It’s been a while since I’ve posted on the website, largely because the overwhelming majority of discussion has long been on our Discord server. However, it’s recently been brought to my attention that some people either don’t, can’t or won’t use Discord and many casually interested folk stop by the website first – and not seeing any posts for 4 years assume that the project has been abandoned.
As such, this post is intended to update everyone on the status of LabMUD (the game) and FutureMUD (the publicly available engine that LabMUD runs on).
LabMUD
Firstly regarding LabMUD – it is still live and available for play, but almost completely unsupported by staff and generally empty. We feel that the LabMUD setting has run its course and the game has done what it was intended to do – provide a testing ground for the engine while it was in development.
With the public release of FutureMUD and other parties in various stages of setting up their own RPI releases based on the engine, we made the decision that it was better to focus our efforts on engine development and support than further work on LabMUD.
We do still approve character applications and when new people do make characters there are a few players who tend to hop in the world and play for as long as they have interest – I’d suggest you introduce yourself on the Discord if you’re interested in playing.
However, expect very little in the way of new content or interaction from admins.
FutureMUD
The FutureMUD Engine was released publicly as a v1.0 in January 2021 and has continued to be actively developed in the meantime. The engine is fully featured and suitable to run a MUD. There are still areas that I am working on improving the user-friendliness or tools available to admins but I’m nearly completely done with this “builder pass”.
If you’re interested in the engine you can check out the FutureMUD Public Releases page. There’s also a Discord Channel with a number of tutorial videos about how to install and use the engine.
My focus continues to be on supporting the people making serious attempts and setting up a MUD using the engine, as well as developing new functionality for the engine. I feel as if sometime in the next few years I will be ready to USE the engine to make a new MUD, but that is not in my short term plans.
If you have any questions, I’m always happy to answer them on Discord.