A multi-themed online text adventure

MultiMUD! - A Fantasy/Sci-Fi Mud


Welcome
Welcome to the home of MultiMUD, a multi-themed mud that has been online for well over 15 years! MultiMUD has fantasy, modern and sci-fi zones, 17 playable races, 20 classes, a mission system and much more!

On the site. we have guides, maps as well as player profiles, and useful stuff like who is online right now.

So fire up your favourite mud client and join us at multimud.net port 4242.
Newcomers start here!
New to the world of muds or just Multimud?
Check out our How To Play guide or jump straight in with our Java Applet. To get started have with a read of our New Player Guide.

If you need further help, then we sure to check out our online Help files and Glossary. And be dont afraid to ask for help in game!


Latest News
Easter Bunny Hunt 2021 (March 30, 2021)
You know it's easter when there's all these annoying bunnies around
and all you'd like to do is split them - and I mean this literally.
So why don't you get out your bloody glaive, your long sword, thor's
hammer, and apply this to our bunnies galore?!
A "couple" of bunnies are around, and as usual, you can get yourself
an extinction device and join the party.
This time around we're doing it the 'other way' around - we're starting
with fib(21) bunnies and see if / when we'll get them all extincted.

Check out quest board, msg #96, for further details.

Independence Days 2017 (July 4, 2017)
So yes here I was sitting in my godly heights and thinking to myself,
good thing I locked all this stuff deep away, and ate the key. Turns
out, I was wrong. Obviously, I only _dropped_ the key, and someone,
_someone_ must have found it ..and used it. The gates are once more open,
the soldiers come forward and the sanity of war commences yet again.
It Is Time For Independence Days 2017!
Henceforth till the 25th of July 2017 you can enjoy your beloved

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Easter Bunny Extinction 2017 (April 10, 2017)
Oh my, oh my. Bunnies!. You know the drill... It's up until April 24th. Enjoy!

It's that time again: Hell'o'seed! (October 29, 2016)
Hell'o'seed from now until sunday, nov 6th.
Other details can be had from #83 on the quest board.

Independence Days 2016 (June 29, 2016)
They do not even remember why they fight. Nobody remembers, how it all started.
Wars make the past blurry, especially with the victor writing history.
But has it ever stopped the fighting? - It will not, probably, either this time.
Independence Days 2016 - July 2nd to July 10th on your favourite MUD!

Easter Bunny Extinction 2016! (March 25, 2016)
Again, somehow the easter bunnies got loose. Help eradicate them,
check the quest board for details. Event's up until April 1st, noon CEST.

Monster Rumble! (December 22, 2015)
What is a monster rumble, you ask? Something to aspire to. Check the quest board for details.

Advent Calendar 2015 Edition (November 30, 2015)
Beginning today, and spanning until Dec 24th, the advent calendar is back.
Just have a look at it at the Bertold's Fountain. As the lebkuchen and gluehwein
have been discarded en masse last time, I've updated them a bit. Also I
might be having something in mind for those who make 23+ of the 24 possible
days. Have at it, and remember, when Benden offers something for free, there
must be bloody sacrifice involved somewhere...

Advent calendar... (November 23, 2015)
It's soon time to pop open some surprise gifts again, the advent calendar will return soon! (dec 1st)

Helloseed is ON! (October 30, 2015)
BEWARE, TRAVELLERS! DEVILISH CREATURES ABOUND!

We're having another hell'o'seed -- it'll be on until tuesday, nov 3rd
this time around. Other details can be had from #83 on the quest board.

independence days! (July 4, 2015)
The independence days have re-begun! This time it's a tax squabble between
good ol' Welmar II and the lordprotector, both of which claiming to act
both on principle and for the good of their (and all) citizens. Details
about this debate will appear on the quest board.

Civilization advances, so this time the battlefield is in space. There
are two outposts reachable from mos eisley, each having a shuttle platform
which will lead you to a safe area near the battlefield. From there you
can enter the war at your will. It is also possible for you to return
from the battlefield to your safe area, so remember where you entere
the battle.

To choose one side, go to welmar or the lordprotector, and ask them about
keorangar, aragorn, welmar or justice (welmar) or serpent isle or independence (lordprotector),
and agree to the terms by nodding. You'll join the respective ranks and the
gates surrounding the battlefield (and the outposts) will open for you (you
can just walk through the locked gate). For more information, see
help independence days in game, and the quest board. Have fun, -B

independence days! (June 29, 2015)
Beginning in the early CET fourth of july hours, I'll be switching the independence
days quest live! This will not impact the normal gameplay as heavily as it did last
time, so joining it is purely optional. It'll provide a means for you to get rid of
some of your money and help achieve success for your side. Details will pop up on
friday, july 3rd, on the quest board, the quest will start july 4th, and run for
three weeks. Winning side will then be determined and further steps communicated
by the combattants. Enjoy.

Update 2015-05-11 (May 11, 2015)
Update you say? Update on what? Is there something going on? Indeed,
there is. And I think these little bulletins can serve as a heads-up of
changes to come (tl;dr: none yet), etc.

