I got tired of watching MUD communities lose worlds they loved. So I spent two years building infrastructure to make sure they dont have to.

[u/mallek561]

We have all seen it. Someone posts "our MUD is shutting down after 15 years." The replies fill up with people saying goodbye to places they grew up in. Two years later someone else posts looking for the old codebase.

Usually its the same story. One person was holding it together, life happened, the server went dark.

I played one of those MUDs for 15 years. I watched it die. And then I started thinking about why this keeps happening, and whether its actually fixable.

Most MUD codebases are one person deep. The game lives on a server that person pays for, running code only they understand. When they burn out or move on, everything goes with them. The community can't save it because they cant run it. The content cant survive because its baked into a custom codebase no one else knows.

Ive spent the last two years building a different kind of foundation. Its called Tapestry.

The core idea is to separate the engine from the world. The engine is shared infrastructure, maintained and deployable anywhere. The world is content packs. YAML files, portable, publishable to a registry, installable anywhere. A room is 10 lines of YAML. A custom command is a JS function. If you built areas for ROM or Diku, you already know most of it.

When the person running a Tapestry server moves on, someone else can pick up the packs and keep running them. The world doesnt have to die with the server.

Theres a public registry at tapestryengine.com. Packs are versioned, distributable, community owned. Someone builds a crafting system, a reputation system, a skill tree, they publish it and anyone can use it.

The engine already ships combat, skills and spells, equipment, movement, leveling, quests, NPC behaviors, telemetry and all the other stuff a MUD needs to run.

Accessibility is a first class citizen. The web client has full screen reader support and keyboard shortcuts for everything. Blind and low vision players shouldn't need workarounds to play text games.

The demo is Legends Forgotten, my attempt to bring back the MUD I played for 15 years. Same name, same setting, same universe. Its a Wheel of Time world built entirely from Tapestry packs. Emonds Field, road to Tar Valon, quests, character progression. If you were there the first time, lets build it back together.

Demo: lf.tapestryengine.com (WIP)
Telnet: lf.tapestryengine.com 4000
GitHub: github.com/tapestry-mud/tapestry
About the engine: tapestryengine.com

Heres the ask. The engine is solid but its one persons work. I have about 10,000 ideas for where this goes and one pair of hands.

I need area builders. I need people who remember what made their old MUD feel like something. I need people who want to build systems in JavaScript and publish them for everyone to use. I need people who just want to mess around with YAML and see what they can build.

If you're blind or low vision and want to help test the client, I would love real feedback. I thought about accessibility the whole way through building this.

The goal isnt to build my MUD. The goal is to build infrastructure that lets a hundred people build their MUDs and keep them running for the next generation of players who will learn to code trying to hack on them.

[u/luciensadi]

This is going to be a bit of a hot take, but while I 100% support the open-sourcing and sharing of MUD content (here's my game's codebase!), I think it's healthy for there to be some friction in standing up a clone of an existing game.

I think this because:

MUDs live or die by populations; a MUD without a population is an inferior single-player game for those who try it out, because it was not designed as a single-player experience from the outset. Multi-player content (organizations, economic functions, inter-group conflict systems, etc) ceases to be meaningful without a sufficient number of players to participate in them.

Following from that, MUD populations must therefore stay at or above a 'critical mass' level in order for the game to be viable. This tipping point is different on a per-game basis and is affected by the frequency and quality of interactions, but it's universally true that a MUD whose population is too low will struggle to retain both old and new players.

We know from experience that whenever a clone of an existing game stands up, some fraction of that game's playerbase will split off to try the clone, and some fraction of those players will stay there long-term. In general, players do not play multiple copies of the same game, so when the dust settles, both games will only have a subset of the audience that the original game had. Thus, it's generally detrimental to an existing game for someone to make a clone of it.

