See also: Chat | RPG | Chat Clients | Persistant Online Worlds | Nethack | MUSH
Acronym: Multi User Dungeons (or Domain or Dimension)
MUDs are text-only online roleplaying games, being probably the oldest kind of Persistent Online Worlds.
There are multiple rooms with a textual description, and you walk around by typing commands. Multiple players connect to one MUD and interact with one another.
This usually involves:
- chatting
- solving quests
- killing monsters (sometimes also other players)
- getting better equippement
- roleplaying
A MUD usually has lots of game logic, rules which allow what you can do with your items, how figthing works, and so on. But there are some where roleplaying is the main focus, that is, the players develop the story of their characters together. MUSHes (Multi User Shared Hallucination) are often of this sort.
Client Software
This list is not exhaustive.
- MCL (http://www.andreasen.org/mcl) – CLI / *NIX / GPL
- KMuddy (http://www.kmuddy.org) – GUI / KDE / GPL
- zMUD (http://www.zuggsoft.com/zmud/zmudinfo.htm) – GUI / Windows / Non-Free
- Slashdot: What is a good free MUD client? (http://ask.slashdot.org/askslashdot/03/09/29/0219243.shtml)
Server Software
This list is not exhaustive.
- CircleMUD (http://www.circlemud.org) – based on Dikumud
- PennMUSH (http://www.pennmush.org) – a MUSH server
- p2pmud (http://www.p2pmud.com) – a new mud technology to create a peer to peer network of individually created muds
Related Websites
- MUD Connector (http://www.mudconnect.com)
TakeDown.NET -> “MUD”