codebase
DikuMUD
The root of the combat-MUD family. Levels, classes, equipment and area files — and a licence that shaped a generation of derivatives.
Games running it
35 listed · 0 archived · measured, not declared
Counted from the catalogue on this request, over the same filter the link above carries — so this number and that listing are one query and cannot drift apart.
offered in their handshakes: MCCP, MSSP, MXP, MSDP, GMCP
DikuMUD, written at Datalogisk Institut at the University of Copenhagen and released in 1991, is the ancestor of most of what people mean when they say "MUD" without qualification. Levels, character classes, hit points, mobs, equipment slots, an area file format a builder writes offline — the whole vocabulary comes from here, and games that have never seen Diku source still inherit its shape.
Its licence is part of the story. Diku was free to use but forbade charging for access and required the original credits to be displayed, and that clause is why "the Diku credits" appear on the login screen of games several forks removed from it.
The direct descendants — Merc, then ROM, CircleMUD, SMAUG, tbaMUD and dozens of others — account for a large fraction of every MUD listing that has ever existed.
What it looks like from outside
The Diku family is the MSSP family. Where the MUSH side publishes a count through a login-screen
WHO and offers no MSSP at all, Diku-line servers overwhelmingly answer telnet option 70 with a
structured report, and that is where their numbers here come from.
MCCP2 — stream compression — is also common in this family, and it is worth knowing that a client which negotiates it but cannot inflate the stream receives the entire connect screen as binary noise. That was a real defect in this project's own telnet library and it is fixed; see MCCP.
See also
- CircleMUD The DikuMUD derivative that was documented well enough to teach with. Enormously forked; still running.
- 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.
- MUSH, MUD, MUCK, MOO — what the words mean Four words for four traditions, none of which is a genre. What they actually tell you.