r/MUD

Not necessarily looking for a MUD but rather people to play a fun MUD with. I'm looking to join up with another player or a group of players. I want to join in on whatever goals/storylines they have going on in their favorite MUDs.

RP is preferred but I could do with a non RP mud if it has immersive events and goals to strive for.

Hello everyone,

It has been another busy month in NukeFire, with new areas, new quality-of-life systems, more gear hunting tools, more combat cleanup, and a lot more of the usual post-apocalyptic nonsense waiting to kill someone who just got a bit too comfy.

Main Highlight: Foundlist and DBID

Players can now use foundlist in approved zones to see which loadable objects from that zone have already been discovered, along with how many still remain unfound.

The command keys directly off the zone you are standing in, so you can check your discovery progress while you are actually out exploring.

Foundlist also uses the same general compare-style markers players already know from upgrade and compare. That means discovered items can give a quick visual hint about whether they may be an upgrade, a sidegrade, a downgrade, or something your character probably cannot use.

After checking foundlist, players can take a listed vnum and use dbid to pull up the stored identify information for that item without needing to have the object in their inventory.

For a game with as many zones, objects, hidden drops, bosses, and progression paths as NukeFire has now, this is a pretty big quality-of-life step. It gives players a better way to track what they have found, what they are still missing, and whether a zone may still be worth digging through.

More zones are being added to foundlist support over time.

New and Updated Areas

The Drowned Harbor of Saint Orison opened as a new 400-room lower-level zone chain. It sits somewhere between Ashen March and The Red Mile in danger and progression, with sunken docks, dead crews, rotting shipyards, grave-salted uplands, corpse-haunted redoubts, new mobs, bosses, and a focused set of gear, tattoos, and implants.

Dark Pleasures received a major expansion, with roughly 150 new rooms beneath the old layout, 48 new undead mobs, 16 new depth objects, new minibosses and bosses, and a much meaner crawl overall.

The Flatline opened as a strange new midbie area.

Hockey in Hell opened as a new horror-sports zone where the game never ended and the ice remembers every hit. Pick fights with deranged hockey fans, old hockey legends, and current well-known players.

The Integration Ossuarium opened as another new area from the builder behind Phase Dynamics. It is part factory, part tomb, part operating table, with dead workers, broken machinery, corrupted cybernetics, old reactor systems, and the Necrotech Savant watching over it all.

Witch Isle has been revamped with new creatures, treasures, relics, and witch-haunted dangers.

Dectra Chain was updated, with more mobs and objects added and improved load rates.

Other System and Quality-of-Life Updates

The GPS network received a major upgrade. Routes now calculate more reliably, display cleaner remaining paths, and support new commands like gps status, gps route, and gps nearest.

Modern shop systems are now in place. Shops can show power markers beside items, help players spot likely upgrades, filter lists down to upgrade candidates, and allow identify <number> before buying.

Lost Wages received a progressive jackpot system across multiple casino games. Proper wagers now feed growing prize pools, and when someone breaks the bank, Skynet announces who won, how much they won, and which game paid out.

You can now use guns in the upgrade system to see which guns you might want to try to hunt next.

Bigmap received under-the-hood improvements, better GPS behavior, and a memory toggle. Players can now use map memory options and legend controls to adjust what they see, including full mapping or a fog-of-war style view.

Combat Tweaks

Combat smoothing was added to make fights feel less like all-or-nothing coin flips. The goal is not to make combat harmless, but to reduce the worst cases where one huge damage spike instantly ends a fight.

Gun damage received special attention because guns can stack large burst damage from critical shots, sniper-style hits, turret attacks, class scaling, and other modifiers. With smoothing, huge gunshots can still hit hard, but they are less likely to erase a player from full health in one unlucky shot.

Non-gun damage is also tracked. Heavy skills, large spell bursts, melee procs, and other big single-hit attacks can be smoothed when they spike far beyond what makes sense for the fight.

The new +Spike Guard apply gives players a way to build directly into this protection. Equipment with +Spike Guard increases the character's Spike Guard score, making them harder to kill with one massive hit. Small amounts help a little, while stacking more Spike Guard gives better protection against extreme burst damage.

Accessibility

Reader and compact combat support also improved. Players who actively use screen readers now have access to a reader toggle that can summarize high-volume combat output, such as heavy gunfire, into cleaner counts instead of flooding the screen.

