Play Aardwolf MUD

I used to play Aardwolf almost 27 years ago when its address was wolf.mudservices.com 4000.

It was marvelous, and I have my many magical multiplayer moments with MUD which I wasn’t able to experience with MMORPGs or other modern multiplayer games. They are a lot of fun too, but MUD was something else.

I got banned from Aardwolf in early 2000’s because my friend and I couldn’t prove that we were separate individuals connecting from the same modem. They had asked us to count simultaneously in different orders and we had failed the test. We went back to Counter-Strike.

Anyone from Solace MUD here?

I was raised on the internet and spent so much time playing MUDs which then got me to want to create my own and learn to code. I played Abandoned Reality http://abandoned.org/ and it was such an amazing experience learning to write and play pretend. My wife and I met playing Abandoned Reality and turned out only lived 45 minutes away from each other.

I hope a few people try it out and get hooked because of your post.

I got into programming through MUDs, have the fondest memories of those times and deeply appreciate their role in my life. I ran up a giant AOL bill playing Dragon's Gate that I had to work off by doing data entry that helped me understand the basics of computing, and then using that knowledge to create so many scripts and highlights in Rapscallion MUD client. After that, I realized I could make more things and never stopped. What a great time. I remember being online when the MUD I played reached their maximum number of concurrent players - 340 - and thinking that the world was so big. Crazy to think about online gaming today.

Ah I remember playing this one. My first MUD/MUSH was Elendor. Looks like it went down in the last year or so. RIP

Aardwolf was fun, though I remember my big gripe was that it had a bunch of weird little themed zones like the Star Trek and Wizard of Oz ones that felt a little hokey to have in there. These days it wins solely by virtue of being one of the few that's still populated and free.

When I tried to go back to the Simultronics ones (Gemstone IV and Dragon Realms), not only was it a ghost town, which made random interactions almost stressful because you feel like two people walking past each other in a ghost town, but they have double, triple, and quadrupled down on squeezing their whales for every cent. A lot of people playing that game are paying $50-100 a month or more, and even normal players have to cough up more than the base $15 a month subscription if they want more than 1 character (!!!). Looks like their website has been stripped of all its cool character too. Shame.

These games in their heyday were truly a one of a kind experience. All of the weird online socializing you see people getting on platforms like Discord, but all wrapped up around a fun RPG game that felt so much more flexible and imaginative than other online games at the time.

i was gonna post this 15 hours ago but was sure someone would

warning, this ranking will put the horny muds up top: https://mudstats.com/Browse

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my MUD history goes: in '98 i got into realms of despair, played for years. another mud phase is awarded to trenton for his dbzfe/ff1 muds, both having tilesets if you preferred the pueblo mud client. dbzfe was unique in its real time combat, dodging left a right punch, or parrying it high, or ducking. all timing-based, high adrenaline moments for me

but, the past ~7 years or so, i just log into discworld. i made a very ugly site for it, not mobile friendly. https://badteeth.neocities.org/ not even eyeball friendly

seems i like throwing up pages for _things_. i briefly played a finnish mud: https://icesus.neocities.org/

And be sure to check out MUME (Multi Users in Middle Earth) as well! It has a graphical map that shows your location while you navigate the world of Middle Earth and join the epic battle (PK) between the free peoples of Arda and Sauron's minions.

https://mume.org/

Here's a (dramatized) YouTube video of a few epic battles:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-Ax1MZlDoE

And here's a stream of us fighting one of the bigger bosses in the game (a huge spider in Mirkwood):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHnqKQdLzoc

Good memories! Played this back in the early 00's on a 12" iBook often far too late into the college nights. This was before their custom client, so everyone used something different. I remember using TinyFugue, it worked well on Mac OS X at least. MUDs are just text, and tinyfugue must have had something which made allowed for easy capture and scripting because I did a TON of that. Sure, had to learn "regular expressions", but that was fun too!

There was some random phoenix which used to spawn somewhere. You couldn't teleport to it, but you could teleport near it, and I somehow scripted up a seek and destroy phoenix button. Can't recall why, it dropped something useful but not that useful, so mostly it was just the fun of watching the rooms zoom by (textually) and the joy of seeing a code creation work, insignificant as it was.

Thanks, Lasher, for keeping it alive all these years. I still remember Aardwolf fondly. And I still love regex.

Still logging in on occasion in Midnight Sun, I am on the younger side (breaching my thirties soon) and my mother played introduced me at a very young age to play alongside her and to help guide and teach the game (and spelling, and critical thinking, and the digital world) that she had played years before I was born. Many of her longest friends that she still talks with daily she met through MS2 and the various other MUDs such as Aardwolf.

