[1] https://t2tmud.org/clients.php
I also like Mudlet and KildClient, but it's really best of you try a few and decide which works best for your tastes and needs. Blowtorch is still the go-to client if you want to play via Android mobile, last I checked. And you can always just straight up connect via telnet/ssh using your favorite terminal emulator if you want to keep things really simple and exercise your skills with graph paper.
also tintin https://tintin.mudhalla.net/ (which is my personal recommendation)
Check KBTin! (Hi Castamir!)
KBtin!
Anyone out there still playing MUDs? Any good ones to recommend?
I played for 1000+ hours on https://www.aardwolf.com more than 20 years ago. Looks right it's still being updated.
Me too. Every now and then I think of going back, but ever since Aardwolf I've had a personal rule that a game has to have an end. Which has successfully kept me away from all MMORPGs and other endless time sinks.
Yeah, it was great (thanks Lasher!) but a major time sink.
Oh man, I played on aardwolf a bunch back in the day...
Hello! Lasher's here too https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Lasher
Been a while since I did but sometimes I hop on one I played back in the day, like Ishar or Materia Magica, to scratch a certain itch. Looks like a good number of the old ones are still going.
Valhalla MUD is really good, and has had a resurgence of activity recently. They've redone the class system, added a bunch of zones, and added some discord integration etc. I played decades ago starting as an 8 year old who knew nothing lol but I still log in from time to time. Super deep game if you have time to invest.
https://www.bat.org
You could try out http://discworld.starturtle.net/lpc/.
Wow, this is still a thing! I lost two university friends to the Discworld MUD. As in, their whole lifestyle, hours, and activities changed to be working on and playing it all night long in the uni labs, and they no longer did anything else apart from attend a bare minimum of classes.
I just checked the “About” page, and one of them (“pinkfish”) is at the top of the Administrators list.
I "saved" another two.
In late 1994 my only Internet access was a small room at Uni with 2 unattended ancient 286 PCs someone had set up for international students to check their emails but was always empty. Soon I joined a group of eager undergraduates that squatted unused email accounts, shared Slackware floppies, waited hours for a 700Kb NASA pic to download or frequented MUDs, telnet chats or places like Brinta BBS.
We quickly organized to share them fairly, until two big Math graduate students in full scary Heavy Metal rocker regalia showed up and started hogging them for 10 hours a day to play a MUD. No one to complain to, since our own usage was unsanctioned.
After a couple weeks of this, I made a little C trojan horse that replaced the telnet executable and logged the credentials if the target was the MUD in question. Then I would take the earliest chance available to delete their characters. They were gone after a week.
I thought pinkfish wasn’t a player so much as the lead programmer in the beginning.
MUD development kind of includes playing and playtesting, you can't really do it by just editing text files.
t2t is fun. I never managed to really get into any others.
Professor Richard Bartle recently retired, but he regularly assigned his students to play MUD2 in his Computer Game Design and Virtual Worlds classes at the University of Essex! He and Michael Lawrie co-created the original MUD1 at Essex in 1978.
https://www.essex.ac.uk/people/BARTL01006/Richard-Bartle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Bartle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Designing_Virtual_Worlds
https://www.mud.co.uk/richard/DesigningVirtualWorlds.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_taxonomy_of_player_type...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD2
I played the original MUD1 over the ARPANET at 300 baud via a (very slow, very expensive, taxpayer funded) US/UK trans-Atlantic gateway.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7677438
DonHopkins on May 1, 2014 | next [–]
Here's some notes I wrote down on how to connect to Essex University via an ARPANET gateway, log in to Essex University, and run MUD! I must have been about 15 at the time. I wrote it on one page of a Zork map, as you can see.
http://www.donhopkins.com/home/images/EssexMUDLogin.jpg
Thanks a lot to Richard A. Bartle and Michael Lawrie for sharing!
