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Reference

What the codebases are, what the clients do, and what the protocols mean. Written by hand and kept in the repository beside the crawler — not a wiki, and there is nothing on this page to edit. Every number here is a different thing: it comes from the catalogue and is recomputed each time you load the page.

Start here

  • How to connect A host, a port, and telnet. What the address on a game page means and what to do with it.
  • MUSH, MUD, MUCK, MOO — what the words mean Four words for four traditions, none of which is a genre. What they actually tell you.
  • You want collaborative roleplay If what you are after is writing scenes with other people, this is the short path — the codebases to look for, a client that will not fight you, and what to expect on your first night.

Codebases

  • AresMUSH A modern roleplay server written in Ruby, with a web front end and scene tools built in rather than softcoded.
  • CircleMUD The DikuMUD derivative that was documented well enough to teach with. Enormously forked; still running.
  • CobraMUSH A PennMUSH fork with its own division and power model. Small deployment, still answering.
  • CoffeeMUD A MUD server in Java, with the largest MSSP report of anything we have probed and an unusually broad protocol surface.
  • DikuMUD The root of the combat-MUD family. Levels, classes, equipment and area files — and a licence that shaped a generation of derivatives.
  • Evennia A Python framework rather than a finished game. Two Evennia games can have nothing in common but the plumbing.
  • FluffOS The maintained MudOS successor, and the driver most surviving LPMud games run on. The game is written in LPC, not in C.
  • MOO Object-oriented, edited entirely from inside, and as much a research and teaching platform as a game engine.
  • MUCK A TinyMUD descendant with its own Forth-like in-game language, and a social culture distinct from the MUSH side.
  • PennMUSH The most widely deployed MUSH server. Softcode, a long release history, and one of only two codebases in our survey that answer both MSSP and a pre-login WHO.
  • RhostMUSH A MUSH server known for a deep permissions model and a large built-in function set. No MSSP; answers a pre-login WHO.
  • ROM Merc's best-known descendant, and the combat engine a large share of nineties MUDs were built on.
  • SMAUG A Merc derivative built for large themed worlds, with deities, planes and an area set several times the size of its parent's.
  • tbaMUD The maintained continuation of CircleMUD, and the usual answer to "I want to start a Diku-style MUD today".
  • TinyMUSH The ancestor of the MUSH line, still running games. It taught this crawler that its own negotiation bytes can break the next command it sends.
  • TinyMUX The other big MUSH server. Softcode close enough to PennMUSH's to argue about, no MSSP at all, and a pre-login WHO that works.

Clients

  • Atlantis A macOS-only client, long-lived and long in beta. Its scripting is documented as no longer working, which is the one honest "no" in this section.
  • BeipMU A Windows client aimed at the MUSH side of the hobby, with screen-reader support in the output window and Pueblo rather than MXP.
  • Blightmud A modern terminal client in Rust, with Lua scripting, built-in text-to-speech and a screen-reader mode that announces itself to the server.
  • Mudlet Cross-platform, Lua-scripted, and the client with the most thoroughly documented screen-reader support in this section.
  • MUSHclient The long-established Windows client. Five scripting languages, a plugin architecture that most of its protocol support lives in, and a release history that has slowed.
  • Potato MUSHclient A cross-platform Tcl/Tk client written for MUSH players. Good encoding support, and a documentation set that says nothing at all about most protocols.
  • TinTin++ A terminal client with its own scripting language, on every platform including phones, and a documented screen-reader mode.
  • TinyFugue The classic UNIX terminal client. Upstream has not released since 2007; a maintained fork carries it forward.
  • VIP Mud A commercial Windows client built for blind players from the ground up. It names seven screen readers — and publishes almost nothing about its protocol support.

Protocols

  • ATCP GMCP's predecessor. Out-of-band data with a looser payload, largely superseded, and still negotiated by servers that never removed it.
  • CHARSET RFC 2066's telnet option for agreeing an encoding. The reason a game's accented names survive the trip, and the source of some subtle failures when it is absent.
  • GMCP The Generic Mud Communication Protocol — structured JSON messages alongside the text, and the out-of-band channel most modern clients build against.
  • MCCP Stream compression. Cheap, widely deployed, and the protocol that produced the most instructive bug in this project's history.
  • MSDP The Mud Server Data Protocol — the same job as GMCP, done with a compact binary encoding and a discovery mechanism GMCP lacks.
  • MSP The MUD Sound Protocol — the server names a sound file and the client plays it. Old, simple, and easy to confuse with two other things.
  • MSSP The Mud Server Status Protocol — how a game tells a crawler about itself. Everything it reports is declared, not measured, and this site keeps the two apart.
  • MXP The MUD eXtension Protocol — HTML-like markup in the text stream, giving clickable links, images and forms. Widely specified, unevenly implemented.
  • Pueblo The older HTML-in-a-MUD scheme, from the client of the same name. Still supported by MUSH-side clients, and routinely confused with MXP.
  • TLS Encrypted connections. Usually a separate port rather than a negotiated upgrade, and the one capability on this site we verify by connecting rather than by asking.
  • TTYPE and MTTS How a client tells a server what it is and what it can do — including, if the client chooses to say so, that a screen reader is in use.