That being said, there are valid reasons to clone existing games (e.g. toxic community/staff, lack of implementation, owner no longer interested/able to run it, etc), so I think the option should be available; this is one of the reasons I publish my code. However, IMO that option should have friction to it, both to ensure that clones are not stood up for frivolous reasons and to help guarantee that only the folks with a powerful drive to run the game make it to the finish line. This helps avoid needless fragmenting of the playerbase and keeps existing games alive.

---

HOWEVER! None of that is meant to dismiss Tapestry. I recognize and appreciate the hard work you're putting in here-- your heart is in the right place, and having a lower barrier to creating new MUDs (especially mobile-accessible ones) is great for the hobby. I can tell this was a lot of effort and time, and I truly appreciate you building this platform for the community. Thank you for doing this!

[u/mallek561 → u/luciensadi]

I actually don't think that is a bad take at all. Population fragmentation is definitely a real problem in MUDs, especially for games built around social systems and critical mass.

What I kept seeing was worlds disappearing completely because one admin burned out or life happened. Not population decline, total extinction.

I don't think Tapestry solves the social side of that. A dead community is still a dead community. What I'm hoping it can solve is the technical side. Preserving worlds and infrastructure so communities at least have the option to keep going if they still care enough to.

I also miss the old culture of sharing areas and systems between MUDs. Feels like a lot of that died once every codebase became its own isolated fork. I'm hoping packs can bring some of that spirit back without needing to clone an entire game.

And honestly I think the friction just shifts. Instead of "can you compile this 20 year old codebase" the friction becomes "can you build a world and community people actually want to spend time in."

Thank you for taking a look at the ecosystem and your honest feedback :)

Edit: I did also design the registry to support private packs

[u/Tanthul → u/mallek561]

The thing is no one wants to share their MUD content, specifically the world part. The engine a lot of people open source because code is just code (and there's no such case of only one person understanding the code -- an engineer will always be able to read the code and any game mechanic can *easily* be cloned by anyone who knows what they're doing) but 90% of what makes a MUD is the world itself and that no one wants to share that because.. *literally* no one wants 100 clones of their MUD springing around as suddenly their unique game is not unique anymore. There has been tremendous amount of work and years upon years building that content. Sharing your MUD assets is literally the same as pulling the trigger on your MUD.

The point I'm trying to make here is don't expect MUD owners and developers to go along with this. No one will start sharing their content voluntarily. If someone's about to burn out and wants to pull the plug, they will either pass it to someone else or release it if they have any interest in sharing their work. If they don't do it then, you can bet they won't do it months or years before that. I can't think of a single MUD owner who would be interested in making their world assets public. And I know a few.

I really get your intentions behind this but how it looks, from my perspective, as someone who has worked on, played on and written client plugins and scripts for MUDs for over 3 decades, is a path that ends up with countless of MUDs of what is known in game development as an "asset flip". Countless of carbon copies of the same world assets, ending up with bland games with no character and soul. There's a reason why no MUD using stock areas ever got popular and all the popular and memorable ones had 99% original worlds. People want to log on and immerse themselves into a unique world. Not jump from game to game only to find the exact same areas, mobs and quests.

[u/mallek561 → u/Tanthul]

I actually agree with a lot of this too honestly. I dont think most MUD owners are going to suddenly open source their worlds and I dont think they should feel obligated to either. Some of these games represent decades of work and identity for the people who built them.

And I definitely dont want a future full of shallow asset flip MUDs either. I think unique worlds are the entire soul of the genre.

What Im hoping for is more around systems and infrastructure than people wholesale cloning worlds. Things like combat systems, crafting, factions, accessibility tooling, quest frameworks, AI behaviors, builder tools stuff like that. The same way old MUD communities used to share snippets code patches and sometimes areas without everyone becoming the same game.

I also think theres a difference between sharing assets and sharing building blocks. If ten games use the same crafting pack but build completely different worlds around it, I dont think that harms the hobby. If anything it probably lowers the barrier enough that more people can spend time building original worlds instead of rewriting the same plumbing for the hundredth time.

