Building a MUD engine is quite an endeavour in itself. Let alone the game! A good way to test your skills in networking, parsing, databases, and data structures.
I’ve been chipping away at one on my stream using Haskell. Experimenting with Lua integration, parsing, networking, STM and concurrency… currently hacking on Entity Component Systems and unboxed vectors and all kinds of stuff.
Thing is you can start small. Start with a chat server. Add character registration. Add a mob. Add some commands to interact with the mob. Just keep adding things on.
There’s a community for mud coders too. There are dozens of us.
"Show me your [code] and conceal your [data structures], and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your [data structures], and I won’t usually need your [code]; it’ll be obvious."
If you would share your data structures for your MUD?
Between this and the previous MUD post about LLM MUDs I'd love to see a comeback.
A few months ago I tried out my old (1999-2004) hang, wocmud.org
Some of the quests were still sometimes broken. auto attacking mobs were still unfairly strong. But, there were a couple people more than willing to help me get my gear back from my corpse. They helped me remember the areas, quests, syntax, etc that I had BURNED into my memory when I was 14. We chatted and got caught up in the 20 years of updates. Oh, and I didn't get banned for being out-of-character. overall a 10/10 nostalgic experience
I started working on my own with Evennia and claude. I was hoping to hook up an LLM for MOBs but had to put it down when life got busy again.
I'm sure you mean wotmud.org, and I always look for someone to mention this one in MUD threads, but rarely see it.
Man I was hooked on that game in high school. Joined the Lion Wardens, multiple high level characters, knew the zones. Nothing has come close since then.
That feeling of leveling in a safe zone when your screen fills with red names of opposing faction characters and you just get deleted and lose all your gear and a level... so good.
Ah! Well, enjoying a MUD is still a great shared experience haha. Nothing like them since. I still gravitate to punishing games with obscure mechanics and steep learning curves, and I imagine I'm still chasing that MUD high.
I think what made them special was that they were populated by others that put in that effort, and so the community felt invested. And you'd see the same names every time you logged on cause there was a single server, and reputation mattered. Ah man, what a time of life haha.
I learned to touch-type by accident as a kid playing MUDs—no time to look at your hands while you’re under attack! I made friends, discovered things about myself, and even got brought on to start writing room descriptions. Totally formative for me in so many ways.
I logged back on a year or two ago, now in my late thirties, and the sense of community and a critical mass of others who were invested in the game and eager to have me join just wasn’t there. It’s a shame because I agree MUDs have so much unique value to offer. Maybe it’s too much to hope for their return to former glory but I hope at least some flavor of them can rise again as a new form of mostly text oriented multiplayer game.
I had been working on it for a couple years, using it myself. I finally released it recently. A number of users are contributing feature requests, testing, etc on the discord as well.
I miss MUDs. My old MUD went through a rename, a fork, and what have you --- but it's limping on, though with few playing it. The cost of hosting these things are so cheap today that you can just let it sit and mind its own business.
Back in the 90s you needed a permanent internet connection (rare!) and fast enough to handle all the usually uncompressed text, so it had to be a - shocker - T1 or better. Then you needed a server.
My old MUD has a discord; turns out a lot of the people I knew 25 years ago were there and remembered the my nick if not a little about myself back then. That was a fun nostalgia trip.
MUDs will eventually see a resurgence, I think. Mobiles with little language models to give flavour text and quests, plus a little tool calling language behind it to make it happen? I can see it working; in fact, I might just myself...
Yeah but my idea was more about mobiles handing out quests or answering simple questions maybe about what they do. the dungeon gpt thing was a bit more organic.
I learned to code on an LP MUD back in the late 90s. It was a fun experience.
I did all my work in the MUD interface using ED. I didn't realize other people wrote their code offline and sh'd in to upload it. I got very good at writing and editing code on the command line.