Process

So what is going on? In short, I've begun a long voyage which will
ultimately move us away from our current code-base, and non-original
content as well. I'm talking about the next generation of MultiMUD. I have
so far thought that I should start with an empty and clean sheet, and
just go ahead and implement what I thought was worthwile, in a language
and environment and setup that I design from the ground up. Well, as it
turns out, when you do that you keep on second-guessing yourself. I have
iterated through various different approaches at modeling, languages
involved, environment, runtimes and frameworks, weighed them all for
their pros and cons, decided on something, began and ... stopped. What
has stopped me? I didn't know until shortly.

Drive

The passion wasn't there. We don't have a whole lot of players exactly,
but with all I do, with all the work on the MUD, I feel I'm not just
doing it for myself. Approaching the problem "MultiMUD next gen" with
a clean sheet was just for myself. That just didn't give me the drive
I needed, I was excited about the problem, but honestly, it was just
another pet project amongst many. I have many ideas, and others may be
more viable with regards to reaching completion, so the next gen Multi
(MUU from here on out) was easily put back.

Independence Days

What triggered all of this was me preparing the independence days. In
contrast to the previous one, I didn't want to lock down the whole MUD
for having the battlefield. So I looked into using something UW-like to
generate a map for it, and have the battle there. So far, so good. Then
the birthday of Multi came up. I wanted to add a little fun something
for it, a new hard-core gamemode.

Hardcore Gamemode

The idea is simple: start the players off in a cube. The cube is
growing with each iteration. To progress, the player needs to empty
the cube. The cube is automatically generated, and grows up to 5^3 in
size (so never more than 5 levels of 25 rooms each). Mobs, and loot, is
automatically generated depending on the level of the player when they
first enter a level (or the next cube is generated, details..). Now, what
is hardcore? Hardcore means you cannot die. How would this be integrated
in the game? At the main menu, after creating a character, there would
be a new option (and only on a fresh char): Try hardcore. This would
leave you in a lobby.

In the lobby, you would be able to talk with others who try hardcore,
and potentially group up. There's a little information and rooms to talk
and prepare, also interact with the rest of the MUD before you go into it.

So you've grouped up and boasted and what not, now it's time to generate
the first cube. You're going to travel a little bit like BV to the cube,
and enter it. As soon as the group is complete, the cube is initialized,
and off you go. As soon as one group member (including yourself) dies,
times out, or otherwise goes kaput, the whole group is thrown back to
the lobby - with all in-game state (level, exp, eq, inventory, followers,
learned skills, pracs, ...) reset.

The only exit of the iteration of cubes is killing the boss which appears
after the whole group has reached level 60 and is ready to generate the
next cube. Instead of the next cube, the group will be having its face
off with the final mob in the series of cubes for them. If they fail
(one of them dies), it's back to the lobby. If they succeed, they come
out level 60 at BF, naked, with some QP, a sizeable amount of gold,
remort knowledge, and maybe some item. The hardcore mode ends with the
final boss.

So I wanted to implement this. No problem, right? I have code in place
to generate a map. I can parametrize it. I can have it have multiple
levels. I have infrastructure in place to store a character, load, etc. I
can generate mobs and loot on the fly, and even store the state across
a reboot. So what's the problem? It's intertwined state management that
requires a minute and precise protocol of changes to various global
entities and constant (re-)adjustment of existing pointers, indices
and references.

I could implement all as sketched above, but what would happen if one
cube series started and then another char tried it? While the cubes for
the first were still growing? still manageable. Would need constant
adjustment of potentially ALL global values in the game on each cube
regeneration, but doable. What about when the first char failed, and his
zone would be torn down? Throw in a reboot? We are beginning to stumble,
at best. 

Feature stop? But...

Yeah right. I had said earlier that we have a feature stop. Indeed,
I could repeat independence days with the setup I had earlier. Just
lock down the whole MUD and be done with it. But it's a good quest, an
interesting interaction, and something that, just like the barbarian
village, should be accessible at any time. Optionally, I might want
to start/stop it and set it up / tear it down on demand. Wait, feature
stop. Hmm. Yeah, fuck this. I cannot stop myself.

MUU? State?

So, I cannot program in the existing, current codebase, because it's a
PITA and a series of headaches that no volume of whiskey can cure. And I
cannot program in a clean sheet code base, because it will never develop
to the state where it could carry the current players or compete with
Multi feature-wise.

What I need is some organic evolution that reduces my amount of head-ache,
yet has a clean sheet smell to it, and enables me some more modern
practices (say, multi threading, saving the model to the DB, i.e.,
persisting the whole game's state, better AI, web, jabber integration,
etc). I have attempted this before, with switching more of the game
logic to tcl, or ruby, or python. Possibly also lowering the language
barrier for newcomers. But honestly, it's not good enough. Javascript
might have done it, but I'm not going there. Instead, I don't care about
the language barrier, and have chosen something that excites me, and at
the same time gives me enough control and flexibility to slowly usurp
the current code-base. The tool/language of choice here is guile scheme.