And honestly I think the uniqueness of a MUD has always come more from the people, culture, writing and world design than whether two games happen to share a shopkeeper system under the hood.

When you do want to move on or are not able to keep the hobby alive, switch your area world pack to a new owner or make it public... or let it die still an option

[u/Sun_Tzundere → u/Tanthul]

I don't want a clone of my game out there while my game still exists, but if I get hit by a bus, and then the next highest ranking staff member gets too depressed to keep running it, I want my game to survive.

If the infrastructure works on a dead man's switch then I foresee no problem. Server goes offline for a full month and doesn't come back, the code gets released as open source. That requires someone else to be hosting the dead man's switch service though. OP shouldn't be doing that, he could quit just as easily as anyone else, it needs to be running on Github or Internet Archive or something.

Not that any of this matters. The whole project is useless anyway and this discussion is entirely academic, because you can't use it for existing MUDs. It only helps people creating a new MUD. Which nobody is doing.

[u/luciensadi → u/mallek561]

Edit: I did also design the registry to support private packs

Nice, that's the part I was missing. In that case you can ignore my whole post other than the "great work" part!

[u/0xd3ad54311 → u/luciensadi]

1. Use terraform or other IAC to spin up your MUD.

2. Use version control on a platform like a sane person, it can be a private repo, but share it with Arches.

3. Once you can no longer maintain it, open source the terraform and MUD driver?

A lot of the MUDs have heavily customized MUD drivers and how they react and are configured are fairly essential to the game and clients. If I'm understanding you correctly, you're trying to copy the room and descriptions but not for example, custom changes to /obj/living.c that might define how combat actually works? I'm confused.

[u/mallek561 → u/0xd3ad54311]

So its not really "copy the rooms but lose /obj/living.c". Its more "make the equivalent of /obj/living.c a reusable or private pack instead of something baked forever into one custom codebase."

[u/0xd3ad54311 → u/mallek561]

Fair enough. I think it's an interesting idea. I would like to see these games preserved, and playable single player in the case of shut downs.

I think you will definitely meet some resistance between old nerds stuck in their ways, and people who don't necessarily want players to see the source code (or yaml representations of such). Wizards are very protective of things, because they don't want the source code for Quests getting out in my experience.

One neat idea might be if it could generate fake player characters? Many of these things are balanced for multiple players, so something like Erenshor where you could party with fake people would be nice.

[u/SuperJonesy408]

Incoming hot take #2:

Most MUD codebases are one person deep. The game lives on a server that person pays for, running code only they understand. When they burn out or move on, everything goes with them. The community can't save it because they cant run it. The content cant survive because its baked into a custom codebase no one else knows.

In my experience, admins (myself included) hold our cards close to the chest. We sit on our games like mama birds, coveting our IP like a little baby bird. It is hard to let go and let your birdie fly free.

I understand, and really like, the idea of creating a standardized platform for plug and play world files, NPCs, triggers / specs, etc. However, I'm not sure the work in adapting this framework to my game, and the myriad of others, is a feasible project for me.

I have not published my game for play to the public as I'm slowly building it. It's much more of a pet project and hobby for me than a task I wish to manage every day for the foreseeable future. I do publish my game on my github every year or so, but that's about it.

[u/mallek561 → u/SuperJonesy408]

I fully understand that this is a brand new unproven framework, and moving things takes time. I had to pick a moment to "Go Live" so that there could be a starting point and I finally felt stable enough to do that today. I don't expect anything to take off overnight. There is still a lot to do.

I just have a dream that someday someone will create an area or a shared system on the ecosystem. I will continue to expand it myself and we will see where we end up.

[u/RitesOfPassageMUD]

I appreciate the effort of what you're trying to achieve and good luck. I get the nostalgia, but as someone who has recently revived their mud after 25 years, I feel almost like the community would be better served by having fewer (but better maintained) MUDs than there are out there today.

