MUD/MUCK/MOO
Did anyone play MUDs? You know, connect over telnet and advennture around in a Multi-User-Dungeon? I remember some of those pretty fondly, although I never got any characters all the way maxed out. What were some of your favorites?
2025-03-29 · 1 year ago · 👍 Unguided
9 Comments ↓
I've tried at least 2 or 3 times to "get into" MUDs, particularly with the discworld MUD, which I thought I would enjoy...
But I just don't get it, I guess. I don't play any video games, either (not after super Mario brothers 3, I think), so maybe it's just me. I just don't know what I'm supposed to do, and lose interest pretty quickly.
So, not a lot of advice from me, apart from "try the discworld one", if you happen to like the books...
💀 requiem · 2025-03-29 at 19:14:
https://tilde.institute still runs quite a few
🚀 RubyMaelstrom · 2025-03-29 at 20:40:
I play MUDs, on and off! BatMUD has a client on Steam that's pretty interesting, implementing some automapping and additional visualization to the MUD formula. You can also just connect with telnet like a normal human being.
Telehack is a pretty cool MUD experience, something very different from the sword-and-sorcery formula. Hacking the interwebs with your code while other players interact in the same hackersphere. It also has the entirety of Zork, Adventure, and Rogue playable in-world.
Speaking of different, Flexible Survival is a MUD for weirdos and perverts, but I've also probably played more of it than any other MUD in the past decade or so. Worth checking out...
🚀 mk270 · 2025-03-30 at 19:02:
I briefly ran a MUD in the 1990s. My main claim to fame in the MUDding world was that I put together "The MUD Tree" and a peer-reviewed article "A Classification of MUDs". These documents tracked the evolution of MUD server codebases from the 1970s to the 1990s, and copies can be tracked down today.
Looking back, I find it interesting that MUDs attracted some elite talent that went on to be involved in online civil liberties and computer security, e.g., Alan Cox, Brad Templeton, Marcus Ranum, Alec Muffet, etc.
🚀 mk270 · 2025-03-30 at 19:02:
The underlying tech was pretty terrible: almost all were written in C for UNIX, and mostly hosted on UNIX rather than Linux systems until the mid-1990s. We didn't have the benefit of RDBMSes, sqlite, any kind of library for non-blocking event-driven I/O, etc. No-one managed to embed a mainstream scripting language into a MUD server (e.g., Tcl, Perl or Python, in descending order of embeddability). There were instead bespoke languages like LPC and U (a Forth). So a lot of the implementation turned on parsing weird MUD-specific file formats.
💎 pista · 2025-03-31 at 14:23:
I was a big fan of LORD back in the dial-up days.
There was a Web implementation a while ago called Legend of the Green Dragon that seems to have gone offline. But in its place is Legend of the Red Dragon, which seems to run actual LORD!
Requires a very modern Web browser to play and unfortunately I don't think you can telnet in. But it is there.
https://legendreddragon.net
☕️ Morgan · 2025-04-01 at 17:12:
I used to play Imperian ... to be good at PvP combat you had to code, and I do mean code, a "healing system" that would figure out from the text what ailments you had and what commands to issue to heal efficiently. Mine was in perl with an SQL database. Good times.
🌲 Half_Elf_Monk [OP] · 2025-04-02 at 15:38:
Cool to hear this, thanks. I remember enjoying a few... I didn't really enjoy any of the PvP , but that's probably because I was never any good at it. I loved the adventure/rpg aspects of it though... Some of them felt like the bones of a ttrpg. I will say that the *need* for scripting and programming languages seemed to suck some of the fun out of it... I'm fine copy/pasting directions to get from TownA to TownB, but if I have to script a chatbot to fight for me... I might as well play somethign else.
🌲 Half_Elf_Monk [OP] · 2025-04-02 at 15:40:
It occurs to me that advances in LLM tech, when combined the right way with MUD architecture, would really revitalize the genre. I don't mean prompts that tell the bot to "tell a story with the user, but a bot that could generate plot/quest/mobs/loot on the fly to tell a story. That'd be some Ender's Game grade gaming, and the MUD legacy deserves and upgrade.