With all this background, you can know understand that this indeed is
an update of an on-going process, nothing less but the organic evolution
of the current code-base towards a new code base with (again!) evolving
features, but keeping what we can on the voyage - either because we
want to keep it, we may keep it, we just have to keep it, or keeping it
until it has been replaced by something better. This is intentionally
vague, but you can fill in anything you like (or fear) above - changes
to specific skills or spells, the skill and spell system altogether,
character stats, fight system, movement, time, healing, messaging, ...

Update

* I have setup the programming project. I have 100+ commits under
 source control already. I have scripts that deploy necessary third
 party libraries, etc. I can successfully compile the existing game with
 stringing on a guile scheme VM.
* For the first time in our history, we actually have true unit tests
 testing aspects of the C code.
* For the first time ever, we are actually running thread-enabled,
 with more than one thread doing something.
* My prototype now has a functioning, thread-enabled scheme VM running
* there's one scheme thread that handles DB interactions
* communication infrastructure for threads (and other processes), zeromq,
 is in place. This enables me to split related tasks into modules and
 have each module run in its own thread, communicating with the main mud
 via messages. This allows a clean, understandable state management
* message encoding and decoding for some of the MUDs structures is
 mostly done

Oh. And I'm furiously coding on the MUD again. -B

Time to cool down... (April 10, 2015)
..after the easter bunny extinction event is over. Things that will
lower your blood pressure: A trip to hell, evil asgard, a ragnaroek,
a tea break, soloing the pyramid, two-manning the barbarian village.

Once your pressure is settled again, you can get all worked up over
the upcoming 20th birthday of MultiMUD!

Easter Bunny Extinction Event! (April 1, 2015)
Beginning NOW! and continuing until april 9th, the easter bunnies will
get their cute little asses whooped by ... YOU! Come and get yourself an
extinction device (go to the questshop and "engage extinction"), grab that
thing (after maybe having a look at it?) and butcher your way through the
ever growing easter bunny hordes. There may be even rewards for your performance
in the end, and/or some ranking, can you believe it? Oh. And Exp. Lots of
exp. So sharpen your blade, chant your spells, go ham!

advent calendar rewards distributed (January 10, 2015)
Specifically for the following characters, the 'remort without the hassle of building up
knowledge first' flag has been set:  Arehon, Belven, Darnys, Fawkes, Gauss, Jaenar,
Kimber, Li, Maegwyn, Marora, Mirai, Nephrati, Petal, Roxy, Sakayin, Santiago,
Searil, Shree, Shujnai, Silas, Stodiana, Tanran, Taruskith, Theseus, Trahorn,
Trakas, Xavian, Zanda.              Enjoy!

Advent Calendar is BACK! (December 1, 2014)
Beginning today, and spanning until Dec 24th, the advent calendar is back.
Just have a look at it at the bertold's fountain. There's a special reward
choice available for those who make 23+ of the 24 possible packages -- a
"free" remort for non-remort 60s. Have at it, and remember, when Benden offers
something for free, there must be bloody sacrifice involved somewhere....

Bard's Contest Sat Nov 15th (October 24, 2014)
So we are going to have a bard's contest! Prepare your songs, sharpen your
strings, fill the drums, ... on Saturday, November 15th, 11pm central european
time / 5pm eastern time the circle of story tellers, singers and others will
duke out the QP, harp and title.
(Barring technical surprises, the contest most likely will also be tweeted)

Check out the quest board for more details!

Congratulations to Heroes as Barbarian Village Falls (July 28, 2014)
Mark the date everybody, as the proud group of (mainly) Narumi and Olandis, and Koga and Io have
succeeded against the horde outpost of the barbarian village. It's been some time since the
last group with Regrin did it... Rewards have been delivered, and the barbarian village will
return as well. There's always space for more glory... 

Olandis: 33 deaths - 20 QP & [Hero]
Narumi: 28 deaths - 20 QP & [Hero]
Koga: 13 deaths - 20 QP & [Hero]
Io: 9 deaths - 20 QP & [Hero]

-Benden, IMPLEMENTOR

Yet another server move....finished. (June 17, 2014)
Well, what else to say but: we're now on 85.214.57.241 port 4242,
of course STILL multimud.net (albeit DNS caching might take a
random amount of time from within few seconds to many eons until
it's updated. Don't give up. Use the numeric IP).

Thanks to *drumroll* Benden (!) who did all the actual hard work.

May 1st: 19 years of MultiMUD (April 29, 2014)
And we'll be celebrating by mudding relentlessly and visiting all
these dark places we've been avoiding. Come join us for multi's 19th
birthday!

Advent Calendar for MultiMUD! (December 1, 2013)
Every mortal now has access to their personal own advent calendar! It's to
be found at bertold's fountain, do drop by and have a look at it! Get the
package numbered for the specific day, and you'll find gimmicks ranging from gingerbread
and gluehwein over to degrees, gold, QP, some rare items (such as UW mysticals
and relics) and finally, a potential encounter with santa himself!
Do enjoy it daily until dec 24th, special bonus available for those who open
their package daily, each day, for 24 times...on the 25th.

mixpotion memorial week over - mixpotion memory on (June 9, 2013)
"mixpotion recall" allows looking through all these nice recipes the game
has stored ever since mixpotion memorial week (and will continue doing so).
Board of changes (and possibly even the help files!) have more info.

