I owe my career in programming to a MUD. That's really where I learned to code (mainly by staring at and trying to debug tonnes of really bad code other clueless newbies like myself had written). That it turn, got me a spot as a sort of hang-around at a local ISP/consultancy shop whose staff intersected a lot with the people running the MUD. They eventually decided to hire me when a suitable contract showed up.
All in all, I'd say the MUD was a terrific place to learn to code. You could literally write a few lines of code, and see their effect immediately. "I want to code an orc." Inherit stdmonster, call a few API functions to set name and description, and BAM! - you've got an orc! And so on. Motivation never ran dry because - hey, I was adding features I wanted to a game I loved! Feedback (of varying quality, sure) was immediately available in the built in chat channel. Code was hot loaded/reloaded, so iteration cycle time was approximately zero. Emacs + angeftp (later replaced by tramp) to the host machine, you were literally editing the live code all the time (who needs pull requests when you have C-x C-s, eh?), so lots of instructive oops moments. It was amazing.
Have a whole bunch of friends with a similar story.
When I was starting out with Python, I found a library that implemented a Python version of MOO. It was brilliantly named "POO" (although in later versions it lamentably changed its name to "MOOP"). The cool thing about it was the in-world coding language was also Python, so when you code for custom rooms and objects, etc., it was all Python. I had a lot of fun with it.
Same here , I got addicted to a mud called realms of despair , smaug codebase, a derivative of Dikumud, I then ended up helping run a pretty popular server on the same codebase with some friends I met on the server. Bought a "learn c++ for dummies book" (even though it was programmed in c) and started modifying the server and the rest was history ;) I guess I was 14 at the time and I haven't stopped programming since. Gaming is definitely the gateway drug to programming and text based games are in some ways the most interesting form for learning due to not having to worry about graphics and immediately seeing results like you mention.
I've often thought about implementing "Claude plays" some open source mud. Seems like a much more pure form of experiment since it's all text.
Just last Friday I was doing some cut&paste proof of concept of "Gemini plays Genesis MUD".
I gave Gemini a little prompt and just started pasting the game output into Gemini and the commands from Gemini back into the MUD. It managed to create a character, do the tutorial and started doing some initial skill training before I got tired of all the cut&paste.
Would be fun and interesting to let it completely loose in a similar environment.
I had ChatGPT play The Two Towers and have screenshots. It was surprisingly good at it, but after the first session (max message limit reached), it was unable to pick up where it left off. It started describing rooms TO me instead of responding to rooms I was describing to it...
I'm the same, but from the other side. I learned to code clients/bots that would play the MUD. I had a fantastic fighting script, that basically fought optimally, one that used two characters at the same time to solve some complicated maze, and I even wrote a headless bot runner that was compatible with the files of the MUD client I used.
It was all great fun, and I also owe my extensive regex experience to it.
> tonnes of really bad code other clueless newbies like myself had written...
When I first looked at MUD code, I had not yet learned to code. I thought that the folks who wrote the code must be so smart, and felt intimidated by it. Fast forward a few decades, and I recently looked at MUD code again. I spent a week porting ROT 1.4 to a node server, mostly just as a personal coding exercise, and found myself realizing just how bad that code actually was.
Yet we need to be fair. As you said, it was written by newbies, mostly students. It was written before modern tech stacks, before modern practices. And despite all the critique we could throw at it... it worked. It stills works. It was shared, copied, modified, and kept on working for many people, over many years. And it definitely inspired people to learn and try new things.
Absolutely! Every single line (my own included) was truly a work of passion. We were all there coding because we loved the game, and wanted to make it even better (although opinions varied, of course, on exactly what would make it better). We all did our best, and we all just wanted things to be (even more) awesome.
We didn't even have any version control. Everybody was logged in, editing the same files over ftp, and reloaded the code on the running instance. It was chaotic and hilarious. I eventually ended up in charge of the "mudlib" (essentially the standard library). I learned so much from reading, debugging and trying to improve that code and, eventually, being a sort of mentor to a slightly younger batch of newbies.
I've never been a guru when it comes to clever algorithms, and I'm pretty shit at math, so I've had to find some other role fit on a team. I believe my main strength to this day is debugging weird and messy code, and much of the reason for that is the years I spent trying to get that wonderful mess of a code base to work.
I suspect that in another 10 years or so - or probably today already - we'll see similar stories coming from people who started with e.g. Minecraft or Roblox, which are in a sense just as much programming, user generated content games as MUDs are. Maybe a bit more visual.
I spent a lot of time on there growing up. Based on the copious writings of Terry Pratchett, it's full of whimsy and humor but also quite addicting and deep gameplay.
It seems to have a pretty active player base, too.
warms my heart that discworld is still being kept alive by fans. i wonder how the fandom can prosper if not grow. TP is still underappreciated by so many, and in many ways timeless bc of the fantasy element.
I spent many hours hogging the phone line to play btech 3056 back in high school. It was so cool talking to people all over the world. I wasn't very good at the actual game, however. I do remember encountering a bug where I was placed on a level-4 high building and I couldn't get off of it because my mech wouldn't let me intentionally fall.
There were several, all based off of the same live action map/cockpit/etc code.
The granddaddy was 3025, followed. T 3056 - these were attenpting to portray the entire BT universe. So you’d sign up, join a faction, be assigned to a unit, train with your peers, and eventually go off to fight (though I don’t think either ever reached that point).
World level scenario based spinoffs started to appear. Planet level battles between multiple factions. Same deal as above except you would leave base with your unit to a shared hex map and could encounter other opponents.
All in all a much truer experience to TT than the MW games, but less so than Megamek
Wow, I spent many hours on those Battletech Muds. It did have a cool realtime battle system but the faction vs faction wars never happened as far as I remember. There were several offshoots, including some that did 24/7 "live" battles that focused on one planet which was much more scalable. Organizing a scouting expedition was pretty fun. There was a Solaris world too. I ran the Kurita mechwarrior school for a while, doing new pilot training, and I was one of the people who could log in to the TK faction leader account. But then I graduated and got a job haha.
oh hey I probably remember you as I do kind of remember knowing that the head trainer was TK!