Compact combat users also now receive better end-of-round damage summaries with less combat scroll, and work will continue to reduce the amount of combat spam for those it matters to.

Other Ongoing Work

Other ongoing updates include more EXP audit work, more load rate improvements, more Dungeon Crawler Carl mob scaling adjustments, and a steady stream of fixes.

If you like post-apocalyptic MUDs with remorts, guns, mutations, socketed gear, permanent implants and tattoos, large zone chains, dangerous mobs, strange systems, and a lot of long-term progression where it is all about making the numbers go UP, log in and let the Deathlands of NukeFire decide what you are made of.

Website: https://www.nukefire.org

Play in browser: https://play.mudvault.org/?host=tdome.nukefire.org&port=4000

Telnet: tdome.nukefire.org port 4000

Discord: https://discord.gg/B4pzagYaqR

Writing Games article about NukeFire: https://writing-games.org/nukefire-mud/

Thank you again, Andruid!

Someone posted here this week about a 599-year-old character they're thinking of pulling out of mothballs. It got me thinking about returning players, which is a weird category for MUDs because the same character is still there. You haven't lost data. You've lost context.

The thing returning players ask about most is whether their old social network is still around. The honest answer is usually no, but their old House or guild is, and a returner who shows up with knowledge of the cathedral schism from 2009 has automatic cultural cachet with the new generation. Lore continuity is an asset modern MUDs can use. Iron Realms is pretty good at this, but I'm sure we could surface old-event timelines better.

So a question for anyone who's done a long term MUD return on whatever game: what surprised you about coming back? What was harder to relearn than you expected, and what slid back into place without effort?

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.

The air tastes of ozone and old blood...
Hello world! I’m excited to finally share Aetheria, a persistent browser-based multiplayer RPG that I’ve been building. It’s set in a world fractured by the "Great Collision," where our dimension has merged with a shadow plane.
What makes Aetheria different?
✨ True AI Game Master: Every interaction, quest, and NPC dialogue is generated dynamically by Gemini AI. No more "go kill 10 rats" (unless the AI thinks it fits the lore!).
🗺️** Dynamic World Building**: Travelers can venture into the "Fog of Anomalies" to generate entirely new, permanent map locations, biomes (Snow Peaks, Deserts, Volcanic Wastelands), and lore.
🛡️** Guilds 2.0**: Form guilds and get a uniquely generated AI emblem based on your description. Tackle Guild Quests that take place at real map locations.
🏡 Claim your Land: In Aetheria, you can purchase plots of land and build anything from a humble tavern to a massive fortress.
👥 Persistent Multiplayer: You’ll see other "Wanderers" in your location and can team up in shared chat to take down anomalies together.
I just released v0.2, which added the Guild system and land ownership. The game is completely free to play—I just want to build a cool community of roleplayers and explorers.

I’d love to hear your feedback, see your AI-generated guild crests, and watch how you shape this world.

May the gods be in your favor, Wanderers.

Link: aetheria.rocks

Hey there! I’m working on a MUD heavily inspired by the mechanics of OSRS. There are currently 16 skills to grind (each up to level 100), with content up to level ~25 for each one at the moment.

The world is tongue-in-cheek dark fantasy. It’s small (about a hundred rooms), but each room is filled with content: Nodes to gather (some passive, some active), mobs to fight, quests to take, mini-games, interactive props. There’s multiple combat styles, multiple gathering and crafting skills, a player market, player housing, and a whole TCG.

I’d love to get a handful of people testing it, giving feedback and ideas. I’m at a point where adding more seems silly when nobody has played what’s already there.

If the sound of an OSRS-like MUD sounds fun to you, drop me a DM and I’ll send you a Discord invite.

Hi folks,

I've been trying to get into MUDs for like fifteen years and nothing has stuck. Recently Lusternia randomly caught my eye. I understand that IRE no longer supports it, which is a good thing, as it's now just like any other MUD out there: actually free to play with volunteers who run it.

What intrigues me is the world and the focus on roleplay. I went through the tutorial and found the combat really cool, as well--you actually have to wait until you can act and type your actions in. I've tried some other MUDs recently that felt more like the game was playing itself (I'm still reading the room description, meanwhile something has attacked me, and I've attacked back and killed it before I've even realized anything is happening).

So, knowing that I have a good feeling about it, sell me: what's cool about the combat, questing, crafting, and interaction with other players?