Mixpotion Memorial Week! (May 27, 2013)
A week from memorial day on, the mixpotion ingredients will be loading like mad!
There's a slight tweak to it: Although many, many more than usually load, they
are not rentable nor can be sold. Use the opportunity to update your recipe 
databases!

Speaking of recipe database: there's one built into the MUD now. Any potion
you mix will instantly be added to your recipe DB. There is no in-game interface
to it (yet?), but you can access your character's known recipes on the homepage
by going to multimud.net/recipes (you'll have to log in). The web interface
also is still subject to change, luckily though the MUD itself doesn't need to
reboot to pick up such changes.

Well, enjoy!

DEATH TRAPs update (May 27, 2013)
This is a memorial day to remember... so why don't you stop and mourn,
blessing the memory of these evil monsters called DEATH TRAPs (DTs).
They have eaten so much equipment, and ended many a young hero's rise
to the top before the challenge really had begun. So while you are still
thinking about how DTs used to work, let me tell you, they don't anymore.

When hitting a DT now, your EQ will *break*. Just as if its lifetime was
used up. Of course non-magic / non-quest items still are gone afterwards,
but you can repair the rest. Also you will now lose a certain amount of
your experience (and, potentially, degrees) dependent on your level when
hitting a death trap. Finally, keys and norent items still DO disappear
when hitting a death trap.

tweakers and tweakables (May 3, 2013)
Welcome a new system akin to a rudimentary crafting system. It's a little
birthday present from your implementor to the now adult MultiMUD. As we
don't have the spare manpower to populate the ground with all the ores
you'd need to mine them, and melt and ... basically populate the world
with raw materials, come up with how these materials can be combined
etc. etc. etc. we're going down another route.

Enter the tweakables! From now on, some pieces of armor will have a new
flag set, tweakable. The only affection this sort of armor will have,
is its bare AC apply. The armor can be class or align restricted as
usual. The first tweakable items will be the asteroid stuff from qumran,
but (not too many, actually) others are to follow. So what do you need
this flag for on boring equipment pieces?

Enter the tweakers! Tweakers are special items that you cannot directly
interact with. They have affections just as normal pieces of armor,
but you cannot wear them in general. Instead, you can combine them with
a tweakable item, and the tweakable item will take over the affections
of the tweaker.

There will be two sorts of tweaker items: (a) ones that you can find in
places. They are rare, and bear some affections on them.
(b) ones you can find hidden in very, very, very remote or hard to reach
places, or are rewarded to you from a quest. They are extremely rare,
and bear no affections.

Finally, at some weird places, you can find cregu points (cregu points
are just special treasure items).  Under certain limits, you will be able
to use a collection of cregu points to create your own tweaker affections
with an empty tweaker. Self-created, (b)-type tweakers also incur a cost
(in quest points) in the process, whereas the "normal" ones, type (a)
do not. You can imagine you can build better ones than you commonly will
be able to find.

Tweakers can be applied to tweakable items at your next blacksmith using
the arm command: arm <tweakable> <tweaker>. The blacksmith will then
happily rob you of a small amount of money, and present you with your
brand new tweaked item.

The item will have descriptions dependent on the tweaker, and the tweaked
item. To make things even jucier, they are considered personalized
items (and quest items), so you can actually change the item's
durability and descriptions even more at the blacksmith with the alter
command.

The very first tweakers will be the easter bunny paws that will be
handed out to you guys. The next few coming up will be of the (a)
variety, and somewhen you'll stumble over a (b) tweaker and I'll
never have told you about adding them ;)

Have fun. -B

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MULTIMUD (May 1, 2013)
Today, we celebrate the 18th birthday of MultiMUD.

We've come a long way. We're not going away. I'm looking
forward to another 18 years of MultiMUD, and another 18
years after that. And then.. some more.

Anybody honoring the freaking achievement of our existence
today with offering me 18 bags embalmed from level 61 mobs
who have more than 18000 hit points each gets 1 Quest Point.
(This offer is valid for 18 days.)

Oh yeah. MultiMUD is now an adult even in germany. Multi's
applying for a driver's license as we speak.

In case you wonder... (February 27, 2013)
...a number of you have expressed your gratitude for the work that I
am investing to keep this place running, and even from time to time
improve on it, and/or even create a further future for the game.
Even so, when we were taking over our own server, offers had been
made to throw in a share of the payments necessary.
Well. I don't want your thanks. Seeing you enjoy the game is gratitude
enough for me. Well, nearly. If you REALLY wanna "pay back"...
go recruit us some new players. I'm serious. Don't shrug it off as
impossible! You didn't shrug off survivor as impossible for you saw
others had done it. Well, let me tell you, there are MUDS out there whose
player counts aren't as low as ours. There are inspiring examples of
these other ones, with whom we can compete feature-wise, but not with
out player base. Well, let's change that. I know we're living in a niche,
obviously. But I believe real role players are always MultiMUD material.
I didn't say it's easy. Not everyone is cut for doing survivor with a
monk or rogue either. Doesn't make it impossible.
In case you wonder what to do, you can always ask me about the flyers
we have, or check out the ideas board for some other approaches.
So well. Go get me some new sacrifice material.     -B, *IMP*

Nu Klendathu Notes (February 19, 2013)
Nu Klendathu notes are available under http://multimud.net/NuKlendathuNotes.html
I'll update these from time to time to give an accurate picture of the plan, and
announce so on the board of changes in the game. Until then, have fun figuring
out how's it gonna be like!