Man, I hadn't made the connection between my historical MUD experience (shout out Dark and Shattered Lands!) and my relative comfort in TUIs despite my somewhat non-technical background. My son is turning 7 this year and I'd love to get him into something like DSL....it was such a valuable experience for me across a variety of aspects -- obviously reading/typing certainly, but also strategy & problem solving, math, imagination, empathy/social interaction....What an incredible gift it was to have grown up in a time when graphics were worse and our brains weren't completely hacked yet.
MUDs are really cool, but for anyone looking for a narrative fantasy experience, my first recommendation is going to be The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind, but more specifically the mod scene around that game as well as the OpenMW replacement game engine.
Bethesda’s game was a gem that was full of rich lore, plenty of readying, and very flexible RPG systems (although being a magical glass cannon does tend to be the best build). However, it was also a relatively flawed game (which Bethesda game isn’t?) that the community has expanded and fixed into a juggernaut.
I recommend picking up a mod pack from modding-openmw.com and checking it out. Tamriel Rebuilt is particularly impressive: fans have added a massive bank of new maps, quests, etc.
Something cool about the OpenMW engine is that it supports scripting that exceeds the original engine so that new quests are more rich and dynamic than original ones in the game. They are even starting to expand into custom spell effects (as the original game had a rigid list of spell effects that wasn’t malleable).
My favourite game, and I agree that the new content added by the Tamriel Rebuilt is incredible. It is lacking in multiplayer which I expect is a large part of what makes MUDs special. TES3MP is an attempt at multiplayer Morrowind, and claims to be playable, though I haven't tried it so not sure how smooth it is or what the community is like. https://tes3mp.com/
Question to you all, muds tends to have a unix style interface, has anyone done a replacement for this uiux that fits … the class of 2019 first year computer science student that doesn’t understand files and needs a different uiux.
I'm not sure I understand correctly, muds are text based but not file based. But there are several mud clients available with different features. Most include an auto mapper for example, you can connect through different specialized protocols to your favorite mud server.
If a computer science student doesn’t understand files, that should be one of the things they are taught. What’s the point of being a student if it isn’t to learn?
My college roommate was really big into MUDs, one particular one anyway. He wasn’t a super techy person, it was pretty much the only thing he did on his computer.
I am not sure I understand your question- MUDs have a text interface, somewhat similar to a command line. It wouldn't be a proper MUD if it had a graphical interface- there are plenty of games out there that do this like Baldurs Gate. The files part of your comment I don't understand either.
I played around a bunch on the discworld MUD around thirty years back, for a few years. I’m not sure I even remember my username I had. I know I don’t remember the password. I should pop in sometime.
I do think MUD's really have a lot of opportunity to be interesting/fun buildable worlds. That they can be delightful and instructive. Especially with LLMs, the sitting there hand crafting zone after zone after zone forever and ever: that part can take more of a backseat (even though it's also some of the best part).
I once made a web-based MUD game. The response in Korea was surprisingly low. I concluded that MUD games weren't popular in my country, and the people who actually played them were mostly in their 40s and 50s, while general consumers preferred GUI.
These days, I sometimes think about whether I could make a MUD game that interacts with AI, but I wonder if it would appeal to a generation that has no memory of MUD games
But now comes the real question - will the MUDs be programmed in something sane? The last MUD/MUCK I was on was done in RPN-style code. That was a headache to code various plugins and options.
The worst part of that is, at least the only MUD/MUCK engine I ever glanced at the source code for; those primitives were actually still script calls to blocks of C functions.
Modern MUDs and similar will just include a mature script language, like LUA and let that directly access the background resources from within some sandbox. No point in re-inventing the wheel with a custom scripting language. For any legacy data (E.G. running some old world on a new system) it'd probably make more sense to write a transpiler / converter anyway.
One part of MUD history that rarely gets told in English: the Chinese game industry basically started there. In the mid 90s Chinese students overseas ran wuxia MUDs like Xiakexing (侠客行, 1995), all text, built on the LPMud family.
Wuxia fit text games perfectly because every player already had the whole world in their head from Jin Yong novels, so zero graphics needed. A lot of the people who built the first Chinese online games came out of those communities.