EDIT: I'm also the kind of player who's going to be playing probably for like 5 hours a week max. So keep that in mind.

Thanks!

Good day all! I am fairly new to the world of MUDs, having played a bit of Alter Aeon a few years back. However, since that time, I lost all of my vision and am wanting to get back into it. Unfortunately, setting up a MUD client on my new Windows PC has been a struggle, even with some sighted help. Would someone be able to give me a step-by—step set of instructions or maybe point me to where one exists on how to do this so that I can access this fantastic genre of games again? I’m interested in trying other MUDs so do not want to be limited to just MushV and Alter Aeon going forward. I am using the Jaws screen reader if that makes a difference.

Thanks so much for any help that can be provided.

Hi all! I’ve been playing Discworld MUD lately and absolutely loving it. The game feels incredibly immersive because of how in-depth its mechanics are (you can do all sorts of mundane everyday things, I especially love systems like writing, crafting, cosmetic customization, setting up a shop and all that). What I’m looking for now is something with a similarly immersive world, but with a more open-ended or customizable magic system. Discworld’s magic is super varied, especially because so many spells are not just combat abilities but also have other uses like carrying stuff around or just playing around, but I’m craving something even more flexible. I’ve been reading Witch Hat Atelier recently, and it really made me want a game with a magic system that feels unique in the same way, but I'd still love to have the immersive social/world-sim aspects that make Discworld so special.

Are there any MUDs like that out there?

Finally after a few years and with some help with ai I've managed to get this mud to boot. It can be found at godwars.net port 5000. .. I have no idea how compete this version is or if it's missing anything? Really was just me seeing if I could actually get the released code running!! 😂

StrangeMUD is a heavily modified ROM 2.4b6 with a modern WebSocket web client. There's nothing to install: visit the URL and you're in.

Visual — Every zone has its own painted backdrop: forests, deserts, mountains, oceans, swamps, cities. Backgrounds shift on a day/night cycle driven by in-world time. Equipment renders as a pixel-art portrait of your character with each piece you wear. Your scrollback has stamped-seal room markers, gold-gradient achievement cards, and combat verbs styled as severity-coded chips. 10 selectable themes (Molten Gold, Moonsilver, Ashlands, Elven Vale, Forge Fire, and more) retint the entire UI.

Classes — Seven full classes (Mage, Cleric, Thief, Warrior, Necromancer, Paladin, Druid) and nine subclasses. Raise a skeleton army as a Necromancer. Shapeshift between bear, wolf, and eagle as a Druid. Switch between conviction, devotion, and retribution auras as a Paladin. Cast in armor as a Battlemage. Backstab with envenomed daggers as an Assassin.

A world that runs without you — NPCs follow hour-of-day schedules: walking to work, locking up shops, sleeping at home. Procedural dungeons with six themes and three difficulty tiers, complete with bosses, trap rooms, and secret passages. Procedural loot with prefix/suffix enchants and rarity tiers. Quest board, cooking, dwarven brewing, banking, achievements.

Active development. The code is alive. New systems and polish ship every week.

Play in your browser → https://mud.strangeness.org:8443

I’ve been getting the itch to come back to Achaea after an absurdly long hiatus.

I have a character that’s apparently 599 years old now, which is hilarious to me, and I’m thinking about dusting them off and starting the climb again from “old lowbie who barely remembers anything.”

A couple questions for current/former players:

• Is Achaea still fairly active socially/politically?
• Is Mhaldor still a good place for heavy RP and internal politics?
• I’m really not that interested in PvP these days. I’m more interested in faction culture, ideology, intrigue, religious stuff, city politics, etc. Is there still enough of that scene alive to sink into?
• How welcoming is the game these days to returning players who basically have to relearn everything?
• What are the biggest changes over the last 10-15 years that would surprise an old player?
• How mandatory are scripting systems now compared to old Achaea?
• Can you still meaningfully contribute politically without being a top-tier PKer?
• How active are Houses compared to the old days?
• Is there still room for slower-burn RP characters, or is everything conflict-driven now?
• How much has the culture shifted from classic guild-era Achaea?

I remember loving the atmosphere and scale of the world way more than the combat itself, so I’m curious whether that side of the game is still thriving.

Also: if anyone has experience returning after a huge break, I’d love to hear how it went.

(And yes, the idea of a 599-year-old Mhaldorian emerging from the shadows confused and underlevelled is very funny to me.)