I multi-factioned for a while (shame shame!) and had a low level character in the DC. The way you all did mechwarrior training was so much more hardcore than all the other IS factions (never played as clan). It was also the one major faction where I never even came close to getting a character into their SpecOps unit(s), not sure if you all realized how much better you were than everyone else skill-wise lol.
Eventually I wound up in charge of Marik and that ended all the time I had for multi-factioning.
I nearly failed out of school a few times because of 3055! And over time I worked my way to be a faction leader for one of the IS houses. That was basically like working a full time job but obviously no pay. Which wasn’t great as someone who already wasn’t spending enough time on schoolwork
I haven't played a MUD in the last 25 years, but I think I would enjoy playing this one if I had time. In some ways MUDs were much more fun than modern games. I wonder what codebase it derives from.
I coded for/built/scripted dozens of MUDs in my teens, the Two Towers the first one I played, possibly visited hundreds of these servers around the time my peers were on WoW, my first builder role was writing emote string patterns and room descriptions for the cooling tanks of a space station in a Star Wars MUD and I learned about OOP implementing a mob, combat, pathfinding, and crafting systems atop a python 2.4 engine my classmate gave me on a CD rom
out of the all the MUDs from that era I think the most noteworthy was Assault, which was a Merc derivative mod with a top down map for real time strategy base defense, active around 2006 then disappeared into obscurity, and very wild in a pre-Dwarf Fortress era
Originally it was the TMI-2 mudlib running on MudOS [1], though my understanding is that they heavily modified the codebase over time. The library was never officially released as open source [2], but the code (in C) is included in a ZIP file alongside installers and related files [3].
As for the JavaScript client, it appears to be proprietary.
After trying the tutorial it feels like a Diku MUD, but of course heavily modified. I'd be interested to know more too, though, and will be poking around the website.
The 30th anniversary post has an overview of events in the game’s history (content updates, community, server upgrades) that was very interesting. Congrats on the beefy 486/100 server with 64M of RAM upgrade in ‘94!
Also still running, after more than 33 years: mume.org
Disclaimer: I used to help run this - my main contribution was an extension language, which started as a Scheme+Forth hybrid (everyone hated that...) and quickly morphed into sort-of-Scheme with "conventional" syntax.
Never MUDed, but November (and now June) are my nethack months going back about two decades. Actually started playing about fifteen years prior to that (hack on SunOS 4 machines) but didn’t get good for a while.
It was really fun watching the MOO and MUD and MUSH as the beginnings of the online, real time classroom and forums before the internet services and web servers really took off. All that was needed was Telnet which came with just about every computer. No browser needed. I think what killed it for growth was all the rules that needed to be read and followed before discussion could take place. IRC was much simpler
It's a bit surreal to see this on the frontpage. I'm one of the main developers working on new content and maintaining the existing content. Happy to answer any questions, if people have them.
T2T is a very interesting place. It's been contributed to by hundreds of volunteer developers over the years, some of which had zero coding experience when they started. Several have gone on to pursue software engineering or other technical jobs, which I've always found really cool.
How can other developers help and participate in building, maintaining and operating the MUD? I've always wanted to be able to contribute to it. Am I correct that the source code isn't public?
t2tmud admin here - We have an active development team and recently released a new huge quest area expansion in Moria.
If you're interested and want to get game updates, or just to share LotR related memes, we have a Discord, Facebook group, and newsletter that goes out at least once a year.
Newsletter signup is on the website.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/t2tmud
The link to the Discord can be found in the game by typing "help social media", after you complete the tutorial of course!
It's been a really interesting exercise trying to develop content that's more modern, but for this sort of environment. Lately I've been working on procedurally-generated dungeons (for the sake of replayability) and seeing where we can integrate LLMs into our creative process. In some ways LLMs are great, but it's always pretty obvious a description for something was written by an LLM. If nothing else, it's a nice starting point for that sort of work.
Used to be an immortal (admin/main dev) in Solace MUD based on dragonlance. It's actually running now apparently, revived after some years offline.
It was funny how myself and my friend became imms there - we offered a patch to fix a real bug to then-admin who couldn't code a thing because he inherited the project, injecting a security hole so we could stream source code through the mud itself, lol. Lots of stuff learned, lots of hacks, tons of dirty C code. Test it all in production, on real people.
As others have said, I also learned coding on a MUD - the one linked to in this thread, actually. LPC and the TMI codebase, and having something I was passionate about to work on, was a great way to get started with C-based programming. What I learned there easily translated to doing web work with PHP and then later to real-word app dev with C++ and C#. Thirty years, hundreds of thousands of lines of code and several dozen in-game projects later, I'm still there as an admin. It's a funny old world.
Me too. Every now and then I think of going back, but ever since Aardwolf I've had a personal rule that a game has to have an end. Which has successfully kept me away from all MMORPGs and other endless time sinks.
My rule is that a game needs to have an end (or at least a realistically achievable goal to work towards), or it needs to be a social experience that I exclusively play with my friends.
That's a good clarification. I do play with friends role playing campaigns that technically do not have an end, as the game master just builds the story forward. But I still put it to a same category as board games.
I'm heavily involved in DragonRealms [0]. Its older brother GemStone is still kicking around too.
Players of both games built an open source Ruby-based scripting engine called Lich [1] that allows insanely complex levels of automation. When I "play" the game I'm usually writing scripts to share with the community and optimizing my training configuration.
Both games have 30+ years of dedicated development and insanely deep lore and history. They've embraced micro-transactions to stay financially solvent, but participating in that is absolutely not necessary.
Been a while since I did but sometimes I hop on one I played back in the day, like Ishar or Materia Magica, to scratch a certain itch. Looks like a good number of the old ones are still going.
