Back in April 2023, I posted a “State of Play” with regards to the FutureMUD engine and LabMUD as a game. As 2024 draws to a close, there are numerous important updates to speak about in the last 18+ months!
Games Using FutureMUD
Let’s lead with the exciting news – during 2024 the first game built on the FutureMUD engine not built by me was launched, Arda Marred (arda-marred.com). They are a Tolkien-themed MUD set in a similar time period to the original Shadows of Isildur MUD that inspired FutureMUD in the first place.
You can join their discord at https://discord.gg/jCXAgScyqQ or connect to the game at arda-marred.com:4000 as you please!
There are a few other projects (both old and new) in the works by other people as well. The learnings from Arda Marred in particular have been super useful in making sure whoever comes next has an ever-easier experience.
LabMUD
LabMUD remains in totally unsupported legacy mode. I have been giving a lot of folk who are building games with FutureMUD staff access for the purpose of them being able to see examples of how systems are set up and things were built. It’s effectively just a classroom or example now, rather than an actual game.
FutureMUD Engine
FutureMUD has gone from version 1.18.0 in April 2023 to 1.45.2 as at the time of this post, with 82 version updates in that time. A lot of the development has been focused on in-game building tools and improvements, quality of life and bugfixes from Arda Marred specifically.
I continue to actively work on FutureMUD and the seeder, although recently my focus has been on bugfixing as there was a lot of new content released between 2019 and 2024 that had very little battle testing with real players.