UW related memory leak... (February 13, 2013)
I might have plugged it. It was triggered by moving through UW so .. I gave
you a fresh UW. Use as usual. I'll inspect later to see if I was right :)

Lord Thador's short vacation... (February 6, 2013)
Alright, we've all had some fun with the new UW, but I've seen two issues here that
need further investigation. In fact we have some sweet memory problems here .. (somewhat
to be expected, this is C after all and when you make a mistake, usually memory gets
out of hand :). Anyways, to better find the source of the problem, I'll have to reboot
more often, which means we really need the UW to store its state across reboots or else
you all gotta dig through the first level again and again and again and ... so I'll put
the UW on the bench for what I hope will be a couple days at most, to implement proper
storing and restoring of its state. Once we have that, I don't have to feel guilty for
continuously rebooting on you to introduce some new bugfixes and features and new bugs.

The Return Of Lord Thador... (January 28, 2013)
All hail Lord Thador! He's back from his winter vacation and moved into
his slightly bigger halls (some 4500 neat rooms with around 2500 of his
friends) to welcome guests, visitors for a cup of tea.

This is the new layout engine, new size (obviously), all in one zone,
experimental future UW version. It's not reboot proof yet. But we'll be
getting there...

Constructive and Cooperative Play (January 24, 2013)
I was watching what happened after I began switching shops to store their contents across reboots
with interest, for what I was doing was sort of a social experiment. It also was a test balloon,
attempting to see whether you would innately have the same vision with regard to the shops as I
had when I set them up like this. To make a long story short, I have to say I am a bit disappointed
with the result. So this may serve as a reminder, as a pointer into which direction we are actually
heading, and the kind of behaviour that I would frown upon vs. the kind of behaviour that everybody
benefits of.

So yeah. We are small, and I don't see any reason for an overly and overeager competetiveness
amongst you. For instance, I have reduced one set of resources ("fresh money" brought to the game
via reboots, into shops, from where you could harvest it by liberating it in exchange for some
liberated items which you collected...), whereas I have vastly increased another resource
- actually - a lot of them, depending on how you use the infrastructure. Which brings me exactly
to my point. You may have noticed, that there are an abundance of potion bases, simply because
you keep selling them to rusty. Well, of course I have also increased the overall output of
potion bases, but that's beside the point here. What you, constructively and cooperatively did,
was to make rusty a market place of helpful goods. Because you also consume a lot of unlimited
items from him, and seldomly try to sell something for 100k to him, it is easy for him to keep
this up. Remember, shops not only store their inventory, but also their funds.

What I had envisioned when I changed shops like I did was a behaviour like you expose with the
old rusty man. Use the shops to share, take what you need when you go on a trip yourself, refill
with stuff from the world before you leave... money again becomes useful. Not much is needed, and
all it's serving with regard to shops is as exchange tokens. Money -> potion base, potion base -> cash.
Because the funds are so limited, that is a sane way to use a shop now. And it's also a helpful
way. Now let's consider some other shops, for instance, Freyburg's Breuninger's. Here, the same
approach as rusty would mean that newbies, lowbies and levelling people could gather helpful
equipment from the shops, use them, sell again if not too used up, or refill later. Again, there's
not really money to be made from the shops, so coming along with five 100k items isn't helping
anybody.

But you need money?! Well, do you. Lockers are expensive, alright, but with increased rent
space and by taking a PH, you can actually store what an average mudder needs for their bliss.
The money required for this can easily be obtained by good old school murking of mobs. This is
to be your money source, and feel free to have at it. Of course there's also treasures to plunder,
quests to be run etc.

Shops are only one instance of a thought of cooperative and constructive play together. Remember
that we are all here to have fun; of course some want to achieve more than others; and for some
purposes again the resources are limited (or somewhat limited), like attempts at the barbarian
village per uptime, or amount of stones with UW, and competing for these resources is natural
and not a problem per se; but at times you should step for a moment and wonder whether you
are just having fun yourself, or actively ruining others'. I am all for the first, and I assume
we're all together in that we don't want the latter.

Your undead necropedophiliac (someone has some rotten zombie fetus for me?) philosopher gourmet.

Help Marina help Sabach find a lady! (January 24, 2013)
The quest is running -- check out http://mudquest.net for further details.

some more points (January 21, 2013)
There's been some more changes to bash and waiting in combat. I think the
current version should be to everybody's liking. What's new?

Basically you can skip 'stand' when you are bashed and spamming your
next command. Wanna bash back? just hit bash. You will execute this
command at the earliest possible time (which might even still be during
combat, before other people "after" you are acting).