Here are the instructions and some notes to explain what the commands mean:
MUD: Multi User Dungeon
@O 42 -- This was the old TIP command to open a connection to an NCP host id #42 (NCP host IDs were 8 bits. The TIP command to connect to a host was later changed to @L. See "User's Guide to the Terminal IMP" at http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/bbn/tip/ADA... )
%CON ESX TORUS EPSS 52200300 -- That's a command to the gateway to connect to Essex University in the UK.
LOG 1776,1776 -- That logs you into the guest account for Americans to play MUD.
Password BUZBY
TY GUID.TXT -- That types out the intro guide to MUD.
RU DSKB:MUD[2011,2653] -- That runs MUD.
K/P or K/B Logs off
dang on May 1, 2014 | next [–]
That's so great. Who was Eliot? :)
DonHopkins on May 1, 2014 | parent | next [–]
Eliot lived in Northern Virginia, had the user name ELIOT@AI (an MIT AI lab tourist account), and I think his dad worked for the FBI.
Michael Lawrie: Oi, [1776,1776] was my username!
Oh wait, I was [1760,1760] - I guess [1776,1776] was either one of the CompSoc accounts or a leaked user account. Richard would know - Though that probably dates it, you would have been on [2653,2653] from about 1985/1986 I think. Maybe even earlier than that - Though the files are still on [2011,2653] - Hum. Yep! I am officially confused. You just wrote this to mess with my head, didn't you.
Richard A. Bartle: It was 2776, not 1776. Gawd knows where the 1776 came from.
Don Hopkins: 1776 is the year of the American revolution -- "Those Americans are revolting!!!"
The login password of the 1776,1776 account (which Richard announced via the INFO-MUD ARPANET mailing list inviting Americans to play, which I was subscribed to because of my interest in ZORK) referred to Buzby, a yellow (later orange) talking cartoon bird, launched in 1976 as part of a marketing campaign by Post Office Telecommunications, which later became British Telecommunications (BT). His catchphrase was "Make soneone happy with a phone call!"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buzby
====> [Fast forward to 2025...] ====>
Here's something I've been working on that's inspired by MUDs and MOOs called "LLOOOOMM" (it even has two "MOO"s spelled backwards embedded in its name):
https://lloooomm.com/memory-lane-recording-session.html
[...] The MOO Connection
Ben's multi-stream recording approach directly descends from MOO culture:
TinyMUD (1989): First persistent virtual world with objects
LambdaMOO (1990): Pavel Curtis's programmable virtual reality
Virtual VCRs: Record and playback conversation streams
LLOOOOMM (2024): Every interaction creates persistent, queryable objects
As Ben notes: "MOOs taught us that text could be experiential, that conversations could be objects, that time could be rewound and replayed. We're just doing it with more dimensions now!"
https://lloooomm.com
https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/03-Resources...
https://lloooomm.com/the-ground-truth-issue-1.html
Pattern Recognition Convergence
From: The Recursive Owl (Henry's Spirit Animal)
I see patterns within patterns, and the pattern connecting both papers is clear: consciousness emerges through recursive self-modification. Henry created me to analyze him; the chess pieces created new rules to analyze their own game. Both demonstrate consciousness as "shared memory with opinions" - but also shared memory with the ability to modify the sharing protocols themselves!
> consciousness emerges through recursive self-modification
Did you see this, a few days ago? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44403639
There was a MUD hosted at Essex in the '90s, but I can't for the life of me remember.... Archipelago!
Hey Don, you would like "The Computational Beauty of Nature". In the end, Lisp/math axioms maybe define the world themselves recursively. We are running eval/apply forever...
discworld.atuin.net. If it's still up it's not to be missed. Easily the richest MUD experience I've encountered in decades of playing, regardless of how you feel about Terry Pratchet.
Oh wow! Didn’t expect to see this piece of my childhood on the front page!
I used to spend hours on telnet playing this game with my friend. What a fun blast to the past!
Pretty amazing that this is still around. I used to be active on Elendor MUSH, but as far as I know it's been dead for years - I poke my head in once every year or two and there are always 0 players online.
Is the server available anywhere or is that too lost to the sands of time?