King of Kings (万王之王, 1999), usually counted as the first Chinese graphical MMORPG, was a Taiwanese MUD team putting a graphical client on their existing game.
It's hard to find good info on Chinese netizen culture in English in general. I loved chinaSMACK back in the day, but haven't found a good replacement. Do you know of any blogs or anything about this?
WoW and Runescape exist. But MUDs exist too, and text and graphics have different possibilities. So it makes sense to have some of both in this rich world.
Indeed, text and graphics are different styles and there are pro's and con's to either one. Similar to how some people enjoy ps1 style games over "modern graphics". One of the major pro's for text based games is accessibility.
It's in a way comparable to the difference between a novel and a movie or a novel and a comic/manga.
Really before the term MMO was coined these type of games where called "graphical MUDs"
Also Runescape started as "DeviousMUD".
Neverwinter, Runescape, Tibia, Ultima online, Everquest and more all formed from MUD lineage.
Building a MUD engine is quite an endeavour in itself. Let alone the game! A good way to test your skills in networking, parsing, databases, and data structures.
I’ve been chipping away at one on my stream using Haskell. Experimenting with Lua integration, parsing, networking, STM and concurrency… currently hacking on Entity Component Systems and unboxed vectors and all kinds of stuff.
Thing is you can start small. Start with a chat server. Add character registration. Add a mob. Add some commands to interact with the mob. Just keep adding things on.
There’s a community for mud coders too. There are dozens of us.
https://mudcoders.com/
I’m a huge fan of UO which MUDs inspired.
Curious if in the spirit of
"Show me your [code] and conceal your [data structures], and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your [data structures], and I won’t usually need your [code]; it’ll be obvious."
If you would share your data structures for your MUD?
In particular, Raph Koster (aka Designer Dragon) was heavily involved with LegendMud [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LegendMUD
Between this and the previous MUD post about LLM MUDs I'd love to see a comeback.
A few months ago I tried out my old (1999-2004) hang, wocmud.org
Some of the quests were still sometimes broken. auto attacking mobs were still unfairly strong. But, there were a couple people more than willing to help me get my gear back from my corpse. They helped me remember the areas, quests, syntax, etc that I had BURNED into my memory when I was 14. We chatted and got caught up in the 20 years of updates. Oh, and I didn't get banned for being out-of-character. overall a 10/10 nostalgic experience
I started working on my own with Evennia and claude. I was hoping to hook up an LLM for MOBs but had to put it down when life got busy again.
I'm sure you mean wotmud.org, and I always look for someone to mention this one in MUD threads, but rarely see it.
Man I was hooked on that game in high school. Joined the Lion Wardens, multiple high level characters, knew the zones. Nothing has come close since then.
That feeling of leveling in a safe zone when your screen fills with red names of opposing faction characters and you just get deleted and lose all your gear and a level... so good.
nope! wocmud, worlds of carnage. `telnet wocmud.org 4000` or https://www.wocmud.org/welcome.php
I think wocmud is one of the smaller muds out there but for whatever reason my brother and I were obsessed!
I learned about Wheel of Time much later in life so I missed out on WoTMUD
Ah! Well, enjoying a MUD is still a great shared experience haha. Nothing like them since. I still gravitate to punishing games with obscure mechanics and steep learning curves, and I imagine I'm still chasing that MUD high.
I think what made them special was that they were populated by others that put in that effort, and so the community felt invested. And you'd see the same names every time you logged on cause there was a single server, and reputation mattered. Ah man, what a time of life haha.
I learned to touch-type by accident as a kid playing MUDs—no time to look at your hands while you’re under attack! I made friends, discovered things about myself, and even got brought on to start writing room descriptions. Totally formative for me in so many ways.
I logged back on a year or two ago, now in my late thirties, and the sense of community and a critical mass of others who were invested in the game and eager to have me join just wasn’t there. It’s a shame because I agree MUDs have so much unique value to offer. Maybe it’s too much to hope for their return to former glory but I hope at least some flavor of them can rise again as a new form of mostly text oriented multiplayer game.