I have an idea for a modern MUD-like game, and I want to sanity check it with people who know MUDs better than I do.The part I’m thinking about is async play.You play at your own pace. You read a scene, choose an action, and leave some kind of mark on the world. Example: Your character enters a small place called Twinkle Town and talks to Mududu, a nervous goblin shopkeeper. If nobody has bothered Mududu lately, he might offer you a strange silver charm. Player A helps Mududu after some trouble at the market. Player B comes later and threatens him. Player C arrives the next day. Mududu wants to trust travelers because one helped him, but he keeps his hand under the counter because another one scared him. He may still offer the charm, but now the scene has tension behind it.

So players may not meet live. They affect each other through NPC memory, rumors, broken or repaired places, opened paths, warnings, and other traces.

I’m trying to figure out a few things:

• Have MUDs, MUSHes, or MOOs already done this well?
• If this idea is fun enough? ]- What games should I study before building anything?

It is a brainstorm stage I just want to get some other poples ideas. I’m not promoting a live game or asking anyone to sign up for it is not there yet.

Hello all,

I come here asking for something, unusual maybe.

Does anyone know if the ConQUEST mud survived anywhere? The codebase? I loved that mud and I'm not sure if Alister shared it with someone before passing away, RIP.

I asked this in the Mud discord too and a kind human told me that on

Mudstats

it appears as if it was up 2 days ago.

I wonder if it's wrong what it shows or if someone has the codebase anywhere.

I wish I could play and see it, I miss the game.

I was considering creating my own based on Alister's ideas and crediting him, but if I could play it would be even better. I sadly don't remember enough of it to recreate it properly, so what do you guys remember, how were lairs built? How did combat work, exactly?

All the info I have is what I could find on the wiky.

Thanks all!

Hi there! I've been looking for an nWoD/Chronicles of Darkness online game, and haven't had any luck. I know musoapbox used to have a place to advertise but apparently it imploded (I was silentsophia there). Are there any of these games up anymore, please? I'd definitely prefer mage.

Darkwind has been running since 1992, and this past month was one of the biggest development pushes we've had in years!

Quick frame for anyone new: Darkwind is a fantasy MUD with deep guild systems, a living economy, and a world that's been accreting weird interlocking systems for three decades. You can play it in your browser at https://play.darkwind.ai -- using Darkflow it has supports all GMCP plus many new custom ones just for Darkwind!

Here's what shipped recently:

Gods aren't just flavor anymore. Shrines, pilgrimages, holy hours, eclipses, OH MY! Patrons can mark your enemies, demand tithes, and the world's divine balance actually shifts based on what players do. Omens fire, eclipses change the rules, and picking a patron isn't a cosmetic choice.

Bosses got phases. A lot of the old static encounters across Darkwind, Souvrael, Kerei, the Islands, the Highway, the Underworld, and Talamh Darag are being rebuilt into tiered, phased fights with event messages, respawn cooldowns, and real tuning. Killing one feels like an event now, not a loot piñata.

The druid overhaul is the one I'm most proud of. Nwyfre rituals, long-running ritual casting, summonable companions you can name and that scale with you, profession material integration, herb gathering fixes, and ritual components that don't require a second job to gather. Druids feel like druids now.

Reputation actually matters. Hero and villain renown labels, reputation-aware guards (including corrupt ones you can bribe), shop prices that scale to who you are, and a who list grouped by reputation. The world has started noticing what you do.

The browser client got serious. Darkflow now has full sound support, many in-game sounds/events/reactions, graphical who/finger/snoop modals, room image generation, sky pane sync, GMCP media hooks, Giphy reactions on channels, truecolor support, guild resource bars, and saner terminal defaults. It's a genuinely modern way to play a MUD, not just telnet-in-a-tab.

And yes, there's a playable Zork portal. A Zork-inspired domain inside the Darkwind ecosystem, true to the open-sourced "Zork Mainframe" version released on Github years ago. It's a weird side-project that turned out great.

A few other things worth mentioning briefly: Eternal Dungeon got checkpoints, personal bests, and separate solo/group leaderboards. New-player onboarding has a proper guided tutorial, a recall command, an achievement/title journal, and much better help coverage. Ten guilds — Monk, Ranger, Thief, Mage, Ninja, Bard, Paladin, Garou, Cleric, Druid, Fighter — got combat polish passes. And a big stability push went in underneath all of it: linkdeath recovery, character switching, equipment saves, guild soul repair, and a long list of tracked runtime fixes.

