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.

You could try out http://discworld.starturtle.net/lpc/.

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.

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.

t2t is fun. I never managed to really get into any others.

I played for 1000+ hours on https://www.aardwolf.com more than 20 years ago. Looks right it's still being updated.

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!

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

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.

LPMUD / TMI-2 mudlib.

Heavily modified. Language is C like.

Source code has been leaked in the past.

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

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

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.

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.

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!

There was a Battletech MUD??? That's so cool :) MechWarrior 2 is what got me into it as a kid

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

Think text-based World of Warcraft. In fact the heritage is the inverse: from MUDs we got MMORPGs

I cannot believe it is still running nowadays! Colour me impressed.

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.

It is! Sure the fun is not what it used to be.

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.

Funnily enough, every day is March 15, 3019 on t2t. Time stands still!

A persistent online world with an always progressing historical timeline would be a really interesting concept to explore. Complicated though, as for example you don't really want new players to join when the world is on fire (unless that is your setting).

Some MMORPGs handle this alright (although tbh I only really know FFXIV at this point), where every player goes through their own timeline of sorts - you are The Warrior of Light, and as you progress through the story, you're pivotal in some great events like the defeat of the big bad or preventing the world from ending. That kinda thing. But the world is persistent, so it's only you that unlocks new areas and, in some cases, only you see some changes in the world or some NPCs. It's mostly through what NPCs tell you though.

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.

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?

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

also tintin https://tintin.mudhalla.net/ (which is my personal recommendation)

KBtin!

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...

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?

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.