The case for MUDs in modern times

Building a MUD engine is quite an endeavour in itself. Let alone the game! A good way to test your skills in networking, parsing, databases, and data structures.

I’ve been chipping away at one on my stream using Haskell. Experimenting with Lua integration, parsing, networking, STM and concurrency… currently hacking on Entity Component Systems and unboxed vectors and all kinds of stuff.

Thing is you can start small. Start with a chat server. Add character registration. Add a mob. Add some commands to interact with the mob. Just keep adding things on.

There’s a community for mud coders too. There are dozens of us.

https://mudcoders.com/

Between this and the previous MUD post about LLM MUDs I'd love to see a comeback.

A few months ago I tried out my old (1999-2004) hang, wocmud.org

Some of the quests were still sometimes broken. auto attacking mobs were still unfairly strong. But, there were a couple people more than willing to help me get my gear back from my corpse. They helped me remember the areas, quests, syntax, etc that I had BURNED into my memory when I was 14. We chatted and got caught up in the 20 years of updates. Oh, and I didn't get banned for being out-of-character. overall a 10/10 nostalgic experience

I started working on my own with Evennia and claude. I was hoping to hook up an LLM for MOBs but had to put it down when life got busy again.

I learned to touch-type by accident as a kid playing MUDs—no time to look at your hands while you’re under attack! I made friends, discovered things about myself, and even got brought on to start writing room descriptions. Totally formative for me in so many ways.

I logged back on a year or two ago, now in my late thirties, and the sense of community and a critical mass of others who were invested in the game and eager to have me join just wasn’t there. It’s a shame because I agree MUDs have so much unique value to offer. Maybe it’s too much to hope for their return to former glory but I hope at least some flavor of them can rise again as a new form of mostly text oriented multiplayer game.

If anyone is interested, I launched a new mud client in 2026:

https://runemud.com

I had been working on it for a couple years, using it myself. I finally released it recently. A number of users are contributing feature requests, testing, etc on the discord as well.

People start talking to llms all day, suddenly text based games are interesting again...

I miss MUDs. My old MUD went through a rename, a fork, and what have you --- but it's limping on, though with few playing it. The cost of hosting these things are so cheap today that you can just let it sit and mind its own business.

Back in the 90s you needed a permanent internet connection (rare!) and fast enough to handle all the usually uncompressed text, so it had to be a - shocker - T1 or better. Then you needed a server.

My old MUD has a discord; turns out a lot of the people I knew 25 years ago were there and remembered the my nick if not a little about myself back then. That was a fun nostalgia trip.

MUDs will eventually see a resurgence, I think. Mobiles with little language models to give flavour text and quests, plus a little tool calling language behind it to make it happen? I can see it working; in fact, I might just myself...

I learned to code on an LP MUD back in the late 90s. It was a fun experience.

I did all my work in the MUD interface using ED. I didn't realize other people wrote their code offline and sh'd in to upload it. I got very good at writing and editing code on the command line.

Man, I hadn't made the connection between my historical MUD experience (shout out Dark and Shattered Lands!) and my relative comfort in TUIs despite my somewhat non-technical background. My son is turning 7 this year and I'd love to get him into something like DSL....it was such a valuable experience for me across a variety of aspects -- obviously reading/typing certainly, but also strategy & problem solving, math, imagination, empathy/social interaction....What an incredible gift it was to have grown up in a time when graphics were worse and our brains weren't completely hacked yet.

MUDs are really cool, but for anyone looking for a narrative fantasy experience, my first recommendation is going to be The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind, but more specifically the mod scene around that game as well as the OpenMW replacement game engine.

Bethesda’s game was a gem that was full of rich lore, plenty of readying, and very flexible RPG systems (although being a magical glass cannon does tend to be the best build). However, it was also a relatively flawed game (which Bethesda game isn’t?) that the community has expanded and fixed into a juggernaut.

I recommend picking up a mod pack from modding-openmw.com and checking it out. Tamriel Rebuilt is particularly impressive: fans have added a massive bank of new maps, quests, etc.

Something cool about the OpenMW engine is that it supports scripting that exceeds the original engine so that new quests are more rich and dynamic than original ones in the game. They are even starting to expand into custom spell effects (as the original game had a rigid list of spell effects that wasn’t malleable).

Takes me back to the old days, using telnet to play The Marches on the UCSD computers from my apartment dial-up. Any of the other peerage around here?

Question to you all, muds tends to have a unix style interface, has anyone done a replacement for this uiux that fits … the class of 2019 first year computer science student that doesn’t understand files and needs a different uiux.

I played around a bunch on the discworld MUD around thirty years back, for a few years. I’m not sure I even remember my username I had. I know I don’t remember the password. I should pop in sometime.

Personally I think MUDs are a great platform for the agent/human coordination things that everyone's trying to build.

> You can read more about my new MUD engine project, Pinwheel, here on my blog.

Sadly I can't, both links redirect to the same page :P

Yes! Check out wafertown.com :)

I three MUDs in one as a channel mode for my IRCD the other month: https://github.com/float64co/psyrcd/blob/master/plugins/mud....

I do think MUD's really have a lot of opportunity to be interesting/fun buildable worlds. That they can be delightful and instructive. Especially with LLMs, the sitting there hand crafting zone after zone after zone forever and ever: that part can take more of a backseat (even though it's also some of the best part).

There's a MUD inside it, but the late.sh ssh-able bbs with it's door games that got submitted 2 days ago is incredible. It's such a wonderful little text world there. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49001127 https://late.sh/

I'd be keen for a MUD accessed via WhatsApp.

I once made a web-based MUD game. The response in Korea was surprisingly low. I concluded that MUD games weren't popular in my country, and the people who actually played them were mostly in their 40s and 50s, while general consumers preferred GUI.

These days, I sometimes think about whether I could make a MUD game that interacts with AI, but I wonder if it would appeal to a generation that has no memory of MUD games

But now comes the real question - will the MUDs be programmed in something sane? The last MUD/MUCK I was on was done in RPN-style code. That was a headache to code various plugins and options.

One part of MUD history that rarely gets told in English: the Chinese game industry basically started there. In the mid 90s Chinese students overseas ran wuxia MUDs like Xiakexing (侠客行, 1995), all text, built on the LPMud family.

Wuxia fit text games perfectly because every player already had the whole world in their head from Jin Yong novels, so zero graphics needed. A lot of the people who built the first Chinese online games came out of those communities.

King of Kings (万王之王, 1999), usually counted as the first Chinese graphical MMORPG, was a Taiwanese MUD team putting a graphical client on their existing game.

Can't you have multiple users in a dungeon in non text based games? See WoW and RuneScape.

Roguelikes have evolved from being text based long ago, so I don't see why MUDs have to be.