There's another reason why you can skip 'stand'. Players will now
stand up automatically just like mobs always have done. (You can
still stand up manually of course if you want to, but either you will
end up getting a: don't you consider fighting as standing? message,
or it wouldn't (shouldn't!) have made a change if you hadn't.

Mobs also will stand up reliably (or so I hope...) after two rounds
of getting a beating, so no more free beef. But they will also act
right away, so for bashing mobs, you can have real nice bashing battles
now that might end up going back and forth quite a bit.

Aside of that, I fixed the bug where when you rented in a PH with
more than the allowed amount of items, things would go south... You
won't actually rent now if you have too much stuff on you.

Finally, for fighters, don't mock the player with these cooldown
messages when there's nothing to cool down from (i.e., when you utterly
fail to get your parrying/riposting act together, the mud shan't also
mock you on top!)

As usual, report bugs, have fun, die plenty. -B

Bardsongs / play instrument (January 21, 2013)
I've found the reason for the crashes some of our esteemed bards have
caused, and got rid of it. Now if it crashes, it's for an entirely
different reason, yay! :D Anyways. That is to say: play instrument
should be safe to use again.

progress update of the day (January 20, 2013)
- clantalk comm replay now is in color.
- when using affects <target> and target doesn't have any, a wiser msg is displayed
- switch items were broken. I think I fixed them.
- I'm messing around a bit with waitstates in combat. Not there yet.. poor bashers
- Idle renting (timeout) should now properly store your worn EQ etc.
- Prevent to put unrentable items in a locker by putting them into a container (or
  a container in a container in a ...)
- I said I had fixed QE, lol was I wrong. I now have scrutinized a lot more,
  confident quests/scripts are working again.
- display empowered status and charge status of wands & staves in shops
- proper wait state handling for wands / staves / scrolls
- spell scribe was eating your EQ sorta randomly. Fixed now.
- PH saving: when saving a container in the PH, it would be both emptied on the
  floor and saved with its contents. Well, sorry to say, that's been fixed :D

Also, I had to update a lot of objects for the first reboot couple days back.
This was done by some scripts, and these scripts weren't the best ... well. I
have improved them some, and redone the modifications. It's gonna be better but..
if you find e.g. an item with an AC apply of some 4 million, let me know please.

- switch, teleport, ambiance, enterable items or containers that might have been
a bit screwed up should be fine now.
- the ellebore grain is now mixing the correct spells again, sorry about that.

Batch of changes online (January 16, 2013)
The following changes (described in more detail elsewhere, like the other
news items, board messages, facebook, ooc channel chatter, take your pick)
have been activated:

User visible stuff:

- %k in prompt shows seconds til tick
- detect magic cast on others show their affs w/ time left in secs, possibly
- affects will show time left in seconds if you have detect magic on
- affects <person> will work if you can master advanced magic techniques
- "rent" in PHs works now
- when renting, your EQ and its contents get saved as-is (where worn, ...)
- when returning, your EQ and its contents get restored (...)
- lockers also support this now
- self written notes (piece of paper) and mixed potions (bronze vial) can
  be stored now (including their text, or extra aliases for the vial, or..)
- songbooks, prayerbooks are back
- personal EQ is back and improved: you now can also enhance the name list
  of the items, and increase their maximum durability. Personalized EQ is
  enabled to be stored automatically and independently of you.
- amount of items in rent is now 37, in PHs it's 59.
- dome of power now is _always_ helpful!
- objects can now be mailed in mud mail (with 'send')
- new race skill for orcs: frenzy
- addition to parry: riposte.
- enhancement to dual backstab: get rid of the "back". All thieves' "stabs"
  now get a "dual".
- mask alignment update: mask good/evil/neutral and LIKE IT!
- clantalk, say, sayto, gsay now each have a commlog
- shopkeepers now are crash/reboot safe.
- when you die and your corpse gets left behind, that is crash/reboot safe also

Internal, scary stuff:
- juggling control completely from the left to the right, yay
- we're now a pulseless MUD. Way to go! So 1990 in 2013!
- timing should be waaay more reliable. Like a tick each 72 seconds.
- cookies are back!
- all game entities can now be completely stored by setting ..a flag.
- vnums completely changed from a scalar to a structural value.. think
  integer number on one side, complex number on the other. We're so
  imaginary, it's getting real.

Momentarily disabled:
- fame boards
- multibay (still)
- losing EQ by rent timeout (ooooooh)
- storing of more than one pet with stash

We're going to a daily reboot schedule (if we don't reboot earlier...) for
the next couple of .. weeks or so. Until then, report to me what I broke in
the massive process and show some patience ;)                  your IMP

Some progress... (January 16, 2013)
The last reboot fixed a couple of problems that you have found. Sadly the cost
of doing business here had been to reset the lockers, phs and rent files back
to yesternight's state, but that should be the final such set back that's necessary.
- lockers have been fixed
- the problem with keys easily unlocking anything has been fixed.
- also some enterable containers were broken (interdimensional door) - fixed.
- teleport items have been fixed.
- shops displaying some items as 0 cost and then still charging you - fixed.
- postmaster claiming to give you a mail but won't - fixed.
- have your corpses decay once they're emptied
- little oversight in frenzy (frenzy would always seem to start) - fixed.
- a couple of quest engines would not run properly (e.g. corpses in pyramid) - fixed

Looking forward to the next array of bugs :)
- I'm aware of a problem with play instrument, haven't figured that one out yet.


