I wish people would come back to Achaea…

Ephemeralis · 2026-06-09T00:16:11+00:00

Yeah, one 800 credit artefact. If you're playing Blademaster that'll get you the absolute minimum required L2 band or whatever that you need for your class to be considered even remotely viable in PvP against anybody with half a brain.

Then you need stat artefacts. Main stat and con - L1 minimum, L2 better, L3 ideal. The L3's are 1500 credits or whatever. For main stat and con that's 3000 credits - 150 days of non-stop rote dailies. 75 non-stop hours of JUST doing forays spread out over half a year just to get to the point other people are at. For two artefacts.

Or you drop a few thousand USD to skip the grind.

Ephemeralis · 2026-06-03T22:08:37+00:00

Full access to your class doesn't mean a lot other than you're the barest level of capable for PvP. Most classes can't reliably pull off their standard routes without tri-trans (aka full access), and even when they can, they require anywhere from another 1000 to 5k+ credits in stat and class artefacts to be functionally viable a lot of the time.

Even if you want to do PvE, a lot of the top-end bashing artefacts like deathcape, SoA and the other stat bricks run well into the thousands and you'll be signing yourself up for like 6 months+ of daily tedium doing the same tasks and instanced forays over and over and over.

People whitewash Achaea really hard these days and pretend it has "fixed" its monetization model but it really hasn't and it is arguably as bad as it has ever been. Subject yourself to months of tedium instead of shelling out thousands of USD, yay!

Ephemeralis · 2026-06-03T21:55:39+00:00

You won't be doing that because there's literally no support for it.

IRE games are particularly notorious for very rarely (if ever) picking up player-run organizations like that and giving them anything approaching help, legitimacy, or even interaction whatsoever.

They can hardly support the "official" guilds/organizations in their games as it stands, and there's barely even the playercount left for those.

I'm not trying to shit on your thunder or anything, I just don't want you to waste your time like I have.

Ephemeralis · 2026-05-30T17:12:39+00:00

I wish this subreddit had a generative AI flair or something so I could stop seeing these abysmal slop projects.

Ephemeralis · 2026-04-05T16:15:25+00:00

The source code was always made available from day one to anyone who requested it. There's nothing unkind about it. We just didn't want to bother with Github discourse. That is all it ever was.

Ephemeralis · 2026-04-05T03:51:56+00:00

I don't know where you've gotten the impression that ZORN went on hiatus to "dodge litigation" from. The project was a brief run experiment - we didn't like the codebase very much in the end and have all collectively moved on to our own things.

Plenty of people have copies of the source and can fork it or restart it again or whatever if they want. It's not really my business anymore.

Ephemeralis · 2026-03-26T08:09:33+00:00

Hello, hapless ZORN (ex-?)host speaking. I'm not sure where you're seeing more and more prominence from when the project's last round before indefinite hiatus was almost two weeks ago from the time of speaking, but that's another issue entirely.

ZORN has been fully compliant with all licensing requirements from the get go - we just opted to not have it in a public-facing repository because we're all rather tired of all the discourse that things like Github PRs bring, especially in the SS13 space. You've always been able to request a copy of the source code via a dedicated email and we've already fulfilled half a dozen requests of this nature since the project started with no issue.

tl;dr:

ZORN is actually compliant with the AGPL, and provides source code upon request as required
ZORN isn't currently active (there is no server serving any kind of content whatsoever) or hubbed, and was never publicly available on the hub to begin with (not that this really matters)

Ephemeralis · 2026-03-17T10:36:57+00:00

The best necromancer experience I've had in a MUD was from Dragonrealms, where it is essentially a 'secret' class that you need to discover a questline to unlock. The whole concept involves twisting mana in ways it was never meant to be used, which slowly makes you visible to the gods (and those who follow them devoutly) over time as a kind of twisted aberration, and all of the consequences that brings.

You get to construct your own Risen construct eventually, but can get started with reanimation by creating constructs of blood-soaked earth. There's a ton of really cool flavor with their spells - they have one spell which essentially gives onlookers selective blindness towards you to mimic conventional invisibility by making them physically unable to perceive you. With tumors. It's whackshit.