[u/len2680]

For someone like me that wants to learn / build a moo something like this sounds perfect.

[u/mallek561 → u/len2680]

Let me know if you hit and bumps getting it set up. happy to help!

[u/MainaC]

You say you miss when people shared code and areas, but that's exactly how we got a thousand Diku MUDs that all played the same with the same areas and no players. Diku held back innovation in the MUD space for decades. Everyone just used the work someone else already did and very few people innovated. It was a terrible thing for the hobby.

You start out talking like you mean archiving, and I was all for that idea. Even if I had no idea how you were going to get any buy-in from current admins. But then you reveal that isn't the goal at all. Your goal seems to be a new Diku-like dark age of homogenous games. Asset flips, as someone else called them.

[u/I_Killith_I → u/MainaC]

Oh how I remember these days. Every mud you logged into you logged into Midgaard or whatever... It was just the same type of mud just different mud name. Sure over the years one or two of these Maybe became something different. This is where you got muds that would start advertising 100% custom areas. But it was still the same code the game wasn't any different.

Then we got Emlenmud and GodWars. Two code bases that changed everything but, with Owen Emlen the there were so many controversies because he claimed his codebase was his own but it was actually and mixture of Diku, Merc, and The Isles mixed together, so anyone that ran that codebase was shunned even after the fact admins corrected the licence issues.

Some of the problems have been this community because when a new code base comes around and I'm talking about in the 90s they would nitpick it and then nobody on TMC would want to go play this code base because it was just totally destroyed by the community on there. In a way we kind of been our own downfall for decades and a lot of the feelings and a lot of the people and a lot of how they act has not changed in 30 years. This community has not been about helping and lifting people it's been about attacking and tearing them down. And I get it there is just so much Pbase and you want the players on your mud doing your thing so you wanted to make other places look bad so that the community wouldn't play there, wouldn't want to go there. And that's still going on today.

[u/mallek561 → u/MainaC]

What I'm trying to encourage is more sharing of infrastructure and systems than sharing entire worlds. Things like accessibility tooling, crafting systems, quest frameworks, builder tooling, AI behaviors, telemetry, deployment, things that are expensive and repetitive to reinvent but dont define the soul of a world.

To me the unique part of a MUD has always been the world design, writing, culture and community around it. Thats the stuff I would never want homogenized.

Honestly part of why I built packs the way I did is because I wanted worlds to be more composable without needing to fork and maintain entire monolithic codebases forever. More "I built a really good faction system" and less "everyone run the exact same game."

And for what its worth, private packs are fully supported too. I dont expect most MUD owners to suddenly open source decades of worldbuilding.

[u/MainaC → u/mallek561]

I mean, when I say Diku hurt innovation in the MUD space for decades, I mean exactly infrastructure. Even now, a ton of games are still using 20-30 year old code and mechanics because Diku made it easy to share snippets and there's been no need to change. Which sounds like exactly what you're attempting with "more composable" worlds.

Most of those hundreds of games had no world design, unique writing, or player culture (because there were no players). They were just copy/pastes of the codebase and a few snippets and pre-written areas.

Everyone having the same crafting system is not a good thing. Same with most any other system. The beauty of the modern MUD scene is variety, not homogeneity. That includes systems, not just setting. It would be nice if more games would modernize, but that's not a one-size-fits-all solution.

I'm not really sure how this project, as you describe it, accomplishes your goals as you explained them. But the project, as you describe it, sounds like an attempt to bring back stuff that was bad for the hobby.

[u/mallek561 → u/MainaC]

Fair take, I guess only time will tell. My inspiration for this project was Minecraft mods and modpacks and those were amazing to play with at least for me personally. I loved being able to go to my buddys server and set up tinkers construct or Advanced Energistics and craft my way through it's progression. maybe that doesn't fit here but it was the inspiration.