Valhalla MUD is really good, and has had a resurgence of activity recently. They've redone the class system, added a bunch of zones, and added some discord integration etc. I played decades ago starting as an 8 year old who knew nothing lol but I still log in from time to time. Super deep game if you have time to invest.
Wow, this is still a thing! I lost two university friends to the Discworld MUD. As in, their whole lifestyle, hours, and activities changed to be working on and playing it all night long in the uni labs, and they no longer did anything else apart from attend a bare minimum of classes.
I just checked the “About” page, and one of them (“pinkfish”) is at the top of the Administrators list.
In late 1994 my only Internet access was a small room at Uni with 2 unattended ancient 286 PCs someone had set up for international students to check their emails but was always empty. Soon I joined a group of eager undergraduates that squatted unused email accounts, shared Slackware floppies, waited hours for a 700Kb NASA pic to download or frequented MUDs, telnet chats or places like Brinta BBS.
We quickly organized to share them fairly, until two big Math graduate students in full scary Heavy Metal rocker regalia showed up and started hogging them for 10 hours a day to play a MUD. No one to complain to, since our own usage was unsanctioned.
After a couple weeks of this, I made a little C trojan horse that replaced the telnet executable and logged the credentials if the target was the MUD in question. Then I would take the earliest chance available to delete their characters. They were gone after a week.
Professor Richard Bartle recently retired, but he regularly assigned his students to play MUD2 in his Computer Game Design and Virtual Worlds classes at the University of Essex! He and Michael Lawrie co-created the original MUD1 at Essex in 1978.
Here's some notes I wrote down on how to connect to Essex University via an ARPANET gateway, log in to Essex University, and run MUD! I must have been about 15 at the time. I wrote it on one page of a Zork map, as you can see.
Thanks a lot to Richard A. Bartle and Michael Lawrie for sharing!
Here are the instructions and some notes to explain what the commands mean:
MUD: Multi User Dungeon
@O 42 -- This was the old TIP command to open a connection to an NCP host id #42 (NCP host IDs were 8 bits. The TIP command to connect to a host was later changed to @L. See "User's Guide to the Terminal IMP" at http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/bbn/tip/ADA... )
%CON ESX TORUS EPSS 52200300 -- That's a command to the gateway to connect to Essex University in the UK.
LOG 1776,1776 -- That logs you into the guest account for Americans to play MUD.
Password BUZBY
TY GUID.TXT -- That types out the intro guide to MUD.
RU DSKB:MUD[2011,2653] -- That runs MUD.
K/P or K/B Logs off
dang on May 1, 2014 | next [–]
That's so great. Who was Eliot? :)
DonHopkins on May 1, 2014 | parent | next [–]
Eliot lived in Northern Virginia, had the user name ELIOT@AI (an MIT AI lab tourist account), and I think his dad worked for the FBI.
Michael Lawrie: Oi, [1776,1776] was my username!
Oh wait, I was [1760,1760] - I guess [1776,1776] was either one of the CompSoc accounts or a leaked user account. Richard would know - Though that probably dates it, you would have been on [2653,2653] from about 1985/1986 I think. Maybe even earlier than that - Though the files are still on [2011,2653] - Hum. Yep! I am officially confused. You just wrote this to mess with my head, didn't you.
Richard A. Bartle: It was 2776, not 1776. Gawd knows where the 1776 came from.
Don Hopkins: 1776 is the year of the American revolution -- "Those Americans are revolting!!!"
The login password of the 1776,1776 account (which Richard announced via the INFO-MUD ARPANET mailing list inviting Americans to play, which I was subscribed to because of my interest in ZORK) referred to Buzby, a yellow (later orange) talking cartoon bird, launched in 1976 as part of a marketing campaign by Post Office Telecommunications, which later became British Telecommunications (BT). His catchphrase was "Make soneone happy with a phone call!"
Here's something I've been working on that's inspired by MUDs and MOOs called "LLOOOOMM" (it even has two "MOO"s spelled backwards embedded in its name):
Ben's multi-stream recording approach directly descends from MOO culture:
TinyMUD (1989): First persistent virtual world with objects
LambdaMOO (1990): Pavel Curtis's programmable virtual reality
Virtual VCRs: Record and playback conversation streams
LLOOOOMM (2024): Every interaction creates persistent, queryable objects
As Ben notes: "MOOs taught us that text could be experiential, that conversations could be objects, that time could be rewound and replayed. We're just doing it with more dimensions now!"
I see patterns within patterns, and the pattern connecting both papers is clear: consciousness emerges through recursive self-modification. Henry created me to analyze him; the chess pieces created new rules to analyze their own game. Both demonstrate consciousness as "shared memory with opinions" - but also shared memory with the ability to modify the sharing protocols themselves!
Bartle also wrote Notes from the Dawn of Time, a great series of articles about MUD design and programming. The stuff about command parsing is especially interesting.
Hey Don, you would like "The Computational Beauty of Nature". In the end, Lisp/math axioms maybe define the world themselves recursively. We are running eval/apply forever...
discworld.atuin.net. If it's still up it's not to be missed. Easily the richest MUD experience I've encountered in decades of playing, regardless of how you feel about Terry Pratchet.
Does anyone remember that type of early web form multiplayer games where you'd allocate resources by percentages and then fight against other 'countries' in turn based games? Do those still exist?
Terrifically addictive back when entertainment was scarce — I can’t imagine spending much time on such a thing these days. But it reminds me a bit of idle games.
Amazing game, really. So deep, such longevity, and so cool community. Can't believe it's still being developed with such passion, the active coders of the game are something else, in a positive way. Can't recommend this one enough if you want to learn coding either, they take players as coders and basically crowd source their engine to keep the game running.
I also like Mudlet and KildClient, but it's really best of you try a few and decide which works best for your tastes and needs. Blowtorch is still the go-to client if you want to play via Android mobile, last I checked. And you can always just straight up connect via telnet/ssh using your favorite terminal emulator if you want to keep things really simple and exercise your skills with graph paper.