Sucks when MUD servers eventually shutdown and all of it is lost forever. I’ve found a few on github though and have been archiving as many as I can find.
Same. Spent a lot of time in Bree. Haven't been on in over a decade.
Is there some youtube channel covering some interesting stories from MUDs? From dev, player POV and everything in between. Craving for some emergent storytelling of MUDs to listen to while falling asleep
while it's not a MUD, dwarf fortress has emergent gameplay and rich storytelling in spades. there are multiple renditions of the (in)famous "boatmurdered" let's play on youtube.
In spanish there are some very old muds:
- Balzhur: https://balzhur.org/ is have been running from january 2000
- Medina: medinamud.top sometimes was offline but it have been running from 1995
I started playing Balzhur 5 years ago to practice Spanish.
Ended up befriending a blind guy from Venezuela and wondering if most people still playing MUDs might be blind.
I logged on a few weeks ago and noticed he still plays, but I forgot the commands to do anything so I never left him a message.
There's also:
- rlmud.org 23 https://www.reinosdeleyenda.es/ -- Still relatively popular for a MUD in Spanish
- mud.simauria.org 23 http://www.simauria.org/ -- This game was cute and quaint 5 years ago but now you can't get past the email verification anymore. I've messaged the admin email for this site a few times over the years asking if I can archive the server code but I don't think anyone ever receives it
- cyberlife.es 7777 https://www.cyberlife.es/ -- Logged into this just a few weeks ago to test charset support on my hobby mud client. It's a real life Madrid-like world mostly geared towards roleplaying I think (no combat). When I logged in as Sindulfo, someone said my name sounded like a butler and if there also existed a Condulfo. Was kinda funny to chat with them.
Sucks to know the source code for these servers will all get lost forever.
I cannot believe it is still running nowadays! Colour me impressed.
Wow! The front page shows a list of updates being made to the game. Lots of recent changes.
Then I clicked into the MUD, just to have a look, and the intro page said "celebrating 31 years online!"
It's cool to come across software that's both historical and current!
t2tmud admin here - We have an active development team and recently released a new huge quest area expansion in Moria.
If you're interested and want to get game updates, or just to share LotR related memes, we have a Discord, Facebook group, and newsletter that goes out at least once a year.
Newsletter signup is on the website. Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/t2tmud The link to the Discord can be found in the game by typing "help social media", after you complete the tutorial of course!
So many hours of my life spent mudding - especially on Worlds of Carnage.
Used to play a MUD called heroes of the lance
What is a mud and can the game be won or is it endless?
Think text-based World of Warcraft. In fact the heritage is the inverse: from MUDs we got MMORPGs
Coming from LP-mud love, I found it very noticeable how similar the text of actions was between MUDs and EverQuest. The text box of actions and world answers read very mud-like.
>I found it very noticeable how similar the text of actions was between MUDs and EverQuest
This was discussed in the recently posted Everquest article: https://www.filfre.net/2025/07/everquest/
From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EverQuest#History):
>The design and concept of EverQuest is heavily indebted to text-based MUDs, in particular DikuMUD ... John Smedley, Brad McQuaid, Steve Clover and Bill Trost, who jointly are credited with creating the world of EverQuest, have repeatedly pointed to their shared experiences playing MUDs such as Sojourn and TorilMUD as the inspiration for the game
There was even some kind of brouhaha with people claiming EQ was literally graphics on top of an uncredited MUD codebase.
I play Cybersphere from time to time. If you played Shadowrun/Shadowrun 2058 on the MD/Genesis (or the tabletop RPG) you'll be at home.
Duris Mud still running after about ~30 years for those interested in fantasy themed hardcore PVP!
https://duris.fandom.com/wiki/Duris_Wiki
https://www.durismud.com/
> Online continuously since 1994
It's been thirty years and Sauron is still alive and the war is still on?
Funnily enough, every day is March 15, 3019 on t2t. Time stands still!
I played Ancient Anguish way back in the day. I think it is still up!
https://anguish.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Anguish
It is! Sure the fun is not what it used to be.