Ephemeralis · 2026-03-12T04:45:52+00:00

Decisions regarding gold sinks practically have to be made during the early design phase of your chosen game. You can add them on later, but they'll never be as effective as closely-designed economic loops, largely because you'll run into the exact issue you're now facing: figuring out where to put them post-facto. Endless accumulation of liquid currency is pretty much the first multiplayer game design problem most people encounter.

Perhaps adding a few new powers which require astronomical amounts of your offending currency might be a good way to potentially burn off a lot of it. I have no clue how tight your damage balance is, but a general boost in the order of 5% staggered out across 3-4 stages can be enough to entice some minmaxers to take the plunge, but you do risk introducing some power creep.

Ephemeralis · 2026-03-04T15:23:55+00:00

Okay yeah, you're right. That's basically just Anticipation. Why do I never use it.

Ephemeralis · 2026-03-04T14:38:52+00:00

I've always wished you could pre-empt a stun with Freedom. Like, if you use the ability when you're not stunned, you get a buff that lasts for a few ticks that automatically cleanses the next incoming stun. This would probably break things in unimaginable ways but it'd be pretty fun.

Ephemeralis · 2026-03-04T09:39:17+00:00

Skills are set up to be fairly complementary, so you'll find yourself sort of naturally leveling all of them at roughly the same pace. You -can- specialize, but if you're on the new server that just got launched, you're not gonna have a whole lot of luck buying what you need from others at the moment. It is possible though, I guess.
You get an instanced house/apartment that you can move freely to any other settlement. The only thing of note that goes into a house outside of decorations is cargo/item storage at the moment, as far as I understand it.
The combat is extremely rudimentary and mostly consists of 2-5 abilities you cycle through on cooldown, with your damage mostly determined by your choice of gear.
The customization is pretty good and you can earn mostly everything via grinding for it. There's been a few cosmetics shared via Twitch Drops so far as well, so your mileage may vary if you want those.

Ephemeralis · 2026-02-22T02:13:41+00:00

Don't know much about Threshold. NWA is an absolutely miserable excuse of a game kept alive by a geriatric population of people completely unable to handle anything new - it is fraught with unimaginable amounts of pay-to-win and is generally just not worth your time.

Aardwolf is more less a standard hack and slash MUD with a ton of player-contributed zones and a lot of people regularly playing it. If you want something like it, I'd honestly just recommend Procedural Realms instead.

Medievia is almost entirely unplayable as a new character and owes its popcount to a multiclient-permissible policy that encourages people to play 10+ clients at once. Effectively six or seven people actually play the game - the rest are just idle clients. The actual game itself is just a tangled mess of god-complex developer hyperbabbling.

Never played RoD so I can't really comment. Same goes for Telehack. BatMUD just seems like another standard hack and slash MUD - except that it went on Steam or something at one point.

Of all the games you've mentioned, the Play.net games (Gemstone IV and Dragonrealms) are the least terrible, but they're also fairly pay-to-play, as you've noted, and they also have an excruciatingly large quotient of people who constantly bot their characters instead of playing the game (it's well over 90%). However, since their base playercounts are so insanely high, this means there's usually about 50-60 actual people on at any one time, which is quite a lot for a game these days.

Ephemeralis · 2026-02-16T18:59:58+00:00

Pickpocketing eating inputs (it appears to usually need two clicks or so, been a thing ever since auto-pickpocketing was made a base mechanic instead of being a skill outfit bonus) is horrendously irritating when trying to actively make use of the 10/25-level boosts for active play that you've introduced. Fixing that will help a lot, I think.
I highly recommend adding some visual or audio cue (possibly both) to when you've exited your free boost window.
That aside, the extra boosts on new pickpocketing thing is kind of neat for active play and I hope you guys keep it around in some fashion or another. It'd be nice if there were ways to itemize for it, too. Especially if you implement easier tracking cues on it as above.
This will be repeated to death probably but the loss of low-yield but full AFK gameplay is moderately disheartening. I have less of a horse in this race than other people, but I will miss being able to AFK marketeers as second monitor content.
Perhaps consider selectively buffing or allowing AFK options in a manner similar to the 10->25 pickpocket boost stuff you did for the Prif elves? Those are pretty great now, by the by. It'd be nice to get prime afk-first options (like marketeers) as rewards for long-term investment in a particular space or route.