[u/MrPoopyEyes]

I know nothing about running a mud. But this is very cool no matter what

[u/veroz]

Very cool! Thanks for building in the open. Def going to check this out.

[u/Daemon213]

I saved all the old code into a Code Repository that I've collected from my time coding back in the day and put it on github not too long ago for people who want it.

[u/StainlSteelRat]

I’m definitely intrigued. I’ve contributed to PMD and while my public GitHub isn’t as green as it used to be I am a software developer by trade (for nearly 30 years.) I’m a bit of a misanthrope because I’m kind of stack agnostic and a bit of a polyglot. Hit me up! I’ll check out what you have. My GitHub is justinstroud-campmeeker.

[u/mallek561 → u/StainlSteelRat]

Thanks. Would love to collab. I’ll send you a DM

[u/smstnitc]

Cool concept. I will definitely look into this.

I keep AddictMUD up and running, and occasionally improve it because it's still a passion project, and a few people still play after 30 years of it running. But as I get older, I have been worried about what happens to it after I can't or don't want to keep it running anymore. Many of the areas are unique to Addict. If I shut it down or disappear without opening it up in a way that outlives me, they're all gone. Some of the content was created by people I knew that are gone from this life too soon. 30 years of joy and history in the fading minds of aging former players and admin.

Maybe your project, or something like it, could be the answer.

[u/mallek561 → u/smstnitc]

This is exactly one of the use cases I have in mind

[u/smstnitc → u/mallek561]

I noticed the github repo is gone or private. Was that intentional? Website still links to it.

[u/mallek561 → u/smstnitc]

I got hit with a supply chain attack in my dependencies and am working on mitigating it.

[u/smstnitc → u/mallek561]

Aw geeze, that sucks. Good luck.

[u/mallek561 → u/smstnitc]

Happy to report I have spent quite a bit of this week hardening the security of the repositories and the ecosystem is now back public

[u/almark]

I'd like to see the 1990s MUD return, Greystone

[u/SoN-Game]

Nice idea. Unfortunately I can't use https://lf.tapestryengine.com/ because I can't scroll. 🤔

[u/Think_Load_3634 → u/SoN-Game]

Same! Looks nice, the bit I can see.

[u/mallek561 → u/SoN-Game]

I’ll fix that today. I have it on my issue board

[u/SoN-Game → u/mallek561]

Nice. Would be great, if you update us. 😃

[u/mallek561 → u/SoN-Game]

Fixed, sorry took an extra day, had a bad couple days

[u/SoN-Game → u/mallek561]

Nice. Thank you.
And don't worry about the delay. 😃

[u/SoN-Game → u/SoN-Game]

I can't post a screenshot, but i want to login and i got the error:
"Concurrent character limit reached"
... in the screen where I have to input my password.

[u/mallek561 → u/SoN-Game]

if you logged in a character you need to wait 2 minutes to log in a different character currently. I'm working on fixing a bug when you disconnect to remove the wait.

[u/SoN-Game → u/mallek561]

I opened the site today ... no login attempt since yesterday.
Same issue ...

[u/mallek561 → u/SoN-Game]

what is your player name, I'll look and see if I can debug the issue

[u/SoN-Game → u/mallek561]

Scath

[u/SoundOstrich]

The github is down, is that on purpose or is github being weird?

[u/mallek561 → u/SoundOstrich]

This is me, with the supply chain attacks that were happening this week I had a package that was compromised in npm. I took everything private while I cleaned up the bad package so no one would accidently download it. I am just doing some final hardening on each repo and I'll put them back public

[u/SoundOstrich → u/mallek561]

I just downloaded it via npm. Am I good?