What time is it? (January 8, 2013)
It's about time. Or so.

Many of you have noticed in the past, that our ticks aren't exactly happening
each 72 seconds. The reason for this is both historical as well as technical.
Obviously it would be nice to have a tick each 72 seconds, right?

Today, we are burying a companion that has travelled with us for a very, very
long time. Actually, if you look back into the base circle code that we once
stemmed from, you will find the ... pulse. A weird heartbeat that is supposed
to be triggered a constant number of times per second, thus giving you a measure
of time. All the activities in the game (zone resets, combat, ...) are bound
to that pulse.

Well, no more. Instead, I have taken the good old event queue that I've written
a decade ago, and gave it support for real timestamps (with micro second accuracy
(you'll recognize the struct timeval, right?) and 1/10s resolution (the event
queue supports insertion to happen in "1/10s in the future")). Also, I did the
inevitable code mass rape (the fit-for-workplace term is 'refactoring') that
comes with it and dearly enjoyed it, of course. So, even more chance for weird
bugs, unexpected crashes and the like.

This does not mean a change to the game mechanics. On the surface, ticks are
still there, only now they're happening each 72 secs, not in 69..75 seconds.
It's what's under the hood that changed.

So. What we're gaining from it is a way higher accuracy in how the game deals
with time passing and when it has to do something. Previously, you could see
a skew of up to 3 seconds (sometimes worse) per tick. This skew should now
be an order of magnitude lower than your ping to the game. That's nice for you
because it makes it easier to know when a tick will happen (of course the
%k prompt escape helps, too), but it's also nice for me because I now can
write code that depends on exact timing even over longer durations way more
easily.

I hope you'll appreciate this as much as I do. -B

A Todo List (January 7, 2013)
The remaining todo list for multimud (couple bugs aside)
- mailing EQ [check; done]
- rangers get their mixpotion locker [check; done]
- personalized EQ: buy DUR for QP [check; done]
- personalized EQ: self-saving (crash/reboot-resilient) [check;done]
- clantalk commlog [check; done]
- underworld survives reboots / resets only when (cough cough cough) (not trivial)
- UW items locker
- detect magic boost (you're gonna love this)
- "rent" instead of "save & quit" in PHs. [check; done]
- increase # rented items / saved items in PHs / lockers [check; done]
- DT saving -- don't lose your EQ but get to regain it 
- rent timeout -- see above 
- wizard: implement homing beacon as it should've been 
- knight: implement knightly manners as ... 
- warlord: recruit 
- sage: carry minion 
=====================================================

[ ] All of the above done?
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
\ /
NU KLENDATHU.

detect magic update (January 7, 2013)
"- detect magic boost (you're gonna love this)"

So this is what happened:
1) All of detect magic's normal functionality remains.
2) You can cast detect magic on others as well.
3) If cast on others, you will see their active spells (similar to what
you see when you use affects yourself).
4) When using affects yourself, you will see the remaining duration of
your spells in seconds when detect magic is active.
5) The duration of spells when cast on others will be displayed (in secs,
too) if you can cast the spell.
6) If you have adv. magic, you will always be treated as if detect
magic was on, as well as if you could cast all spells. In other words,
on affects, you'll always see remaining duration in seconds; when casting
detect magic on someone, you'll always see all durations. But even better!
7) If you have adv. magic, you can use affects <target> to see their spells
and durations as if you had casted detect magic on them.

This looks like so:
> affects marius
Marius is sensitive to good and bad alignment.
Marius is sensitive to the presense of invisible things.
Marius is sensitive to magical things.
Marius is sensitive to hidden life.
Marius is poisoned! [2456 s]
Marius's eyes are glowing red.
Marius can walk on water.
Marius's movement is sluggish. [728 s]
Marius seems unlucky. [2528 s]
Marius seems corrupted. [152 s]
Marius seems weaker than usual. [728 s]
Marius's feet have been turned to stone! [296 s]


A glimpse... (January 7, 2013)
Little glimpse of the current expected fallout... In order to be able
to rape the MUD to my liking and establish Nu Klendathu as I wanna,
I had to do some infrastructural changes first. In essence, I convinced
myself it's worth it (whysoever) to invest about a man-week of tearing
the code base open, rewiring the shit out of it, and then stomp it all
back together firmly and evenly under a big pile of mud.

So what happened?

I changed vnums. To those not initated, vnums, virtual numbers,
are the prototypical identities in the MUD. Rooms, objects, mobs have
them. Previously, they worked like v = z * 100 + n where v is the vnum, z
the zone number assigned (e.g., 24 for ramtop) and n the room number. For
obvious reasons you are limited to 100 rooms per zone. Well. No more. Now
there's roughly four million rooms per zone number possible (2^22 if you
must know). This doesn't immediately affect you, but it enables builders
to do two things:

1) extend zones to include more than 100 rooms/mobs/objects easily.
2) keep adding to existing zones without further administrative overhead in the MUD.

