The Iron Realms

Text RPGs have been around since the 80s. Most people think they died with the dial-up era. We've been running five of them continuously since 1997, and we're still adding to them. Free to play. No download. #MUD #TextRPG

@andrewbrown Sounds like a super fun project. Keep posting updates! I'd love to see how far you can get with this.

Claude Code Camp is still underway, I finally got over the largest technical uncertainty of having the Agent reliably talk to the MUD. Now I am onto the fun stuff making the agent super capable. But I have walkback through all my steps.

@America_Dev That's a pretty cool idea. How does it work exactly? How do players "play it"?

ClassicMUDS is not just a game. It is my attempt to reimagine the old-school text MUD as a persistent living universe. Instead of starting with players, towns, quests, and combat, the world starts before civilization exists. Before people. Before planets. Before stars. The simulation begins in The Void and slowly builds reality from the bottom up: fields → particles → atoms → molecules → stars → galaxies → solar systems → planets → oceans → life → evolution → consciousness → civilization Every layer depends on the layer before it.

Yes, Composer 2.5 is really that good at coding. Between Wednesday night and this morning, I rebuilt ClassicMUDS.com from v1 into a new foundation. The original v1 was built with @grok the day Grok Build launched. I’ll be bringing that version back online too. The current ClassicMUDS.com is now roughly 450 prompts deep into Composer, with about 10 hours of my own time guiding the architecture, logic, and worldbuilding across ChatGPT, SuperGrok, and Composer 2.5. I queued up 75 prompts before going to bed to wake up to a near perfect app. It only took about 20 minutes of deploying and troubleshooting to resolve. What started as “classic MUDs in the browser” has become something much bigger: A living universe simulation. (Currently in active development)

@LordYuppa 200 players is huge for a MUD at any day! Nice work.

@IronRealms It was called Entropy, and peak was 94 to 96 when I had the privilege to run it off a military mainframe. Peak concurrent players hit 200 and that was huge back in the day.

Pick any MMO. Look at how guilds work, how kill-on-sight rep feels, how the auction house runs. Then look at a MUD from 1995. Almost all of it was already there, running as text. #MUD #IronRealms

@SwoleBenjiYT Strong opinion for a man currently reading our text and typing more text back at us. We'll save you a seat!

@IronRealms I'm not "playing" a text only game fucker.

@Lensar_dawn Carrion Fields is one of the all-time great PvP MUDs, and the WoD MUSH scene basically wrote the playbook on online RP that the industry is still catching up to.

@IronRealms Having worked in the industry since 1995, I'd say MUDS like Carrion Fields and World of Darkness MUSHES had a greater impact on my career than anything else.

@LordYuppa Thirteen years of running a MUD is a serious commitment, that's longer than most live-service games last. Which one was it? Always interested to hear about the communities.

@IronRealms I ran a Mud from 1990 to 2003! Good times

@wwwjim Every game has to encode its mechanics and social systems in text somewhere. MUDs just skip the renderer and let you read the source.

@IronRealms I love this, the rendering engine is just the gateway to the text 🏄‍♂️

@NameMetaX MUDs as CS project is one of the best uses of the format. The whole loop fits in a semester and forces students to learn state and async networking at once. The part that hurts is not knowing they were real games until that point.

@IronRealms this is really inspiring, when i was in college for web and app development one of the first projects we had to learn was making a MUD game with PHP lol, it was one of my favorite projects and didnt even know they existed until then, i wish this got more widely known

@moochigames Genuinely the best kind of comment to wake up to.

@IronRealms This account alone is making me become a MUD fan...

A good description gives you just enough. The shape of something. The sound it makes. The way the air changes. Your brain does the rest. Does that make text better at horror than visuals? #MUD #TextRPG

@SIP770386985521 hahahaha, good luck! At least it's a fun project.

@IronRealms I hit me hard a couple months back. Downloaded a RoT 1.4 code base and started recoding it.

Text RPGs have been around since the 80s. Most people think they died with the dial-up era. We've been running five of them continuously since 1997, and we're still adding to them. Free to play. No download. #MUD #TextRPG

@malinformedtv We are currently working on a total revamp of the client. It's going to feel really solid in the next couple of months here.

@IronRealms Ok, this is pretty fun. Love the advanced UI.

@Vauche7777 That is admirable dedication.

@IronRealms He has several commonly used macros assigned to overlay buttons, and when needed, can still type input into a text box manually.

@SIP770386985521 They are truly a unique genre unto themselves. Definitely a lot of nostalgia and fun in there.

@IronRealms I miss MUDS. I'll have to check it out.

@BOLDBANGER314 @BlackDumpling The good old days of dial-up.

@BlackDumpling @IronRealms I wasted many hours on majormud with my friends in high school. I had the phone line tied up for 9 hours straight one Sunday 😭 it's a text based mmorpg, not really a d&d creative type game.

@auroter We're still here! It's actually crazy to think about how long we've been around.

@IronRealms I played Achaea for a while, way back in the early 2000s! I still think about it sometimes. Interesting era to be in nowadays for text based games.

@SalaciousBReal I remember once I had a concerned mother email me that her son was doing the exact same thing and was hoping I would ban all of his accounts.

@IronRealms I almost flunked out of undergrad because I was spending all my time running a guild on a Wheel of Time MUD. Band of the Red Hand ruled !

@JeffWittyArt Nothing like those nostalgic feelings of gaming in the 90s.

@IronRealms Oh man, i ran/coded PsychoMUD back in the early-mid 90s. I miss my old MUD

@tjstebbing It's crazy how fun it is to work on those projects, even if they never get released.

@IronRealms I cut my teeth in the mid 90s on The Forests Edge (diku), later Discworld then started building my own at uni that I never launched (learned a lot about programming though!) .. Every few years I get an urge to build a whole new MUD for folk today.