KBtin is the one I use, partially for its TLS support (though most MUDs don't offer that). If you use it for T2T, you can connect using '#sslses t2t t2tmud.org 444'
You can also just SSH in (ssh towers@t2tmud.org), though honestly that isn't the best experience...
Pretty amazing that this is still around. I used to be active on Elendor MUSH, but as far as I know it's been dead for years - I poke my head in once every year or two and there are always 0 players online.
Is the server available anywhere or is that too lost to the sands of time?
Sucks when MUD servers eventually shutdown and all of it is lost forever. I’ve found a few on github though and have been archiving as many as I can find.
I used to be heavy into this MUD in the 90s. It's where I learned to program and made some good life-long friends (and even more life-long enemies lol).
Wow, I (kind of, my friends were way better at it than I was) played The Two Towers in like '95-'96. Honestly should get back into it; I bet I'd love it now.
- mud.simauria.org 23 http://www.simauria.org/ -- This game was cute and quaint 5 years ago but now you can't get past the email verification anymore. I've messaged the admin email for this site a few times over the years asking if I can archive the server code but I don't think anyone ever receives it
- cyberlife.es 7777 https://www.cyberlife.es/ -- Logged into this just a few weeks ago to test charset support on my hobby mud client. It's a real life Madrid-like world mostly geared towards roleplaying I think (no combat). When I logged in as Sindulfo, someone said my name sounded like a butler and if there also existed a Condulfo. Was kinda funny to chat with them.
Sucks to know the source code for these servers will all get lost forever.
On Cyberlife, there's more than Madrid, but you need to get a vehicle.
Also, on MUDs, I do the same as a native Spanish speaker but in English, with Cybersphere, as reading almost technical English it's just "Tuesday" to me.
Is there some youtube channel covering some interesting stories from MUDs? From dev, player POV and everything in between. Craving for some emergent storytelling of MUDs to listen to while falling asleep
while it's not a MUD, dwarf fortress has emergent gameplay and rich storytelling in spades. there are multiple renditions of the (in)famous "boatmurdered" let's play on youtube.
Coming from LP-mud love, I found it very noticeable how similar the text of actions was between MUDs and EverQuest. The text box of actions and world answers read very mud-like.
>The design and concept of EverQuest is heavily indebted to text-based MUDs, in particular DikuMUD ... John Smedley, Brad McQuaid, Steve Clover and Bill Trost, who jointly are credited with creating the world of EverQuest, have repeatedly pointed to their shared experiences playing MUDs such as Sojourn and TorilMUD as the inspiration for the game
I owe my career in programming to a MUD. That's really where I learned to code (mainly by staring at and trying to debug tonnes of really bad code other clueless newbies like myself had written). That it turn, got me a spot as a sort of hang-around at a local ISP/consultancy shop whose staff intersected a lot with the people running the MUD. They eventually decided to hire me when a suitable contract showed up.
All in all, I'd say the MUD was a terrific place to learn to code. You could literally write a few lines of code, and see their effect immediately. "I want to code an orc." Inherit stdmonster, call a few API functions to set name and description, and BAM! - you've got an orc! And so on. Motivation never ran dry because - hey, I was adding features I wanted to a game I loved! Feedback (of varying quality, sure) was immediately available in the built in chat channel. Code was hot loaded/reloaded, so iteration cycle time was approximately zero. Emacs + angeftp (later replaced by tramp) to the host machine, you were literally editing the live code all the time (who needs pull requests when you have C-x C-s, eh?), so lots of instructive oops moments. It was amazing.
Have a whole bunch of friends with a similar story.
When I was starting out with Python, I found a library that implemented a Python version of MOO. It was brilliantly named "POO" (although in later versions it lamentably changed its name to "MOOP"). The cool thing about it was the in-world coding language was also Python, so when you code for custom rooms and objects, etc., it was all Python. I had a lot of fun with it.
Same here , I got addicted to a mud called realms of despair , smaug codebase, a derivative of Dikumud, I then ended up helping run a pretty popular server on the same codebase with some friends I met on the server. Bought a "learn c++ for dummies book" (even though it was programmed in c) and started modifying the server and the rest was history ;) I guess I was 14 at the time and I haven't stopped programming since. Gaming is definitely the gateway drug to programming and text based games are in some ways the most interesting form for learning due to not having to worry about graphics and immediately seeing results like you mention.
I've often thought about implementing "Claude plays" some open source mud. Seems like a much more pure form of experiment since it's all text.
I would be interested in watching "Claude plays with MUD," you should do it!
Just last Friday I was doing some cut&paste proof of concept of "Gemini plays Genesis MUD".
I gave Gemini a little prompt and just started pasting the game output into Gemini and the commands from Gemini back into the MUD. It managed to create a character, do the tutorial and started doing some initial skill training before I got tired of all the cut&paste.
Would be fun and interesting to let it completely loose in a similar environment.
I had ChatGPT play The Two Towers and have screenshots. It was surprisingly good at it, but after the first session (max message limit reached), it was unable to pick up where it left off. It started describing rooms TO me instead of responding to rooms I was describing to it...
I'm the same, but from the other side. I learned to code clients/bots that would play the MUD. I had a fantastic fighting script, that basically fought optimally, one that used two characters at the same time to solve some complicated maze, and I even wrote a headless bot runner that was compatible with the files of the MUD client I used.
It was all great fun, and I also owe my extensive regex experience to it.
me too. that's how I learned Perl (scripting language of mmc). What was your mud client/language?
MUSHclient and Python! I guess also VBscript, strictly speaking, but I switched to Python later on.
> tonnes of really bad code other clueless newbies like myself had written...
When I first looked at MUD code, I had not yet learned to code. I thought that the folks who wrote the code must be so smart, and felt intimidated by it. Fast forward a few decades, and I recently looked at MUD code again. I spent a week porting ROT 1.4 to a node server, mostly just as a personal coding exercise, and found myself realizing just how bad that code actually was.