If anyone is interested, I launched a new mud client in 2026:
https://runemud.com
I had been working on it for a couple years, using it myself. I finally released it recently. A number of users are contributing feature requests, testing, etc on the discord as well.
People start talking to llms all day, suddenly text based games are interesting again...
I miss MUDs. My old MUD went through a rename, a fork, and what have you --- but it's limping on, though with few playing it. The cost of hosting these things are so cheap today that you can just let it sit and mind its own business.
Back in the 90s you needed a permanent internet connection (rare!) and fast enough to handle all the usually uncompressed text, so it had to be a - shocker - T1 or better. Then you needed a server.
My old MUD has a discord; turns out a lot of the people I knew 25 years ago were there and remembered the my nick if not a little about myself back then. That was a fun nostalgia trip.
MUDs will eventually see a resurgence, I think. Mobiles with little language models to give flavour text and quests, plus a little tool calling language behind it to make it happen? I can see it working; in fact, I might just myself...
I think one of the very first public demos for GPT was a text adventure game?
Yeah but my idea was more about mobiles handing out quests or answering simple questions maybe about what they do. the dungeon gpt thing was a bit more organic.
I learned to code on an LP MUD back in the late 90s. It was a fun experience.
I did all my work in the MUD interface using ED. I didn't realize other people wrote their code offline and sh'd in to upload it. I got very good at writing and editing code on the command line.
Man, I hadn't made the connection between my historical MUD experience (shout out Dark and Shattered Lands!) and my relative comfort in TUIs despite my somewhat non-technical background. My son is turning 7 this year and I'd love to get him into something like DSL....it was such a valuable experience for me across a variety of aspects -- obviously reading/typing certainly, but also strategy & problem solving, math, imagination, empathy/social interaction....What an incredible gift it was to have grown up in a time when graphics were worse and our brains weren't completely hacked yet.
Takes me back to the old days, using telnet to play The Marches on the UCSD computers from my apartment dial-up. Any of the other peerage around here?
MUDs are really cool, but for anyone looking for a narrative fantasy experience, my first recommendation is going to be The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind, but more specifically the mod scene around that game as well as the OpenMW replacement game engine.
Bethesda’s game was a gem that was full of rich lore, plenty of readying, and very flexible RPG systems (although being a magical glass cannon does tend to be the best build). However, it was also a relatively flawed game (which Bethesda game isn’t?) that the community has expanded and fixed into a juggernaut.
I recommend picking up a mod pack from modding-openmw.com and checking it out. Tamriel Rebuilt is particularly impressive: fans have added a massive bank of new maps, quests, etc.
Something cool about the OpenMW engine is that it supports scripting that exceeds the original engine so that new quests are more rich and dynamic than original ones in the game. They are even starting to expand into custom spell effects (as the original game had a rigid list of spell effects that wasn’t malleable).
My favourite game, and I agree that the new content added by the Tamriel Rebuilt is incredible. It is lacking in multiplayer which I expect is a large part of what makes MUDs special. TES3MP is an attempt at multiplayer Morrowind, and claims to be playable, though I haven't tried it so not sure how smooth it is or what the community is like. https://tes3mp.com/
Question to you all, muds tends to have a unix style interface, has anyone done a replacement for this uiux that fits … the class of 2019 first year computer science student that doesn’t understand files and needs a different uiux.
I'm not sure I understand correctly, muds are text based but not file based. But there are several mud clients available with different features. Most include an auto mapper for example, you can connect through different specialized protocols to your favorite mud server.
Example clients: Mudlet, zMUD, kMUD, mushclient
If a computer science student doesn’t understand files, that should be one of the things they are taught. What’s the point of being a student if it isn’t to learn?
My college roommate was really big into MUDs, one particular one anyway. He wasn’t a super techy person, it was pretty much the only thing he did on his computer.
I am not sure I understand your question- MUDs have a text interface, somewhat similar to a command line. It wouldn't be a proper MUD if it had a graphical interface- there are plenty of games out there that do this like Baldurs Gate. The files part of your comment I don't understand either.