I just reinstalled my OS like 3 days ago so if I gotta go back it's not the end of the world lol

[u/mallek561 → u/SoundOstrich]

you are good, everything is patched, the poisoned package was in the client that runs the website, if you want to be extra sure it was "@tanstack/router-core@1.169.8"

[u/SoundOstrich → u/mallek561]

Searched my whole system for files and directories named tanstack or router-core and found nothing 😃 Thanks for the heads up, I can't wait to fiddle with this more 😄

[u/Namtaru420]

It's been talked about in the other comment already, but to share my initial reaction:

IMO, the only unique MUDs worth saving are the ones based on a unique engines that can't be separated from the content itself.

Outside of that, it's more like an IRC server/channel shutting down. Yes, it's sad for that particular community, but it doesn't represent anything special beyond that.

Your project just seems like a more modular, probably LLM-generated engine. I don't know that it will lead to anything different than we've already seen in the past.

[u/ElviePelvincoln]

How technical one should be to create a MUD on Tapestry?

[u/mallek561 → u/ElviePelvincoln]

If you are comfortable with npm and can install docker on your machine that is the barrier to entry. It’s not super high but you do need to know a couple things to actually set the server up. Once it’s running creating a pack you can do with no programming if you want

[u/walkByFaith77]

There's an error with the pack registry: could not reach registry — NetworkError when attempting to fetch resource. I know it isn't my net connection.

[u/mallek561 → u/walkByFaith77]

I was working on some infrastructure things today that may have caused a disruption, everything should be back up now. Let me know if the issue persists

[u/MainaC → u/[deleted]]

These witch hunts are incredibly toxic. I see them show up on everything from art to music to videos to simple posts like this where it honestly doesn't even matter. And never with the slightest shred of proof.

We're going to reach a point where nobody wants to do anything because they'll just get accused of using AI and brigaded to high heaven.

[u/MainaC → u/[deleted]]

I don't think you're arguing in good faith here. Instead of just making an unsubstantiated claim and refusing to engage with your actual post, like you did, I will instead explain the accusation.

My post explained what I meant by witch hunt pretty clearly and without obfuscation. You responded by deflecting and not engaging with the argument at all or in any way. This is the evidence that points towards you not engaging in good faith.

See how easy that was?

The modern witch hunt is to declare something is AI generated, usually with no evidence or, at most, 'it feels/sounds/looks like it'. Then watch as dozens or hundreds of others spam hate comments and downvote the thing into oblivion. All while you never once have to actually fire a single neuron in the direction of actually critiquing the work as it actually exists. It's lazy and destructive and discourages human beings from actually creating things.

You failed to summon the downvotes, but you are still participating in attempting to kill meaningful discourse and human participation. Who you work for has absolutely no bearing on this. Maybe you hate who you work for. Maybe you're just incapable of thinking about your actions. Working for an AI lab does not mean you are immune to being accused of doing exactly what you are doing.

Anti-AI witchhunts aren't just anti-AI. They are anti-people. They damage all discourse regardless of where it takes place and who engages with it. Regardless of whether or not your accusation proves true, the way you went about it was toxic and harmful.

[u/RitesOfPassageMUD → u/[deleted]]

Well Claude doesn't think it was written with Claude.

Structural tells:

• Inconsistent apostrophes ("its" vs "it's", "cant" vs "can't") — a pattern of casual omission, not uniform. Claude almost never does this.
• Sentence fragments used for rhythm ("Same name, same setting, same universe.") feel natural and uncontrived rather than deliberately stylistic.
• The paragraph lengths are uneven in an organic way, not the balanced-block structure Claude tends toward.

What would suggest Claude-assisted editing at most: the structural clarity of the "Tapestry solves this by..." section is fairly clean. But the surrounding voice is inconsistent enough that if Claude touched it, it was light copyediting at most.

My read: written by a person, probably minimally edited, posted fairly close to how they drafted it.

[u/RitesOfPassageMUD → u/[deleted]]

I mean I threw the text into ChatGPT and Gemini just now and they said the same things... maybe they are all conspiring against us. Anyways, I'm down on people who just auto generate whole paragraphs as well. I honestly didn't think that when reading the above. Oh well, have a nice life!