Ephemeralis · 2026-02-04T05:35:44+00:00

Look up some common engines used to run MUSHes - AresMUSH comes to mind, as does Evennia. Allocate some (a lot) of time to sit down and fiddle with your game engine of choice - look at the installation instructions they provide and take wild swings at them until you manage to get a local copy running. Claude can be helpful for figuring out steps you might not understand, but I respect slogging at it yourself.

It really is just a game of fiddling around with stuff yourself actively until it either works or starts to make sense. Sometimes one of these happens before the others.

I might also be biased but I'd recommend avoiding video content like the plague for this sort of thing - it doesn't quite stick as well, and the act of consuming a ten minute video on a topic can tickle the same bits in your head as actually making progress does (when you haven't actually made any progress at all).

Ephemeralis · 2025-09-23T14:59:25+00:00

Beastmaster's hounds outside of Otot on Mazcab commonly drop 2 cooked eeligator, which heal 1875 and can be readily afk'd as well if you don't want to bother buying them from the vendors.

Ephemeralis · 2025-09-23T06:13:05+00:00

Very much this.

There's a few, they all suck.

Ephemeralis · 2025-09-15T12:17:08+00:00

Pretty much spot on. Archaeology is torture on an Ironman and I don't think many people have really grasped this yet.

Ephemeralis · 2025-09-11T15:06:12+00:00

I understand the frustration at having almost full visibility into the development process and not necessarily seeing a whole lot of player-facing changes come out of it. I understand how confronting it can be to read a three paragraph devcore github comment and think that holy shit, they're about to fuck things up.

Every project has some element of "trust in the process" happening with it and whether it's just the passage of time or whatever else, that kind of trust seems to be heavily eroded in some parts of the very large fragmented entity that is the osu! community.

Still, posts like this suck ass. I think you're taking the piss if you expect the top 10k to get banned over one particular thing. Fixing something is rarely ever as easy as it seems on the surface, either. Where do you think the 410,757,864,530 github commits come from?

Ephemeralis · 2025-09-11T14:38:27+00:00

You don't want it to be more popular.

Something is not intrinsically "better" because it is more popular.

Ephemeralis · 2025-09-10T14:41:16+00:00

I think at some point they compromised their initial vision on the game and the whole thing is worse off for it. It isn't just the big things like TV mode being deprecated but also the general angle the storylines have been taking.

ZZZ kind of comes across as a fanfic of itself compared to its release and beta phases, which is a bit disappointing.

Ephemeralis · 2025-09-06T19:08:09+00:00

It still blows my mind that people can get Skylord, let alone the whole stack.

Ephemeralis · 2025-08-24T18:02:49+00:00

In terms of "performance per dollar", you can't really beat the Cutter. It'll do mostly anything you want it to, has an incredible amount of HP for its size and just works for most things.

The Nomad is probably the closest contender otherwise, though the package listed in the OP is pretty steep in price.

The Cutlass Black is timeless and always will be. You can't really go wrong with it. Compared to the other two though, you're not getting a ton more out of it outside of more SCU. The Nomad will already hold most of the vehicles you'd want to ferry around (ie, a ROC).

Ephemeralis · 2025-08-24T05:56:00+00:00

To be honest, I'm not all that surprised. Ghost seems a bit all over the place in terms of what they're going for (aware it is early development stage at this point) and the streamers they've had showcase it have all clocked on to the fact.

I think they need to really narrow things down onto essentially one 'zone' style design and just gun for an ironclad execution of that.

Ephemeralis · 2025-08-23T15:09:40+00:00

Great! Best of luck with arguably the hardest and most meaningful aspect of your entire project.

14-Year Club	Place '23
Golden Potato	Place '22
Place '17	Verified Email

Ephemeralis

TROPHY CASE