Simply untrue.
There have been hundreds of MUD clients and many of them were not purely text based at all. Many had images and map screens built in.
I played around a bunch on the discworld MUD around thirty years back, for a few years. I’m not sure I even remember my username I had. I know I don’t remember the password. I should pop in sometime.
Personally I think MUDs are a great platform for the agent/human coordination things that everyone's trying to build.
> You can read more about my new MUD engine project, Pinwheel, here on my blog.
Sadly I can't, both links redirect to the same page :P
I three MUDs in one as a channel mode for my IRCD the other month: https://github.com/float64co/psyrcd/blob/master/plugins/mud....
Yes! Check out wafertown.com :)
I do think MUD's really have a lot of opportunity to be interesting/fun buildable worlds. That they can be delightful and instructive. Especially with LLMs, the sitting there hand crafting zone after zone after zone forever and ever: that part can take more of a backseat (even though it's also some of the best part).
There's a MUD inside it, but the late.sh ssh-able bbs with it's door games that got submitted 2 days ago is incredible. It's such a wonderful little text world there. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49001127 https://late.sh/
I'd be keen for a MUD accessed via WhatsApp.
I once made a web-based MUD game. The response in Korea was surprisingly low. I concluded that MUD games weren't popular in my country, and the people who actually played them were mostly in their 40s and 50s, while general consumers preferred GUI.
These days, I sometimes think about whether I could make a MUD game that interacts with AI, but I wonder if it would appeal to a generation that has no memory of MUD games
But now comes the real question - will the MUDs be programmed in something sane? The last MUD/MUCK I was on was done in RPN-style code. That was a headache to code various plugins and options.
The worst part of that is, at least the only MUD/MUCK engine I ever glanced at the source code for; those primitives were actually still script calls to blocks of C functions.
Modern MUDs and similar will just include a mature script language, like LUA and let that directly access the background resources from within some sandbox. No point in re-inventing the wheel with a custom scripting language. For any legacy data (E.G. running some old world on a new system) it'd probably make more sense to write a transpiler / converter anyway.
One part of MUD history that rarely gets told in English: the Chinese game industry basically started there. In the mid 90s Chinese students overseas ran wuxia MUDs like Xiakexing (侠客行, 1995), all text, built on the LPMud family.
Wuxia fit text games perfectly because every player already had the whole world in their head from Jin Yong novels, so zero graphics needed. A lot of the people who built the first Chinese online games came out of those communities.
King of Kings (万王之王, 1999), usually counted as the first Chinese graphical MMORPG, was a Taiwanese MUD team putting a graphical client on their existing game.
It's hard to find good info on Chinese netizen culture in English in general. I loved chinaSMACK back in the day, but haven't found a good replacement. Do you know of any blogs or anything about this?
Can't you have multiple users in a dungeon in non text based games? See WoW and RuneScape.
Roguelikes have evolved from being text based long ago, so I don't see why MUDs have to be.
Because then it would be a different thing?
WoW and Runescape exist. But MUDs exist too, and text and graphics have different possibilities. So it makes sense to have some of both in this rich world.
Indeed, text and graphics are different styles and there are pro's and con's to either one. Similar to how some people enjoy ps1 style games over "modern graphics". One of the major pro's for text based games is accessibility.
It's in a way comparable to the difference between a novel and a movie or a novel and a comic/manga.
Really before the term MMO was coined these type of games where called "graphical MUDs"
Also Runescape started as "DeviousMUD".
Neverwinter, Runescape, Tibia, Ultima online, Everquest and more all formed from MUD lineage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Graphical_MUDs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_massively_multiplay...
So you say, but I notice you made a text post and not a reaction vlog.
The greatest tragedy is I can only upvote this once.
You seem to be suffering from the misconception that text-only is a _bad_ thing.
Roguelikes use text as symbols, rather than being primarily literary. This comparison doesn’t make sense
What’s the point of books? Can’t you just watch a movie?