About FutureMUD

An engine, not a single game

FutureMUD is a platform for creating Multi-User Dungeons, with a particular focus on the Roleplay Intensive tradition. It supplies the simulation and authoring systems that game owners need to build a distinct world without turning every design decision into a programming project.

It uses stylistic conventions drawn from the RPI MUDs that have come before it, such as Shadows of Isildur, Armageddon, Atonement, Harshlands and others. However, under the hood , it is a modern engine with a modular architecture and a rich set of systems that can be used to create worlds of any style.

Its systems cover characters and bodies, combat, crafting, economy, law, weather, magic, vehicles, items, languages, time, building, and much more. It has a compiled, strongly typed scripting language for joining those systems together inside a running world.

Current technology

The engine and its supporting products are written in C# and target .NET 10. The game server is a console application that accepts traditional MUD client connections over TCP. Persistent game data uses MySQL through Entity Framework Core and the Pomelo provider. The public website is an ASP.NET Core Razor Pages application and does not connect to a game database. It also has a Discord bot that can be used to relay messages between the game and a Discord server, and a web-hosted mud client for playing the game in a browser.

Built for world builders

FutureMUD includes an interactive database seeder, in-game builder commands, a Discord integration, terrain tooling, and APIs alongside the core engine. Code-backed command, prog, and item-component help is exported from each stable Engine build, so the reference on this website describes the version you can download.

Public source, licensed use

The FutureMUD repository is publicly visible for source inspection, release provenance, and development history. Public visibility does not make FutureMUD an open-source or open-contribution project and does not grant permissions beyond the stated license.

FutureMUD and all associated tools are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Read the licensing page before using or redistributing the software.

Support and discussion

Use the FutureMUD Discord to discuss bugs, ask questions, or get support. If you want to propose a fix or contribution, discuss it there before investing substantial work.

The engine is under active development; operators should test upgrades against a backup of their own world.

Contributions

FutureMUD is primarily the work of Luke Cunningham a.k.a Japheth, but numerous people have contributed to the engine and its supporting tools over the years.

Thank you to Case, without whom FutureMUD would not exist at all.

Thank you to Akari, who made an enormous number of bugfixes during the LabMUD era.

Thank you to Kithrater, who has made numerous contributions in both code and design over the years.