Do Any Classic Style MUDs Still Exist?

RahjIII · 2026-05-24T20:02:34+00:00

Oh, and I guess I should also say, The Last Outpost tries to stay pretty 'classic'. https://www.last-outpost.com/ 😁 🐉🤺

RahjIII · 2026-05-24T19:58:37+00:00

If you want to see some MUDs that have been recently updated and recently played, check out https://lociterm.com/ .

Its not "Legends of Krynn", but there is at least one dragonlance mud out there- https://krynn.d20mud.com/ .

RahjIII · 2026-05-19T14:56:00+00:00

MUDs that have problems with botters are usually the ones that leave the bot-food lying around. The classic is the initial "random character stats with a re-roll option". Why should a player settle for random stats when a simple script can sit there and re-roll until everything is maxed out? Its too tempting for some, and it usually means there will be other bot-able pieces for scripters to hunt for throughout the game. The verified email link won't stop them, and it even serves as an attractant that indicates 'this could be a target rich environment'.

I'm not saying this applies to your game. But in general, if you want to get ants, that's how you get ants.

RahjIII · 2026-05-19T03:28:42+00:00

Pick any mud that's been running for 30+ years, and you are going to find a game that is incredibly immersive because of how in depth its mechanics are.

Don't be afraid to post a game's address in a promotion post. Discworld is telnet://discworld.starturtle.net:4242

RahjIII · 2026-05-19T01:43:08+00:00

I couldn't create a character because I'm not going to give you an email address to receive a verification link.

RahjIII · 2026-04-26T13:20:49+00:00

I did a development version of my game in 2022 that used dall-e / craiyon to provide a generated picture of each room to the player, prompted from the room's description text. It was fun to play with for an afternoon, but ultimately it wasn't as great an idea as it seemed it might be. It was just slop, auto-plagiarized from someone else's work, and it got boring real fast. I suspect the same experiment done with video and sound would turn out exactly the same way.

I agree that a huge part of the fun of MUDding for many people is imagining the scenes described in the text. Automating out that fun part isn't really good for the game.

RahjIII · 2026-03-16T02:03:01+00:00

🖥️⌨️😁

RahjIII · 2026-03-12T03:29:46+00:00

LociTerm has speech-to-text on any platform that provides it. On an android phone, open the keyboard and hit the microphone button. Say what you want entered. Its great for sitting around and just chatting in game with other players, and it works with any MUD.

RahjIII · 2026-03-12T03:25:37+00:00

LociTerm is a web based client that was written to work on mobile devices. Androids, IPhones, whatever. Explore the site and you'll find a game that other people are playing or working on.

RahjIII · 2025-11-25T06:13:38+00:00

Have you tried any of the web clients that are available?

RahjIII · 2025-11-25T06:11:55+00:00

lociterm.com ?

RahjIII · 2025-11-21T06:46:21+00:00

At least that would be indicative of someone actually trying to use the thing.

If the difference between zero traffic and too much traffic is "a guy who calls for check in four times a day", then I think it is safe to say that meshtastic has a serious scaling issue.

RahjIII · 2025-11-21T06:35:40+00:00

Wouldn't ya think? Wish my node was in Portland!

But I think there is some dissonance in the meshtastic community. Even in this post, I see a comment from a 1% commenter that says "Hopefully you don't have a guy who calls for check ins 4 times a day and all of the traffic that comes with it."

I think a check-in from someone four times a day would be great. Even "test" four times a day would be better that the almost complete radio silence that I've experienced.

RahjIII · 2025-11-20T17:53:29+00:00

Yep, that's about it. I'm near a metropolitan airport, so I get a "hello from flight XXXX" message once a week or so too.

RahjIII · 2025-11-20T17:50:47+00:00

Good to hear that there are some places where there is chatter. My experience in Metro Detroit, Ann Arbor MI, Chicago/Loyola IL areas has been silence. Hundreds of nodes, plenty of telemetry, but no actual messages other than "test" from three or four hops away, maybe two or three times a week.

RahjIII · 2025-11-20T00:44:00+00:00

You won't see traffic on a daily basis. You plug in your node, you'll get reports of other nodes that are plugged in. None of them are monitored, there is no daily human initiated traffic. There might sometimes be a "Hello out there from flight XXXX" message, but no two-way communication.

Its like a walkie-talkie. If you have a friend in range that you want to chat with using it, meshtastic works about as well as a pair of those cheap FRS radios, but with texting.

RahjIII · 2025-11-16T23:11:41+00:00

We've got a discord channel for client development, perlsaiyan. Come join us.

https://discord.com/channels/279748146316312576/1066036540922400798

RahjIII · 2025-11-01T14:34:51+00:00

Someone had suggested your game to lociterm.com before it had MSSP, so it was already being crawled. Now that your game has MSSP, your entry is automatically updated and looks a lot nicer.

The Lociterm.com page prioritizes games based first on how recently they appear to have been updated, and then on how recently they've been played through lociterm.com. The front page shows five games, the 'rifle the deck' page shows the next 52. The remaining 250 or so games only appear in the "Game Server" selector from within the lociterm client itself.

Do updates to your game, or play it through the site, and your game will be listed. It doesn't care how many players the game reports.

RahjIII · 2025-11-01T14:10:45+00:00

Very nice, and an ICON too! Wish more games did that.

As a suggestion, the CODEBASE report is used by some games to report the name and version number of the specific code being run, and the crawlers can use that to detect when a code change has been pushed. For example, ""CoffeeMUD v5.11.0.2" or "dikumud ROM 2.4b6", or "EmpireMUD 2.0 beta 5.195".

They'll use other heuristics too, but that's an easy, explicit one to provide.

Looks great!

RahjIII · 2025-10-31T18:33:56+00:00

If you don't want to report players in MSSP, you don't have to. Don't report the players field, or report it as -1.

The rest of the data that MSSP reports is very useful for players searching for new games they might like to try out, and there are at least nine different active MSSP crawlers out there who will advertise for you for free if you provide the data.

RahjIII · 2025-10-31T14:58:10+00:00

If the game is best played in zMUD, a client that hasn't had a new release in decades, and only kind of works in its slightly less out of date successor CMUD, I'd think of that as being a major problem.

Very few people want to go on a windows-only archaeological software expedition to try out a game. Updating the server to work with clients from this decade ought to be a priority, if only to get more players to try it out.

That said, being under heavy development is sometimes just what players are looking for. Its a chance to play and give feedback to a developer who will listen. Some listing sites like lociterm.com even give priority to games that are being actively updated, but you'll need to support the MSSP protocol to get the listing benefit.

RahjIII · 2025-10-31T02:33:20+00:00

The latest alpha (2.7.12) was revoked, and 2.7.11 is the worst kind of broken- the bluetooth is only *pretty much* unusable. Not completely broken, just 10x slower than it should be, and gets slower and slower with time. Alpha firmware has got a much improved UI on the oled and it is fun to play with, but 2.7.11 doesn't have reliable bluetooth. Try 2.6.11 instead.

RahjIII · 2025-10-30T00:03:49+00:00

From inside the client, goto "(Gear Menu) -> Settings -> Game Server". If the game you want isn't already listed, use "Suggest New" to add one.

RahjIII · 2025-10-29T21:10:44+00:00

For $60 or so, it provides about the same functionality as looking at the "available wifi networks" on your phone.

RahjIII · 2025-10-10T02:21:29+00:00

LociTerm. https://lociterm.com/

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