If you're a returning MUD player, recall will get you out of trouble. If you're new, the tutorial will hold your hand for the first hour and then turn you loose.

Play in your browser: https://play.darkwind.ai
Check out the website at: https://darkwind.ai

Happy to answer questions in the comments; bout the systems, the tech stack, the 30-year history, whatever.

**This section is not AI generated, and I feel I should disclose my feelings on AI and how I am using it up front. I am not a coder, I struggled with making even the most basic zmud triggers. I am not a game dev. I have a full time job AND at 45 years old, have my first child due in September, so obviously like any sane human - did the only thing logical, decided to TRY and build a mud. I will spare you the details of the last 6 months, but this would not be even remotely possible without AI. I know people have very strong opinions on this, but, the way I see it, pandoras box is blown open, and the truth is this: I fucking LOVE MUDs. They provided me with the most peak gaming moments of my life, I made friends all around the world, and I just really really really don't want to see it die. This is almost undoubtably a fool hardy and ultimately fatal expedition on my part, but as many a MUD journey begins, not being scared of dying and losing everything is rule #1. So , if you hate AI please don't come, I had to use it extensively to code, but I promise you my 30 years of mud experience and 40 years of gaming starting with com64 phatasie series my dad had bootleg floppy disk copies of(he called it that nerd game, my dude you had a home PC in 1984 and were burning floppy disks, I didn't fall far from your nerd tree) all the way up to today, gaming has been central in my life, and I have always had very clear visions of what a great MUD would be, so I really hope you come poke your head in and at least maybe roast the hell out of me in some reddit post :)**

I'm building a text MUD set in a 1995–2000-era high-fantasy world (D&D / Dragonlance / Forgotten Realms-adjacent, original IP, original engine — no code lifted from any other MUD). 100% custom from the floor up.

Why I'm doing this: I keep finding empty servers, lonely subreddits, and well-meaning attempts to keep 30-year-old games on life support. It makes me sad. I want a place that actually feels alive.

I have zero professional dev/coding/design experience. I'm motivated, I'm slow, and I'm honest about both of those.

**Influences & what this isn't:**

This isn't a remake of an old MUD. I've been shaped by years of MUDding plus a long list of other games — WoW, Guild Wars, Runescape, Rust, Diablo, Path of Exile, BG3 — and bits of each fed into the design philosophy. I want vets and MUD fans to love it, but I'm building it with the QoL and player expectations of 2026, not 1996.

That said: this game has a lot of callbacks to the major MUD I've played from 1994 to today. If you were a MUDder in that window and you were a badass — you might spot a former character of yours lionized in here.

**At beta launch:**

- 8 of the planned classes and 12 of the planned races live; full roster expansion ready by early 2027

- 200 spells / 150 skills / 500+ emotes / tons more

- Only a handful of spells are learned from guildmaster. If a spellcaster wants to grow in power, he must adventure and seek out the knowledge of those who they wish to acquire more powerful magic from(75% of spells and ALL the "good" ones are added to your permanent spell list after studying a spellbook containing 1 spell. the book is consumed about attempt to study. Failure is possible and book must be loaded again. Spells are in circle tiers, and the spellbooks are also in tiers, so each book can drop different spells of that tier, as with everything else, you will have to discover more on your own.

- Hundreds of unique, powerful items - with load limits(best items in game are limit 1 instance) — this is a gear-driven game

- Keyword-driven zone exploration is core to play

- Plenty of solo and small-group content. Some zones are punishingly difficult.

**Stack:** TypeScript / Node.js server, Prisma ORM, Socket.io / WebSocket client layer, custom hardened command bus, full TypeScript front-to-back.

No zone counts, no room counts — that's for you to find.

Open beta announce within a month. If you want to come kick the tires, drop a comment and I'll DM when it's live.

Hello,

I recognize the fact that VIP mud is not always the best client for some, but for me it has ticked all my boxes for many years, so I'm kind of attached to it. However, for reasons unknown to me, it seems to want me to input my registration information which it then does not accept. I've had this client registered for at least a decade now and have never encountered this problem before. What's more, audiogames.net also seems to be having problems because it also doesn't seem to want to accept my account credentials, and I haven't changed those in forever. Does anyone know what might be going on with either of these entities? I can easily use vip in demo mode but shouldn't have to as I know my registration is completely valid.