u/the_andruid

A warm thank you to Aelyn for taking the time to share her work on Erion, which just recently celebrated its 21st anniversary!

Some of the topics covered:

• How Aelyn codes the game without the use of her hands.
• The sheer amount of content available in Erion, but more importantly:
• Some of the quality-of-life and accessibility features that set it apart.
• Aelyn's advice for starting and managing a MUD project.
• What's new as of the past couple of months, plus what's coming.

Link to the article:

https://writing-games.org/erion-mud/

It's finally done! The results from the survey have been published here:

https://writing-games.org/2026-state-of-the-niche-report/

Thanks for everyone's patience while I worked through the analysis and write-up - most of it probably won't be too surprising, but hopefully at least some of it is interesting.

It's longer than anticipated, too, so for the high-level points, I recommend skimming the table of contents.

Oh, and some tools and codebases got multiple positive mentions in the free-text responses - you'll find them listed in the "Shout-outs and thanks" section toward the end. =)

With help from some folks in the community, I'm running a short, anonymous survey on where the niche is at -- what people are excited about, what's worrying them, where they see themselves a year from now.

Anyone involved in the hobby is welcome, whether you've been here a day or decades. Takes about 1-3 minutes:

https://surveys.writing-games.org/state-of-the-niche-2026-8nXcSn

Open through May 24. Results will be shared after it closes.