In other words, Sabach can now blow up Tortuga and I could simply add a
seventh level in the pyramid with the size it's supposed to have (and
also fix level 6 to finally have double the depth/width as level 5!).
I did a lot of cookie fixing. Well, nice, eat your cookies, eh? What are
cookies? Cookies are little bits of information associated with your
character, an object, a room or a mob. These are bits of information
that usually are not required to be present. An example is personalized
EQ. We need to store the changes somewhere. So the EQ could have a
cookie storing its updated descriptions. Cookies were broken in some
respects and I never had the heart/stamina to debug what was going on,
partially also because some very very wise-ass coder wrote the cookie
subsystem and did smart things there that I don't even bother to analyze
now. It's a pity, because it was a system of beauty. Well, now I've
replaced it with a system of simplicity and extensibility. What this
means for you is that a lot of cookie based things will come back. Pet
storage. Personalized EQ. Even without Night City accessible currently,
datachip and deck storage will work again. Song books and your collected
sermon prayerbooks will work again.

I also added storage of entities from the game.. That is, any room now
can function as a PH-like thing basically. Actually, even more than
that. Assume you have a mob sitting in one of these rooms, and the mob
has an item on him, now the room saves and includes the mob and the EQ
he's carrying. Any object can function as storage now. Assume I make
a container that only can carry UW items. It stores itself. You could
throw it anywhere and it would save itself and its contents. Next reboot,
it's sitting there again. Same goes for mobs.

I've added communication backlog for say, gsay, sayto. Clan channels
are on the agenda, don't worry.

I've also added a prompt escape for 'seconds left till tick'.

And I've done even more, but I'll return to work on some final
infrastructural bits and pieces before I'll go ahead and indulge in the
bliss of creating nu klendathu itself.

some more items checked off the todo list (January 7, 2013)
"rent" in PHs now works. You can still remove all, drop all, save,
quit of course. Or just "rent" in a PH without removing or dropping
anything. Also it's now legal to have containers in containers in PHs.
When renting, your norent items are extracted, but you remain wearing
your EQ/inventory as usual. You will return in your PH wearing your
stuff.

The new number for Bryant to be mad at is 37 
(=amount of items stored in rent/cryo).

PH owners will rejoice over 59 items storage capacity now. (that's
basically a full "rent" set and another set. So PH owners no longer need
to rent/cryo just because they have a 2nd and 3rd set, oh gosh!).

mask alignment,dome of power update (January 7, 2013)
Missing from previous list: mask alignment change. Mask alignment
shall take an argument, good, evil or neutral. You will be perceived as
such. Additionally, while mask alignment is on, neither your virtual,
nor your real alignment changes. What this means is that if you're lucky
enough to have mask alignment, you can swap to some other alignment while
really remaining at your alignment. In other words, you are evil and wear
your lucifer outfit, but "mask good" and join some goodie group on an
asgaard run. You will kill evils with them. Your alignment will remain
'pure of heart' throughout to the outside, and your previous alignment
to the inside (including your EQ). You (still being evil) could also go
'mask evil' and go evil killing and both your perceived and real alignment
would remain evil.

dome of power now doubles the saving throw only if it makes sense
for you. That is, on non-positive spells it will throw another time
if you have not succeeded yet, and will give you a chance to fail if
you have succeeded so far. In other words, a 66% success positive spell
cast on you used to have 56% success chance; now it'll be 88%. So it'll
be good for you to have dome of power on no matter what.

While tweaking object saving... (January 7, 2013)
Lockers have also been updated now. So the same traits that apply to the new
object saving (container content remains intact, even volatile information
like, say, what you've scribbled on a piece of paper, or a potion you mixed)
apply to lockers. So yes, you can stuff your potions in a warp and then put
that warp in the locker. Next up is also making sure that the items that can
store themselves, and are containers, like the upcoming UW mega bag, will
fit into the lockers and count as one single item. So you'll be able to stuff
in any UW item into there, and then stuff the bag into a locker and forget
about it.

PK THURSDAYs! (July 29, 2012)
The mortals of this game are so awesom! that they created a game in the
game that will deliver its implementor what he appreciates the most:
sacrifices. The theme is the PK THURSDAY which spans 30hours of awesome
murking of each other. You get to take an outlaw flag and get rid of it
afterwards again. This will enable you to take it out on all the other
guys who are there. One winner for sure: The reaperman gets to take out
the defeted contestant.
Why 30 hours you might ask? Well, to make things fair for our playerbase
we begin at midnight, on the very first CET second of each thursday, and
end it o the first second of friday morning of eastern time.
We will be keeping stats of who beat who and what and maybe at some point
how. Also you can keep the outlaw flag of course, but then it will not be
removed on a subsequent occassion without the proper sacrifice, see also
help outlaw.

Degree Boni (April 18, 2011)
The Chance to gain a bonus point has been effectively doubled.
It is thus 2 per mille per degree achieved already (e.g. 48%
for degree 240), and also the degree'ers plaque got a little
polish, try additional filtering like l degrees 100 50

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