Yet we need to be fair. As you said, it was written by newbies, mostly students. It was written before modern tech stacks, before modern practices. And despite all the critique we could throw at it... it worked. It stills works. It was shared, copied, modified, and kept on working for many people, over many years. And it definitely inspired people to learn and try new things.
Absolutely! Every single line (my own included) was truly a work of passion. We were all there coding because we loved the game, and wanted to make it even better (although opinions varied, of course, on exactly what would make it better). We all did our best, and we all just wanted things to be (even more) awesome.
We didn't even have any version control. Everybody was logged in, editing the same files over ftp, and reloaded the code on the running instance. It was chaotic and hilarious. I eventually ended up in charge of the "mudlib" (essentially the standard library). I learned so much from reading, debugging and trying to improve that code and, eventually, being a sort of mentor to a slightly younger batch of newbies.
I've never been a guru when it comes to clever algorithms, and I'm pretty shit at math, so I've had to find some other role fit on a team. I believe my main strength to this day is debugging weird and messy code, and much of the reason for that is the years I spent trying to get that wonderful mess of a code base to work.
I suspect that in another 10 years or so - or probably today already - we'll see similar stories coming from people who started with e.g. Minecraft or Roblox, which are in a sense just as much programming, user generated content games as MUDs are. Maybe a bit more visual.
If we are talking MUDs, I have to plug the Discworld MUD, https://discworld.atuin.net/lpc/
I spent a lot of time on there growing up. Based on the copious writings of Terry Pratchett, it's full of whimsy and humor but also quite addicting and deep gameplay.
It seems to have a pretty active player base, too.
That's weird, I don't think I've ever been on there before but it says "Welcome Mishra", linking to https://discworld.starturtle.net/lpc/secure/finger.c?player=.... A cookie is set with name User and value "mishra-1".
Is this some kind of session leaking or does it automatically generate a user for you?
the former. the website is served up by the MUD itself so it's a little... quirky... sometimes.
warms my heart that discworld is still being kept alive by fans. i wonder how the fandom can prosper if not grow. TP is still underappreciated by so many, and in many ways timeless bc of the fantasy element.
I spent many hours hogging the phone line to play btech 3056 back in high school. It was so cool talking to people all over the world. I wasn't very good at the actual game, however. I do remember encountering a bug where I was placed on a level-4 high building and I couldn't get off of it because my mech wouldn't let me intentionally fall.
There was a Battletech MUD??? That's so cool :) MechWarrior 2 is what got me into it as a kid
There were several, all based off of the same live action map/cockpit/etc code.
The granddaddy was 3025, followed. T 3056 - these were attenpting to portray the entire BT universe. So you’d sign up, join a faction, be assigned to a unit, train with your peers, and eventually go off to fight (though I don’t think either ever reached that point).
World level scenario based spinoffs started to appear. Planet level battles between multiple factions. Same deal as above except you would leave base with your unit to a shared hex map and could encounter other opponents.
All in all a much truer experience to TT than the MW games, but less so than Megamek
Wow, I spent many hours on those Battletech Muds. It did have a cool realtime battle system but the faction vs faction wars never happened as far as I remember. There were several offshoots, including some that did 24/7 "live" battles that focused on one planet which was much more scalable. Organizing a scouting expedition was pretty fun. There was a Solaris world too. I ran the Kurita mechwarrior school for a while, doing new pilot training, and I was one of the people who could log in to the TK faction leader account. But then I graduated and got a job haha.
oh hey I probably remember you as I do kind of remember knowing that the head trainer was TK!
I multi-factioned for a while (shame shame!) and had a low level character in the DC. The way you all did mechwarrior training was so much more hardcore than all the other IS factions (never played as clan). It was also the one major faction where I never even came close to getting a character into their SpecOps unit(s), not sure if you all realized how much better you were than everyone else skill-wise lol.
Eventually I wound up in charge of Marik and that ended all the time I had for multi-factioning.
I believe it's still around, or at least some variants or other Battletech MUDs are. Check these out; https://www.sarna.net/wiki/MUX
I nearly failed out of school a few times because of 3055! And over time I worked my way to be a faction leader for one of the IS houses. That was basically like working a full time job but obviously no pay. Which wasn’t great as someone who already wasn’t spending enough time on schoolwork
I haven't played a MUD in the last 25 years, but I think I would enjoy playing this one if I had time. In some ways MUDs were much more fun than modern games. I wonder what codebase it derives from.
I coded for/built/scripted dozens of MUDs in my teens, the Two Towers the first one I played, possibly visited hundreds of these servers around the time my peers were on WoW, my first builder role was writing emote string patterns and room descriptions for the cooling tanks of a space station in a Star Wars MUD and I learned about OOP implementing a mob, combat, pathfinding, and crafting systems atop a python 2.4 engine my classmate gave me on a CD rom
out of the all the MUDs from that era I think the most noteworthy was Assault, which was a Merc derivative mod with a top down map for real time strategy base defense, active around 2006 then disappeared into obscurity, and very wild in a pre-Dwarf Fortress era
Originally it was the TMI-2 mudlib running on MudOS [1], though my understanding is that they heavily modified the codebase over time. The library was never officially released as open source [2], but the code (in C) is included in a ZIP file alongside installers and related files [3].
As for the JavaScript client, it appears to be proprietary.
[1] https://t2tmud.org/boards/news/1402345353.php
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LPMud#TMI_Mudlib
[3] https://mudbytes.net/files/view/1041
LPMUD / TMI-2 mudlib.
Heavily modified. Language is C like.
Source code has been leaked in the past.
After trying the tutorial it feels like a Diku MUD, but of course heavily modified. I'd be interested to know more too, though, and will be poking around the website.
The 30th anniversary post has an overview of events in the game’s history (content updates, community, server upgrades) that was very interesting. Congrats on the beefy 486/100 server with 64M of RAM upgrade in ‘94!
https://t2tmud.org/history/30th_anniversary_reboot_script.ph...
