Funnily enough I took up trying to develop a new MUD engine from scratch in Haskell, with an embedded Lua interpreter for scripting as well.

https://github.com/agentultra/bakamud

And I often stream working on it at https://twitch.tv/agentultra

MUDs are great! Achea is another great one.

Happy gaming folks.

absolutely agreed.

warning to those just trying them out now though : a lot of MUDs have gone the unfortunate route of having premium shops and other MMO pitfalls.

I don't think Aardwolf does -- not positive. I think Achaea and some of the other big ones do though.

I recommend Discworld. https://discworld.starturtle.net/lpc/

I had such a magical experience with the Realms of Despair MUD from the age of 16 up to around 24. That's where I learned most of my programming, and made friends I talk to every day even now, twenty years later. MUDs take some getting into, but they really are fantastic.