MUDs are truly wonderful, and I hope they have a resurgence in some form soon.

https://midnightsun2.org/

Just wanted to remind everyone of the wonderful world of MUDs

if you're into MUD history, I ported the latest source I could find from SillyMUD to work on modern systems: https://github.com/jerrysievert/sillymud

it was quite a bit of fun, and the 3rd or 4th MUD I worked on.

MUDs are what got me into serious programming (my first ~100k lines of C code), dropping from college (turned out great for me) and making friends for life. Owe so much to them.

I grew up on Aardwolf. It basically taught me to touch type. Thank you for reminding me of its existence <3

There was a MUD I read a printout of the textile manual for when I was a kid (didn’t have a computer). It explained how to create mobs and zones, and one of the example characters they used repeatedly was a knight or paladin called Geoffrey. I think it also introduced me to kobolds.

I’d love to find it again and reread it.

I thought it was called Legends but that hasn’t turned up the same thing.

I used to play Aardwolf too, great memories. I think I got to 6x remort before going on hiatus. I'd be tempted to return, except I decided a couple of decades ago that no more games that don't have an end.

My first MUD was Phoenix. At some point they did a big update that forced all players to restart from level 1, and subsequently lost their player base and died. I'm sure I learned something from that debacle.

I played WoTMUD for years. It is a Wheel-of-Time themed PVP-focused MUD. To this day, I check it out every Christmas because the holiday events were a special moment of my childhood.

I used to play MUDs in my youth - first PaderMUD/Xyllomer, then GEAS. I could already feel that the genre was declining past 2000. With less time on my hand there was a point I'd have to retire anyway, but horrible code changes made by random hobbyists put in charge of both MUDs also contributed to the feeling I had to quit sooner rather than later. Both MUDs also tampered (aka nerfed/ruined/changed) the way how 'who' works (find out who else was currently playing; GEAS specifically first took away the ability to find out who was playing at all whatsoever at the same time, thanks to PO Allalltar becoming the new surrogate admin after the original admin-team was mostly gone, and then did a partial restoration after players complained but not a full restoration - but in fairness, if it would not have been that nerf it would have been any other game-breaking zero-discussed code change by whoever was suddenly the new head admin in town).

Nonetheless I encourage people to keep the genre alive. MUDs probably peaked in the 1990s.

I learned Perl scripting client for one MUD back in 2000, and that led me to web development.

Just a month ago, I remembered one MUD I've been trying out since 2003. And found that it is still online, and my password still works. Very weird feeling to log in to something 22 years later. It was pretty advanced at the time, with 256 color support, IPv6, advanced encoding support, etc. https://cryosphere.org/

Old Aardwolfers gang, rise up. Loved that game.

I had a crappy computer with crappy internet back in the day. I didn't play Aardwolf, but I played another mud called Alter Aeon. I still have fond memory of it and check back in every few years.

How long before we see nostalgic posts about WoW and Everquest?

This looks like an app? Are there web-based MUDs (clients)?

EDIT: Thanks, I see the Web Client link now (derp).

MUDs were the fentanyl of university students :D

I played Aardwolf briefly but I mostly stuck to a nightmare/LP MUD that is still around but essentially empty. I learned to code (which ended up being a gateway to C/C++), grief, and be compassionate to new players.

See also http://discworld.starturtle.net/

I got back to briefly [1] playing Aardwolf this (2025) summer. It's still VERY good!

[1] ~50 lvls on my paladin char.

check out Forsaken Lands: https://wiki.theforsakenlands.com/

Ah, MUD, so many memories. In university I’ve spend unhealthy amount of time on the local MUD server.

I've had a ton of fun playing Aardwolf!

precisely enthralled LLM would help with such MUDs a lot, providing it wouldn't go off the script...

Lasher is here too.

Still waiting on a new release of TinyFugue…

My friends and I all cut our teeth on https://last-outpost.com 30 years ago now. It’s crazy how reliable such an old game is. I was an absolute slacker in school, but had an inexplicably high reading level which I attribute to “LO” and Magic: the Gathering. My 7-year old son really got a kick out of playing it, and it’s a great way to teach reading comprehension to young ones.

Epic training for reading output tokens.

I love MUDs, they got me real experience coding and typing when I was 12 years old and I never stopped. I actually maintain the MUD I played as a kid now (up since 1992!) though we have very few players these days.

I have been (extremely slowly) migrating the Diku codebase to Swift, I hope to complete that and ship it this way someday (I've been too scared to ship these changes, though they work locally just fine). Maybe when I retire!

I just spent 10 minutes being told that the name I chose was not usable. Am I being pranked, is this the whole game?

What happens if I start the game and say WOLFENSTEIN?