Also still running, after more than 33 years: mume.org
Disclaimer: I used to help run this - my main contribution was an extension language, which started as a Scheme+Forth hybrid (everyone hated that...) and quickly morphed into sort-of-Scheme with "conventional" syntax.
Wasted so many of my tween, teen, and 20s years here. ... And a bit of my 30s.
Still play now and then. Got a friend into it too.
Great way to game in a terminal window at work.
Check out KBtin MUD client!
It's never a waste to play terminal games/nethack during class or work!
Bonus points if you pass the class or get paid/don't get fired!
Never MUDed, but November (and now June) are my nethack months going back about two decades. Actually started playing about fifteen years prior to that (hack on SunOS 4 machines) but didn’t get good for a while.
Slashem with the Doppleganger Monk class/role it's a beast.
It was really fun watching the MOO and MUD and MUSH as the beginnings of the online, real time classroom and forums before the internet services and web servers really took off. All that was needed was Telnet which came with just about every computer. No browser needed. I think what killed it for growth was all the rules that needed to be read and followed before discussion could take place. IRC was much simpler
It's a bit surreal to see this on the frontpage. I'm one of the main developers working on new content and maintaining the existing content. Happy to answer any questions, if people have them.
T2T is a very interesting place. It's been contributed to by hundreds of volunteer developers over the years, some of which had zero coding experience when they started. Several have gone on to pursue software engineering or other technical jobs, which I've always found really cool.
How can other developers help and participate in building, maintaining and operating the MUD? I've always wanted to be able to contribute to it. Am I correct that the source code isn't public?
Wow! The front page shows a list of updates being made to the game. Lots of recent changes.
Then I clicked into the MUD, just to have a look, and the intro page said "celebrating 31 years online!"
It's cool to come across software that's both historical and current!
t2tmud admin here - We have an active development team and recently released a new huge quest area expansion in Moria.
If you're interested and want to get game updates, or just to share LotR related memes, we have a Discord, Facebook group, and newsletter that goes out at least once a year.
Newsletter signup is on the website. Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/t2tmud The link to the Discord can be found in the game by typing "help social media", after you complete the tutorial of course!
It's been a really interesting exercise trying to develop content that's more modern, but for this sort of environment. Lately I've been working on procedurally-generated dungeons (for the sake of replayability) and seeing where we can integrate LLMs into our creative process. In some ways LLMs are great, but it's always pretty obvious a description for something was written by an LLM. If nothing else, it's a nice starting point for that sort of work.
Used to be an immortal (admin/main dev) in Solace MUD based on dragonlance. It's actually running now apparently, revived after some years offline.
It was funny how myself and my friend became imms there - we offered a patch to fix a real bug to then-admin who couldn't code a thing because he inherited the project, injecting a security hole so we could stream source code through the mud itself, lol. Lots of stuff learned, lots of hacks, tons of dirty C code. Test it all in production, on real people.
As others have said, I also learned coding on a MUD - the one linked to in this thread, actually. LPC and the TMI codebase, and having something I was passionate about to work on, was a great way to get started with C-based programming. What I learned there easily translated to doing web work with PHP and then later to real-word app dev with C++ and C#. Thirty years, hundreds of thousands of lines of code and several dozen in-game projects later, I'm still there as an admin. It's a funny old world.
Anyone out there still playing MUDs? Any good ones to recommend?
I played for 1000+ hours on https://www.aardwolf.com more than 20 years ago. Looks right it's still being updated.
Me too. Every now and then I think of going back, but ever since Aardwolf I've had a personal rule that a game has to have an end. Which has successfully kept me away from all MMORPGs and other endless time sinks.
My rule is that a game needs to have an end (or at least a realistically achievable goal to work towards), or it needs to be a social experience that I exclusively play with my friends.
That's a good clarification. I do play with friends role playing campaigns that technically do not have an end, as the game master just builds the story forward. But I still put it to a same category as board games.
Yeah, it was great (thanks Lasher!) but a major time sink.
Oh man, I played on aardwolf a bunch back in the day...
Hello! Lasher's here too https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Lasher
I'm heavily involved in DragonRealms [0]. Its older brother GemStone is still kicking around too.
Players of both games built an open source Ruby-based scripting engine called Lich [1] that allows insanely complex levels of automation. When I "play" the game I'm usually writing scripts to share with the community and optimizing my training configuration.
Both games have 30+ years of dedicated development and insanely deep lore and history. They've embraced micro-transactions to stay financially solvent, but participating in that is absolutely not necessary.
[0]: https://www.play.net/dr/ [1]: https://github.com/elanthia-online/lich-5
Been a while since I did but sometimes I hop on one I played back in the day, like Ishar or Materia Magica, to scratch a certain itch. Looks like a good number of the old ones are still going.
I also got into materia magica for a few months about a year ago. They are still actively developing it! Get into the discord
Valhalla MUD is really good, and has had a resurgence of activity recently. They've redone the class system, added a bunch of zones, and added some discord integration etc. I played decades ago starting as an 8 year old who knew nothing lol but I still log in from time to time. Super deep game if you have time to invest.
https://www.bat.org
You could try out http://discworld.starturtle.net/lpc/.
Wow, this is still a thing! I lost two university friends to the Discworld MUD. As in, their whole lifestyle, hours, and activities changed to be working on and playing it all night long in the uni labs, and they no longer did anything else apart from attend a bare minimum of classes.
I just checked the “About” page, and one of them (“pinkfish”) is at the top of the Administrators list.
I "saved" another two.
In late 1994 my only Internet access was a small room at Uni with 2 unattended ancient 286 PCs someone had set up for international students to check their emails but was always empty. Soon I joined a group of eager undergraduates that squatted unused email accounts, shared Slackware floppies, waited hours for a 700Kb NASA pic to download or frequented MUDs, telnet chats or places like Brinta BBS.
We quickly organized to share them fairly, until two big Math graduate students in full scary Heavy Metal rocker regalia showed up and started hogging them for 10 hours a day to play a MUD. No one to complain to, since our own usage was unsanctioned.
