Icesus - Our progress in April and May
Hi, Belannaer here. I'm one of the developers of Icesus (https://icesus.org), a Finnish LPMud, running for 31 years. I'm here to bring you some news of what we have been working in last month or so.
Our big focus has been modernizing the MUD and the tools around it to improve the user experience for new and old players.
Player experience improvements expanded
Our MUD currently has 16 distinct main guilds (basically classes), 8 culture guilds, 13 open guilds, 14 profession guilds and 17 secondary guilds (and all their sub guilds). In the past these were much harder to join but we've working hard to make, especially the main guilds, easier to find and join for new players. The newly expanded quickstart will also give you a good race and background choices and guides you towards one of these guilds. We also have gone through our newbie help files and help files in general and improved them to more modern and understandable form.
We heavily improved our support of newer and more popular clients and have included official packages for Mudlet (https://icesus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=10665) and Blightmud (https://icesus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=10667). Our own webclient has been upgraded as well and the layout has been made better and nicer. For more crafty mudders we have also improved our support for GMCP related things so you can customize your experience to your liking.
Saga Legends
One big new system we introduced in past month is the new Sagas system (https://icesus.org/legends/). These keep the record of player activities in 6 different categories for each in game year (a bit less than real month). You can see and follow how different players are performing in these activities and also how they are competing with each other for the top spot of the legend on the Sagas. Once a year ends these legends are recorded permanently into our past legends and a new cycle begins. This gives new and old players something constant to work for during each cycle of a saga and requirements for the next saga may not be similar to the previous one.
World Changes
Summer is starting here and leaves and flowers are popping everywhere so we decided to bring more colour to the lives of players as well. For 3 decades we supported 16 distinct colours and now we have upped that to fifty (with option to add more up to 255). These colour were immediately put into place throughout the game and to colorize our brand new world map with more vibrant options.
Talking about the new world map you can see our fantastic new maps here: https://www.icesus.org/maps/
Our map is made up of 1600 x 1200 ascii characters. Each of these characters represents a single room in our "outworld". For example "f" for forest terrain type and so on. Each of these terrain tiles have many specific things to them such as travel costs, weather, plant and animal life and a lot more, which makes adventures through the wilderness an experience on it's own. Naturally you can do many activities in the nature as well like fishing and hunting to name few. Actual areas and cities are connected to these outworld tiles.
We used to use mainly the 800 x 600 middle portion of the map due to that being max size of our really old map. Now I vastly increased the size of our little valley, especially, from the edges and introduced a lot of new interesting land formations to the map and for players to run around. Some of the highlights are the big volcanic valley in the west side of the map, which also introduces totally new ashlands terrain, the big water area with lakes in the southeast and the big glacier areas areas around the edges of the valley. All of these have plans for future content to be added as well.
World changes don't stop there though as we also overhauled our temperature and weather system which now changes depending on time of day, season and so on. This dynamically affects the landscape as rivers and lakes freeze and thaw, snow falls and covers the land and other similar effects happen through out the land with temperature changes. Distance from the volcanoes also plays a big part in the temperature calculations which keep the main areas of it habitable and unfrozen.
And what would be the world changes be if we also didn't touch the fauna? We revamped all of our outworld animals to be up to more modern standard (many of them were _ancient_) and now numerous fantastic animals prance around the valley, with more to come in the future. We also made the temperature and season affect the animals as well and for example a bunny in a frozen area might have a totally different, more valuable, skin type for leathercrafting compared to its beach-body-ready-summer bunny cousin. Some of these skins might even have magic imbued to them that will carry over to the leathercrafted items. Also some new fish has been sighted by our fishers!
New content and big changes
We also did a little bit more! We introduced a new culture guilds called Wanderers that focuses on travelling and exploring the valley (great with all the new world changes). All our guilds are now also much less restricting on joining requirements so you can combine your guilds, races and many other things in brand new ways.
In our quest to bring the game to 2026 standard we are going through older guilds and reworking them, especially improving the quality of life features and getting rid of some old weirdness from the last 3 decades of work. First of these have been now done with the rework of our psionicists guild. Both the caster and melee version have gotten a brand new coat of paint and insanity.
There are also numerous smaller and bigger changes that I left out from this feature length post, we've been busy sorry! If you have any questions we would love to answer them in detail, whether it's about the game as player or technical features or anything else. Feel free to pop a question here or come say hi in-game at https://icesus.org.