I got tired of watching MUD communities lose worlds they loved. So I spent two years building infrastructure to make sure they dont have to.
We have all seen it. Someone posts "our MUD is shutting down after 15 years." The replies fill up with people saying goodbye to places they grew up in. Two years later someone else posts looking for the old codebase.
Usually its the same story. One person was holding it together, life happened, the server went dark.
I played one of those MUDs for 15 years. I watched it die. And then I started thinking about why this keeps happening, and whether its actually fixable.
Most MUD codebases are one person deep. The game lives on a server that person pays for, running code only they understand. When they burn out or move on, everything goes with them. The community can't save it because they cant run it. The content cant survive because its baked into a custom codebase no one else knows.
Ive spent the last two years building a different kind of foundation. Its called Tapestry.
The core idea is to separate the engine from the world. The engine is shared infrastructure, maintained and deployable anywhere. The world is content packs. YAML files, portable, publishable to a registry, installable anywhere. A room is 10 lines of YAML. A custom command is a JS function. If you built areas for ROM or Diku, you already know most of it.
When the person running a Tapestry server moves on, someone else can pick up the packs and keep running them. The world doesnt have to die with the server.
Theres a public registry at tapestryengine.com. Packs are versioned, distributable, community owned. Someone builds a crafting system, a reputation system, a skill tree, they publish it and anyone can use it.
The engine already ships combat, skills and spells, equipment, movement, leveling, quests, NPC behaviors, telemetry and all the other stuff a MUD needs to run.
Accessibility is a first class citizen. The web client has full screen reader support and keyboard shortcuts for everything. Blind and low vision players shouldn't need workarounds to play text games.
The demo is Legends Forgotten, my attempt to bring back the MUD I played for 15 years. Same name, same setting, same universe. Its a Wheel of Time world built entirely from Tapestry packs. Emonds Field, road to Tar Valon, quests, character progression. If you were there the first time, lets build it back together.
Demo: lf.tapestryengine.com (WIP)
Telnet: lf.tapestryengine.com 4000
GitHub: github.com/tapestry-mud/tapestry
About the engine: tapestryengine.com
Heres the ask. The engine is solid but its one persons work. I have about 10,000 ideas for where this goes and one pair of hands.
I need area builders. I need people who remember what made their old MUD feel like something. I need people who want to build systems in JavaScript and publish them for everyone to use. I need people who just want to mess around with YAML and see what they can build.
If you're blind or low vision and want to help test the client, I would love real feedback. I thought about accessibility the whole way through building this.
The goal isnt to build my MUD. The goal is to build infrastructure that lets a hundred people build their MUDs and keep them running for the next generation of players who will learn to code trying to hack on them.