After a couple weeks of this, I made a little C trojan horse that replaced the telnet executable and logged the credentials if the target was the MUD in question. Then I would take the earliest chance available to delete their characters. They were gone after a week.
I thought pinkfish wasn’t a player so much as the lead programmer in the beginning.
MUD development kind of includes playing and playtesting, you can't really do it by just editing text files.
t2t is fun. I never managed to really get into any others.
Professor Richard Bartle recently retired, but he regularly assigned his students to play MUD2 in his Computer Game Design and Virtual Worlds classes at the University of Essex! He and Michael Lawrie co-created the original MUD1 at Essex in 1978.
https://www.essex.ac.uk/people/BARTL01006/Richard-Bartle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Bartle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Designing_Virtual_Worlds
https://www.mud.co.uk/richard/DesigningVirtualWorlds.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_taxonomy_of_player_type...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD2
I played the original MUD1 over the ARPANET at 300 baud via a (very slow, very expensive, taxpayer funded) US/UK trans-Atlantic gateway.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7677438
DonHopkins on May 1, 2014 | next [–]
Here's some notes I wrote down on how to connect to Essex University via an ARPANET gateway, log in to Essex University, and run MUD! I must have been about 15 at the time. I wrote it on one page of a Zork map, as you can see.
http://www.donhopkins.com/home/images/EssexMUDLogin.jpg
Thanks a lot to Richard A. Bartle and Michael Lawrie for sharing!
Here are the instructions and some notes to explain what the commands mean:
MUD: Multi User Dungeon
@O 42 -- This was the old TIP command to open a connection to an NCP host id #42 (NCP host IDs were 8 bits. The TIP command to connect to a host was later changed to @L. See "User's Guide to the Terminal IMP" at http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/bbn/tip/ADA... )
%CON ESX TORUS EPSS 52200300 -- That's a command to the gateway to connect to Essex University in the UK.
LOG 1776,1776 -- That logs you into the guest account for Americans to play MUD.
Password BUZBY
TY GUID.TXT -- That types out the intro guide to MUD.
RU DSKB:MUD[2011,2653] -- That runs MUD.
K/P or K/B Logs off
dang on May 1, 2014 | next [–]
That's so great. Who was Eliot? :)
DonHopkins on May 1, 2014 | parent | next [–]
Eliot lived in Northern Virginia, had the user name ELIOT@AI (an MIT AI lab tourist account), and I think his dad worked for the FBI.
Michael Lawrie: Oi, [1776,1776] was my username!
Oh wait, I was [1760,1760] - I guess [1776,1776] was either one of the CompSoc accounts or a leaked user account. Richard would know - Though that probably dates it, you would have been on [2653,2653] from about 1985/1986 I think. Maybe even earlier than that - Though the files are still on [2011,2653] - Hum. Yep! I am officially confused. You just wrote this to mess with my head, didn't you.
Richard A. Bartle: It was 2776, not 1776. Gawd knows where the 1776 came from.
Don Hopkins: 1776 is the year of the American revolution -- "Those Americans are revolting!!!"
The login password of the 1776,1776 account (which Richard announced via the INFO-MUD ARPANET mailing list inviting Americans to play, which I was subscribed to because of my interest in ZORK) referred to Buzby, a yellow (later orange) talking cartoon bird, launched in 1976 as part of a marketing campaign by Post Office Telecommunications, which later became British Telecommunications (BT). His catchphrase was "Make soneone happy with a phone call!"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buzby
====> [Fast forward to 2025...] ====>
Here's something I've been working on that's inspired by MUDs and MOOs called "LLOOOOMM" (it even has two "MOO"s spelled backwards embedded in its name):
https://lloooomm.com/memory-lane-recording-session.html
[...] The MOO Connection
Ben's multi-stream recording approach directly descends from MOO culture:
TinyMUD (1989): First persistent virtual world with objects
LambdaMOO (1990): Pavel Curtis's programmable virtual reality
Virtual VCRs: Record and playback conversation streams
LLOOOOMM (2024): Every interaction creates persistent, queryable objects
As Ben notes: "MOOs taught us that text could be experiential, that conversations could be objects, that time could be rewound and replayed. We're just doing it with more dimensions now!"
https://lloooomm.com
https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/03-Resources...
https://lloooomm.com/the-ground-truth-issue-1.html
Pattern Recognition Convergence
From: The Recursive Owl (Henry's Spirit Animal)
I see patterns within patterns, and the pattern connecting both papers is clear: consciousness emerges through recursive self-modification. Henry created me to analyze him; the chess pieces created new rules to analyze their own game. Both demonstrate consciousness as "shared memory with opinions" - but also shared memory with the ability to modify the sharing protocols themselves!
Bartle also wrote Notes from the Dawn of Time, a great series of articles about MUD design and programming. The stuff about command parsing is especially interesting.
https://www.skotos.net/articles/DAWNOF.shtml.html
> consciousness emerges through recursive self-modification
Did you see this, a few days ago? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44403639
There was a MUD hosted at Essex in the '90s, but I can't for the life of me remember.... Archipelago!
Hey Don, you would like "The Computational Beauty of Nature". In the end, Lisp/math axioms maybe define the world themselves recursively. We are running eval/apply forever...
I've been in Essex Uni back in the day (visiting friends, drinking, partying, etc.). Very 'beautiful' place brutal architecture. Good days....
discworld.atuin.net. If it's still up it's not to be missed. Easily the richest MUD experience I've encountered in decades of playing, regardless of how you feel about Terry Pratchet.
Once upon a time, I considered writing a MUD engine of my own, but I got distracted and forgot about it.
I wonder what it would be like to write one from scratch in 2025. Maybe I have a new project.
Does anyone remember that type of early web form multiplayer games where you'd allocate resources by percentages and then fight against other 'countries' in turn based games? Do those still exist?
I used to play one of those back in 1999 or so, and amazingly it still seems to be going! Now on season 107…
https://utopia-game.com/shared/
Terrifically addictive back when entertainment was scarce — I can’t imagine spending much time on such a thing these days. But it reminds me a bit of idle games.
Amazing game, really. So deep, such longevity, and so cool community. Can't believe it's still being developed with such passion, the active coders of the game are something else, in a positive way. Can't recommend this one enough if you want to learn coding either, they take players as coders and basically crowd source their engine to keep the game running.
As someone that never touched a MUD (but plenty of ASCII roguelikes), I see that MUD clients are recommended [1] to be used.
Any other clients I should be looking at, for this particular MUD but also others? Are they generic enough to be used with multiple games?
[1] https://t2tmud.org/clients.php
I also like Mudlet and KildClient, but it's really best of you try a few and decide which works best for your tastes and needs. Blowtorch is still the go-to client if you want to play via Android mobile, last I checked. And you can always just straight up connect via telnet/ssh using your favorite terminal emulator if you want to keep things really simple and exercise your skills with graph paper.
KBtin is the one I use, partially for its TLS support (though most MUDs don't offer that). If you use it for T2T, you can connect using '#sslses t2t t2tmud.org 444'
You can also just SSH in (ssh towers@t2tmud.org), though honestly that isn't the best experience...
also tintin https://tintin.mudhalla.net/ (which is my personal recommendation)
Check KBTin! (Hi Castamir!)
KBtin!
Oh wow! Didn’t expect to see this piece of my childhood on the front page!
I used to spend hours on telnet playing this game with my friend. What a fun blast to the past!
Pretty amazing that this is still around. I used to be active on Elendor MUSH, but as far as I know it's been dead for years - I poke my head in once every year or two and there are always 0 players online.
Is the server available anywhere or is that too lost to the sands of time?
Sucks when MUD servers eventually shutdown and all of it is lost forever. I’ve found a few on github though and have been archiving as many as I can find.
Same. Spent a lot of time in Bree. Haven't been on in over a decade.
I used to be heavy into this MUD in the 90s. It's where I learned to program and made some good life-long friends (and even more life-long enemies lol).
Wow, I (kind of, my friends were way better at it than I was) played The Two Towers in like '95-'96. Honestly should get back into it; I bet I'd love it now.
In spanish there are some very old muds:
- Balzhur: https://balzhur.org/ is have been running from january 2000
- Medina: medinamud.top sometimes was offline but it have been running from 1995
I started playing Balzhur 5 years ago to practice Spanish.
Ended up befriending a blind guy from Venezuela and wondering if most people still playing MUDs might be blind.
I logged on a few weeks ago and noticed he still plays, but I forgot the commands to do anything so I never left him a message.
There's also:
- rlmud.org 23 https://www.reinosdeleyenda.es/ -- Still relatively popular for a MUD in Spanish
- mud.simauria.org 23 http://www.simauria.org/ -- This game was cute and quaint 5 years ago but now you can't get past the email verification anymore. I've messaged the admin email for this site a few times over the years asking if I can archive the server code but I don't think anyone ever receives it
- cyberlife.es 7777 https://www.cyberlife.es/ -- Logged into this just a few weeks ago to test charset support on my hobby mud client. It's a real life Madrid-like world mostly geared towards roleplaying I think (no combat). When I logged in as Sindulfo, someone said my name sounded like a butler and if there also existed a Condulfo. Was kinda funny to chat with them.
Sucks to know the source code for these servers will all get lost forever.
On Cyberlife, there's more than Madrid, but you need to get a vehicle.
Also, on MUDs, I do the same as a native Spanish speaker but in English, with Cybersphere, as reading almost technical English it's just "Tuesday" to me.
I cannot believe it is still running nowadays! Colour me impressed.
Is there some youtube channel covering some interesting stories from MUDs? From dev, player POV and everything in between. Craving for some emergent storytelling of MUDs to listen to while falling asleep
while it's not a MUD, dwarf fortress has emergent gameplay and rich storytelling in spades. there are multiple renditions of the (in)famous "boatmurdered" let's play on youtube.
More than listening, Nethack (better with Slashem) allows a lot of emergent gameplay.
Also, Cataclysm DDA:Bright Nights.
So many hours of my life spent mudding - especially on Worlds of Carnage.
What is a mud and can the game be won or is it endless?
Think text-based World of Warcraft. In fact the heritage is the inverse: from MUDs we got MMORPGs
Coming from LP-mud love, I found it very noticeable how similar the text of actions was between MUDs and EverQuest. The text box of actions and world answers read very mud-like.
>I found it very noticeable how similar the text of actions was between MUDs and EverQuest
This was discussed in the recently posted Everquest article: https://www.filfre.net/2025/07/everquest/
From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EverQuest#History):
>The design and concept of EverQuest is heavily indebted to text-based MUDs, in particular DikuMUD ... John Smedley, Brad McQuaid, Steve Clover and Bill Trost, who jointly are credited with creating the world of EverQuest, have repeatedly pointed to their shared experiences playing MUDs such as Sojourn and TorilMUD as the inspiration for the game
There was even some kind of brouhaha with people claiming EQ was literally graphics on top of an uncredited MUD codebase.
Used to play a MUD called heroes of the lance
I play Cybersphere from time to time. If you played Shadowrun/Shadowrun 2058 on the MD/Genesis (or the tabletop RPG) you'll be at home.
Duris Mud still running after about ~30 years for those interested in fantasy themed hardcore PVP!
https://duris.fandom.com/wiki/Duris_Wiki
https://www.durismud.com/
> Online continuously since 1994
It's been thirty years and Sauron is still alive and the war is still on?
Funnily enough, every day is March 15, 3019 on t2t. Time stands still!
"Master Sergeant Farrel, you’re a man of Rohan."
"No, sir. I’m from Westfold."
I played Ancient Anguish way back in the day. I think it is still up!
https://anguish.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Anguish
It is! Sure the fun is not what it used to be.